The eight factions
Eight forces are fighting over what is left of Europe. They want incompatible things, they fight in incompatible ways, and every one of them believes it is surrounded. Every one of them is correct. Not one of them has the full map. You can tell them apart at fifty yards by the paint, and learning to do that fast is most of staying alive.
The 139th Armored Core
Assembled from the survivors of a dozen divisions that no longer exist, running on parts stripped from their own dead. Every hull carries honors belonging to units that were wiped out earning them. They held the mouth of Redsector when nobody expected them to. They are still waiting for the hero who was supposed to come instead.
Olive drab · battle damage
The Living Arsenal
An apocalypse cult that gives its weapons away for free, to anyone, including you. Red over white and black, angels and swords, and the sincere conviction that every death shortens the road to a world with no war left in it. They are not sad about any of this. That is the part nobody gets used to.
Red on white · iconography
DMV-9
The Federal Department of Motor Vehicles does not manufacture Class-14 Armored Domiciles. Unpainted grey, no adornment beyond the warning labels required by Article 6. There are eighteen volumes of them, and veteran crews collect them like medals. Regulation is the god mankind craves. The Department has perfected it.
Unpainted grey · warnings
Coffin Boys
Condemned hulls pulled off the scrap route and welded back into something that mostly runs. Two dead tanks make one living one, the mismatched paint stays exactly where it is, and the pit crews sign their work in a greasy yellow found nowhere else on Earth. Losing your tank gets you reassigned to a worse one.
Rust · yellow daub
Democratic Republic of Germany
What the Doctor left behind. Glass plating lit from somewhere inside it, energy weapons where the guns should be, and a manufacturing process nobody has reproduced since he fell. His Librarians are still building to his notes. Nobody has asked whether the notes are finished.
Violet · luminescence
VPR
Free cities that pooled what they had: French resistance veterans, Soviet dissidents, Glass defectors, and every militia in between. A dozen towns’ insignia slowly resolving into one army, largely because of a single firefighter who does not appear to age. They are not defending an idea. They are defending the towns, which have names.
Light blue · white · orange
Peace Corp
Officially a neutral relief organization. In practice: gold trim, banners the size of a barn door, and a tank named after the man commanding it. Every crew publicly renounced their corporate holdings before shipping out, with donations and speeches. The cover story is not being maintained especially carefully.
UN blue · gold trim
Tracked Profiteers
Three companies bound by one contract, selling armor to whoever is buying and arbitrating disputes that as often require a kinetic solution as a diplomatic one. Burned black hulls out of Redsector, imported Mk4s flying old heraldry, and a walking foundry running on steam and its own industrial runoff. They nearly destroyed each other. Then they merged.
Black · brown-tan · brass