Quote:bbjygm - Hamilton will do well and everybody will be very calm and cool about it when they do

Hamilton does well.

The league actually takes it pretty well... for a time.

GMs around the league begin instructing their players on underhanded tactics and street rules fighting. Players begin wearing brass knuckles under their gloves. They line their elbow pads with barbed wire, and a few players even switch their skates for gloves, sliding around the ice on their Bauer NEXUS 2Ns while slicing their opponents with their Vapor 2X Pros.

There's an uneasy arms race developing. Finally, like a match that lights a container of fuel, the league explodes into war with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand Eller.

Sticks are converted en masse to pikes with which to line the perimeter of their trenches. Tanks are fitted with treads made of hockey skates, so as to better traverse slippery terrain. A howitzer is developed that fires gigantic hockey pucks, but quickly hauled out of service when it's discovered that rubber ammunition is wildly impractical.

The war rages on, with no end in sight.


Two years after the war's beginning, a stalemate has been reached. One side wins a battle, captures a trench, and then loses it the next day. This continues for some time until one brave corporal in the Hamilton Steelhawks 33rd division decides he's had enough, climbs above the battlement and calls to the other side for a truce.


He's immediately hit by a mortar and blown into a thousand pieces, but his act of bravery helps bring in an uneasy peace between the two sides. Former foes meet once again as in the old days of the SHL, and share stories about close calls, existential horrors of war, and the tale of one Chicago soldier who was executed for treason after refusing to fight without being properly compensated. ■