Mutated by fallout from the Chernobyl disaster nearly a decade Before WWIII, Saukko was discovered as a pup by an old pensioner couple who found him by a river in central Finland, standing up and catching fish with a handmade spear. The pensioners had been among the hundreds of thousands of citizens forced to flee Finnish Karelia after the Winter War in 1940, and were still bitter over the experience. Saukko was raised on stories of Karelia before the Russians came, so when Finland began mobilizing after The War, he was the first of the Beast Folk to volunteer for the newly energized Karelia Brigades, and went on to become one of the heroes of the Karelia War.
The Karelia War
Most of the nuclear weapons used in the brief war were duds, but enough were launched that the world’s political and financial capitals were still flattened. Decentralized federal nations recovered fairly quickly, as state or provincial governments were still largely intact and able to step in to maintain some degree of order; the same could not be said for strongly centralized “communist” and “socialist” nations, which descended into immediate chaos once their governmental heads were cut off. The Soviet Union collapsed overnight, and what military forces had escaped destruction were left with no leadership or direction, because they hadn’t been prepared for an attack and weren’t trained to have individual initiative.
Finland, on the other hand, had been waiting half a century for this sort of thing.
Although awash in fallout, Finland was otherwise unscathed by The Bomb. The government sealed the borders and told the rest of the world that Finland had been heavily damaged and was no longer able to interact with its neighbors; most of its neighbors were on fire, so no one bothered to fact-check the story, leaving the Finns free to begin a massive military buildup without interference. Six months After, the Finnish military stormed eastward and easily captured land as far as Lake Onega and the White Sea, including the Kola Peninsula and all of traditional Karelia. The population of the area had not fared well under Soviet rule, and a majority welcomed the freedom and higher standard of living promised by the new Greater Finland; there were pockets of fierce resistance, but most of the Soviet forces in the region simply abandoned their posts and equipment.
The ruins of Leningrad were easily captured. The Finns announced that it was being renamed Pietari Kaupunki and would be used as a base of operations to build up forces for an eventual attack on what was left of the area around Moscow; to this end they would expel all of the surviving Russian citizens and fortify the city during the Winter. Nationalist remnants of the Soviet military used this as a rallying cry, and began massing forces in western Russia; when Spring came they launched an all-out assault on Pietari Kaupunki… and discovered that it had been abandoned.
They had time to move in and set up their own base of operations before the entire city exploded around them.
One of the Karelia Brigades had used captured Soviet weapons to rig the city for demolition, then moved out disguised as fleeing refugees. They had withdrawn just far enough east to hide in the surrounding region and wait for the single largest Soviet army still in existence to bottle itself up in a burning city on a narrow peninsula; when a Finnish army swept in from the west and forced a ruinous retreat of the surviving Soviet forces, the hidden brigade cut the fleeing columns to pieces. Western Russian military capacity was crushed, and in short order all of the former Soviet satellite states rose up and declared themselves independent. Individual Soviet soldiers for the most part realized that it was better to be a new citizen of Ukraine or Lithuania or Kazakhstan than a Soviet corpse, and nearly all of the Soviet forces remaining in the satellite states either defected or just walked away. The USSR was no more, and Greater Finland was born.
From my Adorable Creatures universe, which grew out of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles And Other Strangeness RPG campaign from the late ‘80s. It’s set in the early 21st Century of a world where WWIII happened in 1995, and wasn’t nearly as bad as everyone had expected. It was still terrible, hundreds of millions of people died, but it turned out that the vast majority of the world’s nuclear weapon stockpiles… were fake. Politicians in the great powers had requisitioned trillions of dollars for defense spending over the decades, but had spent it on the same things politicians throughout history have spent taxpayer dollars on: ale and whores. Missile silos were top secret party caves for top military brass, with endless beer and nachos; nuclear missile submarines were underwater casinos for the rich and not-so-famous; strategic bombers were kitted out for Mile High Club joyrides for wealthy campaign donors; many of the real missiles and bombs had warheads made of carboard and aluminum foil and filled with sand. Enough warheads were real that most of the world’s major cities got at least one airburst, and national capitals and financial centers were targeted for big enough saturation attacks that they were destroyed, but by Day Two it was obvious that civilization had been wrecked but hadn’t completely collapsed.In the aftermath of The Bomb, the whole world learned what Japan had known since 1945: All Radiation Is Mutagenic. Many humans began developing bioenergetic powers and became superheroes and/or supervillains… and many began mutating into animal-like forms. Millions of animals worldwide also began mutating, growing into larger, more bipedal versions of themselves, with functional hands and human-level (or greater) intelligence. These Beast Folk were common enough that most of the world’s nations, both surviving and newly formed, were quickly forced to acknowledge them as citizens to prevent mass uprisings.