"The age of kings is dead, Adamat, and I have killed it."
-
Powder Mage Book 1, Brian McClellan.
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2016-2026: KCC's Ten Year Anniversary
2026 marks a pivotal year for the Kaiser Cat Collective - the year in which we turn ten years old! A decade ago, I founded this channel with the purpose of bringing the incredible lore of the Kaiserreich mod to the world through a combination of concept art, narrated voice acting, and other worldbuilding videos. Throughout the decade, the community has continued to expand, and we've taken on an increasing amount of original ideas and concepts we wanted to explore. Last year, this culminated in the announcement of American Kingdoms - our first ever medieval alt-history project, written and developed entirely by the KCC community and crew.
The idea is to expand the channel into a collective focused on 'high-quality alt-history worldbuilding'. The method, of course, is well known by now - animated and narrated concept art highlighting stories and characters from an alt-history world. After 'What if Germany Won WW1?', we want to touch other classics as well, such as 'What if America had already been settled during the Dark Ages', as well as more experimental standalone projects such as a Kalterkrieg-inspired three-way cold war (Projekt '67) and the sci-fi/alt-history blended world of World War 2044.
2026 Roadmap - American Kingdoms
In 2026, we will begin releasing the first videos of our new, all-original American Kingdoms universe. This is our first ever foray into medieval alt-history, based on a fascinating but little-explored topic: What if the Americas had already been settled during the Dark Ages?
This video series serves as a new generation of 'World of' Videos - exploring an alternate timeline through character pieces, monologues and snippets of art and writing. For this universe, me and Yana are also experimenting with a new art style - inspired heavily by the Baroque and Neo-Classicist masters, American Kingdoms will give us a glimpse of a history that could have been as seen through the lens of myth and legends.
Prologue - American Kingdoms Vol.01 videos
"The next night, I lay awake with a full belly, looking at the stars. They had shifted - tilted subtly, impossibly. Constellations I knew were changed. Orion’s belt loosened. Ursa devoured. I knew then for certain, we were beyond the maps now. Past even the stars of men. And I was at peace."
~
Internally, we generally refer to a series of semi-related videos as a 'content wave' or a 'volume' (like from a book). This first volume of American Kingdoms releases serves as an introduction to the universe, and consists of a handful of projects: Two animated videos, and two audio short stories.
Each can be seen as a connected part of the narrative, but they are also an experiment in style and substance in their own right. In general order, the four projects are as follows.
Argonauts: What if the Romans Discovered America?
Argonauts will be our first video in the American Kingdoms project, and serves as a form of prologue as well - narrating the first arrival of Roman settlers to the continent, kicking off the Point of Divergence of the alt-history world.
Originally, this video was titled 'World of American Kingdoms - The Roman Settlers'. We are moving away from 'World of' as a title, however, to focus on clearer and direct headlines that outline the alt-history hook of a video. in this case, it's 'American Kingdoms Short Story - What if the Romans Discovered America?'.
The narrative here focuses on the fictional Roman adventurer 'Americus Vespucius' who - through divine inspiration, madness, or both - is driven to embark on a voyage across the Atlantic, becomes the first European to set foot on American soil. This monologue will be narrated by the incredible Eamon Kinsman, who you may remember from his great work on Kaiserreich Documentary: Bulgaria and other World of Kaiserreich videos.
The entire video is presented as a 'tavern tale' or myth, where a combination of improperly recorded history and exaggeration make the events seem larger than life. What is true? What is fiction? Just as the World of Kaiserreich series has the unreliable narrator, we are bringing that concept back in American Kingdoms.
Along with this very new way of storytelling, we have switched up our art style quite dramatically - For American Kingdoms, we are trying more for a baroque, epical feeling with wide, sweeping brush strokes. Think 'Iliad meets Disco Elysium', which is how I explained it to Yana back when we first discussed our ideas for this world. Here's some of the art and writing for the project to give you a taste.
"The world to me felt tight, wound too far, as though all things were on the verge of uncoiling. Then came the birds. A flock of songbirds - no, a cloud, a writhing mass of them - rose shrieking from the trees below and made for the sea. I tell you, I have never seen such a number. Thousands. Tens of thousands. A black veil thrown toward the setting sun. These birds did not circle. They did not land. They did not return. Westward they flew, into the endless void beyond the horizon. That was when I knew. That was when I dropped to my knees in the cold, black sand and raised my hands to the broken sky."
We left the port of Gades at dawn. Most of all, I remember the silence. No cheers, no brass horns. Just the sound of gulls, and the creak of wood, and the slow, sacred beat of the oars. Behind us, the world we knew receded. Despite the grey dawn, we left port in high spirits, or perhaps mania. The ship Aequinox, a creature of rib and sinew, carried thirty-two men and two months' worth of supplies: Salted meat, dried lentils, biscuit hard enough to break teeth, and water stored in wooden casks that would soon taste of mildew and rust. We were argonauts, pilgrims, madmen with divine wind in our sails. We believed the world would yield to us as a ripe fruit opens to the knife. How foolish we were. How wrong we judged our chances.
"Westward. Always Westward. I set out alone into the green wilderness, barefoot, cloaked, led by the winding trails worn smooth by those who called this land home. Birds called my name in tongues I did not know. The trees whispered scripture. I walked until the forest opened — and there, in a clearing lit by shafts of gold, I found them. Their camp was still. The natives watched in silence as I emerged from the trees — salt-stained, sun-burnt, bearing the last trinkets of Roma: rings, coins, relics of a world they had never seen. I laid them at the feet of a man crowned with feathers and bone. I bowed low, as before a king. Or a god."
Battle of Bunker Hill: What if the Revolutionary War happened in 1375?
Our Battle of Bunker Hill video, set more than a thousand years after Argonauts, takes place during the medieval Revolutionary War era that will be the focal point of much of the American Kingdoms universe. As you can imagine, a lot of the project will revolve around the incredible cool and under-explored idea of American knights running around the continent during the Late Medieval and Early Renaissance era. This is also where the 'Tricorne knight' concept art comes from, as well as Day the Editor's idea of doing animated battle maps inspired by the great Youtube channel Kings & Generals.
My viral piece of concept art that started it all - titled, aptly, 'Tricorne Knights! Tricorne Knights!'
The return of audio drama and podcast content: The American Kingdoms 'Sagas'
"While no serious scholar regards the Sagas of Erik and Wamsutta as reliable historical documents, their endurance in tavern tales, chapbooks, and popular histories reveals a curious pattern: many of their episodes parallel known events with striking - if stylized - fidelity."
~
Audio fans rejoice! After a long hiatus, I decided to put a bunch of my American Kingdoms writing into audio format, using Youtube's new Podcast features. The American Kingdoms Sagas will be a series of short audiobook chapters highlighting various myths and stories from the American Kingdoms universe. This audio content is great as background audio for daily tasks, and I hope to use the format to experiment with scripts that wouldn't otherwise make it to a full video.
The first two audio chapters to release will be:
Paul Revere's Last Ride: A medieval Paul Revere rides out to warn American rebels of the approaching Redcloak host, only to meet a grizzly fate...
Tea Party: The events of the Boston Tea Party reimagined as a 'tavern tale' - starring folk heroes Wamsutta and Eric, a Native American and Bostonian immigrant fighting shoulder to shoulder against the Redcloak menace. This story has some touches of folk legend inspired by Norse tales. If the format proves popular we may revisit these two heroes during other 'Sagas'.
The American Kingdoms Wiki & Worldbuilding Project
Beyond just stories and content, the American Kingdoms project exists as a collaborative worldbuilding effort - for this reason, the American Kingdoms wiki serves as a central lore primer that anyone can contribute to. Many of the mechanisms - lore submissions, rework teams, and a voting body called the Small Council, will sound very familiar to Kaiserreich fans. For AK however, there is no mod, only the joy of hanging out on Discord, writing lore with the lads, and making kickass videos 😀.
The volume of wiki submissions has been, quite frankly, shocking, with hundreds of articles already written in 2025, even before the first AK video release is out. The challenges of moderating and creating central lore from such a wide variety of submissions are definitely top-of-mind. Hence, the project of creating canon and consolidating all submissions and factions is slated to be an ongoing process that extends throughout the development of American Kingdoms.
Standalone Projects - 'Germany Empire in Vietnam' or 'Cold War Projekt '67'
Guten Morgen Vietnam! I think the thumbnail for this one says it all, but hell yes, it's Kaiserreich Cold War 😀. At least on the surface though - because there is no official Kaiserreich canon, our 'German Empire in Vietnam' video will serve as a fanon riff on Kaiserreich-adjacent timelines, taking heavy inspiration from spinoff mods such as Kalterkrieg and other 'three-way cold war' alt-history scenarios.
This and WW2044 are intended to be standalone projects for now - essentially, experiments in different timelines with various techniques of video production. The main art style will be a mix of familiar 'World of Kaiserreich' animated art, this time mixed with Arma 3 Machinima content - a new type of video we started experimenting with during KRDOC9.
A look at the moodboard for our Arma 3 Machinima work - combining and modding existing Cold War assets and models to tell alt-history stories
The narrative itself will center around a young Bavarian soldier who is sent to the 'Vietnamkrieg' in an alt-history mirror of the real-life Vietnam War. The monologue will be played by the ever great Jon Kava, known for his incredible work as The Broker in The Divided States. From the script summary:
In this stand-alone alt-history animatic, inspired by the legendary ‘Kaiserreich’ project and its Cold War spinoff ‘Kalterkrieg’, Kaiser Cat Cinema artists and actors explore a fresh take on the classical three-way Cold War scenario: A world where Germany wins World War one, but the Second World War ends inconclusively.
The end of Second World War did not bring final peace—no Endsieg for the German Empire. Instead, the world has fractured further along ideological lines, with a cold war, a ‘Kalter Krieg’ now spreading across the globe.
Nowhere does the proxy war rage hotter than in Indochina. After retreating from its East-Asian holdings, the German Empire attempts to maintain its influence in local politics. On all sides, Berlin is beset: not only by the Syndicalist Internationale, now led by the Kuomintang, but also by its rival, the Japanese Empire.
The Cold War project is based on a series of Cold War paintings I did back in '22-'23, originally to try out some ideas for The Divided States. Mostly, I wanted to do a fun riff on movies like 'Apocalypse Now' and 'Full Metal Jacket'. 'Different Flag, Same Hell
Special thanks to all the Patreons that supported the development of the Cold War Project concept art!
Standalone Projects - World War 2044
Closing off our Standalone Projects is the alt-history / sci-fi blend of 'World War 2044'. Formerly known as the Dieselpunk project, WW2044 combines my sketches into an animatic short video that explores D-Day in a modern setting. This project has lived on my HDD for a good many years as a bundle of concept art, so I am excited to finally bring it to life! From the script summary:
What if D-Day happened in 2044? In their ‘World War 2044’ animatic series, the alt-history content creators at the Kaiser Cat Collective reimagine the great battles of the Second World War with modern technology and tactics.
Keen eyes will notice a lot of this concept art has grown out of the Dieselpunk project - which featured a more far-out Wolfenstein aesthetic. After trying out various things, I ended up doing a more grounded setting instead, which then gradually morphed into this Dieselpunk-inspired-but-still-realistic setting. Our Arma 3 community games were also a large inspiration for the development of this universe. A big S/O to all the operators who showed up to free Altis last year 😀
Some earlier concepts explored the German Army and Japan in this timeline, and I was surprised at how viral these concepts became on Instagram. Occasionally, I try to post some concept art for various projects as 'dev diary carousels' - a series of images showing off the art with some thoughts and sketches from myself. You can find these art blasts in my Dev Diaries as well.
If you don't do so yet, make sure to follow Kaiser Cat Cinema on various social media channels via our Connect with KCC page. If you only follow KCC on a single channel, it's very easy to miss such posts.
Channel name updates - 'Kaiser Cat Cinema' becomes the 'Kaiser Cat Collective'
Internally, I've quite often referred to KCC as the 'Kaiser Cat Collective' or 'Kaiser Cat Syndicate'. I've always found this to be a more elegant way to referring to the Kaiser Cats as a community, rather than just a channel. This year, I am also working on updating our websites and brand names to reflect this new naming system. After all, we produce a ton of music, writing, wiki work, art pieces and other projects that don't neatly fit in a video.
If you've written an article on the wiki, created fan art for one of our universes - you are just as much part of this collective as the rest of us 😀. With the American Kingdoms wiki project specifically, I am hoping to make fan art and fan writing a much larger part of the channel going forward. I've been collecting some of my favorite fan art from the American Kingdoms project, and intend to feature them during my traditional 'After-show' where I thank Patreons, crew and fans for their incredible contributions to the universe.
In that vein, here is the really cool 'World Of' style designs for the Byzantine Order of Bermuda by Freeman Veceslav on our Discord!
Alongside renaming ourselves the 'Kaiser Cat Collective', we may work on expanding our branding system to more clearly indicate the nature of each project. Audio and music projects would be labeled 'Kaiser Cat Radio', our traditional videos and animations would remain 'Kaiser Cat Cinema', and our gaming group would use 'Kaiser Cat Gaming'. 'Kaiser Cat Operations' has been in use for a while, and is actually the name of a hidden Youtube channel only the crew has access to - one we use to upload animation tests and other video assets before they make it into a final video.
March on in the Kaiser Cat united front - because you are a Kaiser Cat, too!
Flagmaker & Print - 2026 Roadmap
It is no secret that KCC does not make money (it, in fact, runs a frightening deficit), as hiring professional actors and artists to make videos costs much more than we make from Youtube. Luckily, I have a day job - the development of Flagmaker & Print! We've seen some incredible growth at FMP the past two years, and should be slated to ship our 10.000th custom flag order this year - pretty nuts! If you haven't done so yet, check out the Flagmaker's site. For those that don't know, Flagmaker & Print is a tool we developed to make it extremely easy to design and print your own flags for worldbuilding, hobby projects and the like.
Our winter 2025 updates, dubbed the 'FMP2000 SuperFast' update (yes we do some meming here) has significantly improved the performance of the app across all devices and platforms. There's a lot of work to be done, however. I am still not happy with where our mobile app is at, so we are hammering away at new features, better UI, and other goodies coming to FMP in 2026.
If you're interested in learning more about that particular project, follow my Flagmaker dev diaries here.
Closing Thoughts from Vincent - A New Journey
Those who have followed KCC the past few years know it has not been an easy journey for me. My spinal fracture really threw a wrench in the works, culminating in me developing my own self-designed bed desk to help manage my low back pain. Through medical care and a careful regimen of stability training, I have managed to bring the pain back to manageable levels. Unfortunately, that stuff never really goes away, and I find myself in the difficult position of managing a chronic injury while working two jobs. I'm still dodging the double spinal fusion surgery I will need eventually - but of course, that's a ticking time bomb 😅. Until then, we forge on!
The second part of the year was defined by my father's sickness and death - closing the book on his decade-long fight against cancer. This was obviously a difficult and dark period for me, but I've decided to not linger on it extensively. Despite my public-facing job, I do prefer keeping such grief and family matters personal, so I have not talked about it much beyond what is necessary for my work at KCC. Of my father, I will say this: We not only buried an incredible man, an incredible father, but also a great artist and a great thinker. As I said to the crowd at the eulogy: For me, there will always be a hole in the universe now.
To finish with some more mundane frustrations... home and studio renovations are slated to absorb a lot of time (and money) this year. When the bathroom started leaking water in 2024, I initially laughed it off. That was until the roof of my kitchen collapsed. That's not a metaphor by the way, the roof of the kitchen is literally coming down!
The roof, Jack! The goddamn roof is collapsing!
The glorious jank that was the first iteration of the supine bed desk, coupled with a quick drywall patch job over a heap of waterlogged rotten drywall. Yes, it's been quite the year indeed...
The current - and much more comfortable - iteration of my bed desk.
So, 2026 - a new journey begins. The challenges are enormous, but we face them with an incredible team, a growing community, a deepening passion for becoming the greatest alt-history collective this timeline has ever seen.
In the words of a great navigator: "Here. There. Beyond."
- VincentDN