Crimson Guard

The Crimson Guard (Ostro-Ludzic: Gardă Karminovă), also known as the Territorial Guard and Crimson Volunteer Detachment, is a Subprime-based military reserve force in Ostrozava, formally defined as a Citizen's League for Territorial Defense. Together with the Civil Guard, which it predates by almost fifty years, the Crimson Guard is one of two non-military paramilitary forces in Ostrozava, but unlike the Civil Guard, their responsibilities do not extend to law enforcement; instead, the Crimson Guard only activates during times of wartime or crisis, such as natural disasters; if possible, activated Crimson Guard units are subordinated to the Civil Guard. When in peacetime, they serve as a state gun club with ties to the pioneer movement; despite their ties to the Pioneers, the minimum age to join nevertheless remains 18.

The Crimson Guard has its origins in the First Partisans' War, when invading Aureumterran and Velikoslav troops overran large swathes of Ostrozavan territory before the then-underequipped armed forces could respond. Subsequently, bands of former revolutionaries and other citizens opposed to foreign occupation banded together as irregulars; these initial Crimson Guards were largely diverse ideologically, though as the course of the war continued and the Ostrozavan military grew, many non-Socialist members of the Guards were purged or sidelined. The Guard was incorporated into the military after the war, and extraneous organizations were disbanded for fear of breaking the state monopoly on violence. The Crimson Guard again reconstituted as a grassroots political movement before and during Second Partisans' War, largely around Rheigen, a region then-occupied by Aureumterra; at the outbreak of the Chaos of '57, the Crimson Guard also pivoted to a anti-Daliborist stance before the military did; they are often credited for having assassinated at least three Daliborist generals and thus contributed to the Army's turn against Dalibor and the appointment of the first Prime Defense Council under Elias Manninger.

After the 1962 creation of the Ostrozavan Civil Service, the Crimson Guard became a Subprime-level organization, individually organized by local governments, and intended to serve as a more decentralized counterpart to the Civil Guard, which took over many defensive and law-enforcement responsibilities (such as rural policing) previously done by the Crimson Guards; this has led to an occasionally tense rivalry between the two organizations, although this rivalry has partially died down in recent decades.