1. Addition of Slovenia. Slovenia is a non-sc country hemmed in between Austria, Hungary, Croatia and Venice. Slovenia has no coastline, so that Venice still borders Croatia.

2. Addition of the Volga-Baltic Sea waterway branching off of the Volga-Don waterway already present, with an additional branch to the White Sea, thereby connecting all Russia's coastlines. The lake where these three new canal systems meet (Lake Onega, but unnamed on the map as it's not a space in its own right) is on the corner of St. Petersburg, Murmansk and Gorky, so fleets can move directly between any two of these spaces. Gorky is now a Russian port, capable of building fleets as well as armies, a function it also fulfills in reality as the primary shipyard of Russia.

3. Addition of Sea of Azov, the northern part of the Eastern Black Sea separated from the rest by the Strait of Kerch and from the Western Black Sea by the Perekop Isthmus. Given that a Strait is a water connection and an Isthmus a land connection, you can move fleets to and from the Eastern Black Sea, but not the Western Black Sea. For the same reason you need a convoy to move armies between Sevastopol and Rostov.

4. The Don river, part of the waterway joining the Black Sea with the Caspian Sea, is on the border between Donbas and Rostov, enabling direct fleet movement between Donbas and Volga.

5. Addition of the Canal du Midi (or more accurately the Canal des Deux Mers –the Canal of the Two Seas– as it includes the Canal de Garonne which runs parallel to the river Garonne), which runs from the Gulf of Lyons to the Bay of Biscay through Auvergne and Bordeaux, thereby providing another alternative to move fleets between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The Canal in reality is too shallow to accommodate sea-going vessels (indeed, it's more of a tourist attraction nowadays), but we may assume that it has been widened and deepened prior to the start of the conflict, finally fulfilling the dream of Louis XIV, le Roi Soleil, during whose reign it had been constructed.

6. Inclusion of the MULTI_COAST_PORTAGE rule, allowing to portage convoy a fleet on one of Iran's coasts to the other coast with the assistance of a convoying army in any of Iran's neighboring provinces.

Whereas Modern-Up was a collaboration between Mario Huys and Vincent Mous (creator of the Modern variant), Slovenia is what Vincent calls "a different variant". The addition of Slovenia was first proposed by Chris Fridrich and put in its definite form by Mario, who describes this in the Diplomatic Pouch Zine article The Modern Art of Love, with a riposte by Vincent in the next Zine. Read also The Modern Art of Travel for a description of the new canal systems.