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Old 08-23-2009, 10:24 AM   #277
robkelk
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Join Date: Oct 2007
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Default Re: Alternate Earths 3, What Worlds? (hypothetical)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Spudzill View Post
What about IST? It was, for a time, very popular. What would the various IW factions make of it, I wonder? Especially post Gatherer? BTW Was there a 9/11 on IST?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery View Post
See the earlier Updating GURPS IST thread. robkelk is a good guy to bounce questions off of about IST, and you can always sign up for Bob Schroeck's forums and ask there.
You called? <g>

Bob says (I'm paraphrasing here) there wasn't a 9/11 in the IST world, because the Middle East wasn't the "big bad" of the setting and Cuba didn't have the resources to pull off an operation like that. Besides, IST-1 has precogs (see GURPS Y2K for more about that).

As for how IST fits into the Infinite Worlds... see here. In summary:

IST-1 is the canonical IST as presented in GURPS IST.

IST-2 is "IST Dark", mentioned in a sidebar on page 59 of GURPS IST. (For some reason, IST-1 and IST-2 occasionally swap parachronic coordinates - this isn't official yet, but Bob says he'll include it in the draft of any GURPS IST update he writes for 4e.)

IST-3 is Super Rebels, a project that was never published but ended up being referenced in the description of Richard Carey in GURPS Shapeshifters.

Now we get into the unofficial IST alternates (all smiled upon, or at least smiled at, by Bob).

IST-4 is a world where metahuman powers appeared in the 1980s, and is quickly becoming a IST/TS crossover world.

IST-5: "On this timeline, the United Nations first attempted to create a super-team to enforce its policies soon after the organization was founded in 1946. This first effort failed. A second group was organized in 1957, soon after the Suez Crisis, but this one soon disbanded as well. Another was created in the mid-1960s, only to be disbanded soon after. A very large group was organized in 1975 ... but rather than being disbanded, its members all seem to have disappeared. However, the fifth group, organized in 1982 has STOOD UP to the test of time. So far, at least. :)" - Chris Davies. (Insert your own Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Babylon 5 jokes here.)

IST-6 is a powers/steampunk crossover, where metahumans first appeared during the Napoleonic Wars.

IST-7 is a world where the metahumans took over the world by default. (Some people want to call it "Alan-Moore-1" instead of "IST-7", due to its similarity to Mr. Moore's never-written story Twilight of the Heroes.)

IST-8 is "Powers: The Masquerade"


And crossing IST and IW the other way... This is highly unofficial, but it's based on Bob's ideas.

The Loon (GURPS IST, p. 67) has, through no fault of his own, been thrown into an alternate universe. He's been using his Modular Abilities (Cosmic) to try to find a metahuman method of going home, visiting a large number of Myth parallels along the way. As yet, the only parallel that he's visited which is also known to Infinity and Interworld is Gernsback-2, where he traded some of his knowledge of IST-1's gravity physics (and the plans for the Anson GravMaster antigravity device) for food and lodging, and picked up a travelling companion who has no intention of returning to Gernsback-2.

The adventuring party who've followed The Loon showed up in public in Gernsback-2, completely blowing The Secret out of the water. This has given Infinity fits. Worse, when an Infinity agent pretending to be a local interviewed one of the locals who'd interacted at length with the visitors, she confirmed that even the least powerful of them were competent and/or powerful enough to be good candidates as I-SWAT recruits, and none of them were from known alternates...
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Rob Kelk
“Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”
– Bernard Baruch,
Deming (New Mexico) Headlight, 6 January 1950
No longer reading these forums regularly.

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