View Single Post
Old 11-27-2016, 09:07 PM   #1
PTTG
 
PTTG's Avatar
 
Join Date: Feb 2011
Default Alternate Crosstime Organizations

By default, our alternate timelines (like in New Reality Seeds) are carefully designed to not be new power players in the Infinite Worlds Setting.

Let's forget about that. What are alternate crosstime organizations suitable for addition to what we might call a more cosmopolitan multiverse? These timelines may be up-to-present, that is to say, astronomically up-to-date with Homeline. Or maybe they replace Homeline. They can have working projectors. The secret can be out on these worlds.

Here's some of my proposals.
---

De Hillige Oarder fan Kartograaf (HOK):

In 1252, Frisian merchantmen discovered a way to navigate a sailing vessel from worldline to worldline. Each worldline is "adjacent" to only five six others, meaning that travel to the hundreds of worlds they've discovered is slow, but they have even better energy efficiency than Homeline does.

Their plentiful offworld trading strengthened the Frisian Freedom, and the system of local self-rule gradually spread around the continent. It's been 800 years, and today, the Holy Order of Cartographers is the primary crosstime authority. They explore new wrāld-rūtes and classify the worlds they find. The overall worldine is mid TL 7, low TL 8 in a number of nautical fields and life support (they encounter smother worlds just like homeline, and so many of their "conveyors" are fully sealed to allow them to pass through safely). They have nuclear weapons, however they have only been used once, and that was a terrorist attack in 1970; since then, they have imported nuclear dampers from a gernsbeck-like world. Their technology is otherwise advancing fairly slowly, in part because they've only found worlds more advanced than their own in the last 40 years.

The dominant languages are accented forms of Frisian, Mandarin Chinese, Haudenosaunee, Iranian, Nahuatl, and Mexica French, and the most common government organization is a federalized-freedom system, where local areas (usually a single large city or a rural area with the same total population) are independent but swear fealty to large regional federation. The most powerful such state is Dśtslān, consisting of the majority of Europe, plus the population centers of what is Russia in OTL. Though the federation is not very religious, many of its old establishments preserve names and heraldry from the HRE, which collapsed into a civil war circa 1820, and only reformed into the new order around 1930. The next most powerful organization is China, which includes the Japanese islands, and then Haudenosaunee, which is the unified government of North America. The access to alternate worlds lead to nearly no drive to exploit the "new world."

Their science of crosstime travel is behind Homeline; on the other hand, crosstime phenomenon like mana (HOK is no-mana) and near-humans are acknowledged and accepted by the public. The methods of actually navigating from world to world is a special form of teachable psionics, and HOK itself has a strong baseline psionic field. It is broadly believed that the early Frisian crosstimers discovered it by accident, but in fact, they were granted the secret by an agent of the Cabal.

Worlds with null psi, such as Homeline, are just another Vanish world to them.

Last edited by PTTG; 11-29-2016 at 09:30 PM.
PTTG is offline   Reply With Quote