Quote:
Originally Posted by martin_rook
I have played in and enjoyed the IST setting, but I had to ignore the timeline because some of it made no sense to me.
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Besides being a really fun way to twist the plot, Reality Quakes are really just a reinforcement of the Fundamental Rule of
GURPS: THE GM IS GOD(DESS). So, change "history" without fear or hesitation. IT'S ONLY A GAME.
If I may blow some philosophical smoke, real history is just chock-full of examples where people
seemed to act in not only unexpected ways, but ways that
seem now to be obviously against their own interests. One of Barbara Tuchman's Very Thick Books,
The March of Folly, details in parallel some splendid examples.
The real-world U.N. itself continues to provide some splendid examples. Why does it exist at all? I think the most fundamental answer is that FDR really wanted it, Stalin let him have it, and Churchill couldn't stop FDR and knew it. The organization of the U.N. looks a lot like the organization of the New Deal to me: Lots and lots of agencies with theoretically broad powers that cancel out because they overlap. Sounds a lot like the American government, doesn't it? And in some ways, like Hitler's government, whose ever-changing organization charts look very much like original Illuminati games with more and more optional decks in play.
HISTORY IS BUNK --Henry Ford
Well, not really; Ford himself built a sort of proto-Disneyland celebrating the Good Old Days As They Should Have Been. Ford's assertion really means that the history you learn in school, and the history people cite when they want to prove this or that point, ain't necessarily so. The idea of objective history itself is exactly as real as the idea of a perfect sphere: Both are ideal forms which probably never occur in nature and, if they did, could never be proven to have occurred.
THE BECKET EFFECT
Why would U.N. delegates act in a way that their governments wouldn't want them too? Well, why did Thomas Becket, once the most reliable lackey Henry Plantagenet could ask for, become a thorn in his side after Hank II got him that gig as Archbishop of Canterbury? How about the discovery of real power to disagree with the master? How about the tendency of human beings to identify more and more with the people they see the most of?
THE GODS AMONG US
IST is a world of Supers, and maybe the really important Supers are the ones who don't don tights and chase fame, glory, and merchandising deals.
One of the most interesting supers in
Mixed Doubles is a guy no one living knows is a super, a U.S. Congressman with Precognition. With this power, he has little trouble being on the right side of any issue, right being whichever side will get him more votes, or keep him from losing the least votes. He has potential for being an incredibly useful lever to warp the flow of history to the "proper" channel, and since he keeps his power secret, the GM is perfectly justified if he or she never reveals his nature. Or her nature, if he gets a sex change.
Heck, why not throw in a real god(dess) or three? Shapechanging gods taking human guise are all over the place in all sorts of mythologies (Odin, Loki, Coyote, Krishna, Madame Pele), as are heroes being promoted to gods (Imhotep the architect, Herakles/Hercules, Quetzalcoatl.) Gods as superheroes are part of the Supers trope anyway. Dust off those
In Nomine books for more guidance on divine string-pulling.