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Old 07-03-2019, 11:18 AM   #4221
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Default Re: New Reality Seeds

Try this one...

Saga-5

The Saga designation covers worlds were history diverges in the North Atlantic Viking settlements or the lands associated with them. Saga-2 has the Irish reach Iceland early and with non-clergy in the groups. Thus the Norse find a settled island. Both Saga-1 and Saga-4 involve successful Vinland colonies. Saga-7 has no Norse settlements of either Iceland or Greenland. Saga-3 as well as four and eight, Iceland stays free of Norse Royal control. In Saga-8 Iceland joins the Hanseatic League. However, Saga-5 is different.

In most parallels were the Norse settle Greenland the colony dies out in later Middle Ages crushed between climate change, royal mismanagement, and insane trade restrictions. However, although the local year in this Q5 parallel is1495, the Greenland Norse colony is vital and thriving!

Anthropologists studied the colony and found that someone had introduced genetically modified grains (Oats, Barley, and an exotic grain called Red Rye{It looks like Rye, tastes like Chestnuts}) and some similarly modified herbs, fruits, and fodder crops, into the colony. These crops thrived in Greenland.

According to records and other evidence these crops were introduced around 1150 AD' three and a half centuries ago. No known society capable of world-jumping could create these crops. This means that there have been or at this are are, others out there more deadly than Centrum and the Cabal combined.

Both Centrum and the Cabal have bought seed corn for each of these crops. Red Rye particularly looks like a winner. But both are searching Saga-5 for more evidence.

Since the few records about the introduction of the new crops say that the people who brought the crops claimed to be Welsh folk working for the Great-Grandson of Merlin the Wizard, Wales is a place to look. As the sailors that maned the ships said they were Icelanders and the Welsh-folk hired them in Reykjavik, Iceland is also high priority. As the nearest known relatives of the modified oats came from Caithness, Scotland is worth a look. And the Barley points to Finland.
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Last edited by Astromancer; 07-04-2019 at 05:44 PM.
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Old 07-03-2019, 06:20 PM   #4222
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Originally Posted by malloyd View Post
Presumably somebody from the Moro family - one of the prominent noble families of Venice, providing an assortment of Doges, Governors of Cyprus, prominent members of the Council of Ten etc, for several centuries.
I did some searching on Wikipedia, and I think it's for Cristoforo Moro, the 67th Doge of Venice, who must have arranged the creation of the canal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristoforo_Moro

I have no idea what 'Moro-1' would be.

It does seem to be all the rage to name timelines with a number after it, to indicate that it's one of many similar to it. I don't know what the exact breakdown is in GURPS Infinite Worlds, but it seemed like more than half of the worlds were singular, not part of a group.
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Old 07-03-2019, 07:52 PM   #4223
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I did some searching on Wikipedia, and I think it's for Cristoforo Moro, the 67th Doge of Venice, who must have arranged the creation of the canal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristoforo_Moro

I have no idea what 'Moro-1' would be.

It does seem to be all the rage to name timelines with a number after it, to indicate that it's one of many similar to it. I don't know what the exact breakdown is in GURPS Infinite Worlds, but it seemed like more than half of the worlds were singular, not part of a group.
A good Moro-1 might be Venice taking and holding Negroponte(Euboea) a major source of food for Venice. A Venice with a more stable food supply would be less vulnerable. And a major defeat for the Ottomans would have vast knock on effects. The seeming invulnerability of the Turks was a constant source of fear and xenophobia in Christian Europe and a major force for complacency in the Islamic world.

Moro-1 might be a world were Venetian pragmatism was the order of the day in the Mediterranean basin. Cross cultural exchange and respect making for a richer more stable world.
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Old 07-04-2019, 02:26 AM   #4224
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Originally Posted by fchase8 View Post
It does seem to be all the rage to name timelines with a number after it, to indicate that it's one of many similar to it. I don't know what the exact breakdown is in GURPS Infinite Worlds, but it seemed like more than half of the worlds were singular, not part of a group.
The book concentrates its page-count on the weird but interesting worlds. It's strongly implied there are lots of less interesting ones.
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Old 07-04-2019, 07:42 AM   #4225
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The book concentrates its page-count on the weird but interesting worlds. It's strongly implied there are lots of less interesting ones.
Numbered timelines aren't necessarily all that similar to others in the same sequence; they just have a common defining characteristic. Reich timelines all have a surviving 3rd Reich, but is there necessarily anything else connecting them?
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Old 07-04-2019, 04:02 PM   #4226
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A good Moro-1 might be Venice taking and holding Negroponte(Euboea) a major source of food for Venice. A Venice with a more stable food supply would be less vulnerable. And a major defeat for the Ottomans would have vast knock on effects. The seeming invulnerability of the Turks was a constant source of fear and xenophobia in Christian Europe and a major force for complacency in the Islamic world.

Moro-1 might be a world were Venetian pragmatism was the order of the day in the Mediterranean basin. Cross cultural exchange and respect making for a richer more stable world.
A 'strong Venice' would be a good alternate, but I think it (and Moro-2) would more likely just have been named 'Veneto'.

Maybe Moro-1 was actually a 'weak Venice', perhaps a Venice conquered by the Turks. Infinity wanted to name it 'Veneto' (would have been before discovering Moro-2), but the Italian government didn't want a conquered Venice worldline named after the Italian province. Then came another timeline with a divergence in the same time & place, and the 'Moro' designation was born.


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The book concentrates its page-count on the weird but interesting worlds. It's strongly implied there are lots of less interesting ones.
There are a lot of echoes (I'm not sure how they're named; maybe by how many years behind Homeline they are, like the general Centrum designations), a lot of empty worlds (most uninhabitable), and I think it was said 41 coordinates designated 'Vanish'.

I don't know how many parallels there are, but GURPS Infinite Worlds does highlight weird worlds. Though most of the weird ones seem to be on Quantum 3, which would give Quantums 4-7 to the empty & parallel worlds (and Q6 to echoes, but that quantum has more worlds than the others, indicating that the echoes are 'extra'), so would imply way more parallels.

Quantum 4 probably has a bunch of 'regular' parallels that aren't mentioned, simply because worlds on Q4 aren't accessible to Centrum, aren't on same quantum as Homeline, and aren't on weird Q3.


This is to say nothing of Quantums 8-10. I always wondered if those Centrum-only quantums have parallels of Homeline (since that's effectively what the only inhabited parallel above Quantum 7 that we know of, Centrum, is), parallels of Centrum, both?

One would have thought that, over the decades, Interworld would have noticed all these parallels, even if just in Quantums 6 & 7, that diverged from Centrum at the same point, White Ship - noticed before noticing Secundus. But maybe, before the Lockridge Protocols, once Interworld determined that a newly discovered timeline was inhabited, they just blocked it and looked no further. Plus Centrum has a poor sense of its own history.


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Numbered timelines aren't necessarily all that similar to others in the same sequence; they just have a common defining characteristic. Reich timelines all have a surviving 3rd Reich, but is there necessarily anything else connecting them?
Not always, but often. The rules on how to name timelines seems pretty fast & loose at Infinity (they got Attila completely wrong).

It seems often like a group name is created if there are worlds that conform to pre-parachronic, 'traditional' ideas of alternate history, mostly war divergences: the Reich worlds are 'What if the Nazis won?', Dixie 'What if the CSA won?', Bonaparte 'What if Napoleon won?', etc. Those do seem to have pretty close divergences, all during one war.

Though that was then extended to lost governments/civilizations, such as the Communist Lenin parallels, Rome worlds. Those are the ones that are less similar (Lenin-2 has a Communist revolution in the USA.

Then there are the Taft worlds, which seem to be all named that not for Robert Taft, but radiation found on one world named after him, that is found on others.


Interestingly, while GURPS Alternate Earths 1 has three worlds from groups, Dixie, Reich-5, and Roma Aeterna, GURP Alternates Earths 2 eschews group names - 'Cornwallis' instead of a Britannia, for instance.
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Old 07-05-2019, 12:31 PM   #4227
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Try this one...

Way back on page 107 I came up with Thaw-1 (see below). Now here is Thaw-3!

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Thaw-1
In Thaw-3 a Super-volcano in the Congo Basin explodes in a truly massive event in 1818 only a few years after Tambora, within three years Toba also exploded. Temperatures plunged worldwide.

Europe, not even recovered from the Napoleonic Wars collapsed. The technology of the period didn't really allow for quick enough mass migrations to do much of anything.

The population of the Northern USA and Canada went south in the territories recently taken by General Jackson and further South into Texas and other parts of Mexico. The Five Civilized Tribes cut shrewd deals and joined the new government. Spain found Florida lost to them before they even knew what happened.

Those that could flee Europe went to Brazil were the Rain forests were quickly replaced by vast savannas. Asia collapsed under vast famines.

The local year is 2007 and temperatures have been slowly increasing for decades, but this world is still cold like the Little Ice Age. The Cabal, seeking wealth and power aided the USA. Slowly bringing in usefuol technologies and "Finding" lost books and information. The USA, which claims all of North America north of Mexico, is almost to TL6, but is rapidly developing.

Latin America is a fractured mess and covered in wars, civil wars, revolts, and revolutions. Spain and Sicily are the only functioning European nations. China and India are slowly working through wars of unification. The Dutch, having married into the local elites in their East Indies, are pretty much absorbed at this point, but paper and the printing press still transformed Indonesia into an Empire. The European/Berber/Arab communities of North Africa are facing both brutal drought (the desert returning) and the return of the old disease climate.

It looks like this Q6 Low Manna world is the Cabal's for the taking is Homeline can't stop them.
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Old 07-06-2019, 01:43 PM   #4228
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Try this one...

The Spanish Flu was bad enough, several other epidemics came ripping through the world in the 1920's (Cabalists suggest a group of plague demons got loose on this low manna Q6 parallel, and they didn't mind letting Homeline know this in order to secure everyone's safety) but afterwards the were so few children. Very few people could have more than two and most couldn't have any.

The local year is 1999, the population worldwide is about 300 million. These people are changed. They have few if any genetic diseases, mental problems are rarer, they even look better (the humans of this world all are genefixed and have the Zero Point Traits from Transhuman Space of No Genetic Defects, No Mental Defects, and No Unattractive.) Homeline, the Cabal, and Centrum, all smell rats, but why was this done?

The local politics are messy. Hybrid Vigor was seen in the USA as the magic bullet to defeat the sterility. It seemed to work. Meanwhile, much of continental Europe plunked down for blood purity. The English speaking nations and Italy followed the US lead. The Franco-Germanic Fascist Union snarls at the American mongrels and the Asiatic Communists. Meanwhile the USSR practices selective breeding of humans. They claim profound results, and show little proof.
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Old 07-08-2019, 11:51 AM   #4229
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Try this one...

Merlin-6

Most Merlin worlds are parallels were magic either returns or shows up in the Modern Industrial period. However, Merlin-6 has magic show up in England in 1581 when John Dee attempted a ritual he found in a book that claimed to be written by Apollonius of Tyana. At first only the valley of the Thames from Kimble to Gravesend was at normal manna, but it spread.

The local year is 1735 on the Q5 world. The normal manna area extends from Marrakesh North to Tromsø, and from Reykjavík east to Arkhangelsk.

The rest of the world is Low/No manna with no manna being more common.

Magical knowledge is growing slowly, but some non-Cabal wizards from other parallels seem to have found the place.They are letting out a few lower power spells in order to build up their reputations and get money and followers.

The scholars of Europe seem to be focused on dealing with magic scientifically. They certainly snap up any new spells going, But they analyse any spell they get, they're beginning to be able to invent new spells. They aren't good at it yet, but they are beginning.

Basically, an age of Reason Swasher with Magic returning.
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Old 07-08-2019, 07:10 PM   #4230
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Originally Posted by Astromancer View Post
Try this one...

Merlin-6

Most Merlin worlds are parallels were magic either returns or shows up in the Modern Industrial period. However, Merlin-6 has magic show up in England in 1581 when John Dee attempted a ritual he found in a book that claimed to be written by Apollonius of Tyana. At first only the valley of the Thames from Kimble to Gravesend was at normal manna, but it spread.

The local year is 1735 on the Q5 world. The normal manna area extends from Marrakesh North to Tromsø, and from Reykjavík east to Arkhangelsk.

The rest of the world is Low/No manna with no manna being more common.

Magical knowledge is growing slowly, but some non-Cabal wizards from other parallels seem to have found the place.They are letting out a few lower power spells in order to build up their reputations and get money and followers.

The scholars of Europe seem to be focused on dealing with magic scientifically. They certainly snap up any new spells going, But they analyse any spell they get, they're beginning to be able to invent new spells. They aren't good at it yet, but they are beginning.

Basically, an age of Reason Swasher with Magic returning.
This could be interesting, Beware of side effects. Magic items can't be used where there is no mana, but over time, mages will be able to do things like forge better steel, build more precise instruments, and the like. The magic is done; the resulting materials are non-magical, but spells were used to work them. Over time, that's a big advantage--huge advantage.

NOTE: This barely conforms to the Merlin designation, but I'd say it does.
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