New Reality Seeds

[Astromancer]

I rewatched that old film Things to Come. The Middle section is a great adventure setting. Wings over the World hereafter WoW is one of the modles for Centrum, so Centrum would be after them like a bee after honey. Let them figure out the game and have WoW seek an alliance with Homeline. Remember that the book The Shape of Things to Come has scads of great background details to play with.

The Boss, played by Richardson is a cool foe and a possible ally (but can you trust him?) Meanwhile, Cabal will certainly be a vital ally, but will Homeliners be able to respect him? Fun group dynamics.

[PTTG]

A two-world Skerry. One is a strange alternate with an unknown and distant divergence point; the other is a "dream realm" of constantly-shifting terrain. The normal realm is Iris, and the dream realm is Morpheus.

All humans (and near-humans, I suppose) in Iris gain Jumper (Projection [-25%], Accessibility: Sleep [-10%], Uncontrollable [-10%], Unconscious Only [-20%], and Limited Access [-20%] capping at [-80%]) [20], and have ~50 points of Modular Abilities (Physical +50% (They may change their virtual forms' physical aspects), Virtual -50%, Uncontrollable -10%) [45]. As a special effect, jumping in this way fulfills the biological need for normal sleep for [0].

Still trying to figure out how to build "death in the dream world causing one to wake up instead of dying."

In short, the "dream world" is a real world, shared by all humans in this worldline. Although the dream world is real, the terrain is mutable and self-changing, and navigating it uses the Dreaming (Morpheus Navigation) skill, which defaults to Dreaming -4. There are a number of modifiers, but broadly, finding a specific dreaming person uses the Area Class modifiers from B176; for example, finding someone you know personally is unmodified, finding a random member of a distant but known empire is tough but doable, and finding a specific person you don't know personally, such as your king, is extremely hard. Similar rolls allow you to avoid pursuit.

Manipulating the dream world calls for Dreaming; a success achieves your goal, a failure produces generic or bland results at best, nothing at all, or an ugly or disturbing artifact. The GM may assess penalties for expecially complex or specific items between -1 and -10, but there is nothing it is impossible for a dreamer to picture; traits that reflect a creative, thoughtful, or imaginative nature provide bonuses. You may take a bonus equal to a relevant relative skill level. For example, anyone can attempt Dreaming to conjure a castle. A child with Dreaming-8 and Curious might roll against 10. An adult with Dreaming-10, 10 IQ, and Architecture-13 rolls against 13, but may take a -4 penalty because his idea of a "castle" is far more detailed than the child's. Animals can be dreampt this way, but the dreamer must use points from their Modular Abilities to buy them as an Ally; such creations are technically part of the dreamer.

The approximate date is 1000 BCE, chronologically speaking. Society is similar, although somewhat more advanced and unified. Dream Guides - people who have high Dreaming (Morpheus Navigation) skill and who aid others - are a common practice, and the use of the dream world to teach skills has somewhat increased the productivity of most settlements (In game terms, some six or eight hours of additional training time is available.) The largest communities (currently TL 3) are in the Indus valley, modern-day Greece, and coastal China and Japan; trade flows busily among these three great cultural centers. Kings are normally fairly kind to their people; if enough people are really unhappy then they can make nights uncomfortable for their rulers.

There are three main languages along the trade route, and traditionally three empires consisting of a somewhat feudal series of kingdoms, baronries, and counties. The rest of the world is largely tribal, although North America is home to a diffuse network of trading cultures around TL 2. One universal is that clothing is comfortable and practical both day and night, and a visitor to this dimension would note that people tend to sleep with one or two useful trinkets strapped to them (physical contact is not actually important, only familiarity.

Why the detailed rules for dreaming? This worldline hasn't been discovered by Homeline yet. When they do, there are even odds that the first explorers could end up on Morpheous - and the dream world can be a very dangerous place for you to materially visit. Alternatively, visit Iris first and run it as a mystery. When PCs fall asleep for the night, their players have to leave the room... continuing the adventure in the dream world then works best if they first struggle to find one annother, succeed (lacking the skill but having major bonuses from knowing one another and sleeping near one another,) then trying to escape the suddenly mad world!

Dreamstuff is only barely stable as it is. Taking it out of Morpheus is probably impossible. I have no idea what would happen if you tried to actually dream up a conveyor...

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by PTTG

I have no idea what would happen if you tried to actually dream up a conveyor...

Well, I'd rule that you need to be a sufficiently good conveyor engineer that you know everything needed to build one from scratch in an industrial society with no knowledge of parachronics. And there's a rather obvious reason why such people don't get to leave their homeworld.

[ericthered]

Classically, only Iris would be accessible to infinity.

I think the 'waking up' part is best modeled by borrowing 'telecontrol'+50% form possession or construct +50% from duplication

[fchase8]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Indeed. Actually, I'd have thought that a better bet would be to give them two different worlds. There isn't a terrible shortage of timelines, and whatever you do, you've got two or more communities who are going to develop a historical tradition of blaming each other for the deaths of billions. Perhaps Miracle Workers had a tight budget, but still.

Actually, there are known colony worlds with two or more very distinct populations - Bhuvarlok/Tecumseh, for example. You do have whole uninhabited planets to play with. So, just find a couple of worlds where the chartering government will hand back a county-sized area in a fertile but not overly-valuable area distant from their own capital, and agree to keep a benevolent eye in case of emergencies, and put the survivors there. (The cost to the government would be small, and the PR boost would be nice.) Accept that a few decades down the line, the survivor colony will need to make friends with their neighbours, and plan accordingly. There's still scope for problems, but it's surely safer than expecting 10,000 traumatised war survivors to build a new world from scratch on their own.

I could see the idea of a Homeline colony world taking in a refugee population from a hell parallel. The refugees taken in would have to be relatively small when compared to the Homeline colonists, and at least perceived to be similar/friendly.

But perhaps Infinity wants to keep any refugee world separate from Homeline colonies, so they can keep the refugees at arm's length from Homeline. Those refugees would be from a world advanced enough to cause an apocalypse, and likely would include people responsible for the end of the world. These aren't the kind of people you'd want on a world with an open door to Homeline, and sharing a world with Homeline citizens.

And allowing refugees from a world onto a Homeline colony could create a bad precedent. GURPS Infinite Worlds mentions the 'Alternity Exodus', where Homeline Israel saves off-world Jews and brings them to Homeline Israel, and it's denounced by the U.N. Bringing refugees to Homeline colony worlds would be rather close to that, and could be exploited.

Infinity is very reluctant to expose The Secret to non-Homeliners, including the desperate ones - indeed, especially the desperate ones, as they're the ones who'd be willing to take dangerous risks with parachronics. I was always under the impression that the one refugee world Miracle Workers set up was a test case. And the U.N. has enough trouble with its world for Homeline refugees, Refugee.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Classically, only Iris would be accessible to infinity.

Morpheus, OTOH, ought to be easily accesible from the Astral Plane, if you're doing a Cabal game (or have people from the Cabal involved, anyway).

[Anders]

After Churchill was fired from his post as Lord of the Admiralty, he served in France for a while, resigning just before the Somme (wise move). What if he had been killed during that time?

(I am following this channel about WWI, covering it in great, exhausting and depressing detail. It is worth watching)

[Astromancer]

Try this idea. One weird event changes a world.

In 1947 a spaceship lands near Washington DC, it a minor trader/scavenger group. Basically good natured. They trade some details on superconductivity for Rare Earths.

From 1947 on everybody knows space in important and humanity's future is out there in the stars. It's 1980, we have a moonbase and the information on superconductivity is being to pay off.

Both Centrum and Homeline want to get the superconductors and any space tech. The Cold War is heating up and spies, out world or otherwise need to be careful.

[PTTG]

Not a bad idea. Do the aliens keep visiting or did they just stop by?

Here's one: Lee decides to go with the North; maybe he married a northern girl (possibly because he decided that marrying his cousin would be unwise), maybe Lincoln just managed to make his perspective a little bit clearer.

As a result, the south is crushed immediately. The North has population, industry, economy, terrain, and in this case tactics on their side (in OTL the North had catastrophic failures in leadership; even in this TL between supreme commander Lee and his soldiers there's a couple layers of inept leadership that Lee overcame). In a matter of months Northern forces end southern pretentions; near the end southern troops are so demoralized that they surrender more often than they fight.

Here we can go two ways: Either the reconstruction is much more successful, ultimately leading to a modern south with an average standard of living much closer to the north, or reconstruction goes worse because the North is less committed. The south remains a festering rural backwoods and drags the rest of the US down, possibly rebelling again and again over the years.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by Anders

After Churchill was fired from his post as Lord of the Admiralty, he served in France for a while, resigning just before the Somme (wise move). What if he had been killed during that time?

(I am following this channel about WWI, covering it in great, exhausting and depressing detail. It is worth watching)

That's a good question, since he filled a number of posts and gave a number of speeches, among other things, in the following years. The most significant immediate consequence I can see is that David Lloyd George would need to appoint someone else Minister of Munitions in 1917.

In the long term, it could lead to Britain doing worse in WWII, possibly even needing to sue for peace, but nothing could make Seelöwe work, other than magic or significant outside intervention.