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Old 05-20-2015, 08:56 AM   #1071
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Default Re: New Reality Seeds

Hmm. You'd have a lot of British people, for example, wanting to reclaim their grandparents' homeland, and a fair number of old people wanting to see how much of their childhood homes had survived.
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Old 05-20-2015, 10:54 AM   #1072
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer View Post
Try this idea. In the mid 1930s a Supervolcano near the equator goes off.

(SNIP)
This still counts as an "America! Hell yeah!" timeline of the sort you tend to like. :)

I'd make the situation in North America a little more difficult. The need to move south, so quickly, into the former states of the Confederacy, would bring U.S. cultural conflicts to the forefront -- especially since there were still people alive, in the 1930s, who has either fought in the Civil War, themselves, or had parents who did.

Yankee culture differs from Southern culture in significant ways. One of the reasons the Civil Rights movement lasted at least two decades (and remains an ongoing effort, really) is that it had to take that long. They couldn't move any faster, and still maintain civil order (which got pretty shaky at times, even so).

If you have desperate Yanks and Canucks moving south in a hurry, because they have no other choice, then Southern reactionaries have no time to adapt. The same sort of mindsets that led to White Defense Councils would lead to something similar by a different name (Associations for the Defense of Southern Traditions, or what-not), that would act legally -- and illegally -- to defend the status quo as much as possible.

In the end they'd lose. Given the scope of the catastrophe, every culture would endure radical change. But, traditional Southerners would fight tooth-and-nail to resist, and I think we'd wind up with, in effect, a brutally nasty second Civil War, and that's how we'd have addressed the issue of race, in this scenario.

All the old would-be Confederates would be broken or dead.

That means, 70 years down the line, the scars on North American societies would remain pretty fresh. Everybody would know about such atrocities as forests full of "strange fruit" or other sorts of summary executions without due process, as well as devastated towns and land redistribution.
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Old 05-20-2015, 12:15 PM   #1073
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In the end they'd lose.
Uhm...why? The newly arriving population has no material power base. The factories are in the tundra. Food production is controlled by their hosts. They own little property. The refugees power base is devastated. All the advantages of the North in the US Civil War are gone, with the exception of manpower, which they can't feed.

Essentially, it's a refugee crisis and the refugees are dependent on their hosts for necessities. Further, there isn't enough to go around. You're not going to get to civil rights issues. You're going to be dealing with food riots and people being murdered for shelter in winter.

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Old 05-20-2015, 03:04 PM   #1074
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Uhm...why? The newly arriving population has no material power base. The factories are in the tundra. Food production is controlled by their hosts. They own little property. The refugees power base is devastated. All the advantages of the North in the US Civil War are gone, with the exception of manpower, which they can't feed.

Essentially, it's a refugee crisis and the refugees are dependent on their hosts for necessities. Further, there isn't enough to go around. You're not going to get to civil rights issues. You're going to be dealing with food riots and people being murdered for shelter in winter.
1. This occurs because of a series of volcanic eruptions. It's not a single catastrophic event that happens with little warning, such as a comet strike.

2. That means it takes weeks to realize this might be a problem, and months before it becomes obvious to everyone that it is a problem, and even then they'll argue about how bad it's likely to get. Heck, they do that with atmospheric science, now, and it's much more sophisticated than it was, 75-80 years ago.

3. The United States continues to struggle with the after-effects of the Great Depression, and the general public has already expressed its displeasure with "Do-Nothing" reactionaries, by voting Herbert Hoover out of office. They expected the Federal Government to "Do Something" about the Great Depression, and they'll likely continue to expect the Federal Government to "Do Something" about this problem, too.

4. Franklin D. Roosevelt, regardless of how he's perceived, today, was seen by most Americans back then as a popular leader doing the best he could to deal with the national crisis and, for the most part, doing a pretty effective job of it, despite whining of Hoover supporters in Congress, and a recalcitrant Supreme Court. That means...

5. ...when Roosevelt picks up the telephone and talks to the state governors and says, "Here's what we need to do, boys," most of them will respond, "How can we help?" Not, "Go f*** yourself."

6. When U.S. Army Chief of Staff Douglas J. MacArthur picks up the phone and talks to the various National Guard commanders in each state, they're also likely to say, "What can we do to help?" The reason is they know that, while the Regular Army isn't very big, in the 1930s, it's commanded by men such as MacArthur, Fox Conner, John J. Pershing and George Marshall.

Moreover the second-tier officers include such talents as Dwight Eisenhower (well known, already, for his command of logistics), George C. Patton, and Omar Bradley. These men chose to remain in the Regular Army during the inter-war period, rather than move to the National Guard, or quit and join the private sector as businessmen. Their primary loyalty is to the United States of America, and they'll have zero patience with any secessionist movements, which...

7. ...are not very popular, at this point, anyway. The Civil War had ended only about 70 years before, and the horror of that was fresh in everyone's mind -- as were the reasons for the Confederacy's defeat. Nobody sensible would want to put the nation through that again (especially since the most active of political agitators were leftist, at this point, and few people wanted to see a socialist revolution).

Also, Roosevelt is a DEMOCRAT, and Nixon's Southern Strategy hasn't taken place, yet, because the Civil Rights movement hasn't started. Why would southern DEMOCRATS thwart someone they helped to elect?

8. That means the only people likely to resist pulling together as a country to meet the crisis, head-on (which is what Roosevelt would call for, in his popular Fireside Chat radio addresses), would be utterly idiotic reactionaries. They'd face a National Guard willingly serving under federal command, the Regular Army, and the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Army Air Corps.

Yes, they'd commit horrific atrocities against blacks, at first, but when Patton and Eisenhower roll into their towns with tanks and troops, they surrender or they die. Moreover, the military commanders know who to arrest, once they take the surrenders, because J. Edgar Hoover's G-men are right there, with them.

That's exactly what MacArthur would order them to do, and they'd do it. His commanders extensively studied Grant, Sherman and Sheridan, and those would be the commanders they'd emulate, in this civil insurrection. Moreover, the nature of the crisis would be such that they wouldn't have any luxury to fool around with a bunch of idiots.

So, any southern resisters wouldn't be facing what they consider wimpy, starving, unarmed Yankee refugees, because Roosevelt wouldn't let it reach that point. They'd face the U.S. Army, led by some of the most able commanders in U.S. military history.

Resistance wouldn't last much more than a year, if that long. After that, the CCC and other work-groups get busy building housing, water and sewer treatment plants, hospitals and other facilities and infrastructure. It's a race against time, by that point. They don't have time to dilly-dally, and Roosevelt and his officers don't have much tolerance for foolishness, either.

The survival of the country is at stake, and they'll not put up with stupidity from the philosophical grandchildren of those they'd consider fools from three generations, past.
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Old 05-20-2015, 04:56 PM   #1075
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer
Try this idea. In the mid 1930s a Supervolcano near the equator goes off. Global tempatures plunge for seventy years. The great colonial Empires break-up because they can't be sustained. However much of their populations flee to the colonies to survive. The USSR is crushed, Germany also falls apart. The USA has strong internal lines of comunication and FDR in the White House, and a population with a belief in the rightness and worthiness of their nation and a southern lattorial that is still viable. The population of Canada flees South and is integrated into the US population along with a fairly strong immigration from Europe, but Latin America gets far more immigrants.

It is now the year 2010, the climate is returned to the Early 20th century norms. World population is 2 billion. The USA and Canada are integrated into one nation. This happened because most of the Canadians had to flee to the USA. This nation is TL7 begining to move to TL8.
Maybe. Common American perception aside, Canadians aren't going to be easy to integrate into U.S. culture. Let's look at a few sticking points that may end up altering the U.S. rather than the other way around.

First, a lot of Canadian farmers on the prairies lost a lot of their topsoil during the dustbowl days and they know in a general way that it ended up down around Texas. Maybe they'll try to reclaim it.

Second, Quebecers, Acadians, Franco-Ontarians and Franco-Manitobans aren't going to roll over quietly and start speaking English and don't think you can just drop them off in some Louisiana bayou to join their Cajun cousins. There's a lot of bad blood there from the Expulsion. Generally, Cajuns feel that Quebecers in particular didn't raise a finger to help them at the time.

Canadians, as a whole, are also pretty bad-tempered regarding American bragging about WWI. Canada views the U.S. as a Johnny-come-lately who showed up after the really hard part was over. To put it in perspective, Canada recruited close to 10% of its population into the military (Canadian and British) and had high enough casualties that most families lost a son, some a cousin and those that didn't had a neighbour who had.

Canadians had a very bad time when Conscription was applied late in the war, so the Selective Service Boards are going to be something Canadians oppose vehemently. They'll be pushing for an all-volunteer armed forces.

Another thing that will affect the U.S. military will be Canada's view on military technology. Tanks and air power are both going to get a big boost, particularly from Arthur Currie and Billy Bishop.

Canada is also going to want a different political order from the U.S. The electoral college and a directly elected President are by and large going to be no-fly items. Canadians are going to want a strong federal government with most of the power with a few residual items like agriculture, civil law and education reserved to the states. They're also going to be pushing like crazy for a National Criminal Code to replace the jumble of existing jurisdictions.

Their impact on the South is going to be unpredictable. On the one hand, Canadians have been on the free states side since 1785 (New Brunswick) and 1793 (Ontario [then Upper Canada]), being the terminus of the Underground Railroad. On the other hand, Canada, through Britain, was politically allied with the South during the Civil War and the South did stage a few raids/bank robberies from Canadian soil and Canadians were as enamoured with the romance of Southern chivalry as anyone.

Canadians are also going to make economic politics more difficult. Canadians have seen the General Strike of 1919 which shut the city of Winnipeg down and has very mixed feelings about the RCMP [then RNWMP] using lethal force to break it. The Communist Party of Canada is not a banned party in Canada and it's leader, Tim Buck, is well-enough liked by the man in the street as the founder of The Canadian Brotherhood of Seamen, among other unions. The easiest way to find a Canadian Communist union is to look for the word brotherhood in its name. Also strong at this time are the Cooperative Commonwealth Farmers, first led by J.S. Woodsworth, later by Tommy Douglas, who will see it become the NDP; and the Social Credit movement.

Canadians don't have a wide open frontier tradition. Pierre Berton remarked in one of his books that at the time of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in the American West, the NWMP were issuing fines to settlers for chopping wood on Sunday in the Canadian West.

Canadians don't really think of themselves as having fought wars with Indians [the North-West Rebellion of 1885 would qualify but it's seen as mainly a war between the white Metis and the white Central Canadians). Speaking of Metis, because Canada's half-breeds formed a nation of their own (culturally, if not politically), half-breeds won't have a social stigma with Canadians.

Another sort-of shocker for Americans is going to be the descent of Canadian Indians into the U.S. The northern Dene Nations may end up picking up their two "lost" brothers who wandered south, the Apache and the Navajo.

I'm sure we can find other barriers to easy integration but this list should do for openers.

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Old 05-20-2015, 06:06 PM   #1076
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The biggest issue for the Canadians would be their need to move south regardless of how they feel about the way Americans do things. At a population of ~11,000,000 Canadians vs. ~ 127,000,000 Americans, the Canadians will mostly be assimilated.

As to how well Southerners will resist the changes brought in by those from further north, Yankee, Canadian, or Quebecois, the Southerners will have the advantage of place, blacks were not that well know in north, without the WW II migrations to work in the factories. There will be Northerners who will go along with Southern attitudes based on race. The only exposure a lot of Northerners will have is things like Amos and Andy, black face vaudeville acts, Hollywood portrayals, or worse rumors and stereotypes. A lot of lower class Northerners will also likely buy in to the poor Southerner tradition of "at least we're above the N*****s" add in the original posters European refugees, and you will have an even bigger mishmash going on. How much will Americans draw together to resist foreign ideas? Would this include Canadians? British? You start to see a very different drift in the culture of North America.

Lastly don't count on a united U.S. Army to overrun the South. Patton would have gone home to Virginia at the drop of a hat, just as his grandfather did. Others will go as well.

The bottom line is that no one group would survive intact, the question is which compromises will work.
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Old 05-20-2015, 07:15 PM   #1077
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Quote:
Originally Posted by adm View Post

(SNIP)

Lastly don't count on a united U.S. Army to overrun the South. Patton would have gone home to Virginia at the drop of a hat, just as his grandfather did. Others will go as well.
During the years between the wars, Congress drastically cut back funding for military expenditures, to about half of what the military asked for, just about every year. Eisenhower remained at the rank of major for 16 years -- no promotion, and very few raises in pay. Patton remained a major for 14 years, under similar conditions. He also obeyed MacArthur's orders to use cavalry to suppress a veterans' march, in 1932.

If either man was inclined to leave the military, they would have done so. If Patton was inclined to resign rather than follow orders he found "distasteful," he would never have used U.S. Army cavalry against protesting veterans.

For you to say either man would have refused to do his duty in a situation as dire as the one presented defies the clear historical records about things they actually did.

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The bottom line is that no one group would survive intact, the question is which compromises will work.
Now, this is certainly true, and it largely matches what I wrote. If anything, I expressed criticism of Astromancer's, "America! Hell yeah!" setting, by saying the inevitable changes in U.S. society would have been a lot more bloody and painful than many might think -- not that he ever stated (or even implied) it would be a walk in the park.
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Old 05-20-2015, 07:51 PM   #1078
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The biggest issue for the Canadians would be their need to move south regardless of how they feel about the way Americans do things. At a population of ~11,000,000 Canadians vs. ~ 127,000,000 Americans, the Canadians will mostly be assimilated.
...
You're assuming that "move south" is the same as "move to the USA," though. At least in Nova Scotia, the US-based (but not -backed) "Fenian" raids would still be in living memory, and there's a nice bit of British Empire in the Caribbean; migration from eastern Canada might bypass the 48 states altogether. And folks living north of 60° North might not move as far south as the Great Lakes.

But let's assume all Canadians do move to the USA. That would make them roughly 8% of the total population - a larger fraction of the population than many recognizable minorities are.
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Old 05-20-2015, 07:52 PM   #1079
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Snip...For you to say either man would have refused to do his duty in a situation as dire as the one presented defies the clear historical records about things they actually did.
A) I didn't say anything about Eisenhower, and I think he would stay with the Army.

B) I think Patton would be far more likely to return home to Virginia, for starters he would be going home to defend it from invaders, just as his family did in the Civil War, the War of 1812, and the Revolutionary War. With his background, he was of the more conservative type of person who would have had little sympathy for able body men essentially asking for a handout. Yes the Bonus had been promised to the Veterans of WW I, but it was not due until 1945. Demanding it early did not sit well with him.

Quote:
Originally Posted by tshiggins View Post
Now, this is certainly true, and it largely matches what I wrote. If anything, I expressed criticism of Astromancer's, "America! Hell yeah!" setting, by saying the inevitable changes in U.S. society would have been a lot more bloody and painful than many might think -- not that he ever stated (or even implied) it would be a walk in the park.
I understand your intent, I just thought you were to quick to assume the South would go along with the new order.
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Old 05-20-2015, 07:59 PM   #1080
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You're assuming that "move south" is the same as "move to the USA," though. At least in Nova Scotia, the US-based (but not -backed) "Fenian" raids would still be in living memory, and there's a nice bit of British Empire in the Caribbean; migration from eastern Canada might bypass the 48 states altogether. And folks living north of 60° North might not move as far south as the Great Lakes.

But let's assume all Canadians do move to the USA. That would make them roughly 8% of the total population - a larger fraction of the population than many recognizable minorities are.
Fair enough, I was mostly responding to Curmudgeon's post.
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