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Old 12-09-2019, 11:56 AM   #4491
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Default Re: New Reality Seeds

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Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
What happened from the point of view of the inhabitants? Did it all change suddenly, or gradually, or have there always been these disparities?
As far as the inhabitants are concerned the changes happened a few weeks ago. At first everyone thought they were not touched by the effect. Because they can still get telemetry from Mars rovers and the base that was placed in orbit around Mars for the Manned Mars flight that was planed, and other probes throughout the Solar system, the folks on the Moon think the phenomena might be limited to the Earth. But they can't know.

Most of Europe west of Russia's 1939 borders is in the years 1940, 1942, or 1943. Exceptions in Western Europe have been noted. Greece is in the later 1950's and the NATO bases have warned the Germans to stay out.

Russia, on the western side of the Urals, is scattered throughout the Soviet period. To the East of the Urals it's far more random but within the 1895-2027 limits.

The largest areas under single years are in the USA. The Eastern USA (Atlantic to Mississippi) is mainly in the year 1971. The USA between the Mississippi and the Continental Divide is in the year 1897. Between the Pacific and the continental divide most of the USA is in the year 2017, a highly prosperous Tech Level Nine version of that year.

Most of the rest of the planet in broken into time distortion areas roughly the size of Wales under one year or another. But smaller and larger time distortion areas exist, with lower population areas tending to be larger.
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Old 12-09-2019, 12:38 PM   #4492
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This world was a fairly normal Q5 Echo of Homeline, well except for superheroes showing up in the late 1940's. The normal inertia that prevents rapid technological growth in a world with supers seems to be in operative here as the local year is 1958 (the Silver Age is in full swing) and the Tech Level is 7+2.

Recently, a large group of supers from several other parallels have arrived, they think their worlds were destroyed (they were all simply moved into distant Quanta not related to the Quanta known to Homeline, Centrum, or the Cabal). Many of these heroes are from worlds with radically different values and ideals. Cold War Earth seems strange and barbaric to them. Many of these supers don't see democracy in America, they see anarchy. They see USSR and Red China as blasphemies. Some of these supers came from a Caliphate, and they see infidels dominant and the Dar-al-Islam in deadly peril,

A Supers war is brewing up. Homeline is freaked out. The secret isn't really a secret in this world. In fact there is some evidence that this world had World Jumpers who visited Homeline in before panchronomic theory was a thing!

Trying to prevent/defuse this war without getting a plague of unwanted supers is vital. Given the locals on this parallel simply nuking the place would be both ineffective and would lead to exotic reprisals.
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Old 12-09-2019, 01:38 PM   #4493
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Default Re: New Reality Seeds

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As far as the inhabitants are concerned the changes happened a few weeks ago. At first everyone thought they were not touched by the effect.
Are the people the same ones as from 2027, with a sudden change of clothing and different skills? Or, from their point of view, has everywhere else changed?
Quote:
Russia, on the western side of the Urals, is scattered throughout the Soviet period. To the East of the Urals it's far more random but within the 1895-2027 limits.
There will be at least one Soviet ICBM site from the 1970s, 80s or 90s, and they'll have told the Germans that Operation Barbarossa is cancelled:

"We're from the future. We have the weapons of the future. If you invade/do not withdraw within a week, we'll demonstrate by destroying Berlin utterly and making the Ruhr uninhabitable. You do not have, and cannot swiftly develop, any means of stopping us doing this."

"The war you're about to launch/have already launched is known in our history as the Great Patriotic War. We won it, at great cost. Every Soviet officer studies it, and we know a lot about your plans, methods, and equipment. In our history, you committed war crimes on a vast scale. So much so that we're being actively friendly by giving you this warning. Ask anyone from the 1950s or later who knows any history. This is your only warning."
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Old 12-09-2019, 01:45 PM   #4494
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Default Re: New Reality Seeds

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Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
Are the people the same ones as from 2027, with a sudden change of clothing and different skills? Or, from their point of view, has everywhere else changed?

There will be at least one Soviet ICBM site from the 1970s, 80s or 90s, and they'll have told the Germans that Operation Barbarossa is cancelled:

(SNIP)
An amalgamation of Soviets, confronted by the Third Reich? Again?

There would be no warning. They'd just nuke Germany.

Any discussion would take place, after that.
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Old 12-09-2019, 02:11 PM   #4495
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You can do some fun things with shattered timeline worlds. The chunks proposed are a little big for my taste, at least in the US. Though you've successfully split the US in such a fashion as maybe be balanced. The West will have around 60 million people and higher technology, but won't be well organized for some time, and will have a less complete economy. The East has 120 million people and cold war footing, as well as a morale boost when they find out "We won".

I don't think the two nations will join anytime soon. Each will have strong objections to aspects of each others culture. Also, Nixon is president in the east, and that will be fun.

I think that exploring generational gaps is the funnest thing to do with this world, and I'd work hard to make sure that the military and economic advantages of the most current generations don't overshadow the previous ones (usually population count is the best method, I would think).

I'd also try to arrange it so that as many rulers of Russia are alive (and currently ruling at their age) as possible. We should start with Lenin, Stalin, The Czar, and Gorbechev. And yes, Berlin is probably toast. Unless the Moon people shoot the bombs down.

How are China and India?
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Old 12-09-2019, 05:36 PM   #4496
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Default Re: New Reality Seeds

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You can do some fun things with shattered timeline worlds. The chunks proposed are a little big for my taste, at least in the US. Though you've successfully split the US in such a fashion as maybe be balanced. The West will have around 60 million people and higher technology, but won't be well organized for some time, and will have a less complete economy. The East has 120 million people and cold war footing, as well as a morale boost when they find out "We won".

I don't think the two nations will join anytime soon. Each will have strong objections to aspects of each others culture.

(SNIP)
The mind-bending cultural conflicts would be the most fun source of conflict, IMO.

That's why I like Prince Charon's "Five Earths" setting that he works on, from time to time, even though I'm no fan of supers settings.

What happens when those in the 21st Century see a lynching take place in a town full of people from the 1920s? Or hear a young Strom Thurmond give a "Dixiecrat" speech? Or someone from the 1950s sees states legalizing marijuana?

Prince Charon's setting has that, but avoids much of the trauma by keeping the worlds separate, with only gateways connecting them.

Do a "Sidewise in Time" reality quake, and the whole world would Balkanize, with every bad thing that word means.

Great setting for a game, but it would suck to live there.
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Old 12-09-2019, 07:04 PM   #4497
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A good point. I am working on a post about Centrum Light and one of the things I am wrestling with is how they can be so good at timeline alteration and cliodynamics, while so clueless and ignorant about outtime histories in general.

Currently I am considering bureaucratic groupthink and having very deep but overly narrow experience in the social science and psychology of conquering and assimilating the barbarian remnants of their own world's Last War. Which gets them very tunnel visioned in a way they are having great difficulty breaking out of. With plentiful resources their methods work very well on the survivors of their own world's history. With limited resources and on alien cultures in alien languages, not so much. And stealth and more advanced tech can only get you so far.
Don't forget the language barrier - not just that Interworld/Uplift doesn't speak the language, but they think that anyone who doesn't speak Anglic is at best backward, and struggle with the idea of other people thinking in their own language. Sort of like the 'Ugly American' stereotype, but squared.

While Uplift would love to import the techniques used to recover from the Last War, they don't have the resources/knowledge/everything else. Necessity breeds Centrum focusing on the bigwigs, and thinking that everyone else will follow. That's probably how Centrum thinks Last War recovery worked (hierarchical thinking), rather than how it actually did (appealing to the masses).

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Now I want to write a scenario where the PCs are assigned to a test case program where a Centrum academic iconoclast faction wants to demonstrate their new system, which is heresy to the establishment
In the original GURPS Time Travel, it mentioned a former echo, Arachne, in the sixteenth century where Centrum blatantly revealed its existence, to try to make the uplift/assimilation work better/faster. GURPS Time Travel also listed some successful Centrum interventions, one of which was Queen Mary of England executing her sister Elizabeth.

Put the two together and you've got an echo which Centrum up-shifted with Elizabeth's execution in 1554, and now Centrum has revealed itself as it tries to take over. This would be a distinct outlier in Uplift missions, though not so much heresy as a different tactic from on high.

And would ask how Centrum would 'reveal itself' to a sixteenth century world. How do you explain parachronics, a future alternate world, and much more to people who are just getting used to the idea of the New World? And that's just Europe - what about everywhere else (of course Centrum would focus on Europe).


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I’m now imagining them being really good at abstract analytical mathematical analysis of history, but a bit crap at the simple gut feel of how people work. Like a mathematical physicist who hasn’t run a lab experiment in twenty years, and can barely visualise what the numbers mean.
I love that analogy/description! There has got to be some GURPS character traits to describe that.

(I actually fall back on the old D&D Intelligence vs. Wisdom - Interworld has lots of Int, not so much Wis...)

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This could mean that one failure mode for Centrum ops is a green field officer saying “That can’t be right! People would never be that irrational!” and refusing to follow through on a perfectly good theoretically-derived plan. But equally, it could cause a lot of I-Cops to be horribly blindsided because they think they understand people, in a situation where the Centrum plan looks weird and pointless but is actually bang on the nail, because let’s face it, people are weird but numbers don’t lie.
There could be a 'rebel' Interworld/Uplift agent who has plans that look too 'Secundus' to his/her higher-ups.

Coming up with different thinking, even in the face of 'rational' plans not working, could still be bad for a Centran's career/status. Anyone who thinks 'outside the box' is a splittist who sympathizes with the locals - or worse, Secundus!

Last edited by fchase8; 12-19-2019 at 02:16 PM.
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Old 12-10-2019, 04:01 AM   #4498
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Regarding fractured-time worlds -- I have a huge soft spot for Ken Hite's "Years of the Comet" from one Suppressed Transmission, though I've never quite got around to working out and running my very vague "Agents of Sir Francis Bacon" scenario idea. Having all the fragments coming from within a century or so of each other seems a bit too... tortuous, somehow, though.
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Old 12-10-2019, 04:39 AM   #4499
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Default Re: New Reality Seeds

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Originally Posted by tshiggins View Post
What happens when those in the 21st Century see a lynching take place in a town full of people from the 1920s? Or hear a young Strom Thurmond give a "Dixiecrat" speech? Or someone from the 1950s sees states legalizing marijuana?

Prince Charon's setting has that, but avoids much of the trauma by keeping the worlds separate, with only gateways connecting them.
I think some of my earlier thoughts on what became that setting involved large, possibly ground-level wormholes. A possible AU includes a really bad first contact with an alternate Steampunk USA (or CSA), that results in Patton and Petraeus (or someone, I'm not sure when I firmly decided on the start date) meeting while the forces each are leading have gone a-marching through (Stp)Georgia. Obviously that didn't happen, but it's something that does fit this thread.

So, definitely after Obama took office and before David Petraeus retired from the Army; let's say late 2009, portals of various sizes open up connecting several Earths. 2009 Germany's reaction to 1939 Germany is really not friendly at all, and they have the edge there in technology, allies, and sane leadership. Unfortunately, the Nazis can flee to less advanced Earths, once they realize that yes, they really are that screwed against the Future Earth (even with all the magitech Dieselpunk Earth has in Five Earths, WWII on that Earth would have been over very fast if not for the bottleneck of space travel; 2009 France has some rather bright ideas about what should be done with Nazi Germany). Steampunk Germany and Clockpunk Germany don't want their strange ideas, but do want the technology, and the Fantasy Germanian tribes vary quite widely.

Meanwhile, 2009 USA and 1939 USA find each other disturbing, but an 1869 where the CSA didn't lose the civil war (didn't exactly WIN, but they ended it still a separate nation, so that's close enough), and they're demanding the return of their runaway slaves who crossed some of the portals, is much more disturbing. The fellow that the CSA sent to negotiate with 1939 USA (who were trying to avoid a war until then, due to FDR being a 1930s Democrat) managed to make two critical failures on Diplomacy in a row, and offend enough of the Dsp-US Congress to give FDR a free hand in 'fixing the mistakes of another past.'


EDIT: I am still working on Five Earths, it's just going slowly. I've asked for a little help in that thread on finishing the August, 2014 timeline post, and may end up asking for more, soon.
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Old 12-10-2019, 06:14 AM   #4500
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I'd also try to arrange it so that as many rulers of Russia are alive (and currently ruling at their age) as possible. We should start with Lenin, Stalin, The Czar, and Gorbechev. And yes, Berlin is probably toast. Unless the Moon people shoot the bombs down.
I'd probably go with:
1989 Gorbachev in Moscow
1955 Khrushchev at his Dacha
1917 Lenin in Petrograd
1945 Stalin in Yalta
And 1943 Stalin in Tehran.

August Coup Gorbachev could be interesting, but he probably would just be shot in the chaos, and Yeltsin would take over. I might put Putin somewhere in Siberia (on photo op obviously), and maybe revolutionaries jailed by the Tsar.

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Elsewhere (with AH elements):
- Cyberpunk Tokyo sandwiched between a Sengoku south and an (idealized?) north, with WW2 Imperial holdouts.
- Company Rule in Bengal, Greek states in the far west, Cholas to the South, and Mughals in the Middle.
- Afghanistan would have literally all forces that ever invaded in some capacity.
- Mexico would have Zapata and Villa, a French protectorate, modern cartels, and Madero in Mexico City.
- Cuba would have Teddy Roosevelt leading US forces against Castro and Batista.
- Korea would have Japanese Imperials in the south, Mongols in the north, Kim Jong-Un in a Pyongyang centered packet, and UN led forces having just secured Incheon from 1950, and 2021.

Maybe more later.
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