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Old 08-27-2016, 11:45 AM   #31
malloyd
 
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels and Hells in general!

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Real kudzu doesn't even come that far south into Florida. It may not like sandy soil or something.
Like all plants, it's actually rather fuzzy about growing conditions. There is a reason there is a lot of plant diversity in the world you know. If something could easily adapt to grow wildly everywhere, it already would have.

Kudzu gets a lot of press because it really likes the sort of open disturbed ground where humans have cut a road, plowed a field, or built a building, so it tends to grow where the people are to notice it.

Most weeds are like that really. In the wild they are specialists in fast recolonization of areas some disaster has cleared off, and will be outcompeted in a few years, so they tend to be relatively rare. The human habit of inflicting disasters on huge areas of the same ground over and over (by plowing or burning or mowing or clear cutting or whatever) is a real boon to them.

Note incidentally that in its native habitats in east Asia, kuzu is a pretty decent food crop, so you really need that poison co-mutation to turn this into a hell world.
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Old 08-27-2016, 12:16 PM   #32
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

I have a game somewhere in my hard drive that is an unusual kind of hell parallel because it's a reification of the human fear of nature. The world has been enveloped by dense forest with humans reduced to living in small villages, except for the feral once-humans who live in the forest and have lost language.
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Old 08-27-2016, 12:17 PM   #33
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

I'm thinking the chlorine would probably be a crosstime alien terraforming project -- something that the PCs wouldn't discover until several sessions into a purely Miracle Workers campaign!

The new moon situation would be interesting, although the astrodynamics of that are hard to pin down.

Kudzu could see Antarctic settlements, too, but it might be easier to live anywhere else and just deal with the neurotoxin.
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Old 08-27-2016, 12:51 PM   #34
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels and Hells in general!

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...
Note incidentally that in its native habitats in east Asia, kuzu is a pretty decent food crop, so you really need that poison co-mutation to turn this into a hell world.
It's one of the reasons why I prefer fungi for grow anywhere apocalyptic life form. Consume organics so no need for good light; desiccate forming nigh impossible to kill potential spores; often full of toxins anyway; etc.
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Old 08-27-2016, 01:02 PM   #35
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels and Hells in general!

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It's one of the reasons why I prefer fungi for grow anywhere apocalyptic life form. Consume organics so no need for good light; desiccate forming nigh impossible to kill potential spores; often full of toxins anyway; etc.
On the downside, it's a different kind of apocalypse. That consume organics trait means your grow anywhere fungi will eat all the people well before it makes big inroads into most of the crops. Plants are a lot less digestable.
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Old 08-27-2016, 01:06 PM   #36
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels and Hells in general!

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On the downside, it's a different kind of apocalypse. That consume organics trait means your grow anywhere fungi will eat all the people well before it makes big inroads into most of the crops. Plants are a lot less digestable.
True, and while we owe much of our fossil fuel to indigestible plants from before anything evolved to break down lignin, it was a fungus that "figured" it out first.
Also, hideous fungus blights create a much different vision of overgrowth apocalypses than lush green plants.
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Old 08-27-2016, 03:13 PM   #37
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

Unintelligent clanking replicators took over the planet.

This near-parallel world had ~100 times more dissolved uranium in seawater. As a result, it was possible to produce a self-sufficient sea-filtering power plant and maintenance system in the mid-20th-century.

Robots with no initiative gradually paved over earth, collecting useful materials. Humans are TL5 except with no metals, due to predation by the machines.
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Old 08-27-2016, 04:27 PM   #38
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

If you're going to go with that much more uranium, then there could be natural reactors in the present like the one earth had over a billion years ago. None now due to that pesky half life disallowing sufficient densities without enrichment.
Gurps Disasters: Meltdown And Fallout mentions how it's just possible for low tech peoples to create simple reactors this way.
Slaves work the uranium mines to keep the Roman Empire alive... until the evil X invent the slightly superscience version of nukes.
A real honest to goodness dark age without the need to handwave "lost" technology and knowledge. They just never had it.
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Old 08-27-2016, 05:47 PM   #39
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

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Slaves work the uranium mines to keep the Roman Empire alive... until the evil X invent the slightly superscience version of nukes.
Go with salt mines. You mine salt with higher than usual uranium concentration left over from the drying of the Mediterranean (which has a weird enough history to easily handwave anything you need for that, and a geologically recent one, less than 5.5 million years since the Messianan salinity crisis), found in Calabria, Sicily and Central Tuscany (which appear to be the only substantial exposed Messinian halite deposits which are on land, and quite convenient for the Roman Empire). When kept just moist enough this weird salt boils the water you moisten it with. Nuclear steam engines (with a side effect of radiation poisoining) here we come.

Of course there are also a lot of extra "geothermal" hot springs sites all around the shores of the Mediterranean, fed by water seeping into deep deposits of ancient salt too. You can even use that as the source of the discovery of the effect.
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Old 08-27-2016, 07:11 PM   #40
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

A series of Babylon worlds, where various nuclear wars brought about hellish conditions. (Although there may be annother term somewhere...) Except for extremely recent ones, many of them are safe to wander unprotected.

1983 -- Soviet false positive caused an errant first strike. Stanislav Petrov was not present. Present date 1999, the southern hemisphere is overrun with refugees, while warlordism rules the global north.

1983 -- Soviet inteligence failure caused a first strike in response to the "Able Archer" wargame. Western powers weather initial strike fairly well, due to fortuitous wargame prep. USSR command and control shattered. Nuclear terrorism with soviet broken arrows proves more devastating. By 2006, remaining global powers are paranoid police states, or else failed states.

1962 -- US opens with "limited" first strike on forces in Cuba after negotiations fail and the blockade is broken. Mixed conventional and nuclear war follow, particularly in Europe. Both sides finally escalate more than nine months later. The lengthy lead-up caused widespread bomb preparation, but also more arms build-up. Only bunkers remain in northern hemisphere less than three years later, and the radiation levels mean many groups remain in stasis.

1979 -- US false positive caused an errant first strike. Europe, horrified by the display of aggression, frantically declares neutrality and pledges aid to USSR. The divergence may have come earlier than the war itself. US almost obliterated entirely, and Europe-USSR coalition is struggling with the knock-on effects of the bombardment. 1995.

2011 -- Diverged in the 70s with high computerization of USSR, part of a series of changes allowing the nation to persist. Both sides extend influence into southern hemisphere. USSR uses ICBMs against internal threats on border with China; global war boils over from there. By 2018, the world was just starting to rebuild, and warlords and legitimate authorities are hard to distinguish.

2004 -- Diverged in 1938 with different NAZI leadership. Nazi Germany achieves a peace treaty after subjugating Europe. Decades later, a four-party global war eventually turns to nuclear bombing. Most nuclear contamination was actually released during the manufacturing of the nukes.

1772 -- Diverged in 200s, possibly 300s, with economic changes in Roman empire. An industrial revolution took hold in 1100 AD and in 1772 a diplomatic incident sees nuclear war between Uyrop and Bharata. The Americas suffer economic more than literal fallout.
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