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Old 08-28-2016, 01:39 PM   #61
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

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Err, the Trinity test happened in July 1945, more than two months after the end of WWII in Europe.
Mutatis mutandis, the setting remains the same if you correct for my poor history research (which, tbqh, I didn't even attempt; I was typing off the cuff). The basic plot point remains teh same either way: "ridiculously powerful nukes".
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Old 08-28-2016, 02:44 PM   #62
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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. . .
According to Richard Rhodes (in "The Twilight of the Bombs") it is possible to make a low level N-bang! out of physically-smacking two lumps of highly-enriched uranium together. (Of course, getting highly-enriched uranium is the problem . . . )

Don't know enough physics to know whether or not Rhodes is on to something.
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Old 08-28-2016, 02:55 PM   #63
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

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According to Richard Rhodes (in "The Twilight of the Bombs") it is possible to make a low level N-bang! out of physically-smacking two lumps of highly-enriched uranium together. (Of course, getting highly-enriched uranium is the problem . . . )

Don't know enough physics to know whether or not Rhodes is on to something.
It's that enriching that's the technological marvel, I think. Separating an element lump apart by tiny atomic mass differences is hella' hard. They have the same chemistry, so you can't go by that "crude" method.

I do think the engineering of nuclear bombs get easier the purer your fissionables are.
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Old 08-28-2016, 02:55 PM   #64
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

Or maybe the clearly different nuclear physics caused Trinity to occur earlier.

But I don't think you're making enough pains to recognize the fact that, in a single test, the USA did more harm to itself than the war did to most other countries -- and that's with the weapon positioned in one of the least-populated areas!

Any other side would consider the possibility of setting off a nuclear bouy in international waters east of DC and wiping out the eastern seaboard. What remains of the US after that would be swiftly crushed by communist boots....


Wild: Some unknown spellwork on this High-mana worldline converted the entire planet to a massive wild-mana zone. The current year is, astronomically, 1880, but the society was originally 5+2 with heavy magic integration.

Noir: A primeval hell world, this place has always had death-aspected low-mana, trace in some places. Only these oases have any form of life at all, and they drift with time. It is a realm of skeletal trees and torporous undead that wake to stalk trespassers beneath a colorless sky.

Lost: In 1964, a bizarre cosmic phenomenon caused all human bodies to fade away-- every human alive became an intangible, immortal spirit. Though they can communicate with one annother fine, only very sensitive visitors can hear them. It's been 50 years, although decay seems to be arrested here, and many places are almost exactly as they were left. Some of the voices have gone mad, others have achieved a serenity. Most concerning, though, is that visitors to this worldline will fade away, too, over the course of twenty four hours, as their resonance patterns come to match the frequency of this potentiality.

Hunger: A toxic fungus that grows in cold conditions, but not above room temperature, reached endemic status around the world in 1993. The spores can survive high heat well enough that even canning is unreliable. Only thoroughly dried and salted goods are safe. As a result, the animal world is mostly unaffected, but human food distribution cannot function. It's 1995 and food riots are a global phenomenon, and a five-year-old can of beans is precious. Some food is radiation-sterilized, which is effective, but there's not nearly enough equipment to protect from everything.
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Old 08-28-2016, 03:04 PM   #65
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

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Err, the Trinity test happened in July 1945, more than two months after the end of WWII in Europe.
July 16th, which also happens to be the day the Apollo 11 launched, first day of the Islam calendar, Comet Shoemaker Levi 9 hits Jupiter, and my birthday, but that's not important right now. ;)
Nukes, moon, religion, and astronomical destruction could be an interesting link between a few Lucifers.
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Old 08-28-2016, 03:13 PM   #66
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

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...
Hunger: A toxic fungus that grows in cold conditions, but not above room temperature, reached endemic status around the world in 1993. The spores can survive high heat well enough that even canning is unreliable. Only thoroughly dried and salted goods are safe. As a result, the animal world is mostly unaffected, but human food distribution cannot function. It's 1995 and food riots are a global phenomenon, and a five-year-old can of beans is precious. Some food is radiation-sterilized, which is effective, but there's not nearly enough equipment to protect from everything.
All manner of disaster worlds rest on food/crop destruction.
I once imagined a world lacking grass. That removes rice, corn, wheat, rye, oats, bamboo, barley, sugarcane, etc. According to Wikipedia 70% of all crops are grasses. And while they may have evolved in the time of dinosaurs, they did not become anywhere near as ubiquitous until post KT extinction event.
Switch that to some insidious disease that only affects them, and you have a mostly similar earth but with grass-eaters like humanity royally screwed.
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Old 08-28-2016, 03:56 PM   #67
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

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All manner of disaster worlds rest on food/crop destruction.
I once imagined a world lacking grass. That removes rice, corn, wheat, rye, oats, bamboo, barley, sugarcane, etc. According to Wikipedia 70% of all crops are grasses. And while they may have evolved in the time of dinosaurs, they did not become anywhere near as ubiquitous until post KT extinction event.
Switch that to some insidious disease that only affects them, and you have a mostly similar earth but with grass-eaters like humanity royally screwed.
Alert readers will recognise that this timeline is tagged as Christopher-1.

(Christopher-2 almost received a Tripod designation, for good reasons, until it was recognised that the frighteningly successful alien invaders there definitely weren't Martians.)
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Old 08-28-2016, 04:20 PM   #68
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

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All manner of disaster worlds rest on food/crop destruction.
I once imagined a world lacking grass. That removes rice, corn, wheat, rye, oats, bamboo, barley, sugarcane, etc. According to Wikipedia 70% of all crops are grasses. And while they may have evolved in the time of dinosaurs, they did not become anywhere near as ubiquitous until post KT extinction event.
Switch that to some insidious disease that only affects them, and you have a mostly similar earth but with grass-eaters like humanity royally screwed.
A blight that targeted all grasses on a family-wide scale would wreck terror on the human diet. It'd be a big deal, but it actually wouldn't kill as many people outright as you'd think. We actually have a number of crops that could feed the human race... we just don't use them heavily at the moment.

The resulting panic would do as much damage as actually loosing next years crop. We could switch over to other crops, and if everyone was rational and worked together we'd probably have few deaths... but that's not going to happen.

Long story short: we could live off other stuff, but we don't, and when the grass dies society will far apart out of worry if for no other reason.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

One I've actually used in a game:

Psi exists, and can be awakened in anybody or everybody. And it has been. The world is filled with telepathic soldiers who have the ability to stun or kill with their mind, rewrite your beliefs and loyalties, and to awaken your abilities to do the same.

The conflicts these "soldiers" fight are now meaningless, but they roam the world trying to complete their mission, rewriting each other's minds and hunting anyone who's survived the wars that spawned them.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Were-wolf: This would be a gotha world if the virus had made zombies. Instead it made werewolves. Cities were torn apart monthly, and the ability of the lycanthropes to go back to being people made hunting them all down even harder. Its suspected that in the end it was the human forms that really ended the world.

Most surviving communities are were-wolves themselves. Every full moon the packs appear and make war with each other -- which makes it really hard for different communities to get along -- you're just going to try and kill each other at the end of the month. Still, life goes on.
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Old 08-28-2016, 04:52 PM   #69
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

Psi exists, and it's very strong in this worldline. It appears the awakening occurred in 1844, at which point this otherwise ordinary, no-mana parallel suddenly underwent some kind of psionic transformation. All human beings, several cetean species, and several great apes joined into an overmind. This did not bring about the end of technology or even society; the overmind cultivates its constituent parts with utterly ruthless efficiency, as it seeks for other minds in the universe. The only scout to go there actually resisted the overmind long enough to jump back and warn of the danger to the secret....
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Old 08-28-2016, 05:14 PM   #70
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

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A silly example:

GURPS-ate1: A unknown strange planet is passing by earth and will probable become a second moon. This means 2012-like events in the beginning. People will need enormous arks, also called houses, to survive. The survivors will enter a completely unknown reality. It turns out that the strange planet is a mana-enhancer and has some very strange plant and animal life which will contaminate earth.

The questions is: Who is selected on the arks in order to maximise the chance of human survival?

Fortunately, a brilliant scientist, Steve Jackson, has developed a initial system of measuring how well adapted a human is to a new environment. It uses the concept of 'character point' (cp). People with more character points are more likely to the coming disaster. A certain Dr Kromm designed the tests that determine someone's cp score. Other scientists like <enter favourite GURPS-author here>, elaborated on the system and described ways on improving your cp-score.

It is one year before the apocalypse and the final tests for selecting the survivors are at hand. People are desperately working on improving their cp-score. The debates are furious. Why is a person less usable, just because he is honest and charitable? Also, people, e.g. <enter favourite GURPS forumite here>, are pushing for different rules, because they feel that the original ones do not properly reflect reality. Some of the arks have adapted some of those alternate rules as rules of their house.
Love this idea!...


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I'm also enjoying fchase'work.
Thanks!

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Instead of flooding, why not draining? Drop sea levels 800m and see how things look....
That is a neat idea. It could be from some sort of global cooling causing the polar ice sheets to go - or from some global scorching that evaporates the oceans (I think there was a comic book that had something like that).


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Then it is very noticeably not sleep. Human metabolisms only decrease by 10% from base and sleepy animals don't live longer than more wakeful related species. But of course, that just makes it creepier.
Yeah, it is more like hibernation, but even more extreme than that. For one thing, it is impossible to wake someone up, even with pain.

It kind of resembles theoretical 'deep sleep' for space travel. Which would make it interesting to some people on Homeline (even with infinite worlds, there are going to be people who want to travel the stars).


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Originally Posted by ericthered View Post
A blight that targeted all grasses on a family-wide scale would wreck terror on the human diet. It'd be a big deal, but it actually wouldn't kill as many people outright as you'd think. We actually have a number of crops that could feed the human race... we just don't use them heavily at the moment.

The resulting panic would do as much damage as actually loosing next years crop. We could switch over to other crops, and if everyone was rational and worked together we'd probably have few deaths... but that's not going to happen.

Long story short: we could live off other stuff, but we don't, and when the grass dies society will far apart out of worry if for no other reason.
This reminds me of the movie Interstellar. In that case it was wheat (and later a few other crops, such as okra, I think) that all died off.

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Were-wolf: This would be a gotha world if the virus had made zombies. Instead it made werewolves. Cities were torn apart monthly, and the ability of the lycanthropes to go back to being people made hunting them all down even harder. Its suspected that in the end it was the human forms that really ended the world.

Most surviving communities are were-wolves themselves. Every full moon the packs appear and make war with each other -- which makes it really hard for different communities to get along -- you're just going to try and kill each other at the end of the month. Still, life goes on.
This is a really cool idea, and could apply to any time period. It could stretch from medieval villages where each month they go to war, to high-tech worlds where it's a like a big violent party each month (think The Purge), recorded for playback and mass viewing afterwards.

Or if the virus isn't as widespread, maybe it's just this great fear among medieval townsfolk, who ostracize/kill suspected lycanthropes (in human state or wolf), but still are terrified once a month. Or in a high-tech media world, lycanthropes are the new slave gladiators, second-class citizens (at best) who once a month become celebrities on the biggest night for watching.

Indeed, it could stretch across various worlds, like the gotha virus. Call them 'Lycan' worlds, and Infinity wants to know how this condition spread across the multiverse.
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