Catalog of the Weird Parallels

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Losing the capacity for fear means anger isn't much of an issue either. The emotions are rather entangled with each other.

That sounds like you're projecting your personal issues onto all of humanity.

Either way, only three people in history literally had no fear. And they suffered severely for it. They can't recognize fear expressions or most "instinctively" dangerous situation. It's as debilitating as lacking the ability to feel pain.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by TGLS

Heck, Unfazeable stops you from showing strong emotions to begin with.

That's not quite true according to some authors. It is supposed to be an advantage not a straight jacket for unrelated behaviors and emotions.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by tanksoldier

Haven’t read the whole thread but it reminds me of Heinlein’s “Number of the Beast”... depending on what axis of reality you travelled on you’d find yourself in universes which had differences from our own Prime universe.

There was a universe where the only observed difference was the lack of the letter J in the English alphabet.

There was an axis where all the imaginary universes could be found, including Oz.

Weird would be finding an axis or in the common Gurps world hopping terminology, a skerry, where primates are increasing/decreasing in size.
Very similar worlds in all ways but go one way in the skerry, and primates are 5% shorter, and in the other way 5% taller.
It may take some exploration before it becomes noticeable how predictable the change is.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

That sounds like you're projecting your personal issues onto all of humanity.

Not especially. I'm more the paralytic response type. But for people in general getting angry is a common reaction to feeling fear for perfectly solid evolutionary reasons. Fight or flight.

[PTTG]

I have to disagree that Unfazable humans would be more drawn to deadly fights. Even thought they might not be scared, someone who's losing a fight would have a completely rational reason to surrender. The opponent would have rational reasons to accept the surrender in most cases, and wouldn't have a normal panic-driven desire to keep the target down.

Of course my reading of the advantage may differ from the standard, but I was under the impression that Unfazable doesn't remove emotions, but rather suppresses outside emotional influences. Terror, taunting, and bad jokes don't move you, but your cognition still functions normally.

[AlexanderHowl]

Rage-1

Rage-1 is a TL4 Quantum 6 world where the majority of the female human population is blessed (cursed?) with some level of the Berserk disadvantage and some level of the Berserk Talent. Level one of the Berserk Talent is associated with Berserk (15), level two with Berserk (12), level three with Berserk (9), and level four with Berserk (6).

The Berserk Talent allows for the development of Breath Holding (up to one level per level of Talent), Enhanced Move (Ground) (up to one level per level of Talent), Damage Resistance (Tough Skin) (up to 5 levels per level of Talent), Damage Reduction (up to one 'level' per level of Talent), Extra Attack (up to one level per level of Talent), Lifting ST (up to 5 levels per level of Talent), Metabolism Control (up to 2 levels per level of Talent), Regeneration (up to one 'level' per level of Talent), Super Climbing (up to 5 levels per level of Talent), Super Jump (up to one level per level of Talent), and Striking ST (up to 5 levels per level of Talent).

Without exception, Infinity forbids travel to Rage-1 to anyone except its most diplomatic female agents because of the risks involved with traveling to the timeline, so little is known about the timeline except that it seems to be governed by surprisingly peaceful cultures that are unlike any known by Homeline. While individual violence is common, organized warfare is rare, as soldiers rarely survive the consequences of battle, and political conflicts are settled by dueling champions. The cultures that Infinity has infiltrated are matriarchal, matrifocal, and matrilineal, with groups of related women marrying in common groups of unrelated men.

[Fred Brackin]

What strikes me about the World Without Fear is that not only is Winning through Intimidation not a thing, Intimidation itself is not a thing. You can't influence someone by instilling fear in them when they don't feel fear.

Much pre-conflict interaction could end up looking like a formal debate on the planet Vulcan. You'd only demonstrate the ability to use force on someone else to appeal to his rational desire to avoid the consequences.

Of course, you could try and deceive your opponent into overestimating your ability to use force on them. That's sort of like specious intimidation.

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by TGLS

Heck, Unfazeable stops you from showing strong emotions to begin with.

From the description, it seems to me that the denizens of Dauntless have a high level of Fearlessness, rather than Unfazeable.

[nothri]

Itzamna: More of a “traditional” hell parallel, but still in the spirit. Named after a Mayan god of the calendar, Itzamna was until recently a unique but peaceful world. The first major divergence took place sometime in the first millennium BC. The Olmec civilization discovered a lodestone compass which they used to make geomantic measurements and discover the rudiments of electromagnetic principles. The Maya added these discoveries to their own remarkable mathematical principles, possessing a working compass and the beginnings of a Newtonian level of physics by 500 AD. Along the way other minor breakthrough were made, most significantly a working knowledge of inoculation spring from ritual peiercing and bloodletting. Itzamna would have remained a near world parallel with an unusual level of Maya mathematics (but otherwise a Stone Age society) if not for a second divergence- a Polynesian visit to the east coast of Mexico. Hosting these visitors as navigators and applying the use of the compass the Maya kings began a series of trading expeditions, eventually creating an American version of the Silk Road. Improved ship building, woodblock printing, blast furnaces all make their way back to mesoamerica, alongside plagues that wipe out many rival societies not graced with inoculation knowledge. Stresses in the coming centuries, combined with renaissance like competition between city states and of course the heightened mathematics cause the Maya to enter an industrial revolution based on electromagnetic batteries by 900 AD. The city states enter a colonial age, dividing the world between the city states. By 1300 the Maya enter into a technological singularity, their empire vanishing overnight. So they existed as a nearly forgotten myth until 2012 AD. In that era the remnants of the Mayan AI experienced a kind of Y2K error in their internal calendars, causing a technological equivalent of a psychotic breakdown in the tech level 12 machines. Unable to reconcile the error, the machines have determined something is wrong with the universe, and only ritual sacrifice to the forgotten gods will correct the problem. The rest of the human race is being wiped out in bloody monthly raids by terrifyingly complex mecha in service to a dead empire.

[David Johnston2]

Nullasia: A parallel Earth where all the landforms are the same except that Eurasia just stops a few hundred miles east of the Ural Mountains with nothing on the other side of the Bosphorus or the Sinai Peninsula. With India, Mesopotamia and China never having existed, civilization began in one and one place, what we call Egypt. The center of the dominant religion is therefore located there and the most powerful nation in the world still the one centered around the Nile, although the one in Britain is rising to challenge it and has begun to develop water transport technology equal to that of the 15th century.

The world is a much more watery and much populous place and even though going by the stars they are in their 21st century, their technology is much less advanced. They have movable type, and pretty good clockwork but are only beginning to discover gunpowder. Several centuries ago colonists from the Scandinavian peninsula managed to make their way to a North America still filled with megafauna and their descendants are still in the process of spreading into the previously uninhabited west and south. Homeline has people trading and studying the life in the Americas which evolved independent of humanity for tens of thousands of years, but it is also interested in a mountainous island continent in a position roughly corresponding to the Himalayas. The inhabitants are very similar in a appearance to Homeline's Tibetans and have unique and interesting cuisine and artwork as well as life so strange that it might as well come from another planet.