ISOT and Infinity?

[YankeeGamer]

I wonder how Infinity would react if they ran into the 1632-verse or Island in the Sea of Time, with The Secret that either time travel or cross time travel exists, and has happened on a large scale. Worse, if the found multiple?

[David Johnston2]

Yeah banestorms happen. If they caught it early on they'd probably relocated the storm victims to a Homeline colony to keep them from running amok on a less advanced world. If they were already well established Infinity would just shrug. After all they'd be centuries away from doing anything that's a problem outside of the world they're messing with.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Yeah banestorms happen. If they caught it early on they'd probably relocated the storm victims to a Homeline colony to keep them from running amok on a less advanced world. If they were already well established Infinity would just shrug. After all they'd be centuries away from doing anything that's a problem outside of the world they're messing with.

There are some things Infinity just can't handle ie something on the scale of Changing the times would really scare them. A singe town/city is one thing but a whole country (especially one the size of the US) is a totally different thing.

[David Johnston2]

Ugh, I hated that one. The idea that anything capable of an ISOT, sentient or non-sentient would care about the arbitrary border line drawn between the Great Lakes and the Pacific just strikes me as absurd. That they're doing it just so the United States can Mary Sue it up in World War II, a conflict the United States already was more than adequate to handle just strikes me as uninteresting. Now, slightly more interesting would be transporting modern Japan back to 1942. How would they handle the peace negotiations, their obligation to both the troops of 1942 and their victims?

But I dye grass.

Infinity is perfectly capable of throwing their hands and leaving things be when they lack the resources to make a difference. They do it all the time.

[Astromancer]

The main force in the Changing the Times world would be FDR. We've no leader in the world today on anything like his level. I could so see Yanis Varoufakis getting to FDR and giving him a few history lessons. They'd make a team.

I could see Putin, Netenyahu, Erdoğan, and Xi Jinping, all going through the roof at the thought of facing off with a figure like FDR. Also, as intelligence came in and people who became important leaders in America's future became better known, the resources available would be astounding.

Doubtless the main energies in America would go to catching up. TL8 medicine would doubtless greatly aid FDR's longevity. America jumping from TL6/7 (we'd be on the border) to TL8 would be a massive change. The waves of economic growth would effect the whole planet.

On the soft power side. American culture was vibrant in 1942. Hollywood, Jazz, Golden Age Sci Fi, poetry, theater, would all be vibrant and the opportunities from all these things would be amazing. Marilyn Monroe is a little kid, Norma Jean wouldn't have to change her name or go through the degradations she faced to get her crack at stardom here.

[Apollonian]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Ugh, I hated that one. The idea that anything capable of an ISOT, sentient or non-sentient would care about the arbitrary border line drawn between the Great Lakes and the Pacific just strikes me as absurd. That they're doing it just so the United States can Mary Sue it up in World War II, a conflict the United States already was more than adequate to handle just strikes me as uninteresting. Now, slightly more interesting would be transporting modern Japan back to 1942. How would they handle the peace negotiations, their obligation to both the troops of 1942 and their victims?

But I dye grass.

Infinity is perfectly capable of throwing their hands and leaving things be when they lack the resources to make a difference. They do it all the time.

Agreed. But it's an interesting campaign premise.

Infinity found the first Island worldlines about five years ago. The first one appeared to be a standard echo up until a point in the late 1970s, when Vancouver Island had apparently been replaced with the Vancouver Island of the 14th century. The event had caused a sensation, of course, and "paratemporal physics" was a serious field of study on the worldline... though not one with much success. Local date was 1989. Infinity blocked off the worldline, and one bright spark started looking around to see if they could find where Vancouver Island had got to. They did so, and Infinity declared the two worldlines a skerry and assigned some observers to both worldlines.

Then an explorer team stumbled across another pair, this time of 1907 Germany and 9th century Germany. (Event occurred 70 years prior to discovery.) A few months later, Infinity time, a quartet was discovered which the transposed geography had marched "counter-clockwise" through them - 1933 Japan had replaced 1721, which in turn replaced 200 CE, which in turn had replaced 33,000 BCE.

At this point Infinity is reasonably sure that either these are myth parallels, or that some ludicrously powerful trans-dimensional being/organization is playing silly buggers with the universe. In the hope that it is the former, all such worldlines have been dubbed Island-Xa (e.g., Island-1a and Island-1b are the Vancouver Island timelines).

Then it happened in Johnson's Rome (thankfully, in a rather obscure chunk of Siberia, which traded places with its 7,000 BCE counterpart).

The PCs are Infinity researchers, or bodyguards thereof, who are studying "transdimensional displacement", which of course includes banestorms and the like. They start in Johnson's Rome and its new counterpart, trying to figure out what the heck is going on and how (if at all) Infinity can counter it.

[YankeeGamer]

Originally Posted by Apollonian

Agreed. But it's an interesting campaign premise.

Infinity found the first Island worldlines about five years ago. The first one appeared to be a standard echo up until a point in the late 1970s, when Vancouver Island had apparently been replaced with the Vancouver Island of the 14th century. The event had caused a sensation, of course, and "paratemporal physics" was a serious field of study on the worldline... though not one with much success. Local date was 1989. Infinity blocked off the worldline, and one bright spark started looking around to see if they could find where Vancouver Island had got to. They did so, and Infinity declared the two worldlines a skerry and assigned some observers to both worldlines.

Then an explorer team stumbled across another pair, this time of 1907 Germany and 9th century Germany. (Event occurred 70 years prior to discovery.) A few months later, Infinity time, a quartet was discovered which the transposed geography had marched "counter-clockwise" through them - 1933 Japan had replaced 1721, which in turn replaced 200 CE, which in turn had replaced 33,000 BCE.

At this point Infinity is reasonably sure that either these are myth parallels, or that some ludicrously powerful trans-dimensional being/organization is playing silly buggers with the universe. In the hope that it is the former, all such worldlines have been dubbed Island-Xa (e.g., Island-1a and Island-1b are the Vancouver Island timelines).

Then it happened in Johnson's Rome (thankfully, in a rather obscure chunk of Siberia, which traded places with its 7,000 BCE counterpart).

The PCs are Infinity researchers, or bodyguards thereof, who are studying "transdimensional displacement", which of course includes banestorms and the like. They start in Johnson's Rome and its new counterpart, trying to figure out what the heck is going on and how (if at all) Infinity can counter it.

Only Infinity would be arrogant enough to think that they can counter something of this power level. Of course, if you don't know that something is way beyond you, you might find a way.

For added frightening goodness, perhaps some of the islands moved across quanta, perhaps even resulting in land from an otherwise inaccessible quantum arriving.
For that matter, something like this might move an entire timeline across the quanta.

Anyone looking for Island timelines can fund them in huge numbers, good and bad, at alternatehistory.com. We love them there, as well as realistic timelines.

[robertsconley]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Ugh, I hated that one. The idea that anything capable of an ISOT, sentient or non-sentient would care about the arbitrary border line drawn between the Great Lakes and the Pacific just strikes me as absurd.

The various ASBs* (Skippy, etc) have been consistently depicted as bored god-like beings doing whatever entertains them. In that scenario transporting countries with arbitrary borders is very logical.

(Alien Space Bats)

[robertsconley]

Originally Posted by YankeeGamer

I wonder how Infinity would react if they ran into the 1632-verse or Island in the Sea of Time, with The Secret that either time travel or cross time travel exists, and has happened on a large scale. Worse, if the found multiple?

What scarier is the Emberverse Earth that Nantucket was transported from. It would take a jumper to figure out what going on in there. Even then with the more or less active involvement of the ASBs that caused everything, things might not end so well for the jumper.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Ugh, I hated that one. The idea that anything capable of an ISOT, sentient or non-sentient would care about the arbitrary border line drawn between the Great Lakes and the Pacific just strikes me as absurd. That they're doing it just so the United States can Mary Sue it up in World War II, a conflict the United States already was more than adequate to handle just strikes me as uninteresting. Now, slightly more interesting would be transporting modern Japan back to 1942. How would they handle the peace negotiations, their obligation to both the troops of 1942 and their victims?

I wouldn't call it a Mary Sue as 2002 US has a lot of problems - the biggest of which is oil. Oil imports for the US were around 9 million barrels per day (3336175*1000/365) in 2002 with consumption at 19 million barrels per day (19700*1000)

Nearly half of the oil the US needs to function as it normally did in 2002 just went "poof"and for it to effectively take the Axis and Stalin (you know he is on the table as it were) on the military is going to be first in line for oil. Airlines are effectively grounded (the Air Force has first dibs on the jet fuel being produced), interstate trucking is limited to those routes not still serviceable by trains (the 2002 rail system is a shadow of what existed in 1942) as trains are far more efficient then trucks for long distance commerce.

Then there is the issue of the international trade system being toast with the imports 2002 US got now also gone. Everything that requires those imports won't be seeing new versions for years as there just isn't much (outside of raw materials) from 1942 that would be marketable to a 2002 society.