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Old 03-12-2021, 08:54 AM   #101
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

Worldlopers Inc.

Professor Zandt was always a bit of a moonbat. He made the most wild claims, but somehow managed to get the funding. One week we arrived at his office only to find a tape cassette. The tape claimed that if we were watching it, he was captured or killed by something called "The Centrum". Then he outlined an experiment that would "bridge two quantum worlds". We did it as a bit of a lark; no one seriously thought it would work.

Like Infinite Worlds, but:
-> Centrum is hegemonic, and has no real peers.
-> Centrum is searching for other worlds that have developed cross-time travel. Smart players have taken steps to keep their homeworld secret. Dumb ones developed cross-time travel that doesn't use coordinates (i.e. like the Chronobahn).
-> Cross-time travel and coordinate location developed by Homeline is a tad mystical and comes off as crazy to anyone who has it explained to them.
-> Cross-time travel is kept secret on Homeline (at least at first). This is in part because they seek to line their pockets and in part because they are unaware of the risks.
-> If Homeline seeks to unseat Centrum from its position, they will probably need allies. Most other cross-time travelling organizations might actually be worse than leaving Centrum in charge.
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Old 03-14-2021, 02:29 PM   #102
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

Dynasts

Worldlines are clustered in groups of about fifty; we could call these groups Quanta, but we're gonna call them Fiefs. There's about a dozen known Fiefs, each with a single Dynasty of world-jumpers that wanders the landscape in search of truth and fun. Each Dynasty's Jumper power works slightly differently (different power modifiers). Dynasts capable of crossing between the Fiefs are the exception, not the rule, and tend to handle diplomacy between the Dynasties, all of whom are touchy, possessive sorts, even if most of them only rule a few primitive worlds directly and keep a low profile in high-tech worlds or similar dangerous areas.

And you could play members of these great Dynasties, like a sort of multipolar Amber, but one Fief has gone pear-shaped. On a world much like ours but perhaps with better and cheaper biotech, a Dynast jumps in to traffic and winds up in the emergency room, comatose or nonresponsive. Dr. Paul van Zandt sends blood and tissue samples off for testing, sequencing, etc. Then the patient disappears from her bed, in front of witnesses, on camera, all that. Van Zandt, being both quick thinking, visionary and perhaps of nonconventional morality, dumps the vanished patient's genome into a bank of stem cells to start churning out blood et cetera at his own private expense. When he has eight liters he gets a similarly flexible colleague to do a full blood replacement on himself and makes his first jump.

By selecting people with exemplary fitness profiles, pretty much all of van Zandt's synthetic Jumpers can cross Fief boundaries. A full blood replacement makes one a Jumper for about a year. A liver transplant will make a permanent Jumper who requires antirejection drugs for the rest of their life and all that entails, so Van Zandt strongly prefers the temporary blood route. It also places a time limit on potentially rogue employee-partners. Although one of the first things he did was set up a biotech lab on an isolated worldline so he had a base of operations in case relations with his governments turned poor.

If you want a secure but self-interested operation, Dr. Van Zandt destroyed all the records on Homeline he could reach as soon as his offworld lab was up and running. Adjust local privacy laws and medical practices to suit. If not, one or more Homeline governments have successfully reconstructed the cloned blood and tissue from samples and records. If you want a few, paranoid and unpleasant variations on Van Zandt, have the government jumpers quickly run afoul of the local Dynasty, which blasts Homeline with nukes or something, causing poverty and disorder but definitely not getting all the synthetic jumpers. Players can thus be basically Swagmen under Captain Van Zandt, or agents who lost their home country and are now looking for both revenge and a new home country. Or Dynasts.
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Old 03-15-2021, 08:05 AM   #103
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

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Originally Posted by patchwork View Post
Dynasts

I immediately want to make little changes and embellishments to this setup: that's probably a good sign.



If a diplomat transports an ordinary dynast to a new fief, can the dynast operate in the new fief? Either answer can lead to some interesting diplomacy.


Part of me wants to keep the idea of fiefs but use radically different methods of transportation. One fief is the colligio janario. One fief is made of tentacled aliens. One fief might use classic conveyors. But I suppose that's a different idea.
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Old 03-16-2021, 01:16 AM   #104
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I immediately want to make little changes and embellishments to this setup: that's probably a good sign.
Agreed.



Quote:
If a diplomat transports an ordinary dynast to a new fief, can the dynast operate in the new fief? Either answer can lead to some interesting diplomacy.
I was modeling Fiefs with simple Range modifiers, so yes, the foreign Dynast would be able to wander about within the "new" Fief's borders. This being Infinite Worlds, having created a rule we will now find the exception.


Quote:
Part of me wants to keep the idea of fiefs but use radically different methods of transportation. One fief is the colligio janario. One fief is made of tentacled aliens. One fief might use classic conveyors. But I suppose that's a different idea.
Not so different; I think the collegio would work as one of the dynasties. Tentacled aliens certainly weren't part of my plans, but the more I think about it the more I think they don't break anything necessarily. Classic conveyors in the IW sense are right out, but a Dynasty could have the Gadget and Portal modifiers, leading to something similar.
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Old 03-16-2021, 10:24 AM   #105
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

[QUOTE=patchwork;2371636]
I was modeling Fiefs with simple Range modifiers, so yes, the foreign Dynast would be able to wander about within the "new" Fief's borders. This being Infinite Worlds, having created a rule we will now find the exception.

Quote:
Not so different; I think the collegio would work as one of the dynasties.
what about the order of Eustathius? They use a more traditional jumper bloodline, I'd say, but they ride it, and that means its a bit more "gear-like".



Quote:
Classic conveyors in the IW sense are right out, but a Dynasty could have the Gadget and Portal modifiers, leading to something similar.
What about classic conveyors wouldn't work well with the dynast concept?
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Old 03-17-2021, 04:35 AM   #106
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

Conveyors are a technology that works independent of the operator; nearly anyone can be trained to use one, and untrained people might be able to hit the right button through simple luck. They can be mass produced. They can be transferred from one person to another easily, even by accident. Granted, as written we have no projectors, so the conveyor-fief would be entirely contained, unable to reach other fiefs unassisted, so that wouldn't completely wreck the landscape.

But the core idea is that only people born special have been able to jump from world to world for a long time, and the Disruptive New Thing is biotech that can turn "ordinary" people into jumpers, albeit at significant risk and cost. Conveyors don't feed into that at all; if they exist, then the Dynasts would be 1) aware of the possibility and ramifications of purely technological, and thus potentially mass, worldjumping, and 2) some of them would be not especially hostile to the idea, because there's always someone and they've had time to get used to it.

Ok, and having thought about it for a moment, a conveyor-fief that had previously been completely isolated could be an interesting "season 2", once the initial conflict had become stale. But if they're present from the beginning they undermine the core idea rather than support it.

Went back and reread collegio. I'd actually make the Order of St. Eustace the Dynasty of its Fief, and perhaps the other Dynasties regard their ranting about sorcerors harvesting the souls of whole worlds as delusion. Of course, they're only as delusional as the GM finds convenient.

Last edited by patchwork; 03-17-2021 at 04:54 AM.
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Old 03-17-2021, 07:19 AM   #107
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

IST: Infinite Super Teams

Take the premise of establishing one super-team per country (or region) made up of a multi-national supers, and expand it to alternate worldlines!

I mean, why have all these superhero stories about going to alternate dimensions if there isn't going to be subsequent cross-dimensional travel?*

I'm going to have to leave specifics up to individual taste: I tend to go for a "gee whiz" Silver Age style with little-to-no exploration of the consequences of worldline mingling, but I know that's not for everyone.


* This question is rhetorical. You do not need to answer it.
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Old 03-28-2021, 07:02 AM   #108
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

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Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw View Post
IST: Infinite Super Teams

Take the premise of establishing one super-team per country (or region) made up of a multi-national supers, and expand it to alternate worldlines!

I mean, why have all these superhero stories about going to alternate dimensions if there isn't going to be subsequent cross-dimensional travel?*

I'm going to have to leave specifics up to individual taste: I tend to go for a "gee whiz" Silver Age style with little-to-no exploration of the consequences of worldline mingling, but I know that's not for everyone.


* This question is rhetorical. You do not need to answer it.
I had kind of a related idea, only combining Homeline with I.S.T. Earth; a world of superheroes that has relatively recently become a parachronic power, and is coming into conflict with alternate timelines with their own superbeings and other supernatural entities.

Mostly an excuse to have superheroic adventures on alternate earths, honestly.
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Old 03-28-2021, 11:57 AM   #109
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

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I have toyed with using networks of worlds where the portals of each world only connect to twelve other worlds (with each type of portal associated with each zodiacal constellation). Portals would only function during the appropriate zodiacal times, only when opened by the appropriate zodiacal rituals, and could only be sensed by people that shared their zodiacal signs. I have not fully developed it yet though.
It feels to me as if it would be neater if each timeline connected to 11 other worlds, so that that timeline itself would have a Zodiacal sign, just like those it connected to.

A possible neat gimmick would be to link the twelve signs to the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, and through them to the cycle of fifths. This would open out the number of worlds, because the cycle of fifths isn't perfectly closed. You can go down a fifth, to F, B flat, E flat, A flat, D flat, and G flat, or you can go up a fifth, to G, D, A, E, B, and F sharp---but F sharp and G flat aren't the same frequency. And similarly, when you go from F sharp to C sharp, that's not the same as D flat, and G sharp's not the same as A flat. So the whole thing could be open ended.
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Old 03-28-2021, 02:09 PM   #110
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

2500 States

In 1976 Earth-New York time, 50 United States capitals in 50 alternate earths opened a permanent portal to a fifty-first, "idealized" America, which almost immediately became a warzone. The current situation is half "peace between brothers", half cold war.

The alternate worlds all have some form of North American country and have a local post-1776 date. Aside from that, anything goes.
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