New Reality Seeds

[Astromancer]

Try this one. Robert fulton offered the steamship to Napoleon in about 1804 or 1805. At least in our history he did this. Napoleon rejected the steamship as an absurd and silly idea. However, imagine a world where Napoleon understood what Fulton offered and what it could do for him. In 1807, a fleet of armored French troop transport craft leave port for southern England moving against the wind and tides. The Brits are caught flat footed.

Now Napoleon's Empire was built on archaic financial structures, finance by plunder mainly. French banks were way behind the times and didn't fully catch up to best practises until decades later in our world. So, in this world, although Napoleon has conquered the United Kingdom, and changed it into the Anglican, Caladonian, Cambrian, and Hiberian Republics, his Empire still falls. Only it falls apart in 1857.

It's now 1865, all Europe is at war. The monarchists allied with the churches (the historic norm) and the Republicans allied with the Urban masses (again the historic norm). This would be a wild setting for steampunk swashbuckling.