New Reality Seeds

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

My first thought while reading was the opposite.
A world jumper that screws with timelines by creating immunities in soon to be plagued peoples.

I like your idea better. Mine was basically along the lines of "what if historical eugenicists got their wish."

Giving retrovial immunity to European diseases to the various western-hemisphere cultures would be a fascinating coup. Earlier discussions along those lines tended to say that the European invaders would face a rougher time and while they would establish footholds, they'd be unlikely to really take over the continents.

One potential is a very slow push onto the "New World," which would probably give all the Europeans a chance to get a foothold, rather than a few particularly lucky ones. Without explosive growth, these settlements would probably develop feelings of independence much more slowly.

Given large and urban populations, the native civilizations would have no trouble assimilating European technologies and domesticates. How they choose to use them -- and to what degree -- I can't say.

Centuries later, someone might wonder why measles, the plague, and countless other diseases disappeared from humanity around the time of the Colombian Exchange (maybe it's tomatoes?).

[Flyndaran]

Plagues appeared and disappeared throughout history. I doubt anyone but a 19th century or later epidemiologist could even see it as unusual.

Of course one could add another hiccup to a timeline by one of those diseases evolving and jumping from a non-human host back to humans. That smallpox lacked any other host is a major reason why we were able to eradicate it after all.
Edit: Oh, it looks like measles only exists in humans too.

[Astromancer]

Some aspects of the history of the Americas would stay the same, with a change in personnel. Example: The Plains Indians would still be crushed by destroying the Buffalo herds. However, it would be other tribes of Native Americans, farmers like the Americans who took their lands in our world. Perhaps the Mississippians would be the ones to take over the plains.

[Astromancer]

Try this idea...

Between the Urals and the Altai mountains instead of a vast swampy lowland, there is a vast shallow bay/gulf. The Gulf of Siberia is navigated from early times on. The presence of an Arm of the sea that far into Asia means the Silk Road went through well watered plains and was more active from an early period, with much more cultural exchange as a consequence. This world would have been different from ancient times. The Han and the Romans might have contacted each other. Heck, Alexander might have marched to Western China.

It would be a very exotic world.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Dar al-Islam?

I mean, it sounds pretty good in English, but also kind of...othering. (Also, it's basically Arabic for "the Islamic world," but more poetic.)

I’m never sure how much the Sunni-Shi’ite divide is really a theological expression of the older and perpetual Arab-Iranian divide.

I mean, the same could be said of the Great Schism and the division between Greek and Latin culture, or the Troubles and divisions between Irish and English culture. (Or if you think of the Troubles as cultural in origin, between Catholics and Protestants.) You could even describe the Crusades as a clash between Europeans and Saracens, rather than anything religious.
Religion is not separate from culture; it is a part of culture. Religion is certainly a very important part of culture, one which shapes and is shaped by other aspects in crucial ways, but it's still culture. Making a sharp distinction between religious and cultural divides doesn't make much sense to me.

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Nippon-7

I love alternate histories where non-Western powers catch on that the Westerners are worth dealing with. There are plenty of examples of non-Westerners recognizing the value of what the Westerners have and manipulating them into helping eliminate their local enemies (or at least not fighting them) while they use their access to Western crops, technology, etc to incorporate them into their own economy and military, thereby undoing the head start Europe got from a variety of factors...but pretty much all of these examples come from societies without the materials, land, or raw manpower to challenge the budding colonial empires. The non-Western nations which had such were pretty much all regional powerhouses, with the same proto-nationalist arrogance shared by the mightiest countries in Europe; I wonder if that's part of why none of them were among the early exploiters of European ideas.

Originally Posted by PTTG

-snip-

I like the idea, but I'd probably make a couple of tweaks to the central antagonist.
First, a worldjumper with a portable lab doesn't seem quite enough to shape a world; I'd add a couple of extra qualities, like being a brilliant bio-engineer (perhaps with some self-modifications—at least enough to grant immunity to disease and biological immortality) and maybe another psionic ability or two.
Second, I'd say he's testing out different ideas. There's never been a world where doing drugs enough leads to sterility, for instance, and he wants to make sure it has the results he desires. Right now, he's seeding various test worlds with the pre-designed eugenic plagues, and also finding similar-enough "control groups" which he gives everything he gave to the test world, except with a version of that eugenic plague which doesn't actually eugenic. Once he has individual plagues which accomplish what he wants, he'll test worlds with multiple plagues at once to make sure there aren't any adverse physiological, epidemiological, or sociological interactions between them. Then, once he has a single packet of eugenic plagues that he thinks can bring humanity to its greatest potential, he'll release them on as many worlds as he can get away with.
Third...that plan sounds like the kind of plan that would be most fun to interrupt halfway. He's moved onto the combo-platter tests, and amassed some followers who believe in his cause (and have useful abilities or skills), and by the end of the campaign he'll be throwing together his ultimate (if undertested) plague to release before those short-sighted fools can stop him.



Here's a thought for you. H.R. Giger was once stalked by Dutch customs agents who thought the paintings he made were photographs. What if they were?
...Yeah, it's pretty shallow, but it allows for a modern Lovecraftian horror timeline...and I didn't have any better ideas of where to share that fun fact.

[Flyndaran]

Updating Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model" to more modern times is one way to subtly add Lovecraftian themes.

[Astromancer]

Mu-2

The Mu parallels designate worlds where there is an additional continent in the Pacific Ocean. Normally this is the submerged continent that New Zealand is the main above water area of, in fact Mu-1 and the other Mu parallels are of this type. Mu-2 is a continent slightly larger than Australia in landmass but wider and longer because of vast bays and gulfs, in the Northern Pacific.

The continent, named "New Hanover" by its discoverer, James Cook, in 1778 on his third voyage, was forested, but with trees unknown elsewhere. No land mammals other than bats were found by Capt. Cook. Seals, sea otters, and sea cows were found in vast abundance. However, rats escaped the ships and pigs and goats were deliberately left behind. The trio beginning a mass extinction. The most prominent local flora were the birds. Some flightless birds colloquially called "wolf buzzards" were deadly pack predators like a cross between Cassowaries and Terror Birds, oddly enough, like the Dodo, a relative of the dove. Behemoths, the largest flightless bird ever in this parallel, (much larger than Homeline's Moa were both easily domesticated and useful as both transport and food source.

From the 1790's on, whalers set up small settlements on the bays and coves of New Hanover. At first, these merely harvested seals and birdlife. Later they became farming communities. In the 1830's New Englanders began to settle the western peninsulas. At the same time an Irish nationalist, who died young in Homeline's history, began to set up colonies of Gaelic speaking Irish and Scots on the Northern Peninsula. Welsh nationalists copied him elsewhere on the continent. Groups of Germans petitioned Queen Victoria to settle there as well. She and her government, unaware they owned the place said, "Yes." The New Englanders and the Irish both made clear they weren't under British rule and petitioned the USA to claim the areas they lived in. The Brits were A) unhappy to turn land over to the Americans, and B) glad to be rid of troublemakers.

The local year of this Q6 parallel is 1869. The USA is recovering from the Civil War and industrialized. Western New Hanover wants to expand into the central lands of the continent. The Eastern Penninsula's German towns are becoming nationalistic and are being strongly influenced by German-speaking radicals who want to create a socialist state. They seek full independence. The Welsh-speakers want either independence or to join the Americans. Meanwhile, the old Whaler settlements Want to say with Britain. Hawaii is trying to claim lands on the Southern Penninsula which extends nearly to Wake Island. The climate of this part of New Hanover is much warmer than the rest of the land and is the home of condors larger than Pelgornis. These Condors are predatory and aggressive. They are called Griffins by most people.

Basically, a stranger wild west. It adds a touch of The Valley of the Gwangi in the giant exotic avians. The simple fact of the isolation of this continent makes who's really in charge far less certain. If you move the timeframe up a little, Japan and Germany could be brought into the setting as competitors and antagonists.

[Astromancer]

This yet as unnamed parallel is getting called "Lucky" in some circles. The local year is 1924 and. Hitler died in a street brawl. Noticed only by out time analysts. Stalin is dead in a carwreak. Franco, Trotsky, Mussolini, Mao, and several other future dictators are dead.

Homeline wonders if someone is trying to shape history. They can't object to the chosen direction. However, they still need to find out the motives of whoever's behind this. The PCs only need to search for clues in violent unstable nations around the world during a period of crisis.

[Flyndaran]

There would be some unpleasant consequences of removing major wars and dictators from history though. With no Hitler, antisemitism would be FAR more prevalent, for example.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Mu-2 is a continent slightly larger than Australia in landmass but wider and longer because of vast bays and gulfs, in the Northern Pacific.

I'm calling BS on this continent not being inhabited by humans before European explorers came along. (You didn't say it was uninhabited, but you didn't mention natives, and judging by our record elsewhere I doubt humans would get there without causing a mass extinction by bringing rats, livestock, etc.)An Australia-sized continent, let alone one larger and wider, would just about stretch from Japan and Kamchatka to Alaska, if not coming within easy sailing distance of Hawaii or California. (Image courtesy of thetruesize.com. Map seems to be a Mercator projection; beware the Mercator.)
Maybe its inhabitants would be descended from Japanese sailors who went far east and discovered a new land, maybe they're Polynesians, maybe they're even Native Americans or a mix of all three, but they would exist and have a greater impact on the timeline (and especially New Hanover's colonization) than you described.
And, to me, the possibilities of a new Pacific continent allowing prehistoric diffusion of culture, crops, and critters between the Far East and the Americas far more interesting than a continent full of somewhat interesting creatures and a few more colonies, just because those colonies are meddling in American politics.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

There would be some unpleasant consequences of removing major wars and dictators from history though. With no Hitler, antisemitism would be FAR more prevalent, for example.

This, so much. You can't fix major social or economic issues by finding and locating the BBEG, murdering him, and watching credits roll.
Focusing on Hitler: Even with no Hitler, the German people are still going to be drowning in war reparations and the economic problems caused by them. They are still going to feel angry at having lost the war, and will want to blame someone for their ills. Heck, killing Hitler won't even stop them from blaming the Jews and Commies; the stab-in-the-back myth was already brewing when the Armistace was signed, and antisemitism among the was clearly demonstrated in the German army during the War. (And probably elsewhere, but it's Germany we're focused on.)
To prevent the Holocaust, or any other 20th-century horrors, you need to stop the Great War. Hm...looks like some of the root causes have to do with some emperor not respecting Serbian nationalism or something...just gotta kill some of the imperial family and—wait a second, something about this doesn't feel right.

Seriously, though.
If they're going with the solution of killing all of OTL's big-name dictators, they're just going to shuffle the dictators and maybe the ideologies. The last monarchies of Europe will crumble, the countries who prospered after the Great War (until the Great Depression) will thrive and keep sanity in power, those who suffered will choose dictators who promise great dreams and revivals of national power.
They could then go through that timeline for another sweep, and another, but that will lead to all of the most charismatic and talented potential-dictators being removed from history, leaving the teeming masses looking for a scapegoat and a comforting narrative without any visionary to cling to who can promise them a better world if they just give up a few freedoms and grind some even-more-disenfranchised demographics under their heels. This kind of thing doesn't really happen in the real world (because nobody has ever picked off specifically the sorts of people who could become such visionaries with such precision), but I can only imagine it would lead to chaos, with different half-baked demagogues gathering small followings of people who already understand and agree with their ideas, while those without such demagogues come together and try to find some justification for getting angry and beating people up.


There's a vaguely-related idea I've pondered occasionally. What if we got Hitler because some time travelers killed off German demagogues until we got someone who wasn't crazy enough to kill tens of millions before the world could react, nor pragmatic enough to keep a fascist government in place for generations? I've never quite figured out if it's enough to be the core of a story rather than a worldbuilding element in a time travel story (some handwavy bullcrap which simultaneously explains why the heroes aren't trying to stop historical atrocities and why even the most sympathetic of time-meddlers have to be stopped)...maybe one of the worlds without Hitler gets involved as an antagonist or something? The obvious way to do so would be to have Nazi Germany win and dominate the world's politics, but that's boring and overdone, so let's consider the possibility of a more spectacular failure.

I can easily see a sufficiently power-mad dictator blitzkrieging into France and Poland and so forth, rounding up tens of millions of ethnic minorities and political dissidents for execution (probably by some cost-effective method like pushing them off a high cliff—ideally into the ocean or something, so it's self-cleaning), making a mess of the infrastructure and industry, and crippling West and Central Europe's economies even worse than after OTL's World Wars. The UK, USSR, and various colonial nations manage to beat back this overextended megalomaniac without much trouble, before the USSR (with some support from other allies) sweeps into Japanese territory. Since the Japanese are invaded well before anything like nuclear weapons could come to bear; barring extensive use of Royal Navy aircraft carriers as bases for frequent and successful bombing runs with normal bombs or something along those lines, it would take an invasion of untold scale to force Japan to surrender. In the process, Japan would likely also be wrecked.
End result of this WW2: European continent in ruins from the western coast (probably excepting Iberia) to the edge of the USSR, Japan and parts of China occupied by Japan not doing much better, New Deal struggling on without the easy stimulus sales pitch that Pearl Harbor provides. The USA remains focused on internal affairs and meddling in Latin America, leaving the Old World to the UK and USSR.
Asia would be dominated by Communists, since the UK would have fewer Pacific interests than OTL's USA did. China and other USSR allies would probably be on friendly terms with the USA, who could serve as a neutral mediator in conflicts between the UK and USSR. The Middle East and Africa, though? Especially areas still under the influence of European colonial powers? Those would become battlegrounds between communist insurgents and democratic conservatives.
Meanwhile, reconstruction in Eurasia goes on. However, tensions rise between the UK and USSR as they try to fight over influence in the reconstructing nations. And at this point, it's probably worth mentioning that this world's WW2 was basically a shorter, sloppier version of its Great War. Sure, the advancements in tank and aircraft carrier technology were put on full view, but the only extreme devastation was caused by mustache-twirling dictators, not anything sensible enough that one could see their leaders doing it. None of it seems integral to the form of war...and certainly there aren't any weapons which captured the world's fearful attention like the atom bomb.
In OTL, World War 3 is a term thrown around for a hypothetical conflict which could have occurred during the Cold War. In this timeline, it is an actual war which flows as seamlessly from WW2 as WW2 did from WW1. The weapons developed since the first World War have a chance to be used by nations not being controlled by arbitrary narrative purposes, and they include the very same weapons which terrified generations in our timeline...with only rudimentary defenses and little political or ethical resistance to their deployment, because nobody really groks just how much more powerful these bombs are than the bombs of last war.
As in OTL, the USA emerges as the world's main power, due to the other powers being devastated by war. However, this devastation was far more thorough, and the USA much less prepared to help. If the Four Horsemen bribed Lady Luck, billions could die from famine, pestilence, and lingering conflict; even if they didn't, a global hyperpower ruling over a world too devastated by war to resist its whims should be a terrifying concept on its own. I mean, look at how hit-or-miss OTL's closest contender has been in its meddling and tell me this timeline wouldn't be a nightmare.