Alternate Crosstime Organizations

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

With an entire sub-branch dedicated to all the reality quake inducing, world-line jumping, universe splitting Flashes.

A lone sub-branch is not going to be enough. A single Flash can create enough breaks to require the attention of an entire division inside the org ... and I know of at least six timelines that have a Barry Allen as Flash (Arrowverse, Flash (1990 TV series), the main DCU, the SuperFriends cartoons, the DCCU (most notably the Justice League movie), and Young Justice). Granted, some of these aren't as bad as others.... as only the Arrowverse and main DCU Flashes have truly broken time.

[Flyndaran]

Code name: Apple division... because it does not support Flash.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

The problem of course is that even though they were both constrained by the Comics Code, DC's Silver Age was very, very different from Marvel's Silver Age soap operas and alienation. They only converged in the Iron Age.

Well, yes but that is why it is world-hopping setting and why the factions' goals only roughly coorespond to the tone and themes of their respective ages (which incidently they aren't genre-aware of as such; well maybe except for instances of Animal Man and Deadpool).

Silver Age Earth-616 and Pre-Crisis Silver Age Earth-One would therefore be worldlines under the Ascendant, and share some common rules reflected in both game mechanics and society. In both places it is nearly impossible for supers to accidentally kill people, ordinary people generally like and trust superheroes, and superscience is accepted as matter-of-fact by the scientific community.

Incidently as stable worldlines under a factional dominance they aren't battlegrounds in the war and actually are inaccessible even to the Ascendant's agents. The factions' agents are all survivors of worlds that have been lost (being orphaned as such is how you gain world-hopping in this setting) and the battleground worlds are all on the verge of Crisis making them accessible to refugees.

[William]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Psionic Neanderthals (almost long-earth style) with psionic worldjumping ability. They miiiiight have crossbred with some homo sapiens resulting in a few psionic family lines in various worlds.

Not much of a power structure -- they generally cover as ordinary migrant people in most worldlines, avoid close inspection, and disappear when they get too much attention.

They prefer wild worldlines, where they forage and hunt a little, and then move on.

It's nearly impossible to contact them intentionally, and they don't really care that much for humans (we did generally wipe them out wherever they didn't flee), but they are not totally averse to helping someone in need.

The idea of a nomadic culture whose nomadic range is worldhopping is very neat to me. It immediately makes sense, but I honestly think this is perhaps the first time I've heard of it -- everyone else seems to have a home base of operations. They could be very useful in a fantasy game. If you don't mind, I'd like to toy with a couple of variations.

The Far-Romani

Even harder to follow than the usual caravans of the travelling people, the Far-Romani are an offshoot of Roma culture whose native magicians have discovered the secret roads that lead across the parallels. There are, broadly, two main groups: the Early and the Late Far-Romani.

The horse-drawn wagons of the Early Far-Romani travel around fantasy parallels that are closer to the European Middle Ages in technology; on worlds with geography similar to Homeline's, they tend to cluster around Eastern Europe, and on stranger worlds they are likely to be found in nations with the cultures most congruent to these. They pursue the same sources of income as traditional Romani: street performances, tinsmithing, peddling, and other trades that can be maintained as itinerants. Where practicable, many are also professional magicians. (As they regard themselves as bound by Roma law, the legality of magic in the outsider culture is of merely pragmatic interest to Roma practitioners of a typically high-margin business.) They rarely buy uncommon goods for offworld sale unless there is a high potential profit margin and something can be passed off in the customer's world as a valuable but understandable rarity; the Far-Romani have no more love for surveillance and invasive regulation than Romani who stay on a given world, and guard the secret of their interplanar origins as zealously as Infinity. As escape routes go, being able to vanish from the face of the earth is an extremely useful ability.

The Late Far-Romani travel in motorized caravans, crossing worlds closer to the modern day, anything after the invention of the automobile. They can be found across the globe, though still mostly in America and Europe. Their worlds are more likely to be generally low-mana; they actually favor worlds where mana is nearly nonexistent, detectable in secret pockets or under specific mana-enhancing conditions. They do less peddling and have more focus on arts and entertainment, performing both independently and with traveling troupes that they join and leave, and selling crafts in wood and fiber. Some follow seasonal migration routes for farm labor and construction.

The Early and the Late Far-Romani both seem to have a world-independent means of telling time, possibly by reading certain signs in the worlds they cross, for both have a roughly annual gathering. The Early Far-Romani meet in a town a day or so away from a Constantinople whose cosmopolitanism extends to a gamut of humanoid species; the town is settled by retired Far-Romani who collect fees and maintain the grounds for the annual gathering. The Late Far-Romani gather in the Big Bend region, in a Texas that maintained its independence (save for a brief occupation by a zealously abolitionist America after the North swiftly won the Civil War) and now sits between the U.S. and Mexico.

Fascinatingly, the Early and the Late Far-Romani do meet, about once a decade in a Grand Conclave held in a near-modern Turkey, but rarely exchange technology. The Early Far-Romani have almost a Mennonite aversion to adopting modern technology; they may have good reason for avoiding it, as the Early Far-Romani seem to regularly give birth to more numerous, and more powerful, magicians and psychics.

Petty theft is a charge laid at the feet of Romani in all worlds, but is no more likely among them than anywhere else. The more serious charge of kidnapping actually has some basis: wild-talent worldwalker children whose parents cannot understand the bizarre behavior of their empowered offspring may find that the travelling people have offered their child a life that can satisfy their yearning for an impossible freedom, and should they object to their little one running off with the tinkers, the Romani may prefer to give the kid the final say. It doesn't hurt that worldwalkers are extremely useful to have marrying into the bloodlines.

Other than preserving Roma law and culture, there are few common imperatives that the Grand Conclave imposes on its free people. There is, however, one strict law: the Reich in all its forms is to be avoided at all costs, and the worldwalker magics and psionics that the Romani use must never be allowed to fall into Nazi hands. Should the Porajmos, the Romani name for the facet of the Holocaust that involved the Nazi efforts at their own extermination, ever threaten a world, it must be fought by any means possible. A Romani who stops travelling to volunteer and fight against any form of the Nazis with any nation's forces is still considered to have Romanipen, and may return to the road at any time after the war with their rights and privileges intact.

[Flyndaran]

Like a human-centric version of my True Fey. They don't care at all what you look like, only that you have reality altering magic with world jumping being the most important. Their form of magic tends to make cross-breeding possible even when biology says it shouldn't be.
The present royal family happen to look human, so that's the fashion for partners and aesthetics.
Those birthed by Fey but lacking powers tend to get dropped like sacks of potatoes and referred to as goblins. Changeling is a common custom for killing two birds with one stone. Get a magical baby and dump a non-magical one that may still have a nice "goblin" life among mundanes.

Some worldlines and locales act as giant meeting hubs for proper Fey with much larger outskirts having more permanent goblin-markets of those left behind.

[William]

And another planewalker nomadic culture. I really like this idea. Taps me out for now though.

The Buffalo Trail

The slaughter to extinction of the American bison could easily be a necromantic working or a ritual sacrifice in addition to the practical effects it would be expected to have on Plains nation cultures. On some fantasy worlds, with spiritual assistance from Native priests as much in danger as their food source, prayers for escape from the murderous onslaught of the white man show the buffalo a new migration route and the people of the Great Plains the way to follow them.

The buffalo from such a world become parachronozoids. They join an enormous herd, one whose passage takes days and can stretch across multiple worlds. Not all of them are in a single herd; they can split or merge as resource pressure and hunting successes demand. They somehow sense where there is good grazing and the appropriate seasonal weather to be found. The worldlines they come to tend to be thinly populated; in many, the United States has torn itself apart in some form of the Civil War, or a failed American Revolution has left Spain, France and England gnawing on each others' shins to the South and East. Whatever the reason, in most worlds they pass through the Plains are wide open.

As the buffalo stamp out their migration, they leave trails that skilled trackers with the right eyes can follow. So heavy is their tread that even after the doors they make have closed for a considerable time, the right prayers can open them again, long enough for a tribe to pass through. This is the life of a tribe on the Buffalo Trail: following the migration, hunting as much as necessary, foraging where they can, trading with natives when they pass through. Given that the buffalo tend to choose worlds where the species is not under extinction threat, it is rare that a worldwalking nomad feels the need to explain his origins in much detail to the locals, certainly not well enough to teach one how to follow the parachronic migration. The herd must sustain their own people, and it is vast but not infinite. Thus the Buffalo Trail hunters leave behind stories that mix seamlessly with other folktales and myths, of spirit tribes that follow buffalo herds the size of the sky, appearing and vanishing within days. They especially like buying guns and ammunition, for a good quantity of which they are willing to trade some truly splendid horses.

The followers of the Buffalo Trail come from many different peoples: from their histories, the Comanche seem to have been the first, but nomads from the Apache to the Sioux can be seen among them. Fortunately, when a tribe comes into contact with speakers of a different verbal language, Plains Sign Talk seems to be mutually understandable among the various timelines the tribes hail from. When it is possible to track a nation to its source, so far all seem to have come from Quantum 5 around the mid to late 1800s, under similar conditions. Few come from non-Homeline-like geographies. The rare exceptions include several centaur tribes.

When a new nation has found the Buffalo Trail, they are invited to join the Plains Congress, and usually accept. Skilled diplomats, polyglots, and worldwalkers gather regularly to represent their nations at a Black Hills in a high fantasy parallel where all vertebrate animals have the power of speech, albeit with limited intellect. In this world the Black Hills is buffalo territory, but in gratitude to the humans who had helped save their distant brothers, humans are permitted to use it as a meeting ground. (As it happens, humans are native to the world but remain confined to northern Africa. There is insufficient communication between the continents for the Plains Congress to know this, however.)

The Congress mostly adjudicates disputes of hunting rights in specified territory and timing among the various worlds, distributing the tribes among the herds where they can be supported. In the process they are developing a rather sophisticated parachronic coordinate system! It also covers any diplomatic issues that may arise; the most common issues arise from overpopulation of a given nation, and they generally suggest that a portion of the oversized nation settle into a worldline somewhere. This is usually agreed to; refusals tend to spark the fairly rare internecine violence over hunting rights to a herd. There is frequent talk of finding a world for the peoples of the Buffalo Trail to settle down, perhaps to gather their now considerable numbers and make a concerted push to expel the white man from a North America somewhere. As most of the Buffalo Trail nations escaped extinction by the skin of their teeth, few of their leaders have any stomach for a war of extermination, and so this idea is always shelved. The anger against the white man is a permanent feature of the society, though, and there is equally little stomach for parley or trade of any sort with Uncle Sam's invaders. Short raids against any U.S. outposts are a frequent feature of a young man's life. Unfortunately, these often leave trouble behind for the blameless locals. On the occasions where Infinity has needed to deal with peoples of the Trail, they have uniformly had the best results when sending agents of nonwhite races.

Occasionally a jumper is born among the Buffalo peoples that can strike out on their own trail, and some among them believe that one day such a leader will find a fresh paradise without human or other claimants, where the buffalo can find a permanent home, and the nations can disperse across the Plains never to make war again. For most of the Buffalo Trail people, though, this is just a wishful daydream.

[fchase8]

You could have the Far-Romani meet the Buffalo Trail in Gallatin, a Q5 world with an independent Texas and a chaotic plains.

Where would the Early-Romani congregate on Yrth? Tredroy?

[William]

Mm, seems reasonably like their sort of area for a stopover... but, of course, any Early Far-Romani on Yrth are probably stuck there, unless their parachronic pathfinding is much better than your average run of worldhopper skill.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by William

...
Occasionally a jumper is born among the Buffalo peoples that can strike out on their own trail, and some among them believe that one day such a leader will find a fresh paradise without human or other claimants, where the buffalo can find a permanent home, and the nations can disperse across the Plains never to make war again. For most of the Buffalo Trail people, though, this is just a wishful daydream.

I imagine that Homeline agents have told them of the many worlds lacking humans entirely, but aren't believed for political reasons. Though it is interesting that the Buffalo people can only reach parallels with indigenous humans.
They may have a very skewed view of how rare such naked ape realities should be.

[sir_pudding]

I realized that I set up the premise for the factions in "All Along the Watchtowers" but I didn't actually list them. Oops.

Order of the Golden Mystery - Seeks to undermine consensus reality and increase mysticism and magic. They want worlds where mystical power origins are most common, powers can be deadly and unpredictable, causality is weak, death is a transformative experience, people are mostly unaware of superpowers, and weird science isn't well distinguished from weird magic. Tries to make reality so plastic that continuity of events is irrelevant, unfortunately this often triggers a Crisis before it gets to that point. Believed to have been completely wiped out by The Scourge. Corresponds to the Golden Age.

The Ascendant - Seeks to create superhumans who survive their worldlines, and utopian futurism on existing worldlines, activity pursues Crises in the belief they can steer the resolution into improved realities. Their ultimate goal is apotheosis. They try to make science origins the most common, powers are safe, death is a revolving door, causality is fluid, people generally like and trust superheroes, superscience is generally accepted as real science, and magic is rationalized. They try to balance continuity against their idea of progress, in order to trigger a Crisis under ideal conditions according to a complex theoretical model. Corresponds to the Silver Age.

The Scourge - Seeks vengeance for the destruction of their original realities, the elimination of all other factions, and to a lesser extent the elimination of metahuman abilities. They want conditions that make mundane origins common, powers are extremely deadly and defensive powers are less effective, death is permanent, causality is strong, people generally distrust and fear superhumans, weird science and magic are often indistinguishable from pseudoscience and harder superscience has hyper-realistic (even cynical) limitations and consequences. They are willing to use a scorched earth strategy and would rather see a world be destroyed in a failed Crisis rather than allowing it to shift to the enemy. Corresponds to the Iron Age.

Legendary Aeon - Seeks to stabilize continuity in order to prevent and reduce Crises. They are unconcerned with origin sources, but try to keep the relative population of metahumans low by making origins in general less common; powers have consequences but are controllable, resurrection is possible but not without costs, causality is adaptive, people generally treat superhumans as individuals but have realistic concerns about the effects of powers, magic and superscience are generally accepted but regulated by institutions. They try to guide a Crisis into the most stable possible result that preserves as much of the previous reality as possible. Corresponds to the Bronze Age.