Catalog of the Weird Parallels

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Ottriman

Shitpost

For some baffling reason, this timeline features advanced computers and mass internet usage despite being in the middle ages! Smiths can craft electronics by hand and batteries are readily available, ones that can be charged with cranks, sunlight or water-wheels.

The current date is 1000 AD, the world is TL 3 but with TL 9 electronics somehow. According to cursory research by timeline-hopping agents this +6 TL to electronics has held true even back into the stone age, where tribes would make tabulating machines to track their stock of supplies.

With global communication networks being over a thousand years old as a tech at this point, the world has explosively shared culture, information, memes and shitposts about everything from cooking to religion and more.

Yet travel is still hard and most people are dirt farmers, with rugged and sophisticated smartphones helping them out. In many places this huge access to information means that people are much better educated on average than OTL 1000 AD, and also inundated with false internet data on social media platforms, of course.

Have I got a book for you. Have you read To the Chapel Perilous? It's about the local media response to the Grail Quest. Great jokes and good suspense.

[Ottriman]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Have I got a book for you. Have you read To the Chapel Perilous? It's about the local media response to the Grail Quest. Great jokes and good suspense.

Haven't heard of it, what actually inspired me to write this were some pics on Cracked.com about modern tech ruining historic moments.

I will check it out thank you very much.

[Astromancer]

Having watched The Ballad of Buster Scuggs, a strange and wonderful film with rich layers of intense realism and surrealism blended magnificently together, it occurs to me that this is a ready made Weird Parallel. Perhaps a style of weird parallels. The film is both a loving celebration of Westerns and a wicked parody of them. More richly, it is just as interested with the themes and ideas of the Western as with the tropes and conventions.

Watch the movie, it is widely available. It will give you wonderful new ways to disorient your players. Once you figure out what the film is doing, the method can be applied to many different periods of history and types of narratives.

[Astromancer]

Try this idea...

A parallel where certain people are locked into narratives. Basically, 5% of the population has a form of Destiny that makes them part of a narrative/story. This Destiny has an Area of effect which varies according to the needs of the narrative.

Thus PCs could be helplessly caught up in a story of any random genre.

[PTTG]

A god of mischief opens a portal connecting two echoes of homeline. The portal appeared in the transbay tunnel connecting Oakland to San Fransisco, connecting a 1984 echo to one 38 seconds earlier. Trains from the late Oakland go to the early SF, and vice versa.

At first, citizens on both worlds come to the conclusion that their partner cities are just a little bit off. It took a surprisingly long time for the other shoe to drop. For years, people accepted that sometimes, BART is a little weird about schedules.

The system worked because anyone who traveled through the tunnel on one side almost certainly traveled through the tunnel on the other; there were some small number of people per year for whom the one-minute delay caused enough of a difference that both people ended up in the same worldline at the same time, but it was few enough that it was written off as a lost twin or an urban legend. Investigation into the mysterious disappearances and appearances had become a bit of a hobby for a number of bay area residents.

This all changed with the loma prieta earthquake in 1989. The complicated conditions of the portal and the timeline meant that trains en route in the tunnel experienced a weird combination of effects, including seeing two quakes separated by seconds. In the late worldline, the train was stopped in place; in the early worldline, the train was ordered to continue (as it was near the end). This resulted in a train arriving when it had not been expected, and in the other worldline, the reverse happened.

Due to the god's careful wiring job (in order to hide the odd time delay from the system operators, operators at both ends of the tunnel saw the whole tunnel as if everything was normal and correct for their end, despite the fact that halfway through, the power and control for the tunnel switched from late to early), even this strange scenario could have been mostly ignored. However, the divergence now meant that hundreds of people had arrived early, and dozens of them took ferries or other boats back across the bay. Meanwhile, their alternate selves would later take the BART system to/from the city on their worldline, and then would take the tube back.

Over the next day, 25 people ended up reduplicated in a highly publicized way, and as all of them were on the same BART train the evening of the earthquake, it was fairy easy to pinpoint a cause. Paranormal researchers were first on the scene, but soon real researchers discovered the bizarre portal phenomenon.

The trickster god's joke had only just begun...

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by PTTG

A god of mischief opens a portal connecting two echoes of homeline. The portal appeared in the transbay tunnel connecting Oakland to San Fransisco, connecting a 1984 echo to one 38 seconds earlier. Trains from the late Oakland go to the early SF, and vice versa.

At first, citizens on both worlds come to the conclusion that their partner cities are just a little bit off. It took a surprisingly long time for the other shoe to drop. For years, people accepted that sometimes, BART is a little weird about schedules.

The system worked because anyone who traveled through the tunnel on one side almost certainly traveled through the tunnel on the other; there were some small number of people per year for whom the one-minute delay caused enough of a difference that both people ended up in the same worldline at the same time, but it was few enough that it was written off as a lost twin or an urban legend. Investigation into the mysterious disappearances and appearances had become a bit of a hobby for a number of bay area residents.

This all changed with the loma prieta earthquake in 1989. The complicated conditions of the portal and the timeline meant that trains en route in the tunnel experienced a weird combination of effects, including seeing two quakes separated by seconds. In the late worldline, the train was stopped in place; in the early worldline, the train was ordered to continue (as it was near the end). This resulted in a train arriving when it had not been expected, and in the other worldline, the reverse happened.

Due to the god's careful wiring job (in order to hide the odd time delay from the system operators, operators at both ends of the tunnel saw the whole tunnel as if everything was normal and correct for their end, despite the fact that halfway through, the power and control for the tunnel switched from late to early), even this strange scenario could have been mostly ignored. However, the divergence now meant that hundreds of people had arrived early, and dozens of them took ferries or other boats back across the bay. Meanwhile, their alternate selves would later take the BART system to/from the city on their worldline, and then would take the tube back.

Over the next day, 25 people ended up reduplicated in a highly publicized way, and as all of them were on the same BART train the evening of the earthquake. Paranormal researchers were first, but soon real researchers discovered the bizzare portal phenomenon.

The trickster god's joke had only just begun...

You are twisted. I admire you for that!

[Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2]

Originally Posted by PTTG

A<snip>

Diabolical!

[Astromancer]

Try this idea...

In this world the Devil wins. Then he realizes that running the world involves responsibilities! I'm largely rifting off of Anatole France's book Revolt of the Angels, which was a lively satire of Radical Left-wing politics. Basically, Satan in this setting has gotten over himself and trying to run the universe fairly and less prudishly too.

Satan is an active god, often correcting the The Pope and telling him that the present ruler of the universe has a different point of view. Meanwhile, many angels and demons are trying to make the Earth a better place to live for humanity. They are just as united and focused as humanity.

As outsiders, the PCs could get tangled up in this universe's politics which are truly baroque.

[PTTG]

Tiny seed here: A fantasy setting on a disc world, with both sides inhabited and the only access through being a series of caves inhabited with monsters.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Tiny seed here: A fantasy setting on a disc world, with both sides inhabited and the only access through being a series of caves inhabited with monsters.

Tasty! Stir in a little D&D and some Bender's Game and season with the mines of Moria.