Alternate Earths 3, What Worlds? (hypothetical)

[Tom Kalbfus]

What if you move Australia northward and Eastward so that it straddles the Equator and populate it with dinosaurs, and leave everything else in the World the same? Call this Lost World.

[Fionn The Otaku]

Originally Posted by Glamourweaver

Is Brendan mentioned in some product, an external resource, or is it a homebrew?

It's homebrew but not exactly, Brendan is the most likely name for a world where Celts discovered and colonised North America well before 1000 A.D. as there is an Irish Saint named Brendan the voyager who may have discovered America, Iceland and many other Islands over 1,300 years ago.

[Lord_Kjeran]

Chello!

Tom, I take back all the bad names I've called you....! ;) Lost World is absolute genius! An especially useful idea if one has GURPS Lands Out of Time from e23.

GURPS Lands Out of Time

:thumbsup:

Tony

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Almafeta

Mousetrap: Like our world, but due to a near-miss in the early days of Earth, the planet spins faster: in our time, each day lasts 21 hours, 34 minutes, and 16 seconds. The calander year has 406 days (14 months of 29 days), with a leap year about every 3 years. Humans have progressed at much the same tech level, but the culture is changed to adapt to people being awake all hours of day and night (human circadian rhythms run on a 25-hour schedule; they can handle being 4% shorter, but not a full sixth).

What, exactly, do you mean by "the early days of Earth"? Cause if it's much before the evolution of humans, then the day length won't matter - human circadian rythyms will evolve to match it.

[Almafeta]

Originally Posted by kelly_pedersen

What, exactly, do you mean by "the early days of Earth"? Cause if it's much before the evolution of humans, then the day length won't matter - human circadian rythyms will evolve to match it.

... I didn't think of that. Crud.

[Infornific]

Originally Posted by Tom Kalbfus

What if you had a parallel where the zero-point level for strength was 11 for women and 10 for men? In other words when you create a native female character you alter the GURPS rules slightly for women. a zero-point woman character would have the following attributes before points were spent on attributes skills and advantages:
Women
ST 11 [0] DX 10 [0] IQ 10 [0] HT 10 [0]
HP 11 [0] Will 10 [0] Per 10 [0] FP 10 [0]

And the attributes for men are:
Men
ST 10 [0] DX 10 [0] IQ 10 [0] HT 10 [0]
HP 10 [0] Will 10 [0] Per 10 [0] FP 10 [0]

and character creation from that point on follows the GURPS rule book in everything else

Lets also stipulate that this alternate's date is the same as on homeline.
Now women were like this in this alternate from since before recorded history.

The question is, how would this affect recorded history if you assumed women were physically stronger than men on average instead of weaker?

Would women have a different role in society?

They would still be mothers and bear children, but how would greater strength affect their role in history? Would their be more Queens and female soldiers, or would things remain the same as in our world?

Lets call this Alternate Gynarch

How would Infinity Unlimited approach this world, other than this small difference the men of homeline look like the men of Gynarch, the women of Gynarch are somewhat taller than average than then men of Homeline and Gynarch and the Women of Homeline look somewhat dwarfish in comparison to the Women of Gynarch, although not outside the human average for that world. Female Homeliners might be mistaken for 14 year old women of Gynarch if they are in their twenties.

Never an evolutionary biologist around when you need one, so I'll take a stab at this. OK, some very amateur speculation. Superior male size and strength probably helped in keeping patriarchy going but isn't everything. Remember societies consistently force young strong men to obey older, weaker men. There's a school of thought that the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture caused women to lose status for a number of reasons. To list a few - the agricultural life lead to more pregnancies and a resulting strain on women; superior male strength made men more valuable on the farm and consequently of higher status (I don't entirely buy that one); increased size of society and increased inequality made oppression of women more possible and and beneficial (to powerful men at any rate.)

If women are bigger and stronger than men, they're going to be able to do more physical labor and beating up and oppressing women won't be as practical. On the other hand, I don't see a mirror image of patriarchy. There's a large benefit in evolutionary terms if a man gets exclusive sexual access to several women. Of course, this usually involves oppressing women (who for some strange reason rarely go for the harem concept) and generally oppressing other men as well. On the other hand there isn't a similar benefit to a woman getting exclusive access to several men. Catherine the Great had a lot of lovers and even rewarded them but she didn't bother with a harem. Likewise concern over paternity is another reason for patriarchy. Again women don't need to worry about paternity as much.

So what I'd suspect you'd see is not outright oppression but a mild bias in favor of women in society, with the bias decreasing as technology advances and physical labor becomes less important. In game terms, this would be a monor Social Stigma which exceptionally strong men could buy off. Families as someone else suggested are likely to be matrilineal. At low tech levels military service is likely to be female dominated due to superior female size and strength. There's a school of thought that women are too valuable to be risked in battle but that in my opinion is overstated. Numerous societies practice female infanticide (ancient Greece with one exception had a poplulation skewed heavily toward men) and even today it's common in patriarchal societies for boys to be more favored and get better medical than girls.

I can't see Infinity being particularly concerned unless they thought the reversed dimorphism might be contagious (like initial views of Microworld.)

As for why you'd get reversed sexual dimorphism:

1. Divine/alien whim - some goddess or alien creature made things so as an experiment or because of personal prejudice.

2. More practical alien effort - someone or something is breeding humans as servants/livestock/etc. Males are primarily valued for breeding purposes rather than labor in this scenario - this would probably go hand in hand with a birth rate skewed toward females.

3. Some kind of radical feminist experiment, possibly post-apocalyptic. In this scenario, women were deliberately genetically engineered to be larger than men in order to put an end to patriarchy once and for all.

4. Reversed approach - some form of selection chose for men to be smaller. One possible mechanism - if greater agility or climbing skill became an evolutionary advantage for men only, you're likely to get selection for small men. All other things being equal a small man is more agile and a better climber than a large man - see GURPS Gulliver for detailed discussion in game terms.

5. Something selecting for larger women. I'm kind of drawing a blank here, but others have come up with ideas.

- DW

[BeUrgaust]

A-Ming-inca In the early 15th century the Chinese were doing some major world explorations. Bringing with fleets them in the upper 3,000s of treasure ships 5 times the size of their European Contemeraries, to use as trade with the peoples they met and impress upon them China's riches. (what follows is the alternate). After the trek to Africa, the Emperor Zheng He, decides to ignore the advice of his ministers and begins the long expedition eastward across the Pacific to discover the "Gate of Gold" a bay that is remarkable in beauty and its natives though technologically inferior has a deep insight that his Confucian upbringing understands. This leads him and his fleet to do major trading with the Western Coast of this Megacontinent, providing metallurgy, gunpowder and various other technologies a good 60 years before the Spanish arrival. Imagine that as an alternate where the Europeans were held at bay durring early conquests, due to heaven trade with the Chinese.
Do you want fries with that? A world without potatoes. If we look at history many turning points were due to this simple tuber.In 1650 when the Potosi silver loades ran out this was a highly economic crop. Cromwell's disbanded soldier's in 1652 grew it on their confiscated land and allowed the Irish to flourish. It allowed the Prussians to survive the seven year's war (1756-63), In the 19th century is sustained Europe's industrial and demographic expansion.
Ogadai 1- The Mongolian Westward expansion during the regein of Genghas Khan stopped in 1242 due to a single death, Khan's third son, Ogadai. Here he lived and the Mongols marched right through Europe whipping the earth clean of the White race. This continued back east and the Mongols dominated all of Eurasia and Africa before settling down. The Age of Discovery would have been very different.

And I agree with Cyrano, and Taft-7, and maybe I missed it but I would like more on Iskander-2

[Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2]

Worlds in a third AE book? Lessee ...

I agree with full write-ups for Haussman-3, Cyrano, and Azoth-7 (especially Azoth-7, with a full description of their uber-alchemy).

Other possibilities:

Mars-2: A steampunk world set a generation or so after the War of the Worlds. The factors that led to WWI are still building, but the technology is based on steam and clockwork, and advanced engneering principles have been reverse-engineered from Martian technology. Most power is derived from transuranic element-heated steamengines produced by factory-devices salvaged from the Martian landing-craft but not fully understood. And it looks like WWI might be fought with giant steam-powered mecha and nuclear weapons ...

Lucifer-6: Somewhere in prehistory an alien terraforming pod landed in North America. The central part of North America never contained Indians or Anasazi, but it does hold bizarre alien beings and nonhuman intelligences. The French and Spaniards sent in explorers who never came back, so lands north of the Rio Grande, west of the Mississippi, and east of the Rockies are an unknown wildness. In 1804, President Jefferson sent in the Corps of Discovery and they found a nonhuman civilization with a technology about 50 years ahead of their own. Now the year is 1850, the USA is still east of the Mississippi, the west coast is Spanish and Russian, and the Unhumans still have a tech edge over the world. The world is debating whether or not to band together and destroy them, while the Unhumans debate whether or not to play the Game of Empires the humans like so much ...

Trench: The Zimmerman telegram was either never sent or never discovered, and the Germans respected America's neutrality. The US never entered WWI. The war dragged on until 1925, at which point the economies of the major European powers were completely destroyed and their populations significantly reduced. Civilization in Eurpoe collapsed into hundreds of tiny principalities all squabbling with each other. Japan and China expanded into the vacuum - China's western border now is within a day's travel of Moscow and Baghdad, and the Japanese Empire includes Indonesia and New Guinea and the east coast of India. America ceded it's Pacific possessions to Japan in 1933 in order to avoid a war. America is isolationist, technology is somewhat behind, and disturbing fascist movements are blossoming everywhere. England is several small countries that do not get along. International trade is primarily "adventure cargo" (get some stuff, go to a foreign port, hope to find a buyer). The year is 1937.

[Tom Kalbfus]

Originally Posted by Infornific

5. Something selecting for larger women. I'm kind of drawing a blank here, but others have come up with ideas.

- DW

Evolutionary accident, the genes just mutated that way. Just because something is improbably doesn't mean it couldn't happen.

[calgodot]

Originally Posted by Almafeta

Actually, it turned out that smallpox and other European diseases weren't what killed most of the south americans when the Spanish arived -- archaeological pathologists have discovered that it was a disease that came from South America that did the damage.

Originally Posted by kelly_pedersen

Not to be rude, but do you have a citation for this? It pretty much contradicts everything I've ever heard about the American disease environment.

Almafeta may be thinking of the recent revelations that syphilis, long thought to be part of the white man's scourge on indigenous populations, may have already been in the "new World" when the firt Europeans arrived:

http://www.archaeology.org/9701/news.../syphilis.html

There have also been discoveries regarding a disease which resembles tuberculosis found in Peruvian mummies; TB has long been thoguht to have been introduced to the Americas by Europeans.

http://www.archaeology.org/0203/newsbriefs/peru.html

Other than this, I've heard of no reliable study or evidence that suggests the traditional hypothesis - that Europeans introduced disease which killed perhaps 90% of the indigienous population - is wholly flawed or invalid. Such a revelation would be headline news in archaeological, historical, and political circles.