08-22-2019, 08:32 AM | #1541 |
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
That does kind of remind me of the Horrible Histories song about Dick Turpin. The facts of his life that apparently aren't well known are much more thuggish, and kind of pathetic. (I'd never heard of him before the song.)
While turning Robin Hood that way is certainly more realistic, I was mainly thinking of a reverse myth. The sheriff is noble, and not just performing his duty to catch an outlaw. Hood is despicable beyond that of a street thug. Also lots of people idolize anyone that "sticks it to the man" no matter the method or collateral damage. Look at the wild west murderers that are still beloved.
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Beware, poor communication skills. No offense intended. If offended, it just means that I failed my writing skill check. Last edited by Flyndaran; 08-22-2019 at 08:35 AM. |
09-04-2019, 04:57 PM | #1542 | |
Join Date: Feb 2011
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
Quote:
In fact, a lodge of the Cabal infiltrated a number of early RPG studios and their publishers, working functional power-building rituals and spells into the course of the game. When done properly, the effects would build over time, increasing from a gentle imagination-boosting effect to outright collective lucid dreams. The lodge's goal is surprisingly mundane. They want to gather real, non-magical money from a homeline parallel which they can use in a nearby Normal-mana close parallel full of magical components and resources available on the open market. As a bonus, their product allows them to discover potential mages from the population and recruit them into the lodge. Maybe those make more sense the other way around. Either way, they protect their roleplayers and their games by manipulating society with their spells. Ares-3 In this worldline, Mars is 80% Earth's mass and surface gravity. This resulted in a dramatically fuller volatiles budget, and an active core. The now bright-white planet is known as the Evening Star, often at its brightest when opposed to the sun (Venus is exclusively the Morning Star). Due to inertia, the history of this worldline was almost identical up until the late 1800s, as advancing telescope technology revealed a world with weather, volcanic flows, and a thin band of seas along the equator. By 1990, several efforts to bring research settlements to the equatorial martian coasts are successful. War on Earth would trigger nuclear Armageddon, but on Mars, research bases disappear into the shifting snowbanks without a trace... Last edited by PTTG; 09-04-2019 at 06:12 PM. |
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09-04-2019, 07:44 PM | #1543 |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
Does "disappear without a trace..." mean they can hide easily or they're fragile and desperately need their lifelines to Earth?
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09-04-2019, 11:19 PM | #1544 | |
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: The deep dark haunted woods
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
Quote:
Listen carefully ... you can hear the snow daintily chewing ...
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"When you talk about damage radius, even atomic weapons pale before that of an unfettered idiot in a position of power." - Sam Starfall from the webcomic Freefall |
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09-05-2019, 01:26 AM | #1545 |
Join Date: Feb 2011
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
All of the above. Mars' hostile climate means that even well-prepared military bases can and have been destroyed with all hands by avalanches, storms, lava flows, and the other hazards of this larger mars. This means that military conflicts here have plausible deniability to prevent the cold war from going hot just because the soviet martians raided an Allied mars base or vise versa.
The question, of course, is what the bases are there to find. And that's where MDL v3.2's point comes to the fore; Mars has life. What form it takes is hard to say, but it is clearly so deadly that its previous attacks have left no witnesses at all. |
09-05-2019, 02:43 PM | #1546 | |
Join Date: Dec 2012
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
Quote:
Does seem like an interesting setting for a range of games, certainly.
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Warning, I have the Distractible and Imaginative quirks in real life. "The more corrupt a government, the more it legislates." -- Tacitus Five Earths, All in a Row. Updated 12/17/2022: Apocrypha: Bridges out of Time, Part I has been posted. |
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09-05-2019, 05:14 PM | #1547 |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
Might I suggest that there are about four or five bases that have been on Mars since nearly the beginning of settlement which haven't been touched, by Martian life, and no one knows why. Some could be actually safe, some could be fool's paradises. Not knowing would be like an itch they can't scratch.
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Per Ardua Per Astra! Ancora Imparo |
01-27-2020, 12:57 PM | #1548 |
Join Date: Feb 2011
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
Conundrum-2 is an Earth where great apes never evolved, and there is no sign of active intelligence whatsoever, except for a region of the North American prairies near Homeline's headquarters. There, 100-foot long stone letters that appear to have been in place for the last 700 years spell out the phrase, in English, "You're overthinking this."
Homeline has quarantined the worldline for now, but there is a constant argument over whether or not that's doing exactly what the creator of this worldline wants. |
01-27-2020, 01:10 PM | #1549 |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
One type of weird parallel is suggested by Flintstones. Basically a social structure blended with technologies that don't fit.
Picture a world with a very ren-faire like Medieval Culture, with dragons, wizards, fay, and all the fairy-tale bells and whistles. However, people read newspapers and watch TV and work 9to5 jobs. There was a cartoon like that back in the 1970's. Rifting off the novel To the Chapel Perilous (where the news media covers the quest for the Holy Grail) institutions can be slotted into times and cultures wildly inappropriate for them, like newspapers in 6th century Britain or a space program in 19th century Europe.
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01-27-2020, 02:13 PM | #1550 |
Join Date: Feb 2011
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
Oh that sounds adorable. I imagine a democratic election for the king of a fantasy realm, complete with town criers repeating short ads for the candidates; and each one ending with the magically repeated voice of the Monarchical nominee's voice saying, "I'm Lord Ploughammer, and I approve this message."
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