Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > GURPS

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 09-29-2017, 11:11 AM   #521
Astromancer
 
Astromancer's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

Try this world.

A few weeks ago (June 7th 2014) Five additional Earths appeared in this Quantum 6 world's Solar system. Communication has been established with a few of these worlds. A group of beings calling themselves superheroes claimed to have caused this effect, but they can't do anything about it now.

Each Earth is in the same orbital path. Each Earth is in the Lagrangian points of the planet following and preceding it in the orbital path.

Besides the world above (Alpha) there are

Beta (June 1969) Warnings about how Nixon plans to scuttle the October surprise have been given to Johnson. Although less advanced than Alpha, Beta has the most advanced space program.

Gamma (June 1942) Ways to get aid to the allies are being researched. The Nazis fear this, but so do the Soviets.

Delta (June 1862) The Superheroes have contacted Lincoln and Juarez but though no other leaders worthy of contact. At least two of the supers want to organize aid for both presidents.

Epsilon (June 1587) John Dee has contacted the people on Alpha. His he a dupe of the Cabal, a leader of the Cabal, or and independent mage?

and Zeta (date uncertain) Arthur Pendragon seems to be king of England and is at war with Emperor Justinian of Rome. The facts are still murky.
__________________
Per Ardua Per Astra!


Ancora Imparo
Astromancer is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 09-29-2017, 02:04 PM   #522
Flyndaran
Untagged
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

This would be very bad for system stability long term. But I wonder what interesting astronomy could be done with such giant platforms for simultaneous observations.
Then there's the hassle of who owns Mars for future exploration/colonization. Natives, or most technologically advanced that actually gets there first?
__________________
Beware, poor communication skills. No offense intended. If offended, it just means that I failed my writing skill check.
Flyndaran is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 09-29-2017, 05:28 PM   #523
robkelk
Untitled
 
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: between keyboard and chair
Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer View Post
...
Epsilon (June 1587) John Dee has contacted the people on Alpha. His he a dupe of the Cabal, a leader of the Cabal, or and independent mage?
...
If you're going by what's in GURPS Cabal, then the answers are no, yes, and no, respectively.
__________________
Rob Kelk
“Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”
– Bernard Baruch,
Deming (New Mexico) Headlight, 6 January 1950
No longer reading these forums regularly.
robkelk is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 09-30-2017, 02:50 PM   #524
Astromancer
 
Astromancer's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

Quote:
Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
This would be very bad for system stability long term. But I wonder what interesting astronomy could be done with such giant platforms for simultaneous observations.
Part of what makes this system weird is that it is stable.

Quote:
Then there's the hassle of who owns Mars for future exploration/colonization. Natives, or most technologically advanced that actually gets there first?
A truly lovely/nasty little fight, good call.
__________________
Per Ardua Per Astra!


Ancora Imparo
Astromancer is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 09-30-2017, 02:52 PM   #525
Astromancer
 
Astromancer's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

Quote:
Originally Posted by robkelk View Post
If you're going by what's in GURPS Cabal, then the answers are no, yes, and no, respectively.
Exactly! Is this Dee that Dee? Is he a dupe, opponent, foe, truly independent operator, or something truly strange?
__________________
Per Ardua Per Astra!


Ancora Imparo
Astromancer is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 09-30-2017, 04:46 PM   #526
Flyndaran
Untagged
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer View Post
Part of what makes this system weird is that it is stable.

A truly lovely/nasty little fight, good call.
But the locals would have no way of knowing that initially. Even if and when they realized, they wouldn't know why it is stable. That would leave them reasonably afraid that it could become unstable at any moment.
Probably leads to something akin to the fears of WW III during the cold war. Maybe everyone dies tomorrow; maybe not.
But we also saw how blasé people got after decades of that.
__________________
Beware, poor communication skills. No offense intended. If offended, it just means that I failed my writing skill check.
Flyndaran is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 09-30-2017, 06:48 PM   #527
Prince Charon
 
Prince Charon's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2012
Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer View Post
Try this world.

A few weeks ago (June 7th 2014) Five additional Earths appeared in this Quantum 6 world's Solar system. Communication has been established with a few of these worlds. A group of beings calling themselves superheroes claimed to have caused this effect, but they can't do anything about it now.

Each Earth is in the same orbital path. Each Earth is in the Lagrangian points of the planet following and preceding it in the orbital path.
This looks pretty familiar, but I have no objections (and I'm not totally certain you remember the setting in my .sig, anyway).
__________________
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.
Prince Charon is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-03-2017, 09:03 AM   #528
Jasonft
 
Join Date: Aug 2008
Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

I could see a similar thing where five worlds jump and one is left behind every time. There might or might not be a world that always jumps - but nobody knows why.

Be really strange if the jumps were randomly timed. Say maybe every 6-36 months all the planetary auroras kick into overdrive and you know you have only a couple days before the jump...

All kinds of interesting variants. Make for a wonderful Infinity/ Cabal/ Supers crossover campaign.
Jasonft is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-03-2017, 12:16 PM   #529
Flyndaran
Untagged
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

That would render any form of astronomy not-planet based impossible.

Or create a separate system of arrays dedicated to detecting probe signals sent by worlds they replace.
Okay, we're getting weak radio from Voyager 14 half way to Alpha Centauri and Curiosity 5 telling us that the habitat is nearing completion.
BLIP!
Wait, is that half a message from Mars demanding their Danegeld or they'll fire their disintegrator ray? What does "blocking Venus" even mean?
BLIP!
__________________
Beware, poor communication skills. No offense intended. If offended, it just means that I failed my writing skill check.
Flyndaran is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-03-2017, 12:37 PM   #530
somecallmetim
 
somecallmetim's Avatar
 
Join Date: Oct 2006
Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

Two weird ideas from a while ago:

Regress 1-12

The Regress Skerry is a set of 12 Earths located on Quantum 7. It is very difficult to deliberately navigate to a world within the skerry from outside (all parachronic operation rolls at -5) but simple to navigate within it (+5 to the same rolls). The worlds (simply called Regress 1 through Regress 12) have local dates just slightly less than forty years apart. Regress 1 is currently in the year 2020, Regress 12 is in 1584.

Until the local year 1860, they appear to be anchors, like Homeline in every testable respect, though very stable and unable to be shifted. Also, history tends to aggressively right itself, as odd coincidences move things "back on track". Regress 1 continued on normally, so far as homeline can tell, with the exception of four unexplained, simultaneous deaths in Paris in 1900, which did little to disrupt things in the grand scheme. At the same instant in Regress 2, the consciousnesses of the four dead individuals from Regress 1 came to occupy the bodies of their counterparts, seemingly retaining their full memories.

When 1900 rolled around on Regress 2, the four died again and assumed control of their bodies on Regress 3. The date for their psychic regression is rapidly approaching. By now the four have identified eachother and intend on spending the next cycle trying to understand what is happening to them.

On Regress 2, they mostly managed to make slightly more comfortable lives for themselves, only slightly disaligning history. On Regress 3, they managed to locate one another and to build relatively large sums of wealth and advance several technological fields in the process. (History seems far more plastic after the regress has occurred within a worldline.) Their intention is to build a more efficient commercial and technological empire and begin investigating possible physical or psychic causes of their state. They also closely watch for any disruptions of expected events that they do not directly cause, both in hopes of avoiding unintended consequences, and tracking down anyone else with an anomalous relationship to time. They would be very interested in parachronic technology, as what happened to the "old" timelines they occupied is a topic of great curiosity.
-----------------------------------------------------
Arneson

Arneson is a Quantum 3 world. The current year is 1297. It was a no mana until 1202, when a reality quake and an earthquake simultaneously hit Syria. While the earthquake had a counterpart on Homeline, it was far more severe on Arneson, resulting in hundreds of thousands deaths. It also opened a huge, geologically improbable sinkhole.

Then it got worse. Within a few days, the sinkhole poured forth monsters. First blood drinking insects as long as a man's hand. Then strange, lizard like things that hunted more like great cats, aggressively stalking those near to the pit at night. And finally, strange, eyeless men, who could hunt like bats, clicking and shrieking to locate prey.

If the depredations weren't enough to provoke a response, the equipment the monster-men carried was. While most carried crude, iron weapons, a few had swords bright as silver but sharper and harder than steel and glittering with jewels. Expeditions within the pit revealed a strange mix of natural caves, strange architecture, and oddly organic tunnels that pulsed and writhed. Clearing the upper levels of monsters was bloody but straightforward work, but the deeper sections were more treacherous and had larger and stranger beasts. Though they had recovered a king's ransom in treasure, the low hanging fruit was quickly exhausted and the opening was sealed. This was sufficient to stop the monsters from swarming en masse, but smaller openings were found throughout the countryside, drawing those braver than they were wise to try their luck in the pit.

Amongst the treasures discovered in the early expeditions were books in no known tongue. Though they were in no known alphabet, divination and strange dreams helped a few scholars begin painstaking interpretations of the texts, which were complex instructions in a totally unknown system of magical rituals. Whats more, these rituals sometimes worked! Assuming they were performed properly and within a few miles of the pit by one of those few who had been able to translate them. Copies of these texts were made, but only the originals seemed to inspire the strange dreams and visions that led to their interpretations. A new book from the pit would earn a huge price for anyone lucky enough to escape with one.

At first these aberrations were feared as the end of the world, but eventually it became clear the strangeness was largely localized. Until two decades later when a pair of earthquakes in northern Italy and Cyprus opened similar pits with different, though equally horrific, creatures. The resulting rush of adventurers and fortune seekers dragged many strange wonders from the new pits. Swords that burned with unending flame, staffs that held the power to command lightning. More troubling still, strange temples within the pit held altars and idols of nameless gods, and strange relics that granted powers to those who prayed at them. The Catholic Church (as well as nearly every other religious body made aware of them) condemned these powers as demonic deceptions. Despite this, heretics (referred to as Voragites) have declared these temples to be gifts from God to provide miraculous aid against the heathens occupying the holy land. Though few outside the sect are convinced, most explorers are willing to overlook their religious qualms in exchange for mystical healing of wounds are protections, even if their powers wane away from the pit. (In game terms the levels of both mana and sanctity are low at the mouth and upper levels of the pit and grow stronger the deeper you go.)

Over the past 90 years, several more pits have opened, many near Italy, raising large areas of the peninsula to at least very low mana. A recent earthquake near Kamakura Japan has opened a similar pit. Infinity researchers have found several more such openings in the Americas and are exploring a particularly isolated one more aggressively. The chance to explore the strange and powerful magics here are tempting to Paralabs, but even automatic weapons and body armor don't make exploring the pits safe. Several Infinity researchers are also undercover in Crete. Since so far the earthquakes here have continued to line up with ones in Homeline history, they are watching for any strange parachronic phenomena in the lead up to the 1303 earthquake.
somecallmetim is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Tags
infinite worlds, weird worlds

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 06:47 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.