A Request For Help On Characters (Plus Lenin-2 Expansion Ideas)

[Madd Kossack 115]

So I'm relatively new to GURPS (although I have read up on Alternate Earths and Infinite Worlds thanks to their respective TV Tropes pages, as well as RvBOMally's GURPS Covers). I'm finding one of my biggest entry barriers is character design, since I can't find an equivalent to something like "Call of Cthulhu Occupations" to help me think of which specific skills and stats are needed for my characters. I have quite a few ideas, but even trying to use the sample Infinity Patrol characters from GURPS 4E's Basic Set, I'm spinning my wheels trying to sort out the stats.

However, besides help with how to work character creation, one of my character ideas also included some ideas of mine to expand Lenin-2 (a Hell Parallel listed under Xing La's character bio, and something I got some more details on from RvBOMally's "Lenin-2A", which speculated on the state of the world prior to everything melting down into environmental and nuclear catastrophe).

To give everybody a "TL;DR" summary Lenin-2's POD had a communist revolution in the United States around the 1890s (think the French Commune, but during Industrial Revolution America), and from there it spread across the world, with the only holdouts being the British Empire (which lost "The Summer Wars" to the combined communist forces during the 1950s), and a democratic/capitalist China (which had its tech accelerate from expatriate Americans and other foreigners). The communists themselves were split between the Bolsheviks (which of course occupied Russia, but also had a presence in Western Europe, with RvBOMally giving them the faction name of the "Paris-Leningrad Pact"), the Mitteleuropan DKAP (which had an alliance between Germany, Italy, and the Scandinavian nations), and the Christian Communist Congressional Party (C... C... C... P...).

Unfortunately, two problems arose in that the three communist blocs were A) about as dodgy on environmentalism as the USSR and PRC (especially prior to China starting to do an about-face on pollution in the 21st Century to bank on the oncoming Green Revolution), and B) were FAR from united in cause, wanting to crack each others skulls as much as they finally wanted to break the final capitalist holdout of China. Cue "The Autumn Wars" of Lenin-2's 2000s (where nukes were launched by the communist blocs on China as well as each other), and as far as Homeline can see, the world has been plunged into a T3 and under dark age, with only China struggling along with an overall T4 society trying to preserve what scraps of T7 tech they have (they HAVE launched a T10-level spaceship out into the stars, Alpha Centauri style, but where they are now is beyond the knowledge of the survivors).

The character bio on Xing La (which is framed as a Homeline agent's report begging to recruit her to Infinity Patrol to prevent her from being killed on the utter Hell Parallel Lenin-2 had become - find it in the 4E Basic Set Characters book) expands on the sad state of Lenin-2 post-Autumn Wars, with the very earth and sea dying a slow, choking death between radiation and smog blankets, and most people outside of whatever meager settlements there are being mostly cannibalistic ferals trying to break your skull open or rip you to pieces, with Homeline desperately trying to scavenge Chinese records and find and use as many "magic bullet" environment cures they can.

However, before going onto my own character, I was actually going to expand upon the other three communist factions (the Paris-Leningrad Pact, M-DKAP, and CCCP), and explain how they differed from each other prior to the Autumn Wars. Now, I have been introduced to how socialist ideologies aren't all copycats of Stalin and Mao through, among other things, Hearts of Iron IV mods like Kaiserreich (not to be confused with the various GURPS Kaiserreichs), and that there are more democratic variants of socialism such as syndicalism, anarcho-communism, etc. The fact that a revolution occurred in the 1890s USA, at a time when the only other model of a socialist society was the egalitarian if short-lived Paris Commune, I'd argue that America succeeded (at least, initially) in keeping a more democratic government that instituted socialist policies. My model for the (initial) post-revolution USA would be based on AH.com's "Reds!", where, notably, a diplomat from Stalin's USSR is utterly baffled that the UASR didn't shoot Robert Taft for refusing to take his oath for office, and it caused a diplomatic rift between the UASR and Stalin's USSR.

As for the other two factions, the timeline of how fast the European nations changed to communism is unclear (the statement of the Bolsheviks implies the Russian Revolution still happens at least within the early 20th century). So while I'm basically forced to resort to writing the gaps in myself, I feel that the USSR, instead of being taken over by Stalin, is instead led by Trotsky (as this Alternate History Hub video shows, the other most likely successor, Trotsky, actually invented most of Stalin's policies such as the Five-Year Plans, but also focused on aggressively aiding communist revolutions around the world, while Stalin was more concerned with keeping himself in power through paranoid purges and using the Warsaw Pact as a meat-shield), and that France (whether they went socialist earlier with a more successful Paris Commune, or underwent a later communist revolution, even potentially with Trotsky's help) would one way or another gravitate towards the non-Stalinist but still highly militarist USSR (a prime leader being Boris Souvarine, an OTL French Marxist who loved Lenin and Trotsky, but HATED Stalin). For the DKAP, I'm admittedly pulling at straws to show a concrete difference they have with the Americans and Bolsheviks, so the closest I'm getting is that Strasserism (a.k.a. "Nazism but with leftist economics") was what took charge in Germany, and that the Italian part of the alliance had Mussolini borrow a page from his Kaiserreich counterpart (with his path explained on the "Strengthen The Chairman" part of this Focus Tree).

So to recap, we have a Trotskyist Russia/Western Europe, a Commie-Nazi Central Europe, and a (for now) Libertarian Socialist America leading up to the Summer Wars, where the European communists tackled Britain and most of its colonies in the Eastern Hemisphere, while the Socialist Americans likely had to deal with Canada and Britain's holdings in the Caribbean. The Lenin-2 timeline is, again, fuzzy, but I wanted to have the "government shift" of America happen sometime after the Summer Wars, when continued environment degradation began to foster a "desperate times require desperate measures" attitude from the Americans. This results in a rise of theocratic politicians (who were now espousing a more authoritarian version of socialist policies) around the 1980s (i.e. when televangelists and Ronald Reagan - who in this timeline, swings to the left instead of the right, but otherwise holds similar policies of increased military intervention, militarizing the "Drug War", etc. - begin to rise), until it builds up to a Handmaid's Tail scenario of a theocratic cult taking over in an armed coup d'etat, bolstered by even worse problems such as plummeting birth rates, sharp decreases in food and fresh water, out-of-control storms, etc.

But why expand all of this backstory to nations that effectively no longer exist after the Autumn Wars?

That's the thing Homeline doesn't yet know - they're still around.

Yes, I'm basically taking the route of almost every nuclear post-apocalypse game ever, and saying that groups of survivors have survived the bombs and pollution through cowering in blast-proof bunkers, with each nation having their own version to the Enclave plotting to reclaim the wasteland from the "savages" that have popped up in the intervening time. I may be running afoul of the site's character limit at this point, so I'll break it off here, and get to explaining my character idea in the next post.