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Old 08-25-2016, 04:40 PM   #1
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Default Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

Whoops. Should have called 'em hell parallels. Find and replace I guess.

These are all worlds which are terrible to visit and which have dying or no civilization, likely no humans. Fun places to vacation....

Global Cooling: Coal and oil reserves around the world are laden with a light, highly reflective aresol particulate that survives the burning process. Starting as early as the 1910s, a slight decrease in temperatures was detected; the response was to burn more fuel to keep warm. The spiral was terminal from the '40s, and in the present day of 2020, even clear days are noticeably dim in comparison, and temperatures are plunging. Civilization is collapsing in food riots...

Drexler: The discovery of a (local superscience) way to dispose of waste heat and manipulate atoms in 1999 lead to the production of grey goo nanomachines in 2012, which escaped the lab by November of that year. It took one machine 8 hours to duplicate itself; six broke containment into the soil, and so a little over a week later there was about 1 mole (the nanomachines being mostly carbon, that is almost exactly 12 grams) out of containment. Though math might say that earth would be consumed within a month, the surface is actually a pockmarked battlefield, some places intensely irradiated to destroy the sensitive nanites, other places doused in acid. No humans survive, as anyplace radioactive enough to resist the nanites is, well, radioactive. Fortunately for visitors, the nanites 'die' when not on their native worldline....

Strangelet 1 and 2: Strange matter struck Earth. Effectively a Vanish worldline. There's two of these; they actually can be detected by the characteristic, extremely brief signal response from the probes sent through.

Strangelet 3: Strange matter struck the moon in 1989. The pulse of radiation from the super-hot moon sterilized the Earth over a period of less than 24 hours, most of which were spent frantically traveling west to avoid the moonrise. Humans survived here for 45 days until the last vessels were lost.

Strangelet 4: (Not Hell yet) Mars was strangified in 1526. The nature of the transformation of the planet is a matter of intense theological debate. Visitors are concerned that Earth's proximity to the strangelet will eventually result in the timeline going the way of 1,2, and 3.

Beasts: In 1896, a team of archeologists opened a sealed stone structure in Canada, releasing tens of thousands of monsters, no two alike. The beasts were innate mana enhancers and mages as well, and today (1960), the only living humans are slaves for the beasts -- evidently kept solely for perverse entertainment. Most alarming, the structure was discovered directly underneath the location of Infinity headquarters.

Paranoia: Approximately 214 years ago, an unknown catastrophe afflicted the surface of earth, and since then, humanity has survived, barely, under the auspices of a friendly AI leader. Nothing can go wrong.

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Old 08-25-2016, 05:46 PM   #2
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

A couple from Broken Rooms you might get a kick out of (since you seem to be using the "Lucifer" designation very broadly):

Hotspot: the sun has entered a flare state. Global temperatures are up about 5 C on average, and the UV radiation during the day gives people who go out during the day without protective gear second degree burns. Humans are desperately trying to complete undersea and underground closed systems as the biosphere crashes, and everyone understands that even if those projects succeed, there isn't going to be enough room for everyone.

Damocles: there's a supermassive object, apparently a black hole, transiting the solar system. Astronomers are currently watching it break up and absorb Neptune. It will transit the inner system close enough to pull Earth out of its orbit in a decade or so...they've named it Damocles.

Sterility events and plagues are old standby's drop them in any year you like.
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Old 08-25-2016, 06:05 PM   #3
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

Gaia Strikes Back: a collection of realities where the earth itself seems to develop strange defenses against the human threat.

Allergy: over a few years span, every human develops severe to lethal allergies to all wild plants and animals. Only hydroponically grown plants and animals fed on them all within sealed enclosures fail to induce the problem This means only a few vaults of survivors remain while the rest of the earth appears normal. Visitors may or may not develop such allergies.

Berserker: All wild animals go berserk whenever smelling humans inducing homicidal rage. Only domestic pets raised from birth are immune... usually. That scratching at the wall just got a whole lot scarier than "just mice".
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Old 08-25-2016, 07:14 PM   #4
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

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Originally Posted by PTTG View Post
These are all worlds which are terrible to visit and which have dying or no civilization, likely no humans. Fun places to visit, but not to live.
.
As a technical note, in IW naming a "Lucifer" prefix applies to worlds struck by meteors. A reference to the Niven/Pournelle book _Lucifer's Hammer_ which has not proven the timeless classic once thought by somebody.

I'm afraid only your Strangelet worlds would qualify. The rest are are just Hell Worlds. IW already has a bunch of those, including a Drexler.
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Old 08-25-2016, 07:23 PM   #5
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

That's why the name didn't sound right. I just couldn't put my finger on why.

Okay, meteors causing devastation could work in ways other than classic dino-killers.
One vignette of the first Creepshow movie had some moss inducing meteorite that eventually infested the only human I remember, Steven King, ultimately making him commit suicide. spoiler fnorded.
Of course, there's always The Blob and The Thing if we count meteorite/spaceships.
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Old 08-25-2016, 07:49 PM   #6
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

Quote:
Originally Posted by PTTG View Post
...

Beasts: In 1896, a team of archeologists opened a sealed stone structure in Canada, releasing tens of thousands of monsters, no two alike. The beasts were innate mana enhancers and mages as well, and today (1960), the only living humans are slaves for the beasts -- evidently kept solely for perverse entertainment. Most alarming, the structure was discovered directly underneath the location of Infinity headquarters.

Paranoia: Approximately 214 years ago, an unknown catastrophe afflicted the surface of earth, and since then, humanity has survived, barely, under the auspices of a friendly AI leader. Nothing can go wrong.
To keep the Lucifer designation, perhaps the demon gates only exist on the sites of major meteorite impacts. Those in the know dread what will come through the disturbingly-silent-so-far Chicxulub crater.

Paranoia may be post impact disaster or even meteoric impact extinction was the exaggeration or outright lie keeping people underground.
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Old 08-25-2016, 08:33 PM   #7
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

Worst part is I actually did read Lucifer's hammer.... well, I fixed the op.

I'm liking the gaia's revenge worlds.

Lucky: signs point to a massive human die-off in an immense series of unrelated fatal accidents. Falling out of bed and landing wrongly is the most common, simply due to about one third of humans being asleep at a given time. Curiously, visitors gain Rediculous Luck while here, which of nothing else leads to impressive fights. 1874, it's only been a few weeks when pcs arrive.

Shroom: a fungus adapts to grow explosively in lungs, 1922. Victims cough black slime, gradually suffocate months after exposure. Civilization collapses within five years, the stragglers dare not enter the spore-laden cities.

Cult 1-5: on all five worlds, a religious group, curiously uniform over the selection, spreads over the entire planet and in each case the entire population of the world either joins or dies; the cultists then commit mass suicide, leaving the world empty. Three worlds were echoes, two were close parallels. These suicide events occurred in ~1150, ~1340, ~1770, 1971, and 2019.

Rads: Radiation works differently here. A nuclear accident at Saint-Laurent Nuclear Plant in 1969 released an exotic radioactive particle similar to, well, tiberium, in that it is self-replicating and spreading -- essentially a self-perpetuating fallout disaster. The planet's surface is technically habitable, but increasingly radioactive.

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Old 08-25-2016, 09:36 PM   #8
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

Quote:
Originally Posted by patchwork View Post
A couple from Broken Rooms you might get a kick out of (since you seem to be using the "Lucifer" designation very broadly):

Hotspot: the sun has entered a flare state. Global temperatures are up about 5 C on average, and the UV radiation during the day gives people who go out during the day without protective gear second degree burns. Humans are desperately trying to complete undersea and underground closed systems as the biosphere crashes, and everyone understands that even if those projects succeed, there isn't going to be enough room for everyone.

Damocles: there's a supermassive object, apparently a black hole, transiting the solar system. Astronomers are currently watching it break up and absorb Neptune. It will transit the inner system close enough to pull Earth out of its orbit in a decade or so...they've named it Damocles.

Sterility events and plagues are old standby's drop them in any year you like.
I especially like that both of these could be stretched to be true Lucifers...

Hotspot in particular looks like a fun one for a conveyor to show up in.
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Old 08-26-2016, 07:57 AM   #9
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

One of my favorite disasters:

A form of algae that floats in the sky via tiny gasbags appears, whether evolved or created. its very small, but doesn't seem to need soil and can pull water from the atmosphere. Clouds of this stuff slowly block out the sun, lowering SURFACE temperatures on earth and causing crop failures.

If you show up after its happened, you just get oppressive clouds over a surface as lifeless as the deep sea floor -- which is to say that things survive, but its a different world. Please note this disaster is quite possibly contagious.

-----------------------------------------------------

Nuclear wars are a nice way to build a hell world --- radiation everywhere, nuclear winter, and so forth.

Actually, ATE is essentially a book on hell worlds.
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Old 08-26-2016, 10:51 AM   #10
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Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

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If you show up after its happened, you just get oppressive clouds over a surface as lifeless as the deep sea floor -- which is to say that things survive, but its a different world. Please note this disaster is quite possibly contagious.
It takes a lot of energy to crack lift hydrogen from anything, it's going to leak badly, and sunlight isn't a very intense source. I don't think there is going to be enough red and blue photons in any given column of air to sustain enough of this stuff to get deep sea floor level darkness, certainly not thickly enough there won't be plenty of weather caused holes in the cover. Forest shade under a green sky perhaps. This is still bad news for the current ecosystem of course, particularly since the removed photons are also the ones the land based plants wanted, but probably well short of sea bed levels.
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