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Old 09-18-2016, 12:33 PM   #21
ericthered
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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Originally Posted by robkelk View Post
I could see Infinity turning Vacuole-3 into the corporate cafeteria. They do have a habit of taking advantage of resources on timelines that aren't Homeline, after all.
I'd personally have it be a stop-over for all sorts of world-jumpers.

For comedic effect, have it have multiple quantum entrances and have infinity and centrum teams meet up completely unprepared for each other and in fact not really all that style: they just want a bit to eat. Of course, you can only leave the way you came.

Or have it be accessible by jumpers only, not by projectors. Good way to make folks paranoid.
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Old 09-18-2016, 01:03 PM   #22
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

We're veering dangerously close to the time-tavern idea which comes and goes, someplace where people from any and every potentiality end up, and which (perforce) has a powerful and perhaps ontologically ambiguous patron.
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Old 09-19-2016, 06:40 PM   #23
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

Bull Moose:
Roosevelt won the presidency in 1912, and every election since. Current year 1960; nobody knows how he's still alive, but the USA is a freverently imperialist, progressivist wonderland/nightmare.

Platonic:
An infinite, flat white plane, featureless except for a grid of thin black lines, under a slightly unusual sky. The inhabitants are a variety of platonic solids; Icosahedrons are comparable to human intelligence, while those solids with fewer sides are less and less intelligent. Tetrahedrons and cubes are exclusively autotrophs that appear to gain sustenance from the "sun," an apparently infinitely distant sphere.

Icosahedrons have some ability to use fine manipulation; perhaps telekinesis? One other thing of note; while all living things grow into regular shapes, injury can distort, cut, or shatter them (they appear to be made of a brittle, glassy substance). Icosahedrons build structures from slabs of cube-trees and cut them with sharp tetrahedron-grass.

The Icosahedrons mostly speak a language made of musical notes, but previous visitors have taught some of them ancient Greek, a very old dialect of Cantonese, and Centrum's English variant.

Drasil-1:
Everything under the branches of Blue Drasil tree experiences time more slowly than those elsewhere. Especially large trees have increasing effects: Anyone under the canopy of a Blue Drasil tree gets a number of levels of Decreased Time Rate (with all the implied effects of slowed time; each level makes a 1-second action take 1 additional second, so DTR 5 means that an attack action takes five seconds) equal to the tree's SM^3, but it doesn't take effect unless the tree is SM+1 or more. The trees broadly resemble weeping willows with very long 'veils', but the leaves are strongly blueish, and small white flower-buds are visible regardless of outside conditions.

Blue Drasils are not common, but they are widespread -- their abilities insulate them from the climate around them quite effectively -- and they can be found around the world. They are extremely difficult to cultivate, not the least because only very mature trees (>=SM+2) produce saplings, and therefore anyone stepping under the canopy will spend at least eight times as long inside than out!

The trees grow up to SM+6 (20 meters or so), meaning that merely spending the day under one can transport you several months into the future. Rumors of mighty giants (SM+7 or bunyanesque SM+9) are almost certainly just legends. On the other end of the scale, most population centers have a SM+2 or SM+3 tree not too far out, allowing quick access to tomorrow or next month.

The trees have always been a part of history, and so no level of inertia will fix it. I'll sit down and hash out a working world in a bit....

Drasil-2:
A different breed of Drasil tree, the Autumn Drasil, grows here. Those under such a tree's canopy have enhanced time rate at the same way that Blue Drasils work. The red-leaved tree itself is immune to the effect.

Drasil-3:
The Twin Drasil tree grows in two places at once; anyone who walks into the canopy of one instance will, upon departing, walk out the canopy of the other instance. The thick, green foliage permits nearly no light through the curtains. There is no telling where the "twin" of a growing tree is, and transplanting is a very delicate art.

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Old 09-20-2016, 08:13 AM   #24
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

The Drasil worlds sound pretty interesting. Is there any particular reason that you chose the leaf colors that you did?

I personally would have given the Drasil-1 version red leaves because objects near a black hole appear red shifted. Not sure whether objects would appear red shifted if the time dilation wasn't the result of a black hole.
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Old 09-20-2016, 10:32 AM   #25
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

The original idea was, in fact, dilation effects, but you're right that they're basically backwards. I ultimately decided that, since it was magic, the torporous, slow effects of the Blue Drasil made sense and the the accellerative, rapid effects of the Autumnal Drasil called for red.

Red ones go faster, after all.

Speaking of Drasils:

Drasil-4 is a no-mana world home to Snow Drasils, which always have white leaves. They are mana enhancers starting at maturity (~100 years, SM+2). They are manatrophs, so they are known to grow in extremely unusual places; biologists suspect that they are symbiotic with some kind of mana-enhancing life, rather than producing the energy themselves. Since the saplings aren't self-sufficient but mature ones have little surplus mana, they are extremely difficult to propagate.
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Old 09-20-2016, 12:57 PM   #26
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

How do you get something that emits the food they eat?
I'd go with either one or the other.
Perhaps mana-producing "plants" attract all sorts of mana-eating pests. Tenders wanting a surplus must remove them judiciously.
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Old 09-20-2016, 01:09 PM   #27
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

12:01 - The time from midnight to one A.M. does not appear to exist to non-mages. Since there are so few, nothing much seems to change from the instant at 12:00 to 1:00. But for those few with even Magery 0 and no spells, the world is loads of potential, assuming they survived unsupervised as toddlers. Weirdly, the reality is very low mana with pockets of low mana, so no native knowledge of proper spells seem to exist.

The first such world was named 12:01 where all animal life is frozen in place unable to be affected by mages. The second where all animal life disappears to reappear later was naturally named 12:02.
The reality where the hour just literally seems not to exist and the earth's rotation and sky seem to jump ahead that time is still being argued over. Is it just another member of this cluster or something different?

Mages known to take advantage are of course called Time Bandits. ;)
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Old 09-20-2016, 01:52 PM   #28
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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The reality where the hour just literally seems not to exist and the earth's rotation and sky seem to jump ahead that time is still being argued over. Is it just another member of this cluster or something different?
It's a cool idea, but has a serious problem for high tech settings like Infinity: interaction with other timezones.

Note that you can get most of the concept with much less in the way of logic tangles like that by not messing with the universal clock and just giving mages an extra hour that *isn't* on the clock between 12:00:00 and 12:00:01 - effectively instead of everyone else freezing for an hour, mages superaccelerate for an instant.

Edit: The everybody freezes but all other processes continue to run implicit in the sky seems to jump (as opposed to the hour just vanishes concept) can work, but doesn't seem as mysterious. Everybody will know it happens and be well aware of need to stop automatic processes, be careful not be moving when it kicks in, ensure any fires are safe to leave untended for an hour.... It's like everybody has to sleep, only more compulsory.
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Old 09-20-2016, 02:25 PM   #29
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Ciconia: The local year is 1500 BC, and all human beings are sterile. Instead of reproducing sexually, human young are delivered to couples by a particularly large, intelligent variety of stork. Somehow, in the course of their normal reproductive cycle, these storks produce human young. Based on observation of the stork behavior, it seems they somehow seek out particular couples to receive the child, rather than just dropping it at the nearest settlement. Infinity scientists are at a loss to explain how any of this is possible, and otherwise the world is a completely normal no-mana parallel.

Hardrade-6 and Strieber-5: Hardrade-6 is a Q4 TL5 world where Harald Hardrade rather than William the Conqueror claimed the throne of England. The current year is 1801, and Hardrade’s Anglo-Norway is engaged in a global conflict with the Second Yuan Dynasty over Africa and the Americas. Strieber-5 is a Q7 TL3 world where a global Ice Age has been happening since around 1300. Civilization has collapsed and with every lengthening winter more people starve. These two worlds should be utterly unrelated, but when they people of Hardrade-6 sleep they dream of a specific other person on Strieber-5, and vice versa. Since the population is larger on Hardrade-6, multiple people dream about the same person from Strieber-5.

Mayhem: On April 8th, 1991 a portal to hell opened on the outside Kråkstad, Norway allowing demons to enter the world of the living. Rather than respond with violence, Norwegian authorities track down the invasion force, grant it refugee status, and put it in immigrant assimilation programs. A modest border checkpoint is put at the portal, and diplomatic relations established with the Prince of Darkness. Now, over a decade later, the demons are mostly integrated into Norwegian society. Despite periodic Church burnings, they prove an invaluable asset to the Norwegian economy. Their presence has also strengthens the already robust Norwegian Black Metal scene. Though generally happy with their new home, many demons look back on the eternally bleak hellfrost wastelands of their youth with a certain nostalgia.

McClane-2: This world is a myth parallel that mimics action films from the late 80s and early 90s. The world is perpetually locked in some unspecified year during the 1980s. Time passes irregularly, sometimes allowing trips from New York to Ulaanbaatar and back in a single day, other times skipping over entire seasons overnight. This never results in any appreciable change to science, technology, or current events. Several times a “year” the entire world will experience a “flashback”, typically to some time during the Vietnam War. Independent of temporal anomalies, the world appears to experience regular, yet benign, reality quakes. People can fade in and out of existence, rapidly age (or de-age) overnight, and change completely in appearance and personality. All of these phenomena center around about a half-dozen “protagonists”, whose lives are non-stopped adrenaline soaked adventure. Ordinary locals seem on one level aware of these frequent and rapid changes to the world around them, but are never disconcerted or confused by it.

Vox: Starting with his ascension on September 18th, 14 AD anything said by the Emperor Tiberius could be heard by everyone everywhere in the world as if he were standing 5 feet to their right. The same thing would happen to Caligula, and so for every Roman Emperor after. The current year is 1314, and everyone in the world is privy to the conversations and personal musings of Byzantine Emperor Andronikos II and Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV.
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Old 09-20-2016, 02:38 PM   #30
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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Duplicate:
Starting in 2001, every human being became sterile. However, people occasionally duplicate asexually during sleep. The effect is unpredictable, but works out to be a 2% chance of duplication per year, resulting in about the same growth rate as before. The resultant clones are totally indistinguishable. The present year of 2021 is mostly adapted, but is still struggling with the long-term consequences.
The result may be something similar to Children of Men, even being around the same amount of time since the Event (Children of Men is set 18 years after). I suspect people will be engaging in even more violence and suicide, as there are more of them around to die.

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These two worlds should be utterly unrelated, but when they people of Hardrade-6 sleep they dream of a specific other person on Strieber-5, and vice versa. Since the population is larger on Hardrade-6, multiple people dream about the same person from Strieber-5.
Dreamless had a similar concept, although there the two characters existed on opposite sides of the same world, and each was aware that the other actually existed.
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