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Old 12-16-2015, 01:52 PM   #1501
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Default Re: New Reality Seeds

The Spanish king Alfonso X was a fascinating figure. One both Homeline and Centrum would be interested in. Each would want to both discourage his attempt to become Holy Roman Emperor (he had no chance and he wrecked Spain's economy trying to buy the office) and make sure that he picked a "good" heir early to avoid the civil wars that fouled-up the end of his reign.

Centrum and Homeline would have similar goals here, and they would be competing for the same small pool of allies. The in-fighting could get nasty.

Centrum's goal would be to preserve the High-Middle Ages and move directly towards Royal absolutism. Homeline would want Alfoso's court culture to speed the arrival of the Renaissance and deepen the cultural transmissions between the Christian and Islamic cultural areas.

The agents would constantly get in each other's ways.
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Old 12-16-2015, 07:15 PM   #1502
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I love it. Especially for a slightly madcap game, I'd be sure to have my players use their most combat-heavy meatheads for this one and have it turn out to be a game of court intrigue.
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Old 12-17-2015, 12:25 PM   #1503
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I love it. Especially for a slightly madcap game, I'd be sure to have my players use their most combat-heavy meatheads for this one and have it turn out to be a game of court intrigue.
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Old 12-17-2015, 11:45 PM   #1504
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I'm thinking of a sword-sandle-and-musket setting of some kind. The idea is that metalurgy and gunpowder get radically advanced right at the dawn of the iron age and muskets get popularized. Even if it takes 200 years to spread and get integrated, that could still give us 200 BCE to work with. I'd like to include steam-powered sea vessels somehow...

Here's a way to do it:

A slight change in climate patterns allows the sophisticated trade civilization of the Indus valley to thrive well past 1800 BCE. Eventually they adapt their agriculture as the climate changes, but they maintain their strength and wealth. This civilization becomes the linchpin of the ancient world. Gunpowder is advanced some thousand years- it will take some luck for the alchemists to think of the right thing, but maybe there's a larger group of alchemists working to export through the Indus trade routes. Let's get gunpowder on the field by 200 BCE in the form of bronze bombs and crude cannons in 100 BCE.

A century later, it's 754 AUC and the civilizations of the old world are still learning to make the most of their hand cannons. Jump forward annother 500 years and guns are actually quite refined, and have probably forced metalurgy to advance quite fast. With strong pressure vessels and gunpowder-fueled expansionism demanding long-range travel, steam power has a definite potential home.
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Old 12-20-2015, 11:52 AM   #1505
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I just wanna say that this is a fascinating thread. I only just joined the GURPS forum (despite having played the game since the early days of 3rd edition), and spent the better part of a week reading through this thread.
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Old 12-20-2015, 04:23 PM   #1506
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I just wanna say that this is a fascinating thread. I only just joined the GURPS forum (despite having played the game since the early days of 3rd edition), and spent the better part of a week reading through this thread.
Welcome to the forum and the thread! Please, feel free to post your own reality seeds, or kibitz on any of ours.
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Old 12-22-2015, 01:28 PM   #1507
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In 1568 the Ottoman Empire started digging a canal between the don and the Volga. The canal was soon abandoned but if it had been dug...

A) Ottoman naval action in the Caspian Sea and the plans to dig a Suez Canal, proposed in the same year are acted upon. The Mediterranean becomes a highway again rather than a cul-de-sac. The Ottoman state might even revive politically.

B) The Engineering is botched! the Volga is flooded by both the Don and the sea, the Caspian Sea basin is flooded. The PCs could be Russians exploring the new shoreline to see if their are better ways to trade with China.
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Old 01-03-2016, 10:29 PM   #1508
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Post-Ragnarok

In 1950, Stalin died of poisoning, leading to the already paranoid USSR entering a paradoxism of internal witch-hunts, power struggles and disfunction, while ironically decreasing centralization enough to allow the nation-state to increase its economic output slightly.

The stronger USSR had a wider global influence. Combined with a weakened first world (the US dollar experienced hyperinflation, crash, and revaluing due to a few political mistakes, possibly a secondary divergence point), much of the southern hemisphere was tied into the cold war as well. (South America largely communist, Austrailia capitalist, and Africa split along religious/cultural lines.)

The increased polarization and paranoia resulted in a global thermonuclear war in 1978. This is the timeline known as Ragnarok.

In local year 1999, Homeline scouts discovered the worldline and the ~20,000 survivors, all of whom lived in the few fallout shelters able to survive for ten years without substantial surface supplies. The planet was not utterly uninhabitable, but it was cheaper to migrate the population to a clean earth than try to fix the existing one.

Their new home was named Eden. Homeline provided survival equipment sufficient to get the remaining Ragnarokians back on their feet.

The 20,000 survivors consisted of roughly equal portions of first and second world citizens, nearly all of them from high-ranking urban centers of exceptional political importance (the rural populations mostly starved in the nuclear winters, and the less "important" urban populations were either incinerated in their homes or mummified in temporary shelters after only months.

Now the population of a small town is attempting to reconstruct a functioning modern society despite 10,000 of them blaming the other 10,000 for destroying the world. There are, as one might expect, a number of conflicts.
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Old 01-04-2016, 01:15 PM   #1509
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Post-Ragnarok

In 1950, Stalin died of poisoning, leading to the already paranoid USSR entering a paradoxism of internal witch-hunts, power struggles and disfunction, while ironically decreasing centralization enough to allow the nation-state to increase its economic output slightly.

The stronger USSR had a wider global influence. Combined with a weakened first world (the US dollar experienced hyperinflation, crash, and revaluing due to a few political mistakes, possibly a secondary divergence point), much of the southern hemisphere was tied into the cold war as well. (South America largely communist, Austrailia capitalist, and Africa split along religious/cultural lines.)

The increased polarization and paranoia resulted in a global thermonuclear war in 1978. This is the timeline known as Ragnarok.

In local year 1999, Homeline scouts discovered the worldline and the ~20,000 survivors, all of whom lived in the few fallout shelters able to survive for ten years without substantial surface supplies. The planet was not utterly uninhabitable, but it was cheaper to migrate the population to a clean earth than try to fix the existing one.

Their new home was named Eden. Homeline provided survival equipment sufficient to get the remaining Ragnarokians back on their feet.

The 20,000 survivors consisted of roughly equal portions of first and second world citizens, nearly all of them from high-ranking urban centers of exceptional political importance (the rural populations mostly starved in the nuclear winters, and the less "important" urban populations were either incinerated in their homes or mummified in temporary shelters after only months.

Now the population of a small town is attempting to reconstruct a functioning modern society despite 10,000 of them blaming the other 10,000 for destroying the world. There are, as one might expect, a number of conflicts.
So, how do you game in this setting, in a way that would be fun, really? You're stuck in a small town (basically) of 10,000, which has a long-standing feud with another small town, about crap that happened decades ago on a completely different world.

The easiest thing to do would be to relocate one of the towns to its own continent on the other side of the planet, and then work proactively with the survivors to rebuild some resemblance of a society. Do that job, right, and two generations later the grandchildren get along okay, with one another.

Of course, my preference would be to ditch the settlement, entirely, and relocate to a different world that actually had, y'know, civilizations that didn't destroy themselves.

Fitting in a situation such as that would be a much more fun game, to me, than scratching out an existence as a dirt-farmer in the middle of nowhere, or acting as a counselor to a bunch of traumatized survivors.
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Old 01-04-2016, 02:35 PM   #1510
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So, how do you game in this setting, in a way that would be fun, really? You're stuck in a small town (basically) of 10,000, which has a long-standing feud with another small town, about crap that happened decades ago on a completely different world.

The easiest thing to do would be to relocate one of the towns to its own continent on the other side of the planet, and then work proactively with the survivors to rebuild some resemblance of a society. Do that job, right, and two generations later the grandchildren get along okay, with one another.

Of course, my preference would be to ditch the settlement, entirely, and relocate to a different world that actually had, y'know, civilizations that didn't destroy themselves.

Fitting in a situation such as that would be a much more fun game, to me, than scratching out an existence as a dirt-farmer in the middle of nowhere, or acting as a counselor to a bunch of traumatized survivors.
I don't think you set up a game here as much as it is scenery and a possible location for an adventure in a series of adventure. It might be a great place for a centrum agent to hide out behind enemy lines. Or to recruit a sympathizer.

I'd certainly not put these folks in the same town. I probably wouldn't give them their own world. If I was running miracle workers (you know they did the relocation), I'd stick them as one more settlement on a refuges world, probably among folks who spoke their language and hope for assimilation.

Another gaming idea is making the PC's do the rescuing. They have to find the nuclear shelter and get highly arrogant politicos out of it without getting shot. There are a variety of reasons to run rescue missions: perhaps you want to replace a high ranking USSR official on an alternate and need a clone who thinks of you as a benefactor. Perhaps PR demands that you save Jimmy Carter.

The empty world also has potential for those seeking to go looting. Or those stopping them. Or those policing them and rescuing the idiots who get stuck there.
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