Worlds Enough

[Faraday Cage]

Got some ideas for this thread.

[Faraday Cage]

First up, Alternate Bio-Techs.


Asherah
After the Great Revolt the power of the Zealots in Judea was shattered. In their place a new sect arose, one that had carried the forbidden wisdom of the goddess Asherah for generations. At first they were condemned as heretics by the aristocratic priesthood, but when they grew the Third Temple from a single seed they gained the support of the astonished Pharisees and consolidated political power in Judea. Under the supervision of Asherite disciples, Jerusalem sprouted walls with fanged maws and thrashing limbs to keep out Roman tax-collectors and Legionaries. Living fortresses grew all throughout the rebellious province, stopping the Legions in their tracks. The revolt, and the craft of the Asherites, spread to neighboring Philistine, Arabia, and Syria. The final coup of their anti-Roman alliance was to put a sympathetic faction into power in Egypt, cutting off Rome from it's bread-basket by growing new and terrible pyramids...

Petal Sages
From the court of the Cathayan Khan came the small, black flowers; transported at great expense and peril across the deserts of the Silk Road, through the Near East, and into Europe. These “Flowers of Wisdom” were consumed by Mandarin bureaucrats, Caliphate emirs, and Venetian doges alike; imbuing them with the insight and intellect of Solomon and Confucius.

Dixie and the Behemoths
It was a twist of fortune that a Swiss natural philosopher of singular notions immigrated to Virginia, fleeing persecution for his scientific theories. Through fate the Confederacy found his experiments already in the advanced phase at the beginning of the War of Northern Aggression. By what some called destiny the South had it's Behemoths; giant composite brains created from animal gray matter but more powerful than hundreds of human brains. These collosus direct Southern strategy, helping to composite for their lack of men and materials; making the war an even match.

The Momotaro Trees
The Grand Empire of Japan has more soldiers than it's home islands could possibly produce. It's colonial garrisons are full and ready even while it's soldiers die by the thousand defending every inch of Pacific conquest. These brave banzai troopers, all perfect Japanese, are the products of the Momotaro Trees created by Dr.Sasaki. From vast hydroponic gardens perfect soldiers are grown in days while each enemy destroyed takes years to replace. With raw materials flowing in from secure holdings in China and elsewhere, the Japanese war machine shows no sign of stopping. Even when America has and uses it's atom bomb, will that be enough?

[Faraday Cage]

Alternate Martial Arts


American Dragon
After collapsing during the dubbing of Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee was rushed to the hospital and stayed there until the condition that had brought on the seizure and collapse was diagnosed and treated. By the time he was released with a clean bill of health, Enter the Dragon was a blockbuster hit in the States and he had a long career of the Hollywood stardom he had always wanted ahead of him. Martial arts movies stayed a huge fad throughout the seventies and eighties and by the time the trend faded in the nineties the genre was such a mainstay that it still got a high-budget film from one of the major studios every summer. Lee's post-Jeet-Kune-Do kung fu academies spread all across the Western nations, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; preaching his doctrine of formlessness and adaptability, which fit in with American youth culture perfectly and created an entire generation of martial artists. Today the second generation of martial arts Americans are adults, the magazine “Popular Martial Arts” is still a consistent best-seller, and street fighting is a way of life.

Hands of Death
The dark secrets of the Agarthan Masters weren't able prevent the fall of the Reich, but they did survive the war and go underground along with Nazi Germany's elite ring of ninja assassins. Otto Skorzeny, the only publicly known figure of any relation to the group, the Hands of Thule, has been keeping himself and the dictator Franco alive through mastery of chi ever since; in isolation from the rest of the world behind the eagle eyes and tiger palms of the Spanish Grappler Police. It's said Mengele himself is still alive, sustained by spiritually polluting evil chi, and guiding the Hands from a stolen Soviet nuclear submarine somewhere off the coast of Argentina...

[naloth]

I would go a different route with Mengele:

4th Reich
Toward the end of the WW2, Josef Mengele fled to Brazil and became a traveling doctor to remote villages. In reality this was only a cover for him to continue his twisted experiments in breeding a superior race. Josef covertly manipulated the pregnancies of countless women. This resulted in an abnormal quantity of twins and a population much higher than the small village could maintain.

Any casual interview of the any of the twins shows they have a somewhat arrogant demeanor, a slant toward ayran superiority, and an almost telepathic ability to anticipate conversation and persuade others.

Case study of their lives show they mostly moved away, married partners with dominately aryan features, and then had twins (sometimes multiple sets!) with similar qualities.

Interestingly the first half seems to be historically true...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...in-Brazil.html

[Faraday Cage]

Alternate OGRE

Arrows of Orion
The American Orion program sent a manned mission to Mars in the early seventies. Before the end of the decade the Soviets had stolen the nuclear propulsion technology and sent up their own mission - not a full crew and supplies enough for a long voyage of Solar exploration, but instead propelling an OGRE class smart-tech rocket tank to claim strategic mineral resources and Lunar territory in the name of the people of the Soviet Union. Ever since Luna, Mars, and some of the larger asteroids and planetoids have been the prowling grounds of roaming autonomous rocket-propelled nuclear weapons launch platforms; carving up heavy metals and rare volatiles to fuel the ever growing machinery of war building up back planetside. War, for decades now, has seemed ever imminent.

[Ed the Coastie]

Alternate Banestorm

Megalan America

In 1445, during the Grand Crusade, a couple of Megalan legions are transported by Banestorm from Yrth to the Mississippi river valley near what is now modern-day Saint Louis. By the time of the arrival of Columbus nearly 50 years later, the Megalan legions have established a thriving nation-state despite the reduced mana level.

[The_Nightwatch]

Supers/Black Ops? - "Overlords"

It was quite by accident that Josef Mengele discovered that a combination of slow vivisection, vile hormonal treatments, and certain agonizing chemicals applied in a particular sequence would bring forth quite extraordinary abilities in people...if they survived. It was his bad luck that one of his early "successes" escaped the camp with copies of Mengele's notes and tried to reach the Polish Resistance.

Lots of ways this can go:

- Nazi supers trying to catch the lone Polish survivor
- The survivor gets through, so it's a race against time for the Resistance to create its own supers before the Nazis find them
- They lose the race...it's the few survivors trying to reach the Allies (but not the Russians) with the secrets to these powers

The other thing about this background is, anyone becoming a super has to go through truly horrendous torture, enough that nearly anyone would be killed. So there's a reason you don't have to make any political or military leaders supers if you don't want to; they chose not to go through the horror, or...didn't survive.

Plus, what kind of person chooses to go through something like that? (Megalomania, anyone?) And...what kind of person comes out of it...??

[naloth]

Originally Posted by The_Nightwatch

- The survivor gets through, so it's a race against time for the Resistance to create its own supers before the Nazis find them
<snip>

The other thing about this background is, anyone becoming a super has to go through truly horrendous torture, enough that nearly anyone would be killed. So there's a reason you don't have to make any political or military leaders supers if you don't want to; they chose not to go through the horror, or...didn't survive.

This is a good setup for a WW2 era supers game. Both sides can build Supers and would potentially need them to compete. Candidates would be rare enough to keep the numbers down since you would need especially strong-willed and patriotic people willing to undergo the process and still be sane enough to not kill your side.

[Ego Archive]

Yrth-B

The Bane Worked as designed, pulling an army across the dimensions from Gabrook to Yrth to fight the Orcish scourge. The Fires never happened, and the Ytarrian Forest still exists, and Yrth is still a mostly High mana realm, but not everything went as the Defenders had anticipated.

The Bane Gate pulled through a vast army of Lizardmen, and their Dragon Mounts, who began to immeadiately attack any races they encountered. This usually meant full on battles with the Orcs that were predomintly in this area, however Skirmishes with the Elves and Dwarves were not unheard of. The Dwarves learned what had occured, and immediately declared war on the Defenders sect, eventually under the continued onslaught of the Dwarves and occasional lizardman attacks, the "Dark Elves" drew south east farther into thier forests.

The Bane gate however, did not just pull through the Lizardman army, but it also pulled through a few unfortunate Goblin and Kobold Villages. The Goblins immediatly banded together and traveled south to the lower reaches of the Djinn Desert. The Kobolds scrurried to hide in the mountain ranges to the north and south of the western edge of the Ytarrian Forest.

The Lizardmen pushed the Orc armies North into the stretch of land above Zarak, and began a long occupation of the desert and plains areas along the western seaboard of Ytarria. Eventually the Orcs pushed East into the wild reaches of the "Nomad Lands" area.

The Gnomes of Ytarria, were largely unaffected by the arrival of the Lizardmen, choosing to migrate east away from the constant battles of the western continents.

The lack of the Banestorm allowed the Sea Elves to progress unhindered, and now they have magnificent undersea cities, with vast resources. They generally rule the oceans with an iron fist, and charge any ships a tariff for travelling through their domains.

The Ytarrian Dragons are an entirely different creature than the "Dragon Mounts" that the lizardmen brought through the "Bane Gate" with them. The Ytarrian Dragons are much larger on average, and of course are very intelligent, unlike the bestial mounts. Several Dragons currently maintain kingdoms of thier own in and around the Whitehood Mountains regions.

Obviously the Complete lack of Humans on this Parallel, has made investigating this realm very difficult. Currently there are no off-world operations being conducted, at least not officially. However it does appear that the Elves may have continued to experiment with the Gate magics, as rumors have surfaced that they have a interdimensional nexus point, called the Hall of arches.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by naloth

This is a good setup for a WW2 era supers game. Both sides can build Supers and would potentially need them to compete. Candidates would be rare enough to keep the numbers down since you would need especially strong-willed and patriotic people willing to undergo the process and still be sane enough to not kill your side.

Dr. Doom was never the same after the treatment. Oddly it wasn't the pain that drove him over the edge but the minor untreatable facial scars.

Eeeeexelent.