New Reality Seeds

[fchase8]

Bonaparte-1, 1895

Current Affairs: America and Russia quarrel over China, after the fall of the Bonaparte French Empire.
Divergence Point: 1801: Lord Nelson dies in an attack on Boulogne, and The Battle of Trafalagar four years later is a British defeat.
Major Civilizations: Western (empire with satellites), Orthodox (empire with satellites)
Great Powers: United States (representative democracy, CR2, CR5 for non-whites), Russian Empire (dictatorship, CR4), Empire of Brazil (oligarchy, CR2), Republic of France (dictatorship, CR 3), United Kingdom (representative democracy, CR2), United Republic of Ceylon (oligarchy, CR3), Republic of Hispanola (oligarchy, CR3)
Worldline Data:
TL: 6
Quantum: 6 Mana Level: No Mana
Infinite Class: P9 Centrum Zone: Orange

The first timeline discovered with a Napoleonic victory turned not on him, but the great sea legend, Nelson. The admiral’s death in an attack on Boulogne in 1801 left the British Navy without his genius, and the Battle of Trafalgar four years later, instead of being his greatest victory, was a loss to the Franco-Spanish alliance under Napoleon, who by the next year was dictating peace from the Tower of London.

[fchase8]

Imperial Glory

In The Treaty of The Tower, France stripped the United Kingdom of its colonies, from Canada and the Caribbean to India and Australia. Without British opposition, Napoleon cowed Prussia and Austria, came to an accord with Russia, and littered Europe with new monarchs in his generals & relatives.
Then Napoleon looked to the Americas. He ruled Canada & the Caribbean, and united the French & Spanish crowns under his son, including Portugal (whose monarchy fled to Brazil). The United States’ possession of Louisiana rankled the general, who wished to reclaim the land he had sold.
In The War of 1812, the U.S. was attacked from all sides. However, many in French America hated Paris, from English-speakers in Toronto to Spanish-speakers in Mexico to slaves in the Caribbean. Andrew Jackson stopped the southern advance at The Battle of New Orleans, and the Ontario Rebellion threw back the French to the north. The Peace of Port-Au-Prince restored the status quo, save for the new Republic of Ontario (that soon joined the U.S.).
Stymied in the New World, Napoleon turned back to the Old. He reconquered Egypt en route to India, and by his 1823 death, French forts stretched to the East Indies. But his son was a diffident ruler that let his deputies, usually Napoleon’s generals & their children, run their own fiefdoms.
As the French Empire spun off in a hundred directions, America and Russia grew opposed to it, with coherent industrialization and militarization. They sponsored anti-French activity throughout that empire, which came to a head under Napoleon III. The large taxes for his pet project, the Suez Canal, were resented by his people - and his court, used to to freedom under his father. Intrigues, over-taxation, and anti-French resistance boiled over into The Great Rebellion (1848-50), where subjects from Mexico to Munich to Milan to Manilla overthrew imperial rule.
Almost a half-century later, the world is still adjusting. The United States took Florida, Oregon, and finally Mexico by 1853. Russia pushed west to Konisberg, south towards Afghanistan, and east into Manchuria & Alaska, with influence extended to the Rhine. Meanwhile, Washington & Rio dominated the new Latin American republics. Other ex-colonies established themselves, from freed slave Hispanola & Jamaica to Boer Republic & United Ceylon, the former Dutch possessions taking a cue from the old United Provinces of the Netherlands.
While the old Asian colonies are anti-European and modernizing, America and Russia are in the remains of Manchu China (wrecked by its own mid-century rebellion). The two great powers quarrel from the Free City of Macao to the court in Edo, ignoring the native industrialization in India and elsewhere. Aggressive development around the world has pushed it rapidly into TL6 - and nearer to the corresponding world war…

[fchase8]

Outworld Operations

Discovered before contact with Centrum, Homeline governments have long been active on Bonaparte-1, with the U.S. and Russia taking opposite sides (and China angry). Infinity has tried to forge a single parachronic policy since the start of the Dimensional War, to no avail.
Centrum backs the United States, including trying to end slavery. Infinity and Homeline U.S. attempt to counter Centran influence despite its laudable efforts, but Homeline Moscow insists Czarist Russia is a better bet (despite its own serfs). Meanwhile, Homeline Paris can’t unite the factions in the post-imperial Seventh Republic, while MI-7 is building up the new mercantile U.K. Homeline India supports every little industrializing domain on the sub-continent, while Sri Lanka (in one of its few parachronic activities) proudly backs United Ceylon.
Parachronic tourism was once big in this early found world, but has since moved on. What remains is to Czarist Russia, which towers over post-French Europe. This makes it an easy cover for Homeline Russian agents, who seem to interfere in Infinity oversight whenever possible.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Water isn't a barrier, it's a highway way better than any land connection prior to the invention of railroads has a hope of being. If anything having more coastline makes you less isolated from European imperialism.

Did I forget to mention that part of the whole California-island
idea was that everything was still at its current elevation? (Geologically impossible, yes, but interesting.) More coastline doesn't make it easier to get there if said coastline makes the Cliffs of Insanity look like Kansas.

[hr]

I had another idea. Imagine a time traveler hears that part of the reason Gothic barbarians never integrated into the Roman Empire was that they were Arians, while the Romans wound up with the Nicene Creed. So the time traveler goes back in time, kills the Gothic priest Ulfilas, and helps Athanasius (who had been exiled by this point) convert the Goths instead. So the Goths are integrated better into Rome centuries down the line, the Empire holds firm, all is well?

As it so happens, I disagree heartily with single-cause explanations of such grand historical events. My intuition is that, while having the Goths and Romans share a religion would help Rome last longer, it would still fall eventually...and because I like having such simplistic actions narratively punished, I'll say that the Eastern and Western Empires reunited again by then, so when the Empire falls, the whole Empire falls, with every province becoming an independent state or breaking up into smaller ones. This means there aren't any Byzantines to serve as a proud "bulwark of the east," so Islam sweeps farther west into Europe. I'm not saying Europe is all Muslim, but it gets deep enough that Catholics outside of Iberia come into regular conflict with Muslims.
This means that the Pope & Catholics far from the Middle East care more about Muslims fighting Christians, and organized action against them doesn't need to wait for the (non-Catholic) Byzantines to get desperate. There are multiple Crusade-esque wars of Christendom versus some Muslim ruler or another (who usually gets help from others of his religion); eventually, the Islamic tolerance of fellow People of the Book starts to wear thin and they start retaliating in kind. Eventually, some Granadan king sponsors an attempt to find an alternate route to India that gives the two faiths two whole new continents to fight their endless wars on, and tens of millions of pagans to get caught in the crossfire! (Unless they die of disease or something first.)

Then, perhaps the time traveler goes back to try and make this world a little less...you know...dystopian. He tries to prop up a Byzantine emperor in the east, perhaps by giving him some advanced technology, but this goes spiraling horribly out of control. Since the rest of the Empire is falling apart and the traveler's chosen candidate comes to the conclusion that the End Times have come & he's the Second Coming. This leads to him trying to conquer much of the known world to form the Kingdom of Heaven; when he dies, his son continues (albeit with the theology reinterpreted to fit the fact that Dad was mortal and the world seems to be carrying on).
Within two or three generations, this new Heavenly Empire stretches from Egypt & Greece to some western Indian states, from Saudi Arabia to central Eurasia. The remaining fragments of the Empire and some eastern/northern European tribes and kingdoms have banded together in a so-called Roman Federation, which combines the most ineffective parts of the early United States and the late Holy Roman Empire whenever the Federation isn't directly threatened by the Empire; a similar group forms in India. This happens surprisingly rarely; while the Heavenly Empire preaches a new form of Christianity entirely opposed to the Catholic & Orthodox sects, it suffers from near-constant revolts (in part due to trying to convert the entire empire—a good chunk of which wasn't even Christian until now—to this new faith).
Needless to say, Islam doesn't develop.
But other interesting things do happen! The constant revolts, tensions between the Empire and "Rome"/proto-India, and so on make trade along the Silk Road nearly impossible. Many merchants go from India to various ports in Arabia & East Africa, but the route to Europe proper is still blocked by either a hostile border and probable revolt, the Sahara Desert, or all of Africa (depending on the route taken).
Now, this is where I get a bit silly (if giving the Byzantines high-tech weapons and accidentally letting them conquer a new super-empire wasn't already silly enough). Eventually, some enterprising Scandinavian looks at a globe and decides to see if he can't travel along the Arctic Ocean and through Siberia to reach northern China. He dies. But a few attempts later, someone with the required maps, knowledge, and planning (acquired in part by the failures) gives it a shot, and succeeds. More merchants try this route, and enough succeed that the villages along the way become an established trade route.
This has some interesting effects. First, it transforms the native Siberian cultures, making them traders and bringing them goods from Europe & China. Unsurprisingly, the tribes near each end of the route end up conquered or displaced by Chinese/Scandinavians, but they don't try to extend their reach too far. Second, it transforms the Scandinavians from a backwater into a thriving trade culture.
Third, and perhaps most interestingly, it brings some Chinese traders to the tip of Siberia & the edge of Alaska. Eventually, during one of China's less-isolationist periods, some bold sailor or ambitious emperor will look at a map, go "I want to explore that landmass," and send some ships that way. They might beat western European nations, but if nothing else they're likely to establish colonies in the Pacific Northwest before Europeans get anywhere near there.

At this point, our beleaguered semi-competent time traveler is just going to keep meddling with time. His first step would be to find a Mohammed and get him to start Islam, but after that...who knows? Eventually, he'll end up arming half of Eurasia with ultratech weapons and gizmos as he desperately tries to keep everyone from getting too power-hungry and going nuts. The world would mostly end up in a sort of hyper-feudalism anywhere without a sufficiently powerful & stable central bureaucracy that could control the ultratech (basically China). After all, the battlefield would be dominated by extremely scarce weapons that require specialized training to use (or at least maintain)...doesn't that sound like an exaggerated version of the conditions that produced feudalism? I mean, aside from the conditions that also exist in this timeline.
Beyond that, I could see there being people who try to understand the ultratech. Since the time traveler would probably pose as a god or angel or deva or something culturally-appropriate before giving his gifts, analysis would probably be done primarily by heretics...but I can see some kings secretly allowing heretics access to their ancestral blaster rifle/power armor/hovertank/fusion generator/whatever in hopes that he could give one to each of his sons. If there were enough such heretics, and they communicated enough and had a wide enough variety of samples to study, you could get some hilariously schizophrenic technology levels. Of course, the process for manufacturing this crappy makeshift ultratech would still be hugely expensive, so you would still have feudalism up until industrial technology caught up to the "divine relics". Which, you might notice, is far later than feudalism existed in our timeline.
With feudalism lasting so long, colonial history would be greatly altered. A Columbus figure would probably still exist, finding some monarch with the resources & interest in finding a new route to India. (Also either lacking the geographic knowledge to realize that Columbus would run out of supplies in the middle of the ocean that they didn't know a couple continents were in the middle of, or possessing a semi-ultratech ship that rendered such logistical considerations moot. In the latter case, the Columbus figure would probably be a king or prince who wanted to focus on exploration & trade over naval conquest.) However, it would be hard to establish new colonies in the New World. After all, political power in this world is heavily associated with feudal houses and their ultratech relics. If the royal houses have by this time secured a way to make knockoff relics of some kind, they could send second cousins or third sons to found their own houses with said knockoffs, or a powerful house might just try to establish a colony without its own separate house or relic, or perhaps the occasional European house forced out of its land fleeing to the Americas, but that's about it. The New World just wouldn't be as attractive to the Powers That Be.
Merchants and the like, however, would be very interested in the New World. It's a world with abundant resources, potential customers desperately unaware of the wonders of civilization (and hence willing to overpay for them), and almost no regulation. You'd better believe they'd be setting up shop here. It would start with fur traders, prospectors and such, paying native workers with European trinkets and violently suppressing worker complaints to keep profits high. Then you'd get people setting up farms of cash crops and realizing that the natives were dying of disease too often to make a good workforce, possibly starting a smaller-scale African slave trade or possibly just importing lots of convicts and the like from Europe. This would be similar to OTL colonization, but a slower burn.

So, that's three (arguably) interesting timelines for the price of one (time traveler's sanity)!

[Astromancer]

One good source of gamable problems for infinite worlds would be time travellers like GreatWyrmGold's. A world jumper who thinks they traveled in time and somehow fouled up the world. Picture a snobish aristocrat from a world where neither the 19th, 18th, nor 17th century revolts against authority happened. A world of absolute monarchies and oligarchies. Drop this guy in any world that is moderately close to our 20th century. He'll freak. Then he'll try to froce things back.

Depending on how powerful he is, he's anywhere from a nuisance to a major threat.

[Astromancer]

Here's a great reality seed. Ben Franklin's grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, by his daughter Sally was as radical as his grandfather. I'll have to look up the name, but he was a radical newspaper editor of national importance who died at twenty-nine from Yellow Fever. No less a person than John Adams proclaimed his relief. Alexander Hamilton toasted the news of this man's death in prison. The editor was in jail because of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

This potent and capable a radical could lead to many different timelines.

[PTTG]

I love time-confused world jumpers. Here's a few:

A Vatican-based Italian monk in 1320 CE who discovers he can travel to and from ~25 BCE.

A 2015 OTL-Echo US businessman who has a car accident and stress-jumps to 2007. He buys bitcoin.

A Birmingham librarian of 1945 who travels to an 1812 alternate with extreme narrative contrivances.

A group of children in this 1988 near-parallel were exposed to a bizarre artifact that granted them each the ability to lead a group jump to one particular time. Each child has a specific time they are assocated with, though each can always return to their origin timeline. They also posess Warp, and subconciously return to the place they departed in their home worldline.

The six children are bound to 1922 CE (New York), 1863 CE (Montana), {pick your favorite afterschool-special classical times and places. Obviously one of them's going to be Ancient Egypt.}

Oh, one more: An Alabama senator from 1914 psychically projects a duplicate to a 2016 OTL-Echo.

[PTTG]

What changes could make a modern worldline collapse into anarchy without being triggered by widespread destruction?

Think like Mad Max except without the environmental devastation. Or, more directly, any situation which allows your classical Dungeon Fantasy style adventuring party to work more or less the same, except with modern tech and a familiar world map.

[thorr-kan]

Originally Posted by PTTG

What changes could make a modern worldline collapse into anarchy without being triggered by widespread destruction?

Think like Mad Max except without the environmental devastation. Or, more directly, any situation which allows your classical Dungeon Fantasy style adventuring party to work more or less the same, except with modern tech and a familiar world map.

Infertility plague.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by thorr-kan

Infertility plague.

That will lower the population, and may eventually partially crash the tech level if it gets too small to support economies of scale, but it is not so clear how it generates much anarchy.

Coming up with a convincing reason people both abandoned national governments, and said governments gave up on even attempting to crush this rebellion, even if it takes a destructive war, is going to be hard.