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Old 06-01-2020, 06:01 AM   #1671
Flyndaran
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

Tabloid stories about Atlantis would sound "fishier" on that world than ours.
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Old 06-02-2020, 11:07 AM   #1672
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

Not exactly a Weird Parallel:

Arthur Echoes are just strange. Infinity has found three, all originally on Quantum 6. for whatever reason, they seem to act exactly like Echoes, and they seem to follow Homeline history as much as any other echo does. There's one tricky part; they aren't entirely accurate on closer inspection. Historical figures and other people are exaggerated or otherwise warped.

Arthur-1937 is exaggerated to the point of parody. Hitler is so brazenly aggressive and vile such that it would be unbelievable that anyone would anyone would expect an agreement would be upheld for more than a minute. At least, until you meet Chamberlain, who is conciliatory beyond all reason. WW2 is proceeding on schedule. Reports from Russia indicate Stalin has had a complete personality flip after the Germans declared war; Infinity expects it to happen again after WW2 ends.

Arthur-1772 doesn't have people acting oddly really. This itself is pretty odd, as North and South America are inhabited with large numbers of non-humans (who have the cultures and relative placements as native groups) and fantastic animals. Infinity can't understand how the Native Americans of this world lost even with their magical advantage, but no one from Arthur-1772 questions this.

Arthur-1921 was a very good example. Human sexual dimorphism is ridiculously exaggerated in this world, where women have psionic powers and men are SM + 1, higher ST, and regeneration. Regardless, society and history looked very similar. This lasted until Centrum shot Stalin to bolster Trotsky's world revolution. This flung the world to quantum 3, and society flipped overnight to a practical Matriarchy. Centrum doesn't know what went wrong, and Homeline is starting to think these echoes are parachronic "springs" that if moved could end up anywhere.

Lear-1983 may be a related phenomenon. However, while Arthur echoes are somehow perfect recreations despite something big being wrong, Lear is not right despite nothing being wrong. For whatever reason, Lear has no duplicates of people relative to Homeline, but history has remained very similar. Some events never were (like the Kennedy Assassination), but there have been far too many analogous events to Homeline history.
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Old 06-02-2020, 02:35 PM   #1673
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

Arthur-1776 features most notables as caricatures of their homeline equivalents. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, is a TL5+4 Gadgeteer and Compulsive Carouser. George Washington is easily ten feet tall, immune to firearms, and may be able to heal with a touch. John Adams is prone to singing about all of is problems, and so on.
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Old 06-04-2020, 09:28 AM   #1674
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Rustic-3: A TL0 Early Agricultural society, apparently held in stasis at that point (current date is 1894) by the entire human populace acquiring Level Three Mundanity sometime in the stone age, supressing all technological progress from that point onward (technology beyond TL0 will often simply disappear, though could become part of the landscape or even take the form of entities from local myth). This may have also had significant effects on local cosmology - observation from seaborne platforms suggest a geocentric Earth. Testing their abilites outside of this worldline has currently not proved possible, as parachronic tech and abilities will fail to function within eyesight of local humans.
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Old 06-04-2020, 11:24 AM   #1675
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

It would be interesting to posit ruins from a small population of people lacking that disadvantage. The "magical" ancients which to homeliners would look like any other TL 1 village.
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Old 06-05-2020, 01:38 AM   #1676
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
It would be interesting to posit ruins from a small population of people lacking that disadvantage. The "magical" ancients which to homeliners would look like any other TL 1 village.
The main limit on TL1 in this context would be that copper and tin are not found together in useful amounts (the Bronze Age required established trade routes, IIRC), though they could be TL1 but not have many (or any) bronze tools, working with copper, lead, tin, or whatever other useful ore was nearest.
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Old 06-05-2020, 06:06 AM   #1677
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

Bronze is the big naming feature of TL 1, but I was mainly thinking of all the other infrastructure and items; a permanent settlement, writing, farm, and maybe a "small" megastructure. Just a little of each would look like a magical alien world to a fully stone age people, I think.
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Old 06-07-2020, 01:16 PM   #1678
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Kong worldlines feature enormous nonhuman primates. Kong-1 was initially believed to be a weird one-off for years, but recent discoveries have revealed half a dozen more Kong worldlines in quick succession. An eccentric cliodynamicist (even by the standards of an already kooky field) believes there may be a psiometric shift going on -- the equivalent of a larger-scale reality quake -- and needs data on the current states of the worlds. Realty shards are particularly critical.

The apes (sometimes called kongs) are in all cases somewhere above 15 feet tall, but that's merely the lower limit; alphas can be over a hundred feet tall, and in some worldlines they simply keep growing as they age.

Kong-1 (formerly just Kong) was a worldline that followed along rather closely to the narrative of King Kong. The present date is 1998, with extensive research of Skull Island's biology leading to a moderately more advanced biotechnology and a thriving tourism industry to the island. Feathered dinos live here.

Kong-2 is a worldline that apparently underwent a dramatic shift in 1998. At present, (20 years later,) the entire planet is dominated with giant apes. How such a large population of such huge creatures has come to be the planet's norm over a fairly short time period is as of yet unknown. There are only a few tens of thousands of humans living in scattered settlements; Infinity hasn't been able to contact them much, as they are skittish and fearful of outsiders. The ruins still hold much valuable resources, but cities also provide comfortable nesting grounds for the apes.

Kong-3 apparently never had humans. The giant apes in this case are a little smaller (10-50 feet tall), and somewhat smarter. They appear to be approaching the end of TL-0. There may even be isolated communities breaking into TL-1.

Kong-4 is in the midst of the cold war. Unlike Homeline history, the threat is not nuclear weapons, but instead the products of superscience. A mad Nazi scientist -- Dr. Urs Von Jäger -- discovered a way to reconstitute and reanimate fossilized tissue by harnessing something he called "Paleoresonantic Energy" and "Bio-radio regeneration". Attempting to ressurrect fallen nazi soldiers, he experimented on primates. The war ended before he succeeded, and his laboratories were captured by both sides.

It seemed that the pacific war would drag on for years, as the allies were unable to invade the home islands without immense losses. However, the USA unleashed two of the mad doctor's most successful products on the Empire, and that, combined with the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, lead to the final end of WWII.

Now it is 1971. Both superpowers vie to create the strongest reanimated monsters to fight one annother. Giant apes (uncovered buried in Alaskan and Siberian permafrost) are only the start. All kinds of bizarre ancient animals have been found and returned to life, kept sealed in stasis bunkers, and in a few cases successfully trained to parade around. The dinosaurs that have been reanimated are of the most classic, scaly form.

Kong-5 is currently in 1420. The old world is identical to homeline history. The new world is populated by analogs of its historical native population, as well as a variety of enormous new-world monkey species. Of these, a few are domesticated as beasts of burden and of war.
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Old 06-07-2020, 01:26 PM   #1679
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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Kong
I like these a lot. Looks like the framework for a fun Infinity campaign. (One of the PCs will invariably be an ape of some sort... if I know my players.)
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Old 06-07-2020, 01:54 PM   #1680
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

I like these as well, but would want one where the Kongs evolved from or are Gigantopithecus.
They were the largest primates ever and more related to orangutans than the others. Some of the earlier and somewhat "sillier" estimates put them at 12 feet tall already close to Mighty Joe Young if not Kong proper.
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