Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Kewl beans.

That all looks solid, thanks, Rob.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Bill Cameron raises some interesting points about Emir; remember, I want to take it farther forward, what I wrote is about as far as I can get with linear and logical extrapolation, and so it's time to get creative.

This America would be rather more interested in North African territory; France has something to pledge that will keep the money flowing, if they think it's that or be conquered. More likely, though, even if the Germans manage to get a peace treaty that says they are the winners and are entitled to reparations from France and Russia (there is zero chance of the British Empire paying them a penny under any circumstances, or ceding territory), Wilhelmine Germany is an ambulatory corpse. The German people have died and starved for four years for the promise of glory and future wealth; there is no glory, there will be no wealth, and the hunger keeps going after the peace treaty is signed. Any junker who can't run fast enough is going to be dead by, say, 1923, and the Kaiser is a junker. It's not impossible for Berlin to become acquainted with the guillotine before a peace treaty is signed either. In short, the lack of a successful British campaign will be very helpful to the Ottomans...but they aren't going to be getting any help from their erstwhile allies.

We're 60 years after our initial changes, so honestly we're pretty free to make details up at this point. What would people find more interesting, a USA with a Caliph-in-residence who many people regard as a joke, or a world in which the USA has a close relationship with a surviving Ottoman Empire while leaving Europe in its ruins and rationing?

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

The third possiblity:


Maybe quite a few people don't think of the American caliph as a joke.

This would likely strain US relations with the Ottomans/Tukrish sucessor state for obvious reasons. An American khalifa would present a a direct challange to the Ottoman Sultan's claim to be the khalifa.
And if there's no more Ottoman claim because of soemthing like Ataturk and secularization, then an American khalifa is a threat to the new secular regime.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

My addition

Jeffersonian 3 aka N'er But a Man be Free (or maybe Celtic 5)

Divergence Point, around 1775.

Basically do to some differences among the key players, the US was able create a union with slavery explicitly forbidden.

However the desire for cheap labor was still there so early on there were a lot of Irish indentured but little other immigration except from the UK

This in time lead to a less fractious history with no civil war, a smaller weaker Federal government and rather different outcome with no US involvement in WW1 except by Volunteer Regiments.

Homeline music aficionados like to visit this world for its unique music heavily Celtic flavored with some Native American rhythms and its dominant bluegrass and country styles. It also has English folk revival music

Current year 1980 the nations of the world are in a Cold War with a somewhat stronger Soviet Union than existed on Homeline. There are no nukes.

Main Powers:

USSR and Satellites CR4-5 Communist

European Powers CR3 to CR4 Various

United Kingdom Cr3 Monarchical Republic

and included by honorarium the United States CR2 Republic CR3 in some states which is kind of a satellite of The United Kingdom though considered an unreliable one because of the Irish influence

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Try this idea, a nuclear war in the early 1950's. At that time the USSR had very few bombs (later during the time America was upset over the "Missle Gap" the "Gap" was overwhelmingly in the West's favor). Assume that the Soviets collapse. A very likely scenario.

Doubtless, everybody would still demonize and resent the USA, but if Russia reforms in this world as in our own, the Europe of the 1960s might face a new Imperialist Crony Capitalist Russia. That would skew the culture in interesting ways.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

People love to idealize victims and give them far more leniency than they would otherwise get. Look at how much Bush Jr. and New York city's mayor had to do to squander the adulation from 9/11.
Getting nuked would allow soviet influences of all sorts to spread with less impedance even if their economic power was greatly reduced.

Edit: Not to throw out my political opinions, but Bush Jr.'s policies would not have had anywhere near the lack of opposition if playing the victim wasn't an option.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Only around 10 years after Japan? That would terrify many people into revolt or exodus from the U.S.'s insane warmongering. You can't play the rational one when your first option involves salting the earth of your enemy.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

I'd like to see some timelines where the major oil deposits are moved around, to say, Australia and Central Africa or South America and China. How this changes geopolitics would be fascinating.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

That would require radically changing geological physics.
Argentina already has loads of oil reserves.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

I hope you don't mind this deviation. It's not really a world, but it is a group of interest for the IW setting...

The Alternatives

There's a story that every white-star conveyor operator knows, that every trainee hears before their first jump.

It goes something like this: An ambitious young conveyor jockey fresh out of training, bound for White Star, starts talking to this egghead from R&D. The Egghead's been running some calculations, see, and there's this new dimension he's found- all women. All LONELY women. All of them with well-developed... personalities. The calculations were conclusive. With the right crew, it'd be easy to hop over and pick up some chicks! They'd have their pick of the PLANET!

Naturally, the jockey agrees. There's no time to send a test drone, and anyway it'd get internal investigation on to them. The egghead's SURE about those coordinates. Pretty sure, anyway.

So, they arrange things. Bring around the rest of the jockey's crew, get the egghead assigned to them for a standard survey mission to some boring old smother clone, check out all their paperwork... and then, at the last minute, retarget the jump, to the babe dimension.

Then what happened? Nobody knows. They sent drones to the same coords, and there's no such dimension. The jokey, crew, and egghead were all vanished.

And THAT, that's why you always wait for the drone. Because if some genius forgets to carry a one, the next thing you know you're halfway up Cthulhu's colon....

Of course, like all rumors, there's a grain of truth. A crew did vanish in attempting an unauthorized jump, and it was related to White Star. In fact, at least three white-star marked conveyors left the facility without arriving anywhere, though only one was strictly unauthorized.

But only the most paranoid of IU's security leadership even suspected the truth: That conveyor isn't vanished.

What really happened is that yes, a researcher did discover a world-line coordinate with useful qualities. Specifically, it was extremely unstable, liable to change quantum with only a slight push. Perfect for faking a disappearance. They started the rumors- several, in fact, some saying they left for gold, some for power, some to escape the law. They reached deep into the IU/White Star network to pull together the best of the crooked, and they built a crew.

Then, five years ago, they jumped to an unstable echo, cut some telegraph wires to prolong the great depression, and sent their echo to Q8, where nobody would think to look.

Since then, they've become the most powerful criminal organization in the known cosmos. They perform impossible crimes, undetectable crimes. It took little time to establish dozens of fronts on 27 different known timelines. These are their resource bases, but not their real calling. Today they are known as The Alternatives. They don't work for money (though they do demand high prices to keep the riff-raff out), they crave the challenge of outsmarting the most powerful people in history. They also accept payment in the form of favors... and unusual gifts. They posses a suitcase supercomputer capable of calculating a point-to-point jump in minutes (it still takes weeks of manual programming to get it configured for different conveyor loadouts), a psi-tech torture device, and the mana-enhancing skull of a fanged humanoid.

They are no risk to the secret- if anything, they're better than IU at keeping quiet. But they are a threat to the law and order of the entire quantum battleground. (Nobody knows how they do it, but they can switch quantums. Most likely, they know about the natural portals that cross Q-levels and make use of those dimensions) IU doesn't know about them yet, but they do know about four major heists The Alternatives have pulled off, though they don't realize the connection.

Reich-5 actually met The Alternatives; The thieves took the Hammer of Thor out from under their noses on a myth parallel. The nazis are actively looking for cross-dimensional theives already.

The Cabal aren't concerned with The Alternatives, and the Alternatives avoid magical worlds for the most part (they are looking for an occult partner to expand their reach; as it is, they only really know a few workaday spells like Create Fire and Purify Water, and those at low levels). In fact, the two organizations may cooperate as much as they compete.

Centrum is in the same boat as Infinity... they know about four or five major heists. The danger, though, is what it means about Infinity's knowledge about cliedynamics. If one random researcher can discover the theory behind an unstable world well enough to predict and execute a change, then Centrum is losing its edge. If they ever discovered The Alternatives, and managed to get the whole story, it might lead them to take much more urgent action against Infinity.