Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Greetings, all!

I think this quote deserves to spawn its own thread in the context of consistent worldbuilding. Many of our ideas about how the world (including many a fictional one) works are derived from how our, modern world works. And the string of World War / World War II / Cold War have shaped many aspects of our world. And yet, many settings did not develop along the same historical lines. Some I wonder:

What preconceptions and ideas should be 'unlearned' when designing a world (with TL, CRs, Statuses, Stigmas and other features) which hasn't experienced WW-/ColdWar-equivalents?

Gun Control has been mentioned. Passports are another one (passport/border checks were extremely mild/non-existent pre-WWI by modern standards).

What else?

Thanks in advance!

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Women's/minorities' (and in some cases majorities') rights and roles in society.

Prior to WWII (or was it WWI?), women were not permitted to work in factories; the only reason they were permitted to do so during the war is because the war effort required more bodies on the factories' assembly lines, and there was a shortage of men due to the front lines. Even prior to that, it was extremely rare to find a woman doing what was traditionally "men's work": doctors, lawyers, etc.

I'm not sure how things were in other countries, but segregation of people by skin color was prominent in the US until the 1960s (and even in South Africa until even more recently), with some races (blacks, Jews, etc) being considered "inferior" by the ruling elite.

A lot of this was the believed "superiority" of the European white male over all others.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Women's role in society is probably a lot closer to how it was before. And, of course, everyone is a lot wealthier. A lot. Unimaginably so. Most of the wealth created in Europe during the industrial revolution was destroyed during the war, or spent on the wars that followed. And there probably aren't any nuclear weapons. I wonder if there would even be satellites or computers. I doubt it.

No telling what happened in Russia and China. Oh, and there was never any roaring twenties (look at the social mores there!) or great depression. Which means that the depression never led to FDR and his social programs, or to any of the social programs that followed. Also, check out that commerce clause!

I wonder what would have happened with Japan. Would they have been free to have their little wars? Maybe they conquered Korea and parts of Russia. It's possible that there would have been a Japanese Empire.

On a lighter note, those pulp magazines from the twenties never went out of style, since there was no depression. Television might not ever have been as popular, since the print industry wasn't wiped out at the same time the economy recovered.

I guess there wouldn't have been any nuclear power without all that research during the war, but I don't know enough about the science to guess.

Maybe without the war Tesla would have had another ten years of inventing left in him, but I'm not so sure about that. They wouldn't have blown up his tower. His spirits might have been considerably higher during those years.

Of course, there wouldn't have been any war to have hints of racial integration in. That's probably pretty important.

But generally I think the biggest difference would be how incredibly wealthy everyone would be, at least in the west. It's nearly incomprehensible how much wealth was destroyed during the wars and depressions and recessions that followed.

Oh! They might not have had alcohol prohibition either. The war had a pretty big impact on that, as I understand.

Those automatics weapons never would have been outlawed. And they probably never would have had any reason to start outlawing any weapons, what with no nuclear weapons ever being invented.

Europe looks really crazy, though. I don't think you would have had a Soviet Union. Still have a German empire. Never would have had Communist China.

And there's no telling how much higher the world's population would be. After all, didn't about a billion people die in those wars and under the regimes that were able to come to be because of them? They never would have had that big influenza outbreak here in the states.

Things would be a lot less centralized. There wouldn't be any federal highway system. Maybe people would still use trains. Or maybe air travel would be much more prominent. People probably deal on a much more local level.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

I love the descriptions of bigotry & racism given in the GURPS 3e Cthulhupunk book, where it explains a nuanced attitude that existed in Lovecraft's time but which ALL falls under "racism" today. Modern sensibilities have evolved in such a way that most people have very black and white views on the subject.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Neither gun control nor passports are really a feature of WW/WWII/Cold War influences; gun control is primarily a function of an increasingly urbanized society (with little personal attachment to firearms, since they don't hunt) and increasingly deadly weapons, passports and the like are a function of increased mobility and an increasingly bureaucratic society (also a function of urbanization/population density).

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

I find David Drake books very interesting on the 'worlds lacking modern organization' level. I think it draws on old Rome quite a bit, though I doubt that's the only influence. I don't know how much of it fits into the early 20th century stuff of the previous thread, but if you go back further, or into less orderly regions...


One that's probably got a history as old as cities, if not older, is important people usually packing a personal warband when going about. If the local law doesn't allow an outright private army (which, often, it does) or you don't happen to own one, a gang of slaves, clients, employees, or extended family members can substitute. Some of the very elite still do something like this today, but my impression is that it was much more broadly practiced in the past.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

I don't know about that. Without the gangsters using them in the depression, and without their mass production during the wars, I'm not sure how much exposure people--and politicians--would have to automatic weapons. Would the Thompson have even been invented absent the war? I doubt it.

People's views on guns here in the US were pretty benevolent back then. Without a substantial event to change those views, I would expect them to stay the same.

But automatic weapons are pretty useless. Without alcohol or drug prohibition, I would expect them to just be something else firearms enthusiasts put in their safes. It looks like a negligible difference to me.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

No cold war means no Vietnam, it also ends up meaning no war on drugs. That makes big changes to Timothy Leary and his crew, who may not have ended up being "anti-establishment" poster children but instead been legitimized to some degree which would change a lot as far as both our attitudes towards incarceration/rehabilitation and psychiatry.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

I wouldn't want to end up in an accident in that world. Whole lot of medical advances out of Vietnam.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

On passports: to the contrary, increased mobility were the reason behind the passports not being strictly enforced before WWI.
The discussion of gun laws in the other threat seems to indicate that many firearms became restricted roughly with the start of WWII. Whether it was linked or a coincidence I'm not as sure as you are that it is the latter.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Note: I'm not talking about Earth With No WWI/II/CW. I'm talking about the preconceptions that we need to abandon when designing worlds with no events that can be compared to WW/WWII/CW. Notably, no Cold Wars might mean not only no nukes, but also less 'government secret' treatment of Space and Computer technologies, and no superpowers can mean some other stuff that I am not an expert on in regards of naval situations.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

It wouldn't have been invented without some war, but any setting that doesn't have wars is so alien to human nature that it's really hard to speculate. And gangsters using automatic weapons is nothing special to the depression (barely even related; Prohibition is more to blame, though any form of organized crime will produce similar effects); if you have gangsters, and they're fighting each other, they will use whatever weapons are available and effective.
Snrk. Automatic weapons are darned useful, which is why people fighting in small wars all over the world use them.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Here in the US, my understanding is that it was combined with high exposure of them being used for villainy, and there coincidentally being politicians in office who were willing to enact those sorts of measures. Alcohol prohibition hit, creating the gangsters, and then the depression hit, which led to the election of politicians who didn't like gun rights very much.

Just a weird coincidence.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

the war on drugs would still happen without the could war. the origin of the war on drugs was minority suppression by targeting a vice more practiced by that minority group but not by the dominate group.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Oh, so these are not an alternate earth, but a different made up world that just happens to coincide with our earth's development, diverging in this certain way?

It's really impossible to speculate if that's the case, since so many of our important advances have come from individuals, such as Tesla. And so much of the other--like the automatic weapons ban--are the result of pure coincidence.

There's no Hemingway. If it was going to be a made up world, there never was going to be a Hemingway in the first place. What does that even look like? There's really no way to know. No Murnau or Lang either. We'll have to suppose they have their own great men doing great things.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

I'm not looking for a particular other made up world, but mostly looking at things that we take for granted, treating as an assumed part of TL6+, but which are actually merely the logical outcomes of certain political events in our world. The stuff that a worldbuilder should 'Unlearn'.

(For the record: Æthereal Sun didn't have a WW/WWII/CW-equivalent, but gun laws vary wildly across the world.)

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Note that, in the US specifically, WWI, the great depression, and WWII did correspond to a rather large increase in federal power, and this probably was not a coincidence; however, it's hard to really tie that precisely in to things like TL and CR.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

But it really had to be that particular war at that particular time. A whole lot of stuff had to come together for those gangsters to be using those weapons. Yeah, they'd have had access to some kind of weapons. But it might not have been so easy to get, or as useful. Without a WWI event with trench warfare, there probably wouldn't have been a need to risk developing such a weapon at that time.

What if the equivalent weapon was made in Germany or England or Russia instead? Then it would have been a lot more difficult to acquire. I don't know.

I'm not sure if that's true. They're useful, sure. But I thought they used them because central planners in socialist states decided to churn out gajillions of them, and then they just happened to be available. Would those people in small wars really be that different if they had bolt actions designed for long range? I don't know. What's a VC sniper? One who learned how to use his sights.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

My point was that everything that happens is the result of certain events. What if Newton had never lived? Or Einstein? If you just lump their advances into a TL score, then it gets incredibly difficult to separate out the stuff you're looking for. Was the rise of Marxism an inevitable part of that TL, or was that all the result of Marx, you know, having existed? If a non-historical-earth worldbuilder puts down TL 6, then which is it going to be? Marxism or not?

It's a lot easier to do at lower TLs, where everyone had iron spears, than it is with the modern world where one single inventor or thinker can so drastically change everything.

I don't know what that is.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

The setting I'm currently GMing, which is the reason this topic presents extra interest to me.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Just from skimming the wiki, I'll say that it seems extraordinarily unlikely to me for them to have any kind of computers in general use and for them to not experience miniaturization and all the other modern advances in those technologies. If you strip them of computers entirely, say the governments never created them or encryption devices, Turing never lived, and so on, then you can get away with it.

But giving them some computers but not digital technologies doesn't seem reasonable. Transistors seem like pretty obvious technology, especially if you have vacuum tubes. Do they have vacuum tubes?


Hmm... I wonder if these people could even have radar.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Also, this works in regards to any genre/setting, too. A lot of our fantasy preconceptions - e.g. folks of either gender walking around town wearing armor and having weapons normally restricted to the nobility or city guard/military not only visible but loose in their scabbards and ready to use without fear of repercussions - come from our modern sense of gender equality. Same with the "slavery is evil" bit; prior to the 1800s, slavery was rarely if ever vilified, and in many parts of the world was considered a way of life.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

I feel like these two are a lot easier to explain away. Or to cover up in ways that don't cause very big problems in the suspension of disbelief department. They're not anywhere near as large departures as completely rewriting the twentieth century. Look:

Matriarchal society. Bam! Women can do all the stuff men can, since they're in charge. Economic or religious reason to not have slavery. Bam! No slavery. Ancient Persia didn't have slavery in any recognizable sense, right? And they had matriarchy in Sumer, didn't they? Those look pretty easy to convince players to go along with.

What inventions did or didn't get invented with the absence of those wars? Anybody's guess there. We could argue back and forth on that forever.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

I'm guessing that what we really want here is "what would a world with no Balkans equivalent look like". Once you have a politically fragmented region with multiple warlike people groups some of whom have various loyalties to different outside entities, you are pretty much going to end up with a ton of skirmishes and deep-seated rivalries, which, once modern technology becomes available, are very likely to produce a world war.

If Europe had been somehow shielded from the Huns and Islamic world, it would have continued to putter along with agricultural and feudal innovations. Thanks to the Scandinavians they would probably still have ended up producing powerful naval empires and colonizing the western hemisphere, but Africa might have been left largely alone, and the world's hotspots would have been in the -istans and the Caucasus.

In more general terms, a world without World Wars would be a world where the great sea powers were culturally isolated from the great land powers and/or there were less reasons for the great sea powers to engage in direct warfare.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

I think the biggest assumption that has to be unlearned -- at least for an American -- is the prominence of "the government." As in the federal government. Even after the Civil War asserted that it was "the United States is" and not "the United States are," an awful lot was left up to state and local authorities, or even to no authority in particular. I won't say Washington was without power or authority, but its reach was a lot shorter, both for better and for worse.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

But isn't that just a quirk of the US's anti-government culture, that under pressure has declined over time? Europe developed pretty strong centralized governments just fine well before the wars.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Sure, AKs and M16s have been made in vast quantities and are thus cheap, but there's a reason they've been made in vast quantities.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Possibly, but I guess what I'm saying is that absent the World Wars and Cold War, I don't think the pressure would have been there. And even in Europe, the trend toward centralized government seemed to strengthen in that period. (The interwar years were the most notable of course: Italy, Russia, Germany, Spain and more.)

EDIT: Which, to keep it in GURPS terms, might reflect an average rise in the CR of many societies.

EDIT2: And it occurs to me that my original post may have been misunderstood. When I said "for an American," I meant that that's been the biggest change for the United States, not that it was an overall change that an American would have an especially difficult time adjusting to.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Al Capone and his ilk were the cause of the restriction on submachine guns in the United States in 1934, but Britain of course started on it much earlier. In 1870 it became illegal to carry a gun off of one's property without a license.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

MAD. There's no MAD. No one in there right mind would use a nuke today because of the well known existence of MAD, and sufficient quantities for Armageddon. Divided two world earth. If Russia used nukes to get its away America follows and visa versa. You risk setting off a nuclear war. If everyone builds up nuclear weapons before the first use in anger... nukes might just be sort of a thing.

Still a powerful tool, but the same degree of paranoia about using them is gone.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

I find this is simple but time consuming. You just read things from your target society, and read things written about them by academics, until you have a sense of how things worked. My mental world has at least four filters of “how the human world works”: classical Greece, late medieval Latin Christendom, mid 20th century US, and 21st century Canada. An advantage of gaming is that it forces you to think about some practical details which even reenacting doesn't touch on.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Hrm, Dr Watson never bothered with that (or was bothered about that).

Anyway, the relationship between crime and gun control is the US is that crime causes gun control. The first wave was in cities like New York with its' "Sullivan Act". This followed the "Gangs of New York" period and was designed to take guns out of the hands of the urban poor.

Then came the gangsters. Not just Capone but the spree bank robbers of the midwest like Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. This begat the Act of 1934. Before that almost everything was legal outside of specific municipaiities (order a BAR direct from the manufacturer and get it delivered by US Mail).

The next wave came in 1968 driven by the assassinations of that year and some stuff (like guns by mail) from the first Kennedy shooting.

Nothing twas done that would have effected James Earl Ray' rifle or simply made Oswald buy his in person but this and alter measures weren't really that well connected to the events whose publicity energized them.

Nothing new really. The 34 Act didn't help much with Clyde Barrow stealing autoweapons from police stations and National Guard armories.

A general rule for the US at least is probaly until something was explictly forbidden it was permitted.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

A lot of the things Adolph Hitler did or supported, such as eugenics, and just general racism, would not be as extremely and absolutely vilified, if it hadn't been for him.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Remember two American presidents, both Garfield and McKinley, were killed by small handguns, only about 20 years apart. Despite this there was no giant roar for handgun elimination until the mid-20th century (say, 1930s) and it accelerated in the 1960s.

There had to be a large, vocal, and well-organized anti-gun movement to gain much headway.

The "war on drugs" actually was a product of the Progressive Era. Mid 1910s. Calls for bans on alcohol, drugs, and guns were all part of the same movement to make America safer, more productive, and more rationally organized.

One BIG change due to the Cold War was the microchip. It's cheap as he## now but the original research the led to its development, and, more important, the development of ways to make microchips en masse was extremely expensive -- the equivalent of hundreds of billions of 2012 dollars. No private sector corporation was going to do that without a huge guaranteed market -- which, of course, did not exist in the early 1960s.

Uncle Sugar (Sam, for those less cynical) was in the early 1960s looking at the Big Bad Bear (CCCP) and had reason to fear. The Bear had more people and resources. So if the US of A was going to stave off Russian offensives in the Third World by military force (Vietnam was only the most publicized effort) Uncle Sam had to have superior tech, including communications and sensor gear. Gee. Guess what the microchip is good for?

A friend of mine claimed that people like the late S. Jobs and current Wozniak could build their first computers cheap courtesy of Uncle Sam. (IIRC a 16K Apple cost about $2000 1977 dollars -- say 5-6000 US dollars now -- but that was dirt cheap for a working computer in 1977. Don't ask me how I know that.) The US military was buying lots of microcircuits for use in their aircraft, missiles, etc. but they had to have a very long MTBF (mean time between failures.) Chips from batches that didn't meet the MTBF requirements got shipped back to the manufacturers.

Well, no manufacturer is just going to throw away merchandise if they can make a buck on it some way. "Sure, Mssrs. Jobs & Wozniak, we can sell you these chips -- cheap. Where do you want them delivered?"

And a whole economic sector was born.

But the first checks for R&D, manufacture, and purchase were written by Uncle Sam.

The Progressives and other modernists of the late nineteenth century had been calling for Big Government long before it got here. The wars, especially WWI, did a HUGE amount to sell this idea -- and to make it seem irresistible. "If we don't have command economies with central planning, we're going to be drowned by the efficiencies of the evil Communists!" Well . . .

No wars, less of a sales pitch for Big Brother.

Note that in WW I the US government took over the railroads, about 25 percent of the economy. Almost every senior official of the New Deal had had experience in running things in 1917-18.

Don't underestimate this.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

The Space Race, with the target of getting a man on the moon, was a direct result of the Cold War.

So even though the idea of space travel was becoming realistic from the end of WWII, without the impetus and available budget from the Cold War space travel might be extremely retarded.

Likewise, following from fredtheobviouspseudonym's exposition on microchips, jet travel, radar, cryptography and many other high technology products of wartime need, that we otherwise take for granted, might not exist or be underdeveloped.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Not really. The primary mover behind gun control is generally increased urbanization, and before the 20th century the US was under 50%.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

I can readily believe this, as my Grandfather worked in the microchip industry in quality control, and to this day he gets annoyed by the maddening unreliability of consumer electronics. He knows from experience that they can make them where they just don't break, even under all kinds of brutal conditions.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Not the 30s. The Sullivan act dates to 1911. The Act of 34 had virtually nothing to do with handguns. It was all about autoweapons and saweed off longarms. I am not aware of any noise about banning handguns from that period.

With the Act of 68 you get bans on importing small handguns and pressure for gun control at least tries to acclerate from their but if you look at concealed carry states in the US (46?) it was probably never "a giant roar".

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

That is a good point. Even language has been affected. The Germans don't like using the word Fuhrer any more, and back in 1940 Canadian newspapers could write sentences like the following in their editorial sections: “Some authorities predict that this war will bring the final solution to Canada’s bilingual problem.” (The idea, roughly, was that all the Francophones would join the military, be forced to learn English, and give up French after the war).

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Without the world wars, there's probably no concept of "total war" that involves attempting to destroy the enemy's industrial, transportation, and agricultural base as a means of impairing their abilty to continue making war. Without that basic idea, war becomes more about capturing such things rather than wiping them off the map.

Without total war, there's less targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. War stays slightly less horrific and WMD's are less common and more tactical. As such, there's less popular support for peace and disarmament movements (which probably more closely resemble the isolationist movements of the pre-WWI and II U.S.). And so, many fewer hippies.

Without total war, there might be less of a drive for unconditional complete surrender of the enemy nation, particularily for ideological motives. Once you've taken whatever territory you've set out to take (or repelled the invaders), you make peace with the enemy nation. Keeping the war going until you defeat them completely, and then remaking their internal politics probably happens less often. So less nation building and resources spent on nation building.

Probably without the World Wars and Cold War, there might be less of a bilateral world. Two nations may go to war without dragging in all of the other major players, and times of relative peace without a complete, bi-polar, us-against-them "pick a side" attitude may be possible and occur more often.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

I don't believe this. The ideological heavy lifting had already been done by Clausewitx.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Also see Sherman's March to The Sea as well as numerous attacks on the railroad systems of both sides in the US Civil War.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

I suppose, but if the world wars hadn't demonstrated the concept, and made it acceptable to nations that otherwise consider themselves "civilized", Clausewitz might now be regarded as a crackpot or a psychopath or otherwise ignored.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Like Fred Brackin said, Sherman's March To The Sea. Not to mention that "total war" was the default for much of ancient history.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

My reading may be colored by Reconstruction, but my impression is that the South viewed that as just short of an atrocity, and even in the North it was percieved as not something "civilized" people do.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

On the other hand at the beginning of the Civil War I have heard stories about civilians taking their families out on Picnics near the battlefield so that the family could enjoy the military spectacle. The World Wars in Europe and the Civil War in the U.S. put war back into peoples back yards instead of it being something that happened in far far away land against less skilled and technologically advanced native civilizations.

The idea of war as spectacle and war as serious business tends float back and forth in a culture depending on how close the more recent fighting has been as well as how nasty your previous wars have been.

In terms of the original question of what we might need to unlearn when making a game world their are a few things. The U.S. Highway system was essentially a direct result of the Cold war and Eisenhower seeing the effectiveness of the German Autobahn. Before that my understanding is that traveling by car across the U.S. occurred over roads of vary varying quality and few direct routes.

Food without good transportation system, refrigeration, communication, and general biotech enhancements the freshness availability and quality of food is going to be much more limited.

This one goes back to I believe earlier time periods but for large stretches of human history is that cities were death traps and living in a city would shorten your life span.

Credit while the idea of credit has been around for quite a while the idea of using it frequently in your daily life via credit cards and the like seems to have only caught on I believe in the 1980s or their abouts.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

I would just like to point out that all of the things being mentioned are obvious changes that wouldn't have occurred or inventions that wouldn't have been invented.

But we're still looking at a hundred year period where things would have been happening. What would have been invented? What social changes would there have been? It doesn't make any sense to expect things to have stayed the same. These are the much more difficult questions to answer.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Military techniques that demonstrably work rarely die out just because of social disapproval.

Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)
 

Whatever Sherman was doing in Georgia was far outmatched and exceeded (if not in scale, then in passionate intensity) by the kinds of war atrocities being committed by both sides in frontier areas like Missouri and Tennessee, a fantastical sort of one-upmanship against noncombatants that achieved horrific proportions.

My understanding is, one of the reasons General Lee sought the option of formal surrender was the old military gentleman did not want to see his beloved Virginia dissolve into a generation of liquid guerrilla war. He understood there were soldiers under his command like Nathan Forrest ready to fight on for years as vicious payback, without any chance of success for the larger goals of the Confederacy.

Word.

...

On a related note, I’ve often thought an interesting campaign world would be the one laid out in Robert Chambers’ The Repairer of Reputations. Written in 1895, he creates a weird future world of 1920 completely unlike ours of post WWI.