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patchwork · 11-28-2016, 10:56 PM

All drawn from a source I'm sure people on this board can recognize, adapted for IW:

Daikoku
An early industrial revolution in Japan (and spreading from there) lead to a world-girdling economy and Asian-centered empires with no concept of environmentalism, so that present day Daikoku's 9 billion people live under domes, partially sheltered from a crashed biosphere in which nothing lives or grows, the air chokes and the ozone layer is so destroyed that several hours of direct sunlight can cause permanent damage. They have developed parachronics and have infiltrated several worlds where they offer the products of their manufacturing (TL9 in power generation and information technology and arguably transport, still TL8 in biological sciences and military technologies) in exchange for all the food they can buy, and some oil (they don't need it for power generation, as their fusion plants work just fine despite the waste heat, but it's handy for plastics).

Daikoku hasn't encountered an empty world yet; it would be an expensive and uncertain investment for them anyway, as the knowledge of farming outside of a few hydroponics plants is lost by them. On the one hand, it might give them something to do besides bleed early-industrial worlds dry of food and oil through dummy corporations; on the other, allowing its paranoid, selfishness-is-a-virtue hypercapitalist short-term-thinking culture to really take root in the multiverse is not something Infinity or Centrum would want. Not on a projection-capable worldline, so pick a Quantum of your choice to add them to.

Desolation Road
This artificial skerry has nineteen worlds in it. The newest is a parallel in which American colonization experienced a series of low-probability failures, with hostile locals, natural disasters and disease wiping out English and French colonial efforts and seriously hampering the Spanish, while on the other side of the globe the Ming dynasty is followed not by the mostly-sane Qing but by the mostly-insane Shun. Current year is 1893. One other world has a neo-primitive hunter cult; the other 17 have been nearly scoured free of sapient life. Nearly.

A malevolent godling made this skerry; its early efforts tended to involve straightforward attacks by many-tentacled horrors eating the human population. Then it creates massive, permanent gates to another world to do something similar. As it digests more and more of humanity, it is either becoming more like us, or at least becoming fascinated by us. It is taking its time, using humanoid monsters over the course of centuries, including things like vampires and werewolves, to disassemble human societies from within before administering the coup de grace. There are unconfirmed reports of it even assuming human identity itself. Its rift into the newest world opened on the Grand Canyon about the time Europeans were first colonizing North America, you do the math. It still likes its gooey tentacled pets, though.

The neo-primitive hunter cult was a world in which at some point, an industrial culture turned its back on all that, smashed the machines, declared survival of the fittest and started culling their neighbors. Generations later, its tribesmen receive a surprisingly complete education in science and economics, with the understanding that these are the ideas of the corrupt and weak who should be culled. They spotted the godling almost immediately when it arrived, but acknowledged it as a superior predator, and it was so bemused it passed on without exterminating them, allowing them to hunt throughout its skerry.

There are, of course, small relict populations in the other worlds, After the End style. Their ability to trust each other is poor, and they really don't like the hunters, but something might be made of them. So long as they don't draw the godling back to finish the job.

The worrying part is that the godling chooses its target worlds, and the location of its permanent rifts, with meticulous care, rejecting many easily-digested possibilities. It is not engaged in simple predation, or even self-advancement. It is building something, a multiversal structure that could seriously interfere with Centrum's efforts...

11-28-2016, 10:56 PM	#11
patchwork Join Date: Oct 2011	Re: Alternate Crosstime Organizations All drawn from a source I'm sure people on this board can recognize, adapted for IW: Daikoku An early industrial revolution in Japan (and spreading from there) lead to a world-girdling economy and Asian-centered empires with no concept of environmentalism, so that present day Daikoku's 9 billion people live under domes, partially sheltered from a crashed biosphere in which nothing lives or grows, the air chokes and the ozone layer is so destroyed that several hours of direct sunlight can cause permanent damage. They have developed parachronics and have infiltrated several worlds where they offer the products of their manufacturing (TL9 in power generation and information technology and arguably transport, still TL8 in biological sciences and military technologies) in exchange for all the food they can buy, and some oil (they don't need it for power generation, as their fusion plants work just fine despite the waste heat, but it's handy for plastics). Daikoku hasn't encountered an empty world yet; it would be an expensive and uncertain investment for them anyway, as the knowledge of farming outside of a few hydroponics plants is lost by them. On the one hand, it might give them something to do besides bleed early-industrial worlds dry of food and oil through dummy corporations; on the other, allowing its paranoid, selfishness-is-a-virtue hypercapitalist short-term-thinking culture to really take root in the multiverse is not something Infinity or Centrum would want. Not on a projection-capable worldline, so pick a Quantum of your choice to add them to. Desolation Road This artificial skerry has nineteen worlds in it. The newest is a parallel in which American colonization experienced a series of low-probability failures, with hostile locals, natural disasters and disease wiping out English and French colonial efforts and seriously hampering the Spanish, while on the other side of the globe the Ming dynasty is followed not by the mostly-sane Qing but by the mostly-insane Shun. Current year is 1893. One other world has a neo-primitive hunter cult; the other 17 have been nearly scoured free of sapient life. Nearly. A malevolent godling made this skerry; its early efforts tended to involve straightforward attacks by many-tentacled horrors eating the human population. Then it creates massive, permanent gates to another world to do something similar. As it digests more and more of humanity, it is either becoming more like us, or at least becoming fascinated by us. It is taking its time, using humanoid monsters over the course of centuries, including things like vampires and werewolves, to disassemble human societies from within before administering the coup de grace. There are unconfirmed reports of it even assuming human identity itself. Its rift into the newest world opened on the Grand Canyon about the time Europeans were first colonizing North America, you do the math. It still likes its gooey tentacled pets, though. The neo-primitive hunter cult was a world in which at some point, an industrial culture turned its back on all that, smashed the machines, declared survival of the fittest and started culling their neighbors. Generations later, its tribesmen receive a surprisingly complete education in science and economics, with the understanding that these are the ideas of the corrupt and weak who should be culled. They spotted the godling almost immediately when it arrived, but acknowledged it as a superior predator, and it was so bemused it passed on without exterminating them, allowing them to hunt throughout its skerry. There are, of course, small relict populations in the other worlds, After the End style. Their ability to trust each other is poor, and they really don't like the hunters, but something might be made of them. So long as they don't draw the godling back to finish the job. The worrying part is that the godling chooses its target worlds, and the location of its permanent rifts, with meticulous care, rejecting many easily-digested possibilities. It is not engaged in simple predation, or even self-advancement. It is building something, a multiversal structure that could seriously interfere with Centrum's efforts...