New Reality Seeds

[Prince Charon]

There's an old Pyramid article (well, it's old enough that the full text is available on the sjgames.com website), called Time On Your Hands?, by Thomas Devine, that has a few interesting jumping off points. It's written for Timepiece/Stopwatch games, but it could easily be adapted for IW games, and events similar to those suggested could have happened without outside intervention.

Here's one that I find particularly interesting:

Extend Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Life to Cover the Negotiations at the End of World War II

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's (F.D.R.) final illness caused America to be represented by a dying man at Yalta and an inexperienced man at Potsdam. In spite of Truman's many virtues, the only advisor he trusted in foreign policy, a field Truman didn't know, was a military man who saw the world in only military terms. Joseph Stalin easily had the upper hand diplomatically.

But if you could get a TL8 doctor into the White House, FDR becomes a vital force at both key conferences. Stalin, faced by an energetic FDR, who might have let himself see more of Stalin's very real evil, would have had to make a few more concessions. Eastern Europe's history would have been far less brutal, and some nations, especially Czechoslovakia, might have stayed democracies in the same way Finland did. FDR would still have left the presidency to Truman. It is known that he wanted to retire for reasons of health. The Truman presidency would have had FDR's advice to aid the transition.

Even without a TL8 doctor, it's possible for FDR to just have taken longer to decline, so that he has another couple of years left. Then, you get about the same effect, and an interesting divergence.