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Old 12-28-2018, 10:30 AM   #61
malloyd
 
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

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Originally Posted by PTTG View Post
So pick a dictator, give them some time and a stolen conveyor, and have them start a nuclear war on Homeline.
The problem here is much the same one as the problem with any Homeline criminals having access to conveyers. If Infinity's controls on them are that sloppy, why aren't the militaries and intelligence services of every nation on Homeline already operating everywhere? Only worse because this actually *is* a government that scored one.

If crazed dictator can put this together to steal enough nuclear weapons to start a war, the plan may end up failing when it runs up against the stealth ABM satellites, nuclear dampers and deflector shields all those other nations have stolen from somewhere else.

Any time you allow *any* non-Infinity Homeline power to play a role in a cross-time adventure plot, or indeed even have one that has any significant motivations from, or ramifications on Homeline at all, you risk highlighting the key logic hole in the setting - where is everybody else and why do the powers of Homeline let Infinity play this big a role? It's deliberately glossed over in the setting, because what's happening on Homeline is not the point, but if you are going to violate that by starting to pay attention to events at home, you are going to need to think it through somehow, and its really hard to do that in a way that leaves anything like Infinity (or even the concept of the Secret) intact. Piper sort made it work because the Paratime Police effectively were a major arm of a universal government, that also operates a universal brainwashing ministry, and even then there are cracks and hints that they don't *always* have it their way vis a vis various other licensing authorities, but it doesn't make even that much sense for Infinity.
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Old 12-28-2018, 11:46 AM   #62
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

That's basically the idea of the parallel: their control, while good, is not perfect, and this guy was the first with his motivation.

Since it's early on, the major powers, even with their superior resources, probably haven't been able to steal nuclear dampers, since those would come from advanced worlds (whereas warheads can come from any '60s era hell world you care to name).

There's two kinds of jump nukes, of course: the crude door-kicker one, and the expensive single-use atomic conveyor. If our dictator has reverse-engineered conveyors, then he'll probably go with the latter, otherwise, he'll use the former (which is just a guy in a conveyor with a stack of nukes he tosses out the door).

But all that is justification for the setting, really. Once homeline goes caput, the secret dies on hundreds of worlds as everyone with a conveyor flees wildly. Every nation which was formerly using a conveyor under close supervision now has a gun to the tech's head and tells them to bring the Prime Minister to the closest worldline that isn't radioactive, if you please.

I guess what you get is everybody going swagman.
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Old 12-28-2018, 02:29 PM   #63
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

When I read "jump nuke" I was thinking it was going to be a parachronic version of nuclear pulse propulsion, or maybe controlled temporary Merlin hellstorms. Something you could come up with sometime during the Cold War.
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Old 12-28-2018, 07:10 PM   #64
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

I imagine a nuclear bomb covered in runes with a single chair adjacent and inside a magical diagram connecting it to the bomb.

I like it.
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Old 12-28-2018, 07:37 PM   #65
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

We can also imagine a timeline in which the usual "Cold War went Hot" thing happened, but instead of being vaporized the targets were transported to other worlds/timelines.

Fast forward a few hundred/thousand years and you have an explanation for why humans are everywhere in the multiverse.
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Old 12-30-2018, 09:43 AM   #66
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

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That's basically the idea of the parallel: their control, while good, is not perfect, and this guy was the first with his motivation.
Sure, it's perfectly plausible for the invention of parachronics to trigger a global disaster. The thing I object to is trying to squeeze it into the Infinity setting.

This is an issue that comes up a lot - people want to use the Infinity background, but *also* want to write plots where the players are the first to cope with some particular consequence or threat of cross-world travel. But Infinity is an *established* cross-time setting, they've necessarily dealt with all the "first time" missions and really fundamental issues already. We often aren't told what their solutions are, and many of the ones we are told make no sense (like, say, the ICops that form the campaign frame), but accepting that they exist and mostly worked anyway is an implicit requirement of the background.
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Old 12-30-2018, 01:30 PM   #67
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

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This is an issue that comes up a lot - people want to use the Infinity background, but *also* want to write plots where the players are the first to cope with some particular consequence or threat of cross-world travel.
I do wonder why, if someone wants that for their Infinity, they don't just move up the date of gaining parachronics? There's a lot of adventure potential there.
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Old 12-30-2018, 01:48 PM   #68
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

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Sure, it's perfectly plausible for the invention of parachronics to trigger a global disaster. The thing I object to is trying to squeeze it into the Infinity setting.
You realize this is the thread for squeezing things into the Infinity setting?

I know that RAW Infinity fixed the problem "somehow." The conceit for my proposal is: "what if they didn't?" That's why I mentioned that it happened early on in parachronic history, since if the problem couldn't be solved, someone would exploit it soon.

I think it results in a pretty cool setting, where it's kind of post-apocalyptic and kind of not, with the closest thing to an authority figure being a refugee coalition from Homeline. How does Centrum react to being, in essence, completely right? Can the PCs help restore and rebuild a civilization that's scattered across the cosmos?

It needs to have an explanation based around crosstime travel not in an attack on the justifications of the setting, but rather to build on the ideas of the setting and fit the context of the thread.


Anyway, back to the topic, I like the idea of tying worldlines to some material artifacts. A magic-heavy setting might have it be something like a crystal, or a myst-esque tome, which enables transport to one specific worldline. A more weird-science approach might call for an artifact of significant import, such as most reality shards. A psi-heavy setting probably means you'll need a living human from that worldline to direct an artificial jump.

A semi-realistic superscience would probably work with any old rock from the target, but maybe you need exotic matter to power the jump. Maybe that exotic matter coalesces into convenient orange crystals on some unstable worldlines? Maybe you need some kind of mass spectrometer to prepare such samples in order to make conveyors or projectors work?

Fun elements include holding worldlines hostage by stealing the token that allows easy access, arcane rules about how people can use said artifacts and what gets left behind, and complicated missions involving back-route crosstime travel in order to retrieve new keystones.
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Old 12-30-2018, 02:20 PM   #69
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

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I do wonder why, if someone wants that for their Infinity, they don't just move up the date of gaining parachronics? There's a lot of adventure potential there.
There is absolutely a lot of adventure potential in the first few years after the discovery of parachronics, and it could go in all sorts of directions. The problem with using the Infinity setting there is that if you move back that far (or move of the discovery to quite recently) you don't have most of the background

Stuff that disappears include the Icops and ISWAT, Miracle Workers, the global agreement on an Infinity monopoly, massive established trade that makes the Infinite Worlds really important, agreements on how imported intellectual property works, a long enough contact with Centrum or the Cabal for everybody to regard each other as established rivals with sort of known intentions.... A lot of the IW background hinges on the fact that cross-time travel has been around for a while and is now substantially *regularized*. Sure the details of any particular mission may be surprising, but you know how things work in general - starting from the fact that these trips can be "missions".
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Old 12-30-2018, 02:33 PM   #70
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

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A lot of the IW background hinges on the fact that cross-time travel has been around for a while and is now substantially *regularized*.
Yeah, but the specific implementation is not to my tastes. Hence why I started a thread for alternate versions.
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