Catalog of the Weird Parallels

[Culture20]

Originally Posted by RageWalrus

Hardrade-6 and Strieber-5: Hardrade-6 is a Q4 TL5 world where Harald Hardrade rather than William the Conqueror claimed the throne of England. The current year is 1801, and Hardrade’s Anglo-Norway is engaged in a global conflict with the Second Yuan Dynasty over Africa and the Americas. Strieber-5 is a Q7 TL3 world where a global Ice Age has been happening since around 1300. Civilization has collapsed and with every lengthening winter more people starve. These two worlds should be utterly unrelated, but when they people of Hardrade-6 sleep they dream of a specific other person on Strieber-5, and vice versa. Since the population is larger on Hardrade-6, multiple people dream about the same person from Strieber-5.

Enterprising people could use networks of dreamers for long range communication if they could find groups that dream of the same person and the person that the Strieber person dreams of. The concept that the dreams are real secondary lives should be commonplace since they are shared. Learning the other world's skills shouldn't be difficult considering it's a partial second life you've lived, albeit as an observer.

Vox: Starting with his ascension on September 18th, 14 AD anything said by the Emperor Tiberius could be heard by everyone everywhere in the world as if he were standing 5 feet to their right. The same thing would happen to Caligula, and so for every Roman Emperor after. The current year is 1314, and everyone in the world is privy to the conversations and personal musings of Byzantine Emperor Andronikos II and Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV.

I assume the emperors are aware of this. If so, an emperor could easily become the best teacher ever, standardizing Latin across the globe, even in cultures that have never seen a Roman. As a side effect, people on the Pacific probably shift to become nocturnal as there is a guy speaking (sometimes shouting) in the middle of the night.

[ericthered]

Comments on the dreaming worlds:

You will probably learn some things from the other world.

Language will be a big one. Most languages will exist only on one world or on the other. But if you dream about the same person every night, you may learn their language. Which means random chunks of the population will be able to converse with each other.

Cultural exchange will also be interesting: you will learn a great deal about a culture that's not your own.

The specifics of your dream target are interesting. Do Children dream of other children, or do they get taken around to battles, bars, brothels and who knows what else? When your target dies, who do you switch to?

Attending schools and apprenticeships won't be useful if you're not in a state to properly learn what's going on. And you won't get a lot of the physical skills that you need.

I can see newspapers entirely devoted to what's going on in the other world though.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Culture20

Enterprising people could use networks of dreamers for long range communication if they could find groups that dream of the same person and the person that the Strieber person dreams of.

How would that work? Actually I think a lot of the comments on this are assuming something distinctly unlike dreams. Dreaming about someone does not mean you are seeing their entire life, or reading their mind, and certainly does not mean you are uploading their memories or controlling their actions!

For the learning things tangent, I might be willing to stretch "real" dreams to justifying a default in something you've seen in dreams but not in reality, but that's about it. We're talking about a fraction of an hour a night of watching something non-interactive that isn't structured to teach you anything. I suppose that might generously stretch to a character point a decade.

[Culture20]

Originally Posted by malloyd

How would that work?

As an experiment from the H side (assuming the dreamer dreams by experiencing the sensations of the counterpart):
An H person stumbles upon someone else who had the exact same dream; not just someone from the same tribe from S (that's rare, but not unheard of), but everything the same. Then one of them reaches the conclusion (falsely) that the S person must dream about him too. Eventually people talk about their dreams, so names might get passed back and forth between dreamer and subject until connections are found, and some S people who serve as dream foci could functional announcers: S1 dreams about H1 saying "tell S2 such and such" when S1 talks to S2, anyone experiencing S2 from the H side would know the message. It's not internet speed, but it beats a lot of communication methods.

Actually I think a lot of the comments on this are assuming something distinctly unlike dreams. Dreaming about someone does not mean you are seeing their entire life, or reading their mind, and certainly does not mean you are uploading their memories or controlling their actions!

If it's just dreaming about someone in that the character appears in scenarios your mind creates, then it's not particularly spectacular, and utilmately pointless. In fact, it's virtually impossible to discover that such a connection exists even by world jumpers. The only clue would be names and cultural cross pollination over time.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by RageWalrus

Vox: Starting with his ascension on September 18th, 14 AD anything said by the Emperor Tiberius could be heard by everyone everywhere in the world as if he were standing 5 feet to their right. The same thing would happen to Caligula, and so for every Roman Emperor after...

Consequences of this include:

1. Emperors start doing all, as in all, of their business in writing.
2. Emperors start abdicating quite rapidly, so as to get some privacy.
3. Messengers arrive from China, offering to exchange the Emperor's head for an equal weight of gold, so that we can get some sleep.
4. Rome gives up having emperors, as the alternative is to fight the entire world.

[TGLS]

Or 5. The praetorian guard becomes an elite guard of the deaf, and Roman Emperors begin screaming to defend Rome.

[Jasonft]

Soundtrack - Humans on Soundtrack are continuously followed by distant music that changes in content depending on current/ near future events and volume depending on the individual's level of emotion and concentration. It is, in effect, a worldwide granting of Oracle/ Intuition to everyone who can actually hear the music.

Most of the time, and for most people, the music is something they would recognize and find pleasing. Exceptions seem to exist for people who have Fate/ Destiny/ Luck as their soundtracks are notably louder and can often clearly be heard by others.

Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly after all, events with far reaching effects almost always generate their *own* soundtracks that are loud enough to be heard no matter the circumstances. The dropping of the Hiroshima bomb and the beginning of the Atomic Age was notable for being one of the few times ever that soundtracks stopped worldwide (while the bomb was in free fall).

Out time agents, so far as anyone has been able to determine, universally find it hard to hide from opposing out time agents because such meetings invariably are determined important enough to generate an independent soundtrack. Hiring talented (and quiet) locals to do your dirty work is recommended by Infinity Patrol experts.

[PTTG]

A skerry of a dozen worlds, each radically different from the next. Some are high mana, most no-mana. In some, psionics works, in other not at all. Two have weird-science-based ultra-tech, and one has normal modern tech and Normal mana.

Despite the deep structural differences, the history, language, and population of all twelve worlds is identical. Each world has, as far as anyone can tell, an exact one-to-one correlation of people with the same genetics, name, and overall personality on each world.

Besides the massive changes in physical laws, the biggest difference is that people do not have the same social roles from world to world. A king in one world has a duplicate who is a pilot in annother, a doctor in a third, and a farmer in a fourth. These worlds stay in lockstep, and if an assassin named Darso stabs a king named Narid in a medieval world, a Doctor named Darso will accidentally kill a patient named Narid with a scalpel in a modern world, a pilot will die in an argument with a baggage handler, and a farmer will fall on his neighbor's scythe.

Visitors to any of the worlds must be extremely careful. Nobody knows what will happen if they get involved in history.

[Emerald Cat]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Despite the deep structural differences, the history, language, and population of all twelve worlds is identical. Each world has, as far as anyone can tell, an exact one-to-one correlation of people with the same genetics, name, and overall personality on all three worlds.

I thought there were 12 worlds.

Otherwise, this one looks interesting.

[PTTG]

Yeah, typo from an earlier version.

The worlds naturally have the same number of people, which is about 800 million. This is quite large for some and quite small for others. They all featured a massive war about 40 years ago, and a second, smaller war ten years ago which ended in an uneasy peace.

On all worlds, society is broken up into city-states rather than nations, and there is a complicated web of alliances and treaties that maintains some level of international order. This helps explain how history can be connected as it is over the broad spectrum of worlds.

1: TL 2+3 (subaquatic magic). The main sapient species is an aquatically adapted humanoid. Normal Mana and fairly common Magery.

2: TL 7. Despite different surface configuration, Human society is shockingly similar to 1950s Earth, although tech is more static and specific cultures are "scrambled."

3: TL 8, TL 9 in weapons, armor, and micromanufacturing tech. People live in corporate enclaves rather than city-states, but the alliances and other deals are all the same.

4: TL unclear, rough estimate based on the standard of living is TL 7. Horses are main transportation method, yet nuclear fusion is a common power source. Gunpowder is unknown, but combat lasers are standard. While overall standard of living is similar from one city to the other, weird scientists are very much the resident "wizards" of this society, making technology vary wildly from place to place.

5: TL 4+2 (Popular magic) Magic keeps the cities alive despite the harsh global winters and scorching summers of this world. High mana.

6: TL 3, amid very high-tech ruins. It's not clear what left the ruins behind, but it is clear it isn't human. The ruins, though unpowered, are not decaying, only.... sleeping.

7: TL 4 verging on TL 5. A strange form of ice is not only lighter than water, but also lighter than air, and it melts at about 60 degrees Celsius. It is found only in the polar regions under deep glaciers, but its extraction has already begun to fuel the production of many new designs of airship.

8: ~TL 10?. The "People" are computer programs running in a simulation of a TL 6 society that is otherwise a "normal" instance of this skery The world the computers themselves are in consists of a smother world packed with solar panels and server farms. The world of the simulation has a large number of simplifications that are merely a fact of life for the inhabitants. For instance, water is simulated as marble-like balls until it hits a natural body of water - a glasslike plane.

9: TL 5. A natural cloudlike phenomenon, or perhaps something more esoteric, has resulted in no sunlight reaching ground level, but mostly normal surface temperatures. Artificial light sources are the key to modern civilization. For some reason, plants still work.

10: TL 8+2 (magic). Normal mana appeared over a decade after the great war; everyone born after the awakening has magery.

11: TL 7. The only mass-market media is literature, and in general society revolves around the written word.

12: TL 4. Low mana, very rare magery, although practice allows mages to gain levels. Wizards are powerful kings, each one a master of a city-state.