Antarctic Space Nazis Across the Multiverse

[dcarson]

Going the northern route also gives a chance of finding the polar opening to the hollow Earth. There are so many wonderful pseudo sciences that the NAZIs believed in.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by dcarson

Going the northern route also gives a chance of finding the polar opening to the hollow Earth. There are so many wonderful pseudo sciences that the NAZIs believed in.

Yes, of course, there is that. Though you would likely have to fly over the arctic circle to do that, perhaps over over the Pole itself, which seems riskier than what you want for the first circumnavigation. Time enough for other voyages of discovery as distinct journeys. Probably polar exploration would benefit greatly from a base somewhere far north, but in an area with good water and access to plentiful supplies of food, with enough personnel to allow landing an airship and resupplying it.

One might say, however, that for Antarctic Space Nazis who already have magical access over the World Tree to Jötunheim, a Hollow Earth filled with dinosaurs, inside a frozen planet, it's nothing short of greedy to look for a polar opening to another Hollow Earth. I mean, how many dinosaurs does one culture of Antarctic Space Nazis really need?

[adm]

Just caught up, a few thoughts;

1) Panzerfausts;
Use a contact fuse, likely a simple primer. Have it protected from accidental detonation by a US Army style grenade pin.

2) Steam Engines;
Water wheels can do most of what a steam engine can, and will take less of your initial set up weight budget.

3) Nuclear materials differences;
The main difference that would matter would be isotope ratios.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by adm

Just caught up, a few thoughts;

1) Panzerfausts;
Use a contact fuse, likely a simple primer. Have it protected from accidental detonation by a US Army style grenade pin.

2) Steam Engines;
Water wheels can do most of what a steam engine can, and will take less of your initial set up budget.

3) Nuclear materials differences;
The main difference that would matter would be isotope ratios.

1) Good idea. Would a primitive contact fuze that anyone would be willing to carry, pin or no pin, reliably explode on contact with squishy flesh, as opposed to metal vehicles? The mature TL7 technology RPG-7 does not always do that. I've seen pictures of men with penetrating wounds where the missile is still live ordnance, interfering with treatment.

2) Anywhere water wheels are possible, they'll be used. The ASNs just have such obscene energy requirements trying to go from pre-modern levels of 'power' being synonomous with animals or humans exerting themselves to a TL7 society, as fast as possible. Not to mention the secret Faustian bargain which strongly encourages ASN leaders to always ensure a sizable energy surplus.

Access to untold billions of tons of coal, with the top layers available uding nothing more than shovels, is too tempting to ignore. Sure, the ASNs want to upgrade to some better technology to derive electrical energy from coal products, whatever best suits their engineers with power plant backgrounds and their specific circumstances.

Before they can build enough such advanced power plants, though, I predict that this much easily available coal and an industry that gives off coal gas as a byproduct will lead to a lot of the Age of Steam technologies of Earth's fairly recent past being duplicated on Jötunheim and even to a degree in cities on Germania Hyperborea. Steam engines for early industrial applications, mining, clearing forests, farms, gas lighting and cooking, etc.

3) For Earth and Germania Hyperborea, close enough, differences amount to what you'd expect for uranium from different mines on Earth. For Jötunheim, depends on precision, but they'd probably figure out that there were reasons to believe that the radioactive materials were significantly younger, which in itself is consistent with a pseudo-Mesozoic look, even it there's a lot of magic around and the Jötunheim world seems to be the inside of a frozen Hollow Earth snowball planet, with the cold on the outside seemingly having started to seep in through the 'poles' of the Hollow Earth.

As far as geologists and climatologists can tell, Jötunheim used to be significantly warmer than it is today, with reasons to believe that on a geological scale, the Hollow Earth is going through a rapid cooling phase. Given the high volcanism which seems endemic and to have been present for much longer than the cooling, with those measurable factors inside the Hollow Earth that could theoretically affect global climate seeming fairly unchanged, a rational explanation eludes ASN scientists.

It seems that the seas are freezing at the 'poles', the 'sea levels' are receding and tropical areas are becoming sub-tropical for no better reason than because the poles are somehow removing heat from the ecosystem. Of course, as a Hollow Earth with three magical 'suns' and an orientation where 'up' is 'down' doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, maybe inexplicable climactic variations are normal, in Hollow Earth.

In any case, at least one area where the ASNs are settling is actually growing more salubrious to humans with time. In previous eras, the local terrain seems to have been coal forest and the later alternated between shallow sea bed and vast tropical salt marshes (which would probably have had problems with disease and fresh water). The shallow seas seem to have had periods of where there were extensive anerobic dead zones.

The current terrain, however, features new fields lying below rolling hills (which would have been islands during periods of flooding) and warm, but not unlivably so, weather, a lot drier than it seems to have been, more like the touristy parts of Florida or Hawai than the steamy wet hell it must have been. Best of all, the receding of sea levels now has several rivers running through the lowlands, while they must have had very different courses in past millennia. It's really too bad about the volcanism, foul-smelling (but not immediately life-threatening) air and the fauna, ranging from blood-sucking insects with a bite you really feel all the way to the monsters.

The fact that the local climate at several ASN settlement sites is improved by the fairly rapid changes doesn't change the fact that elsewhere on Jötunheim, many species of flora and fauna are ill-adapted for the new conditions they find themselves in and the evidence strongly suggests that while Jötunheim still looks full of life to ASN colonists from Earth, biodiversity and the total living biomass have fallen precipitiously in what might be only a short time, geologically. Indeed, there is reason to believe that some zones that were habitable within a few decades of the ASNs arrival are now vast death zones, the local life having proven entirely unable to adapt at all.

Species that are at least adaptable enough to migrate in search of new lands more suitable are moving into the ASNs territories in numbers that they find most annoying. As there is abundant plant life in their neighbourhoods, herds of herbivores keep moving in and following them, scary predatory species.

[adm]

Originally Posted by Icelander

1) Good idea. Would a primitive contact fuze that anyone would be willing to carry, pin or no pin, reliably explode on contact with squishy flesh, as opposed to metal vehicles? The mature TL7 technology RPG-7 does not always do that. I've seen pictures of men with penetrating wounds where the missile is still live ordnance, interfering with treatment...

If you have reliable enough primers for rifles, you should have reliable enough contact fuses. It's timed fuses where you get complexity.

RPG-7s are designed to attack metal vehicles. Yes a contact fuse can be set to work on surfaces that are softer.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by adm

If you have reliable enough primers for rifles, you should have reliable enough contact fuses. It's timed fuses where you get complexity.

RPG-7s are designed to attack metal vehicles. Yes a contact fuse can be set to work on surfaces that are softer.

Great!

Then work parties that need to go anywhere outside of the fortified and defended cities of Jötunheim can carry a simple 'Drachenfaust'.

[Icelander]

How much can I fiddle with things like gravity, atmospheric pressure and oxygen concentrations in Jötunheim without causing the ASNs to be unable to build normal cities and carry out normal industry there?

I want slightly thicker air, lower gravity and greater oxygenation, all to encourage bigger and more powerful creatures that don't lumber, but move pretty fast. And, of course, I want to encourage 'dragons' that can fly like bats or smaller birds, possibly being able to more-or-less hover as they feed and to easily snatch man-sized creatures and fly away with them, at least within the stronger mana zones, where some of the native wildlife can draw energy from mana, enabling incredibly powerful metabolisms, and are besides far stronger for their weight than natural muscle yields.

Even under Earth-like conditions and without magic, recent scholarship suggests some pretty scary and huge pterosaurs that are perfectly capable of flight, but there's no reason not to also feature creatures that could never have lived on any Earth. And as long as I don't change anything which would make ASN industry on Jötunheim impractical, making the world slightly more alien is clearly a net benefit.

[Icelander]

What kind of lifestyle, profession or culture at TL2-3 would translate into having skill sets that make a native of Germania Hyperborea able to perform some useful work as ASNs start bootstrapping local technological and economic infrastructure?

What Earth cultures of TL2-3 would produce the best prepared workers for the various fields that the ASNs need to rely on native labour in part?

What kind of TL2-3 professions would best translate over to working under the direction of TL7 engineers, technicians and other experts?

And what are the most important fields where the ASNs need local labour, more sophisticated than merely strong backs, in order to bootstrap local industry up to TL5+ as fast as possible?

[johndallman]

Start with brick-making and brick-laying. The higher TL versions of these will be conceptually comprehensible to TL2-3 craftsmen, although they'll take a while to get used to the higher standards of quality being demanded. Stone-masonry has also not changed a great deal, although higher TL tools make it easier.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Start with brick-making and brick-laying. The higher TL versions of these will be conceptually comprehensible to TL2-3 craftsmen, although they'll take a while to get used to the higher standards of quality being demanded. Stone-masonry has also not changed a great deal, although higher TL tools make it easier.

In a world before or more likely without Hellenes or Romans and if we concentrate on what we might call Greater Central Europe and environs, where would the ASNs be able to find large numbers of brick-makers and masons?

None of the ASN gates appear to lead to parts of the world of Germania Hyperborea south of the Danube analogue or north of the 50th parallel north (no gate I've proposed yet is north of the Owl Mountains in modern Poland, I think). The most westerly gates they use are near their original settlement in Westphalia, nothing, I believe, west of the Rhine. There are gates as far east as the west shore of the Black Sea and in several locations on the Danube, but those are very much frontier areas and unsettled for the first decades of ASN settlement unless there are tremendously important resources there justifying a town that far away. Early ASNs did not settle east of the one great settlement that they founded in the analogue to Glatzer Land / Kłodzko Land in Lower Silesia in modern Poland, on the Czech border.

When begin planning settlement in 1943-1945, the ASNs only had three gates that led to Germania Hyperborea, i.e. the Wewelsburg one, the Der Riese one and a more convoluted path through the World Tree that led to an area where modern Romania would be, on the Black Sea shore, where they raid for slaves, but decided not to settle. They also had gates to Jötunheim and to a small demiplane containing a mystical analogue of Wewelsburg, though until they settled, the mystical realm around Wahr Wewelsburg existed more in potentia than reality.

At settlement in their multi-world Neue Reich, the ASNs added the Externsteine analogue on Germania Hyperborea as a major access point to the World Tree and perhaps their major 'highway' through the multiverse. Any gate can lead there, with sufficient knowledge of the World Tree and the magical lore of the Irminsulen. Some pathways, however, are long and arduous enough for anyone but masters of the occult ways to be better served to avoid them and rely instead on established routes that link two worlds or, more rarely, two points on the same world (this exists, but the travel is often longer and more challenging than a route from Germania Hyperborea to another world entirely)

The ASNs have added many small Irminsul pathways between their magical demiplane and the first settlement around where Paderborn would be, and discovered many other ways through the World Tree that lead through gates at various legendary locations. The ASN gates are still heavily concentrated in historical 'Germany' and not even all of Germany, at least not yet, although quests are ongoing for gates that might exist at analogues to various legendary places from Germanic mythology.

The first ASN settlements were heavily concentrated in Westphalia (mostly around where the Wewelsburg, Paderborn and the Externsteine are in our world) and the Owl Mountains of Kłodzko Land, in Lower Silesia by the Czech border. Lesser concentrations of ASNs later emerge around other gates or in vital geographic areas linking resources with gates, leading to settlement of the Middle to Lower Rhine and in the Black Forest, several outposts and towns in Saxony, and, even later still and with new gate discoveries, perhaps settlement of gate-towns on the Danube.

There is a gate which the ASNs have known about from 1944 that leads to the mouth of the Danube, but travel there was moderately difficult for anyone but healthy and courageous soldiers, at least for the initial trips, and the lack of local resources and distance from the other ASN areas meant that it was just used as a military outpost and staging area for slave raids, not a civilian settlement. Even when travel to it through the World Tree was simplified with new discoveries by ASN occultists in the first years of settlement, that just meant easier transport of slaves and perhaps the odd horse for research and breeding purposes (moving horses through would have been extremely bothersome on any scale, for that gate, at least), unless there are some vital resources at the Danube Delta I haven't thought about.

Anyway, given those geographic constraints, where might ASNs be finding good sources of skilled slaves in various trades they need and just generally people with cultures that make learning to function in an industrializing society easier?

Vast swathes of Central Europe are dominated by a bewildering variety of Hallstatt-esque and La Tené like societies, many of whom speak some form of not always mutually intelligable pseudo-Celtic languages, but by no means all of them. Such societies also extend into Iberia (existing alongside a confusing array of culturally distinct tribes and polities that speak many languages that befuddle ASN philologists), some places in Southern Europe and even further afield in all directions except north.

In general, the north gets progressively less civilized and there are peoples in the far north that don't rate TL2-3, but rather TL1 and even TL0. It may well be that the Germanic tribes on the lands of the ASNs were poor in material culture because they live far away from the active trade routes and more rapid cultural exchange around the analogue Mediterranean, not because of any active anti-German prejudice that crept into the sorcerous shaping of this world, if indeed it is not a natural world.

As the history doesn't match up with Earth, despite similarities, any real-world culture existing before 0 CE in a geographic location accessible from the areas analogues to those the ASNs control, might exist on Germania Hyperborea. I don't pretend to have decided on the exact demographics and ethno-cultural makeup of the entire world.

My PCs have, in a past campaign, never even actually visited this world and only met exactly one group of slaves-to-be from what the ASN dub Germania Hyperborea, whom they rescued from the Antarctic Space Nazis, and those people were from certain alternate cultures (the group came from the same general area, but not the same exact settlements), from which I have extrapolated those parts of the world mentioned so far, but places I haven't mentioned might have received only minimal thought, or never even occurred to me.

So, by all means, anyone reading, please suggest cultures or polities that the ASNs have strong practical reasons to interact with after they start settling, whether or not those particular natives fit into any of the Nazi racial political narratives.