Alternate Crosstime Organizations

[dcarson]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

It occurs to me that someone able to bypass Coventry's travel restrictions and having a grudge against Infinity would find Coventry a fertile recruiting ground.

I'm not sure what the name of the organization would be, but the reaction of Infinity agents, not to mention the organization itself, to finding people they know were sent to Coventry (and that are clearly those individuals, not counterparts from other worlds) is likely to be pretty strong, something to be very deeply concerned about.

Interesting psyop against Infinity. Find the counterpart to someone sent to Coventry and give them enough briefing on the Coventry counterpart so that Infinity will think they are the same. Let Infinity come across them but help them escape after they realize they are a Coventry escapee.

[Mark Skarr]

Coventry Liberation Organization: Possessing a selection of world-jumping conveyances that are unknown to Infinity science, this group makes regular forays to Coventry to extract innocent victims of Homeline’s imperialistic dogma (they're happy to leave the actual criminals behind). Briefing them on methods to stay under Homeline’s radar, they repatriate as many of the victims as possible to their native worldliness. Failing that, with permission, they extract the victim’s families and take them to similar worlds where they can move back into a facsimile of their original life. Rescued scientists continually update and improve their options for travel, allowing for more and more exploration to occur whilst stymieing Infinity's ability to follow or track their operations.

[Flyndaran]

That name comes off sounding a bit too much like stereotypical terrorist groups, to me. I do like a fifth column for justice group that doesn't buy the propaganda of Homeline.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

That name comes off sounding a bit too much like stereotypical terrorist groups, to me. I do like a fifth column for justice group that doesn't buy the propaganda of Homeline.

I agree, I just couldn't come up with a better name.

I was thinking something funny like, "Airing Infinity's Laundry" but, that's too much of an inside joke.

[Flyndaran]

What would such a group call themselves? A Multi-Universal Brotherhood. Federation of Freedom. The Rescuers.

[fchase8]

I always imagined Coventry as kind of like The Village in The Prisoner - an on-the-surface nice place with lots of surveillance, weird people, and you can never leave. I really thought that The Village was the direct inspiration for Coventry.

But the way its set up in the books, I think that there's a wide latitude to how the GM wants to play Coventry. It could be a gulag, or an idyll. Or both, with varying different settlements on different continents.


Furthermore, I think Infinity/Homeline can be played a variety of ways. The books seem to lean into the idea that it's basically 'good,' but another point of view can make it seem very different. Kind of like Centrum.

The excuse in the books as to why Infinity keeps The Secret is that it doesn't want 'bad' worlds to get it - i.e., like exactly what happened on Reich-5. In the original GURPS Time Travel, a representative of Infinity even discussed keeping it from 'good' worlds, from pointing out that they could leak it to 'bad' worlds.

Mostly, Infinity is so spread out, a finite organization over infinite worlds, that it's just not powerful enough overall to benevolent or malevolent. It may kidnap, even kill some people, but it also saves others through Miracle Workers and I-Cops - but mostly, all its actions are a drop in the bucket of infinite worlds.

[Phil Masters]

The Infinite Worlds set-up was rather transparently created, in the original GURPS Time Travel, as a contrivance to excuse PCs running around between alternate histories, shooting stuff and having adventures. The 4e Basic Set then added arbitrary amounts of complexity and weirdness, to allow more types of much more weird and wacky alternate Earth, and thus to squeeze in more past GURPS publications. Ken Hite then sprinkled a load more eccentric fairy dust on top of that in Infinite Worlds.

The problem is that, exactly as with a lot dungeon fantasy (small d, small f) settings, a world designed to facilitate PCs having PC-ish adventures doesn't hold up too well under any sort of logical analysis (and may well turn out to have a bunch of morally queasy bits), and attempts to add detail and logical coherence end up struggling with those problems. (I mean, replace "a wizard did it" with "Van Zandt did it"...) Personally, I think that the best thing to do with the setting is to play with subsets of the material, and be ruthless about dumping other stuff and declaring it non-canon for the game. So you can have cautious exploration of alternate histories, with no bloody magic or psionics, The Secret being a matter of cautious pragmatism rather than grand policy, and Centrum being a shadowy, distant threat. Or you can make it a wacky expansion of the GURPS Cabal setting, with amoral wizards chasing after incomprehensible personal advantages, and Infinity and Centrum as clueless NPC twits with tragically restricted world-views. Or you can be unfortunate low-power psionic world-jumpers from what looks like the present day, trying to work out what the hell is going on while being chased by the transdimensional equivalents of the Cold War CIA and KGB.

Or, well, whatever. Just don't use everything in the books at once. That way, madness lies.

[Flyndaran]

That's why The Cabal works, in my opinion. They're evil, right on the face of it. Some kind of care about the world in general, humanity a smidge, and ultimately you can't hold dominion over "all" if monsters eat/destroy "all".

Actual good guys have a much harder hurdle of potential hypocrisy to overcome. I don't think any real nation counts as "the good guys" except in very specific time frames and missions. But I just can't see any humane way to justify life long internment camps for innocents.

[fchase8]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

The problem is that, exactly as with a lot dungeon fantasy (small d, small f) settings, a world designed to facilitate PCs having PC-ish adventures doesn't hold up too well under any sort of logical analysis (and may well turn out to have a bunch of morally queasy bits), and attempts to add detail and logical coherence end up struggling with those problems. (I mean, replace "a wizard did it" with "Van Zandt did it"...)

Love that analysis & comparison. Infinite Worlds is practically schizophrenic, and understandably so - there are so many worlds. Any attempt to unite most of the worlds of GURPS would be so.

I think Infinity would work if used on one sort of game, largely 'changing history' or 'alternate history spycraft.' But taking I-Cops from moving an Echo to Yrth would be too much. And any hypothetical Infinity would keep agents in the spheres that they're skilled in.

If one wants to have an adventure across the multiverse, across radically different types of games - and GURPS is the RPG system for that - have them be free agents, wandering around with a random conveyor or world-jumper.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

That name comes off sounding a bit too much like stereotypical terrorist groups, to me.

<snort> They probably would be a stereotypical terrorist group.