New Reality Seeds

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by somecallmetim

I ran a GURPS Prisoner game a long time backwhere the Village was a more sinister crosstime power's equivalent to Coventry. It nicely explained why none of the inmates could identify a common enemy or even agree on what year it was. The power in question had kept crosstime travel a secret even to most on their home line, but had used the resources it provides (technological, material, and informational) to subvert every institution with any real power there. On other worlds they established lesser analogues to their main organization to subvert them. They had a cabal trying to subvert King Richard and abort the Magna Carta to create an absolute monarchy under the heirs of King John and used the Terror to root out enemies in Revolutionary France (which conveniently lets the PCs team up with Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel to fight them). Their home world looked like our history, but was riven through with seemingly opposed conspiracies taking orders from the bad guys, who called themselves the Illuminati.

You have my interest and I would like to purchase your newsletter.

[Phil Masters]

There's a basic problem with the IW set-up that all sorts of factions, including organised crime, dodgy intelligence organisations, and some frankly pretty disorganised criminals, have access to conveyors and even projectors - but the really scary potential misusers somehow don't. So you get to chase Mafiosi and swagmen across the timelines because that's cool, but Al Quaeda never get to jump into an armoury somewhere, pick up a nuke (or a vial of plague, or just a few FAE warheads), and skip them back into Homeline Washington (or Tel Aviv, or Infinity HQ).

Sure, that says that the I-Cops must prioritise real hard and focus accordingly - to the point of letting Mafia activities and such slide, because politics and limited resources - but you're still then left in one of those "we have to be lucky every time, they only have to be lucky once" nightmares.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by patchwork

I think Coventry was pretty transparently designed to let people play Prisoner in IW ^^ and it's one of my favorites >.>

We were thinking of the same address.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by somecallmetim

I ran a GURPS Prisoner game a long time backwhere the Village was a more sinister crosstime power's equivalent to Coventry. It nicely explained why none of the inmates could identify a common enemy or even agree on what year it was. The power in question had kept crosstime travel a secret even to most on their home line, but had used the resources it provides (technological, material, and informational) to subvert every institution with any real power there. On other worlds they established lesser analogues to their main organization to subvert them. They had a cabal trying to subvert King Richard and abort the Magna Carta to create an absolute monarchy under the heirs of King John and used the Terror to root out enemies in Revolutionary France (which conveniently lets the PCs team up with Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel to fight them). Their home world looked like our history, but was riven through with seemingly opposed conspiracies taking orders from the bad guys, who called themselves the Illuminati.

Deeply cool! There's a book Time Raiders I think, by another game company, that would support that campaign nicely. The conspiracy couldn't change history, so they would change what it meant.

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

There's a basic problem with the IW set-up that all sorts of factions, including organised crime, dodgy intelligence organisations, and some frankly pretty disorganised criminals, have access to conveyors and even projectors - but the really scary potential misusers somehow don't.

Lots of settings have that problem, though. You only need one near-c relativistic impact to ruin your day, and when everyone has an FTL spaceship...

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

There's a basic problem with the IW set-up that all sorts of factions, including organised crime, dodgy intelligence organisations, and some frankly pretty disorganised criminals, have access to conveyors and even projectors - but the really scary potential misusers somehow don't. So you get to chase Mafiosi and swagmen across the timelines because that's cool, but Al Quaeda never get to jump into an armoury somewhere, pick up a nuke (or a vial of plague, or just a few FAE warheads), and skip them back into Homeline Washington (or Tel Aviv, or Infinity HQ).

Sure, that says that the I-Cops must prioritise real hard and focus accordingly - to the point of letting Mafia activities and such slide, because politics and limited resources - but you're still then left in one of those "we have to be lucky every time, they only have to be lucky once" nightmares.

I suppose keeping the conveyors expensive and Centrum a real threat, i.e. if you can get a conveyor, you've enough reality orientation not to risk suicide.

I admit, that's a weak reed.

[David Johnston2]

The Huston Plan: The adoption of the Huston Plan after Hoover's demise means that the United States government forms a new "Homeland Security Agency" with a broad and secretly illegal mandate to investigate and suppress "subversion" going so far as to build confinement camps for anti-war protesters. Watergate never happens. The reporters are dealt with before it's an issue.

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

The Huston Plan: The adoption of the Huston Plan after Hoover's demise means that the United States government forms a new "Homeland Security Agency" with a broad and secretly illegal mandate to investigate and suppress "subversion" going so far as to build confinement camps for anti-war protesters. Watergate never happens. The reporters are dealt with before it's an issue.

Interesting. Could make for a fun world where crosstime infiltrators hang out in the comparatively safe USSR or China.

[Gedrin]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

I suppose keeping the conveyors expensive and Centrum a real threat, i.e. if you can get a conveyor, you've enough reality orientation not to risk suicide.

I admit, that's a weak reed.

Possible Reasons:
The detection method isn't effective against small disruptions. Perhaps it's tracking events that create highly divergent echoes. Maybe it's mystical divination or guardian spirits that don't bother with anything under kilo-death scale.

Response resources are limited. If the "detector" is awesome, maybe they don't have enough agents to do the job. Given the potentially exotic nature of threats, teams might require a set of abilities that are hard to assemble in quantities needed to do the job.

ICop policy actively rewards illicit organizations with "trip tickets" in exchange for actionable intel on major disruptive cross time activity. HOOK: Criminal intelligence service that actively hunts these events for the purpose of selling the info to other criminal organizations that need trip tickets.

The resources and knowledge may be there to stop all illicit activity, but for a variety of reasons, they choose not to do so, as a matter of formal policy. It might be that they've looked at cross time and decided that many plans are better than one. Maybe wide knowledge of conveyors and travel are of use when The Secret is finally recognized as pretty much blown (Steel isn't really scarier than Great Old Ones and Super Nazis). Perhaps it's just the utility of black markets and back channels.

Homeline's conveyor tech, all of it, the fundamental physics, can be controlled by a/the ICops, and the don't want anyone to know. Maybe it's a machine. Maybe a super. Perhaps conveyors don't really work, but do draw the attention of a being that can move others cross time.

Homeline is a Puzzle World: There are countless echoes where Homeline is destroyed/derailed by cross time terrorists, but it never happens on Homeline.

[fchase8]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

I would imagine that most intelligence agencies, and even Infinity, Inc., have a whole bunch of algorithms paging through commodities purchases and resource allocations, looking for signs that somebody is building a projector.

In that sense, nuclear non-proliferation provides a decent model. If somebody in, say, Uzbekistan, started to buy uranium, that would create a blip and intelligence agencies would start making some pretty energetic inquiries.

About the only people who might get away with that are national governments, and even then it could be tough. After all, Iraq no longer has a functional nuclear reactor -- the aforementioned Israelis made sure of that. Given what's going on in that country, now, there is no way the Israelis regret that decision.

I'd imagine that, in the case of our putative Uzbek, a quiet little special op team would probably show up in the middle of the night and do to them what we did to Bin Laden. However, if that fails, a half-dozen stealth bombers with bunker-busters might pay a call, and those who sent the sorties would adopt the Israeli response -- "Yep, sure did, and if you wanna make something of it, we're right here."

This would be an excellent mission for some branch of the I-Cops - and would be made easier by being able to go to an empty Uzbekistan, then jump over to Homeline's, and jump back after finishing.

What exactly is need to build a parachronic device is still vague (beyond power requirements) - it is still essentially super-science. But it would require something(s) that Infinity could track. Plus search for the power usage, like looking for indoor pot farms.

Originally Posted by patchwork

I think Coventry was pretty transparently designed to let people play Prisoner in IW ^^ and it's one of my favorites >.>

Originally Posted by somecallmetim

I ran a GURPS Prisoner game a long time backwhere the Village was a more sinister crosstime power's equivalent to Coventry. It nicely explained why none of the inmates could identify a common enemy or even agree on what year it was. The power in question had kept crosstime travel a secret even to most on their home line, but had used the resources it provides (technological, material, and informational) to subvert every institution with any real power there. On other worlds they established lesser analogues to their main organization to subvert them. They had a cabal trying to subvert King Richard and abort the Magna Carta to create an absolute monarchy under the heirs of King John and used the Terror to root out enemies in Revolutionary France (which conveniently lets the PCs team up with Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel to fight them). Their home world looked like our history, but was riven through with seemingly opposed conspiracies taking orders from the bad guys, who called themselves the Illuminati.

I had never thought of this - so obvious, so awesome!

This would a great way of having Infinity be the 'bad guy', and to introduce Infinity to a non-Infinite Worlds campaign - have the character discover something he wasn't supposed to, then end up in Coventry with a whole bunch of other strange characters from strange places.

And Infinity probably wouldn't send Homeliners to Coventry - there are regular Homeline jails to send them to. So no one in 'the village' would know the whole Infinity background, just bits and pieces.

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

There's a basic problem with the IW set-up that all sorts of factions, including organised crime, dodgy intelligence organisations, and some frankly pretty disorganised criminals, have access to conveyors and even projectors - but the really scary potential misusers somehow don't. So you get to chase Mafiosi and swagmen across the timelines because that's cool, but Al Quaeda never get to jump into an armoury somewhere, pick up a nuke (or a vial of plague, or just a few FAE warheads), and skip them back into Homeline Washington (or Tel Aviv, or Infinity HQ).

Sure, that says that the I-Cops must prioritise real hard and focus accordingly - to the point of letting Mafia activities and such slide, because politics and limited resources - but you're still then left in one of those "we have to be lucky every time, they only have to be lucky once" nightmares.

Yeah, but that's true with all 'the world hangs in the balance' settings - supers, space, magical apocalypse, etc. In order for there to be adventures to play, there have to be stakes and risks. Yet the cool aspect of the setting (super powers, space travel, magic, etc.) has to be available enough for the players to get involved with it.

I suppose that Infinite Worlds does stretch it all, going from realism of shifting historical echoes to four-color worlds like Lizardia, because it's supposed to take in all sorts of worlds/settings. Even the enemies range from the complex view of Centrum to cross-time honest-to-god Nazis...