Infinite Worlds Timeline

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by quarkstomper

I have difficulty seeing our current Administration being happy with a stronger UN, and would suspect it would try to undermine Infinity Unlimited or rewrite the charter to give the US more control.

Personally, I agree. But the wildcard in this is Van Zandt's secret meeting with the security council, after which they emerged basically willing to give him whatever he asked for.

Frankly, this is a howling scarlet plot device and a quarter, albeit one with campaign potential. But so long as this Big Secret remains secret, one is allowed to assume that somebody was able to explain whatever-it-was to Bush and Cheney in sufficiently simple and impressive terms that they folded and told their supporters - including the Religious Right and the oil companies - to shut up and live with it.

On the other hand, since the resources of an infinite number of worlds would provide such benefit to Corporate America, to the economy and to the country as a whole, I'm sure most conservatives would support parachronic travel, even if it meant concessions to the UN.

At least until they noticed how disruptive of the status quo the Infinity Boom would actually be. But the book specifically assumes that very few people were bright enough to realise just how vast a change this technology represented. (Which I can just about buy. Even smart economists are prone to minimalist assumptions.)

On the third hand, would our current administration even exist in Homeline? The unveiling of such a big scientific discovery in 1998 would definitely make parachronic travel a campaign issue in 2000; it just might give Gore a "Nerd boost" to put him over the top. Or the Republicans might decide to nominate a candidate with a more tech-savvy image.

Historical inertia. The same way that the modern English language is a crosstime constant from Centrum to Yrth...

[quarkstomper]

Thanks for the thoughtful and helpful comments

Originally Posted by Captain-Captain

Question: What year did the historians insert their Oswald? Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union certainly got him a heavy look see by the FBI. They would have had to establish a paper trail for their guy fairly early in the game to survive that level of scrutiny.

Hee. I have to admit, this plot was a case where I was so dazzled by an audacious idea that I kind of glossed over the holes.

Logically, the historians could only have been working on this plot for a year or two, so they could not have inserted Oswald any earlier than that. They would have produced as much fake documentation as possible, but if our rouge tourist could have seen through it, then so could the FBI

(After the game it occured to me that perhaps I should have had the echo's version of Oswald die in Russia. Since our Oswald made a suicide attempt while he was trying to defect to the Soviet Union, this would make a logical point for a divergence. In the game, however, I just said that Oswald died in childhood)

The plot I finally came up with, and it has a lot of patches I made on the fly as I spotted the logic holes during gameplay, is this: the historians are operating under the assumption that the Homeline Oswald was a patsy being used by a conspiracy; they are inserting their own Oswald into this timeline as a stalking horse to bring the conspiracy out into the open. They did not originally intend to actually have their Oswald assassinate anybody, but the guy they picked to impersonate him went a little crazy and started to get too much into character.

Actually, it would have been in the historians' best interest to let us take the rouge tourist, but by that time they had kidnapped him themselves and when the our team showed up they decided they needed to cover their tracks further.

*sigh* When historians go bad, they are the worst of criminals!

I had originally planned to throw more confusion into the mix by having the President's parade route change at the last minute and not go anywhere near the Book Depository where everybody would be waiting for it; but as it turned out my group resolved the plot before the President even landed in Dallas.

Under close examination, my plot doesn't really hold water. But as I said, the idea was so audacious I was willing to buzz over the plot holes and hope the players wouldn't notice. And I could always blame any lapses of logic on those nutty historians.

[This Name is Taken]

All these ideas are nice and cinematic, but GURPS tends to be more down to Earth, even in crossworld dimension hopping silliness. So, here's how the closed session went.

Van Zandt: Gentlmen, to put it bluntly, I can make you all very very rich, richer than any human being has ever been before. I can share the wealth with the world, or cause a stock market crash the likes of which you've never seen!

Secretary General: You're bluffing!!

Van Zandt: *Smiling knowingly* That's what the LAST Secretary General said a few worlds back...

Secretary General: Where do we sign?

No monsters, no girbblies, no parachronic reality doodads, all just simple human greed. And now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

[Lord_Kjeran]

Chello!

Yep and knowing the UN and how corrupt it is.....I can see GREED factoring right on into it.

Tony

[Pesterfield]

Iraq (along with North Korea, Libya, Iran, Syria, Cuba and Burma) is still (or again) a rogue state in 2027.

I wonder what they're doing with parachronics? Probable trying to improve alternate versions of themselves. I could see North Korea and Cuba trying to contact alternate USSRs for funding and helping alternate Soviet States endure.

Iraq will probable try to expand in alt MidEast, maybe also attack altIsraels. Often being fought/competed with by Homeline Iran trying to do the same things. Maybe Syria as well.

[Qoltar]

Original question was timelines & Fictional versions of the Presidents - Right?

I see this as a possibility:
2000 = Gore wins Election

2004 = George W. Bush elected for his first term.

2008 ? = George W. Bush runs for his 2nd term, has challengers in the primary.

I'm only basing on the fact that the American electorate seems to go back & forth. 12 year of Reagan /Bush, then 12 years of Clinton/Gore, then Bush wins for the first time. (Hey now we have a good excuse for those Presidential templates we did a few weeks ago.)

Over the longer course of History ..american voting does go back and forth.

- E. W. Charlton

[cptbutton]

Resurrecting this thread, has anyone done this?

I am not so much interested in connecting OTL events to IW as what the dates of various IW events are in realtion to each other. Yes, I know that 3E and 4E are different.

I am thinking about an early on game, when the Homeline and Centrum have just barely become aware of each other.

Has anyone got anything on this? I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

[Kallatari]

Here's what I have regarding the timeline that I use in my campaign that is purely world-hopping related. These events were picked up from statements somewhere in the campaign setting or additional Infinite Worlds books (or annex in Campaigns book) then slightly elaborated upon, but I admit there might be a couple of personal additions to it specific to my campaign. I sadly don't have original page numbers references, but I'm sure they can all be discovered with search features in your PDF reader.

Edit: This timeline is solely composed of 4E sources, and has not been compared to 3E alternate worlds materials

(too long, so splitting into two posts)

1922: Centrum develops its first conveyor and beings exploring alternate worlds.

1934: Centrum adopts a "hands off" approach to inhabited alternate Earths and a policy to only exploit worlds without any humans.

1958: Centrum policies for other worlds begins shifting, with a desire to re-educate the other worlds to match their philosophy. There is much debate on this topic, and changes are only small.

1995: Dr. Paul Van Zandt, a physics professor, built the first working parachronic projector and used it to visit Earth-Beta. He concealed his observations and continued his experiments. Six months later, following a mysterious fire that destroyed his Darthmouth laboratory, he resigned from teaching to set up a "consulting" firm.

1995-1998: Dr. Van Zandt refined his theories and contacted 23 more universes, and personally visited six alternates himself. He also founded White Star Trading, a then-secret interworld trading corporation to finance his experiments.

1998: Dr. Van Zandt made headlines by publishing his results - and formally incorporating Infinity Unlimited, with subsidiaries including White Star Trading, Parachronic Laboratories, and Infinity Development. Furthermore, Van Zandt offered to license his designs to any government or corporation interested in crosstime travel. After a closed session with the U.N. Security Council, Infinity Unlimited was formally placed under the jurisdiction of the United Nations Interworld Council (UNIC).

2001: All contact is lost with an "echo" world, that appears to be an exact duplicate of Homeline's history, but at some point in the past.

2001: Discovery of the worldline Attila.

2002: Homeline makes the startling discovery of the weird worldline they call the United States of Lizardia. On this strange world the dominant species, called neo-troodons, evolved from dinosaurs and a civilized species of intelligent lizards inhabit the Earth. What makes this a weird parallel, however, is the fact that this history of civilization is almost identical; e.g., the speak the same languages such as English and French, their countries have the same names such as the United States and France, etc. Despite playing out the same history, the individuals were different; e.g. they had WWII with Nazi from Germany, but there was no Hitler, Churchill, or Roosevelt.

2003: Contact is lost with two more "echoes." Scientists begin to speculate that these worlds are actually the past of Homeline, and that anyone attempting to change that past - thus creating a paradox - effectively causes the echo to vanish, destroying it. Infinity limits further travel to echoes and begins debating closing down all access as being too dangerous.

2004: The mystery of the vanishing echoes is solved as one group of patrol men from a vanished echo report back. As the future of the world change, it shifted from Q6 to Q5, becoming an alternate world. Infinity scientist therefore learn that they can, in theory, cause deliberate shifts to the echo worlds in Q6 by changing the timeline. Infinity, however, bans any experiments to do so. Travel to echoes remain restricted and carefully watched.

2008: Homeline has now discovered 633 worlds, finding all of the most mathematically easily predictable coordinates for alternate world. The rate of further discovery of new worlds settles down to about 10 per year after this point.

2011: Infinity discovers the worldline of Reich-5.

2012: Infinity discovers the world of Enigma, on which the entire population of the planet seems to have simply disappeared. After six months of investigating, no obvious cause of method was discovered. Infinity closed the worldline from further visits as a precaution.

2012: Having developed a cure for the Ariana Flu, Infinity opened Ariane up for full colonization.

2014: Time Tours nearly goes bankrupt when bad word of mouth depressed ticket sales to the overhyped Camelot-2.

2015: Centrum's discovery of Homeline (which they call Secondus) places a fear that a world in near-anarchy that is on the verge of parachronic discovery, could threaten their world and bring back the wars that nearly destroyed them. Combined with the reality that "infinite worlds" is not as infinite as they believed, Centrum officially changes it policy about other worlds, starting a process to secretly change them to be more like them (without otherwise revealing parachronic technology)

2015: Infinity discovers the world of Merlin-1.

2017: Discovery of Camelot-3.

2017: Infinity patrolman Ted Gruberman, a scout with the ability to jump between worlds on his own, performs a blind jump to an alternate world, but doesn't come back. Unknown to Infinity, he discovered and became trapped in the world of Yrth.

2018: Infinity develops the various theories of Reality Quakes through its study of the various Camelot worlds. In particular, the discovery of the 535 A.D. quantaclysm causes Infinity to abandon the Camelot designation for any further worlds in which a King Arthur is discovered since "Arthur" might not be a natural native of those worlds.

2018: An intruder captured in one of Infinity's most secrets labs turns out to be from another world-spanning Earth now referred to as Centrum. Infinity released that agent with an offer of friendship. Centrum immediately accepted, with apologies for their earlier penetration of Infinity's territory.

2018: Infinity patrolman Ted Gruberman finally manages to escape the world of Yrth on a magical raft which brought him to another worldline. Now able to jump between worlds again, but not sure exactly where he is, he begins jumping around to find his way back to Homeline.

[Kallatari]

Continued from previous post...

2019: Discovery of Sherlock-2, which led to the development of the Williams-Khor Hypothesis for explaining the physics of the infinite worlds, which postulates the worlds are created based on the expectations of the travelers, which is why they can find "myth" worlds like Sherlock-2. The theory is rejected by Paralabs, who prefer Van Zandt's original Many Worlds Interpretation.

2019: Four timelines disappear from Q6. They are later re-discovered in Q7, and it was determined that Centrum "stole" them by altering their timeline. Centrum seems to be able to successfully calculate what changes are required to shift world closed to their own quantum. Relations with Centrum are ended, and the "infinity war" begins.

2019: A scout team exploring Rustic via a nexus portal wound up involved in a prison break from a Hessian concentration camp in South Africa. Among the escapees was that worldline's Cecil Rhodes, interned for illegal mining activity. Infinity offered him a job running outtime mining operations through Consolidated Mines, Unltd.

2020: Infinity diverts more resources to fight the ever-increasing amount of crossworld organized crime. It still isn't enough.

2020: Worldjumping Scout Ted Gruberman finally makes it back to Homeline and reports back on the world of Yrth. His description of the immense banestorms that struck Yrth a millennium ago causes an uproar at Paralabs as they try to understand it. Many wonder if the humans that populated Yrth came from Homeline's past.

2020: Infinity notices that 6 more echoes have shifted out of Q6. Three end up on Q7, one moved to Q5, and the other two have not yet been rediscovered by Infinity. Although Infinity suspects Centrum is involved in these shifts, there is no evidence to confirm this, and echoes have disappeared before for other reasons.

2021: Three more echoes disappear from Q6. One of these was not rediscovered. Of the other two, one ended up in Q4, and the other in Q7. Examination of the worlds found evidence of deliberate outside tampering with the history, confirming Centrum's involvement, making them the 5th and 6th confirmed Centrum interventions. However, since one of the worlds ended up in Q4, which is outside of the reach of Centrum, scientists are somewhat relieved that Centrums science in shifting worlds hasn't been perfected yet.

2021: Infinity sends a group of scouts to Yrth. This time prepared for the dimensional sargasso, it only took them 5 months to get back. The successful missions convinced Infinity to allow more carefully planned missions into the world.

2021: Centrum infiltrates the world of Kaiserreich-4

2021: A Merlin-1 CIA agent secretly infiltrates Homeline, indicating the start of Merlin-1 as a new hidden cross-world power.

2022: An unauthorized attack by Homeline Russian Spetsnaz on Reich-5 resulted in the Russians being killed, and the Infinity Patrol sent to stop them having members and a conveyor captured. Infinity closes the worldline from all further access, fearing that they were now aware of interworld travel and didn't want the Reich to gain any more technology or knowledge. UNIC prepares the plans for Operation Firefall - a full scale invasion by Homeline - but the plans are shelved, fearing that it was too likely to end up with the world obtaining parachronic technology and becoming Homeline's enemy.

2022: Consolidated Mines, Unltd.,, became independent from Infinity Unlimited, with Rhodes as its new head.

2022: The United States of Homeline, under the order of President McConnell, sends Ranger Force Tau on Gallatin for a pre-emptive attack on that world's Algerian government before it could deploy its nuclear missiles, which would have send the entire Middle East into turmoil.

2023: ISWAT travels to the world of Iskander-2 to retrieve ancient Buddhist texts that, while mundane on that world, they believe will help them power a ritual on another world to banish a demon. There, they encounter C31R07 ("C-31"), who they eventually recruit as one of their agents. The demon is successfully banished.

2023: Infinity discovers the world Taft-7.

2023: Infinity investigates what appears to be outworld manipulation of the stock markets of a world, and meet Baron Janos Telkozep. The vampire offers his expertise in finances, vampires, and the cabal in exchange for protection against the cabal. Janos Telkozep is quickly recruited by ISWAT.

2024: The Raven Division from Reich-5 discovers and conquers the world of Nostradamus. With that world, the Raven-Division soon discovers the Chronobahn crossroads leading to four other worlds. They quickly expand along the Chronobahn to invade the "neighboring" worlds, including Friedrich.

2024: Only two survivors from an Infinity patrol on Taft-7 return, and both had become insane. Much to Infinity's surprise, a few days later, a magical gateway is created in the location from where their conveyor arrived, and a single man stepped out. This was professor William Headley, who explained that their patrol disturbed Ancient Ones and things that man shouldn't be meddling with. He indicated that he followed the patrol in order to warn them that these elder things will also be able to do the same and thus might pose a threat to Homeline. After a full interrogation, professor William Headley, is brought into ISWAT as an expert on Ancient Ones. At his recommendation, access to Taft-7 becomes restricted, and even the location of the conveyor itself is locked with permanent guards in case anything else follows.

2024: Homeline conducts its initial survey of the Gothic-2, in the local year 1807.

2025: An ISWAT team pursued a world-jumping criminal to Yrth. While fighting him, two of the members of the team are saved by Dai Blackthorn, a teleporting thief. Unwilling to waste such a useful ability, they quickly recruit Dai into their ISWAT team.

2025: The elven sniper Iotha is recruited by ISWAT, as they are impressed by her heroics of spending the last 15 years hunting down and eliminating all of the winged eyries who had been plaguing the humans of that world. Her talent at spotting natural portals was also highly desirable for Infinity.

2026: ISWAT recruits Xing La from the dying world of Lenin-2 based on the recommendation of an Infinity patrol leader who had been hiring her for odd jobs for the past four years.

2026: Homeline makes the discovery of the worldline they call Merlin-3.

2026: Paralabs experiments with the open-circuit projectors of Project Hypercube results in a team of scouts being flung randomly between different worlds.

2026: Infinity accidentally rescues Louis D'Antares, who was a double of one of their patrolmen who was killed on a mission on Cyrano. With his knowledge of the world and combat training as part of the Royal Guard, Louis is invited to join an ISWAT team.

2026: Infinity discovers Caliph.

2026: A vigilante named Sora arrives on Homeline through a stolen conveyor. She explains that it was being used by the Triad of her world to work with the Triad of another world. Sora helped the Infinity Patrol take down the interworld criminal organization, and was then offered a position in ISWAT.

2026: The Condor Group of Merlin-1, thanks to the "Perón-Penguin Pact” allowing them to study the Queen Maud Land
Hellstorm, made contact with Reich-5's Armanen Order.

2027: Infinity discovers Ezcalli. Centrum discovered Ezcalli shortly afterwards; Infinity suspects that someone from Homeline leaked the coordinates to Centrum.

2027: Reich-5's Raven Division, with the help of the Condor Group, establishes a secret based on Merlin-1.

2027: (Current Year as of GURPS Campaigns and Infinite Worlds books). There are currently 841 alternate world coordinates that have been discovered by Homeline. Scouts are discovering more and more "rule-breaking" worlds - perhaps because most of the "close" worlds have already been found.

2029: Homeline opens the world Oppenheim, in the local year 1916, for touring.

2031: On Oppenheim, in the local year 1918, the Spanish Flu somehow blends with the Gotha virus, creating the Gotha-Z virus that not only drives the living to madness and fills graveyards to overflowing - it empties the graveyards out again as the dead rise and stalk the living everywhere. Access to the world is quickly restricted, and it is renamed from Oppenheim to Gotha-Z.

2032 - On Homeline, the collapse of Austrian government touched off a gigantic scandal in the EU: Startling amounts of money flowed from various pharmaceutical and biotech companies to Social Democratic Party politicians in at least four countries. And the byzantine, convoluted money trail led – eventually – to Gothic-2. Normally, the Patrol would shut down access to the worldline and flood the problem with I-Cops. But someone in the EU – or a conspiracy of several someones – still swings a lot of weight, and they have Justice Division completely stonewalled in Homeline. Their juice even reaches into UNIC; Infinity’s change-of-status report (shifting Gothic-2 from R6 to R1) is still mired in the bureaucracy today, three years later (2035). Infinity is therefore limited to investigating the conspiracy from the Gothic-2 end.

2035: Current Year as of GURPS Infinite Worlds - Worlds of Horror book.

[Kallatari]

I will point out that Infinite Worlds - Worlds of Horror (I think, but possibly Lost Worlds) advances the timeline from 2027 somewhere into the 2030s... presumably a number of years equal to the difference in when the pdf was published.

I haven't included those references since my campaign hasn't reached that point in the timeline yet (I just reached early 2029).