New Reality Seeds

[dcarson]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Surely we'd get a triumvirate. Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, George will lead the fight and Ben and Thomas will outfox Merlin.

There are myths and legends about them but not a they will return one.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by dcarson

There are myths and legends about them but not a they will return one.

Now you're being unfair just because we're a newer nation and kept better records from the start.

[Astromancer]

Try this one...

East of the Ladywater

This Q4 is a myth parallel. The tech level is four in the western lands, it seems to get lower in the east. Magic is a functional supertech, it allows for some rifling of guns. The top of the line rifles aim as well as tech level six rifles did on Homeline. There are a few other similar things.

The manna level varies from place to place. Most areas are low manna with something or other different. Low manna for everything but one thing being common. Many places have cycles like "the fuller the Moon the higher the manna" or "Manna is opposite the sun, lowest at noon highest in the middle of the night." Areas of stable normal manna become university towns and/or manufacturing hubs.

The Ladywater (as vast river sacred to the mother goddess) flows not into the sea but into a vast salty lake about 2,500 feet below the local sea level. It's a vast area of stable high manna and filled with exotic dangers and treasures ranging from incredible luxuries to vast sources of power.

A highly important form of transport locally are Hippogriffs. Although hostile to most humans, hippogriffs like mages. Any magery effects Hippogriffs as a combo of Animal Empathy and Charisma for hippogriffs equal to the level of Magery. When the Mage deals with the Hippogriff all animal skills related to the hippogriff are at plus one per level of Magery just like spells. Further, when riden by mages, hippogriffs gain extra speed proportional to the square of the Mages levels of magery. Thus a Mage with Magery 2 riding a hippogriff causes the beast to be four times as fast. A Mage wit Magery 5 would cause the creature to fly 25 times as fast. This extra flight speed doesn't seem to cause any complications, even when the steed and rider are going faster than sound.

More later...

[YankeeGamer]

Here's a generic post-apocalypse fantasy world, with some serial numbers filed off for generic non-copyrighted use.

A lot of fantasy worlds have a huge underdark, with enormous caverns, underground oceans, etc. Somehow, the surface oceans don’t flood them—probably some divine protection added into other things.

But, the ongoing war between elves and dark elves, and between dwarves and deep dwarves, combined with a surge of problems with other creepy-crawlies, resulted in a change to that.

One group of “heroes” was faced with the consequences of this war again and again, and gradually grew more and more willing to adapt extreme measures. In particular, three great dark elvin cities were primary targets. It was a welcome bonus that a few other dark communities were in the expected flood zone. The benevolent underground e communities and a few others were categorized as “acceptable losses.”

It took a century, but they broke the protections against flooding—and at the same time, shattered the barriers between the greatest ocean and the underdark in several places, including the great inner sea.

The results were more than the association had expected. Fault lines they had triggered broke with more violence than they’d dreamed of, and the oceans poured into the underdark, accompanied by earthquakes and volcanoes. Cities below were wiped out, miles wide sinkholes opened up above ground. The great Inner Sea was reduced to a few small lakes separated by miles of exposed sea bottom, and a massive sinkhole.

The association DID accomplish their desired results—the dark elves are all but extinct, and a demon worshippers' next is cleared away. Essentially, the entire western underdark has been destroyed. And there are connections between various regions—and every so often, another one gives way, and more of the underdark is opened to flooding.

Even underground seas were all but depopulated of everything smaller than microbes, as the pressure change crushed almost everything.

Now, decades later, the old inner sea bottom has collapsed into the sinkhole, and in one place, is over 10 MILES deep. (Not an error; it’s the deepest known sea in the world, since it flooded into two subterranean seas) Its sea level is much lower than it used to be, only a little higher than the ocean.

This is geologically unstable, and the shore is bound to collapse soon.

Here and there enclaves survived by one means or other—usually mighty magics. Some of them have continued to survive, but others fell as as either the hastily thrown up protections collapsed, or struggles between factions resulted in failure. (A Dispell thrown in the wrong place, with a critical success, could damage protections holding back miles of water...)

The surface is a MESS! Sea Levels have dropped a few hundred feet, devastating portside economies. In some places, the earthquakes created Tsunamis, wiping out coastal communities. Even now, decades after the crash, massive shifts are causing more earthquakes throughout the continent. Places that see earthquakes are seeing them more often, and more severely, and there’s a few regions that have not seen earthquakes in living (elvin) memory until the event, are now major quake and volcano zones.

There was a year without a summer the first year after the Event, and have been a couple more of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

Surviving underground civilizations nave a grudge...

This could even be an alternate Yrth, with a few changes.

[Apollonian]

Originally Posted by YankeeGamer

Here's a generic post-apocalypse fantasy world, with some serial numbers filed off for generic non-copyrighted use.

I swear I've seen something like this before. Have you posted it earlier in this thread or somesuch?

[TGLS]

Infinity expected a parallel where Quebec separated from the rest of Canada. They did not expect Mitterrand (Q7 2022), where Quebecois sovereignty from Canada led to waves of separatism around the world. This in turn led to stronger supranational organizations, paradoxically strengthening a radically transformed Canada. Centrum backs the Canadian Federation, while Homeline France supports a French dominated European Union. Infinity quietly operates in the fragmented remains of the Soviet Union and China, keeping WMDs out of the hands of tyrants and terrorists.

[AlexanderHowl]

In Algonquian-7, the Algonquian peoples allied with the French in the early 1600s, allowing them to successfully resist British and Dutch efforts to colonize New England and the Mid-Atlantic due to benefiting from French training and French weaponry. Without the constant genocidal pressures of the Dutch and English colonists, the Algonquian peoples were capable of recovering their populations and formed the Algonquian Federation as an ally of the Kingdom of France. The city of Manhattan became the capital of the Algonquian Federation and the center of trade between the Algonquian Federation and the Kingdom of France.

By the late 1600s, the Algonquian Federation was capable of conquering the Iroquois Confederation, granting it dominance over the eastern Great Lakes region. Using the diplomats of the Lenni-Lenape nation, the Algonquian Federation was capable of absorbing hundreds of smaller tribal nations without conflict until it reached the northern borders of the Catabwa and Cherokee and the eastern border of the Sioux. With control over the fur supplies of the Great Lakes, the Algonquian Federation proved to be a lucrative market for French merchants in the early 1700s, especially since the Algonquian Federation refused to trade with the Dutch and the English due to the memories of their behavior during the early 1600s that drove them into their alliance with the French.

It is now the late 1700s, and the relationship between the Algonquian Federation and the Kingdom of France has only grown stronger over the intervening 160 years. In turn, the Algonquian Federation assisted the Catawba and the Cherokee against attempts by the British to colonize their territories. With the assistance of the Algonquian Federation, the French were capable of defending their territory of Louisiana against British forces during the Seven Years War, allowing them to focus on the larger conflict. At the end of the Seven Years War, the British were forced to exchange their Caribbean possessions to remove the French from the Indian Subcontinent.

With a massive share sugar trade of the West Indies but depending on the British slave trade, the Kingdom of France is offering a massive financial reward for the development of technology to improve the efficiency of sugar production. The Kingdom of France understands that it is at the mercy of the British merchants for its labor and wants to eliminate its dependency on slave imports from Africa. For its own part, the educated elites of the Algonquian Federation, training by the greatest minds of France, seek to produce the technology that would improve the efficiency of the sugar industry, as the Algonquian Federation wishes to become the equal of the Kingdom of France.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Try this one...

East of the Ladywater

This Q4 is a myth parallel. The tech level is four in the western lands, it seems to get lower in the east. Magic is a functional supertech, it allows for some rifling of guns. The top of the line rifles aim as well as tech level six rifles did on Homeline. There are a few other similar things.

The Ladywater (as vast river sacred to the mother goddess) flows not into the sea but into a vast salty lake about 2,500 feet below the local sea level. It's a vast area of stable high manna and filled with exotic dangers and treasures ranging from incredible luxuries to vast sources of power.

The lands between the Ladywater and the Aushten mountains are a buffer zone. Orcs used to roam far to the West, the development of guns was a disaster for the Orc tribes. The orcs have the intelligence and skill to make firearms, but they aren't able to form social units stable enough, and economies rich enough, to support firearm equipted armies. The Orcs were driven east of the mountains. The lands between the Ladywater and the Aushten Mountains are allowed no lords.

Once it was understood that there were rich empty lands with no lords many peasents and run away serfs went east of the Ladywater to build a future free of lords. Now the lands between the Ladywater and the Aushten mountains has a moderately large population. It is basically run as a series of Cossack bands. Although some of the towns have elected governments. If the orcs try to swam out and ravage the lands of men again, there will be a tripwire.

More later...

[Micah Davis]

Prometheus-1 is a TL7 parallel in the early sixteenth century, notable primarily for being a schizo-technological development and appropriate population for its tech that was otherwise a very high inertia parallel - The millions of souls in Europe were still ruled by a collapsing feudal system and guided by a corrupt, Catholic Church hurtling towards the Reformation. Although interested in the strange rigidity-and-flexibility mix of the timeline, Homeline was primarily concerned with averting a potentially nuclear Hundred Years War in Europe - Infinity quietly allowed the Vatican to send many priests to infiltrate and try to reform the Catholic Church before it was too late.

That was until Prometheus-2 was discovered, a TL7 parallel in the early fifth century with schizo-technological development and appropriate populations for its tech that was otherwise a very high inertia parallel. The recurrence of the phenomena was not what freaked out Homeline - While the big name characters of history were the same as their Homeline selves, the great mass of people in Prometheus-2 had alternate timeline selves in Prometheus-1.

Thrown into a panic at the discovery, Infinity's deal with the Vatican leaked to the public and huge fury sprang up within Protestant churches at Infinity's religious meddling. Now, Infinity parachronics experts must work round-the-clock trying to identify the cause of the "Prometheus Convergence", its Cliodynamics experts are working to avert nuclear wars, and the I-Cops are struggling to stem the tide of expat Protestant bomb throwers.

[YankeeGamer]

Originally Posted by Apollonian

I swear I've seen something like this before. Have you posted it earlier in this thread or somesuch?

I posted it quite some time ago, somewhere--but don't remember where. If here, apologies for the duplication.