12-30-2018, 02:46 PM | #71 | |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds
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12-30-2018, 04:20 PM | #72 | |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds
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12-30-2018, 04:25 PM | #73 |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds
They would proclaim they were completely right. Still, it was a dictator, someone far closer to Centrum and opposed to democracy and open societies that caused the war. At least in your own scenario.
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12-30-2018, 06:09 PM | #74 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds
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I'd ditch any cosmic conflict/fate of the world(s) metaplot too (e.g. the Infinity-Centrum and looming Reich-5 threats in the Infinity setting). I'm not overly fond of them even in fiction, and for a game setting I prefer to keep as much stuff as possible small scale enough the actions of individuals (i.e. the players) really could plausibly determine the story outcome. On the flipside, if I were looking to rebuild the Infinity setting to be mostly the same but a bit less illogical, I'd lose stuff that is there specifically to allow more individual action. Maintaining a situation that doesn't make sense to everybody is a lot easier when individual everybody's can't do anything to challenge it. I think the biggest gain for the smallest change would be to ditch the mobile conveyers - every transfer requires a fixed projector that must be located on Homeline. This instantly kills all the "stolen conveyer" and independent swag-man plots, but that's sort of the point. It's much more plausible for Infinity (or anybody) to maintain a monopoly or near-monopoly if all they need to do is keep control of the projectors, which have to be in one world, and keep tech spies away from a few key components of them, than it is to keep track of every single conveyer all them time. Worst case should somebody actually manage to build an unauthorized projector, you can at least temporarily reassert your monopoly by capturing one discoverable location, you don't need to chase needles in an infinite haystack. The still limited distribution of nuclear reactors vs, say, meth labs, says a lot about the greater controllability that functional immobility and even a fairly modest level of greater expense provides.
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12-30-2018, 07:42 PM | #75 |
Join Date: Feb 2011
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Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds
The secret is dead not because it's wise to break it, but because there's no more adult supervision. Every conveyor is either being used by someone completely inhumane or is evacuating people to every worldline that's reasonably safe. Johnson's Rome is probably flooded with refugees in hours/minutes.
Plus, there's no international cooperation at that point, since most of the devastation was created by the nuclear war among superpowers. (Naturally, that wouldn't happen unless it was close to happening on its own, so we'll assume that the world was already a tinderbox, not unreasonable considering the economic refocus occurring because of crosstime travel.) Evacuations can't immediately go to uninhabited worldlines, since moving tens of thousands of people into unimproved wilderness is going to be almost as bad as leaving them in radioactive ruins. Seeing that anyone who would punish you for breaking the secret is irradiated or an evacuee, it's not a hard decision. One way to preserve the secret regardless might be to scatter the refugees around a number of historic echoes. A dozen extra people showing up to board a refugee ship out of Europe or to cross the prairies of the USA can probably be handled by inertia, right? Farther back, language becomes a problem, but paperwork becomes less of one... Last edited by PTTG; 12-31-2018 at 02:06 AM. |
12-30-2018, 07:55 PM | #76 | |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds
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12-30-2018, 09:36 PM | #77 |
Join Date: Feb 2011
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Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds
There's no rational reason, but all it takes is one person with some material evidence or knowledge and an irrational reason. Maybe they think that the problem was that society needed time to rewire itself to deal with The Secret. Maybe they think that hiding the existence of Homeline disgraces the memory of those lost.
Out of some tens of thousands of refugees taken randomly from those who happened to be within 45 minutes of a conveyor or a projector location, how many are going to do something stupid? More than one per worldline? So not entirely dead over the entire cosmos, but many of the most popular worldlines are going to be chaotic and there are going to be rumors everywhere. My favorite is definitely historical echoes. There's just not enough oversight, and their really attractive destinations for refugees since the risks are low and people supposedly can fit in... despite this, it's easy for untrained people to screw up. Imagine a guy operating a conveyor for FedEx hearing the nuclear missile alert on the radio, and that Manhattan just got blown off the earth. Is he going to worry about The Secret when there's a horde of people offering $3,000 for a seat anywhen else? Hell, even if he's a loyal Infinity agent, he'll do what he can to drop people off where they do the minimum of damage to the time-stream, but he's not going to stop rescuing Homeliners from incineration just because it's against regulation to let untrained people wander around a 1964 echo. Last edited by PTTG; 12-30-2018 at 11:22 PM. |
12-31-2018, 06:19 AM | #78 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds
I don't see why not. AFAICT the entire reason Homeliners are keeping the Secret in the first place is to preserve an advantage for their homeworld. There's not much point in that if that homeline is devastated, and any refugees presumably have some incentive to tell people in order to secure said advantage for their *new* homeworlds, or even just to have something to trade for the right to stay.
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12-31-2018, 09:52 AM | #79 | |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds
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Shields I like to make expensive and small enough that you only blanket worlds you feel are extra important, like your homeworld. Anywhere else they give away your position and the enemy just lands outside of them. The detectors I like because they give you limited information about your foe. Instead of having one person look out for conspiracies to change the course of history for a world, you have a guy report on activity: "Three conveyors just came into Budapest yesterday, 2 hours apart each." "Budapest? We're in the middle of the American civil war and someone wants to fiddle around in Hungary?" "Yeah, its weird. Maybe its some swagmen trying to kidnap a composer or artist." "We'll see. I've got your readings. We'll see if the lab can determine if the conveyor is from Homeline or from Centrum."
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12-31-2018, 09:53 AM | #80 | |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds
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Yep, there is a LOT of adventure potential there. I just don't know if I'd use centrum as the main villains: part of the advantage in such a setup is that your foes are unknown. I'd be just as likely to use Siaku-mon.
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Be helpful, not pedantic Worlds Beyond Earth -- my blog Check out the PbP forum! If you don't see a game you'd like, ask me about making one! |
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infinite worlds, infinte worlds |
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