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Old 01-23-2021, 08:08 AM   #5321
ericthered
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Default Re: New Reality Seeds

It has come to my attention that Winston Churchill's first transatlantic flight made him a temporary target of both sides when the plane was flown quite a bit south of the intended route. (see the last few paragraphs of the blurb).



WWII is overdone, but having Churchill die in a tragic accident seems like one of the slicker ways to change things. The effects are also likely to be subtle rather than done with a hammer. It might be a fun way to make a "lightly tweaked" alternate.



I'm not sure who would have replaced him. Is anyone fluent in that sphere of history?
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Old 01-23-2021, 08:28 AM   #5322
johndallman
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Originally Posted by ericthered View Post
I'm not sure who would have replaced him. Is anyone fluent in that sphere of history?
The likeliest candidate is Clement Attlee. There was no Deputy Prime Minister at the time, but Attlee would be appointed about a month later, on the 19th of February 1942. Attlee became Prime Minister after the 1945 General Election.

A potential problem is that Attlee was leader of the Labour Party, and Conservative MPs might not have taken well to the PM no longer being a member of their party. The most likely Conservative candidate would be Anthony Eden.
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Old 01-23-2021, 01:47 PM   #5323
GreatWyrmGold
 
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I just finished watching Shaun's feature-length video on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Needless to say, a video going over the details and causes of a historical tragedy makes me think of ways that that tragedy could have been avoided.

History stuff from that video:
Spoiler:  


So here's my thought. Sometime early in 1945 (probably a bit before the Yalta Conference), Soemu Toyoda dies and the Moderates (with help from Mitsumasa Yonai) make sure a Moderate is chosen as his successor. Let's call this successor Captain Juzo Okita.
Captain Juzo has two roles in this alt-history. One is to break the deadlock between Moderates and Hardliners; the other is to convince the Minister of Foreign Affairs Shigenori Tōgō (another Moderate) that Stalin won't bail them out. This leads to Japan actively seeking surrender around March, perhaps after the firebombing of Tokyo. FDR accepts their surrender in a way that makes it clear both that they're not getting rid of the emperor and that that doesn't count as a condition, letting them get everything they want out of the surrender.

At this point, Germany hasn't surrendered yet, but the war is basically over. The occupation and reconstruction of Japan start a few months sooner, and Japan is spared a few months of economic damage (and two nukes, of course). FDR still dies; the Trinity Test and the rest of the Manhattan Project continue, heedless of how they won't be used on their long-selected targets, and eventually a public demonstration is made to show the overwhelming power of the US military (a proposal made in our timeline before the generals decided to just bomb cities anyways).
Stalin is ****** that the other Allies made an agreement to let them take land from Japan and immediately invalidated it by ending the war before they could join, which doesn't help tensions between the USA and USSR at the start of the war. On the other hand, he didn't get a chance to break his non-aggression pact, so relations between the USSR and Japan might not be as bad, letting Japan potentially serve as a diplomatic intermediary between them and the USA? I dunno, I'm just trying to think of how this timeline could move forward.
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Old 01-23-2021, 03:39 PM   #5324
fchase8
 
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Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
The likeliest candidate is Clement Attlee. There was no Deputy Prime Minister at the time, but Attlee would be appointed about a month later, on the 19th of February 1942. Attlee became Prime Minister after the 1945 General Election.

A potential problem is that Attlee was leader of the Labour Party, and Conservative MPs might not have taken well to the PM no longer being a member of their party. The most likely Conservative candidate would be Anthony Eden.
Reich-2 diverts with Lord Halifax becoming PM (and negotiating an armistice). Though in real life he turned it down because he was a Lord, something that would still be the case here.

If no Churchill (I'd previously heard of a divergence point when he was almost hit by a car when visiting NYC), I think it would be whoever rose in his stead. Yes, likely Anthony Eden, with Attlee as deputy.

Eden would likely have followed the same policy as Churchill, to continue the war, if not with the same rhetorical flourish or friendship with FDR.



One idea I had about Dixie is that there was no Churchill, as his mother was American, thus even that high-inertia parallel could diverge. I also thought that there would be no (American) Wallace Simpson, thus no Abdication, and Edward VIII would still be King (friendly with Imperial Germany & the CSA, instead of Nazis).

Thus the United Kingdom of Dixie, already coming out of losing The Great War, stripped of Africa (and previously half of Canada), and quite possibly still trying to keep Ireland, would have much worse leadership during The Alliance War (their version of WWII). A "Conservative-Fascist Moseley" government is mentioned.

Homeline cliodynamic theorists like would have rated an absence of Churchill as a prime reason why Britain loses The Alliance War and quits overseas.
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Old 01-23-2021, 10:21 PM   #5325
David Johnston2
 
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Oops-1: Oops is a world ravaged by localized reality quakes every few months transforming sections of it into alternate realities except for a tiny number of reality stable individuals and a small area of Switzerland surrounding what is left of a particle accelerator that exploded.

Oops-2: Oops-2 is a version of Earth that has been devastated by large meteorites and is additionally freezing cold since the sun is a protostar still gathering the dust and gas to turn itself into a main sequence star. Investigations indicate that it was parachronically transported into a timeline early in the formation of the solar solar system.

Oops-3: Oops 3 has been invaded by "demons" through a dimensional rift created when an early prototype of parachronic technology exploded. An attempt to use a nuclear weapon to stem the invasion seems to have widened the rift.

Oops-4: A failed parachronic experiment caused humans and other animals to manifest "superpowers" As a result civilization collapsed in most of the world save for a few city-states that manage to hang on with the help of superheroic champions or supervillainous juntas.

Oops-5: Oops-5's parachronic research facility was flung by a Banestorm to some as yet unidentified destination. Of all the Oops parallels this one seems to have gotten off most lightly. Unfortunately plans are in the works to continue the research safely off planet.

Oops-6: Facility seems to have collapsed into a micro black hole that fell to the center of the world, which was ravaged by earthquakes in the process.

Oops-7: A burst of oz particles irradiated the entire world causing widespread temporal decay and mutations among the surviving life.

Last edited by David Johnston2; 01-24-2021 at 02:31 AM.
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Old 01-23-2021, 10:55 PM   #5326
AlexanderHowl
 
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Brown dwarfs are failed stars, our Sun was never a brown dwarf. Now, you could have the parallel being an Earth while the Sun was a protostar, but the atmosphere was likely much more massive before the impact that created the Moon (something similar to Venus). The Earth would have been much hotter, not colder, probably around 1600 K, because protostars are much more luminous than normal stars (while they are powered by gravitational contraction rather than fusion, they are much larger), and the Sun was likely a 1,000 times luminous as a protostar than it is now.

Last edited by AlexanderHowl; 01-23-2021 at 11:05 PM.
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Old 01-24-2021, 02:31 AM   #5327
David Johnston2
 
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Brown dwarfs are failed stars, our Sun was never a brown dwarf. Now, you could have the parallel being an Earth while the Sun was a protostar,
The accident took a fully formed Earth from a present day parallel and moved it to a parallel where the solar system was still forming.
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Old 01-24-2021, 09:11 AM   #5328
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I suppose that we have to bring in Dark-1 and Dark-2, a two-world skerry in which both worlds (previously Echos) suffered some kind of apocalyptic event (worse in one case than the other) in 2020. There are hints of reality quakes building around the epicentre of this event, a nuclear power plant in northern Germany. Infinity are torn between the need to determine what the hell happened and a distinct if unclear sense that that they don't want to mess with this situation.
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Old 01-24-2021, 10:35 AM   #5329
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Originally Posted by David Johnston2 View Post
The accident took a fully formed Earth from a present day parallel and moved it to a parallel where the solar system was still forming.
And you would still have to deal with a protostar with 1000x the luminosity of out present Sun, which would increase temperatures to 1600 K. As I mentioned before, the Sun was never a brown dwarf, it was a protostar, there is a big difference between the two.
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Old 01-24-2021, 11:57 AM   #5330
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And you would still have to deal with a protostar with 1000x the luminosity of out present Sun, which would increase temperatures to 1600 K. As I mentioned before, the Sun was never a brown dwarf, it was a protostar, there is a big difference between the two.
I find it difficult to believe that a still coalescing sun with most of it's mass still being gathered is that bright.
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