[IW] Our campaign and our version of The Secret

[Benway]

Hi everybody. First time post from a long time lurker. Happy to be here.

After many years of no GURPS, I have finally managed to get a group together for a weekly game of Infinite Worlds. We've played about a dozen sessions over the last few months and it has been great fun. There were difficulties as my players were either PFers or rules-lighters, but after some kicking and screaming and a couple of dropouts, things are rolling along quite nicely.

We're running a high-powered team of ISWAT troubleshooters. The current team includes:

Ivan: A test-tube Dhampir from Gulag-4 (a dystopia where Russia prevailed in the Cold War but things didn't work out so well) built with the Nightstalker template from Supers, Experiment from Psis, Swagman and ISWAT from IW.

Grenville Marais: Centran Unattached Agent from the Progressive Reformist faction which is now working with ISWAT to face a new enemy (see below).

The Billionaire: Renaissance Man/Sifu jumper and billionaire from IST.

Zero: Phantom/Resistance fighter/Monster Hunter from IST Dark.

Benway: Former organlegger and hacker from Shikaku-Mon. While in prison having his brain hacked, his latent jumper ability was triggered and he was displaced to Reality Abzu where he worked with Project Sandman as a Wetware Hacker. After he left that bummer scene he was tapped by The Cabal. He studied magic, gate-hunting, world jumping, and teleportation in the Tibet of the Cabal homeworld. Now a Cabal defector working with ISWAT.

The campaign started on Magna Graecia, a world where Moses never showed up, a vampiric Roman Empire relocated to Russia, Greece controls the Mediterranean, dragons control Germany and Alexandria and Byzantium are free cities. Elves, dwarves, a TL4 Portugal, TL4 Algonquin and Creek nations, and an emerging TL5 Thrace are also major geopolitical powers. The team was sent there to neutralize a troublesome dragon that ISWAT suspected was influenced by The Cabal and about to go parachronic. (Turns out he was already a major player in The Cabal and was totally plugged in).

Almost immediately, I pulled the rug out from under them. Centrum attempted to push Homeline into Q4 at the same time that Israel and Russia launched a major assault on Reich-5. The result was that Reich-5 was vaulted into Q6 with the Chronobahn intact. Shortly after, The Armanen Order seized power.

Centran Pragmatist Extremists were responsible and the effects were ultimately fatal. The ill-advised operation created a rip in the continuum and in flooded The Node, an overwhelmingly powerful silicon-based polymorphic species that conquered Centrum in very short order. It appears that Centrum was able to destroy their projectors before The Node could appropriate them. The invaders did find a way to get from Q8 to Q7 via Moebius-2 a world that exists in both quanta simultaneously. (Our heroes closed the passage by inadvertently destroying the planet when the dragon, who is now The Cabal Grandmaster, possessed Benway and forced him to switch out an experimental parachronic shift-bomb with a world destroying bomb using tech of unknown origin).

Okay, long way to go to set the table, but there is a payoff.

After reading blivets of posts on the forums, there seems to be issues with The Secret. Some of the discussions even turned a bit salty. From my perspective, the status quo Secret seems a bit flimsy. Spurred by the possibility that Van Zandt disclosed a deeper Secret to the UN, the juices started flowing.

IOIW the true nature of The Secret lies within the structure of the Quanta. There is only one Universe and one Sun. If one were to approach Earth from space there would be one Earth but with sophisticated enough sensors one could discern a fracturing of the timeline into multiple Earths. The overall effect is a helix-like fractal chain that defines the Quanta. With two projector sustaining worlds, this form is maintained. According to models presented by Paralabs, every time a new projector goes online (one already has in our campaign), the structure of the helix changes. With three the helix begins to distort, add a fourth, the form changes again. With 12-14 projectors, the ramifications resemble a bizarre Escheresque checkerboard, somewhere around 16-18 the universe collapses into a quantum fog. The more projectors, the faster they appear.

I suspect that the science is a bit goofy but there were gasps and whoas from my players when I made the reveal so we're going with it. At that moment, they fully understood their Fanaticism disadvantage. It gave a sharp focus to their motivation that I did not anticipate. This also explains The Node. Infinite Earths are a direct threat to the existence of the Universe. This, I feel, is a great way to plug aliens into one's game.

Maybe this idea could be adapted/refined/tweaked to give The Secret more danger, bigger teeth in your campaign. Still working on it on my end.