What are the weirdest AHs you've wrote?

What are some really weird scenarios you've wrote or created but never went through with? posting here because i don't know where else. I would appreciate mod help if this is the wrong place.
Anyways, here are some of mine.:

  • Millard Fillmore as President for life 1848-1875
  • Vatican Empire; Controls north africa, iberia, italy and the balkans
  • Some klansman escape to africa and set up a violent city-colony that still has slavery.
 
The main setting I write hinges on Arminius winning the Battle of Idistaviso. In the next few centuries there's rapid Germanic state formation and eventually the Germanic peoples adopt an organised neo-Platonic faith. Oh, and also they get usurped by East Germanic-speaking people, who eventually overrun all of OTL Germany and play such a huge influence on Austria and other fringes of the Germanic world they end up speaking East Germanic too, at least officially. Arminius is essentially a god at this point (OTL some say he's the inspiration for Siegfried/Sigurd, although this is controversial, but TTL it's regarded as fact). A spear which he supposedly had (Germanic peoples traditionally threw spears to mark a battle, and this is the origin of Odin's spear Gungnir), the Spear of Arminius, ends up a giant point of contention between two rival rulers in the 19th century to the point where one rival ruler makes a silent film (since they don't have talkies at that point) involving breaking and reforging said spear as a propaganda film (with nicely written title cards). This helps start my TL's version of World War I.

I'd have to post over 2,000 years of history here if I wanted to post my AH setting, and it ends with a rapidly developing space age (thanks to the Tunguska Impact), construction of an orbital ring around Earth and hundreds of O'Neill cylinders, and humans spreading throughout the Solar System despite/because of major conflicts (i.e. World War III and worse). TTL's World War II (called the Great War, from 1916 to 1922 TTL) has 1950-1970s tech, a major satellite war (and conflict on the Moon, Antarctica, and the North Pole!), and defines the course of the world afterwards (spoilers: the Germans win). There's also some nice parallelism in this timeline, so you can still find a struggle between fascists and communists, a lot of drama over nationalism, and less dramatically, you can listen to all sorts of ATL rock music, rap music, metal music, whatever (I've developed African Romance languages and East Germanic languages for this setting, and translated some songs into those languages), despite the POD being 2,000 years ago. Oddly, they don't develop the modern internet or commercial computers for well after they have computing tech.

My main problem in posting any of this is that there's simply too much to write about. The best TL I could do (since what Arminius and his successors do is a bit less exciting) would be my TL's connection to the Julio-Claudian dynasty and their end. The Pisonian Conspiracy kills Nero and appoints Calpurnius Piso as emperor, who rules in a just manner. Incidentally this helps Seneca the Younger and Lucan become key writers in the Western canon (Western literature TTL is also helped by a few scrolls from the Epic Cycle surviving). The descendents of the Pisonian dynasty mostly do pretty well for themselves (they're descended from Crassus and Pompey after all!).

I can only present select elements, like a hypothetical Roman conquest of Mauretania south of Volubilis, or detach some elements, like a Christian sect being formed in North Africa using its Berber influences (thanks to a brilliant leader, a true "great man of history") to conquer the region and basically being like OTL Muhammad and Islam. Ironically he fights an ATL Caliphate and his efforts help turn Islam into an ethnic religion instead of a universal one.

I think this qualifies as "weird", but I've been writing it for almost a decade at this point, so I'm too attached to it to make much else. The worst of it has been buried years ago. So much of it has been influenced by what I've learned in that period (the origin was Rome Total War: Barbarian Invasion, a theatrical version of Late Antiquity). There's also organised kingdoms on the West Coast of North America (by some California Indians and especially PNW Indians) plus most of Australia, developed Maori (who along with the Malagasy replicate OTL's Meiji Japan more or less, albeit not as well), and all other sort of crazy elements. If your definition of ASB is "Sealion" and not actual alien space bats, then I've crammed in as much ASB as I can into 2,000 years of history.
 
This one probably takes the cake for me. I try to make a lot of my timelines bizarre (socialist South African Aaron Burr, anyone?), but this scenario probably takes the cake just for how outlandish it is.
 
ATLs written by someone living in an ATL can become this. For my Chaos TL, I made:

chaos-cliche.PNG


Please note:
- The octuple monarchy of England, Ireland, Denmark, Castille, Portugal, Brittany, Florence and the HRE!
- The Greater Unionist Panslavic Orthodox Commonwealth of Old, New and South Russia!
- The New Egyptian Empire with its holdings in southern Europe!
- Surviving Scotland, Aragon, Navarre and Venice!
- French Netherlands! (again!)
- Nassau (grey) becoming even greater!
- Braunschweig-Meissen-Austria-Berg-Upper Silesia (brown)!
- The all-new duchy of Holstein and Lower Silesia (yellow)!
- The Boiian Republic (Bavaria + Bohemia)!
- The Über-Teutonic Order (black)!
- Even Greater Switzerland in orange! (Bonus: It's not a republic, but under the Habsburgs who saw what they could achieve with their battle-hardened Swiss soldiers!)

chaosworld-cliche.PNG


- Über-German Atlantis (brown)!
- Russian Tawantinsuya!
- Braseal and Argentine stay English!
- Castillian Songhay!
- South of obligatory Italia Nuova (blue): Genoa in exile, New Navarre, Aragonese Atlantis, Brittany-beyond-the-ocean!
- Papal Louisiane (light green)!
- The New Egyptian Empire in its full glory (dark green)!
- The Persian-Choresmian border from Chaos TL!
- Portuguese west Africa!
- Technocracy of Kerala!
- United rest of India!
- China under the new Chung dynasty, that plans to restore Pax Sinica in splintered SE Asia!
- Swedish Antipodia!
- German Indies!
- Independent Aztecs AND Maya!
 
I am currently writing a 1500s AU with the world as a matriarchal society and Anne Howard (Boleyn) as Queen in her own right...
 
So I found myself talking about pretty much every TL I wrote, so instead I am going to talk about TLs that I am sad got abandoned. All of these are ASB or Fandom.

1) A Beyond Earth/ME combo I wrote.
In hindsight, I shouldnt have gone for the suprise twist of it being a crossover, because what I did write was ultimately just the set up for what was going to be the TL proper, an imagining of what the next ME cycle was going to be. The set up itself kind of sucked, the Corporate republic world and the wars themselves being kind of short and not well fleshed out. My descent into madness kicked in just before starting the TL proper and so I never continued and I am admittedly afraid of picking it up again.

2) A Tekumel/Numenara style ME setting with the comical POD that the Crucible (aka the star child) is not clearly glitching and proposed instead harvesting civilizations and putting them in a resource poor dysonsphere. Essentially Iron Age ME races with Clarkesthirdlaw tech being occasionally bestowed in the name of various Deities/Leviathans. Unfortunately Andromeda came out, had a lot of similar plot points and killed my interest in ME TLs for a while.

3) A Bioware/Bungie crossover setting in the style of WWZ/Thuktun's modern day Race. Essentially humans being newcomers to the galactic scene means that they are seen as the only neutral power left in a galaxy thats has had galaxy spanning wars multiple times and is currently in a 3 way cold war (humanity being the only species with real freedom of movement). "Galaxy War 1" was going to be between the Citadel and the Covenant. Galaxy War 2 was going to be a 3 way war between the New Forerunner Ecumene, the reborn Prothean Empire and the Citadel.
Ultimately it was between that or my 40k Andromeda TL, and I felt that the Andromeda TL was more realistic all considering.
 
2) A Tekumel/Numenara style ME setting with the comical POD that the Crucible (aka the star child) is not clearly glitching and proposed instead harvesting civilizations and putting them in a resource poor dysonsphere. Essentially Iron Age ME races with Clarkesthirdlaw tech being occasionally bestowed in the name of various Deities/Leviathans. Unfortunately Andromeda came out, had a lot of similar plot points and killed my interest in ME TLs for a while.

Where is this TL?!
 
"Golden Mountain Province": Chinese immgrants, including a branch of the White Lotus Society as cadre, take over California in the Gold Rush era.

Field Marshal Sir Mohandas Gandhi, VC, CSI, Governor-General of the Dominion of India.

Alexander von Habsburg, Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire.

The Hua Dynasty: Frederick Townsend Ward, Emperor of China.
 
Last edited:
I made a bunch of notes for this idea where some Viking war chief or something brings his son (who is like 10 or so) to a battle, gets killed, the Vikings lose the battle and the son gets adopted by some European (as in French/Anglo-Saxon/German) dude. That kid then grows up, basically writes Adam Smith's stuff and we get a cool Viking trade empire thing dominating the North Sea in the 900s. Possibly getting crusaded by an angry Pope who doesn't like the free market and doesn't like that the Vikings are taking the church's monopoly on money away.

It had to be a Viking because I couldn't imagine a Catholic leader taking such a radical step.

That's about as far I got before deciding it was utterly ridiculous (even if you don't need ASBs for early free market). But it sounds cool, and it did convince me to make another TL at all this year, so why not?.

- BNC
 
I never posted it, but

Me and a friend came up with the idea of a Viking world because she thought it would be better for women in the long run. It included
A Scandinavian union.
A Norse dominated Northern France.
United States of Vinland the rebelled in 1714 that eventually stretched to Oregon.
Independent Cherokee superpower.
Earlier German union created by Bavaria in early 1800s.
Fascist Russian Empire that plunged Europe into war by invading the polish Lithuanian commonwealth in 1941.
A Japan that was conquered by China. Probably ASB


Also, one I have been meaning to post is a rather strange one that springs from the Cleburne plan that leads to the following in 2018
CSA is a diverse superpower along side the French 4th republic and a militant Empire of Japan (who the CSA and France are having a cold war with)
Russia loves democracy and still has Alaska
Canada had a communist revolution in 1917, was defeated in 1964, now is like a less powerful Putin Russia
Califonia is occupied by Japan
EU is dealing with "Engleaving"
Germany is just a handful of States
Isreal doesn't exist
Ottoman Empire is a peaceful great power
Mexico is a stable great power, same with Brazil
MLK was a confederate president in the 60s
And Tim Allan is the current president of the United States
 
You should post this! I'd love to read it.
Well, the problem was that the POD was the same as the grey and the black timeline, all the way down to Sherman getting killed by a black sharpshooter. I didn't want to be accused of plagiarism
 
Top