What I'm going for in this timeline in this timeline is a less crazy world. Although there's still considerable invasions and displacement, a lot more people still retain their land. North and South America stay mostly native American, there minimal settlement of Australia and the extent of exploitation of Africa is severely reduced.
For this purpose I'm having China branch out early making contact with the world. Due to trade and accelerated technological growth from trade evening out tech development (the entire world gets boosted by Chinese knowledge from the trade network), the less advanced civilizations are better developed (harder to exploit long term) and there's no continent wide genocides we saw OTL. Most of Europe's expansion is butterflied away. Although China trades worldwide, there's no overseas colonization and instead of having some all powerful Superpowers, power is more evenly distributed worldwide. China has less ability to coerce nations an ocean away and the Rurikir (reunified Kievan Rus') can't bully anyone either.
I'm looking for a POD of something highly unlikely that happened OTL or an atypical betrayal with the POD being that event proceeding through a more likely outcome. I thought it would be an interesting twist in-story to portray our more chaotic and violent world as the divergent timeline, reliant on unusual events. The still imperfect but markedly better world of the Alternate Timeline is portrayed as the true "Prime" universe with the many "timeline branches" in that era preferentially resembling the Prime timeline. To put it in Star Trek terms, they're living in the Prime Universe, we're living in the Mirror Universe (except less campy). This is why I'm collecting more than one POD.
There's a few stories but in the (very) distant epilogue the characters can see the other possible universes and they can clearly see them clustered (i.e quite similar) around their own universe with a few weirder universes further out. One such universe is ours and another such universe is the one I discussed in the DWBI Continued Terran Empire forum. That one is also a Mirror style universe and since it's premise is "really unlikely stuff ruins life for Humanity" it's quite a lot easier to write. I mixed in a hefty dash of humor.
Currently I'm going for an early Industrializing China pulling the entire world forwards with it, long before Europe can start their expansion. Factors such as China needing friendly nations for horses and generally not being interested in colonizing nations an ocean away prevents China from pulling a mass conquest or mass divide and conquer scenario. What do you think of this idea and are there any other suggestions for PODs that can keep China from being conquered by others? Help for the main POD is appreciated too.