Yeah, the Soviet War is fascinating. Racist Technocrats Vs. Stalinists: Whoever wins, we lose!
GURPS Infinite Worlds Covers
- Thread starter rvbomally
- Start date
Faeelin
Banned
Don't forget, Imperial Japan rules East Asia. The Congo is now run by those shiny technocrats.
A world I've been debating covering is Homeline itself; we know there are differences, as there was no War on Terror, for one thing. But I'm afraid it will end up looking like a slightly modified nineties basemap where only the footnotes tell you about the cool stuff that can't be mapped, like how Colorado now has a disproportionately huge influence on the Electoral College because it's colonizing an entire planet on its own.
I've run into the same problem with Lenin-4 and Terradyne. Apart from the Moon and Mars, and some sea level rise on Terradyne, the map is more or less identical to OTL 1990.
I always thought that a good loophole for making Terradyne more interesting is that the members of the UPOE exist in a limbo between sovereignty and mere autonomy from the United Peoples, so regional blocs like the Pacific Rim Coalition could be shown as federations. Alas, no loopholes like that for Homeline.
Yeah, I might screw around with it a bit, and call it Lenin-4A. It's a chronoshifted version of Lenin-4!
EDIT: Further reading on Terradyne shows that their own map is inaccurate.
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Terradyne
This was a difficult one to make, but ultimately an enjoyable one. This is GURPS Terradyne. You might be wondering why this is in the middle of my Lenins series, and that's because this world is actually Lenin-4. Kinda. It's technically Lenin-4's future. SJG made Terradyne in the 1990s (evidenced by this retroactively hilarious tidbit, and the Soviet Union being "temporarily embarrassed"), and by the time Infinite Worlds came out, it showed its age. SJG did something I liked, which was turn the world into an alternate history. Lenin-4 is the result, only Lenin-4 is in the 2020s. I will make that one, but I wanted to make GURPS Terradyne first because it's far more interesting. I love this setting because of the 1990s sensibilities. China is on the rise, but Japan is also a great power. The Soviets are still around.
Terradyne is a hard science fiction setting, which features a conflict between the United Peoples of Earth (a UN replacement) and Terradyne, a megacorporation turned de facto interplanetary empire. The United Peoples of Earth are much more powerful than the UN, and work more similarly to the United States, but national governments still have a lot of control over local issues and even dissent over the Terradyne issue. I have indicated this on my key, which has China being on the most anti-Terradyne end, and the Japanese on the most pro-Terradyne end.
Now, for the changes and guesses I made. I mostly changed around borders in Africa and the Middle East, because SJG unhelpfully provided a map of OTL 1990 (complete with East Germany) with some sea level rise. I decided to use @Zauberfloete's 30 meter sea level rise map rather than fiddling around with what SJG provided, since that's a more realistic map, but I did screw around with the Netherlands because SJG makes the point that the Dutch kept the seas out. I kept Israel out of the UPOE as a conjecture based on their history with the 2027 bombing. I also conjectured that this eventually led to a Syrian civil war and a second Iran-Iraq War[1], which gave me an excuse to mess around with the borders there. The sourcebook also mentions regional wars in Eastern Africa, Central Asia, Central America and the Middle East, so it's not like I'm violating some enforced "no more war in the future" thing. A lot of the Martian settlements are conjecture, save for Uruk and Lowell. As are the continued existence of Tranquility Station and Zhukov Base, and that Japanese base. I made Brazil one of the more powerful Earth-based powers, creating a Lusophone/Hispanophone alliance system around them. I kept Yugoslavia together, and kept Namibia in South Africa, which is more to indicate it's an alternate history than it is to match the 1990s origin of the map. I also left some countries out of the UPOE, to indicate that this isn't some united humankind future.
[1] I thought this makes more sense from a 1990s perspective. More inter-Middle East conflicts, no 9/11, War on Terror, "Mission Accomplished," bombing weddings with drones and ISIS crap.
Terradyne is a hard science fiction setting, which features a conflict between the United Peoples of Earth (a UN replacement) and Terradyne, a megacorporation turned de facto interplanetary empire. The United Peoples of Earth are much more powerful than the UN, and work more similarly to the United States, but national governments still have a lot of control over local issues and even dissent over the Terradyne issue. I have indicated this on my key, which has China being on the most anti-Terradyne end, and the Japanese on the most pro-Terradyne end.
Now, for the changes and guesses I made. I mostly changed around borders in Africa and the Middle East, because SJG unhelpfully provided a map of OTL 1990 (complete with East Germany) with some sea level rise. I decided to use @Zauberfloete's 30 meter sea level rise map rather than fiddling around with what SJG provided, since that's a more realistic map, but I did screw around with the Netherlands because SJG makes the point that the Dutch kept the seas out. I kept Israel out of the UPOE as a conjecture based on their history with the 2027 bombing. I also conjectured that this eventually led to a Syrian civil war and a second Iran-Iraq War[1], which gave me an excuse to mess around with the borders there. The sourcebook also mentions regional wars in Eastern Africa, Central Asia, Central America and the Middle East, so it's not like I'm violating some enforced "no more war in the future" thing. A lot of the Martian settlements are conjecture, save for Uruk and Lowell. As are the continued existence of Tranquility Station and Zhukov Base, and that Japanese base. I made Brazil one of the more powerful Earth-based powers, creating a Lusophone/Hispanophone alliance system around them. I kept Yugoslavia together, and kept Namibia in South Africa, which is more to indicate it's an alternate history than it is to match the 1990s origin of the map. I also left some countries out of the UPOE, to indicate that this isn't some united humankind future.
[1] I thought this makes more sense from a 1990s perspective. More inter-Middle East conflicts, no 9/11, War on Terror, "Mission Accomplished," bombing weddings with drones and ISIS crap.
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That settles it, I'll do Homeline. I know you said Terradyne had more border changes than you initially thought, but if one of your best maps can also be one without huge amounts of border changes, Homeline definitely has potential. Great map, I especially thought extrapolating 90s future predictions due to the print date was a clever idea.
EDIT: Though I must say it's a little odd for Tibet and Inner Mongolia to be staffed with toadies of Beijing if Beijing is underwater...
Great to hear! I suggest looking at future history cliches from 2005 and earlier, and being as different from OTL as possible. So, no 2007 financial crash, Arab Spring, Syrian Civil War, ISIS, migrant crisis, Brexit, and Trump is just the host of The Apprentice. Trawling around the Future History forum's earliest days may be helpful.
I was thinking along those lines. Infinite Worlds itself mentions how 9/11 was averted due to superior security technology on planes.
Yeah, a timeline that's less airport technothriller than our own. I'm actually thinking that, apart from the changes made by the parachronic and derivative tech, it's actually a rather mundane and boring timeline.
You're right, it would be pretty boring, if not for Infinity deciding to do hilarious things like put an alternate Cecil Rhodes in charge of relations with alternate Africas. The books even admit that the world would be a whole lot shittier if not for the release valve of parachronics. Kurds can just colonize a planet if they want their own lands, after all.
Very nice indeed, rvbomally. Minor quibble: not sure Ethiopia is likely to go Muslim, it's only about a third Muslim nowadays. Future demographic trends are, of course, unpredictable.
The source material mentions Islam being the one religion that gets a boost in followers, so I extrapolated that to apply to Ethiopia as well.
Lenin-4
Lenin-4. This is the "prequel" to GURPS Terradyne (my cover here) that SJG added to Infinite Worlds, possibly to explain why the Soviet Union was still around there. Clever, I think. What did surprise me is that the current year was 2027, during the Golan Heights attack, and when both the UPOE and Terradyne were in their infancy. I'd think they'd set it in 2120, because that setting is much more interesting, and tell people to buy the Terradyne book. I guess that violated SJG's own rule about not having space settings in Infinite Worlds? I dunno, but it made me make two maps for the same timeline and this one's less interesting. Bleh.
The PoD is a worse 1970s recession forcing perestroika a decade early, and the US and USSR agreeing to cooperate to dominate Earth and space. It reminds me of Pournelle's CoDominium, actually. Unfortunately, we find out that the UPOE and Terradyne eclipse them, so I guess we don't get a Pournelle-verse. Or do we? I like to imagine that Infinity Patrol discovering Lenin-4 has altered its fate, and that Terradyne (Lenin-4 Beta?) is a chronoshifted timeline with no causal relationship with Lenin-4, akin to Centrum and Centrum Beta.
Other details. You'll notice the Moon bases. Yeah, Tranquility, the American base, was established in 2002. SJG assumed we'd be on the Moon in 2002, instead of dealing with terrorism. Optimistic folks, them. I added the Second Iran-Iraq War and other hints to the future of Terradyne. The North African Union is around, as is the UPOE, but the Golan Heights attack hasn't invalidated the UN yet, so they're still in their infancy. I decided to keep the Warsaw Pact around, but united Germany, because that is a sign of American-Soviet rapproachment if there ever was one. Of course, Germany becomes a great power again and threatens to pull the EC away from American and Soviet control. Whoops. Also, you may notice that China has a different color, but the same name. That's because the CCP is still in charge. They got thrown out sometime after 2027 in Terradyne, replaced with a socialist (democratic, I presume) government.
The PoD is a worse 1970s recession forcing perestroika a decade early, and the US and USSR agreeing to cooperate to dominate Earth and space. It reminds me of Pournelle's CoDominium, actually. Unfortunately, we find out that the UPOE and Terradyne eclipse them, so I guess we don't get a Pournelle-verse. Or do we? I like to imagine that Infinity Patrol discovering Lenin-4 has altered its fate, and that Terradyne (Lenin-4 Beta?) is a chronoshifted timeline with no causal relationship with Lenin-4, akin to Centrum and Centrum Beta.
Other details. You'll notice the Moon bases. Yeah, Tranquility, the American base, was established in 2002. SJG assumed we'd be on the Moon in 2002, instead of dealing with terrorism. Optimistic folks, them. I added the Second Iran-Iraq War and other hints to the future of Terradyne. The North African Union is around, as is the UPOE, but the Golan Heights attack hasn't invalidated the UN yet, so they're still in their infancy. I decided to keep the Warsaw Pact around, but united Germany, because that is a sign of American-Soviet rapproachment if there ever was one. Of course, Germany becomes a great power again and threatens to pull the EC away from American and Soviet control. Whoops. Also, you may notice that China has a different color, but the same name. That's because the CCP is still in charge. They got thrown out sometime after 2027 in Terradyne, replaced with a socialist (democratic, I presume) government.
I like how you've made different blocs overlap. Germany is in the EC and UPOE, but the EC also includes Poland which is in the Warsaw Pact... It lets you see how the sort of integration that's happened by Terradyne might come about.