I didn't mean actually shifting Centrum itself. I was curious why they don't colonize 8 and 9 more.
GURPS Infinite Worlds Covers
- Thread starter rvbomally
- Start date
I didn't mean actually shifting Centrum itself. I was curious why they don't colonize 8 and 9 more.
They probably are. Mostly they want to shift worldlines to be closer to them than Homeline. Which makes it harder for Homeline to access those worldlines then.
As for colonizing, I think they're still focused on fixing their Earth first.
Well, Infinity has worlds on the opposite "side" of quantas that Centrum can't get to period. Centrum probably has these as well, but as the books are written from infinity's perspective they have no way of knowing about these.
http://gurps.wikia.com/wiki/Worlds_of_Infinite_Worlds. The numbers of worlds in 8, 9 and 10 seems rather limited. 8 got 45, 9 43 and 10 52. Quantum 6 with 379 is the big price.
Apparently D20 Future had its own little competitor to Gurps Infinite Worlds called Dimension X, which I was quite surprised to find recently when I got the PDF. The handful of worlds it details are all cliched, down to their names: "United American Emirate" (Muslim colony in the Americas), "Midgard: (Vikings win forever), "Nazi Europe" (Guess), "Napoleonic Union" (guess).
However, the metaplot is rather interesting. There is a single dimension called Nexus that invented "Dimension wands" that allow cross-universe travel, and whose Dimension Rangers police the multiverse. Basically, most universes are loose tributaries of Nexus in exchange for the goodies such an alliance provides, with a few independents. Recently, though, universes have simply been disappearing, becoming impossible to travel to. When the Rangers check it out, it turns out there's a rapidly expanding wave in dimensions that get destroyed that rapidly ages everything caught within to dust. The campaign is a dash to evacuate dimensions and stop the apocalypse, along with interesting moral quandries (should we evacuate Nazi Europe?, etc.)
However, the metaplot is rather interesting. There is a single dimension called Nexus that invented "Dimension wands" that allow cross-universe travel, and whose Dimension Rangers police the multiverse. Basically, most universes are loose tributaries of Nexus in exchange for the goodies such an alliance provides, with a few independents. Recently, though, universes have simply been disappearing, becoming impossible to travel to. When the Rangers check it out, it turns out there's a rapidly expanding wave in dimensions that get destroyed that rapidly ages everything caught within to dust. The campaign is a dash to evacuate dimensions and stop the apocalypse, along with interesting moral quandries (should we evacuate Nazi Europe?, etc.)
Here’s my map for GURPS: Autoduel, the sourcebook based on SJG’s Car Wars game. Not formally a part of the Infinite Worlds setting, I’m including it on this thread under the same reasoning as rvbomally’s cyberworld map, that all gurps settings are canonically part of the Infinite Worlds multiverse, they just don’t know it yet. It’s insane, but embrace that and you should have some fun.
History, American and Otherwise
The PoD is hard to pin down but something happened in the 90s: the economy tanked and advances in gasoline alternatives lead to the US military switching over to an alcohol-based fuel in 2000; the civilian market followed either them or switched over to electric cars. It was a lucky thing too, as in this world many of the largest oil reserves had run almost dry by 2010! Fortunately, a world with 10 years of drifting away from oil meant this only caused the recession to become a double-dip, rather than the end of civilization. Among the few remaining reliable oil reserves were those in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, which became richer than kings [1]. Though the world was increasingly non-oil-using, black gold was still needed in many industries and prices were high. They seceded in rapid succession in the early 2010s under the moniker of the Free Oil States, using their endless treasuries to fund modern militaries that fought off the feds. They remain three independent nations, even if the FOS itself has degraded from military coalition to useless talking club.
In the interim period, during the 2000s, three things happened in the United States.
First of all, 9/11 just didn't happen, and so there was no War on Terror- Al-Queda simply never executed the attack.
Media entertainment had been getting more and more violent, sexual, and debased. Congress saw this as a major reason behind gun violence and crime rate increases. Lawmakers introduced the V-chip, an advanced computer that could intelligently censor, in real time, television broadcasts and internet streaming, available (but optional!) for free to all Americans. The V-chip met with outrage from the left and libertarian right, who correctly pointed out the V-chip could be programmed by the government to censor political opinions, not just graphic content, and though engineers who dissected the chips saw that they were really what they were advertised to be, the government could change them in the future. However, concerned parents and moral conservatives still turned out to pick them up in droves. Those who installed them were also often annoyed as a glitch in the chip would reset all connected electronic clocks to 12:00, a bug that would not be adequately addressed. Still, many Americans kept the chips, reasoning that decent television was worth it. The V-chip ironically caused television to grow even more graphic, as producers stated that if the public didn’t like it, they could get a V-chip.
Since the late 90s, environmental regulations began to go non-enforced as a desperate America turned to any resources they could get their hands on. This lead to backlash as national parks started to be tapped and forested, and an invigorated American Green Party won 20% of the House in the 2008 elections. Their popularity declined after the Free Oil States seceded, as an oil-less America could not fill the energy gap entirely with renewable energy. They maintained a few seats in the House from the most liberal northern states, but never recaptured the support they once had.
A major reason the Free Oil States could remain independent was due to the fact that the US government was a mite distracted with a blight that caused global famine in 2012 and 2013, and a nuclear war with Russia in 2014. The Grain Blight first appeared simultaneously in Ukraine and Nebraska in 2012, spreading throughout the world (though Australia successfully quarantined itself) and destroying staple crops such as wheat and rice as well as drug plants like poppy and marijuana (the only good side effect of this was ending the War on Drugs rather suddenly). Russia and America each accused the other of engineering the blight, launching parts of their nuclear arsenal at each other [2]. Luckily, each nation’s orbital satellites intercepted very nearly all of the nuclear missiles. Unluckily, a couple cities got wiped off the map and global cancer rates rose and temperatures fell. [3] Many nations collapsed due to the Blight, becoming warlord states and feuding kingdoms. Those that survived were ramshackle operations at best. [4]
About the same time at the Blight burned itself out, another catastrophe hit the world. The worm, a computer supervises, spread throughout computer networks, shutting off power grids, wiping financial records, and causing smart-homes to self-destruct. Interestingly, the worm had been programmed to activate at a specific time - 3:33 PM - sparing homes with the V-chip whose clocks still flashed 12:00.
The Worm caused a restructuring of the internet as it had been known, into segmented, smaller and more paranoid networks capable of limited interaction with one another. This fragmentation would, hopefully, prevent a disaster like this from happening again.
Finally, it seemed like the cascade of disasters might finally be over. This was not the case.
You see, the US, FOS, and Canada had huge stores of food in preparation of famines like the world was now seeing. These were managed admirably, and it took four years for the average American or Canadian to start going hungry after the blight. But once they started to, these nations, unaccustomed to chronic hunger since the Great Depression, tore themselves apart. Rioting was universal, refugees from the cities fought farmers for remaining fertile land, and the federal government had to flee Washington as the city burned behind them. Gun ownership rose to near-universal levels.
This lead to the rise of gang-armies of outlaw motorcyclists, who would stay mobile on their energy-efficient cycles, traveling hundreds of miles for raids for supplies and slaves to bring back to their strongholds.
In this environment, with the Federal Governments of the US and Canada in hiding in a military base, state, provincial and local governments were on their own. Some state or provincial governments collapsed or became dictatorships. Many towns burned to a crisp and the cities that survived often abandoned the riot-prone downtowns and walled off the safe areas, becoming Fortress Towns. Of the three Free Oil States, only Texas survived the Food Riots a democracy.
The famines ended when marine researchers at the University of Washington working with the latest in cloning technology developed a quick-growing, and not too awful-tasting algae, which the federal government finally returned from exile to distribute. The formula was published for free and circulated as widely as possible. Government aircraft delivered shipments to besieged cities. Rioters went home, and security forces began to mop up the worst of the cycle gangs. Finally, in 2017, the chaos was over. The A&M University in Texas team also developed advanced human cloning and memory transfer technology, allowing wealthier Americans unconcerned with the thought of what happened to their soul security in the knowledge that several “thems” were in cold storage were they killed.
During all this chaos, heavy firepower and motor vehicles were increasingly combined. With the law a mere suggestion in many parts of the country, a gun turret on city busses or a rocket for the hood of the family sedan became a requirement just to get to work. Such practices became universal and in 2025 collided with the violent world of TV entertainment when two hotshot rivals fought each other in their cars on pirate television. Initially considered illegal under dueling laws, intense public demand for something to distract them from a deteriorating world lead to its legalization as “Autoduelling”[5]
As American society began to rebuild, one faction opposed the restoration of Federal authority. Combining true-blue anarchists with libertarians disgusted with the government, the Anarchy Party won elections on the platform that local government had protected everyone a damn sight better than the feds. Exhausted, the government was willing to make previously unheard of concessions. Anarchist communities (“Roanokes”) that didn’t want to be governed from Washington were literally erased from the map, with incoming roads blocked or dynamited, thus making enforcing federal authority over them impossible. But as the Anarchy Party failed to change policies at a national level, more militant anarchists formed the Anarchy Relief Front, the switch to the Party’s carrot. Within a decade, the ARF was the number one terrorist group in America. The ARF’s heyday was cut short in 2036, when they went too far. They killed 8 out of 10 members of a congressional subcommittee investigating them, shortly thereafter stealing a prototype Dempsey XM-6 tank from an army base near Midville, Ohio. But the tank and ARF forces were destroyed by militia when they maneuvered into the city itself. [6]
ARF went dormant for the next nine years ,and were believed a non-entity.
Then, in 2045, when American President Wilson Tanner gave a televised national speech announcing he was declaring the anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing a national day of morning alongside Oklahoma, the ARF struck, launching an attack on the White House. ARF agents somehow impersonating Secret Service agents whisked the President away, and he was never seen alive again. The President, naturally, had four clones lying dormant in secure bunkers across the United States. The government expected and had prepared for an ARF attack on these. They hadn’t prepared for the ARF hacking the wakeup signal to reach all four bases. The four Tanners arrived at the White House within an hour of each other, and when they realized what had happened none initially would give up power. With the executive essentially vacant, ARF capitalized on this by using homemade artillery to shell American military bases around the country. Finally, one of the Tanners retired from politics to go back to the original’s family and tend to the peanut farm; the remaining three exploited a law that said clones remained the same legal person as their progenitor, becoming co-Presidents together. After all, legally the office had only a single occupant: Wilson Tanner. The three soon mopped up ARF artillery installations; the FBI discovered the location of the ARF’s inner circle; this was reduced to a crater - though the pulpy remains of certain bigwigs were not found [7].
Three years later, the present era has become known as global reconstruction. All the disasters and terrorists that conspired to end civilization failed by but inches, and now it is time to rebuild.
The World:
The superpower of 2050 is the Commonwealth of Australia, which managed to go completely untouched by the Grain Blight due to a complete closing of immigration and emigration and shooting anyone who came within her territorial waters, emerged the breadbasket of Oceania. But the world, still hunger-prone, required a savior. The Outback, unsuitable for large-scale agriculture, became home to miles upon miles of sterile pools for growing clone-algae that was exported all over the world. Australia maintained a coherent state, military, and now much of the world dependent on it for food. Within five years, they had the last requirement of a superpower - a nuclear arsenal. Treaties with other western countries were expanded upon, Australia now looking to assemble an alliance against Japanese expansionism [8].
Internally, Australian society is undergoing changes. The Liberal Party lead the nation through the Blight with the steely-eyed law-and-order conservatism required to weather such an inhumane immigration regime, but while it won elections in a landslide while times were bad, once its relaxed but still very strict policies were no longer a life and death matter, its formerly unassailable mandate fell under siege not from the Labor party alone, but also the new Libertarians, who accused the Liberals of abandoning everything they stood for -freedom, the free market, the fair go- in the name of security. Australia seems to agree. The Liberals are rapidly disintegrating while the Libertarians ascend, and the Labor party waits anxiously for an outcome to the right’s civil war.
The Libertarians already govern two states and are passing laws similar to the American model - the Autoduelling Association of Australia is as renowned as its American counterpart.
[1] And more importantly, richer than the bankrupt federal government.
[2] The rest of the world stayed out of it, focusing more on managing their collective pantries.
[3] It didn’t even have the side effect of really countering global warming, which was less of a concern due to the huge drop-off in fossil fuel use.
[4] Australia did rather well through all of it, but more on them later.
[5] Or autodueling, depending on your location, the time of day or the phase of the moon.
[6] ARF sympathizers claim the ARF only intended to abscond with and sell the tank, not actually attack Midville with it. Few believe them.
[7] Though it is possible they misidentified the puddles of gore that were all that remained in the compound, and if so they did perish after all.
[8] Anti-Asian racism, alas, has only intensified.
(More text soon)
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Droll reversal, innit?I find it funny how Mad Max didn't happen in Autoduel's Australia.
Humor aside, how closely does your map and such follow the Autoduel stuff? Any changes you made in your description compared to what is mentioned in the Autoduel sourcebook?
What I've written so far is the basic backstory and is pretty much the same. Almost nothing of what I've written contradicts the sourcebook, but I do expand upon the world a lot more. Obviously the sourcebook didn't go in-depth about Australian politics, for example.
A fun ASB scenario! Although I must say this was a bit much...
The Outback is the world's best location for ponds??
Why is Britain a rogue state? From the description it doesn't sound much worse than a number of this world's emergency regimes. And how did Russia (which already has difficulties feeding itself) and China make it though the global famine in one piece?
Or will that get covered with the follow-up writing?
The liquid in the pools barely resembles water at this point, and is closer to a chlorinated sludge. It doesn't evaporate.A fun ASB scenario! Although I must say this was a bit much...
The Outback is the world's best location for ponds??
Yep.
Ah, but you can create ponds of chlorinated sludge almost anywhere. Here in the US we call them "public swimming pools."
Of course - most countries have these pools. Australia is notable because it's turned huge swathes of uninhabited land into these algae farms, so it's a top exporter.Ah, but you can create ponds of chlorinated sludge almost anywhere. Here in the US we call them "public swimming pools."
I remember the Autoduel Universe from when I was younger. I especially loved that my home, New Hampshire, was an enclave of sanity in a world gone mad. New Hampshire STRICTLY prohibited armed automobiles, trucks, and such. People living near the highway didn't have to worry about stray 37 mm anti-tank rounds, loose rockets, or random laser blasts. Even some of the White Mountain parks were safe to camp in.
Haha, I remember that! Thought they said to avoid certain parks because the cannibal gangs might attack campers.
I found an issue of pyramid long ago detailing an early draft of Infinite Worlds they decided not to go with, does anyone remember this? IIRC the plot is that America discovered Parachronics during the cold war and used them to beat Russia, Reich-5 were to be the main villains, and Rome Aeturnum was going to be an American ally they let in on the secret and assisted in conquering their world.
Edit: found it!
Edit: found it!
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Jesus, that article is 20 years old! And man, things really changed from that concept!
Does seem entertaining in a dumb fun kind of way, though. Ameriwank vs. the Space Nazis, who will win?
Don't know. In order to set up an RPG, often a conflict like this cannot be won.
Also, Zeta sounds like Ming-3 from Alternate Earths.