GURPS Infinite Worlds Covers

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wellis

wellis

Tiro said:
I have to say that of all the Earths mentioned in this thread so far this "Tsarevich" has to be the one I would most love to see illustrated; it would seem to be the sort of setting that an artist from the school of Mr Mike Mignola would have a particularly delightful time drawing up!
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Cool thing about it is that it seems to be a sort of pulpish timeline. For example, it's implied in an adventure hook that its Venus is a jungle type of planet like all those old ideas of Venus were.
Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (Quest)
Using new calculating engines developed at the University of Krakow, astronomers have tracked the reality shard that hit Tsarevich (“the Ries bolide”) 14 million years ago back to the planet Venus. Astronomers theorize that Venus is a younger world than Earth, earlier in its geological development: a world of volcanoes, jungles, and vast soda-water oceans.

Its native life might resemble Earth’s dinosaurs; it might feature some alternate evolutionary track leading to sentient octopoids or to a race of parthenogenetic women. It might be home to alien light- bringers, or to seductive psychic vampires. More to the point, its crystal mountains doubtless hold immense veins of magical power – enough to make the man who commands them a god on two planets.
Whether their own ambitions or the plans of a hated rival drive them, the PCs want to get to Venus.

The GM might simply start the campaign by reading the above paragraph and asking players to build characters who want to go to Venus, or introduce this goal in tempting fashion during an ongoing campaign set on Tsarevich. Getting to Venus almost certainly involves mad science: probably a rocket, but it’s surely too early to rule out an immense cannon, an anti-gravity screen, a teleportation field, astral projection, or opening a wormhole. The heroes may have to hunt down lost plans of earlier planeteers, spy on their rivals, accumulate immense wealth, summon the ghost of a dead inventor, or just buckle down to a series of gadgeteering rolls (p. B475). Anything at all might await the voyagers on the Planet of Storms – although it hardly seems sporting to send the bold adventurers to roast on the acid-drenched hell world that is Homeline Venus.
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wellis

wellis

In case Tsarevich isn't picked, anyone ever thought of doing Siva-6?:
On Siva-6 (Q4, current year 1599), Julian the Apostate survived as Roman Emperor in 363 A.D. and conquered Persia, driving the Christians east to India and Central Asia. The Christian Turks waged holy war against the Mithraist empires of the west and the Confucian and Hindu states of the east, bringing block printing south with them in the 11th century. Their Indian sultanates sponsored printing presses, accidentally triggering a scientific revolution during debates with Hindu astronomers. Along with Christianity, the Black Death (redirected by Turkish southward trade) swept away much of the aristocratic and caste structures in India, clearing the path for full industrial takeoff. India is the center of the TL8 world, but on the verge of tearing itself apart in religious warfare.
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rvbomally

Good news: Every map in GURPS: Infinite Worlds (and Alternate Earths, and Lost Worlds) will be covered eventually, barring those which would just be a blank map (such as that world which got hit by a gamma ray burst).
Bad news: "Eventually" does not mean "soon." The Sun will expand into a red giant and consume the Earth eventually.
 
wellis

wellis

Hopefully it won't take 5 billion more years for you guys.

Jokes aside, if we put down setting information, like I did for Tsarevich, does that help?

Also rvb, what worldline do you plan on doing next?
 
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Tiro

I would personally love to see more information on the various settings (I Love a Multiverse, which is why I'm more of a DC deadhead than a Marvel zombie), provided you yourself are willing to keep posting that sort of thing Wellis.:)
 
wellis

wellis

Tiro said:
I would personally love to see more information on the various settings (I Love a Multiverse, which is why I'm more of a DC deadhead than a Marvel zombie), provided you yourself are willing to keep posting that sort of thing Wellis.:)
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I can. Uh if the other people in the thread are okay with that?
 
wellis

wellis

There are also some alternate timelines in the Pyramid magazines as well.

Igor-1 is an interesting timeline.
 

Tiro

Now that's a rather intriguing world (and to my jaundiced eye feels just a bit like a love-letter to Harry Turtledove by virtue of the pasting taken by Great Britain during the course of this particular Timeline).:idontcare:
 

naraht

Tiro said:
Now that's a rather intriguing world (and to my jaundiced eye feels just a bit like a love-letter to Harry Turtledove by virtue of the pasting taken by Great Britain during the course of this particular Timeline).:idontcare:
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Some missing chunks of the world would seem to make this difficult, starting with no explanation of how Canada *lost* Quebec. The Germans sending an alt-Zimmerman telegram to English Canada as part of a war that the British are already in seems really odd and Canada accepting(given the war on the North American Great Lakes) even more so. In addition, the British African Colonies seem only to be those gotten from the Decaying Ottomans, so what happened to Nigeria/Kenya/Uganda/etc? and for the British losing India, the African Colonies and Canada (sort of) being the end of the empire makes my wonder about everything from the Caribbean to Burma to Australia/New Zealand.

"The existence of magic had a great effect on the dominance of the wider world by western civilization. Already technologically inferior, the fairly ineffective hedge magic of the indigenous peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Asian continent allowed strategic dominance by Western Europe and the Americas."

makes me wonder just how much of East Asia (Japan, China, Siam) ended up completely curbstomped in the last half of the 19th and early part of the 20th century, and by *who*.
 

Tiro

I did not mean to infer that this Timeline was actually BASED on Mr Turtledove's work, rather that the fact that the local United Kingdom seems to have come down with a bad case of "Perfidious Albion" reminded me of the similar misdeeds & misfortunes that seem to accrue to Great Britain whenever she appears in any of his novels (at least those that I have read to date!).;)
 

naraht

Tiro said:
I did not mean to infer that this Timeline was actually BASED on Mr Turtledove's work, rather that the fact that the local United Kingdom seems to have come down with a bad case of "Perfidious Albion" reminded me of the similar misdeeds & misfortunes that seem to accrue to Great Britain whenever she appears in any of his novels (at least those that I have read to date!).;)
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Hmm. In the WorldWar series, it isn't too bad compared to the rest of the planet (even if they do become that TL's Japanese in terms of being tourists). I'm still trying to come up with another one. *But* to be fair, a random timeline is much more likely to be bad for the British than this one...
 
wellis

wellis

On Lenin-3 (Q6, current year 2004), Mussolini stayed Communist and his government supported the Catalan workers, who were the anti-Soviet, anti-Fascist “third force” in Spain during the 1936-1939 War. Mexico’s Cardénas brought his own socialist government into Mussolini’s “anti-Moscow Socialist Axis” in 1938, and Mussolini’s Axis stayed neutral during “the inter-fascist struggle” of World War II. The U.S.-U.K. alliance took an increasingly technocratic stance after the war, and launched a series of huge government “Manhattan Initiatives.” Government scientists intended projects like the Moon shots, the fuel-cell car (caused by concern over Iran’s socialist government joining the Axis in 1953), the Concord stratojet, and so forth to maintain the West’s lead, even after the Soviet collapse in the 1960s. This uneven development path leaves Lenin-3 TL6 in some areas (like personal electronics and agriculture), TL7-8 in most things, and TL9 in high profile gadgets like moon colonies, fuel cells, and supersonic aircraft.
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Now this is an interesting timeline! I've heard someone once describe it as being almost like a vision of the future from the 1960s or a Gerry Anderson style timeline. It looks like a place Bond villains would exist in. And as another person put it, with the main Communists here being Italian, that means Commie agents will have "buckets of elan and style!" :D

TL 6 refers to technology from the 1880s to the 1940s, TL7 is 1950s to 1970s, and TL8 is 1980s to current. TL9 is well like manned offworld colonies or in-orbit of Earth.
 
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