GURPS Infinite Worlds Covers

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Prometheus_2300

wellis said:
Who is going to oppose Centrum? No seriously, who is there to oppose them that actually had the technology and capability to do so? If 3veryone around you is dead or dying, you're the only healthy individual, and you'ge got the technology to build an assault rifle while for them their best tech is the bronze spear, you're going to win your fights a lot more.

You seem to be under the oppression Centrum even had any opponents that could mstch their capabilities. It didn't. They were the only ones with an intact tech base and such while also being healthy at the same time.

I can buy that their Earth still has areas that are desertified or may still need some work to clean up but I can't buy that some post-apoc warlord group had the technology or training or capability to take on Centrum because there is no mention of anything like that. No similar organizations that hid away or anything.
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I never said that any opposition was well organized or had enough to even fight Centrum at all. I was making the argument, that they can't be everywhere at once or even want to. On their own world they are the power supreme, but you can't tell me that a world map of Centrum is just all colored one color with no problems or contentious areas at all anywhere, Claimed yes, controlled no. Even with a parachronic empire, cleaning up 90% of the globe that has crumbling abandoned cities, needing to rebuild infrastructure from scratch, and replanting how much farmland, isn't easy.

Who's going to oppose Centrum on their homeworld? No one, but time and nature are sure going to give it their all. You think that after 100 years they'd rebuild the Trans-Siberian Railway, 40+ major metropolises, the abandoned infrastructure of a mostly dead world. A map of Centrum would likely have Australia fully inhabited but coastal metropolises dotting the Southern Hemisphere, and a few more in the North. Given how many were killed the population of Centrum could be under 500 million. My point is that most of Centrum would be empty, filled with ruins, and the occasional newly founded city with airfield to connect to Austalia. In 1902 I'm sure there were other nations, but current year, no. Nothing more than maybe a dozen guys clawing through the ruins of Beijing, that Centrum hasn't found.
 
Dixie-4
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    • rvbomally

    After a long series of distractions, I'm back in the GURPS game. Continuing with the Dixie series is Dixie-4. According to Infinite Worlds, "the Civil War occurred in 1844, the West is still Mexican, and the United States and CSA are allied against the Mexican and German Empires. Britain is neutral." I don't know what could provoke an American Civil War in 1844 off the top of my head; perhaps an earlier abolition movement? At any rate, I depict the Confederates being much stronger here, as the South was comparatively stronger than the North than they would be twenty years later, and I even have all of the slave states joining the CSA. Of course, this begs the question: why is the CSA rebelling, when the South had control of the federal government at the time? Good question, next question.

    Mexico itself would have to be strong, and perhaps fought a few wars against the Americans and Confederates. That's about what it will take to bring both the USA and CSA on the same side. Here, Mexico never suffers the humiliation of the Mexican-American War, and while it has a few problems with civil unrest, generally does a better job at border control. The American Civil War generated a lot of refugees trying to flee to Mexico, provoking a tougher Mexican response. The violence of the ACW created lots of outlaw types, so when the Americans were going to Mexico, they weren't sending their best.[1] With the USA and CSA at each others' throats, the American governments couldn't do much about it. The Americans did try to fight wars of Manifest Destiny against Mexico, but separately, and they were each defeated in turn. British assistance helped. Later on in the century, the Mexicans turned to the Germans, who (as Prussia) defeated France and Austria during the War of German Unification. These defeats against Mexico turned Mexico into the great threat that the Americans, Confederates and (later) the Canadians could unite against.

    British neutrality implies lots of negative things about the situation in Europe: have the British already been cowed by the German war machine? Has there been a more recent war between them and the natural German rivals of France and Russia? Does Germany already dominate Europe, rendering British opposition moot? Perhaps so, a world under a dominant Kaiserreich. This is what I chose: a world where the German Empire reigns supreme. Germany is the richest country in the world, although its colonial empire is growing unwieldy. The Germans have no real opposition to their global rule; only the Americans have formed a bloc to oppose Germany, and the only reason they can do so is because their words are backed with nuclear weapons. Nuclear proliferation is limited to Germany, Russia, Italy, the USA and the CSA; Britain and France had nuclear programs during the Great War, but they were shut down and are now legally barred from producing more. China has a clandestine program, as does India and South Africa.

    The French and British went to war against the Germans and the Russians in the 1930s, with the French and British losing and being forced to sign off much of their colonial empires. The Germans defeated the French by successfully breaking through the Western Front and capturing Paris, while the British fought on until a German atomic bomb destroyed the Royal Navy in the Channel, and a second one destroyed Birmingham. The British initially kept the dominions, but the growth of an independent national identity in the dominions, along with distrust of the British, eventually led them to go their own way. The French have been humiliated and are about as eager for war as OTL Germany, however, they are neutral. The French are permanently disarmed and prevented from getting into an alliance with any other great power. Russia is on Germany's side. The Russo-German alliance was secured by Bismarck ITTL and it stuck, with Germany taking the Russian side during the Great Game, and it's only recently starting to crack.

    In the East, the Qing have been deposed and replaced with the more reformist Tao Dynasty. The Ottoman Empire remained neutral after the Balkan Wars, where the Germans and Russians basically disassembled their European holdings; the Ottomans almost joined the French and British in the Great War, and are glad they didn't. India became independent after the Great War, with Russian-backed nationalists taking control, and now the Indian National Party is trying to keep the country and itself from splitting along all sorts of identitarian lines.

    [1] Some of them, I'm sure, were nice people.

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    • Reich-2
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    • rvbomally

    Surprise! Another cover, and this time I'm jumping off the Southern wagon to visit the other staple of alternate history: the Reich worlds. That's because I'm a bit tired of working with 19th century maps and, thanks to the efforts of SRegan and others, Axis victory basemaps are easy to come by. I'm also going out of order and exploring Reich-2 first. That's because @Prometheus_2300 already did Reich-1, and while I have my own take on that, I'll post it later. I also want to go in order from least German-dominated to most. You think Dixie-4 has my therapist asking awkward questions? This set will eventually make it look tame.

    This Reich-2 map is based on Diamond's, and, like the Dixie-1 map, is one of the oldest maps on AH.com. I decided to change things up a bit from his version, to make it line up more with what seems realistic and what Steve Jackson Games says. Infinite Worlds provides quite a bit of detail, which makes my job easier, but it reveals a five-way Cold War with WWII great powers. Unfortunately, it's something that most people in the alternate history community have already seen countless times. But, such is working with Axis victories. The PoD is Lord Halifax becoming Prime Minister and negotiating a peace with Germany. Okay, I can buy that. But then he negotiates an alliance with Japan to break up the Axis? That's way out there. Points for creativity, I guess. Naturally, the alliance breaks down when the Japanese start supporting independence movements in India, and the British respond by running guns to China.

    This is also the most realistic of the Reich worlds. Yeah, it's gonna be a fun ride.

    There isn't much else to say about Reich-2 here, as most of it has already been fleshed out by Steve Jackson Games, and most of my additions are in the annotations. I depict the British Commonwealth members as British allies, but also have India under direct British rule because SJG's description implies direct rule. I also have the Americans and British in an adversarial position towards one another, but I suspect they work together more often than they do against each other. Technology is rather advanced, with all sides having orbital nuclear missile platforms that have frozen the world in a "Kalter Krieg."

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    • Reich-1
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    • rvbomally

    Continuing along, here's my cover of Reich-1. As you can see, @Prometheus_2300 and I have very different philosophies when approaching these covers. Compared to his take, I'm taking a pulpier route, without regard for things like plausibility. Why? Because it's clear Steve Jackson Games did not have that intent. After all, look at Reich-5. So, I went with what I thought the text was implying: a Fatherland-like situation. In this world, Germany destroyed the BEF and forced an unequal peace, and then later crushed the Soviet Union. Since the text mentions battles in Siberia, I took that to mean the Germans taking what they wanted from the Soviets, but allowing a rump Soviet state to exist. In this case, said Soviet state is under Zhukov and some weak CPSU underlings; Stalin, Beria and the rest were killed in the Battle of Moscow, or captured and paraded before the people of Welthauptstadt Germania. Meanwhile, the Americans crushed Japan, which I depict here incidentally helping out China and turning the Soviet Union into an American satellite state.

    Right now, both powers are fighting a third world war. According to Steve Jackson Games, neither have developed nuclear weapons, which I find implausible, but whatever. Hitler seemed content with what he had, but Himmler, his successor, started the war in 1949 by invading Britain, despite warnings from the military that the Germans were not yet ready to take on the Americans. I depict the Germans succeeding in Sealion II: Sealioner, but they are having a lot of trouble putting down the British resistance. After all, they know what happened to their French and Soviet counterparts. The Germans, on the other hand, aren't willing to use the more draconian methods on the British population...yet. The Americans have blockaded the Atlantic coast, and American jets are equal to their Luftwaffe counterparts. They're also massing an invasion force in Iceland, and the Germans have no idea where it's going.

    The Americans are rather determined to put an end to the Nazi regime, and are working on the atomic bomb to do just that. The British are fighting fanatically against the Germans, but Churchill's demands for liberating the British Isles go against the American plan to land somewhere on the mainland. The Soviets are fighting to the last man and the last round, but it's not doing much good; American forces are pouring into the USSR, and the Soviet leadership suspects that whatever autonomy they have left will soon be forfeit. China is being a bad ally, having signed a non-aggression pact with Germany and telling the Americans that they still have a lot of warlords and communists to take care of at home, and that their exhausted, ill-equipped army won't do well against the advanced German war machine anyway. The American OSS is suspicious, citing historic links between the KMT and the Germans, but the military insists that their advisers have their Chinese counterparts under control. Meanwhile, in Europe, the Italians are proving to be a drag once again, and the Spanish are making silly demands like asking for the Philippines in exchange for entering the war on the German side. Himmler grows increasingly paranoid, as he made many enemies on his way to the top, and the OSS is aware of this.

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    • Reich-3
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    • rvbomally

    Moving right along, my cover for Reich-3. According to SJG, the PoD is in 1941, when the Japanese decide to attack Vladivostok instead of Pearl Harbor. I guess the Imperial Japanese Army was more influential in this timeline. The Americans stayed out of the war and never fully funded nuclear research, while the Germans and Japanese divided Eurasia between themselves. SJG mentions UK refugees, so the United Kingdom was invaded at some point. At any rate, I have chosen to depict a full-blown Axis victory, with no holds barred. I have used various base maps from other depictions of Axis victories here, rather than try to emulate what SJG set forth in Reich-5, to further differentiate the two. I suspect that even after the defeat of the UK and the USSR, wars of conquest continued, and with a current year of 1970, the Axis have had plenty of time to conquer and consolidate. So, what you are seeing here is not the product of an alternate WWII, but an alternate WWII and a series of wars afterward. Still implausible, but hey, it's GURPS.

    The Americans are isolated, with only Canada and Mexico as close allies. I depict the rest of the Caribbean and Central America as in the American camp, since the description mentions the Germans coveting America's sphere of influence here. I also handed America the Philippines, even though only Hawaii is mentioned as being an American possession the Japanese covet, because if the Japanese did attack the Philippines, they would have gone to war with America. The Germans and Japanese are having increased border incidents along their common Eurasian border; I suspect most of that is in Central Asia, because the Siberian border of the Third Reich is doubtless heavily garrisoned. The two Axis powers have decided to table these disputes until they defeat the Americans. The SJG blurb is silent on whether nukes have been invented in the meanwhile, but I suspect the Germans, Japanese and Americans have their own arsenals, with Germany's being the strongest and America's the weakest. The threat of nuclear war wouldn't necessarily stop the Axis from launching an attack; they are the Axis, after all.

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    • Reich-5
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    • rvbomally

    Here's my cover for Reich-5. I didn't do many filling in the blanks here, because Steve Jackson Games did a good job of explaining the world of Reich-5. GURPS Alternate Earths even provides a world map. Almost all of the annotations on the map are from GURPS Infinite Worlds or GURPS Alternate Earths, almost verbatim. I haven't made many changes from the provided map or the descriptions provided by Steve Jackson Games, except that what appeared to be French West Africa in the original map has been divided into various Italian puppets. This is because Vichy France is depicted as a very weak state, one that would not plausibly have control over that much of Africa, and because I wanted to give Italy more puppet states to match its status as a world power.

    I think Reich-5 has many unique aspects as an Axis victory world. The Germans are far more powerful than we normally see, having control of India. Argentina is a major world power, just as it was a German puppet in Reich-2; this is why fascist Argentina shows up in my interpretation of other Reichs. The Germans have a Reichsprotektorate system which, as far as I can tell, never existed IOTL. The Japanese have kept China together, but as a part of their "Outer Empire," while Manchukuo was given former Soviet territory. The United States is a fascist ally, not divided between the two Axis powers. Suid-Afrika is much larger than what we could tell from actual Axis war plans. All in all, an interesting addition to the multiverse of Axis victories.

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    • naraht

    rvbomally said:
    Here's my cover for Reich-5. I didn't do many filling in the blanks here, because Steve Jackson Games did a good job of explaining the world of Reich-5. GURPS Alternate Earths even provides a world map. Almost all of the annotations on the map are from GURPS Infinite Worlds or GURPS Alternate Earths, almost verbatim. I haven't made many changes from the provided map or the descriptions provided by Steve Jackson Games, except that what appeared to be French West Africa in the original map has been divided into various Italian puppets. This is because Vichy France is depicted as a very weak state, one that would not plausibly have control over that much of Africa, and because I wanted to give Italy more puppet states to match its status as a world power.

    I think Reich-5 has many unique aspects as an Axis victory world. The Germans are far more powerful than we normally see, having control of India. Argentina is a major world power, just as it was a German puppet in Reich-2; this is why fascist Argentina shows up in my interpretation of other Reichs. The Germans have a Reichsprotektorate system which, as far as I can tell, never existed IOTL. The Japanese have kept China together, but as a part of their "Outer Empire," while Manchukuo was given former Soviet territory. The United States is a fascist ally, not divided between the two Axis powers. Suid-Afrika is much larger than what we could tell from actual Axis war plans. All in all, an interesting addition to the multiverse of Axis victories.
    Click to expand...

    Sort of surprised that the Germans have Antarctica all by themselves...
     
    Reich-4
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    • rvbomally

    Here's the last of the Reichs, Reich-4. I saved this one for last because it's practically Germany takes over the world. According to SJG, the Wehrmacht succeeded in breaking into Leningrad, Germany and Japan succeeded in developing nuclear weapons by 1945, and German ballistic missiles managed to destroy the United States. The Axis split North America between them, with the Japanese providing the bulk of the occupation troops. The Axis turned on one another, and after an incident in the Persian Gulf in 1979, the Germans launched a first strike which decapitated the Japanese Empire and left Germany a functioning state that eventually took over the world. I chose to interpret this as a nuclear war that heavily went in Germany's favor, because that's what it would take to keep the Nazi regime in place and give it the ability to take over the world. I considered painting the whole world grey, but I thought that would be boring, so I left a lot of German client states, such as the United States and a revived Republic of China. This also matches SJG's assertion that the Nazis are having trouble finding the wherewithal to dominate the world, so some "outsourcing" made sense to me. As for Italy, Italy was taken out of the picture; after Mussolini's death, the Italian regime fell into civil war, with the anti-German faction winning. The Germans could not have this and replied with nukes.

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    • wellis

    wellis

    The "Pacific States of America" sort of reminds me of the one from Dawn of Victory.

    Sounds like Reich-4 is a very grim place.
     

    Tiro

    It's a Nazi-infested parallel Planet Earth and those don't tend to be very cheerful places to live or to visit (for very painful reasons).

    Please Keep Up the Good Work you fellows!:)
     
    Centrum Beta
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    • Prometheus_2300

    Well... I am calling this as being the most controversial map so far created. I present to you... Centrum Beta, an echo of Centrum's timeline before the war.

    Centrum's history is at times at odds with what would be plausible, and somewhere between OTL USA luck, and Drakas authorial fiat protection. However there are a few things known. It also doesn't help that 6 centuries of history is crammed into a few paragraphs.

    One, the Anglo-French Union was the one uncontested superpower of the globe. Two, a larger Mongol threat forced the Anglo-French (aka Angevin Kingdom) to look elsewhere to expand, and innovate in terms of military doctrine to survive. Three, phenomenal tech progress caused likely by an earlier scientific Revolution. So as a result I came to these themes behind Centrum Beta

    Anglo-French Empire (Or Angevin Empire) has the luck of the United States. This one is just based on history that the Angevins simply never faced a threat that they couldn't either outfox, or outmanuever or crush. In Spain they likely fomented dissent and assumed the Crown of Andalusia, pushing out the Muslims.

    Mongol Invictus Apparently the Mongol Empire plowed straight through Central Europe and was on the borders of the Angevin Empire before they turned around. I'm thinking that unlike in OTL, Kublai Khan, and one of his relatives kept India afloat for a while longer than OTL. The Chinese Empire under the Ming/Yuan Dynasty, embarked on Zheng He adventures alongside military campaigns. India subdued Persia, and along side the Ayyubids were the chief empires of Islam. The Western Mongol Empire crumbled and was easy pickings for whoever fought them, allowing the AF Kingdom to become the AF Union with a set up similar to the Commonwealth of Nations of the 1920s, and an active monarchy.

    No Gods, Only Man Religion is not mentioned in the Centrum section except as being just tradition. Either some form of Atheism starts in the 13th century, likely around a center of learning like Urbino or Paris. One thought I had was that the Angevins and the Vatican had an investiture crisis, and in the end the Angevins just siezed the churches (somehow). Combined with an early scientific revolution this would get Centrum to hit the industrial age in the 15th century rather than the 19th. Given how contentious Italy was in OTL, I think the crisis had more to do with proto-capitalist Angevin companies, fighting Venice and Genoa, and the Vatican getting involved because of their prodding. The AF Kingdom wasn't going to let religion be brought into a trade war.

    TerraNova genocide? While it would go against what modern Centrum stands for, the Angevins weren't exactly sad or even try to stop that the Native American populations were being slaughtered by disease. In fact since they industrialized at around the same time as American contact I suspect, they even developed the IFV as a means of crossing the great plains. This also illustrates that Centrum has had a low population for a very long time (Mongol Success, North American epidemics, Black Death). With the Angevin Empire being the most advanced power, they had a settler rush to get people out of Europe, and practice "freelance Imperialism" in the "Western Continents" or assimilation zones in Africa.

    Asiatic Enemies As much I am sure the AFU would like to believe they were in command of the world in 1902, they probably weren't totally. What little details exist show that bioweapons were unleashed in response to China and India, and that "a few dozen" AFU cities were hit with nukes. I think what happened is this... The Angevins were a century or more ahead of everyone in tech, they had nearly 5 continents under their control, and actively assimilating large populations or engaging in "freelance imperialism". Thanks to freelance Imperialism that the AF Union followed, corporations and companies were the tip of the AF spear so to speak, and operated with impunity where they could. The Opium Wars or event like those happen all the time, and unless the nation and the AF Union work out a commerce accord, those wars continue to happen, until either the nation breaks or the corporations just assimilate until it becomes a part of the Union proper.

    China under Kublai Khan, and Ming Imperial policy, sees China becomes the leading power besides the AF Union. While the AF Union was expanding in the Americas, China got Indonesia and East Africa. Unfortunately China just wasn't advanced enough. How would ironclads fight battleships? How would Battleships fight submersibles? How would Carrier groups stop a nuke in Beijing? The crisis that likely caused the 1902 crisis was a terrorist strike backed by China, utterly furious over AF companies running roughshod over their territory and people. They stole some nukes from an AF convoy, negotiated with Poland for rocket design, slip a few nukes in trading ships leaving Calcutta for AF ports, ICBM the rest...

    Corner an enemy and they will do something desperate. Nuclear Weapons were used by the Angevins to make artificial Saharan lakes and other projects, someone stole them. China and India conspired and used one of the few vectors that the Anglo-French wouldn't see coming... Space. My theory is that since the Anglo-French were just so far ahead tech wise, had the Americas, Europe and most of Africa resources, with a low population, they didn't see much point in going to space. Easier to just lay a few more dozen transatlantic cables, what could a satellite do that a high altitude plane couldn't? A missile strike by Chinese and Indian ICBMs were completely unexpected. Got the AF traders to run from Chinese spheres of influence, they didn't think they had nukes much less willing to use them in war. The immediate aftermath was that shattering London and 41 other metropoles broke the Anglo-French Union, into a thousand squabbling pieces. Bioweapons were unleashed by some noble in Italy, that wound up mutating and killing billions. The only reason that Australia survived was that their navy got pulled away early, and never returned. That's how the "Centrum Military Conglomerate" becomes "Centrum"

    Overall, the Anglo-French Union were the only power on the globe at least from their view, the Celestial Kingdom, Chaghatai and others were all non-voting members in the Union, before 1902 the Union had UN levels of membership, with a level of integration among voting members far exceeding the EU. Although the AFU had a military, it's private military groups made up a good portion of the armed forces on the planet. The population of the planet is hovering just over 1.2 billion people, with the AFU being 2nd. This is why Centrum is so weirded out by Homeline, they are bizarrely over-populated in their view. Whereas by Homeline standards Centrum Beta is underpopulated for 1895, but even more so when you realize they are TL7 not TL5 like 1895 Homeline.

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