From the AHTG gazeteer, which I'm almost done with...
Isla De California – a world in which “the big one” hit California in the Middle Ages, so when European explorers arrived a channel of ocean ran from the Gulf of California as far north as OTL Puget Sound. The republic of California is one of the richer and most developed parts of the globe, and is the leading nation in the Spanish-speaking trading block known as the Confederation of American States, but the world’s dominant powers are the British Empire and the Empire of Peru - Spanish OTL South America, including the western bits of OTL Brazil (Portugal and Brazil never united in this world, so there was much less Portuguese penetration west of the Tordesillas treaty line), the Philippines, Australia, NZ - with China as a rising third power. The German-Russian Collectivist Block broke apart rather messily in the 1980s with the second Russian civil war (which thankfully only involved a _few_ nuclear weapons) - although Red Germany remains in control of a number of chunks of the Block, it no longer really counts as a first-rank power.
Australia and New Zealand were settled earlier and are more densely populated than in our world, especially New Zealand – Australia suffers from some serious water shortages. It’s a more aristocratic and elitist world, and a number of states still allow dueling, including Isla de California itself. Curiously, there was an actual masked revolutionary (or possibly revolutionaries) going by the name of Zorro who played an important role in Isla De California’s breaking away from the rule of Madrid. (Even more curiously, Californians are not fond of spicy food). Most of Spanish-speaking America is essentially first world.
Bruce