Great map, but where do you find/download the mormon alphabet? I've been interested in doing a mormon graphics timeline
Map Thread XIX
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet Wikipedia has a fair article on the Deseret alphabet.
I used http http://2deseret.com/ personally, but it can be a bit of a pain sometimes.
Oh sorry, didn't even know someone else did this.
Edit; Turn out I did, I just forgot about it.
Mormons everywhere!
Anyhoo, a map.
A map based on the "GURPS Infinite Worlds" manual game world Gallatin, in which an early death of Alexander Hamilton leads to the failure to ratify the Constitution and an early breakup of the USA. It is, I suspect, a spit-take on SF and AH writer L Neil Smith's "North American Confederacy" series, which takes a perhaps overly rosy view of the results of the US going hardline libertarian from almost the start. There is the name itself, with Albert Gallatin being seen as the founder of Libertarian-World in that setting (one of the novels being titled "The Gallatin Divergence") while the anarchic Ohio Association seems a callback to the Confederation itself, and the the authors certainly don't shy from making the results pretty darn dystopic, with the German Empire (1914 version, not 1940s, but nastier), the Japanese Empire, and the Soviet Union all existing right up to the "present" of 2004 (even name-checking Joe Stalin, never mind how unlikely it is that he still ends up running Russia in a world which diverges from ours in the 18th century).
I have tried to avoid some of the more unlikely coincidences, so consider this something of a "cover" of the original.
The world is divided into four major power blocks, although the fourth isn't exactly unified. There is the Japanese Empire, and it's integrated economic block, similar to the Empire and Greater East Asian co-prosperity Sphere of our world, but with six decades more of experience and brutal repression. There is the German block, centered in the German "system" for Europe, the Europaverein, a German Empire which in the absence of the US won the equivalent of the First World War and has absorbed it's crumbling Austrian sibling: German democracy, still pretty weak in our world's 1914, has been permanently stunted by the state of perpetual mobilization required to keep its dominance of Europe unchallenged. There is what I have chosen to call the Union of People's Syndicates, an anti-capitalist, collectivist dictatorship broadly similar to the USSR of OTL, if a bit less casually wasteful of its own human and material resources (it still killed millions of its own, but hey, not _tens_ of millions!). It allied to the Japanese in its "liberation" of Asia in an attempt to regain losses to the Germans and expand into the middle east while Japan was distracting Germany and the British.
The Japanese somehow developed the atom bomb first (perhaps the Germans were complacent enough that the High Command didn't feel it necessary to follow up weird physicist's notions), and used it to nail down its victory in the east: they ignored Russian request for a joint invasion of India or some bombs to finish off the Germans, and the Russians were barely able to pull off an armistice well short of their ultimate objectives (The Japanese did make some vague threats to send bombs if the Germans didn't make peace, but they weren't very convincing). The Japanese "stab in the back" is still well remembered in Moscow.
The fourth block consists of the British Commonwealth, which the British have managed to turn into a fairly democratic federation of nations, if still rather less integrated than the other great powers, and their allies, the North Americans, which in turn are a military alliance and free trade union of otherwise quite independent and opinionated nations. Texas, in this world the most populous and industrialized nation in North America, leads and has a formidable nuclear arsenal (probably more than is economically sensible, really) and the attitude of a first rank nation in spite of really not being much stronger than say, our worlds 2004 Germany if they went full militarist again. It is also a deeply racist nation which didn't give up slavery till the 1910s, and to this day maintains a form of Jim Crow oppression of its black population with the full weight of the state behind it.
Nuclear weapons are also owned by California and the rump "United States" (five of them), but in numbers more in proportion to their actual importance. The USA is bustling and multiethnic, with a large Jewish minority, well-ordered and law-abiding, and is sometimes referred patronizingly by German tourists as like a "little Germany." California is nowadays essentially bilingual in Spanish and English, but remains racist towards Asians: understandably if regrettably, "Yellow Peril" fears have never really gone away. (Californian politicians often talk as if they could see Japanese Hawaii from their house). The Ohio Association, essentially a free rider on the Texan atomic umbrella, is an annoyance to everyone on the continent, due to the constant smuggling which takes place across its open, open borders, but has its friends in politics, especially those who bank there.
As the world moves into the 21st century, the three great empires of Eurasia are looking a bit long in the tooth: the example of free African states in the British or (admittedly one each so far) Japanese and Syndicalist blocks is making the German position in Africa ever harder, and may Germans think the day may come when Africa is more a burden than a benefit (so far, German Africa overall returns a profit, thanks to an extremely effective (and brutal) resource and labor extraction process, but if the rebel situation gets out of control...) The Syndicalist economic system, if less insanely centralized than the Soviet one (with it's turf wars between the ministries of Tic-Tacs and Smarties) has been almost as bad at creating added-value products, and is suffering from virtual schizophrenia as different factions try to create either a "people's market" or computerized prosperity on the "red plenty" model. At least they haven't reached the "shooting food rioters" stage of things - yet.
And then there's Japan, still trying to fully pacify China after six decades. In the 70s, much of western China became essentially ungovernable thanks to communist infiltrators and their local supporters: the Japanese withdrew east, taking with them everything they could truck away (down to the last can of Who-hash) and anyone fearing for their safety due to being collaborators or just too wealthy, but then radiologically, chemically, and biologically poisoned the area they had left, killing forty million Chinese (in just the short term: long term numbers remain hard to calculate) and declared their willingness to do the same to every inch of China rather than have it fall to the Reds. This nearly started WWIII, but it at least cowed resistance for a while.
Now, rebellion is once again hotting up again as a new generation comes to the fore, the "military frontier zones" are a hell on Earth, and the Japanese government turns to ever more repressive and misogynistic methods to get the birth rate up. Everyone doubts the Japanese government has the guts to repeat their actions of 1974 (for one thing, they've put so much work into their puppet regimes), but if they do, will the Reds decide they will need to respond?
Anyhoo, a map.
A map based on the "GURPS Infinite Worlds" manual game world Gallatin, in which an early death of Alexander Hamilton leads to the failure to ratify the Constitution and an early breakup of the USA. It is, I suspect, a spit-take on SF and AH writer L Neil Smith's "North American Confederacy" series, which takes a perhaps overly rosy view of the results of the US going hardline libertarian from almost the start. There is the name itself, with Albert Gallatin being seen as the founder of Libertarian-World in that setting (one of the novels being titled "The Gallatin Divergence") while the anarchic Ohio Association seems a callback to the Confederation itself, and the the authors certainly don't shy from making the results pretty darn dystopic, with the German Empire (1914 version, not 1940s, but nastier), the Japanese Empire, and the Soviet Union all existing right up to the "present" of 2004 (even name-checking Joe Stalin, never mind how unlikely it is that he still ends up running Russia in a world which diverges from ours in the 18th century).
I have tried to avoid some of the more unlikely coincidences, so consider this something of a "cover" of the original.
The world is divided into four major power blocks, although the fourth isn't exactly unified. There is the Japanese Empire, and it's integrated economic block, similar to the Empire and Greater East Asian co-prosperity Sphere of our world, but with six decades more of experience and brutal repression. There is the German block, centered in the German "system" for Europe, the Europaverein, a German Empire which in the absence of the US won the equivalent of the First World War and has absorbed it's crumbling Austrian sibling: German democracy, still pretty weak in our world's 1914, has been permanently stunted by the state of perpetual mobilization required to keep its dominance of Europe unchallenged. There is what I have chosen to call the Union of People's Syndicates, an anti-capitalist, collectivist dictatorship broadly similar to the USSR of OTL, if a bit less casually wasteful of its own human and material resources (it still killed millions of its own, but hey, not _tens_ of millions!). It allied to the Japanese in its "liberation" of Asia in an attempt to regain losses to the Germans and expand into the middle east while Japan was distracting Germany and the British.
The Japanese somehow developed the atom bomb first (perhaps the Germans were complacent enough that the High Command didn't feel it necessary to follow up weird physicist's notions), and used it to nail down its victory in the east: they ignored Russian request for a joint invasion of India or some bombs to finish off the Germans, and the Russians were barely able to pull off an armistice well short of their ultimate objectives (The Japanese did make some vague threats to send bombs if the Germans didn't make peace, but they weren't very convincing). The Japanese "stab in the back" is still well remembered in Moscow.
The fourth block consists of the British Commonwealth, which the British have managed to turn into a fairly democratic federation of nations, if still rather less integrated than the other great powers, and their allies, the North Americans, which in turn are a military alliance and free trade union of otherwise quite independent and opinionated nations. Texas, in this world the most populous and industrialized nation in North America, leads and has a formidable nuclear arsenal (probably more than is economically sensible, really) and the attitude of a first rank nation in spite of really not being much stronger than say, our worlds 2004 Germany if they went full militarist again. It is also a deeply racist nation which didn't give up slavery till the 1910s, and to this day maintains a form of Jim Crow oppression of its black population with the full weight of the state behind it.
Nuclear weapons are also owned by California and the rump "United States" (five of them), but in numbers more in proportion to their actual importance. The USA is bustling and multiethnic, with a large Jewish minority, well-ordered and law-abiding, and is sometimes referred patronizingly by German tourists as like a "little Germany." California is nowadays essentially bilingual in Spanish and English, but remains racist towards Asians: understandably if regrettably, "Yellow Peril" fears have never really gone away. (Californian politicians often talk as if they could see Japanese Hawaii from their house). The Ohio Association, essentially a free rider on the Texan atomic umbrella, is an annoyance to everyone on the continent, due to the constant smuggling which takes place across its open, open borders, but has its friends in politics, especially those who bank there.
As the world moves into the 21st century, the three great empires of Eurasia are looking a bit long in the tooth: the example of free African states in the British or (admittedly one each so far) Japanese and Syndicalist blocks is making the German position in Africa ever harder, and may Germans think the day may come when Africa is more a burden than a benefit (so far, German Africa overall returns a profit, thanks to an extremely effective (and brutal) resource and labor extraction process, but if the rebel situation gets out of control...) The Syndicalist economic system, if less insanely centralized than the Soviet one (with it's turf wars between the ministries of Tic-Tacs and Smarties) has been almost as bad at creating added-value products, and is suffering from virtual schizophrenia as different factions try to create either a "people's market" or computerized prosperity on the "red plenty" model. At least they haven't reached the "shooting food rioters" stage of things - yet.
And then there's Japan, still trying to fully pacify China after six decades. In the 70s, much of western China became essentially ungovernable thanks to communist infiltrators and their local supporters: the Japanese withdrew east, taking with them everything they could truck away (down to the last can of Who-hash) and anyone fearing for their safety due to being collaborators or just too wealthy, but then radiologically, chemically, and biologically poisoned the area they had left, killing forty million Chinese (in just the short term: long term numbers remain hard to calculate) and declared their willingness to do the same to every inch of China rather than have it fall to the Reds. This nearly started WWIII, but it at least cowed resistance for a while.
Now, rebellion is once again hotting up again as a new generation comes to the fore, the "military frontier zones" are a hell on Earth, and the Japanese government turns to ever more repressive and misogynistic methods to get the birth rate up. Everyone doubts the Japanese government has the guts to repeat their actions of 1974 (for one thing, they've put so much work into their puppet regimes), but if they do, will the Reds decide they will need to respond?
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A patch for a connected Caspian Sea. Since it is 30 meters below sea level, I brought it up to a plausible level.
I think geological TLs have some underrepresentation, so anyone looking for a geoTL for the Caspian, here you go.
A reminder to everyone that Panama wasn't an isthmus 10 million years ago. Do your worst.
Well, the Bosphorus was, as early as 8000 years ago.
Rather than a sea, why not have an interconnected lake system, kinda like European Great Lakes
So are we talking a secondary war with America at least co-operating with Germany?There's no way in hell that the US is going to ally with the Third Reich, unless we're also proposing president Lindbergh or something.
There's a short AH story by Ward Moore (author of the famed early AH story "Bring the Jubilee") on this theme, called "A Class with Dr. Chang." Japan never attack the US, which ends up sitting out the war, which ends in an at least partial victory for the Reich. Unfortunately, failure to ever engage Fascism and a a feeling of having been left out of world-changing events leads the US itself to eventually go fascist (or "Americanist") and Dr. Chang's class ends badly.
Unusually considerate ASBs!
I agree that Japan was the logical choice but what if Hitler's need for raw materials over-rode that.
Japan could have occupied Vichy Indochina and controlled Indonesia as they did Indochina in OTL "by agreement" with the Dutch Government in Exile.
As Germany had been helping Chinese industrialisation maybe they could see the potential.
Shahanshah: Revolution in Hayastan
Reposting my entry in @Entrerriano 's excellent Telephone Map Game: 2nd Edition. Follow the link to check out the other amazing entries in the game!
@KutKu ’s map featured a Cicilian Armenia that went on a reconquest spree far into Seljuk territory, reclaiming the Armenian highlands. I’m not especially familiar with the 13th Century Middle East, but the magnitude of the reconquest quickly made me think of Alexander the Great.
Taking the idea to its extreme and logical conclusions, we'd end up with a multiethnic Christian, Armenian empire lording a over Perso-Arabic majority. Focusing in on the Alexandrian parallels, the Armenian Empire might well meld Greek political traditions (inherited from its rule of Cilicia) and Persian cultural traditions (with well over a millenia of cultural osmosis) into one. Like Alexander before them, the Armenian Kings would style themselves as latter-day Achaemenids. However, all empires must end. There is a day that the well-oiled Armenian machine must sputter and die, and when Greek, Persian and Armenian can no longer tolerate one another...
Where to go aesthetically? My mapping style has evolved quite a bit since working on the Islamic Incas and my first Austria-wank. Notably, I chose to include elevation in this map and make good use of Paint.NET's opacity function. Choosing some comfortable colors was also fun to do, but in retrospect, I should have better planned the color coding. Then again, I have Uni applications to deal with, so whatever.
Note the Magic: the Gathering cards in the corner. To make this map stand out, I decided to include Risk/Twilight Struggle board game elements. Elevation is admittedly a weird aesthetic choice for a board game, but the rule of cool is paramount--and so it was that years after the Armenian Empire was dead and buried, an Iranian board game company would make a game depicting the Armenia's downfall.
The map is fresh out of the oven at the time of writing, and there are some hints scattered throughout the map I hope @Zalesky and @Falkanner pick up on.
- The Saoshyant bomb: a nuclear device invented by Iranian rebels
- The use of Persian numerals: Perhaps Persian mathematicians have a more long-lasting cultural impact?
- The abundance of provinces in the Empire's West: A sign of neglect in the East?
- Mention of the Mughals: The Mughals of Babur Shah would likely have been butterflied. Might this be a Persianized Mongol Empire?
NARRATIVE said:
Shahanshah: Revolution in Hayastan
Reposting my entry in @Entrerriano 's excellent Telephone Map Game: 2nd Edition. Follow the link to check out the other amazing entries in the game!
@KutKu ’s map featured a Cicilian Armenia that went on a reconquest spree far into Seljuk territory, reclaiming the Armenian highlands. I’m not especially familiar with the 13th Century Middle East, but the magnitude of the reconquest quickly made me think of Alexander the Great.
Taking the idea to its extreme and logical conclusions, we'd end up with a multiethnic Christian, Armenian empire lording a over Perso-Arabic majority. Focusing in on the Alexandrian parallels, the Armenian Empire might well meld Greek political traditions (inherited from its rule of Cilicia) and Persian cultural traditions (with well over a millenia of cultural osmosis) into one. Like Alexander before them, the Armenian Kings would style themselves as latter-day Achaemenids. However, all empires must end. There is a day that the well-oiled Armenian machine must sputter and die, and when Greek, Persian and Armenian can no longer tolerate one
Shamelessly posting my map to add some context, which is itself based on Caspian’s
I noticed the large byzantine empire, so i guessed a POD could be a Manzikert, i also noticed one of the country at the south wasn't labelled so i took liberties and thought it was the Seljuk or successor, and i assumed they would go more into the caucasus if they can't go deep into Anatolia, then some Turkish general secedes Rûm sultanate-style and establish a turkish empire around the caucasus and armenian highland, pushing more Armenians into Cilicia. I also butterflied away the mongols due to the early POD. Also i guess the Turks would manage to settle the fertile georgian plains, and become a sizeable population there if the Plague killed half of the Georgians
While in America, the Mormons had been forced into exile many times, from Missouri to Illinois to California, but during this time other arrangements would be made. A Mormon missionary by the name of George Q. Cannon had went to Hawai'i to spread his churches beliefs, and he enjoyed relative success, even getting the bible translated into the native Hawai'ian tongue. In the aftermath of the Mormon-Californian war, LDS President Brigham Young looked for a new place to locate his followers, and it was brought to his attention that Hawai'i was having a population shortage, and that a large group of natives had converted to the church. They boarded boats and set off for Hawai'i, looking for new homes and a chance to live in peace. When they got there, tensions rose between the Mormons and non Mormons, and the natives who converted where ostracized with those who moved over for being colonists and colonial supporters. While the king tolerated them, he raised a special tax on them and didn't permit them to own land. As they worked under the Hawai'ian upper class, their funds slowly drained, and President Young decided that the best way to deal with this was to restart the United Order, with some more overt socialistic tendencies, and to refuse to pay the taxes levied on Mormons. This sparked a military reaction from the Hawai'ian government, and shortly afterwards the death of Hawai'i, as the Republic of Deseret was proclaimed. The LDS Church seized control of the country, removed the upper class from power, and heavily encouraged conversions. While this was successful, it did aggravate some within the church. This state of affairs was maintained for a long period of time, as Deseret would ship out fruits and ship in the additional goods the needed, until the 1956 Revolution, where the LDS Church was forced out of power and the state was forced to secularize.
After secularization, terms and term limits where introduced upon the Deseret President, in addition to the development of a Parliament and Prime Minister. Now politics are divided between two main groups, the Liberals who seek to privatize industry in an attempt to further secularize the state, and the Labor Party who seek to further remove capitalistic elements from their government.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Map translation:
Top right: Republic of Deseret, Circa 2019
The islands are just the Hawaiian islands, but Honolulu County is still called Oahu
The big words in the ocean are "Pacific Ocean"
Box in the bottom left: Republic of Deseret
Population: 922,824
GDP: 76,076,000,000 DD (Roughly $82 billion)
Religion: 91% LDS, 9% Other
*: National Capital (Which is on Honolulu)
Aurantiacis
Gone Fishin'
Crossposting now from the Telephone Map Game, which has been spawned off of XFE's map of a giant Armenia. Not my best work, but it's simple enough and I like Poland-wanks.
Deleted member 94708
Interesting premise, but I think there are two assumptions that are pretty off-base. First, you’re wildly overestimating the ability of the PLA to take and hold hostile territory as opposed to acting in a glorified police role. Second, even Trump could be persuaded to provide a huge amount of food aid to India to keep its people from fleeing across the border. That would also plug in nicely to his “prop up farm incomes during the trade war” initiative.
It’s also worth noting that China is de jure a hair larger than the US and that the US would end up ISOT’ed there, while Indonesia and India would be in the US and Canada respectively.
VINTAR CIVILIZATION
http://fav.me/ddi8rmw
Created for the telephone map game no. 2
I got an insanely detailed persia-like state that seemed to me to originate from armenia. And so i decided to change things up a bit and imagine that the fertile valley was actually in armenia and not iraq.
A couple of easter eggs:
Sumer...summer
Vintar...winter
The city names are plagiarizations of real world ones for instance erusalm is jerusalem
The top line of numbers and letters are stages of world history that i hoped the person after me would perhaps pick up on or use.
The names of the surrounding tribes on the map are weird little names I made from bastardizing russian for instance kukhovari sounds like "kitchen cooks" in russian
http://fav.me/ddi8rmw
Created for the telephone map game no. 2
I got an insanely detailed persia-like state that seemed to me to originate from armenia. And so i decided to change things up a bit and imagine that the fertile valley was actually in armenia and not iraq.
A couple of easter eggs:
Sumer...summer
Vintar...winter
The city names are plagiarizations of real world ones for instance erusalm is jerusalem
The top line of numbers and letters are stages of world history that i hoped the person after me would perhaps pick up on or use.
The names of the surrounding tribes on the map are weird little names I made from bastardizing russian for instance kukhovari sounds like "kitchen cooks" in russian
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Since everyone else is posting their maps from List 3 of the Telephone Map Game, I might as well:
This was based on XFE's map. In the previous game, I received a map of Europe and decided to go into the Middle East. In this game, I got a map of the Middle East, so, I thought, why not do the reverse? And that's how Hayastan got itself involved in a war in Eastern Europe.
Interestingly, I interpreted the "Revolution" in Hayastan as being more like the French Revolution, one where the government is drastically reformed, not as a total collapse of the state in question. As a result, the empire survives well into the 20th century.
The backstory I had going in my head was that Hungary, Bessia (a Pecheneg state from an alternate Migration Period) and Romania declared war on an extremist Poland, which backfired when Poland repelled the invasion and its ally Serbia (having irredentist claims over OTL Montenegro) attacked the three countries from behind, in return for Polish aid in a new front against Croatia. Germany and Russia prefer letting the warring countries beat each other up and weaken each other over getting involved. While all of this is going on, a civil war is happening in Anatolia, and Poland has been stirring the pot since before the war broke out. Hayastan finally decided that they couldn't tolerate the Anatolian Civil War and its spillover any longer, which prompts them to get involved. The rest can be guessed from the map.
This was based on XFE's map. In the previous game, I received a map of Europe and decided to go into the Middle East. In this game, I got a map of the Middle East, so, I thought, why not do the reverse? And that's how Hayastan got itself involved in a war in Eastern Europe.
Interestingly, I interpreted the "Revolution" in Hayastan as being more like the French Revolution, one where the government is drastically reformed, not as a total collapse of the state in question. As a result, the empire survives well into the 20th century.
The backstory I had going in my head was that Hungary, Bessia (a Pecheneg state from an alternate Migration Period) and Romania declared war on an extremist Poland, which backfired when Poland repelled the invasion and its ally Serbia (having irredentist claims over OTL Montenegro) attacked the three countries from behind, in return for Polish aid in a new front against Croatia. Germany and Russia prefer letting the warring countries beat each other up and weaken each other over getting involved. While all of this is going on, a civil war is happening in Anatolia, and Poland has been stirring the pot since before the war broke out. Hayastan finally decided that they couldn't tolerate the Anatolian Civil War and its spillover any longer, which prompts them to get involved. The rest can be guessed from the map.
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