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duck-foot wrote:i like your program zino. seems cool.. i think ill try it out.

thank you i hope you enjoy it

Thanks to Aramanthus' scenario of easily-read/easily activated summoning manuscripts seeded throughout Earth by ancient evil, illiteracy becomes an enforced state of being in the paranoid societies of Earth...Only select occupations are allowed to be literate, and they are trained to exercise proper 'literary hygiene', including the ability to recognize the signs of literary traps and 'tainted' manuscripts, and in how to break off reading them and shield their minds....a 'Farenheit 451' situation is in place, not to keep the public ignorant and under control, but to prevent Words of Power from being read and invoked, thus endangering Humanity...

ROFLMAO!! :::Taking a bow::: Thank you Taalismn! I'm so glad I helped create another wild world for other to preruse. Just be glad that the influence of those forbidden manuscripts doesn't make the paper it's written on indestructible.

Everyone on earth at some point or another actually walks along an invisible and unknowable edge. This edge is the barrier which seperates the living from the dead. Now imagine if people could step back and forth accross this barrier.

Aramanthus wrote:
Everyone on earth at some point or another actually walks along an invisible and unknowable edge. This edge is the barrier which seperates the living from the dead. Now imagine if people could step back and forth accross this barrier.

You mean people either alternate between being dead or alive or the living world and an 'afterlife'?

duck-foot wrote:so aramanthus is the antichrist? i knew it..... well time to go buy some bottled water and go live in the swamp.

Just don't wreck my snare traps....

Actually I was thinking of living people going back and forth across the barrier. Sorry I was a little tired that night!

...in that case, Duck-Foot...don't disturb my landmines...

The Celts conquered all of europe and discovered America, making a lasting treaty w/the Native Americans and ushered in the space age as the catholic/christian religion never arose to suppress the knowledge of the times. Now we have been in space for 2 or more centuries and have FTL drives and colonies in Alpha Centuari, etc.

duck-foot wrote:what if hitler ws successfully killed in operation velkerie. with the wermact taking control of germany and the top nazi officials jailed. the germans would have asked for peace. with this the US no longer had any reason for total victory, nor would the uk or russia. this would have lead to a germany still armed after the 2nd world war. what would this have lead too? a combined german, uk, and us bloc against russia? or would the us have left europe? would NATO have fromed? would only germany and the uk have tried to block russian advances? or would the once NAZI become allies with the soviets?


so what do you think would have happened?

Don't see it going that far...The Russians being Russians, and Stalin being Stalin, they'd have wanted to OBLITERATE Germany and stuff the remaining organization full of their puppets...Having been burned by the Germans before, Stalin, who was a rather simplistic and paranoid bully, would have wanted the Germans well and truly bloodied, so he'd have kept his generals advancing...if for nothing else then a raw territory grab..
Would the Allies have united with the German command against the Russians? Probably not, until the Russian began advancing towards Germany's western borders..or until Patton arranged an international incident...But the Germans would have been ground to dust between the two forces...
Basically the Allies would have let the Germans get hosed..after all, the British government had ignored the secret channel attempts by German factions to arrange a truce(that would have allowed the Wermacht to concentrate fully on fighting the Soviets), the general attitude being that 'you can't trust Jerry'...only after the Germans had been beaten down, would the Allies attempt to win theor hearts...as with the Berlin Airlift...

PBS series 'Secrets of WW2' does a good (if brutal) progression on the Hitler-Stalin pact, and gives the strong impression that Stalin was basically a monstrous bully who didn't realize, until too late, that Hitler was gunning for him all along...he seems to have honestly thought HItler would smack around the west for awhile before turning on the Soviets, so Stalin could take his own sweet time massacring the Polish Army officer corps in prison, and subjugating the Baltic republics..
Also talks about how Churchill basically ignored the demands of the Polish-in-exile who wanted the aforementioned massacres brought up at the Allied-Soviet summitts...The west decided to sacrifice the Polish issue to buy peace with the Soviets(not wanting WW2 to drag on for another decade if Stalin didn't back down on restoring Poland and the Baltics)...

But what would we have nuked? And how? We lacked the means to reach Moscow from any of our European bases, and the A-bomb hadn't yet been made small enough for a carrier-based aircraft...even if it had done a Doolittle-like suicide run from the North Sea...

INteresting ideas. I think you are both covering this nicely.


What if the weapon manufacturers had made even faster progress on new armor types. And then leapped ahead in the area of exosuits. Even before the end of the 20th century several nations manage to deploy actual working power armors. The worlds wars are now changed forever.

Aramanthus wrote:INteresting ideas. I think you are both covering this nicely.


What if the weapon manufacturers had made even faster progress on new armor types. And then leapped ahead in the area of exosuits. Even before the end of the 20th century several nations manage to deploy actual working power armors. The worlds wars are now changed forever.

Steam or electric knights?
Moto-knights clashing on the battlefields of Europe?
Well...actually until artillery churns up the ground enouggh, then you got a brigade of heavy body armors wallowing in muddy trenches and craters trying to haul themselves up and out before the next barrage...

Moto-knights! Sounds cool to me! I can always use a new version of Bubblegum Crisis.


During the dark and early days of the war in the pacific, General MacArthur is taken from the Phillipines to Australia. But something happened.... The PT boats that were taking MacArthur to Australia are intercepted and destroyed by the Japanes naval air force. MacArthur is killed in this action. The course of the war follows Chester Nimitz's plan. The war drags on longer that it did in our world. The world is changed forever.

Rather than let Spain spearhead the conquest of the New World, the Pope declares the new lands to the West to be 'The Holy Preserve of His Holiness the Pope of Rome', effectively declaring hands off until Roman officials can explore, map, and parcel out the new realms to the worthy, and organizes several Papal expeditions to further make good on this claim...Normally, given that Italy is still fragmented, and the Papal 'fleet' is effectively made of mercenary sailors, the other European powers would scoff at this claim, except that the Pope has threatened to excommunicate anybody caught violating the order....putting the Catholic leadership of Spain in a tight position...Risk infuriating the Catholic world against them by ignoring the Papal injunction and rush ahead to explore the New World, or sit pat and watch Rome claim the best parts(or, more likely, those heretical Protestant English and Dutch get the prize)?

That was one particularily evil one! Good job!

It was found early on that gold was so over abundant in the upper crust that you could go to your local rock face and dig a few shallow holes and remove several hundred pounds of the finest and purest gold. Making it almost worthless. Maybe make some funny moneys for kids our it.

Enemies of America decide to do away with America with a fiendish new device...a temporal bomb...planted near the heartland, it plunges the United States, a good chunk of Mexico and Canada, and swathes of the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean inside a vast hemispherical(actually spherical, as it extends into the Earth itself) beyond an apparently impenetrable barrier....
Impenetrable except by the terrorists responsible, who believe that the T-Bomb's effects have locked the interior of the sphere into a state of slow-time...and the terrorists have the means to penetrate the field and move amongst the temporally-frozen interior as if they were normally-timed...With this, the perpetrators figure on being able to do any number of things; stripe-mine North America, or kill each and every person with impunity...before the time-barrier goes down..
At least that's how it's SUPPOSED to work...in reality, in the first few moments, a Rifts-style event was initiated, and the affected area was temporarily transposed into another universe akin to Rifts Earth...the area's inhabitants were subjected to hell on Earth, facing monsters, aliens, and all manner of nastiness, and barely managed to survive, convinced that the rest of the world outside the barrier has already fallen...
Rather than SLOW the passage of time, the T-Bomb actually managed to ACCELERATE it...in reality, several hundred years have passed inside, and North America has passed through its Federations of Magic, its Coalitions, its Alliances, its New Republics, and has managed to pull back together...and they're now aware of the true nature of the T-Barrier, which has been slowing down, bringing the affected area back into synch with normal time...BY the time the terrorists were ready to penetrate the field, and when they did, they were either killed by residual monsters, or else captured by the authorities of he new Norther American nations and interrogated, so they now have some idea of what happened..
Meanwhile, outside, only 5 or do years have passed....economies have fallen, the world has reeled in shock, there have been a succession of natural disasters triggered by weather and geological disruption caused by the interference of the temporal bubble, and many governments have collapsed, many replaced by paranoid regimes that either genuinely fear what happened to North America may happen again to THEM, or else use that same fear to impose tight control on their citizens...
And meanwhile, armed with evolved and alien technologies, the new nations of North America sit behind the increasingly rapidly deteriorating T-Barrier, waiting for it to finally come down...

duck-foot wrote:

taalismn wrote:But what would we have nuked? And how? We lacked the means to reach Moscow from any of our European bases, and the A-bomb hadn't yet been made small enough for a carrier-based aircraft...even if it had done a Doolittle-like suicide run from the North Sea...

no we did not. but, russia is so huge we may have been able to actually transport it there undercover and unseen.

But would we have had the gorm to do such a thing? That would seem rather underhanded for the time...

Also..(Robotech Crossover)
Alternate Earth, circa 1990..Institutionalized slavery is the way of the world, with conditions varying from outright and lawless in parts of Asia and Africa, to ritualized and institutional, but no less corrupt, in Japan and Europe...Only North America, and the UNited States, due to the way of political currents, are bastions of abolition, but so many slaves to be freed, with so many global vested interests arrayed against universal manumission...

Then, in 1989...a small fleet of alien ships, crewed by people calling themselves the Disciples of Zor, arrive in the American West...They come claiming to look for a legacy left/sent to them them by their mentor, and they value the freedom of people...
The DoZ taskforce consists mainly of early model Bioroids and ships, with a few renegade Zentraedi ships and earlier model mecha...they're somewhat beat up, but with enough resources, can repair most of the fleet to battleready condition(but they're hiding this fact from the Terrans)
..and yes, they're anticipating Zor's Battlefortress arriving in 1999...

Alternate Robotech universe:
The SDF1 crash backstory occurs as per canon, but a UN secret initiative to create super soldiers was based near the site. They get clearance to access the technology of the alien vessel, and discover that protoculture is capable of being bonded to life forms. They manage to develop superhuman agents with super abilities (Side effect is the same for all: glowing eyes, and their entire bodies glow as they use their powers)

Then, of course after the space fold mishap, this lab is part of the city that's brought along. So now you have the Zentraedi on one side, and on the other side, Veritechs and superhumans in pressure suits and jetpacks (except for those who have flight abilities and don't need the packs)

Some awesome one guys! Please keep them coming!


At the end of WW1 the US didn't take a back seat at the Paris peace conference. Wilson refuses to let the British and the French lay the crippling terms against the Germans. This has the effect of delaying the great depression. And things do heat up in the world of politics. Although in this uiniverse it isn't Germany. It's the world versus Joesph Stalin. When WW2 occurs literally the whole world slams into Russia after the Russians kill some poor Austrian artist. A nobody named Adolph Hitler. At the end of the war Stalin after his trial is executed. The new Russia turns out far better once they have ended Stalin's reign of terror.

During World War II, the Germans arrogantly decide that Swiss neutrality is overrated and they control all the surrounding countries anyway, so why not seize the whole treasure chest? Nazi Germany invades Switzerland...

Ah. Here let's play with that one! Thank you for the inspiration Taalismn!


At the start of the 20th century the Swiss demonstrate their full power. They launch an invasion of Europe. It turns out that the Swiss have been breeding supermen in their quiet country. They conquer Europe easily. It is when they march on Russia that they loose like everyone else who attacks Russia during the winter.

*William of Orange, who led the successful revolt of the Netherlands from Spain in history, before finally being assassinated later in life, isn't so lucky in this timeline and gets kacked by the Dons early on...

*Henry IV of France decides that Paris ISN'T worth a Mass, doesn't convert to Catholicism, and lays bloody seige to Paris, before raizing the city...France is subjected to another several decades of bloody religious civil war, Spain is kept distracted by the fracas to its north, alternating between sending troops to support various factions, and financing the Catholics...as a result, parts of southern France effectively become Spanish protectorates...

*The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of French Protestants was launched in part due to fears, fanned by Catherine de' Medici, that Henry III(later Henry IV) and his Huguenot buddies were extering too much influence King Charles IX into supporting a joint attack by the Dutch and the French on the Spanish...winning Dutch independence that much sooner, and possibly putting a mixed-religion France in a better position to lord it over Spain....
What if Catherine and her Guise allies had been shut up, permanently driven out of power, and Admiral Gaspard de Coligny's(who would have been killed during the Massacre) suggested plans of collaboration with the Dutch had gone ahead?

(You can nitpick European history FOREVER like this)...

Some excellent ones Taalismn! And you are right about discussing alternate European history.

Instead of the pope ordering the destruction of the templars. He actually expands their powers. Granting them even more power that any organization has ever had in the church. Eventually the Templars have enough power to place various people on the Papal throne.

-ahem-
May I direct your attention to here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6AAt-oV3wE&hd=1
Alternate CS versus native sepecies in their own world?
Just a little something to get yer mind-juices flowin'

Muhammed, future prophet of Islam, while on the lam from his rivals, never does emerge from the desert...
And for equal time...
The Roman governor Pontius Pilate decides that this whole civil unrest business and cruxifiction doesn't sit well with him, so he decides to send this Christ guy into exile, first to Rome, then to one of the outlying territories...say, Britain.....
Gautama Siddhattha Buddha never does leave his family's palace in Lumbini and start on his journey of self-discovery, instead finding meaning in enjoying the pleasures of his aristocratic inheritance...

Excellent additions. I'll add some more after work tomorrow. I'm off to get up at 4:30am. Night All.

World War 2....The IMperial Japanese learn, through spies, that the United States government is covering up the fact that the Japanese 'Fugo' offensive of jetstream-borne firebombing balloons is actually getting to the NOrth American continent(fun note: the Japanese launched some 8,000 of these things against the West...it's estimated that perhaps 3,000 actually made it, but only about 350 have actually been found)....The Japanese up the number of balloons launched, and arm many of them with chemical and biological weapons(mainly agricultural diseases, but also a number of anti-human pathogens blooded in experiments in Manchuria), forcing the USA to divert more resources to the balloons, and trying to control panic in the American public...especially after several plague-armed Fugos land in populated areas....

Very nasty one Taalismn. My Dad and I have a conversation about that very thing in the past. Thank you for allowing me to remember a conversation I had with my dearly departed Father!

Humans have a far more pronounced estrus/fertility cycle......most of the year, people think little or nothing of sex...but for about three weeks out of a year.... personal productivity drops, emotions rise, and people thing of nothing but.....
Picture how this would affect commerce and history...

Star Trek never aired(Gene Roddenberry having died prematurely several years before)....an entire generation of geeks, nerds, and starry-eyed nascent scientists never gets inspiration and reason for being....

Some excellent ones!


Humankind discovers that they are being observed. It turns out it's humans from the future. The ones from the future are trying to prevent something terrible from happening by interveneing. Their only problem is to decide which even is the one they need to prevent.

TrumbachD wrote:

Aramanthus wrote:Some excellent ones!


Humankind discovers that they are being observed. It turns out it's humans from the future. The ones from the future are trying to prevent something terrible from happening by interveneing. Their only problem is to decide which even is the one they need to prevent.

I like the idea of either a time travel campaign or one with people from multiple time frames.
To expand on this:

1)The future Humans could either be in contact with the future people to help them find the key event, or cut off from them and on their own and must find that event for themselves.

2)Choosing wether the future people traveled via Tempral Magic, Temporal Techno wizardry or a "Regular" Time Machine all might offer different story possibilities.
Not sure if there are any canon Time machines or just temporal magic, but they have certainly been seen in the Sci Fi and comics that Rifts and HU are indspired by..

3)This campaign offers the possibility of creating new tempral OCC's:
A) Temporal Explorers,(Academics, geeks, even college kids studying for a history degree)
B)Temporal Interveners (Making the future better by fixing the past).
C)Temporal Bonvivants (Opportunists who use their knowledge to get rich and live the good life).
these are just the few Ideas that popped in my head when I first saw this post. I'm sure there are lots more.

If you want, you could use a few of these guys to complicate things for the future people.

TrumbachD wrote:

Aramanthus wrote:Some excellent ones!


Humankind discovers that they are being observed. It turns out it's humans from the future. The ones from the future are trying to prevent something terrible from happening by interveneing. Their only problem is to decide which even is the one they need to prevent.

I like the idea of either a time travel campaign or one with people from multiple time frames.
To expand on this:

1)The future Humans could either be in contact with the future people to help them find the key event, or cut off from them and on their own and must find that event for themselves.

2)Choosing wether the future people traveled via Tempral Magic, Temporal Techno wizardry or a "Regular" Time Machine all might offer different story possibilities.
Not sure if there are any canon Time machines or just temporal magic, but they have certainly been seen in the Sci Fi and comics that Rifts and HU are indspired by..

3)This campaign offers the possibility of creating new tempral OCC's:
A) Temporal Explorers,(Academics, geeks, even college kids studying for a history degree)
B)Temporal Interveners (Making the future better by fixing the past).
C)Temporal Bonvivants (Opportunists who use their knowledge to get rich and live the good life).
these are just the few Ideas that popped in my head when I first saw this post. I'm sure there are lots more.

WEll, I'll be dipped in hot chocolate....Develop them, that's an order...Let's get an entire Temporal society going here...

If you have a copy of the old TransDimensional Turtles supplement for the old Palladium Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles(back in the day before they essentially became superpowered smurfs), you'll find some backpack and vehicle-mount time machines and dimensional twist-crossers......

WOW Interestiing how one little post can bring some interesting results. I'm looking forward to seeing what developes from this.

During the premeire of a new television show, everyone watching it is transported to the future. Here they become slaves to future humans who want nothing more then servants to help them doing menial task.

Marconi, the developer of radio, gets assassinated by an occult society wanting to keep 'the ether pure from human transgression', before he can make his great breakthroughs....

*'The Affair'...The Dreyfus Trial, was a crushing blow for tolerance and truth in France, tarring the French reputation for decades, if not a century, afterwards...and convinced a number of Jewish observers that the only hope Jews had of getting a fair shake in the modern world was to form their own homeland.....But what if the French Army came out and threw out Esterhaze's faked evidence and correctly accused HIM instead...Lt. Col. Georges Picquat, head of the army intelligence unit, after all, was an anti-Semite, but came to the conclusion that Dreyfus was framed, but was shut up by the authorities...What f they had listened, and France HADN'T earned a big black mark for bigoted guillibility? Would Theodor Herzel, the founder of Zionism, and a witness to Dreyfus's humiliation, perhaps have taken a softer stance on whether or not European Jews could co-exist with the rest of Europe?

*Cleopatra never committed 'suicide'...Instead, she manages to evade Octavian's troops, and very publicly and openly surrenders to another Roman general....Unable to stage her suicide, Octavian has to, as he promised, bring her back to Rome 'in chains', but is obliged to keep her, as an Imperial prisoner, healthy and alive. In Rome, Cleopatra, having borne Julius Caesar's son(Caesarean, who would have been hunted down and killed by Octavian in canon history), with allies in the Senate, manages to get, if not a pardon, then a stay of whatever execution Octavian might have in mind, and Octavian instead is forced to become part of a power-sharing regency until Caesarean comes of age and can assume the Emperorship...Could the Empire have survived a period of such indecisiveness...and perhaps, might it have bought time for anti-Imperial reformers to reverse the corruption of the old Republic ideals? Or simply bled the nascent Empire with another round of backstabbing and power-maneuvering?

Some great alternate universes.

A bored student at school stares at a point on a wall while in detention. (For being bored with a very boring teacher.) The student discovers that if he focuses on a certain point he can see a seam in reality. When the teacher leaves the room, he moves over to the seam. Once there he figures out how to unlock and open the seam. Once it is open he looks thru and sees another dimension. After looking at it for several days he decides to see what it is like. As he passes thru to another dimension, someone witnesses his translocation. Which is then revealed to the rest of the world as something new. And of course this person gets credit for the discovery instead of the true discoverer.

Aramanthus wrote:Some great alternate universes.

A bored student at school stares at a point on a wall while in detention. (For being bored with a very boring teacher.) The student discovers that if he focuses on a certain point he can see a seam in reality. When the teacher leaves the room, he moves over to the seam. Once there he figures out how to unlock and open the seam. Once it is open he looks thru and sees another dimension. After looking at it for several days he decides to see what it is like. As he passes thru to another dimension, someone witnesses his translocation. Which is then revealed to the rest of the world as something new. And of course this person gets credit for the discovery instead of the true discoverer.

...and the next succession of universes is just as dull and boring as the one he just left....

Reading the Mike Resnick-edited 'Alternate Warriors' anthology...great for alternate universe ideas...Ghandi as a THugee, Martin Luthor King as political assassin, Jane Austen and Daniel Boone versus Napoleon Bonaparte, Albert Einstein as a super secret agent in WW2, and Albert Schweitzer as Tarzan...
Great stuff if you can find a copy...

Seeing the Nazi attack on England in 1940 the U.S and Canada fromed the North American,s Alliance.

The European Alliance fails to win the Battle of Lepanto against Ali Pasha's muslim naval armada, despite having a superior weight of cannon...The Venetian Navy is destroyed, and Venice sues for a separate peace, earning it the hatred of the rest of the Alliance(already infighting among themselves)...As that happens, the Turks seize Malta, kick out the Knights of Malta, and consolidate their grip on the Mediterranean, while Spain, Venice, and the Italian states fight it out among themselves....BY the time the differences in the Europeans are worked out, the Turks have had relatively uncontested control of the Med shipping lanes, and consolidated their hold on various strategic coastal ports and islands...

During his two-week 'vacation' in Yellowstone National Park, shortly after being elected, during which he went into the wilderness essentially with only a handful of companions....President Teddy Roosevelt is attacked and killed by a mountain lion that gets the drop on him....

In 1860 Some how the 11 states that seceded are replaces with ther 1760 counterparts.

How would this changed things?

How do you see the North reacte?

gaby wrote:In 1860 Some how the 11 states that seceded are replaces with ther 1760 counterparts.

How would this changed things?

How do you see the North reacte?

Given the much lower population density and higher number of native Americans in the areas in question, I'd say massive land grab by Northern states...

duck-foot wrote:

taalismn wrote:Reading the Mike Resnick-edited 'Alternate Warriors' anthology...great for alternate universe ideas...Ghandi as a THugee, Martin Luthor King as political assassin, Jane Austen and Daniel Boone versus Napoleon Bonaparte, Albert Einstein as a super secret agent in WW2, and Albert Schweitzer as Tarzan...
Great stuff if you can find a copy...

ive never heard of this.... sounds intrueging. so im guessing hitler and hideki are both pacifiests?

I don't think they did those stories. I read a bunch of the Resnick alternate history anthologies several years ago. They had a lot of theme books like Alternate Warriors and Alternate Presidents.

Alternate Presidents had a couple though (the JFK and Clinton one), that could conceivably have been in this universe.

I'll have to look for the Alternate Presidents book...as I recall it has Dewey Beating Truman on the cover...

hmm .. how about a world that seems to be 'pre space travel' and is using satelites to communicate with moving pictures and noises via airwaves.

and shuttles or craft that try to land on the surface have issues and seem to skip in the atmosphere.

its as if the planet does not want visitors.

shiiv-a wrote:hmm .. how about a world that seems to be 'pre space travel' and is using satelites to communicate with moving pictures and noises via airwaves.

and shuttles or craft that try to land on the surface have issues and seem to skip in the atmosphere.

its as if the planet does not want visitors.

Or, instead of radio transmissions between satellites...lofts giant mirrors to bounce coded light beams off of ...
Then somebody comes up with the idea of using them to reflect intense LASERs...

Maybe a radio-wave free world? Marconi, Tesla, and company never figured out how to send signals through the 'ether'?