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Alt History ideas, rec and general dicussion thread

As I've stated on the And Our Flag thread, I've been interested in doing a partial-remake partial-fusion timeline of @Dab master's 2020: Shots Fired. I'm curious what everyone else thinks:

I originally conceived of 366 Days of Madness, the scenario in question, as a fusion of 2020: Shots Fired (I think I must've stumbled upon it via @Mister Anemone's 2020: Brave New World, that one with the unicorn) and a bunch of other "horrible year" timelines like A Very Bad Year (1973) and @Mr.Gatsby's And Then Things Got Worse — the ultimate goal being to bring about global armageddon by December 31, 2020.

After looking back on the original and realizing it's far too derivative of Shots Fired for my tastes, I've been writing up a redux that uses the same events, but switches up the dialogue a lot more to make it at least partly original — it's best pitched, as mentioned above, as a partial redo of Shots Fired with Dab's current experience from writing And Our Flag, along with the ideas and help of the SV community.

That's that. I'll be posting the first few bits here for anyone interested.
 
This year's summer project (which is now shifting into my autumn project, and will likely be my winter project as well) has been kind of an interesting ride. I've taken it upon myself to do an update/revision of GURPS International Super Teams. What is GURPS International Super Teams? Well Timmy, it's a superhero TTRPG from GURPS 3rd edition that tries to take a somewhat more grounded approach to the concept. Kind of like the early phases of the MCU, only bigger in scope. Once upon a time it was one of GURPS' "core" setting worlds, with sidebars in quite a few other sourcebooks. These days it's largely forgotten... but I'm still fond of it.

It's also an alternate history. I mean, yeah, superheroes but it also has some explicit allohistorical events happen in it. Which got my attention, then they started bugging me because they were clearly plot devices meant to get the setting over a few hurdles. Which is fair: it's a TTRPG splat, not a thoroughly researched attempt at serious alternate history. But they bugged me, and well... that's how I ended up here.

I've written a lot of words over multiple revisions of this thing but there are a few hurdles I keep slamming into. The biggest one being the formation of the Super Teams in the title. See, the game backstory is that in the early 80s at the peak of Cold War tensions the UN said "enough of this bullshit" and instituted a blanket ban on nuclear weapons and militarized superhumans. In order to enforce this they established the IST, a UN-backed and UN-funded super team consisting of hundreds to thousands of heroes stationed in every UN member nation.

From the perspective of dumb pulp nonsense this is fine, more or less, but looking at it from the perspective of a painfully detail-oriented althist guy there is a problem: the UN can't actually do that. So while I've got an idea of where it needs to go to stick roughly to the original's continuity and where I want it to go afterwards I haven't figured out the one weird trick the UN needs to pull off in order to have the power to make this work in the first place, at least not without the world being way more different from the canonical low-butterfly "world outside your window RIGHT NOW" setting.

Any ideas on how to square the circle? Anyone? Help? Bueller? I'm cold, and there are wolves after me.
 
Sounds like Worm without the misanthropy or nihilism.

Anyway, the easiest option would be to have the ban on weaponised metahumans be more along the lines of a strategic arms treaty between NATO and the Warsaw Pact: They can't simply make superpowered individuals simply go away, that would just lead to someone going Magneto even if they were willing to try, but they can agree a ban on actively trying to create more of them and to classify certain superpowers as WMDs.

The trouble is, the supervillains don't see any particular reasdon to abide by those restrictions, so occasionally the multi-national teams on each side of the Iron Curtain find themselves having to cooperate against a third party who's made themselves everyone's problem. This gets even more complicated when the European Union sets up its own separate taskforce that isn't technically part of NATO's chain of command, even though some of its members are on that team as well. (Negotiations over the inclusion of Switzerland stalled out and they didn't even bother to ask the Vatican.)

China have their own domestic team who are rarely seen operating outside their territory, and are widely rumoured to have a rather intense political education component to their training that's probably going to lead to conflict with the Central Committee one of these days. Nobody's sure what the North Koreans have going on but they're number one suspect behind the periodic kaiju attacks that Japan's own super team specialises in.
 
You could probably have UN Super Teams work as basically UN Peacekeepers and Observers and etc..., just on a continuing mission, basically reservists and volunteers seconded to the UN with both genuine idealism and also it being kinda lowkey grifty for especially smaller nations to lease out their Super Teams on UN contracts and in the service of gaining international recognition and renown. As for what continuing mission and task force and such would be left so open-ended for this loop-hole, I imagine more than just ersatz SHIELD/X-COM responding to the crisis and panic of superpowers, you could have superpowered versions of the Vela Incident and the Mount Cheyenne false alarm and all that, close calls getting closer as militarized supers fulfill a targeted spec-ops and living drone strike niche like the return of the old school tac nuke craze. As thus as like the last great effort of the Carter administration or something there's arms limitations and super-soldier non-proliferation treaties, protecting key sites and conventional WMD infrastructure and preserving deterrence. All of which, while hollowed out by the Reagan years and partially damaged by leaning on technically-private or at least ambiguously non-military teams, remain ultimately the framework of super-soldiers and superheroes. And so coming into the 90s and on you have various specific formations of UN super-disarmament or super-ceasefire-observation teams activated as needed, but developing behind and alongside them the like United Nations Office of Superhumans and the International Superpower Agency studyign and classifying superpowers and offering join counter-terrorism and emergancy response management and whatever between different national superheroes. The whole NGO complex, but with laser vision.
 
Jake said:
Sounds like Worm without the misanthropy or nihilism.
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A little, yeah. It predates Worm by quite a lot, though. (Published in 1991. You can see the thick layer of dust on it - much like me.) The key difference aside from tone is that GURPS IST doesn't start from a point where metahumans are a shiny new thing in the 1980s, they've been around to some extent since WW2, though they only really start to make significant althist waves in the 1960s. By the time the UN puts its foot down the whole hero/villain thing has been established for over a generation.

Jake said:
Anyway, the easiest option would be to have the ban on weaponised metahumans be more along the lines of a strategic arms treaty between NATO and the Warsaw Pact
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That would be the easiest option & if the plan was to just do "vaguely realistic 20th century geopolitics But With Superheroes" it would work out pretty well, but I am trying to keep to the source material's line as closely as possible. And tbh one of the original's charms is that it sets things up as "the default job for you, the PC, is as a UN Peacekeeper in spandex." I like that, there's a novelty to it that I want to preserve.

Also, re: China, I have plans for that. There's a tidbit in the original book that I am going to exploit shamelessly because while it's rattled off as an example of nation-state supervillainy in the book it's also a perfect storm of bad decisions with one hell of a potential boomerang effect. Indeed, the ripples from the cultivator wars continue even into the 2020s... :drevil:

bookwyrm said:
You could probably have UN Super Teams work as basically UN Peacekeepers and Observers and etc..., just on a continuing mission, basically reservists and volunteers seconded to the UN with both genuine idealism and also it being kinda lowkey grifty for especially smaller nations to lease out their Super Teams on UN contracts and in the service of gaining international recognition and renown.
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Could work, but at the same time it feels a little too cynical and there's enough cynical superhero nonsense out there as it stands, it don't need my meager contributions.
 
Honestly, I didn't even see it as that cynical, coming from a lot of places of self-motivated concern from the big Security Council nations and such, yes, but in so doing allowing the floodgates to open for the idealists in, at least the 90s, a real shot at superpowers being almost more tightly demilitarized and more in line with activist hopes than the long bitter struggle against nukes and for peace in general. A place where you can have stories about doing good in complicated but still mostly good faith efforts by institutions with good intentions, but where how and where good is achieved and all the different paths where good intentions can sometimes end up are thornier problems to narratively play around in.
 
Mal-3 said:
This year's summer project (which is now shifting into my autumn project, and will likely be my winter project as well) has been kind of an interesting ride. I've taken it upon myself to do an update/revision of GURPS International Super Teams.
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Great, okay, now you've set off one of my trigger phrases. Thank you for that. :V
Mal-3 said:
From the perspective of dumb pulp nonsense this is fine, more or less, but looking at it from the perspective of a painfully detail-oriented althist guy there is a problem: the UN can't actually do that. So while I've got an idea of where it needs to go to stick roughly to the original's continuity and where I want it to go afterwards I haven't figured out the one weird trick the UN needs to pull off in order to have the power to make this work in the first place, at least not without the world being way more different from the canonical low-butterfly "world outside your window RIGHT NOW" setting.

Any ideas on how to square the circle? Anyone? Help? Bueller? I'm cold, and there are wolves after me.
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IIRC, the setting's official explanation of that is "the UN cracking fusion power gives them a carrot to dangle in front of nations to get them to comply." That said, I assume from the fact that you're asking this question in the first place that you're not going with that justification?
 
Having recently reread Tinker Tailor Solider Spy and watched the 70's miniseries; I suppose there an ATL question of which of the two great spy IPs would make the 1970's US more pissed off at a time when the CIA is arguably at its most clumsy and coup'y era yet:
1) that SIS was staffed with public schoolboys so bitter about the loss of empire putting their tribe out of a job (and blaming America for it) that they let a particularly unsubtle mole feed anything and everything they ever shared with the UK right to Moscow for years if not decades because they all agreed with his anti-American sentiments?
2) That SIS was operating a pack of state-sanctioned psychopaths they were letting run about the world as particularly unsubtle assassins likely to get in bed (quite literally) with the first KGB agent to buy them a martini, shaken not stirred?
 
Hakazin said:
Great, okay, now you've set off one of my trigger phrases. Thank you for that. :V
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Always happy to help!

Hakazin said:
IIRC, the setting's official explanation of that is "the UN cracking fusion power gives them a carrot to dangle in front of nations to get them to comply." That said, I assume from the fact that you're asking this question in the first place that you're not going with that justification?
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Not wholly, at least. Fusion power makes for one hell of a carrot (and it makes for interesting ramifications down the line by the mid-late 90s when the full grid is up and suddenly a huge chunk of the fossil fuel industry is obsolete) but I'm not sure it's enough. At least, it's not enough to convince the nations who need to be convinced the most, i.e. the UNSC Big Five. Even the original book I'm ~85% sure pencils in a second Carter term because even in 1991 we all knew Reagan would've never gone for the IST.

Earlier drafts pretty much filed the whole thing under "PC shenanigans" (TTRPG after all) and in the end I may just give up and go back to that...but I'm still hoping to dig up something that makes it less ridiculously implausible.
 
Jake said:
Sounds like Worm without the misanthropy or nihilism.
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People always say that, but when I read Worm I actually read a rather nuanced character-driven story about mental health and trauma that also happened to be a fantastic superhero reconstruction. It even has a happy ending for our main lead.

It's nowhere near the darkest thing I've read, and the only stuff that I at all found troublesome to read was Bonesaw's introduction. I don't know why people think it's nihilistic, it's very clearly a soaring ode to human resilience and the ways in which people live on despite dealing with intense suffering.
 
So how would you expect Joe Lieberman being President during the 2000s to play out?

Suppose Gore narrowly wins instead of Bush, only for him to be assassinated by some right wing militia fanatic nut mere months into his presidency. Let's also assume that 9/11 still happens on schedule and plays out mostly the same.

....Wait. it just occurred to me that trutherist conspiracism is going to be WAY more toxic here considering Lieberman's jewish. Oh dear...
 
I think Joe Lieberman would seriously seriously consider appointing a Republican as his acting VP in his new administration, so take that as the omen of disaster that it is :V
 
Mal-3 said:
This year's summer project (which is now shifting into my autumn project, and will likely be my winter project as well) has been kind of an interesting ride. I've taken it upon myself to do an update/revision of GURPS International Super Teams. What is GURPS International Super Teams? Well Timmy, it's a superhero TTRPG from GURPS 3rd edition that tries to take a somewhat more grounded approach to the concept. Kind of like the early phases of the MCU, only bigger in scope. Once upon a time it was one of GURPS' "core" setting worlds, with sidebars in quite a few other sourcebooks. These days it's largely forgotten... but I'm still fond of it.
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Honestly, I'm kind of a GURPS fan (well, the settings + sourcebooks, not like I have anyone to play with), especially settings like Infinite Worlds, so I'm kind of stoked really
 
What's a good name for an AH offshoot of the Jacobins that eventually evolves into alt-Marxism? OTL had the Ultra-Radicals, or Enragés, under Roux, Varlet, Leclerc, and Lacombe. Gracchus Babeuf later led a "Conspiracy of Equals".

Enragism? Varletism? Leclercism? Babeufism? Equalism? "Radical Jacobinism"? Something else?

(Main inspiration for this comes from the HOI4 mod Pax Britannica, where the Thirteen Colonies stay British and France's economic situation doesn't become as bad. The French Revolution dies early and becomes the French Reformation instead. Robespierre then starts analyzing class divisions and material analysis for how the revolution was betrayed. Years later, Friedrich Engels expands on Robespierre's writings to turn Jacobinism into the in-universe equivalent of Marxism, while "state socialism" becomes the equivalent of social democracy.)
 
Idea: A successful Prussian scheme (or even the Hanovers cutting their losses in America before the Revolution kicks off) inaugurates a turbo-monarchist world order and how it all goes wrong.

Well, wronger, because its monarchy.
 
I've been idly kicking around the idea of an alternate history based around the idea of Arthur (eldest son of Henry VII and Henry VIII's brother) surviving the sickness which killed him and butterflying away the English Reformation. I've been on a church history kick as I've started attending again and it would be a very interesting idea to me, although one which I couldn't do justice unless I read a lot more on the period.
 
QueenOfRoses said:
I've been idly kicking around the idea of an alternate history based around the idea of Arthur (eldest son of Henry VII and Henry VIII's brother) surviving the sickness which killed him and butterflying away the English Reformation. I've been on a church history kick as I've started attending again and it would be a very interesting idea to me, although one which I couldn't do justice unless I read a lot more on the period.
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Personally, I think it would be more interesting if Edmund (Henry VII's youngest son and Arthur and Henry VIII's brother) survived, because while Henry VIII would still be king he now has a clear male heir whose existence could take England in interesting directions, especially if Edmund has his own children and Henry still wants a legitimate son.
 
Was there any possibility of the American War for Independence being only half-successful, with the USA only encompassing 6 (or fewer) of the of the original 13 colonies and the British controlling the rest?

EDIT: (Might be more accurate to say 12 or fewer colonies)
 
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I am inclined to that being doubtful as being possible, any scenario that allows for effective enough British control over half the rebelling colonies to hold them is likely a scenario where they have the capability to crush the rest.
 
I think you could maybe swing like Vermont as an extension of Canada and the colonies south of Virginia as an extension of the British Caribbean
 
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