GURPS Alternate Earths is a GURPS role-playing game supplement by Kenneth Hite, Craig Neumeier, and Michael S. Schiffer, which was published by Steve Jackson Games in 1996. It presents six alternate histories from the real world, and background material for creating adventures for each of these worlds.
Contents
GURPS Alternate Earths presents six versions of Earth possessing alternate histories from that of our own world, as well as a number of less-detailed alternate settings scattered throughout the book in sidebars. Attention is given to the ways in which agents of the Infinity Patrol presented in GURPS Time Travel and their rivals from the mysterious parallel known as Centrum attempt to influence the course of history in each parallel. There is a sequel volume, GURPS Alternate Earths II, and the concept of the conflict between the Infinity Patrol and Centrum across the many parallel Earths was made central to the Fourth Edition of GURPS as the default setting in the Basic Set and in the supplement GURPS Infinite Worlds.
Dixie Dixie posits an alternate history where the Southern filibuster William Walker, as President of Nicaragua, chose to protect Cornelius Vanderbilt's Accessory Transit Company rather than turn on his tycoon supporter. Without Vanderbilt's opposition to his regime in this timeline, Walker was able to conquer Cuba and make his Nicaragua the most powerful nation in Latin America. During the American Civil War, Walker's ships ran the Union blockade and ensured that Southern troops were well-supplied, leading to their victory over Northern forces and the independence of the Confederate States of America. In turn, the United States allied themselves with Germany and took most of Canada from the Confederacy's British supporters while the Confederates absorbed Mexico and most of Central America. The "current year" in Dixie is 1985, with the world dominated by the U.S.A., the C.S.A., the moribund German Empire, the nascent Russian Republic, and the rapidly modernizing United Republic of India. Technology is somewhat more advanced than at the same date in our world, with personal hovercraft and supersonic transports commonplace, and the presence of nuclear-armed orbital weapons platforms and the juxtaposition of the progressive "Yankees" and the stratified "Southron" society adds to the tension caused by the "Long Drum Roll" (the U.S.A-C.S.A. analogue to the Cold War).
Reich-5 Reich-5 (so named because it was the fifth parallel world discovered by the Infinity Patrol in which Nazi Germany had won World War II) takes as its point of divergence from real history the successful assassination of president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt by Giuseppe Zangara in 1933. While vice president-elect John Nance Garner attempted to implement Roosevelt's New Deal, he was unable to unify the country. U.S. politics seesawed back and forth between radical left- and right-wing administrations under Henry Wallace and Charles Lindbergh, with the country as a whole mired in isolationism and a continuing Great Depression, while Germany and Japan fought and won World War II, conquering the Allies without American involvement. In 1944, following Japanese attacks against American targets across the Pacific, including Pearl Harbor and the West Coast, Vice President William Dudley Pelley seized control of the nation after the assassination of Republican president Charles Lindbergh; the German invasion of Canada in the following year gave Pelley an excuse to arrogate to himself dictatorial powers. His theft of the 1948 election from Robert Taft (running on a combined Republican/Democratic ticket) prompted a Second American Civil War that was ended by a Nazi invasion of the United States and their development and use of the atomic bomb in 1950 against American cities. The "current year" in Reich-5 is 1995. Greater Germany dominates Europe, Africa, and India, while the U.S.A. is little more than a puppet state of Nazi Germany, with a resistance movement only just recovering from a brutal defeat in the Uprising of '76. The Japanese Empire controls China, Southeastern Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Oceania, the Eastern Soviet Union, and the entire Pacific Rim.
Roma Aeterna Roma Aeterna diverged from real history when Nero Claudius Drusus survived his German campaigns and founded a different Julio-Claudian dynasty than in our history. Their patronage of the Heronian Academy led to a more rapid development of industry, which produces in the Roma Aeterna setting a very different world in which the Third Roman Empire based in Hesperia (roughly corresponding to Mexico and Texas) rules much of North and South America, Northern Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and India. The only other significant political entities in the world are Serica (China) and its North American kingdom Fu-Sang (centered on San Francisco), Taehan (a growing empire based on the Korean Peninsula), and the isolationist South American kingdom of Huaraca. The "current year" in Roma Aeterna is 1878.
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