A superhero setting from Scratch

[Mark Rand]

16 minutes ago, Hermit said:

 

To be clear, the Amazon nation is in what is now in the REAL world... Northern Turkey. Where the ancient greeks believed the Amazons dwelled.

Okay. 

[Hermit]

And Allies of the US is a very big possibility . If comics have taught us anything is that at least some  Amazons are drawn towards macho American heroes.

 

*Crosses fingers*

[Tjack]

   Atlantic City goes underwater and doesn’t even have to change it’s name.  Also it’s the toxic waste dumps that NJ is known for that provide the mutagen that transforms the populace.

[Mark Rand]

4 minutes ago, Tjack said:

   Atlantic City goes underwater and doesn’t even have to change it’s name.  Also it’s the toxic waste dumps that NJ is known for that provide the mutagen that transforms the populace.

Yeah, into merpeople.

 

Now, there are no more casinos there and the Miss America pageant has to be reestablished in a new city. 

[Cancer]

Anything that eliminates part of New Jersey is OK by me!!

 

... And I expect that after the novelty wears off, the Amazons will have a remarkably similar response to "persecution of the male minority" remarkably like China has about all sort of things: "Our internal affairs are NOT for discussion in an international venue."

 

And at least the joy-riding alien teenagers hit an airplane rather than, oh, a controlled-flight-into-ground strike into Mumbai at 3,000 km/second, replacing the urban area with a steaming crater, killing all the residents, and damaging the spacecraft enough so it can neither transmit distress signals nor get itself back into space.  But there's enough surviving machinery to get the humans very, very interested...

[Cancer]

"Speak softly and carry a big snake-man."

[Hermit]

I admit, I am somewhat proud of the aliens options.

[Cancer]

I admit I would have had the option that a (dead) spaceship, including (dead) passengers, were found thirty meters below the surface embedded in basalt of the Columbia River Basalt Group in eastern Oregon, in a layer of rock that was laid down about 16 million years ago.  The spacecraft isn't damaged (much), but all the power sources are long dead.  Recent erosion and a cliff collapse exposed the remnant sometime in the last fifteen years, though discovery of the ship is more recent than that.

[Hermit]

Maybe that space craft was discovered, Cancer, but it wasn't the first public display of Aliens are out there? Who knows

[Tjack]

35 minutes ago, Mark Rand said:

Yeah, into merpeople.

 

Now, there are no more casinos there and the Miss America pageant has to be reestablished in a new city. 

 

    I just flashed on that episode of Futurama where the crew stumble onto the lost underwater city of Atlantais.  That’s what you get when Atlanta GA. drops into the ocean and the citizens become a society of redneck mermen.

[assault]

4 hours ago, Cancer said:

in a layer of rock that was laid down about 16 million years ago.  The spacecraft isn't damaged (much), but all the power sources are long dead.

 

Pff. 16 million years and the power sources are dead? What kind of rubbish spacecraft was it?

[Hermit]

Wow, a lot of close votes on this one.

 

Speaking of which, to those that voted: Thanks

[Mark Rand]

I'm giving some thought to using some of this in my Junior Justice Foundation campaign.

 

When Atlantic City sunk, the nearby islands between the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic Ocean went under, too.  Fortunately, some people became merpeople.  Of course, they had to rebuild the Miss America pageant.

 

As far as the Amazon nation, which I'm calling, for now, Amazonia, knowing its boundaries and when it was founded would be good information to have.  For now, it's current ruler is Queen Caroline I.

[assault]

Futurama jokes aside, my preferred location for Atlantis is off the coast of Africa. The idea is that they speak an archaic Berber dialect, related to the Tuareg language(s).

 

Because obviously people who live under the sea speak the same language as people who live in the world's biggest desert.

 

But given these options, Atlantic City.

[archer]

Quote

Jan 31, 1961, a mercury program goes seemingly wrong and an astro chimp, #65 aka Ham, is seemingly lost. Two weeks later, a saucer lands publicly on the White House steps. The Plutonian Confiderantion returns the Chimp and speaks to a recently Sworn in JFK. The meeting's subject? Classified

 

Love the JFK classified meeting. Gives plenty of room for conspiracy theories about both aliens and the later assassination.

 

I hate the names "Ham" and particularly "Plutonian Confederation". Having a space confederation apparently named after a mini-planet in our own solar system is a little too much of a "1950's sci fi TV show" plot element for my tastes. "Luptonian" maybe?

 

I'm also not a fan of placing Amazonia in northern Turkey for a published setting. That area of the world is very unstable at the moment with an upsurge in Muslim nationalism, a partial withdrawal from NATO responsibilities, the US withdrawing their nukes from the country because they feared the Turkish government would seize them, renewed repression of women, repression of Kurds, and the leader of Turkey who fairly openly wants to re-establish a Muslim caliphate over at least the Middle East and maybe more.

 

By the time you got around to publishing anything, Turkey could be in worse shape than Lebanon in the 1980's or Syria right now.

 

I don't see any way you could place Amazonia in that location and have people of Amazonia be a voice for women's rights or be worshiping pagan deities without it being very jarring for future readers. The reader would be more likely to expect the leaders of Amazonia having to fend off frequent car bombings from Muslim terrorists, assassination attempts, and honor killings of women who show too much independence.

 

Maybe you could have Amazonia appear in the middle of the Black Sea after being lost in a dimensional void for centuries. At the least, it'd tick off Russia. At the worst, the reappearance (if not handled delicately) could displace a hell of a lot of water and cause tidal waves that would heavily damage all the other countries surrounding the Black Sea.

 

2 cents

[assault]

2 hours ago, archer said:

I hate the names "Ham" and particularly "Plutonian Confederation". Having a space confederation apparently named after a mini-planet in our own solar system is a little too much of a "1950's sci fi TV show" plot element for my tastes. "Luptonian" maybe?

 

"Ham" is fine. It's just the kind of name that humans would give to a chimp.

As for the "Plutonian Confederation", well, you see...

 

(Stuff I made up a long time ago follows.)

 

Far beyond Uranus lie the Outer Worlds - artificially habitable planetoids, created by Beings Unknown, and populated by a number of species, including humans taken from Earth tens of thousands of years ago and mutated in their alien environments.

 

Despite being technically within the Solar System, they are so remote that it takes years for even sophisticated spacecraft to travel between them and the inner system. Fortunately(?), however, there is a network of wormholes connecting them and the inner system.

 

The closest wormhole entry point is in orbit around Mars. This has led to considerable confusion on Earth, with multiple species apparently originating on the Red Planet, despite the latter (probably) being uninhabitable!

What humans know as the "Plutonian Confederation" is a group of species who entered the inner system through a wormhole in the vicinity of Pluto.

[assault]

The Amazonia thing is tricky. Even if it happened a hundred years ago, it would still have repercussions. I don't think moving it around helps.

 

The most obvious location would be on the border of what is now Armenia. The problem is: why is it Amazonia, rather than "Western Armenia"?

[death tribble]

What did Penzance do to you ?

[Mark Rand]

55 minutes ago, assault said:

The Amazonia thing is tricky. Even if it happened a hundred years ago, it would still have repercussions. I don't think moving it around helps.

 

The most obvious location would be on the border of what is now Armenia. The problem is: why is it Amazonia, rather than "Western Armenia"?

I came up with Amazonia as a placeholder name for the Amazon nation.  It seems to have caught on.

[assault]

4 minutes ago, Mark Rand said:

I came up with Amazonia as a placeholder name for the Amazon nation.  It seems to have caught on.

 

Yes, that's fine. The issue is the how and why of it being the Amazon nation, rather than the nation you would expect to be in its place.

[Lawnmower Boy]

2 hours ago, death tribble said:

What did Penzance do to you ?

It knows what it did. Now it has to deal with the hard water border.

[Mark Rand]

Amazonia might have vanished in the first century BCE and popped up in its old location, in the Myrtoan Sea, a subdivision of the Mediterranean Sea that lies between the Cyclades Island Group and Peloponnese (a peninsula and geographic region in southern Greece) in early 2010.     

[Hermit]

12 hours ago, archer said:

 

Love the JFK classified meeting. Gives plenty of room for conspiracy theories about both aliens and the later assassination.

 

I hate the names "Ham" and particularly "Plutonian Confederation". Having a space confederation apparently named after a mini-planet in our own solar system is a little too much of a "1950's sci fi TV show" plot element for my tastes. "Luptonian" maybe?

 

I'm also not a fan of placing Amazonia in northern Turkey for a published setting. That area of the world is very unstable at the moment with an upsurge in Muslim nationalism, a partial withdrawal from NATO responsibilities, the US withdrawing their nukes from the country because they feared the Turkish government would seize them, renewed repression of women, repression of Kurds, and the leader of Turkey who fairly openly wants to re-establish a Muslim caliphate over at least the Middle East and maybe more.

 

By the time you got around to publishing anything, Turkey could be in worse shape than Lebanon in the 1980's or Syria right now.

 

I don't see any way you could place Amazonia in that location and have people of Amazonia be a voice for women's rights or be worshiping pagan deities without it being very jarring for future readers. The reader would be more likely to expect the leaders of Amazonia having to fend off frequent car bombings from Muslim terrorists, assassination attempts, and honor killings of women who show too much independence.

 

Maybe you could have Amazonia appear in the middle of the Black Sea after being lost in a dimensional void for centuries. At the least, it'd tick off Russia. At the worst, the reappearance (if not handled delicately) could displace a hell of a lot of water and cause tidal waves that would heavily damage all the other countries surrounding the Black Sea.

 

2 cents

As far as the Ham thing... actually he was a real Astro Chimp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_(chimpanzee)

 

The Plutonian Confederation was intentionally a tease about the demotion it got from 9th planet to 'dwarf planet'... the irony being of all the planets, THAT's the One of import? Maybe the Aliens have a wormhole near there (Props to Assault) and there was a translation error or the  Press just dubbed them that and that's what stuck.  Maybe Pluto, while a small chunk of cold rock on the outside is another hollow planet and some life is quite comfy there in this setting.  I'm still tinkering.

 

The complaint about Amazonia affecting Turkey I don't quite understand. OBVIOUSLY it would be different. ... we had one of the first superheroines of power arise from the Armenian genocide and put a stop to it.  The history of that part of the world RADICALLY Shifts from there regardless of where we go from 1918 on. The poll indicates that the population is 75% female, and 25% male. with the 'average' amazon at Olympic athlete levels of physicality at least. Whatever reality shard caused that shift  apparently lingers. I think its safe to say they'd be way ahead of most nations in women's rights (More than the USA at the time as well as Armenia) regardless of how the poll goes. 

 

 

As for the location... I wanted Amazons and tried to borrow a little from the Greeks who claimed to be experts

While researching them, I studied this...

Quote

 

The Terme River (Turkish: Terme Çayı; Greek: Θερμώδων, Thermōdōn) is in the border of Terme district, located in central northern Turkey between the cities of Ordu and Samsun. The river flows about 50 kilometres (31 mi) east of the coastal city Samsun into the Black Sea.

The region consists of a fertile, rather secluded, plain. High mountains can be found to the south and east, and the Yeşil River flows to the west.

Anciently, it was called Thermodon and was a river of Pontus. Although not wide, it was navigable.^[1] In Greek mythology, the legendary capital of the Amazons, Themiscyra, was found on the river Thermodon. The river was often noted by ancient writers.^[2]

 

 

Then suddenly I was inspired. What was going on around that time at that area during World War One? The Armenian Genocide... nasty business. Instead of some 'what if this horrible thing was even worse' angle, I could do a divergent history that actually came out better...at least in the short term, than our real one.

And I avoided the 'Island of Amazons' bit which has been done in comics so it felt different on top of it.

 

 Turkey in "Scratchworld" (For want a better term) never formed as it we know it in our world. The Ottoman Empire broke up, and whatever variation of Turkey formed, it formed without the area of the Terme River in its grasp. Amazonia is protected by militant super women who have either strange magics and superpowers, or high tech, and superpowers. Radical terrorists might storm into Amazonia to cause trouble, but it would be kind of like trying to slip into Metropolis with Superman and a vacationing Bat family around.

 

Assuming this setting is a duplicate of our own world would be a mistake- one reality crashed into another and made that impossible. Oak Ridge is Atom City and a metropolis (Meaning other cities in Eastern Tennessee are likely smaller as it drew off population)  , Aliens from outer space are publicly known, and so on. The nice thing about the 'minor and major' reality shifts it it should allow for some changes to be subtle, others blatant, and lets me play fast and loose with some consequences if I need to. 

 

Obviously, folks can take any setting and alter it to as grim dark, realistic, silly, corny etc as they need to. They can move things to their hearts content and as suits their campaign best. But for the 'official'Scratch World? I'm keeping Amazonia in the Northern Anatolia area near the Terme River because otherwise it rips out the meaning of one of the first great changes in the setting. Whatever Amazonia is like in Scratch World 2019, during the Great War, a horrible genocide was happening, and in Scratch World? A Heroine arose- and she put a stop to it.

 

Maybe I'm a sap, but I can't bring myself to back track on that now.

 

 

Edit: And I'm getting the feeling folks are just ignoring this post *Sigh*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Hermit]

4 hours ago, death tribble said:

What did Penzance do to you ?

 

Awash in singing pirates I hear!

[Cancer]

10 hours ago, archer said:

[...]

 

I hate the names "Ham" and particularly "Plutonian Confederation". Having a space confederation apparently named after a mini-planet in our own solar system is a little too much of a "1950's sci fi TV show" plot element for my tastes. "Luptonian" maybe?

 

I'm also not a fan of placing Amazonia in northern Turkey for a published setting. That area of the world is very unstable at the moment with an upsurge in Muslim nationalism, a partial withdrawal from NATO responsibilities, the US withdrawing their nukes from the country because they feared the Turkish government would seize them, renewed repression of women, repression of Kurds, and the leader of Turkey who fairly openly wants to re-establish a Muslim caliphate over at least the Middle East and maybe more.

 

[...]

Maybe you could have Amazonia appear in the middle of the Black Sea after being lost in a dimensional void for centuries. At the least, it'd tick off Russia. At the worst, the reappearance (if not handled delicately) could displace a hell of a lot of water and cause tidal waves that would heavily damage all the other countries surrounding the Black Sea.

 

8 hours ago, assault said:

"Ham" is fine. It's just the kind of name that humans would give to a chimp.

 

Actually, Ham is the kind of name that humans DID give to a chimp.

 

As for Amazonia's location ... if you put it a bit further east and south, say in the Caspian Sea, the displaced water could do everyone the favor of refilling the Aral Sea.