What would be interesting alternate history/alternate world type settings?

Huh, hive mind.

No. is just retarded.

One where polytheistic Mongols ruled most of Asia, Natives ruled America and wildlife mostly ruled Africa with fragments of society inbetween. All of these cultures developed culture and technology independently without the urge to explore others. Australia is presumably uninhabitable.

Fantasy Napoleonic Wars.

>legionaries with assault rifles and the like.

Which wouldn't be any different in looks, function, or most likely name even from current day soldiers. The early republican legions where not the Imperial legions were not the late proto-dark age legions, and there's a good few years of ever developing circumstances ever forcing them to change if you want Rome to just not fall the next year instead, on top of ever increasingly fickle whims of fashion.

Serious use of steam and water wheels starting in ancient Babylon

Anything with an additonal continent or a larger earth with more land.

Always interesting to see how Atlantis would change human history or even if certain continents were connected still like Eurasia to Alaska or if Australia had Mu still connected to it.

How about just a story set in a fantastical version of late pre-history/first history? Like in Doggerland or Mesopotamia? I never see that anywhere.

Or Roman's seeing the potential for steam engines for things besides toys

A game set in our world (in any modern era, pick your poison really), but if nukes either have never or can never be created because plot magic.

I'm curious where we'd be if the whole "global deterrent," thing wasn't really a thing.

I think it would make more sense for the Chinese to really do it. Partly because they didn't have slavery in the same way and partly because their iron and steel production was far greater.

Well, Israel wouldn't exist, that's for sure.

Islam never happens.

Alternatively, Islam conquers Europe.

They'd need to get a lot better at metallurgy - boiler explosions were a problem for ages IRL, and without boilers that can withstand more than trivial pressures or even just big sheets of metal Rome (or anyone else) could only flirt with steam power

>Ferdinand's assassination fails
>Napoleon stays in Moscow until spring
>Zenobia rebukes Aurelian's attack
>Mongols reach Japan without any storms

That doesn't sound plausible. Rather, try something like Muhammad or Khalid ibn Al-Walid is killed by an arrow in one of his early battles.

>WW2 ends in 1946 after a land operation in Japan, with several million more casualties
>War with the Soviet Union starts shortly after
>Soviet Union loses some of its positions in Eastern Europe, but occupies Japan
>another war breaks out in the 60s
>US is forced to withdraw from the USSR, but China occupies the Far East
>USSR collapses in the 70s-80s

England gets completely wiped out by super-syphilis in 1690.

Ottomans collapse two centuries earlier, Imperial Russia rebuilds a bumbling and corrupt Second Byzantine Empire, no communism, no world wars, France doesn't fuck itself over funding America's wars, remains stable and prosperous and successfully prevents the formation of unified Germany, China remains a backwater imperialist shothole, USA forms into an irrelevant, isolationist shithole, half of the world is ruled by chinless mutants from the same extended family.

Doggerland isn't that well known, and even if it where anything set there would be made up since we have absolutely no archealogical remains from its time, or any written records of its cultures. Nor do people know what the landscape was like.

Mesopatamia doesn't get enough credit, though. How come people give Egypt all the attention when talking about ancient civilizations?

We know Doggerland was one of the richest habitats of that time. There would have been almost no competition. And then there was the slow flooding. But yeah, the Mesopotamians were too interesting.

The Peace of Amiens holds, cementing Napoleon's conquest of Europe. He doesn't invade Russia and founds a stable dynasty. Later, colonialism into what is now the Third World ensues.

The setting itself would take place in an alternate 1920s where the Great War is about to break out - a fight between the British, French and Russian empires against a massive American-aided uprising of their colonial subjects across Asia and Africa.

Because Egypt lasted mainly. Egypt kept on trucking for literally thousands of years when civilizations around them rose and succumbed to cultural drift or collapse.

>Netherlands is French
plz no

Because those others were surrounded by hostile nomads and empires. South of Egypt was fuck-all and west of it was desert. And no naval force from the north could invade them as most lived inland near the Nile. They did get invaded btw, their enemies just took over for a while.

>half of the world is ruled by chinless mutants from the same extended family.
This is our reality. They're called Jews.

The dinosaurs didn't go extinct but were in fact incredibly intelligent and advanced, and so left on a space-borne migration to avoid mass extinction. And they came back towards the beginning of the dark ages, conquered/colonized the Americas, and this is now what Columbus finds.

I doubt a Bonarpate-led turbocharged French colonial empire would ever let the US grow much. Plus Louisiana was sold after your point of divergence, it might just not happen, making it all worse for the US.

I'd like expanding on this a bit. What nations would wind up coming up in all of this? What nations that are major powers now wind up becoming backwaters because they no longer have (potential) nuclear capability? What does this mean for the areas around them?

Anyone good at making maps?

Lincoln lets the US South secede the Union without fighting--or giving up after a few sharp defeats so a prolonged war isn't something we live out--setting up a potential precedent for a balkanized America along social, cultural, and political lines. What does this mean for the world as a whole?

The CSA go from recession to depression, eventually join the Central Powers soon after US troops landed in France in 1917 and backstabs the US.

In this history Germany would have won WW1
Imagine such a beautiful world
In our timeline the world is run by banks and corporations

>Play Kaiserreich.
>Germany won WW1.
>beautiful world
Har har.

..you think the US had any effect on WW1?

Are you saying millions fresh soldiers getting into battle while everyone else, Germans included, was borderline mutinous had no effect at all?

>Kaiserreich
I'm gonna ask this here because /gsg/ is more interested in shitposting and grossgermaniums than actual discussion, and Veeky Forums replaces every other board.

I've been playing DH for a few days now, and I don't understand the big deal. This is supposed to be the end-all-be-all of Hearts of Iron games, right? I understand that the combat mechanics are much better than in either HoI 4 or in HoI 3, but as far as I can see both diplomacy and espionage are utterly useless. They require loads of investments and give extremely minimal returns with a high chance of failure to the point where you're best off ignoring both of them (removing an entire dimension from the game).

So does everyone see DH as the best HoI game in spite of its diplomatic shortcomings, or do I simply not understand how diplomacy in DH works?

muricans always overestimate their roles in the world wars. The American soldiers had no idea why they were there. Their morale was at rock bottom and only a small minority even shot back. They lost huge numbers too. But Germany lost due to the civil war/revolution going on there.

Fantasy modern times with Eberron type portals to other realms with no post-apocalyptic bullshit.
Invading fantastical monsters, tourists and antagonists are of course, in it.
Airships and floating islands included.

Funding the American Revolution was only part of the problem, extensive pre-existing debt, food shortages, and internal discontent would all need to be addressed as well.

Sooo Flintloque?

Pic related.

Also a world where events like the plague are a regular occurence and the disease can remain dormant and suddenly mutate. People are REALLY xenophobic and paranoid, even more than now. People wear veils, lots of dark rituals and phony medicine.

Also a world where anti-ballistic fibers and alloy concepts and materials were able to keep pace with firearms technology leaving melee combat still relevant and guns getting more and more obnoxious. Power armor is feasible and much sleeker. Tanks can be made as fast as lamborghinis and some aircraft use collisions to kill enemy aircraft.

Where the hell can I find the PDFs for this? The archive on the PDF Share Thread isn't giving me anything to work with.

The CSA rapidly falls to internal competition and ineffective government structure. After balkanizing, the individual states quickly become subordinate partners to various world powers, many with the USA, and the South as a whole is quickly boxed in by the expanding USA. Lack of infrastructure and industrial development sees the former CSA fall into economic obsolescence, followed by economic collapse as soil nutrient depletion and the boil weevil destroy cotton production.

>irrelevant, isolationist shithole
If anything the French and Spanish would consume the Thirteen Colonies and British Canada into their own American empires and we'd see centuries of war between them for control of the Midwest and its god tier agriculture and river system, Appalachian coal, etc. Spain would probably win that fight thanks to control of Florida and Cuba. Then you'd have Russian incursions from the Northwest and more centuries of war.

Really, the British Empire and a USA that quickly expanded and solidified its gaina are the ONLY way colonization of North America wouldn't have resulted in half a millennium of bloodshed.

Nowhere unless you buy them, as they were only recently released in PDF form. Although there is a free pdf that only has the rules for it.

I'm a New Zealander and I can give you a nonbiased perspective: Without USA WW1 would have led to a stalemate
Europe would have lost their empires, but the European nations would have roughly the same borders as they had before the war minus all their empires

Harry Turtledove has a series like that. The Americas are on opposite sides of the first world war, Germany wins thanks to Northern aid and the Confederacy is the bombed out shithole that gives rise to Hitler

Well that's no fun. Although the setting doesn't exactly have to be modern. It could be last century when "modern" weapons and armor were still in development.

A world where the Aztecs make it to the space age but are still really big on sacrifices. Fueling constant war. When the other nations get tired of their shit and triple alliance the aztecs out of the solar system, the space Mexicans just go raid weaker alien empires

How does modern knowledge of astronomy affect the whole sun worship thing? Like the idea of guarding the sun as it goes through the underworld falls apart when you know about orbits and stars

>I'm a New Zealander and I can give you a nonbiased perspective: Without USA WW1 would have led to a stalemate

No. If the US didn't come in the Entente would have lost. Not because of some "hurr durr Amerika stronk" bullshit, but because the US was on the verge of raising lending/collateral requirements to a level where the Entente wouldn't have been able to borrow any more money. When the US entered the war in April of '17, government loans were made with no lending/collateral requirements.

Prior to the US entry, all US loans to the Entente were being made by banks and other private institutions and those lenders had to follow Federal Reserve lending/collateral requirements. While the requirements waxed and waned as the Entente's performance did the same, by December of '16 the Federal Reserve recommended a drastic increase in those requirements and Wilson agreed. The next round of loans was due for negotiation in May of '17 and the UK, which was basically funding the entire Entente effort by that time, wasn't going to borrow anything near to what the war effort needed.

The flow of food, munitions, small arms, raw materials, and thousands of other items was going to be drastically cut around the same time Russia collapsed and Germany began her strategic redeployment to the Western Front.

The Entente would most likely be asking for an armistice in late '17 or early '18.

>Harry Turtledove has a series like that

And it sucks.

If you want ideas for some interesting AH settings, check out alternatehistory DOT com

There's an active timeline there about Age of Discovery Europeans contacting an Australia with several Bronze Age-level civilizations.

They would revolt and join the glorious Umighty States just like Texas.

That's a fascinating question. It could be any number of things. Modern astronomy could create a schism between the priest caste and the palace or the science caste. Or, a better option, their religion evolves. Maybe the underworld is another dimension, or a section of space the system will one day pass through. Sol is still sacred, and most be protected

Not quite sure that would be the style of Native Americans.

I have a question, what would have happened if the americas were left to there own devices instead of getting fucked by spain?

The Roman Empire falls.
Hadrian's Wall, however, does not.

Yes and? Roman Britain wasn't taken over by people from the north, it was taken over by people from the sea.

>b-b-b-but the south will rise again

Smallpox still fucks them over. Other European powers show up instead of the Spaniards.

>Hadrian's Wall, however, does not.
It never did. You can visit it today.

Thanks for explaining that to me
I didn't know USA was involved financially before they deployed troops
If USA didn't deploy troops when the Entente couldn't borrow anymore money from USA, Germany and Austria would have wrecked the shit out of the Entente

>Smallpox still fucks them over. Other European powers show up instead of the Spaniards.

Exactly.

ONE man had smallpox in Cortes party. That's all it took to fuck over the Aztecs and others.

Thanks to native trading routes, smallpox arrived in Peru over a decade before Pizarro and triggered a civil war among the Inca.

Intermittent coastal contact and limited trading were enough to transmit diseases which basically depopulated New England a generation before the Pilgrims arrived.

From the perspective of the native Americans, Europeans were walking bio-weapons.

The way you get around this is simply saying that Native Americans have more genetic diversity, allowing significantly more Native Americans to survive initial contact.

>Thanks for explaining that to me

You're welcome.

>I didn't know USA was involved financially before they deployed troops

Very much so. The US basically fed the Entente and, as industry retooled, provided a shit ton of finished goods. Not "high tech" stuff like tanks, planes, and heavy artillery, but ordinary stuff like ammo, shell casings, munitions, etc.

Here's the funny bit, the US would have loaned and sold to the Central Powers too IF they'd been able to import the stuff they'd bought. Germany even built and used a cargo sub and planned on building more.

>If USA didn't deploy troops when the Entente couldn't borrow anymore money from USA, Germany and Austria would have wrecked the shit out of the Entente

Exactly. When you look at how close the Kaiserschlacht came to knocking the UK and France out of the war in early '18, it's easy to see how the same without offensives would have succeeded without all the US food, supplies, and other materials.

Genetic diversity isn't going to protect against smallpox, measles, etc.

one where the entirety of the landmasses of earth's northern hemisphere were rotated much farther south, maybe 1000-1500 miles or so. way more ariable land, especially in russia/canada.

WW1 with magic on all sides minus magitek WW2 America. Magic is different for each country. Britain is classical wizardry, France is wild magic powered by emotions, Russia is necromancy, Germany is full of warlocks, Italy is ritualistic, Ottomans summon beasts from myth, and Austria-Hungary is divine.

The below is total fantasy, but I feel could make for an interesting setting:

> After the bombs are dropped in 1945, weird shit starts to happen. Prior "holy" items, sites, and faith from all religions actually start to have minor miracles occur (healing of wounds, curing the blind/deaf, healing the paralyzed, etc.)

> Spirital shamanic rituals actually succeed in calling forth the dead to ask for guidance or to haunt a hated foe

> Witches and wiccan spells actually work on a physical level, leading to stuff as simple as controlling flames to inflicting gross diseases

> People start to develop psychokinetic abilities (telepathy, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, etc.)

> All the while the world still recovers from the end of WW2 and the beginning of the Cold War, as when the USSR starts its testing these isolated incidents become more commonplace

> Ends up being nuclear explosions are so powerful they're breaking the barrier between realities, letting 'magic' return to the world after a millenia of being sealed away by... something

>minus magister ww2 America
Wait, so America is at the tech level of it's WW2 self in 1916, but with magitek?

Yep. Everyone else has magic and bolt actions and some early SMGs, America has little to no magic but better guns.

Not 100%, but if Native Americans have a greater diversity of Human leukocyte antigens they would have an easier time weathering the various diseases from Europe. IRL, many groups of Native Americans had the same HLAs, meaning that certain specific strains of a disease (such as smallpox) could wipe a hole tribe out. With a greater diversity of HLAs, only some individuals from that tribe would get sick, which would mean a greater number of survivors.

I think your putting this too lowly
You basically gave america to make the nuke a fuckton bigger,more destructive,easier to use,and over all a better fuck you flag

Don't even need the nuke if you have the industrial base to mass produce things like the Pershing

>The below is total fantasy, but I feel could make for an interesting setting:

Nice rip off of Gurps Technomancer, Skippy.

Got anything original?

>hole

Hole... uh huh uh huh uh uh huh yeah yeah yeah

That isn't going to do anything. What they'd need is to have been raising and living in close quarters to livestock for thousands of years. You'd have to handwave in some species in the New World that'd be more amenable to taming and domestication but this still wouldn't do much as the initial rewards for pursuing this wouldn't really be worth the effort.

This is because the Americas are oriented on a north-south axis meaning they have to move through radically different climate bands which all require different crops, different livestock, and different approaches to survival. They'd need a proportionally much longer time span to develop the practices that could adapt to these differing climates. Eurasian peoples never had this problem because the landmass is on an east-west axis which means the climate changes very little over thousands of miles. This in turn means that that it's easy to spread since they don't really have to change much of anything and when they do encounter changes they are much more gradual.

So if you want to make it so the indigenous people of the Americas to survive they'd need a head start. Probably a few thousand years of one so they'd eventually have to resort to domestication of livestock and crops to extend the land's carrying capacity. Of course this would also mean they're likely more developed in other areas as well but since metal was more of a pain in the ass to get there it doesn't guarantee they'd be on the same parity as Europeans unless you wanted to be very generous with it.

Honestly, I've never read a GURPS book.

Nausscia Valley of the Wind
Massive hostile jungles, acidified and polluted water, and deserts cover most of the earth. Human civilization exists only in small maintained pockets of grasses and non-deadly forest.
Firearms, swords, airships, armor, mechanical limbs
Some scattered ancient relics, the most famous of them being a weapon used in the apocalyptic war thats shaped like a giant human.

There's the movie and a few mangas that cover stuff outside the movie.

Here's a fun one: Earth is just a bit more massive, so that there can be no solution to the rocket equation. How does the 20th century change? Do we go full batshit insane and use nukes for spaceship engines? Do we write the whole thing off as a bad job? How do astronomy, communications, and spycraft evolve when stripped of their biggest tools?

Nobody has. Some people have glanced at a page here and there, though.

Nukes aren't there except as a superweapon, but everyone else has some insane superweapon of their own. Due to MAD, no one wants to pull the trigger.

Well, MAD and the fact that no one really knows how effective their superweapon would be. America thinks that the A-bomb might set the atmosphere on fire, Austria-Hungary is worried that the seraphim they summon might turn on them, Ottomans might not be able to tame the djinni, Russian liches are kinda dicks, etc.

OUTTA MY WAY SYNDIE SHITS

Otto von Bismark was never fired, thus preventing the triple alliance. The result is a series of proxy wars and a prolonged cold war between Tsarist Russia, Imperial Germany, The Third French Rebulic, and The British Empire instead of one big blow-out war.

Meanwhile the US is continuing to expand its reach in Latin America and the Pacific, and Japan edges ever closer to war. We would see the Pacific theater if nothing else of WWII play out much the same way, only without the US sending half its forces to Europe and possibly without nukes.

Now that I think about it, without Hitler going full retard there's no reason Einstein would have to emigrate. The Euro Cold War would come to an abrupt end when Bismarck could nuke London, Paris, and Moscow with missile strikes launched well within German borders.

Cry of the Icemark almost has this. Rome reaches the Cavalier Age.

>TFW Tolkien did a Doggerland setting five decades before Doggerland is recognized as having existed

So, Muhammad just gets called a heresiarch and gets stomped on by the Church?

That's just our timeline if Hillary had won.

I've not even seen a GURPS page, as I avoid any GURPS thread and have never downloaded or looked at a pdf of them.