SpectralTime wrote:Eh, it's just my crazy ability to predict these things. I was almost a teenager before I found out other people couldn't do it too, and were always assuming I'd seen the film before and was spoiling it.
Having read your other comments in this thread:
Good to know things aren't TOO post-apocalyptic.
Shoot. It'll be a MALE American possible cow-cyborg. Aw, well. You can't win 'em all... Unless he's Lincoln!
...No, wait, wrong time period. Curses! No gay Lincoln sex for me...
Slavery? Crap. Aw, well, so long as it's a genuine evil and no one is trying to pull that lame "If the Confederates only won the War Between The States, they'd've gotten rid of slavery on their own! ...Eventually!" bit. As an actual American Southerner, that one pisses me right the flip off.
So... Well, so far we've got two Brits, one American who may or may not be a cyborg, a Chinaman that's actually a Chinawoman whom you really shouldn't kiss, and a red-head of feminine gender and ambiguous nationality. This reminds me of a Call of Cthulhu game I read about with the best idea for a character ever: Chang the Celestial, a mysterious fellow from the Orient with a dark secret: he is actually a Guatemalan librarian named Miguel, and simply too polite to correct the racist white people that surround him.
And, airships. Of course. Did the rest of the world get its hands on helium with America in a much weakened global position, or...?
This is a very good question. In real life, the US had a monopoly on helium production for much of the 20th century, and even now is still responsible for 75% of helium production in the world. Given that most of the US supply of helium is located in states that are apparently contested or controlled by Indians in the game, this makes for an interesting dynamic with potentially contested mines in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. Access to those mines would become vitally important to global powers like the Brits and Russians, and also to the colonies as a means of improving their economic and military situations. I look forward to seeing FenCayne's answer to this one.
...So Africa got hit the worst by the meteors? Daggome it, black people just can't catch a break in this setting! Between the slavery, the colonialism, the natural disasters...
Well, at least Imperial Japan won't happen. That's something. I mean, for all that their 1936 doesn't seem too hot, at least it's not invented facism yet... probably.
It doesn't sound like Germany is a great power in this game, so even if fascism does crop up, it would be at most a minor nuisance to the British and Russian empires, which themselves seem to suffer more from imperialism than fascism. And you really can't have WW2 without WW1, since WW1 both set up the pieces on the board and gave the Germans motive to rally around the fascists and start a new war. It sounds like Central Europe has been too distracted by plague and other issues to get into disadvantageous wars with what (in this game) are its more powerful neighbors.
Hmmm... this leads to the obvious question. Did or did not Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Walt Disney, and the strings of terrible westerns from this time period go on to invent modern movie-going as we know it without an American West to film in and/or about?
Will this already-kinda-miserable world end up having to make due... without Disney OR Star Wars? Or even movies at all?
Heck, there isn't even a Hollywood to make any of this stuff...