…you looked, didn’t you?
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Confessions Of A Time Traveler
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Scum & Villainy & Me
As you may have guessed from the title, this confession is about politics and my meddling therein. Not all of my messing about was aimed at creating new timelines. Some of it was that old time travel situation where you find yourself in a circumstance where you are responsible for our history going according to plan.
The best example of that when I accidentally used the term “national parks” during a conversation with Teddy Roosevelt several years before he was elected president. I also may have not done my best at warning Julius Caesar about his impending death. You win, you lose.
Most of the time I’ve gone into our past has been with the expressed intent of spinning off new universes. It’s fun and it gives others a timeline without the same scum and villainy we know.
A great example is the several times I managed to get J. Edgar Hoover out of the FBI by about 1940 or so. I usually neuralize him into just stepping down, but a few times my dislike for the blackmailing little son of a bitch caused me to frame him for crimes ranging from embezzlement to first degree murder.
Getting rid of Hoover often has some interesting cascade effects. In particular, it spells bad news for the Mafia, since Hoover’s refusal to admit they existed slowed efforts to take organized crime down. But if you have old Eddie go to the joint on murder charges, or even just resign because he was embezzling, the FBI suddenly starts to distance itself from him. The result is a whole lot less Mob.
Another effect is improving race relations because the Klan gets infiltrated earlier and better. Oh, and another really great effect? Ronald Reagan either stays a Democrat or becomes a much less influential Republican.
Speaking of Ronnie Raygun, I have clipped his political wings dozens of times. Of course, I’ve also had him be very successful as a liberal Democrat. In fact, he was the best Democratic president since FDR, and maybe even more popular. He was certainly the most popular governor of California until Kamala Harris came along.
Communism is fun to stamp out, but also pretty easy if you just waste Marx & Lenin early on. Or maybe convince them to emigrate to the USA and become pig farmers.
In China, some well used neuralizing caused a huge wave or pro-American democracy to get rid of the previous infant communist government.
Moving over to England, you’d be surprised at the changes that happen if you make Queen Victoria less of an empire builder and more of a suffragette. It also helps to not let Prince Albert die until the last year or two of the Queen’s life.
Naturally, you can effect huge changes by preventing Lincoln or either of the Kennedys from getting assassinated. Or by having Tricky Dick Nixon, not run for president in 1968. Or by having him actually get impeached and found guilty. Or by having that happen and he goes to jail. Good times.
I’m sure some of you wonder about new timelines where the current orange pinhead is not president. I’d love to tell you exciting stories about the many ways I prevented that, but the fact is, I just went back several generations and made sure his ancestors never left Germany. Ever. Just for good measure, I kept his mom in Scotland, too.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go visit the Founding Fathers with a much more detailed Constitution in one hand and a neuralizer in the other.
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The Doclopedia #1,465
The Alphabet: R is For…Reverse Dungeon
On Halloween, 2014, fifty of the biggest names in the tabletop roleplaying games industry got together for the Third Annual NotACon. NotACon is a three day get together designed to let the people who write, edit, illustrate and publish RPGs just get together to hang out and play games. No running a booth, no meetings, no talking to customers or distributors, no panels, just playing games, eating food & drinking beverages.
That year, six well known industry people declared that a game would run for 30 hours of the con. 30 straight hours. The six GMs would rotate and run the game for 10 players at a time. Players could play for as long as they wanted, then tag out with another player who would take their place. No actual breaks for meals or anything else. A timer would count down the time.
The system was AD&D first edition and the plot was simple: Over centuries, PCs has looted the Dungeon of Tarkon until nothing was left. Tarkon, now a god, got pretty pissed off about that and decided that if his dungeon was not fully restored, stocked with loot, traps and monsters, he would destroy the known world.
A very nice map showed that the dungeon was equidistant from three great cities and many temples, dungeons and ruins. Plenty of places for the PCs to find what they needed. The problem was, they could not tell anyone why they needed so much loot. As you might expect, that created many problems.
The timer started immediately after Tarkon finished telling the PCs what was up. At that moment, to quote one woman who played, “shit got real”. For the first 14 hours, the PCs frantically ran around stealing, begging, buying and even making loot. In doing so, they started a couple of wars and got themselves wanted by every kingdom around.
The remaining 16 hours saw 7 of the 10 characters stocking and trapping the dungeon, while the remaining three went out to trap monsters or persuade the sapient ones to go live in the nice new dungeon. This went about as well as you might expect for a few hours, but then they began to get takers.
When the game ended, they dungeon was finished to Tarkon’s liking and the players had 11 minutes to spare. Everyone declared the game great fun and then all 50 attendees got together to “recap the madness” and have a few drinks.
Several months later, a team of 8 GMs ran a very similar game over a 48 hour period for a total of 164 players at the world’s largest gaming convention. Since then, Reverse Dungeons have been run at cons all over the world, including every year at NotACon.
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The Doclopedia #1,466
The Alphabet: R is For…Roof Goblins
In late 19th century Paris, gangs of street children took to using the rooftops to travel, thus avoiding the police on the street. Soon, these young thieves and scalawags became known as “gobelins au toit”, or roof goblins.
Usually lead by a teenager or two, most of the kids were pre-teens. They lived in attics, besements, down in the catacombs and even in empty apartments. Anything not nailed down was something they could steal, especially food. Panhandling was another source of income.
To make getting across the city easily, roof goblins would mark the best paths to take. These markings were considered public property, so all the gangs used the same signs and nobody messed with any of them. The kids also made use of ropes, ladders, wooden plank bridges and zip lines. One of the most famous chases occured in 1896 when police chased young Alain Courbet almost all the way across the city. 37 policemen were involved and 9 of them suffered injuries. Courbet escaped and was never caught. In 1955, at the age of 71, he was interviewed for a documentary about the roof goblins. He called the chase “great fun”.
By the end of WWI, there were few roof goblin gangs, mostly due to them preferring the catacombs. By 1930, there were no more roof goblin gangs.
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