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Alternate History / Tabletop Games

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  • Aces and Eights: Shattered Frontiers has a very in-depth alternate reality, just so players can't go about hunting down political figures just to say that they changed history.
  • Battletech: The timeline originally began with the fall of the Soviet Union... in 2011. With the expected massive war... just it was a civil war rather than the World War III everyone was expecting in the '80s in Real Life.note . After several messy attempts to retcon it to the Russian Federation or a re-established USSR, the writers have just declared it official AH as well.
  • Chronicles of Darkness: Alternate histories are an uncommon but canonical aspect of the more "cosmological horror" branches of the setting, predominantly Mage: The Awakening and Demon: The Descent.
    • Demon: The Descent: In the setting city of Seattle, thanks to a long game by the God-Machine, there exist four splinter timelines at various points in Seattle's history that demons and angels can enter at leisure. Each one operates on a year-long time loop. The most prominent case of alternate history is 1999, where an angel named Y2K has been tasked with stopping... well, guess. Should some force cause the angel to Fall or to interfere with the course of their duties, all the technological havoc that people thought might ensue from the Y2K bug comes to pass.
    • Mage: The Awakening: The Prince of 100,000 Leaves is an alternate reality so horrible, so evil, that reality itself rejected it, flinging it into the Abyss, where it became sentient. It now tries to supplant "our" reality through the actions of the depraved Cult of the Red Word, who believe that they can slowly overwrite reality with that of the 100,000 Leaves through ritual acts of cannibalism. How bad is this alternate history? In the 100,000 Leaves, cannibalism is a sacrament, disgust is love and abuse is kindness. Britain is known as the Theocracy of Vah and has a sadistic legal code, whilst the North American Continent is known as Cha'annys, the Land of the Broken Turtleshell, whose princes impale the dead on bronze pikes so that their eyes can scan the living for signs of treason.
  • Chrononauts: Players each represent a character from a different timeline altering crucial events in modern history in an attempt to set things back to what his or her own present. One character is a sentient cockroach whose presence requires starting World War III.
  • Continuum is broadly about the players time-traveling to prevent this trope from occurring, since at best it usually has the effect of wiping out numerous time-travelers further Up the timeline.
  • Crimson Skies exists in an alternate history where the United States broke up during the Depression and zeppelins actually succeeded as a transport product.
  • Cyberpunk 2020 became this over time, with later editions of the sourcebook describing the game's timeline as an alternate one in which, among other things, the Soviet Union still exists into the 21st Century while the US and UK collapsed in its place, cyberware — with its issues — and bioware are both ubiquitous and highly developed, corporations are almost de facto states with even standing armies, and despite having no smartphones or tablets and computers of specs ludicrously low next to real-world ones true virtual reality.
  • Deadlands starts by asking, "What if things that went bump in the night appeared in the middle of the American Civil War?" Their answer? Said war drags on for a decade longer than it "should," human technology springs forward in leaps and fits, and humanity potentially winds up dropping supernatural nuclear weaponry on itself. Better than it sounds.
  • Feng Shui: Alternate histories are a key element of the setting, with old timelines being erased and new ones being created as various factions gain or lose power in a conflict known as the Secret War. Most people don't notice when history changes, because their own histories have been rewritten to conform to the timeline alterations as well. However, Secret Warriors who have been to The Netherworld, an alternate dimension that facilitates Time Travel, retain memories of their former lives when these changes, known as "Critical Shifts," take place.
  • Gear Krieg is determined to answer the age old question "What would the world be like if Hitler had had a jetpack?"
  • GURPS:
    • GURPS: Infinite Worlds is based on one version of Earth (ours, known as "Homeline") discovering the means of traveling to hundreds of other alternate dimensions as reliably and economically as domestic air-travel is today, and engaging in a trans-dimensional cold war with a different version of Earth ("Centrum") with similar technology. Homeline's biggest concern is never, ever letting any other worlds figure out that travel between parallel universes is possible (let alone how to do it). Steve Jackson Games published two sourcebooks for the 3rd edition of the game, which detailed at least ten distinct worlds and offered seeds for dozens of variations. In at least one timeline (codenamed Reich-5), the Nazis have ruled Earth for decades and are now starting to study parachronic travel, with techniques that include Powered by a Forsaken Child, Deal with the Devil, and And I Must Scream.
    • GURPS Alternate Earths describes a number of alternate histories that can be either visited by time travelers or serve as a campaign's primary setting, covering themes such as the Nazis winning World War II, the Confederacy winning the Civil War, the Roman Empire never falling, the world developing into a technocratic cyberpunk setting, the Arabs, Aztecs or Chinese conquering the world, a Tesla-backed industrial revolution, the Norse settling North America, and a reptile-ruled world the K-Pt extinction never happened. The setting was later folded into Infinite Worlds.
  • Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution takes place in a universe where Project MK-Ultra was successful.
  • Rocket Age: Rocket travel becomes a reality in 1931 when Einstein and Tesla develop the first rocket and pilot it to Mars. In the decade following, humanity is expanding out into the solar system.
  • Shadowrun: When the game originally began in the late '80s it wasn't alternate history. But since it passed 1999 when a Supreme Court decision gave corporations the right to their own militaries and 2001 when they gained extraterritoriality, effectively making them independent nations, it's become this. Nor did a dragon appear over Mount Fuji in 2011.
  • SIGMATA: This Signal Kills Fascists is set in an alternate 1980s where McCarthyism took off in a big way. The Point of Divergence from our history had McCarthy becoming President of the United States, his single term leading to a lasting foundation of xenophobia, hate and repressive politics that ultimately leads to the homegrown fascist government known as the Regime in 1986.
  • Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization: Emphasised by the use of real-world names for wonders and leaders. Gandhi as president over a nation of scientists kept happy by Bread and Circuses? Isaac Newton builds the Taj Mahal and discovers computers? Elvis Presley conducts espionage, declares Holy War and builds the Kremlin? All are plausible occurrences and add significant amusement to the game.
  • Space 1889: In 1870, Thomas Edison develops an airship that can travel through the aether that exists between planets, allowing for travel to the planets of the solar system.
  • Timemaster. Members of the Time Corps (based in AD 7192 Earth) try to prevent their opponents, an alien race called the Demoreans, from changing human history to make it more to their liking.
  • Traveller originally came out in the mid 1970s. The rather optimistic timeline of its official background universe, in which antigravity was invented in the 1980s and FTL travel in the 1990s, quickly became alternate history (and now seems to be officially accepted as AH, instead of trying to retcon it away).
  • The Yellow King RPG: Two of the settings are this — The Wars is a Weird Wars setting, and Aftermath is 20 Minutes into the Future after the fall of a fascist empire made out of the United States of America. Both have the POD be the publication of The King In Yellow.
  • Numerous historical board wargames have an explicitly alternate-history theme, and in fact some would argue that all historical wargames are, in a sense, exercises in alternate history, since the players are, in a sense, competing to see if they can reverse the historical outcome of the battle or war, or do better than the historical outcome. SPI's "Dixie", published in 1975, was probably the first such wargame, though many more have followed in the decades since. Designer Ty Bomba is a particular fan of alternate history and has published many such wargame designs, starting with "Tomorrow the World" in 1989, presenting a The Man in the High Castle-style nightmare scenario of a Third World War between victorious Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Most recently, Bomba has created a series of games for Decision Games covering hypothetical offensives that Germany could have carried out in December 1944 as an alternative to the historical Ardennes offensive (the Battle of the Bulge). Games covering potential war between the forces of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, which were highly popular in the 1970's and early 1980's and have enjoyed a revival over the past several years, were seen as near-future scenarios at the time but are now firmly in the alternate-history camp. Bruce Maxwell's "designer's signature edition" of his 1983 Victory Games design "NATO", published by Compass Games in 1980, was a major hit upon release, being nominated for numerous Charles S. Roberts awards and winning for Best Modern Game. One of the most famous, and rarest, of wargames in this genre is the "Red Sun Black Cross" trilogy of games (Red Sun Black Cross itself, Return to Europe and Escort Fleet, all covering a Third - and Fourth! - World War between Nazi Germany and an unlikely alliance of Imperial Japan and the United States: It Makes Sense in Context, as the historical briefing explains that due to several key events happening differently, Japan and America never came to blows in the Pacific), published in the mid-1980's by the Japanese game company Ad Technos. Only a few hundred copies of these games were imported to the U.S., where they sold out at wargaming conventions, and they have been much-sought-after (and commanded prices as high as $500 each) ever since.


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