M.J. Young just discussed in his Blogless Lepolt blog, a truly terrible joke of a name, his Gather and Contingency and Parallel worlds. So it seems a good time for me to do likewise.

A few simple definitions for the non-Multiverser players out there. The "world" is a dimension in a game that deals with crossing dimensions, so it’s a subset of the whole setting, but one that will stand on its own. Two, a "Gather world" is one which is big and complicated enough to easily handle the arrival of the whole gaming group into one universe. A "Contingency world" is even simpler…it asks the player to come back to the world in which he made an impact, or failed to do so, and examine the results of previous choices. "Parallel worlds" are a bit more complicated…two seemingly similar worlds, but with key differences allow for the examination under a microscope of these differences and similarities.

Now, we’ll get into examples to solidify your understanding, and to let me talk about some of my playtoys.

I’ve written at least two Gather worlds. One, the Starsong Trinary System, and the other is Through the Valley of the Shadow.

Starsong is an optimistic future, set about four hundred years into the future, and using something I find fairly rare in Science-Fiction, a fairly serious attempt at Realistic Extrapolation. One thing many SF novels and short stories (at least the more serious ones) do is take one trend and extrapolate it into the future. What happens when everyone is able to get cybernetics, for example?

Starsong took about ten fields of human endeavour, and then added for each field seven different technological advances, and then it supposed all these became true. What then? I admit for several days, my mind simply boggled at the question. But then things started to become clearer.

It is a world where humans are still human, even as they transform their shape from a super commando to a blanket to a Cetacean. Where wars are still fought, but very politely. Where rude behavior merits getting sliced in half by a monofilament blade…which is a minor inconvenience because the Robodocs can patch together such minor damage in a few minutes, and the oxygen reserves and blood pump in the base of your brain will keep you alive until they do.

People could make power armours that spew thousands of micro-missile nuclear grenades every minute, weapons that could enable one person to annihilate all the military forces of the twentieth century by himself, and it would be not very costly. For Starsongers are insanely wealthy. Stellarforming whole star systems is within the grasp of cartels of the wealthiest. But the cost for this armour would be worse. It would destroy their world.

They have the Lament Disaster, the Tau Ceti Explosion, where different factions went after each other with planet and star crackers, and in less than an hour released more than a Galactic Hour of energy and killed five hundred billion sentients. So they resolve their issues with swords and chains and quarterstaffs.

And that’s the optimistic future. The next gather is less so, the end of the world as we know it, and I feel terribly sick. Through the Valley of the Shadow makes the awful argument that we may never arrive in Starsong’s glorious, if troubled future.

One man, a would-be suicide bomber, is offered the chance to bring down the West. Take an injection of smallpox, courtesy of a bitter Russian scientist, and go visit America. Walk around, breathe death, and eventually go to a martyr’s grave.

What does one call a group of doppelgangers. Crows gathered are a Murder of Crows, and I suppose a Delirium of Dopplegangers is the right word for this. As the characters arrive, they find that their doppelgangers, alternates already live here, and each has a job in some sort of public safety office.

The world is a modern world, much similar to ours, with perhaps a few changes here and there to keep it interesting. And so when the ‘flu’ strikes the city, and the FBI and the CDC and the local hospitals and the governors of this state and the nearby states start to wrangle, and to fall over each other, and fail to make the right conclusions, and then people start to die in this convention city, and then all over the world you get a vision of just how the world could so easily come to an end.

Not an action adventure movie, but more of a coldly accurate portrayal of just how things could all too easily fall to pieces, and a year from now the still living residents of the planet could look back on the Red Plague, and maybe a few gamers in that world would realize they were now living a post-apocalyptic scenario.

This Gather setting is unusual in that it has a Contingency. It describes what the world is like after the End of the World as we know it.

Which segues us nicely into a discussion of Contingency Worlds. Or more precisely, one such world, and what a nightmare it was. Every world I’ve made has had individual challenges, puzzles to be un-riddled, and enigmas to be unraveled, but this world was possibly the hardest, even harder than Starsong.

Doom of the Mech Empire is founded on the idea of Technological Determinism. That is, certain technologies make certain social arrangements inevitable. Or in other words, woman got the right to vote after the Civil War because pistols were plentiful and cheap and could be easily hidden in the folds of a woman’s dress…and after someone has a gun, it becomes unwise to ignore their opinion.

Or in the case of this world, in its dual scenarios, its minor foreshadowing and its major event, there is a transition from a fairly egalitarian society to a Dark Ages feudalism. Let me say, I am a member of the SCA, the Society for Creative Anachronism, so I like the Middle Ages, but this is not the happy Middle Ages I am talking of in this setting. No, this is the feudalism of brute force, and peasants starving, and the peasant having no legal recourse against a knight in court since the peasant’s word is automatically of no worth compared to a knight’s word.

In this theory, which I picked up from Lord Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, the stirrup plus the limited amount of horses made feudalism inevitable. The knight on horseback could slaughter his enemies. Odds of twenty-five to one were even odds for a knight vs. peasants. A pair of knights could destroy a whole village by themselves. So, the knight was essential on the battlefield, but the limited amount of horses made it so that not everyone could join in.

And then heavy armour, which is expensive and requires financial support from others kicks in, and the knight is someone who requires many years of training, and the armour is not interchangeable, and you get a man who is indispensable, wealthy, and can slaughter his enemies like pushing baby chickens into the water to drown. This is the basis of our D&D games with one hero slaughtering dozens of orcs.

So on an alien planet, just out of the Bronze Age, and with etheric aliens who possess a certain type of humanoid animal, the character arrives, and finds the good guys about to be seriously oppressed by the local evil empire. And no one has the stirrup, the local fighters are dragoons, that is mounted infantry. And yet, if and likely when he introduces the stirrup it will change the world, but there is probably no choice. Its either change for the worse, or die and let evil triumph…thus Doom.

My second playtest lets me know that after this Doom is activated is a good place to insert the break. I have in fact two places to insert the break. The other is after Space Monsters arrive on the planet, and Human Mechs arrive as well, and eventually the character is swept off to the Galactic Empire of Humanity which is facing the same problem as the etheric aliens, the People. An evil empire is attacking them, and they lack the ability to fight back effectively. There is a way, the Mechs can become space-going, and develop a stutter warp teleport drive, and drive the aliens before them, but this too is a Doom.

The etheric aliens change very fast, and so the character may see the changes he has made take effect before he leaves, and thus foreshadow and warn him of the same danger to the Empire of Humanity, but what can one do anyways? Eventually, he gets knocked out of that world, possibly in Mech combat with a Space Monster and later he comes back.

The Contingency shows a new dark age where Mech Pilots crush their former brethren under their armored heels, and where the People also labor under feudalism, and where simple survival is a daily challenge for the commoner.

Another Contingency world I’ve created is Plantations Past, Present, and Perilous which has voodoo curses, repentant ghosts, time travel, and a hole ripped in the world from with entropy leaks out to corrupt the whole planet unless the hero can revisit the past and rewrite it. But we won’t discuss this in detail now.

This world of the Mech Empire had a strong degree of Parallelism, but its not a Parallel World. For that, we turn to Fantastique and Gothika. Here, two Steampunk worlds exist: Massive gears spin, and armour plated dirigibles rise, the Sun never sets on the British Empire, and electronic watches utterly fail to operate. In one, the nightmare of the Victorian Age, "satanic mills" and women are little more than chattel for Lord Ares rules time and space with his ichors-dripping and spiked club. In the other, grand adventure, derring-do, and what some might call a disguised matriarchy for the Grey-eyed Goddess, Athena rules in wisdom and power. One world run by an Anarch Power, and the other by an Alliance Power, and one a nightmare, and the other a dream. But in the end, they shall come to blows for both worlds tied together by a Gold and Iron and Crystal Thread will one day be united under the rule of a single Power.

One other further type of Parallelism is for an already Parallel world to have new versions added to it. I’ve done this with Mary Piper. M.J. wrote Alpha and Beta, and then I took an idea supplied by Graeme Comyn and produced Delta and Gamma. Delta describes the Caravan travels in the American Old West which caravan is owned by the San Franciscan lady of means, Mary Piper. Gamma describes a robotic cruise ship full of memories which sails the post-apocalyptic seas of the year 3000 looking for redemption.

One last note: Its easy to take a setting, perhaps one provided in the First or Second Book of Worlds, and make it a Parallel. In ways, M.J. did this with Naja World, his first Gather. One area is filled with the past signs of human endeavour, and the other side is not touched, yet. But that’s not really what I’m talking about.

One example of this is the Psi Cops 1984 that E.R. Jones created. It is a parallel of 1984 the novel. But in this world, the masters have psi powers. Change that to a world in which secret magic is used to spy on your citizens, or everyone has to wear a slug which tells the masters of any untoward thoughts….

Take the Mary Piper and make it an asteroidal generation ship, or a Bussard ramscoop sublight trading ship, or a blockade running speedboat, or a hovercraft dodging robot ships, or a submarine, or even a dirigible which defies Newton by having fans push air into its sails which provides forward momentum.

Take the events of Perpetual BBQ, and set them on an alien planet. Or for the Mystery of the Vorgo move things forward into the Cyberpunk Era.

Its not hard to Parallel…park.

And Contingency is not hard either. Just bring about your basic Apocalypse, or a technological revolution, or an alien invasion…I think one of the versions of Farmland could use a Contingency for that. What happens after you fail, and the aliens invade?

Gather worlds are a bit harder, and maybe we’ll discuss that another time.

The End.