Glen
Moderator
The XXth Century: 100 years of Change
The XX is a shared worlds project that you are all invited to join. The POD is 12:00 AM on January 1, 1901. The timeline will officially end at 11:59 PM on December 31, 2000. The premise for our ATL is based essentially on Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory; that if you ran the same events over again those events might not have the same results. Therefore, altered events early on should only require very small changes in events, though even those small changes can have big outcomes. For example, two from 1901 will be the wounding but not death of President William McKinley, and the fatal shooting of Kaiser Wilhelm II (he was shot at in 1901, but the assassin missed, ITTL, a shot hits the mark). Obviously, as time goes on and we have many small changes (though perhaps with large results), there will also be changes from OTL that directly and indirectly stem from those changes.
There will be several threads labeled XXth C. that relate to this project. One will be a discussion thread in the Alternate History Discussion: After 1900 Forum. Two will be in the Shared Worlds Forum, a submission draft thread and the official timeline thread. Eventually, we will post our completed XXth Century timeline in the Timelines and Scenarios Forum. If you would like to contribute an event to the timeline, you place it in the draft thread. Discussion about that event should quote the event in question every time for reference, or link to the post if it is long. Suggested posts will be open for comment for two days after posting, and then will be either included into the official timeline, or not. The draft thread is also where you may submit maps for the timeline as well, which will be subjected to the same process as the posts.
Guidelines for your posts:
Nothing should be a change from before the POD.
The date of your event may be before or after the last event in the official timeline, but must not contradict anything in the official timeline.
Events must be plausible within the context of the already existing timeline, and the more probable ones will be more accepted.
Also, though a single event type may in itself be plausible, there will, at the discretion of the moderator, be limits on the numbers of similar events that occur at any given time. For example, even though any one assassination of a world leader in any year might be plausible, if everyone tried to have someone assassinated that year it would become somewhat improbable.
People conceived before the POD will be born as the same people genetically (unless someone wants to write in a miscarriage or death of a pregnant woman after the POD).
People born within the first month of the POD will be mostly the same, as they will have at least all the same genes from their maternal line, and may have a substantial number of the same ones from their father as well. Feel free to use these people as is or with differences from the OTL figures.
People born after this point who have the same or nearly the same genetic heritage will become rapidly less common, and probably will not happen after the first year. However, within the first fourteen years after the POD, there will be many people who are genetically siblings of the OTL figures who would be likely to be born, and who may have the same name as well as the same parents as the OTL originals. By 1915 or so, the fact that we likely will not have the same WWI as OTL will mean that many marriages will not happen as they did in OTL, given the death and displacements it caused in OTL. This may be stretched to 1921 for regions that were not affected by WWI and had locally stable conditions in both OTL and ITTL.
People born after 14-20 years will all be different by this point, and it will be becoming unlikely that we even see the same people marrying, except for certain extraordinary cases. What this means is that almost no OTL figure born after 1920 will be born into TTL. We may still see some related people from OTL families which have a strong tendency towards certain things, for example though you wouldn’t see any of OTL Kennedys born after 1920 (or even before), related Kennedys born after that time might very well still go into politics.
Feel free to change weather conditions, these are rather chaotic. However, they should still conform roughly to normal climates and trends; having a hurricane in late March or an ice storm in New England in July is pretty much out, for examples.
Science and discoveries can happen at a roughly different pace, and in different places if the work is done to explain those differences, but should either be simple things or should have preceding events that build up to them described. Where not specifically mention, assume a progression roughly similar to our own timeline, though I hope that instead, people will give us both faster and slower progressions. For example, penicillin really could have been discovered at any point in the early 20th century or the Atomic bomb might have been delayed without OTL WWII.
Welcome to the XXth Century…
Glen Finney, Proprietor
XXth C: Timeline
XXth C: Draft Thread
The XX is a shared worlds project that you are all invited to join. The POD is 12:00 AM on January 1, 1901. The timeline will officially end at 11:59 PM on December 31, 2000. The premise for our ATL is based essentially on Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory; that if you ran the same events over again those events might not have the same results. Therefore, altered events early on should only require very small changes in events, though even those small changes can have big outcomes. For example, two from 1901 will be the wounding but not death of President William McKinley, and the fatal shooting of Kaiser Wilhelm II (he was shot at in 1901, but the assassin missed, ITTL, a shot hits the mark). Obviously, as time goes on and we have many small changes (though perhaps with large results), there will also be changes from OTL that directly and indirectly stem from those changes.
There will be several threads labeled XXth C. that relate to this project. One will be a discussion thread in the Alternate History Discussion: After 1900 Forum. Two will be in the Shared Worlds Forum, a submission draft thread and the official timeline thread. Eventually, we will post our completed XXth Century timeline in the Timelines and Scenarios Forum. If you would like to contribute an event to the timeline, you place it in the draft thread. Discussion about that event should quote the event in question every time for reference, or link to the post if it is long. Suggested posts will be open for comment for two days after posting, and then will be either included into the official timeline, or not. The draft thread is also where you may submit maps for the timeline as well, which will be subjected to the same process as the posts.
Guidelines for your posts:
Nothing should be a change from before the POD.
The date of your event may be before or after the last event in the official timeline, but must not contradict anything in the official timeline.
Events must be plausible within the context of the already existing timeline, and the more probable ones will be more accepted.
Also, though a single event type may in itself be plausible, there will, at the discretion of the moderator, be limits on the numbers of similar events that occur at any given time. For example, even though any one assassination of a world leader in any year might be plausible, if everyone tried to have someone assassinated that year it would become somewhat improbable.
People conceived before the POD will be born as the same people genetically (unless someone wants to write in a miscarriage or death of a pregnant woman after the POD).
People born within the first month of the POD will be mostly the same, as they will have at least all the same genes from their maternal line, and may have a substantial number of the same ones from their father as well. Feel free to use these people as is or with differences from the OTL figures.
People born after this point who have the same or nearly the same genetic heritage will become rapidly less common, and probably will not happen after the first year. However, within the first fourteen years after the POD, there will be many people who are genetically siblings of the OTL figures who would be likely to be born, and who may have the same name as well as the same parents as the OTL originals. By 1915 or so, the fact that we likely will not have the same WWI as OTL will mean that many marriages will not happen as they did in OTL, given the death and displacements it caused in OTL. This may be stretched to 1921 for regions that were not affected by WWI and had locally stable conditions in both OTL and ITTL.
People born after 14-20 years will all be different by this point, and it will be becoming unlikely that we even see the same people marrying, except for certain extraordinary cases. What this means is that almost no OTL figure born after 1920 will be born into TTL. We may still see some related people from OTL families which have a strong tendency towards certain things, for example though you wouldn’t see any of OTL Kennedys born after 1920 (or even before), related Kennedys born after that time might very well still go into politics.
Feel free to change weather conditions, these are rather chaotic. However, they should still conform roughly to normal climates and trends; having a hurricane in late March or an ice storm in New England in July is pretty much out, for examples.
Science and discoveries can happen at a roughly different pace, and in different places if the work is done to explain those differences, but should either be simple things or should have preceding events that build up to them described. Where not specifically mention, assume a progression roughly similar to our own timeline, though I hope that instead, people will give us both faster and slower progressions. For example, penicillin really could have been discovered at any point in the early 20th century or the Atomic bomb might have been delayed without OTL WWII.
Welcome to the XXth Century…
Glen Finney, Proprietor
XXth C: Timeline
XXth C: Draft Thread
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