Allohistory Travel Guides

[rfmcdonald]

Welcome to the SLP forums. And thanks for the history on how the old AH travel guides works.

Thank you. They were fun, and they played a key role in many of the top posters' writing.

 

[xsampa]

Hello! Randy McDonald here. I find myself visiting the Sealion Press forums for the first time. This thread came up when I began to search to see past discussions of projects I have been involved in.

The Alternate History Travel Guides were a two-fold project.

• There was the website at ahtg.net, a stable site that did host a variety of travel guides to different locations on different alternate earths, all part of a shared universe (multiverse?) where steampunk technology allowed travel between Earth.
• There was the Yahoo Groups mailing list, originally on Onelist, that was a venue for collaborative storytelling, online roleplaying in that multiverse. Many of the locations profiled at ahtg.net featured on the mailing list as venues for adventure, and sometimes the events on that mailing list ended up influencing the histories. My two major worlds of Empires Earth and Tripartite Alliance Earth played major roles in the setting, to the point that the game ended up tweaking their histories a bit.

Hello! I found your Tripartite Alliance Earth to be thoughful and well-designed, even though involved a limited WW3- the TL as a whole is often better for a number of countries

Re: Empires Earth: was Afghanistan ever annexed at any point?

 

[IanBertram]

I just discovered a few days ago the beginnings of a railway history of a line that was never built. It's printed on a dot-matrix printer, so that gives an idea of how long it's been lost! It was originally written as a backstory for a proposed model railway that also never got built...

 

[Bolt451]

I want to do a travel guide through a HRE-style fragmentary Great Britain.

I started doing a travel diary/Guide to my divided Britain of the British Republics TL but couldnt work out when to set it or what to do beyond the initial arrival

I also started a travellers guide to Angland, my Anglosaxonpunk Britain but realised I'd have to write the entire history up to the modern day to work the idea out

 

[Geordie]

I just discovered a few days ago the beginnings of a railway history of a line that was never built. It's printed on a dot-matrix printer, so that gives an idea of how long it's been lost! It was originally written as a backstory for a proposed model railway that also never got built...

Actually, that's a point. Huge numbers of model railways incorporate alternate history, in an admittedly limited way. There must be notebooks somewhere in my parents' home, featuring the history and geography of about a dozen different railways, none of which were ever built. Sadly, neither were the models. I did inherit parts of the North Tyne Light Railway, but I can't claim the credit for construction.

 

[IanBertram]

Actually, that's a point. Huge numbers of model railways incorporate alternate history, in an admittedly limited way. There must be notebooks somewhere in my parents' home, featuring the history and geography of about a dozen different railways, none of which were ever built. Sadly, neither were the models. I did inherit parts of the North Tyne Light Railway, but I can't claim the credit for construction.

My project was the North Pennines Narrow Gauge Railway, incorporating the line from Alston to Haltwhistle, (which wasn't narrow gauge, but might as well have been) with an extension to Hexham and also over the tops to Stanhope and beyond (actually proposed) and also to Barnard Castle (from memory talked about but never formally developed)

The idea was to develop a system comparable to the Welsh Highland etc.

 

[Geordie]

My project was the North Pennines Narrow Gauge Railway, incorporating the line from Alston to Haltwhistle, (which wasn't narrow gauge, but might as well have been) with an extension to Hexham and also over the tops to Stanhope and beyond (actually proposed) and also to Barnard Castle (from memory talked about but never formally developed)

The idea was to develop a system comparable to the Welsh Highland etc.

You could have done great big junction station somewhere godforsaken like Nenthead, just for the sheer madness. If there had been higher levels of silver deposits in the lead veins, something could have occurred.

 

[iainbhx]

My current Election Rides timeline in First Drafts is sort of a guide to travelling around the Bundesreich by train.

 

[IanBertram]

You could have done great big junction station somewhere godforsaken like Nenthead, just for the sheer madness. If there had been higher levels of silver deposits in the lead veins, something could have occurred.

I assumed silver, lead, iron ore and coal traffic. I also invented a military base, a hospital/spa, a distillery and a place of pilgrimage at Wolsingham (suggested by the similar sounding Walsingham in Norlfolk) I think I'll dig it out and see if I can put it into a form suitable for posting. As written it is about planning the model rather than the alt-history.

 

[rfmcdonald]

Hello! I found your Tripartite Alliance Earth to be thoughful and well-designed, even though involved a limited WW3- the TL as a whole is often better for a number of countries

Thank you.

I combined a few different kinds of AH—the world that went better overall, the world that was devastated by war—into TpA, and I am not sure I would do so again. Thematically, it was a bit confused.

Beyond that, I think that the exploration of the fragility of American democracy might have been a bit prescient.

Re: Empires Earth: was Afghanistan ever annexed at any point?

I want to say that, at some point, it had been taken into the Russian sphere of influence; Persia had. I am not sure, though the Bruce Munro map would be accurate.