(05-22-2024, 10:50 AM)M Fnord Wrote: So I'm doing a thing, or at least I'm in the preliminary stages of doing a thing, that involves IST shenanigans. (A Worm crossover in fact, because it's about time I got the damn mind virus too.) More specific, I had the wild hair to do an IST world set in the late 2010s/early 2020s as the baseline. I've read the 90s update Bob did and I've skimmed the IST25 outline (lord but the forum change did a number on the formatting), but it's been a while since then (god we old) so I'm curious to see if anybody has any bright ideas on what kind of nonsense the IST got up to in the intervening years. There's a couple things that I want to include for story reasons, primarily the discovery of parachronics as the next new superscience, but other than that any and all ideas are welcome. Even the stupid ones - maybe especially the stupid ones.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Worm entities effectively wall off the timelines they intend to use for their experiments from parachronic travel from outside timelines. You could have a team of parachronic travelers arrive in one of the affected timelines just as the entities are setting up their barriers and get trapped. In that case, you don't really need a detailed history of the IST timeline, just enough for characters to make references.
Another option would be to have them discover the parahumans timelines after Gold Morning. This assumes that killing off the entities removes the barriers.
The third option is to have the IST timeline(s) be inside the barrier. Imagine the panic when IST Earth loses contact with all other quanta and possibly a large chunk of their own quantum level. I'm assuming for simplicity's sake that all timelines isolated by the entities are at the same quantum level. Do IST supers have encounters with Cauldron? How does that play out? Tinkertech is notoriously irreproducible. The same cannot be said of the tech developed by gadgeteers.