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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WayneLigon" data-source="post: 1778259" data-attributes="member: 3649">The premise of the upcoming Urban Arcana game I want to do is (so far) thus: The world goes through periodic 'surges' or 'tides' of Shadow, where the walls between us and other worlds grow thin and greater amounts of magic are available. Thus you get the classic 'Yeah, we used to think such things were real, but no longer' downtimes. One of these has been going on since about 1300 AD.  All that changes on June 30, 1910 when the Tunguska event occurs. Magic rises once more, the walls come down and things from Shadow once more walk the Earth. I want a slightly more 'knowledgable' public than in the normal Urban Arcana game, almost at the level of the early Anita Blake books. Magic is known and most people at least acknowledge it exists. It exists side-by-side with technology. You can go into biology textbooks and find the 'Greater Appalacian Troll' and the 'Red-Backed European Basilisk'.  In addition to other changes, there is one I know I want: in 1918, a group of radical Native American shamans tried to roll back time in the Americas to approximately 1100 AD, destroying the incursions of the Europeans. They took on too huge a task and botched it. A roughly oval section of North America stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains went back in time to 1870 (This might change slightly as I do more research). And stayed there. Nothing invented past the year 1870 works there, and nothing invented past the year 1870 can ever be invented within that region. The border can fluctuate by a half-mile or so. Travel up the Mississippi has to be done via steam paddlewheel, since that's the only thing that works on some stretches of the river. St. Louis is right on the border of the time-lost area, and some parts of it are in 1870 while other parts are modern.  Some ideas occur to me.  No real development of suburbs. Cities are smaller and taller. Some actually have barricades. The West Coast is cut off from the rest of the US by the Dead Zone; the only way across it is via steam train (I think the Attichinson, Topeka and Santa Fe). Air traffic cannot cross the Dead Zone, since airplanes were not invented by that time; they have to route around to Canada and Mexico. The effect extends to the edge of the atmosphere, so suborbitals, sattillites, etc, can still pass over the area and look into it.  The Interstate system would have to pass through parts of Canada and Mexico as well; or maybe we took back a chunk of Mexico?  Without the oil fields of Texas, where would we be? Maybe fewer people own cars and more use public transport? Did we just explore Alaska sooner? Did we use Earth Elementals to go bring up the really deep oil that would normally be too expensive to get to? Do we have a magical means of simply synthesizing it? Any other ideas? I don't want to change things TOO much but enough to give it an exotic feel.</blockquote>

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