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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WayneLigon" data-source="post: 1780425" data-attributes="member: 3649">Yep, I'm sure I'll run into several things that were invented earlier than they came into common or accepted use. This may or may not mean the date gets adjusted; I'm going to pick up GURPS Old West and do a little more research to help firm up the idea.  The telegraph certainly will help, yes. And you have trains.  Now this is where things get weird about the 'dead zone'. It's 1870 there. It will always be 1870 (or whatever fixed year I come up with). I'm going to say that not even the earth-moving magic they somehow managed to do could change the seasons, so the area does cycle through seasons like everywhere else. I'd thought to make it the same day, forever, but that was just too weird <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Nothing new can be invented, which kinda sucks for them; even if the tech exists to make, say, a crystal radio, if radio has not been invented yet radios cannot be invented there and do not function within the zone. (Since the zone is immune to nuclear attack, guess where the government will evacuate to in case of WW, um, Two). Things brought into it cease to function and begin to function once outside it unless that functioning causes that thing to exist in the first place. Obviously the area is deadly to anyone with a pacemaker, insulin implant, or transplanted organ among other things. If your life depends on a drug invented after 1870, you're screwed.  The obvious 'exception' is that magic works there as well; people point to this as proof that Earth used to have a much higher level of magic at some point in the past, since it was 'already invented'.  Obviously this has a great deal of fun potential and a great deal of headache potential. That's why it's still in the research stage and might still be ammended or dumped.  Anyway, the barrier is permeable. It fluctuates back and forth up to XX distance, since I haven't made up my mind as the wiggle room. Obviously, that area will be a posted danger zone near civilised areas.  People from '1870' can come to our time and live perfectly normal lives and take advantage of all our amenities. If they go back over the barrier, the same restictions apply as to everyone else. People from our side can go live there with no problems at all save as mentioned above and that, no matter what they do or how hard they try, they cannot improve things technologically one iota (though social inventions work; people don't forget they're Communists, for instance). They may know how to create penicillin for instance and have all the tools to do so, but the process will simpy render an inert substance with no medicinal value at all. This is the kind of thing that drives scientists up a wall since there is no good reason it shouldn't work, but it does not. A not-insignificant portion of the US defense budget every year goes into figuring out ways to break or alleviate this curse. So far nothing has worked. There are significant advantages to the area as well. Bioweapons taken there are rendered inert if they are 'tailored' diseases. Nuclear waste is rendered totally inert as well. Nerve gas becomes inert. Nuclear weapons do not function within the area. Rockets don't, either. Explosives more powerful than dynamite or nitro (depending on the exact date of their invention, maybe those - too lazy to look it up right now) are inert.  The debate rages as to what will happen if they DO manage to break the curse. Will the lands and peoples that were there in 1921 (or whatever year this was done) suddenly reappear? What will happen to people in the area now? Or... or will a new 21st century America suddenly bloom in the desert as Time snaps back to what 'should' have happened? This was the doing of a small cabal of mystics, all of whom are still on the FBI's Most Wanted list even though most are suspected of being dead (though that's not stopped others in the past). Most Native Americans denounce what they've done since it permanently screwed them out of what gains they had made at the time and have made it much more difficult for them in the present. Native Americans fill a disproportianate amount of Shadow Hunter and Mystic slots and many are involved in the search for a 'cure'.</blockquote>

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