Back around 2012 or so, I cooked up an alternate history setting. You’ve got to have at least one, it's obligatory. It percolated for a few years, I ended up using it in some assignments for my writing courses in college, and it fizzled out.
[Aside: Point 2 ultimately led to Point 3, in no small part to the misery that was my senior project - I fought tooth-and-nail against my professor’s “no spec-fic” policy, and I ended up with the weaker compromise choice of stringing together my stories in a shitty Twine game with a vague gesture at intertextuality. Absolute dogshit on all fronts. Should have just gone with a story-within-a-story meta maneuver and saved everyone the trouble, but alas, historical Dan was a dunderhead.]
But such things tend to trickle forward into the future. This setting was the origin point for both Lighthouse (which had most of its shape already present even back then) and the very first seeds of what would become Unicorn Meat (which would be almost completely re-hashed multiple times over - the list of unicorn breeds in the module is present in the same order in the very first iteration of the story, while the carvers themselves won’t show up for another few years.)
A lot of the ideas that accumulated in this setting were not alt-history in the strictest sense, being more just Dan Standard Weird Shit (much of which found its way into my Lighthouse Field Guide series of posts), and most of the actual alternative history bits existed primarily as flavor for the modern-day Lighthouse material. It was very much a “pulled in two directions accomplishing neither” type of project.
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Major Divergence Points
Magic Exists
It’s not easy and it's not the kind of thing you can go to school for or infinitely replicate, but it exists. It’s the old tomes and teacher-student transmission type magic. Alchemy is more stable. Surprisingly for the era I wrote this in (ie at my most charitable to Sanderson), I didn’t properly set down a system for it (despite that actually being appropriate for the time period, because I knew essentially nothing about historical occultism at the time). I know geomancy (leylines and so forth) was important.
The history of the US gets completely derailed early on
This was where I bit off potentially more than I could chew, because I had two extreme divergences I wanted to include and ended up adding several more equally or more extreme ones in order to justify them. and as it turns out Dan of 10+ years ago did not know many things.
- I think, but cannot confirm if it was actually there in the old notes, that Washington dies of an infection at Valley Forge. I know I didn’t properly think about the ramifications of this until much later, though
- Revolutionary War ends up coinciding with a major demon / things that are called demons outbreak that cut off most trans-Atlantic travel but also makes the situation in the colonies much more tenuous despite winning the war.
- Big Ticket Derail 1: Post-Revolution westward expansion is halted (primarily due to vague magic reasons - a cop-out, sure, but it did give me the image of giant black monoliths stretching along the entire length of the Mississippi), coupled with a drastic about-face wrt relations with indigenous peoples; The general idea was that, as part of recovery efforts from the demon incursion (since the main incursion was over the Atlantic, the colonies & coastal regions got hit harder than indigenous territory further inland) the official policy became one of voluntary admission into statehood under a less-federalized system, simply because there was 30-40 years where the states couldn’t afford to expand and likewise couldn’t afford to piss off the neighbors.
- Big Ticket Derail 2: The Haitian Revolution spreads to the southern states (aided by a wizard putting his thumb on the scales); slavery is abolished in the 1790s
Ben Franklin the alchemist
He invented a method of making homunculi stable enough that they could be consistently but not mass-produced. I think I called it the Franklin Crucible.
“John”
Escaped slave turned pirate turned whaler turned immortal sorcerer; his aid was critical in helping the colonies win independence / not collapse entirely, and he never let them live it down (Jefferson in particular). He remained a lingering influence over the political landscape long after he fucked off to do inscrutible wizard things / potentially seek godhood. He’s shown up occasionally in slightly modified form in more recent works - if you ever see anything about Botfly or the King of Wands, that’s him.
[Aside: I was in my Malazan phase at the time, so John took considerable inspiration from the emperor Kellaneved and has retained a good amount of it.]
Minor Divergence Points
- Alexander the Great of Macedonia is Alexandra the Great of Themiskyra
- This was the sorta-origin point for how I handle amazons in MSF and elsewhere, though most of the details got filled in later.
- Independent state of Deseret
- This was added not because I was particularly knowledgeable about the history of Mormonism, nor because it fit with anything else in the setting I was making, but because it was a New Thing I Learned About (well, mostly the script) and wanted to include as a background element.
- A highly syncretic form of Christianity survives in Japan to the present (filling a similar niche as Voodoo in the Caribbean)
- Mostly because I thought it’d be cool to explore what would happen when Japanese converts are cut off from contact with Rome, but not driven fully underground. Included stuff like Amaterasu filling the role of Gabriel, and the like. Of all the discrete scenarios I mashed together into this thing, this is the one that I think has the strongest conceptual though probably not practical legs, though it still needs to thread the needle of how to make it happen. Though it’s also a premise where the right extremely charismatic person in the right place can kick things off.
- Japanese ships reach California sometime in the 1500-1600s.
- Not a full-blown colonial effort, more of an accidental confluence of right time / right place / right people in charge for someone to try a circumnavigation. Doesn’t strike me as particularly feasible in hindsight.
- Hawaii remains an independent kingdom.
- Considering the States’ lack of westward expansion in this timeline, this isn’t all that terrible of a stretch.
- The break-in at the Watergate Hotel was actually the heist of an occult artifact called the Eye of Providence.
- This is so fucking goofy, I love it.
- The Internet achieves apotheosis
- This wasn’t portrayed as a good thing, even back then, though it was a lot more insufferably early 2010s about it. It was more like a semi-divine thoughtform-gestalt thing rather than AI, and it was never more than a gestured-at background hazard, but it was definitely meant to be a danger in the background. This was not nearly as cynical, bleak, or horrifying as it should have been.
And there we have it. For a mess of things that I thought were cool at the time thrown at the wall to see what stuck, it's pretty okay. Not going to win any awards for cohesion, but my method's always been Cool Shit first, justifications later (as is no doubt obvious here).
Who knows, perhaps the muse might return in the future and have something new in this genre for me.
