Andalus

The very first draft of what is becoming Andalusada was written as a GURPS Infinite Worlds setting on the SJG forums. (You can read it here, if you're so inclined.) Even by my current standards, it's embarrassingly bad, but I do believe it's worth reposting, just so I can link to it within this blog more easily.

Exiled and penniless, Rodrigo Diaz spent the winter of 1080 in Barcelona, falling out with its lords and weighing his options. In 1081, he caused this worldline's history to diverge when he turned south for Seville, whose armies awaited his order to march west. The taifas fell like dominos; Badajoz in 1082, Cordoba in 1083, and Toledo in 1085. When the Berbers invaded (in a desperate Granadan bid for power), he led the coalition that drove them back from Gibraltar and laid the siege that would capture Granada nine months later. A terrified Alfonso VII recalled his general from exile in 1087 (aborting a planned campaign on Barcelona), but the damage was already done; by the time Valencia fell in 1110, all land south of the Duero and Ebro belonged to the Abbadids, and the cause of Christendom in Spain had been set back 300 years.

Current Events

1930: With war on the horizon and a perilous world economy, the last Muslim superpower is looking for allies and preparing for its first move.

Divergence Point

1080: El Cid is hired as a mercenary general by the taifa of Seville, derailing the Reconquista and setting the stage for Islamic Spain as a European power.

Major Civilizations

Western-Islamic (empire), Western (empire with rivals), Orthodox (empire with rivals), Japanese (empire with satellites.)

Great Powers

Umayyad Caliphate of New Andalusia (feudal representative democracy, CR3 for Muslims, CR4 for everyone else); Greater German Empire (dictatorship, CR4); Great Britain (anarchic representative democracy, CR4 and rising); French Fourth Republic (representative democracy, CR3 and falling); Empire of Japan (clan-based oligarchy with democratic traits, CR4-6); Russian SFSR (socialist oligarchy, CR4-5); Turanian SFSR (socialist oligarchy, CR5) Alaskan RFSR (socialist republic, CR3-4); Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (feudal theocracy, CR2-4)

Worldline Data:

TL: 6 Mana Level: Low
Quantum: 4 Infinity Class: P9
Centrum Zone: Inaccessible

Abbadid Seville was united, majestic, and utterly alone, beset by theocratic Berbers and crusading Franks. Mile by mile, Crusade by Crusade, they were forced back to the Tagus. Then, late in the 15th century, they discovered two things - uncharted lands west of the Atlantic, and a new sect of anti-Catholic Christians - and the tables turned. (The gold brought back by the survivors in 1485 more than paid for the Madeiran armada they came from, lost in a storm the year before.) With the Ottomans marching on Vienna, Mexican gold financing William the Silent's 1566 rising against the Castillian Habsburgs, and the Anglo-Moorish Alliance forming in 1541 (finally securing a peace with Portugal), the Tenth Crusade was little more than the English, Portuguese, and Sevillans racing for territory and occasionally joining forces (or importing Moroccan pirates) to crush the upstart states in the Caribbean.

The peninsula fell into its Third Fitna in 1662 (when the Abbadids were overthrown, replaced by an usurper claiming caliphal authority from Hisham III), but recovered enough to win most of Louisiana in 1762 for its part in the Eight Years' War. Thirty years later, the Umayyads who escaped Napoleon declared the first capital of their exilarchy in New Orleans; the last peninsular caliph lived to see Seville dissolved at the Congress of Vienna and the Moorish Empire ended at last.

Not for the first time, the Umayyads had fled west to escape certain death; not for the first time, they would rebuild and lead the nations. First they would have to rebuild, though, and that would take time - time to whip the new taifas back into line, to establish the Moorish-American Alliance for peace on the borders, to abolish slavery (and get the Havana Sultanate to do likewise) and modernize a desolate and frigid frontier. It was time the world would not let go to waste.

As the economies of the former Allied Powers collapse, the blackshirted Union Order movements preach their betrayal and vow secession from the world. Bolshevik Moscow feuds with Bukhara and courts the Uighurs and Persians. Kyoto is courting India and martyring more Chinese missionaries every day; and Greater Germany, the only functioning state in Europe left after the Great War, is building a colonial empire from its broken rivals. The Islamic world civilization has been broken - and the House of Umayya plans to restore it.

Outtime Involvement

Andalus has been a world of mostly academic interest; its technology isn't particularly unusual, and Time Tours has yet to successfully sell it. (Most of their clientele was disappointed to discover that Islamic Spain would be so Spanish; they're still holding out for a "Johnson's Cordoba" that better matches expectations.) White Star focuses on importing eight centuries' worth of worldline-specific art and literature, and (with much more success) Tizona Gran Reserva tequila and children's schoolbooks (in an effort to help Infinity bridge the Moorish language barrier.)

Worldline access is being restricted partly because the worldline is obviously preparing for a second Great War, and mostly because Infinity has no idea how that war will play out. Andalus has a more mature TL6 than Homeline achieved, and nobody's sure exactly what the world's militaries are spending their research budgets on. Most Infinity missions are therefore focused on researching temporal inertia, occasionally moving to contain emergent fascism, and preparing Miracle Workers for large-scale intervention in case somebody develops nuclear weapons before everybody pairs off for a round-robin world war.

Isn't it awful?

I started writing alternate history before I started reading history, and this is a textbook example of what happens when it does. So here goes.

• Steve Jackson likes its worlds to start with either an enormous wank or an enormous screw, and I copied quite nicely here. In fact, to make it even wankier, I got my history flat-out wrong: by the time El Cid traveled south, Cordoba had been annexed by Seville for something like 15 years.
• There are no butterflies at all. Where does this start? Let's take it from 1087, when Alfonso VI is still doing the same damn things that he ever did, rather than dying. (That's how you screw a nation.) I'm positing multiple Crusades, playing differently because that's how these things work... but there's no actual changes caused by those Crusades, including presumably crusades focused westward that IRL didn't happen after 1147.
  
  It gets truly punishing after I fastforward through the Middle Ages, though. Look at this: "Castillian Habsburgs." Look at that: "Ottoman Empire." Look at him: "William the Silent." Look over there: "America." What the hell was I thinking to keep things this convergent?
• The 1900s are exactly the fucking same.

And yet, in a fun way, this is still roughly canonical.