ffutures | Time-Slip on Titan (Reply)

As regular readers will know, there are some problems with Weinbaum's Flight on Titan, when compared to the other stories of the Planetary sequence. Basically, the background is similar, but dates don't match up, Venus and Mars are described differently, and so forth. It's a bit of a nuisance, but it was easy enough to ignore the discrepancies for game purposes. Except that it suddenly occurred to me that there might be something I could do with them...

Adventure Idea: Time-Slip on Titan
The version of history described in Flight on Titan doesn’t quite match that of Weinbaum’s other Planetary stories. For game purposes these differences have been ignored, but what if there are two parallel universes, somehow overlapping and merging in a weak point of the space-time continuum on Titan?

In one universe the year is 2115; Venus only has a narrow habitable zone, mostly consisting of deadly swamps, and Mars is inhabited by the Thoth, mound builders, etc. The Planetary Trading Corporation failed in 2110, leading to a stock market crash, but the market is already slowly recovering.
In the other universe the year is 2146; Venus is much more widely habitable and has seas, but the last Martians died thousands of years ago. Because Mars had little to offer, expansion into the outer Solar System was slow, and spacecraft are still more primitive than they are in the other universe. The PTC failed in 2142, taking the stock market with it, and there is little sign of recovery.

Somehow the adventurers find a portal between the universes; there must be ways to take advantage. For example, the 2115 world has better spaceships, 2146 has a more colonisable version of Venus. A few patents could make you very rich. Of course there are bound to be snags… Make them nasty and hard to spot!

I'm rather pleased with that one.