Time Wars: Invasion
By Eric R. Ashley



Let me list four dimensions, all quite similar.  You can use any one of these as the defender in the TW: Invasion.  Or you can use them as the beginning setting for a ‘sorta-modern Earth’ game.

The N.A.C., or the North American Confederation, is a loosely federalized collection of states that covers the whole continent of its name.  It was born in the late 1800’s from the combination of the USA, Canada (except for Quebec which later joined), and Mexico.  Much of the governmental power resides with the states, and being a governor is far to be preferred over a senator.  Each state has their own culture, which allows a lot of experimentation.  Some states like Massachusetts forbid alcohol, while Georgia is famous for its peach brandy.  And people move accordingly which means that there is a good amount of social harmony as peach brandy enthusiasts head for Georgia, and teetotalers head for Massachusetts.
It has a very dynamic economy, and Protestantism and Roman Catholicism vie from primacy with duelling books, and parades, and evangelism, and good works.  Most of the hospitals in the NAC are built by one of the denominations (there are several ones such as Lithuanian Revivalists, and the Church of the Bible that rank with the Presbyterians and Methodists) or by the RCC.

The Monarchy of Vespucianna covers the continental United States, and while it does have a king and queen, princes, and some dukes, their actual duties are very limited.  They preside over the openings of large factories, and give speeches on holidays, and serve as living icons to represent the nation.  It is a very well-paid and easy job.
Most of the dukes and princes in their off-time go about having children, and tending their estates, and a surprisingly large number (until you think about it) of Olympic champions come from their ranks.  In fact, its somewhat of an unstated code that a prince should consider other Olympic champions as mates, not required mind you, but suggested.  This helps keep the genome strong, and has resulted in some very talented children.  A number of second sons who go by a different name have made their fortunes the hard way, by skill and pluck.  And some of those ‘second sons’ were actually first born.  One can forego the privileges of the title if one wishes, and about twenty percent in any given generation do.  This is regarded as healthy.
So the monarchy has close ties with the wealthy establishment since many of the establishment are relatives.

The Confederacy of States is the result of the much amended document of Confederation which preceded the Constitution in my home timeline.  Here the Constitution never passed, instead reformers focused on the Confederation and amendments.  The end result was much the same, with a more shop-worn and flexible document, and less absolutist readings of rights.
The government is quite limited in its powers, except for in matters of war where the Emergency Amendments kick in, and then it gathers a slew of more powers to it.
There are few large-scale projects…no Hoover Dam, no interstate highways, no Apollo Project.  On the other hand, there are privately funded O’Neill asteroid space stations in orbit of the Earth, and the toll road system is robotically controlled so that even as you wind down country roads, you’re doing it at the maximum safe speed of a nearly perfect autopilot.

The last dimension is one that I am mostly familiar with.  The President John Walker is different, and the parties are the Reds and the Blues, but the nation is the United States of America, and up until the end of Ronald Reagan’s two terms of office as a Red Party candidate, the presidencies are alike.  Since then George Cooper, and then Henry Martin, and now John Walker.   All men who while they could have been better, and some were dogged by personal and political scandals as presidents did better than most.

Note: You can of course, just make it the USA of a vanishingly different timeline, and have Democrats, Republicans, and George W. Bush as President.  But then, you’re likely to have your interpretation of the leadership groups and people, and to your dismay, you’re likely to find someone in your gaming group rather strenuously disagrees with you.  Let me underline this for those born with the assurance that they are natural aristocrats of the truth, and that disagreeing with them is evidence of mendacity and/or outright mental disability.  There are people of good will, with sound reasons, and well-thought out objections, who disagree with you.
So let me advise you to follow the path of Tom Clancy and Dale Brown, both multiple best-selling authors, and name your presidents something innocuous.  Its less important to do so with the parties, and with some of the lower ranked people.  You might be fine with Dems and Reps, but if politics gets argued at your table, sometimes in raised tones of voice, you might be better off coming up with even less obvious names than Reds and Blues.
As a side note, I named my Presidents in the last dimension good basic English names.  You could change that.  Make them Charleston Court, Archibald Lewiseur, and Valentine Demoreux…but it would be a different world.  So would the world of presidents Arthur Jorgenson, Peter Rasmundsen, and Kevin Hollander.  Each implies slightly different things about the nation,  not necessarily better or worse in my view, but definitely different.
Now on to the game…


The NAC (or whichever one you choose, I will assume NAC for this piece) had been seeing some weird events in Near-Earth Orbit, and some of the pet psychics employed by the High Command had been having nervous breakdowns.  Concerned, the President ordered a Multi-Agency Task Force to investigate.  It soon became clear that neither the Chicoms or the Europeans were responsible for the ephemeral ‘events’ in orbit.  In fact, both thought it was an NAC initiative.
The ‘events’ shared the following characteristics.  A minor spike in radio static followed by a larger spike over a regional area encompassing several states,  and then for a few minutes, a radar return from what looked like a multi-ton satellite.  This would be followed by a large decrease in radio static, and a variable number of minutes later, another lesser decrease in radio static--anti-spikes as they were termed.
The initial spike and its follow-up maintained the same ten minute relation they always did, but the anti-spikes varied from two to a hundred minutes afterwards.
Afterwards, perhaps an hour to a dozen hours, the psychics would tend to go berserk.
This was extremely worrying to High Command because while psi’s were inexplicable, they had also proven to be of considerable use in pointing out potential dangers, if one could understand the dream-like imagery they brought back from their drug-induced trances.  More solidly, it seemed clear that someone had a means to lift a large object into Earth orbit without High Command detecting the launch.
The potential to use this device to drop nuclear bombs all over the NAC was altogether too plain, and so the Task Force was upgraded to Maximum Urgency, and given a hundred billion dollars, and told to ‘somehow or the other, and right quick, fix the problem.’
The first efforts failed inexplicably, and had the commanding general of Task Force Eagle thinking in terms of massive infiltration of the project.  So he broke off part of the group that he absolutely trusted, gave them money and freedom, and set up several more obvious groups to serve as decoys.  The decoys went splat, but the space plane developed by the secret group made its way up into orbit, and waited.
A long week past, and another ten hours, and the plane would have to land.  And then an incident occurred, and the plane used its abundant rocket to lurch across orbits, and snag the device.  Now, this would have done no good because there was a self-destruct device on the intruder.  However, one of the psi’s had insisted on padding the interior of the capture box which the plane towed with a reflective metal.  This metal garbled the self-destruct code sent by the intruder’s pilot.
The intruder, in its box, dropped from orbit after being nudged by the space plane, and parachutes brought the box to earth.  There commando units took charge of it in the field of a Tennessee hill farmer who was more than happy to take the grant offered by the government, and keep his mouth ‘shet tight’.  The pilot of the intruder was less than happy.
Interrogations and examinations of the device brought an astonishing conclusion.  The device was designed to cross dimensional barriers, after being propelled from a machine, and then of its own accord, it would travel back in time.  Once back in the past of the NAC, the pilot would perform a carefully calculated mission.  This mission would change history.
And this was mission number twelve.  But it was not as desperate as all that…not quite.  For one thing, history did not like to be changed.  The larger the change, the greater likelihood of temporal backlash which could wipe out a person, erase the time changer from existence even.  So after a few tries, they had been restricted to smaller changes.
Still, the president of the NAC used to be Senator Charles Watkins, majority leader of the other party.  That had not been planned since such fine control was impossible.
The questions of why, and what, and so forth went on.  Why became clear.  The Terrestial Iconocracy was dedicated to the creation of the superior society, and spreading it across the dimensions.  Its inspired by Plato’s Republic with additional genetic engineering.  The Gold, Silver and Iron castes were honored, and the Tin and Scruff castes were not, despite claims that being Tin was honorable.
Each caste was genetically engineered to be suitable for the tasks assigned to it by the Gold caste.  The Gold were the visionaries, and the administrators.  The Silver were the merchants, inventors, and genetic engineers.  The Iron were the warriors and heavy workers.  The Tin were purely workers.  The Scruff were the few throwbacks, and malformed rejects.
The time traveller is a Scruff given honorary Iron status.  He is a fanatic, conditioned by mental techniques that make turning him against the Iconocracy very difficult.  However, he’s also not very bright, and he’s not been told what to do if captured by the present day NAC.  So with a combination of sweet talk, confusing angles, and other wiles, the interrogators pretty soon have him spilling his guts while still claiming to be a loyal follower of the Iconocracy.
The time machine is a one-way device.  Once the user leaves it, he pushes a button, and it collapses to dust very rapidly.  This is a bio-engineered fungus which eats the iron and silicon and plastic in the ship, and then kills itself when it hit’s the right number of reproduction cycles.  It can only live for thirty cycles of reproduction, after that, it is sterile, and the last cycle dies of old age.
This capability terrifies the High Command, and they wonder why the Iconocracy doesn’t just drop some fungus without a built in death clock and vape all their stuff.  A couple answers come back.  One, the Icons want to build on the NAC world, and a fungus without a clock would stop that.  Two, the Icons don’t really have all the neat stuff the NAC does…so the Icons are looking forward to some looting and pillaging.
It seems the Icons are a typical totalitarian society unable to provide nice consumer products for their citizens.  The first time the time traveller sees a washing machine, he breaks down into tears.
One thing the traveller tells them is that they have to do research to find out effective points of alteration.  Which means there are moles in the society of the NAC.  Happily, the intruder’s device has the means of detecting them…which includes detecting all extra-dimensionals.  This is a good place to insert the verser.  He gets picked up with a bunch of enemy researchers of the Iconocracy, and interrogated by High Command.  You can also have him picked up earlier, or join in earlier.  Possibly, the ‘researcher detector and information transmitter’ on the device which relays the researcher’s information back home is the first thing figured out by the NAC engineers.  Its also possible that the verser might detect the arrival and leaving of the intruder devices, or that the researchers would be able to detect him.  Lastly, a psi working for the High Command might pull his name out of thin air, and insist on the verser being a key person for the project which would allow the verser to see the whole project as it occurs.  He might even get to be the pilot of the space plane.
The next step for the NAC is for them to duplicate the Time Capsule with one of their own.  Now, the NAC has superior machining, and computational skills, plus more trained personnel.   However, they have do this in absolute secrecy because if any of the researchers not picked up (not all of them were, just enough to interrogate…the NAC is monitoring the others) get wind of what’s going on, then the Iconocracy could mount a time mission to undo it.
This begins a period of several years in the up-time of time missions battling it out in the past of the NAC.  Also, the Chicoms and the Europeans become aware of what is going on, and Global Skywatch is set up with their enthusiastic approval, ostensibly to shoot down any rogue asteroids that might smash our planet, but actually to shoot down intruder time capsules aka intruder devices (in the jargon code of the military).  Rather than share a time traveller with the Chicoms, all capsules are shot down, that can be anyways.
The Iconocracy becomes aware of the situation, and begins to fight back by arming their capsules.  They also begin developing other technologies.
The NAC develops their own tech.  Temporal force fields prevent the alteration of causality inside them.  At first, these guard time bases, which had been previously hidden with all manner of deception, and now, while still secret, were not quite so desperately secret.  Then, it became apparent that these force fields could be expanded.  Cities, and then states, and then huge swathes of continents (five hundred mile spheres) in the time of several weeks…some scientists in the project suspected that a new researcher who had invented all this was actually from up-time of them.
This is up to the game master.  This researcher can either be a brilliant polymath, or an uptime agent sent on a one-way mission.  Since, even now, no one knows how to make a two-way time machine.  In any case, she, or he, should be exotic, smart, and attractive, and quite single.  An excellent love interest for the verser…
After this, its not hard to make a many dozen force field projectors, and cover the whole of the world.  Expensive, sure, but well worth it.  The world leaders sigh in relief, and…
The gates open.  Huge mile wide cross-dimensional gates located on the surface of the Earth, which was thought to be impossible because of the gravity problem that totally complicated the calculations, but the genetic engineers bred special “Brains” to handle the problem.  These poor misshapen creatures with their swollen brains sit near each gate, and monitor and adjust the power flux that maintains the gate continually, without rest, without sleep until they go insane, and another Brain is put in their place.
Out of them pour millions of Iron caste who begin to slaughter everything in their paths, focusing on humans, but willing to settle for cows and deer.  Then they eat.  A predator like Iron caste needs a lot of protein.  Humans are mostly protein.  With his genes spliced with tiger DNA, and his rust-red skin with the pale stripes on his huge arms, the seven and eight foot tall Iron caste warrior terrifies by his mere presence.  Seeing him awakes something primitive in a normal human, something that screams “Run!”.
They are armed with blunderbusses, which accept virtually any form of hard substance as ammunition.  These guns are short range, and do massive amounts of low level damage in a huge swathe that is ten yards across at the maximum effective width.  However, against armored vehicles, even APC’s, they do little damage.
Another weapon, nicknamed the ‘thunderclap’ is a pulse laser.  It builds up a laser pulse, glowing a bit more, and humming a bit more as it reaches its peak, and then it fires.  The typical human is instantly dead.  It also will put a hole in an APC.  It can refire every thirty to fifteen seconds.  Range is two miles.  Accuracy is a problem with it however since the beam generation device wavers a bit in its setting.
Ploder is what the Iron caste call their last tool of ranged combat.  It implodes, and then explodes a targeted substance.  It is capable of sustained fire rates for several minutes of one shot per second.  In five seconds it can hole and severely damage the front armour of a M1A1 Abrams tank.  In ten seconds it can destroy that tank utterly as it chews its way through the tank, and hits some ammo.  Range is one hundred yards.  At one hundred one yards, you are completely safe.  At ninety-nine yards, you are totally out of luck.  At less than two yards, it can produce hallucinations and pain, but no physical damage.  At three yards, you’re toast.
Tiger Claws or bagh nakh are razor sharp extendible claws with attached hydraulic needles.  The claws, combined with the Iron caste’s physical strength, can gut a man, and they are Teflon coated so they go right through Kevlar armor.  The needles pop out with enough force to penetrate tank armor, and then curl to hold the user from bouncing back.  They then release.  While extremely noisy since using them sounds like multiple gunshots, a Iron caste warrior could cut his way into a tank if he had a half hour.  Almost all Iron caste carry these.

The initial break-thru was world wide.  At least ten million Iron caste soldier roared into this dimension.  And unlike the defender’s armed forces, each one was a front-line fighter, instead of the ten to one ratio more common to the NAC.  Three gates opened in North America.  One in Georgia, south of Atlanta.  One in the Napa Valley.  One in Ontario.  Each horde began to drive toward the center of the continent, while sending tendrils out toward the other regions.
New York and Boston and Seattle and Vancouver are still relatively untouched because they are off the main invasion path although tendrils come for them.  Two gates drop into China, and one into Eastern Russia, and one into Germany.  Australia got one, and so did Antartica.  South America and Africa got one each.
The Antartican Force immediately began to freeze, and then to cannibalize each other after wiping out our observation posts.
Not every gate had the same number of attackers.  SA  had a quarter of a million.  The NAC got a million for each gate.
The Chinese were the first to go nuclear.  The Southern gate, near Vietnam was nuked.  The nuke was brought in by truck since one of the side effects of the gate was terribly bad air conditions starting at fifty feet above the ground.  It was deadly dangerous to fly a plane within two hundred miles of a gate with the sudden sheer winds, and downbursts, and so forth.  The odds of surviving a flight for fifty miles in the Air Circle of Doom as most pilots called it were one-in-three.  It seemed the gates had odd effects on the weather, but the Iconocracy was able to keep it away from the ground, and their troops.
The interaction of the Chinese nuke and the Southern Gate was catastrophic.  It formed a massive energy bubble that knocked out radio communications around the globe for a week.  But more seriously, it destroyed  close to 1% of the Earth’s crust, and created a gaping hole in the ozone layer.  The huge bowl shape in the mantle was over a hundred miles wide and a half mile deep.  Waters from the Indian Ocean rushed into it, and created Disaster Bay.  The gate was gone however.  The horde was dead, and so was close to fifty million people.
But aftershocks rippled the globe for two weeks after that, and a moratorium on such attacks was put in order.
Meanwhile, the hordes, except for the Antartic horde kept getting reinforced at a rate of ten thousand troops per day for each horde.
It became clear what the goal of the hordes was after some troops were captured.  This was a very difficult mission because while an Iron caste warrior is not terribly bright, he’s brighter than the time traveller.  The Iron caste warrior had no inclination to keep a secret however.
The plan was simple.  Go in. Knock out all time force fields.  Just like the Antiartic field is now gone.  Jump back into the past with thousands of troopers after building some giant time jumpers, and proceed to rework time.  Maybe most everyone would be zapped by the resistance of history, but roll the dice enough times, and they would succeed.
Then all this carnage would not have happened because the NAC would never have existed.  Your world will always have been a happy part of the Iconocracy.  And we will all be rich!
His last part of the plan has the flaw that assumes that the NAC, which is the source of his wealth, is actually just the unworthy holders of the wealth.  And that the wealth will still be around when the NAC is gone.  But his ideology blinds him.  Besides, he’s ferociously aggressive, and hardly needs an excuse to attack and eat.
At this point, it’s a fight to the death with the Iconocracy.
Depending on how you want your fight to go, you can place the force field generators near the gates, or far away.  You can make arguments either way.  Near means the Iconocracy knew where they were, and was able to roughly position its attackers within a couple hundred miles anyways.  Far, means the gates interfere with the opening of the gates, and so it might be that the gate is in South Georgia, and the generator is in West Virginia.  Or that the gate is in the Napa Valley, and the generator is at Pike’s Peak.  Or that the gate is in Ontario, and the generator is in Chicago.
You can also have a maneuver war, or a fight in the trenches or a little of both.  Keep in mind that unless the defenders are killing more than thirty thousand Iron Caste troopers daily, then they are falling behind.  However, the Iconocracy does have limits.  Once they’ve funneled a total of 100 million troopers in, they will start having major drop-offs in supply with less troops and less weapons and poorer quality ones at that.
The typical Iron caste warrior uses human wave assaults, and will stop to pick up a nice bit of booty like a microwave oven.  These items are marked by sigils, and Tin caste come behind and take the items back to the Iconocracy and the Iron caste warriors relatives.  Iron caste warriors tend to go in the direction they are ordered, although they do have some initiative.  A Gold or Silver can re-task them.
They do not get lost since they have magnetic senses, and in that regard they can be physically similar to a homing pigeon except that a pheromone enhanced Gold or Silver can with a map that has magnetic lines inscribed on it, re-direct them by pointing to a new destination.
A leader of five or of ten or of a hundred or of a thousand, which is rare, and as large as the Iron Caste get in their groups can re-direct all his warband.

What remains for this world to be playable?
Physical stats on the Iron Caste Warrior
Stats for the Iron Caste weapons
Stats for the NAC weaponry
Anything else that should be included here?