Generating Geopolitics in Lowell Was Right!

Superpowers are states which are able to support a space program, with military-civilian space presence. To find out how many superpowers there are in your world, roll 1d6+2. You can use nations from our earth, or you can roll or choose from a table.

How did this situation come to be?

The GM can decide alone, or the GM and players can jointly decide the course of the world since 1880 which would result in the geopolitical situation outlined above.

Example:

Designated player rolls 1d6+2, with a result of 4+2 = 6. Six superpowers are on this Earth! One player requests the USA to be a superpower, so that her character will work as she envisioned. No one objected, so the USA was chosen.

The other 5 superpowers were randomly rolled. They were Greater Nigeria, The Australasian Republic, Great Brasil, The Malay Republic, and Mormon Zion. The players and GM between them come up with the following scenarios:

1. Europe was flattened in The Great War - devastated, crushed, and bled dry. There are still armies of barbarians roaming the ruins throwing stones at each other as one player joked. A bit of overstatement maybe, but it never really ended, and armed arnarchic militias do indeed fight each other still in the shattered cityscapes.

2. A Mormon prophet came to prominence in Utah, creating a huge religious revolution in the Rocky Mountain areas. From the Dakotas to Alberta and Britsh Columbia, down to Oregon, to northern Nevada down to Utah, left the Union and became a Theocracy, to the relief of the rest of the USA.

3. In Nigeria, a Dictator arose when the British pulled out because of the Great War. An able administrator, he pulled the country together, then using his large, well drilled, well equipped armies, conquered everything in sub-saharan Africa but the southern part and Ethiopia and the Horn.

4. Because of the Great War, a flood of British and other European refugees set up a state in the Malay Peninsula, based in Singapore. The Dutch in Borneo, Java, and Sumatra soon joined in, along with - eventually - the French in Indo-China, The Thais, and Burma, making a multi-ethnic Asian-European state with immense resources.

5. The Pacific War of the 1940s between Imperial Japan on one hand and Australia and the USA on the other resulted in a union of Australia with western Indonesia, along with the Philippines and many Pacific islands. Japan was ultimately defeated, though not until they almost broke Australia and the USA, and today is a second rate power.

6. During and after the great War, a great many Europeans emigrated to Brazil, which enthusiastically embraced them into its ethnic and cultural stew. Using diplomatic and economic pressures, eventually all of South America north of Chile-Argentina-Uruguay were “volunteered” to be assimilated.

7. Overall, aside from The USA and Mormon Zion, the  equatorial position of these nations gave them an advantage in space launches before the discovery of anti-mass.