Brave New World (role-playing game)

While the history of the Brave New World setting actually diverged from real history in antiquity, the first point of divergence known to the general public was in 1918 during World War I, when a dying soldier spontaneously gained the ability to turn incorporeal. He became the Silver Ghost, the first superhero and a spy for the US Department of War who helped end the war month earlier than in our timeline.

Soon after the end of the war, many other super-powered humans began to appear, as people in mortal danger would sometimes manifest superhuman powers. In the 1920s and 1930s, most of these new heroes did not use disguises and secret identities, and the government and public were fairly accepting of their vigilantism. Super-powered criminals appeared as well, but were kept in check by their heroic counterparts; this period was analogous to the Golden Age of Comic Books in our timeline. Scientists began to refer to these super-powered beings as "Homo Delta" or "Deltas", meaning change.

In the late 1930s, a superhero named Yankee was officially deputized as a law enforcement officer by Chicago, and worked with Eliot Ness to bring down Al Capone, becoming a role model for other superheroes.

On December 7, 1941, Naval Station Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japanese fighters alongside Deltas associated with the Empire of Japan. Deltas began fighting for both the Allies and Axis in World War II. The US Army founded a super-powered unit known as Delta Squadron.

In the autumn of 1943, the Yankee and his young sidekick Sparky were captured by the Wehrmacht and imprisoned in an extermination camp. Yankee and Sparky staged a revolt after nearly two years of torture, but were seemingly killed. However, as their corpses were thrown into the ovens to be incinerated, a new Delta emerged, coming to be known as Superior.

Sparky had transformed into a new Delta, and was quickly found to be the most powerful Delta of all, being virtually immune to firearms, capable of moving at incredible speed, and possessing superhuman strength. He rescued Yankee and two other Deltas from the ovens before killing every Nazi in the camp. A Nazi Delta known as Kaptian Krieg received the distress call and soon arrived to put down what he thought was merely another uprising, only to be torn apart by Superior. The hero then flew to Berlin, fought his way into the Führerbunker, killed Adolf Hitler, and then flew across the world to force the surrender of Japanese Emperor Hirohito. In only a few hours, the Second World War was brought to an end months earlier than in our timeline.

As the Cold War began, the United States did not develop nuclear weapons until several years later than in our timeline, as the early end of World War II caused the cancellation of the Manhattan Project. In place of the nuclear arms race was the new "Alpha" class of super-humans. A handful of other Alphas, similar to Superior, emerged at the end of the war—the Soviet Union was able to artificially create several new Alphas, none as powerful as Superior, though still enough to challenge him. When the Soviets successfully detonated the first nuclear weapon in August 1949, and Superior expressed uncertainty over whether even he could survive a nuclear blast, the United States quickly finished its own nuclear program. Senator Joseph McCarthy held his HUAC hearings over paranoia during the Second Red Scare, but a Delta hero named Patriot eventually shamed him into closing them earlier than in our timeline.

The largest divergent point in this alternate history occurred on November 22, 1963. In Brave New World, as in our timeline, President John F. Kennedy was the victim of an assassination attempt. However, in Brave New World, Kennedy survived due to the intervention of Superior. Instead of sniper fire, in this world, Lee Harvey Oswald was one of several super-villains in power armor who attacked the President's motorcade with energy weapons. Although Kennedy was saved, the incident caused the government to begin dealing much more harshly with super-humans. The Delta Registration Act was quickly passed by Congress, making it a federal offense punishable by life imprisonment to not register superpowers with the government within seven days of manifesting them. Furthermore, all super-humans essentially lacked any civil rights, and could be used by the government in any way it felt appropriate. Delta Prime was founded as a super-powered law enforcement agency to control unregistered Deltas. Witch hunts begin to flush out super-humans who had not registered.

A group of heroes emerged to fight for freedom and civil rights. Calling themselves the "Defiance", they were a loosely organized resistance group that opposed having to register their superpowers. Portrayed as domestic terrorists by the government, the two sides fought for decades. In 1966, a battle between Delta Prime forces and the super-villain Devastator (who was among those responsible for the assassination attempt on Kennedy) ended with Devastator escaping after four square blocks in New York City were destroyed and thousands of lives were lost. In the aftermath of this, Kennedy declared martial law throughout the country. Stoking fears of Delta terrorists, he established himself as President for Life, ignoring the Constitution, and keeping the public under control by manipulating their fears. Congress and the Supreme Court were relegated to mere advisory bodies. Protected by a Secret Service detachment of Delta Prime, Kennedy began enforcing his will through hearings, secret trials, and extrajudicial executions of many prisoners. A super-powered, supermax prison known as the Fortress was constructed in Nebraska to imprison Delta and Alpha enemies of the state.

On July 4, 1976, the "Bicentennial Battle" erupted in downtown Chicago as a showdown between the Devastator, his minions and allies, and Superior and the forces of Delta Prime. Devastator threatened to detonate a mysterious "doomsday bomb" on top of the Sears Tower unless Superior surrendered to him, but his ultimatum was refused, and the bomb was detonated—everything within 25 miles (40 km) of the Sears Tower vanished, leaving a shallow crater into which Lake Michigan flowed, creating the Chicago Bay and killing millions. At the same time, every Alpha in existence spontaneously vanished. Over the next few years, Chicago, now known as Crescent City due to its shape, was effectively rebuilt from the ground up on the shores of the new bay. Established as the center of superpowered activity on Earth, it became the headquarters of both Delta Prime and the Defiance.

Without Superior and other Alphas to keep the world relatively calm, global affairs quickly fell into anarchy. Without the fear of Alphas, the Defiance and Delta super-villains were emboldened to act, leaving many cities scarred from super-powered conflicts. Many nations collapsed into various wars. When the Soviet Union neared collapse in 1988, a coup restored communist power, and the CIA orchestrated the assassination of the general responsible. In 1989, in response to an incident involving Deltas in Chernobyl, a limited nuclear war broke out between the US and USSR, destroying Atlanta, San Francisco, Kyiv, and Minsk.

The Defiance reached its greatest strength as the development of the Internet in the 1990s made it much easier for Deltas to stay in contact and organize. Secret, encrypted web pages, email, and offshore data havens helped the Defiance movement grow from a loose group of malcontents into a much larger and more organized movement. Kennedy was unable to quell the issue by simply shutting down the Internet, as doing so would damage the already struggling economy.

• Nelson Mandela was murdered in 1996, ending any chance of a peaceful settlement of apartheid in South Africa, where racial order is enforced by superhuman powers.
• Australia is actually quite open and hospitable to Deltas, and is one of the few havens in the world where they are treated as equal citizens, assuming they can make it to Australian soil to claim the offer.
• Canada has its own laws requiring registration of Deltas, but they are nowhere near as harsh as in the US.
• China is strangely shorthanded with Deltas, compared to other countries, for reasons not well understood. Fearing that the United Kingdom would not return Hong Kong, they staged a military invasion of the island in 1998, which still was ongoing as of the 1999 date of the books.
• The European Union never formed, and Europe is a fractious, contentious continent of heavily armed police states, although Norway and Sweden are also havens for Deltas.
• Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, but the world was too distracted to expel the invaders, so Saddam Hussein is slowly building an empire of his own in the Middle East.
• Madras was destroyed by a nuclear weapon, although it could never be proven it was from Pakistan, so a nuclear war was narrowly averted.
• In the aftermath of the Bicentennial Battle, Hirohito reasserted his power and divinity, renounced pacifism, and began to rebuild the Empire of Japan, with the rest of the world too distracted to be able to stop him.
• The Soviet Union still exists, with a government plagued by constant coup and assassination attempts.