D20x5 Astounding Alternate Histories

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Click the button below for your very own alternate history. Astoundingness not guaranteed.

Table randomizer generator here: http://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D20	This alternate history diverges during
1	the Paleolithic (3,300,000-11,650 years ago).
2	the Neolithic (12,000-6,500 years ago).
3	the Bronze Age (5,300-3,200 years ago).
4	the Iron Age (3,200-1,500 years ago).
5	the Middle Ages (1,500-500 years ago).
6	the time of the Mongol Empire (1206-1380).
7	the Renaissance (15th-16th centuries).
8	the Mamluk dynasties (1250-1517).
9	the Victorian era (1815-1914).
10	the Romantic era (1770-1815).
11	Classical Antiquity (480 BC-476 AD).
12	the reign of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1603-1605).
13	the life of Jesus Christ (0-33 AD).
14	the campaigns of Alexander the Great (336-323 BC)
15	the Industrial Age (1760-1970).
16	the Machine Age (1880-1945).
17	the World Wars or their interwar period.
18	the Three Kingdoms period (220-265 AD).
19	the recent past (2000-present).
20	the Cold War (1947-1991).

D20	The cause of this alternate history's divergence was
1	a minor religion in our history becoming dominant over others.
2	a pandemic.
3	an anachronistic technological innovation.
4	a natural disaster.
5	the different outcome of a war.
6	an economic collapse.
7	a breakthrough in animal or plant domestication.
8	an alliance between two powers.
9	the discovery of a vital resource.
10	the untimely death of a vital historical figure - not necessarily a famous or even known one.
11	a ruler making a better decision than they did in our history.
12	the beginning of a golden age.
13	a shift in climate.
14	a political revolution.
15	a sudden evolutionary leap.
16	a cultural exchange.
17	a philosophical innovation.
18	unclear, the result of emergence from microscopic initial differences from our history.
19	the non-occurence of a catastrophe.
20	Alien Space Bats (i.e. some truly weird shit).

D20	The regional epicenter of this alternate history's divergence was
1	East Asia.
2	South Asia.
3	the Fertile Crescent.
4	North America.
5	North Africa.
6	Central America.
7	South America.
8	Northern Europe.
9	Southest Asia.
10	Australia.
11	Central Asia.
12	the Middle East.
13	Central Africa.
14	Southern Europe.
15	Southern Africa.
16	Eastern Africa.
17	Western Africa.
18	Western Europe.
19	Eastern Europe.
20	the Arabian peninsula.

D20	The ultimate result of this alternate history's divergence
1	is a relative dystopia.
2	is a relative utopia.
3	is world domination by a tyrannical hegemon.
4	is human extinction.
5	is a state of international tension that makes the Cold War seem like a sunny summer day by comparison.
6	is a world that's scientifically well ahead of our own.
7	is a heavily balkanized international anarchy.
8	is that humanity has been subordinated to a post-human intelligence.
9	is a global monoculture starved for new art and lifeways.
10	is the formation of a shadowy one-world government akin to the Illuminati.
11	is nothing in particular, just people going about their lives as always.
12	is a ruined Earth where humanity survives in enclosed, self-sustaining arcologies.
13	is a war that really did end all wars, resulting in permanent though not always pleasant peace.
14	is an endless cycle of repeating the same patterns over centuries, positive-feedback loops becoming inevitable.
15	is a world in slow decline as rare elements run dry, with no replacements forthcoming.
16	is a world in booming recovery after an international calamity.
17	is something almost identical to our own history on the surface, against all odds, with disturbing differences on closer inspection.
18	is an apocalyptic death cult seizing power and attempting to immanentize the eschaton.
19	is the creation of superweapons that make nukes look like firecrackers dividing the world into an archipelago of isolationist city-states.
20	is a stagnant, ultra-conservative world ruled by a global aristocracy.

D20	This alternate history can be accessed
1	through a magic mirror that exists in both realities, and reflects the other.
2	with a tome that overwrites parts of reality with the alternate history when read.
3	with a psychoactive drug that causes you to mentally "paraincarnate" as someone in it.
4	through an obscure tabletop roleplaying game made by an eccentric recluse, which will catapult players into it.
5	by a simulation running on a quantum computer, the strange physics making the simulation identical to the alternate history's reality.
6	by a caste of psychic mutant "dimension-walkers".
7	by passing through a wormhole in near Earth orbit.
8	through the blast site of a tachyon bomb test.
9	in a manner of speaking by being infected by a memetic virus transmitted by an exceptionally detailed series of forum posts about the alternate history. The infected start to perceive the world as the alternate history's.
10	only during moments of strange celestial conjunctions spoken of by mad prophets.
11	by petitioning a nightgaunt to fly you outside the boundaries of reality.
12	with a paratime-travel machine that can be made with easily-acquired parts, such as those found in a microwave. The instructions were released online, to much discord.
13	by a misty, mystical island that drifts between realities.
14	if you run afoul of a mafia based around a ethnic group which exists only in that alternate history. They dispose of people by dumping them there.
15	with the help of an ornery clique of dissident academics who've researched the shards of it that have emerged in our history through ontological subduction.
16	by catching a disease going around that puts you in a coma, but manifests your dreaming self as a phantom in the alternate history.
17	by getting an in with the shady government agency that's stabilized a gateway to it, and is now trying to exploit it for temporal power.
18	through a portal in a cave at the spot where proto-humanity first stepped down from the trees in both histories.
19	with a set of magic rings that can be stolen from the safe deposit box of one Digory Kirke, which will take you to a forest containing pools that act as portals to many worlds.
20	through a horrific "unfolded" building that exists simultaneously in both histories. It was created when two people in both histories solved a hyperspatial equation at the same time. The building is haunted by monsters made from similarly "unfolded" people.