Through The Looking Glass

This is a list of all major, relevant ways in which the world of the Iron Master differs from the real world. This is not trivia. This page contains only significant differences that could have a major impact on whether or not a decision is a good idea. If you are actively participating in the quest, you need to know this.

Prior to 1936, the setting's history is mostly identical to that of real world Earth. There is some weirdness: Some myths have a much larger grain of truth to them than in reality, there are actual undersea nations in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, but none of this impacts human history at all.

In 1936, Paragon developed his super powers and began crimefighting. This began a period of upheaval as more and more super powered men and women began using their powers. Early on the conflicts were hectic and usually lethal. Paragon lost several friends and killed a number of fledgling villains throughout the Depression. When WWII started, supers fought there as well, typically spearheading small, elite strike teams. Paragon and the Frightener first did battle face-to-face a few days after the official end of the war. The Frightener lost, but Paragon declared that because the war was over, neither he nor any other super had the right to go about killing others over personal battles or moral differences. They had laws for this sort of thing. These events are the point of divergence for history. Major events like the War on Terror and the collapse of the Soviet Union are unchanged, but several minor details have been altered.

In the 50s and 60s, Team Blue and Team Red solidified as concepts. At Paragon's insistence, laws were never worded to make exception for supers as a group (in the United States at least, some foreign countries are different), but as it became more clear that Team Blue was the only thing stopping Team Red from turning the western world into an anarchic wasteland run by warlords, the law began to quietly make off-the-record exceptions for basically any wrong committed by members of Team Blue, so long as the public could be kept in the dark and it wasn't threatening the ongoing existence of the state.

Atlantis and Mu are the names for the two underwater nations in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans respectively. Much like China, the two of them typically have long periods of unity punctuated by periods of intense civil war, and throughout they have conflicts with nearby barbarian tribes. Despite being around for thousands of years, they have had little interaction with humans because it's only in the past century or so that going more than about fifty feet underwater was doable for surface dwellers, and the merpeople typically live at least a few thousand feet down. There's still a pretty big barrier between surface and submarine nations, mostly because there is precious little reason for people who can't even breathe the same air to speak with each other.

Several eastern European nations have joined together into a political bloc that is openly run by the Frightener. Too much overt action against Team Red in any nation, especially if it's unprovoked, will be taken as a casus belli. Despite the saber rattling, however, the fact is that even if these nations are far more militarized than their real world counterparts, they would lose a war against NATO, hands down.

Cities have much less interaction with one another, and states have far more autonomy. This was so much the case that in the 80s there was real fear that another civil war might happen because of how divided the United States had become. Thanks to the internet, the nation is no longer quite that divided, but nonetheless the political landscape is subtly unrecognizable in a bizarro world way to anyone from real life Earth. This was the result of increasing concessions to supers in order to keep Team Blue in one piece. Facing a real possibility that members of Team Blue might retire or flip Red if policies they didn't like were passed, every political platform has placating the supers who keep the state in existence as its first priority, and what policies need to be passed to placate the supers can vary wildly from one city to another. Typically, supers congregate into large population centers, which means that a dozen or so super heroes will work out a compromise between themselves of what policies they're willing to fight for, and the mayors and governors within the unofficial territory of that city and its surroundings must adhere to at least most of those demands, or else threaten to decrease the number of supers fighting for their side. The more Team Blue wins and super powered crime becomes less frequent, the more democratically elected officials can assert policies without worrying about upsetting individual members of the local hero population, while the more Team Red wins the less the official laws matter anyway, as everyone becomes corrupt. Thus the variance between democracy, a compromised democracy with layman supers who think they understand more of politics than they do, and illuminati-esque dictatorships wearing the skin of a former democracy like a suit depends entirely on whether or not there's enough supers active in the area, and has absolutely nothing to do with the actions of the Federal government (although the government's actions can contribute to victory or defeat in any given city). The world is effectively divided up into city-states. Despite the upheaval in domestic policy, no one on either team is eager to interfere with trade or the military, which means that foreign policy remains mostly the same (except in that economics are a lot less stable thanks to the schizophrenic domestic policy of large nations like the United States or Russia).

More locally speaking, Scientology has a lot more clout in Los Angeles specifically, since they target supers for recruitment with the same zeal as they target celebrities, but a lot less clout outside Los Angeles, since the majority of their membership are not supers, which means that vigilantes on Team Blue can (and, in the wake of Operation Snow White, did) kill Scilons by the truckload and face a slap on the wrist in return. Scientology might be wealthy and respectable, but they're not a Fortune 500 or a part of the government, which means individual members of Team Blue are more important than them hands down, and the only reason that's different in LA is because large sections of Team Blue support Scientology. This is the danger of having the bar for entry to the local government be "was born with superpowers." The general public is at least as disdainful of Scientology in the world of the Iron Master as in reality, but the Watcher was a member and most of Team Blue have about as much respect for it as real life Will Smith, which is to say: Rather a lot, even if they haven't actually joined.