history. Despite the rise of other strong European powers, the world is free of major conflicts, which can be attributed to the strong influence of Centrum in this parallel. Caliph In this world the printing press was invented in Baghdad in 796 and was shortly followed by the widespread adoption of the scientific method and an oil-based industrial revolution. The current year here is 1684, but the technological acceleration stemming from these changes has resulted in a society seemingly centuries ahead of Homeline. Unfortunately a burgeoning global war between the tradition-minded major states (Sofala, Persia, Andalus, the Bulgarian Caliphate and the Ummah) and the technocratic Jamahiriya of the western continents threatens the existence of this advanced society. Campbell Named for the early death of influential science fiction editor John W. Campbell which occurred in this parallel but not in real history, Campbell is a world notable for the poverty of its scientific advancement. While military applications of scientific research advanced rapidly enough, science as an intellectual pursuit became associated exclusively with death, destruction, and catastrophe (especially after World War II ended with the bombardment of Germany with radioactive dust, killing hundreds of thousands of people). This led to an anti-scientific wave of pacifist Luddism and charismatic religious revival in the 1960s. Lacking the positive fruits of scientific inquiry, the world heads (in "current year" 2004) through ecological disaster and failing economies to a nigh-inevitable showdown between its capitalist and communist societies. Centrum The nominal villains of the campaign, Centrum is a totalitarian, homogenized world-state, and the only world other than Homeline to have a major parachronic program. Its point of departure was in 1120, when the White Ship carrying William the Aetheling, the heir of Henry I of England, did not hit a rock in the English Channel. William's survival precluded The Anarchy and the Hundred Years War, and ultimately the "Anglo-French Empire" became a world-spanning power, with technological progress centuries beyond that of Homeline. However unbearable tensions existed just below the surface, and in 1902 unknown parties decapitated the ruling house by detonating a nuclear device in London. The resulting succession wars included nuclear and biological weapons, wiped out much of humanity and reduced most of the survivors to preindustrial barbarism. But Terraustralis (Homeline Australia) escaped much of the destruction, and the techno-military cabal known as "The Centrum" that took control there ultimately extended its authority across the globe.