History DarthWiki / PlanetOfTheDead

* HitlersTimeTravelExemptionAct: Averted, at least in terms of death toll. Adolf Schickelgruber was a renowned surrealist painter and died quietly in 1970, and nobody stepped in to fill his shoes. Stalin and Lenin never existed, and the purges they carried out never happened either. Mao, on the other hand, waited until most of Europe was busy fighting itself, then declared the founding of a new Middle Kingdom and invaded Russia, carving out a huge chunk of land before anyone even figured out what was happening. The following political purges and ethnic cleansings ''could'' have been a reasonable substitute for the Holocaust--but on March 15th, 1972, the first and only ghost in history manifested in Irkutsk and claimed that name for itself. In total, the Maoists killed five million people plus change, and the murderous apparition formed from their collective fear and rage devoured a further three, compared to the over thirty million that Axis nations killed in our timeline.

* AlternateHistory: Diverging from our own at the moment history began. The first proto-humans were born, lived for a few decades, died... and a few of them got back up. Notable highlights: No Christianity, the British Empire is a superpower (and the national language is ''French!''), World War II never happened because World War I didn't end until 1972, Hitler was a renowned Dadaist painter ''and peace activist'', the League of Nations never broke up and is headquartered in Berlin, the first man in space crash-landed on the moon and stayed there for five years, and most of Eastern Europe is ruled by the descendants of {{Dracula}}.

* AlternateHistory: Diverging from our own at the moment history began. The first proto-humans were born, lived for a few decades, died... and a few of them got back up. Notable highlights: No Christianity, the British Empire is a superpower (and the national language is ''French!''), World War II never happened because World War I didn't end until 1947, Hitler was a renowned Dadaist painter ''and peace activist'', the League of Nations never broke up and is headquartered in Berlin, the first man in space crash-landed on the moon and stayed there for five years, and most of Eastern Europe is ruled by the descendants of {{Dracula}}.

* HitlersTimeTravelExemptionAct: Averted, at least in terms of death toll. Adolf Schickelgruber was a renowned surrealist painter and died quietly in 1972, and nobody stepped in to fill his shoes. Stalin and Lenin never existed, and the purges they carried out never happened either. Mao, on the other hand, waited until most of Europe was busy fighting itself, then declared the founding of a new Middle Kingdom and invaded Russia, carving out a huge chunk of land before anyone even figured out what was happening. The following political purges and ethnic cleansings ''could'' have been a reasonable substitute for the Holocaust--but on March 15th, 1947, the first and only ghost in history manifested in Irkutsk and claimed that name for itself. In total, the Maoists killed five million people plus change, and the murderous apparition formed from their collective fear and rage devoured a further three, compared to the over thirty million that Axis nations killed in our timeline.

* SealedEvilInACan: The Siberian Holocaust rampaged across Mongolia for a month before it seemed to run out of steam--and in 1953, the world learned the hard way that it had just run out of bodies to consume. This time, it took ''three years'' and the total evacuation of every city in its path to stop it. It's currently lying dormant at the center of a five-mile-wide ForbiddenZone in the Gobi Desert, where a joint military task force made up of British, Union, Byzantine, and Chinese soldiers are dead set on making sure that nobody ever gets close to it again.

* AxeCrazy: The [[NinjaPirateZombieRobot cyborg ninja vampire]] SuperSoldier Specimen Four oscillates wildly between various forms of murderous insanity, from DissonantSerenity to ScreamingWarrior to PsychopathicManchild. And worse, ''nobody knows what triggers it...''

* VirusMisnomer: Loudly subverted; the pathogen that creates zombies is a ''bacterium''--albeit one that ''mutated from the stem cells of baby Jesus.''

* {{Jossed}}: Specimen Four is not Dracula. Just cutting that line of thinking off before it starts.

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* SealedEvilInACan: The Siberian Holocaust rampaged across Russia for a month before it seemed to run out of steam--and in 1953, the world learned the hard way that it had just run out of bodies to consume. This time, it took ''three years'' and the total evacuation of every city in its path to stop it. It's currently lying dormant at the center of a five-mile-wide ForbiddenZone in the Gobi Desert, where a joint military task force made up of British, Union, Byzantine, and Chinese soldiers are dead set on making sure that nobody ever gets close to it again.

* {{AKA47}}: Semi-example. Firearms have taken on a slightly different form over the course of history, developed in response to the abilities and weaknesses of the latest undead menace, and even the few guns we recognize are manufactured by different firms. Assault rifles are nonexistant, and Mikhail Kalashnikov is known primarily for his variable battle rifle, the AR-15. West African arms firm De Boers cornered the phallic symbol market in the 60s with the distinctive PAK shot-pistol, and four out of five big screen terrorists carry the sinister-looking M6 machine pistol, a Chinese gun known for terrible design, shoddy construction, and such awful, ''awful'' performance that its use in the the catastrophic Battle of Myanmar inspired the ImperialStormtrooperMarksmanshipAcademy cliche still in use in modern cinema.

** The Universal Roman Church instituted by Julianos Konstantinos, fusing over a dozen polytheistic traditions into a single cohesive church in an attempt to fight the growing power of the Empyreum. Over time, the name underwent the same Latin-to-Greek-to-Romance mutation that the Universal Christian Church underwent in our own timeline, and modern Universal Romans simply call themselves Catholics. Also has numerous sects of varying degrees of orthodoxy, mostly split over the modern study of comparative religion--whether Tyr is an aspect of Mars, as traditionally held, for example, or whether modern linguistic taxonomies prove that he is actually one of the faces of Deus Pater (Greatest and Best, Glory Be Upon Him And All His Peoples). Other points of contention include what to do about the Way of the Wheel and Sphere, a Dharmist religion on the other side of the planet that has the same linguistic and stylistic elements that unify the Catholic pantheons, and how all the religions that can't be traced back to ancient Mesopotamia fit into the grand scheme of things.

--> '''Zack:''' Tac-Con, unit is out of kill zone; you may drop the package at your leisure. You know, one of those Westric gits called him a monster. Just thought he oughtta know. Over.
--> '''Louis:''' I'll tell him that, Recon. Releasing locking clamps in ten. Over.
--> '''Zack:''' Bring the bloody whirlwind, Tac-Con. Over.

[[Series/DoctorWho Not a planet with]] [[Recap/DoctorWhoNSS4E15PlanetOfTheDead a load of sand and some stingrays.]] In fact, predates it by about six months.

[[Series/DoctorWho Not a planet with a load of sand and some stingrays.]] In fact, predates it by about six months.

* CrystalDragonJesus: The Invictine and Mithraic Churches, both real religions that were absorbed by Christianity, took on much of the same trappings and survived into the present day.

* SealedEvilInACan: The Siberian Holocaust rampaged across Russia for a month before it seemed to run out of steam--and in 1953, the world learned the hard way that it had just run out of bodies to consume. This time, it took ''three years'' and the total evacuation of every city in its path to stop it. It's currently lying dormant at the center of a five-mile-wide ForbiddenZone in the Gobi Desert, where a joint military task force made up of British, Byzantine, and Chinese soldiers are dead set on making sure that nobody ever gets close to it again.

** The common zombie, known as the Bedlam ghoul or plaguewight before the development of a comprehensive undead taxonomy. These are the classic zombies, vulnerable primarily to fire and headshots, and responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire. Today, they're only a threat to undeveloped African countries, who are... [[BeliefMakesYouStupid culturally underequipped]] to deal with the walking dead. [[ScriptWank By which I mean they're a bunch of superstitious primitives who try to hold the world's most dangerous pathogen at bay with assault rifles and voodoo! AIDS allegory? What AIDS allegory?!]]
** The Red Frenzy, a fast-acting strain that causes delirium, violent paranoia, and muscle spasms within a few hours of infection, making the living even more dangerous than the zombies they become. It first appeared in 15th-century Spain, and forced a complete rethink of the country's military policies, causing them to abandon the inaccurate musket in favor of old-school heavy cavalry. This, unfortunately, left them utterly unprepared for the living soldiers of the rest of the world, and modern-day Spain is part of Portugal, which in turn swears allegiance to the House of Basarab, making it the only Mithraic state in predominantly Invictine western Europe.
** The Slow Creep, an especially insidious ''slow''-onset strain that popped up in Pakistan around 1821. It can take weeks before the first symptoms (excessive sweating and salivation) present, and by the time the infected notice that their blood isn't clotting normally, their bodily fluids are saturated with the pathogen. As contagious as the common cold and a good deal nastier, the only thing keeping it from becoming the public health issue of the century was the isolated location of the initial outbreaks, which prevented it from making it to major population centers for another fifty years--during which John Tyndall discovered penicillin.

[[DoctorWho Not a planet with a load of sand and some stingrays.]] In fact, predates it by about six months.

*HitlersTimeTravelExemptionAct: Averted, at least in terms of death toll. Adolf Schickelgruber was a renowned surrealist painter and died quietly in 1972, and nobody stepped in to fill his shoes. Stalin and Lenin never existed, and the purges they carried out never happened either. Mao, on the other hand, waited until most of Europe was busy fighting itself, then declared the founding of a new Middle Kingdom and invaded Russia, carving out a huge chunk of land before anyone even figured out what was happening. The following political purges and ethnic cleansings ''could'' have been a reasonable substitute for the Holocaust--but on March 15th, 1947, the first and only ghost in history manifested in Irkutsk and claimed that name for itself. In total, the Maoists killed five million people plus change, and the murderous apparition formed from their collective fear and rage devoured a further three, compared to the over thirty million that Axis nations are believed to have killed in our timeline.