What Is Andalusada?

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What Is Andalusada? | Point of Divergence | As Our Story Begins
Differences | Science and Technology | How Things Are

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It's a play on the word españolada: "an action, spectacle or literary work that exaggerates the Spanish character." (Bullfights, flamenco music, grinding poverty, the Spanish Inquisition. You know what it means.) An andalusada would, I guess, be a caricature of Islamic Spain.
That explains the name, at least. But what about the world?

It's Alternate History

From day one, Andalusada has been an alternate history. It is set on a planet called Earth, in a universe that is identical to ours in every way — or was, except for something that happened in 1081. That one change set off a cascade of others, rippling outwards across the world and compounding down through the years. As Our Story Begins, any similarities to OTL are superficial, deceptive, and uncanny.

• On the Sliding Scale, Andalusada is, regrettably, Type III for any history that actually matters. When I started writing, the only information I had was a vague divergence ("the Reconquista failed") and a mandatory endpoint ("Saxony, Russia, and Japan are rivals.") Despite my best efforts, I've never completely connected the dots between the two.
• It is, however, a Type I into the early 1100s, and Type II for a century or so beyond that.

More importantly than that, however, Andalusada's alternate history is a very important feature. This is a world radically different from ours, with languages, peoples, and nascent global powers unlike anything in ours. This is a world to engage, explore, examine, and (if there are any gaps that need filling) poke me about.
This is your world. Have fun with it.

It's Political

An oft-neglected fact of alternate history is that history is being everywhere, all the time, and stops for nothing — not even the main characters.

• No man is an island here, entire of himself. Everyone in Andalusada has connections, even player characters, because it's built directly into the chargen rules.

It's your world too, but only if you're willing to fight for it.

It's Dieselpunk

Andalusada shares the same physical laws as our world, but how those laws are harnessed is historically contingent — and Andalusada's Point of Divergence was long before modern science was invented. Over the centuries, Science and Technology has slowly deviated from the patterns of our history, as the laws of nature have been discerned in different circumstances and applied to different problems. As our story begins, Andalusada's technological differences have become prominent. Soon they'll become impossible to ignore.

• Hard Science: "Dieselpunk" is a convenient and accurate shorthand for Andalusada's technological trajectory, but an imperfect fit for the setting. For one thing, Andalusada's primarily an alternate history; dieselpunk is a (very accidental) consequence of the world's difference, rather than a primary cause. More importantly, Andalusada is a world of fairly hard science, bound by OTL's laws of physics (with a few exceptions, but that's How Things Are) — so while its weird technology is cool, it's not impossibly cool as is often the case. For a sense of where I'm coming from, think push-pull guerros, half-tracks, and stealth submarines, rather than giant robots and Tesla death rays.
• Dieselpunk: Andalusada may feature less technomagic than "dieselpunk" implies, but it emphasizes a word the genre often downplays: punk. Celebrate the marginalized, deviant, and nonconforming, and explore the places where technology, subcultures, and politics intersect: biker gangs, tramp typesetters, hotrodders, outlaw broadcasters, and the techno-radicalism this world calls "Dissent." Andalusada loves engines, amplifiers, wind turbines and kitbashed micro-hydro generators because these technologies represent power, power to lift up the lowly — or cast down the mighty from their thrones.

It's Pulpy

So what does one do with a world that has 850 years of backstory, weird science, and a sword of Damocles hanging over its head? What is Andalusada meant for? The answer to that's been consistent over six years: "lowbrow entertainment."

• Hardboiled. Andalusada has no overarching villain and no absolute evil. What it does have is a number of nations vying for influence over the world. Thus, the pulp tradition of Andalusada presents a world familiar from film noir — a world of dubious legality, hard moral choices between shades of gray, and ulterior motives. This informs and overlaps with Andalusada's punk ethos: heroism means solving your own problems, struggling with integrity in a world that often sells out, and defying the powers of this present darkness.
• Heroic. Andalusada is realistic, but it's cinematic realism, lifelike yet larger than life. If you're using this as a game setting, carry that ethos over: the correct answer to "Can we do it?" is "Come up with a plan."
• Metafiction. One of the pretenses of Andalusada is that its stories might, in fact, be historical fiction written in its own future, with the same relation to history that Saving Private Ryan does to WW2.

It's Your World Too

Andalusada began its existence as a setting, not a story — and a shared setting at that. This is a world meant to be played with and used. This is your world too.

• Andalusada is deliberately incomplete. Some areas — Ireland, southern Africa, and northern Cabralia — have been left as sandboxes.
• Canon is intended to be a commons.
• Players have the ability, on a small scale, to create canon ad hoc during gameplay.

Their & Our Timeline

Phrases like "the real world" and "what actually happened" are complex and often confusing when used in alternate history. Andalusada, which is at least slightly metafictional, makes them even less useful. Thus, I'm borrowing two acronyms from AH.com.
(I)TTL stands for "(in) This/Their Timeline" - the world where Andalusada is history.
(I)OTL, by contrast, stands for "(in) Our Timeline" - the doomed world where Andalusada began as a speculative alternate history and ends as a dieselpulp campaign setting.

Andalusada was also tagged as "Political," for several different reasons, but that works slightly differently depending on which timeline we're talking about.

It's Political ITTL

At the most basic level, it's because Andalusada's present day is an exciting time to be alive. (To the extent that it's metafictional, this is the time period when the 21st-century global order congeals and rises to power.) In any extended game or story, even the most hot-blooded action story, at least two very big events are guaranteed to happen if it lasts long enough:

• At some point within the next 20 weeks (i.e. before the end of September), both England-Scotland and France will refuse to renew their ten-year truce without concessions from the other. Despite Saxony's best efforts, any further peace talks will be broken off permanently by Christmas.
• At some point in the next 20 months (i.e. before 1932), women in the UCNA will finally secure the right to vote. Note that this is Canon, but it is not complete: how, when, and why women's suffrage is achieved is open-ended. Your actions could determine any or all of those details. Your story could decide them.

It's Very Political

IOTL, on the other hand, Andalusada is tagged "Political" because it is political. It began with my motive for creating it as a GURPS Infinite Worlds setting: to add one Islam-centered world to a multiverse that was neither an Orientalist fairy tale nor a grim dystopia.

• Andalusada deliberately inverts most assumptions about how history and people "ought" to be.
• It's no coincidence that Andalusada won't have a Holocaust, or that Ouaquouaquite's history isn't the shaggy dog story Haiti's is IOTL, or that the Japanese Empire draws its style and substance from Taisho Democracy rather than Showa militarism. Andalusada deliberately had a lot of its unnecessary racism trimmed in the outline stage; do us a favor and don't edit it back in.