Kermit
I find exploration here quite ribbeting. There's always something new leaping out at you. But you have to toad the line -- no direct contact.
Damp, And Continued Wet
Warmer, wetter, and flatter than baseline, by quite a large margin, this world... which does seem to be Earth, or at least, a world at the same spacial coordinates... has few mountains, deserts, canyons, or oceanic trenches. What it has is swamps. A lot of swamps. Shallow seas separated by constantly-inundated lowlands define the bulk of the terrain, with permafrost more like permaslush in the polar regions, with tiny icecaps. A few small mountain ranges exist, with the tallest peaks being under a mile, and there's a few plains and grasslands where conditions are right, but mostly, it's swamp. Even the open sea isn't very open, with thick growths of seaweed covering much of the surface, and the ocean floor rarely being more than 2-3 hundred feet deep.Consequently, the impetus for life to evolve to thrive without constant moisture was much less, comparable to Baseline cave life evolving to live in total darkness -- a small number of species have done that, but it's a fringe niche.
The Age of Amphibians never ended. The vast majority of "land" dwelling life still needs water for its eggs to hatch. While very few dendripaleontologists have had a chance to look (and the environment is not conducive to fossilization), they suspect there was as much variety of life in this world's past as on Baseline, as even today, there have been sightings of snakelike slitherers, lumbering grazers moving in herds, quick-moving pack hunters, and graceful flyers.
And, oh yes, a burgeoning civilization of sapient frog-men.
Swamp Gas
For obvious reasons, BREACH explorers are keeping out of sight as much as possible, hoping to be written off as visions or delusions. Careful observation has shown multiple villages practicing agriculture, including domestication of animals. "Roads" made of resin-coated wooden planks tied with ropes link the largest into trade networks. Wood, stone, and bone are the main materials in use, but they've learned to tan hides. The most recent, and impressive, discovery is pottery, as it's clear mastering fire was not, as on Baseline, a distant precursor to civilization, but the result of it.While they probably learned to capture fire from lightning strikes and use it while they could, it was not until much later they found a far more reliable way to start, and maintain, fire -- the methane that constantly bubbles up. Their first efforts were no doubt quite explosive, but now, they've started to breed plants that produce excess gas as they decay, stick them in containers with woven filters that control how the gas is released, and thus created controllable fire... and having done that, have advanced to clay pots and similar artifacts. Eventually, they will expand to the small outcrops of rock, and find ores and discover what can be done with them, though it may take centuries still.
BREACH
There are few resources of interest to Baseline anywhere near the breach point, and no nationalistic politics to attract fanatics, so there's only limited contact at this point. Unfortunately, there's a growing movement on Baseline that merely providing some humanitarian aid to historical alternates dealing with disaster is insufficient; that there's a right and a duty to help civilizations advance, to share technology freely, whether it's bronze working or gunpowder. There is, legally, no "Prime Directive" (and intervention of all sorts is happening, as an open secret, on many worlds), and whether there should be or not (and how it could be effectively enforced) is a subject of constant debate. The real risk is that it will be moot; before a policy could be created and agreed upon, unauthorized breachers will have already interfered on so many worlds that the rules will be DOA.
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