Jumpchain CYOA · Crossover Continuity · 1000 CP · Ten Years
One Earth. An idea from the two Brothers, having decided to create a world where both could co-exist. Gotham and New York have simply always been ninety minutes apart, and everyone has always had to live with that.
Earth-7642 continuity. Both publishers' histories run in full. Neither one is a guest star.
Kal-El's rocket came down outside Smallville in a decade when Steve Rogers was already frozen in the North Atlantic and nobody had thought to look. Gotham and Metropolis sit on opposite shores of Delaware Bay, close enough that on a clear night you can see the Bat-Signal from the roof of the Daily Planet, and neither city has had a quiet year since. New York holds the Baxter Building, a mansion on Fifth Avenue, and a Sanctum on Bleecker Street, and it holds all three badly. Hell's Kitchen and the Bowery share a precinct house, a medical examiner, and a body count.
Nothing here was merged. There was no Crisis that welded two timelines, no Amalgam, no cosmic filing error. Both histories simply ran at once, in the same air, for as long as there has been history, and every institution on the planet is built around the overlap and the seams it leaves. That overlap is what will kill you if you forget it, so here are the twelve facts that matter most.
The Green Lantern Corps polices 3,600 sectors under charter from the Guardians of the Universe. The Nova Corps polices the same volume under charter from Xandar. Sector 2814 contains Earth. Nobody has ever resolved this. Hal Jordan and Richard Rider maintain a working arrangement that consists almost entirely of not filing paperwork about one another, and both chains of command pretend not to know.
Arthur Curry holds Atlantis. Namor holds Atlantis. They are different cities and both of them use the word. Surface treaties have been signed with each king by governments that did not know the other existed. Every few years a diplomat notices and is quietly reassigned, because the alternative is asking which king is lying and neither of them is.
The X-gene and the metagene are not the same thing and never have been. One is inherited and expresses at puberty; one is latent in a large fraction of humanity and fires only under lethal stress. Sentinels were built to hunt the first and walk straight past the second. Bolivar Trask calls this a targeting problem. Amanda Waller calls it an opportunity. Charles Xavier calls it the only reason there are no camps yet.
Mephisto, Neron, Trigon, Blaze, Satannish and the First of the Fallen all hold deeds to overlapping ground, and the borders move. A soul sold in Gotham may be collected in Latveria by a creditor who was not party to the contract. Infernal contract law is the most dangerous branch of magic practised on Earth and the second most lucrative, and there are nine attorneys alive who specialise in it.
Stephen Strange holds the title of Sorcerer Supreme by grant of the Vishanti. Kent Nelson holds the Helm by appointment of the Lords of Order. Neither office recognises the other's jurisdiction, both show up to the same apocalypses roughly four minutes apart, and the four minutes have twice been the difference. Their students are forbidden from comparing notes, which is why their students compare notes constantly.
Stamford will kill six hundred and twelve people, most of them children, because a third-rate villain named Nitro is cornered by a reality-television superteam outside an elementary school. Ninety days later the United Nations will pass the Metahuman Accord: registration, oversight, a central index, a chain of command. The Justice League will sign with reservations. The Avengers will split down the middle. Nobody will ask Krakoa or Themyscira, both of which are sovereign and neither of which is amused.
The Watchers have stopped filing reports. The Monitors have started. Whatever is coming reads as a Crisis from one side of the wall and an Incursion from the other, and the models disagree about whether those are two events or one event seen from two angles. The only being alive who has observed both is not talking and has begun quietly moving its family.
Themyscira has been closed for three thousand years by divine concealment. Krakoa opened four years ago and closed itself by choice, with a seat at the UN, a pharmaceutical monopoly and a resurrection protocol. They are the only two powers on Earth that can decline the Accord without consequence, and they have found, to their mutual irritation, that they agree about almost everything.
Wayne, Stark, LexCorp, Queen, Oscorp, Kord, Roxxon and Hammer. Between them they hold every meaningful patent in powered armour, exotic metallurgy, orbital infrastructure and applied genetics, and four of them are run by people who put on a costume at weekends. The Accord's enforcement budget is smaller than any one of their research divisions.
SHIELD, ARGUS, Checkmate, Cadmus, the DEO, Damage Control, Task Force X and the Thunderbolts all claim the metahuman file, and none of them will admit that another exists in the same jurisdiction. This is the single greatest security vulnerability on the planet and every competent infiltrator in both traditions has exploited it at least once.
The Speed Force underlies motion. The Web of Life and Destiny underlies fate and the totemic bloodlines. Both are real, both are inhabited, and where they touch, people vanish. There is a documented forty-mile corridor between Central City and Queens where speedsters lose traction and spider-totems get headaches, and neither cosmology will explain it.
One is a pale girl in a black t-shirt who takes everyone eventually and is kind about it. One is a silent hooded figure who is courted by Thanos and whose attention is a catastrophe. They are aware of each other. They have an arrangement about Earth. Nobody who has learned the terms of that arrangement has been in a position to report them.
You arrive eight days before Stamford. Superman has been public nine years, Batman eleven. Barry Allen is alive and Wally West is the Flash. The Fantastic Four are on their fourth roster. Xavier's has just reopened after the last time it was destroyed. You have ten years.
Take 1,000 CP. Roll 2d8+16 for age. Keep your gender. Roll 1d30 for where you land. Origin trees are half price to their origin and their 100 CP entries are free; heritage acts as a second discount source. Drawbacks cap at +1600 CP; the ones marked uncapped ignore that entirely.
Who is standing where when you land. Sixty-odd entries, none of which will stay accurate for ten years.
What happens if you do nothing. Every entry is a place to intervene.
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Built from 44 Jumpchain documents. Origins, pricing tiers, capstone boosters, the drawback cap, the supplement format and the scenario structure all follow the conventions those documents established. The setting, the options and every word of the text here are new, written for a world where both continuities have always been true at once.