Crossover backstories
I have written a lot of crossovers, but most of them I just put together for fun for a story. There are certain ones that get stuck for me, and make so much sense, and often make canon make so much more sense, that I 100% believe them to the extent you can assume anytime I'm playing in a world, that crossover is active, even if I never explictly mention it in the story. I've run into a few of them talking with people lately, so I thought I would make a list! (I have probably forgotten some that I'll have to come back and add later. And I've left out ones like "Ms. Frizzle is a Timelord" that everybody knows are true.)
There are no Young Wizards crossovers. Every universe is canonically part of the Young Wizards multiverse (though they may seem more or less so, depending on their own laws and the needs of their inhabitants) so every fic is a Young Wizards fic and none are crossovers.
Not every universe has Highlander immortals, but a lot of them do.
- Mad Max is an immortal whose memory gets super messed up every time he takes a Quickening. (Or, well, maybe more accurately: a Quickening that messes up its winner's memory whenever it gets taken.)
- The Old Guard is a Highlander movie; the people who invented the Game were just barely smart enough not to tell Andromache of Scythia about it.
- People with the Ancient gene are usually pre-Immortals (unless they're already Immortals)
Also, the reason you don't mess around with quickenings on "Holy Ground" is that Quickening energy reacts really poorly with even trace amounts of Naquadah. In fact the whole Quickening thing was originally a defense against becoming Goa'uld hosts that was put in place by the last remnant Ancients on Earth during the first Goa'uld invasion, although that's almost entirely forgotten; descendants of Ancient people who left Earth before then don't have it. (This doesn't quite line up with all the lore but the Naquadah-Holy Ground part makes so much sense that I stick with it anyway.)
- (Also, everyone on the Leverage team has the Ancient gene.)
Tolkien's Middle Earth is the universe from Diane Duane's Wounded Sky. Which makes K't'lk Ungoliant and assorted other powers the shadows of various Enterprise crew. (Someday I'll write the fic where they get a chance to visit.)
A Night in the Lonesome October gives the AU backstory of A Study in Emerald.
Sister Simplice from Les Miserables is the French vampire from They Who Hunt The Night. She is bleached-white with cool waxy skin and no detectable age, but she lived through the Great Plague, so it makes sense she'd go into nursing. (Honestly any time I mention vampires they're probably Hambly-style unless they explicitly aren't because they make so much more sense than any others I've read.)
The Earl of Red Gloria is friends with the Dukes of Denver.
Machineries of Empire and the Locked Tomb take place in the same universe, but quite far apart. Look the magic in Machineries isn't not necromancy-adjacent and a myriad is plenty long enough for a whole society to grow up that doesn't remember Earth.
The M25 is a demonic sigil in every universe where it exists. Not sure this counts as a crossover as opposed to a true fact that happened to be popularized by a book, but a lot of people assume it's a crossover when they notice it. Most bypass ring roads are demonic sigils actually; if they weren't before they were built they are after people have been driving them awhile. (The bit where CDs or cassettes left in a car turned into Best of Queen is also a thing that's just true that only happened to be popularized in a book.)
Good Omens is set in the same universe as Mark Twain's Adam and Eve Family Papers.
Indiana Jones and The X-Files take place in the same universe. They also share the same government storage warehouse. (I haven't seen the Indy movie that has aliens in it but also I don't care.)
San Fransokyo was built by refugees after the end of the Kaiju threat and disbanding of the PPDC. Apparently it's now canonically a post-1906 earthquake alternate history but I prefer my version.
Due South and Dresden Files are set in the same Chicago (it's just that the Due South characters understand the magic better.)
Every mysterious invisible island in Lake Michigan is the same island, connected interdimensionally (I've collected three so far, but I suspect a lot of worlds have them, it's just nobody's found them yet.)
All large libraries and small twisty bookstores are connected via L-space.
If you need a place where the air is sweet and everything's A-OK badly enough, then from any city in all the worlds, I can tell you how to get to Sesame Street.
The Minecraft "multiverse" is actually a very old Dyson swarm (or possibly a cluster of them.) Bedrock is scrith. You can fit about a quadrillion average-sized Minecraft worlds into a 1 AU full-sphere Dyson swarm, or 70000 max-sized ones, more if they're not completely flat. Yes I've done the math1, if you assume scrith and artifical gravity this explains everything about Minecraft worlds. Of course there are many more than 70,000 Minecraft worlds but most of them are orders of magnitude smaller than the maximum. The respawn mechanic is that player characters are all cloned ancillaries. (I dare someone to either write Tisarwat and friends visiting that version of the Radch or your favorite Minecraft people making it outside the Radch for the first time.)
1.A standard minecraft "world" ( Read more... )