So, a game of racialist fantasy wish fulfillment imagining a nonsensical alternate history that would never ever have happened, in order to try to argue that "Native Americans were right on the verge of jumping right from mass blood-sacrifice while failing to invent the wheel ALL the way over to Social-Justice Super-tech Utopia, if it hadn't been for that EVIL WHITE MAN!" is what you're presenting as the "Common sense alternative" to Fat Self Care to show that the SJWs aren't just Ideological Terrorists out to transform the hobby into a pop culture version of forced-indoctrination-camps?
Yup. As traditionalist and volkist I'm great supporter of ethnic fantasies even if they have jackshit to do with real possibilities of the world.
I could not care less about real history in my RPG unless I play strictly very historical RPG. Otherwise I'm quite fine with Welsh suddenly being race of Nietzschean ubermensch in Howard's Hyborean Era, despite Welsh being British hillbillies really, I have no problem with not-really African African empires in 7th Sea, and so on, and so on. I mean I could even buy Wakanda if it was not size of fucking Andorra.
Now of course this game can still be very woke - in sexual matters, and in matters of virtue signalling against whites, but this is not given yet.
Also your reducing all North and South Americas to basically Horror!Aztecs is honestly just as bad as their signalling.
To me it looks like Wakanda-for-Indians. A fantasy of a society that not only does not exist, but never existed and NEVER WOULD have existed even if you killed every single white man before 1492. That you need some kind of magic or super-science to explain, because otherwise it makes no sense, and usually still makes no sense even with it.
All to live out the racist fantasy that "if all the white men had just died, we'd be in a much better world".
Well indeed there is magical meteor that brought second Ice Age on world and gave people psionic powers. Which I mean - let's say they acknowledge in 1500s American natives were nowhere near possibility of repelling Europeans on their own power (and I mean magical meteorite is quite peaceful solution - if I was some Lakota Jingoist I'd probably simply reverse plague options - making American strains of infections much more lethal for Europeans - and letting them to move to Europe with American captives).
As I quite like reading - have no chance playing scenarios - where Poland though magical means manages to estabilish Empire and crush Russia and Germany either before partitions or WW2, I honestly understand and support Muskogen desires to at least imagine Muskogen Empire Fairyland. I also support water-elemental based Polynesian Empire taking over all oceans of the Earth.
That's precisely what I have my weird-fiction-fantasy-sci-fi-cyberpunk-hybrids to do wacky shit like that. Including imperialist fantasies for members of disenfranchised nations. :3
You could have santa claus kill every last white person, and it wouldn't have made America sufficiently rich in certain resources required to produce a sufficiently advanced civilization, nor the kind of groundwork of concepts required to create a society that has concepts of the Rights of Man, the Scientific Method, or the Universality of God. You aren't going to get there when you're having huge trouble getting around to inventing the wheel.
That's really weird kind of essentialism. Of course Americans were once many centuries behind due to colonizing fresh virgin continent, rather than use possible synergy of merging of farmers, pastoralist and hunter groups that umphed overall civilisational power of Eurasians. There you started only with hunters and fresh continent. And it took many thousand years for Eurasians to really get farming after Out of Africa, so reaching basically Neolithic period is what should be expected from Americans even if they were genetically superior and smartest of all mankind.
But well we were also rabid barbarians like 8000 years ago and nobody cares.
About those concepts you suddenly capitalise so much - I do not consider human rights to really be vital, they were definitely not in place in times we started to conquer shit out of Native Americans, neither was Scientific Method. Only Universality of God is less material-development depended and well it happened even among Aztec royalty - vide Nezahualcoyotl, and Aztec priesthood officially proclaimed pantheism - those things are certainly possible to made, of course as history learns - accepting Universality of God, rarely leads to Universality of Men.
Now of course it depends of timeline. If game takes part in 2020 and America is suddenly in cyberpunk period I press X.
But it can be like year 3500 and suddenly it's bit more plausible at least with magical psionic meteorite
We reached Scientific Method proper what... 200 years ago, maybe 250. A very short time period in our overall history.
I see one vividly problematic aspect for America development compared to Eurasian ones - lack of horse and I see no other local animal that could easily replace them. That's much more problematic than lack of wheel, which in Eurasia was rather curiosity before we went all cavalry and riders. Without horse it would be wheelbarrows for Americans - much less attractive deal.
It is a complete fantasy based out of a wish fulfillment that utopia would have happened were it not for the evil white men, when in fact it was Western Civilization that has, in all of human history, gotten as close to Utopia as anyone has so far (though admittedly still very very far from it). It's resentment pseudo-history.
Maybe. Or maybe it's just power fantasy of people fucked over by white men, who care more about their national traditions that about universality of Anglosaxon civilisation - which I of course despise as good continental Catholic
The most likely outcome of no Columbian Exchange would have been that in 2021, tribes would still roam the great plains killing buffalo and each other, while central America would be at some stage of its seemingly eternal cycle of building up monument-building empires based on human sacrifice and then having those empires collapse from resource-scarcity back into primitive tribes based on human sacrifice. Maybe the Inca would have fared a bit better, but it's not too likely.
Maybe, maybe not. There is definitely no demand to use mass human sacrifice to build empire even in America. That's why everybody hated Aztecs so much. Occassional human sacrifices were done in Eurasia in Neolithic period, and well way way later and it somehow did not stopped us.