Without the specter of the Third Reich, the plot goes, the world is faced with an altogether more menacing Soviet Union, which under Stalin soon embarks upon its own campaign of global domination, overrunning Europe and forcing the United States and its remaining allies into a desperate guerrilla war for survival.

As outlandish as this all is, it’s in keeping with a common thread: Some of the most active minds dreaming up speculative history can be found on online forums for real-time strategy video games, where alternative outcomes for World War II provide rich fodder for prospective gamers.

One discussion thread explores a history where the Weimar Republic endures, Hitler gets shot and killed in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, and “a free, democratic and prosperous Germany” finds itself at war on the side of Britain in a continent with a very different configuration of alliances and rivalries.

There is plenty of other conjecture, as Vox’s Dylan Matthews points out. British comedian Stephen Fry, in his novel “Making History,” conjures up a scenario in which the Third Reich emerges under the stewardship of a leader more capable and less eccentric than Hitler, with devastating consequences. The Jews get mostly exterminated, Europe falls, and a Nazi empire with nuclear weapons stares across the Atlantic Ocean at the United States in a much different Cold War.