A recent Kickstarter game was loosely based on time travel . The players could get resources from the future , and after time travel is invented , they have to send back the resources or face paradoxes . Essentially , it is a loan , but it tied in with the theme a lot better than a generic loan might have . <| sep |> I can never get my run game going and then my passing plays run out as I ' m forced to pass because of no run game <| sep |> So far as we know there have been three pandemics of bubonic plague , the first during the reign of the emperor Justinian , the second in the fourteenth century commonly called the Black Death , and the most recent occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries roughly 18551959 . Periodic outbreaks occurred in between these three large events . Your great aunt was describing the third one , which saw outbreaks of the plague on every inhabited continent , but Asian countries were the most heavily affected . 12 million Chinese and Indian people died alone . Plague was responsible for some of the deaths caused by Europeans ' first arrival into the New World , but smallpox was likely a more important factor because it is much more communicative and much more lethal . There have been a lot of books about this subject . Born to Die by David Noble might be a good starting place . I ' m not so sure if you can attribute the appearance completely to the world wars , increased trade traffic and easier travel is probably a surer bet because the third outbreak began a few decades before World War I . This would help to explain the connection you ' re noticing to certain port cities .