[Scenario Seed] Zone Rouge

[Catsmate]

Just a quick idea.

After World War 1 the French government closed off a series of areas in northeastern France totalling about 1,200km². The ground was classified as unfit for human habitation or use due to contamination with chemicals (arsenic, mercury, lead, picric acid and others), dead bodies (human and animal) and millions of pieces of unexploded ordnance; the official description was "Completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to Agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life impossible"

The most damaged areas were the Zone Rouge (Red Zone) which even today encompasses about 170km². Plant life remains non-existent in some areas, mainly due to the heavy metal contamination.

But is that the whole story? Was the devastation down only to human explosives, poison gases and similar weapons? Or did the desperate combatants deploy even more horrific technologies; temporary portals to other worlds, thanatos bombs, warp drive modules rebuilt to distort time and space, scavenged nanotechnology, strange toxins found dripping from the walls of deep mines (or extracted from extra-dimensional horrors), creatures altered by crude genetic technology. And what if the residue of such devices is the real reason for the restrictions? Are there things still surviving in the Zone? Breeding? Mutating?

Links.
NetGeo.
More details and pictures.

[starkllr]

Or maybe the Zone Rouge is no longer contaminated at all. Maybe it never was.

Maybe the reports of extreme contamination were all fabricated to keep people out, so the French government could completely restrict that territory for its own purposes. What might they be doing there, in their very own version of Area 51? What sort of experiments would require that kind of secrecy?

[Catsmate]

Sept 30, 2015 15:16:36 GMT starkllr said:

Or maybe the Zone Rouge is no longer contaminated at all. Maybe it never was.

Maybe the reports of extreme contamination were all fabricated to keep people out, so the French government could completely restrict that territory for its own purposes. What might they be doing there, in their very own version of Area 51? What sort of experiments would require that kind of secrecy?

Even if most of the quarantined area was genuine it'd have been simple for the authorities to add a chunk of countryside to the Zone, after all who'd question them? As you say it'd be a suitable site for an experimental facility.

Perhaps something happened during the war and that's what is being studied. A French/British/German experiment of some sort? Or did something crawl up from under ground/fall from the sky/pierce the barriers between worlds/materialise?
Perhaps when the Time Lords returned the soldiers kidnapped for the War Games they made a mistake and dropped off something else there?

[starkllr]

Perhaps when the Time Lords returned the soldiers kidnapped for the War Games they made a mistake and dropped off something else there?

Ooh, I like that!

Maybe the soldiers themselves are the "something else." Who knows what the effects of being dragged willy-nilly through time and space might be? Especially with unstable, cut-rate technology such as the War Chief gave to the War Lords to produce the SIDRATs. Or maybe the memory erasure the Time Lords performed on the soldiers didnt quite take. Or had some unexpected side effects.

Obviously there's much for post WWI French scientists to learn from these soldiers, but equally obviously there's no way they can be allowed back into society. What better place to keep them for study than the Zone Rouge?

[Catsmate]

Oct 2, 2015 14:32:00 GMT starkllr said:

Perhaps when the Time Lords returned the soldiers kidnapped for the War Games they made a mistake and dropped off something else there?

Ooh, I like that!

I've always felt that the implications of The War Games have been
underused; SIDRATS out on missions and missed in the cleanup, fleeing
War Lord technicians/guards, screw-ups during the aftermath. The Time Lords aren't viewed as omniscient any more. They could have dropped off a few men from the Second World War accidentally; from a Gallifreyan perspective they're not that different...

Oct 2, 2015 14:32:00 GMT starkllr said:

Maybe the soldiers themselves are the "something else." Who knows what the effects of being dragged willy-nilly through time and space might be? Especially with unstable, cut-rate technology such as the War Chief gave to the War Lords to produce the SIDRATs. Or maybe the memory erasure the Time Lords performed on the soldiers didnt quite take. Or had some unexpected side effects.

Obviously there's much for post WWI French scientists to learn from these soldiers, but equally obviously there's no way they can be allowed back into society. What better place to keep them for study than the Zone Rouge?

Oh yes, groups of men with shared memories of strange battles. Or as you say carrying Artron energy from their trips in the SIDRATS. Perhaps the Time Lords missed a bit of technology some poilu picked up. Or something he was infected with. And if any of them were in the resistance movement on the wargames planet they may have picked up some anachronistic knowledge.

Then there's the saga of River Song; what if a Frenchwoman was pregnant, could the leakage from the SIDRATs alter the baby?

[Marnal]

Some great ideas here!

For what its worth, there novel "Players" touches on the after effects of "War Games" as does the novelization of "Colony in Space". There's also a short story from one of the anthologies that focuses on it IIRC.

And FASA did a sequel to the War Games in the module "Legions of Death" which deals with some of the Roman soldiers from the story.

[Catsmate]

Oct 2, 2015 15:11:22 GMT Marnal said:

Some great ideas here!

For what its worth, there novel "Players" touches on the after effects of "War Games" as does the novelization of "Colony in Space". There's also a short story from one of the anthologies that focuses on it IIRC.

And FASA did a sequel to the War Games in the module "Legions of Death" which deals with some of the Roman soldiers from the story.

I remember Players, one of my favourite of the PDA series; nice connections to the Who timeline (I especially like Dekker's 'return'). Hmm I wonder if the Players were involved in the War Games.

[jezmiller]

There was another reference to the War Games in the first volume of Short Trips. The story starts with a short report from the War Lords' scientific section, talking about gene-splicing experiments they'd conducted to combine human DNA with the DNA of other species they'd assessed, but ultimately rejected, as their prospective all-conquering warrior race. This was followed by a report by one of the Time Lords involved in the cleanup, noting that they'd returned some of the victims of those experiments to locations near their homes, so that they had a chance to acclimatize before meeting their people again - against the advice of Goth, who recommended that they be destroyed as crimes against nature.

It's possible that the War Lords may have experimented with more subtle augmentations - rapid healing, perhaps, or longevity, or even some kind of variant of regeneration. I'm thinking of the Minyans, a human-like race that the War Chief would certainly have known about. Their form of regeneration seems to have been machine-induced, or at least machine-assisted, but possibly the War Chief could have figured out a way to duplicate the process "naturally" in humans. River Song proves that it's possible. Even if the 12-regeneration limit still applied, and each body aged at a normal human rate, a returnee from the War Games could still end up living about eight hundred or so, gaining a new face and a new identity each lifetime. Such an individual could be a powerful ally, or a very dangerous opponent.

Ho-hum. I do believe that gives me a scenario idea...

[Catsmate]

Oct 2, 2015 19:48:22 GMT jezmiller said:

There was another reference to the War Games in the first volume of Short Trips. The story starts with a short report from the War Lords' scientific section, talking about gene-splicing experiments they'd conducted to combine human DNA with the DNA of other species they'd assessed, but ultimately rejected, as their prospective all-conquering warrior race. This was followed by a report by one of the Time Lords involved in the cleanup, noting that they'd returned some of the victims of those experiments to locations near their homes, so that they had a chance to acclimatize before meeting their people again - against the advice of Goth, who recommended that they be destroyed as crimes against nature.

I looked that up, it's War Crimes by Simon Bucher-Jones. A good little story in a pretty mediocre collection.
I like the idea of left over experiments coming back to cause problems, some potential there. Also the Ulk-Ra species described are interesting and could be used again; perhaps some other race realises their potential as troops.

Oct 2, 2015 19:48:22 GMT jezmiller said:

It's possible that the War Lords may have experimented with more subtle augmentations - rapid healing, perhaps, or longevity, or even some kind of variant of regeneration. I'm thinking of the Minyans, a human-like race that the War Chief would certainly have known about. Their form of regeneration seems to have been machine-induced, or at least machine-assisted, but possibly the War Chief could have figured out a way to duplicate the process "naturally" in humans. River Song proves that it's possible. Even if the 12-regeneration limit still applied, and each body aged at a normal human rate, a returnee from the War Games could still end up living about eight hundred or so, gaining a new face and a new identity each lifetime. Such an individual could be a powerful ally, or a very dangerous opponent.

Ho-hum. I do believe that gives me a scenario idea...

Yep some interesting potential there; maybe the War Lords/Aliens were experimenting with producing elite castes of soldiers for their armies. Shock troops that would recover rapidly or regenerate (shades of Weber's hradani and their misuse by the wizards of Kontovar) are one obvious option but there'd be a need for strategists and tacticians, leaders, scouts and infiltrators, intelligence analysts, technicians and more.

One other matter that intrigues me, where did the War Lords get all the troops? If they were fighting large-scale battles for years they'd have used a lot of cannon fodder. Did they duplicate troops in some way? Simple cloning tanks or more advanced systems perhaps? If so what would the Time Lords do with multiple copies of a soldier?
Could a few such have made it back to Earth, much to the confusion of the authorities...

I really like the idea of a human "gifted" with regeneration and returned to Earth. An excellent potential character for a Pulp era campaign, PC, NPC, companion, antagonist or villain.

On the subject of temporal "contamination" there's a couple of references in Big Bang Generation to possible effects of exposure to time travel:

Bernice had possessed for a short period of time a couple of Time Rings that gave her limited access to the past and future but they were unreliable and, if she was quite honest, it scared her a little to use them. It became obvious to her a few years after leaving the Doctor that her body had changed in small subtle ways that people can only notice because they are their bodies; they live in them from day to day; they sense things.
Bernice could already see that she aged differently to other people. She was probably in her mid-fifties now, but she looked and felt maybe fifteen years younger than that. She had an 18-year-old son, a dead husband, and at one point had had her body stolen away from her and occupied by a less-than-charming life form.

Could the SIDRATS have had similar effects? If some humans made a number of trips in them (and were all the "recruited" humans merely cannon fodder or did some work directly for the War Lords perhaps?) perhaps they'd notice similar effects when they returned to Earth.

[Catsmate]

Another though that's popped into my mind. While the Troughton era portrayal of the Time Lords was nearly omniscient and omnipotent beings but later views are far more fallible and corrupt.
And it's that potential for corruption that interests me; what if some of the more interesting experiments of the War Lords weren't destroyed or fixed, not in error but deliberately? Could some of the Time Lords involved have agendas of their own? Certainly Goth, while not canonically part of the cleanup, was corrupted by the Master later in his life, but did he have plans of his own that might be assisted by having a few suitable human minions?

[jezmiller]

Oct 3, 2015 10:42:16 GMT Catsmate said:

Another though that's popped into my mind. While the Troughton era portrayal of the Time Lords was nearly omniscient and omnipotent beings but later views are far more fallible and corrupt.
And it's that potential for corruption that interests me; what if some of the more interesting experiments of the War Lords weren't destroyed or fixed, not in error but deliberately? Could some of the Time Lords involved have agendas of their own? Certainly Goth, while not canonically part of the cleanup, was corrupted by the Master later in his life, but did he have plans of his own that might be assisted by having a few suitable human minions?

It's semi-canonical that one of the Time Lords at the Doctor's trial was Goth - Bernard Horsfall played them both, so it seems reasonable. Going by the Secret History section in the Time Travellers Handbook, the CIA is just getting established during the War Games. At this time, it may still be a clandestine organization. Goth might have become involved with it around that time, maybe seeing it as a source of useful contacts for his political ambitions.

As an illegal group, the CIA would naturally be concerned about plausible deniability. From its point of view, working through a network of human patsies would have made more sense than sending a Time Lord agent in a "borrowed" TARDIS. There could have been two ways of pursuing that strategy - firstly, planting "sleeper" agents throughout vulnerable areas of history, and secondly, quietly arranging for a few "special forces" troops to "acquire" a SIDRAT that somehow got "overlooked" in the cleanup operation.