[Scenario Seed/Location] Oak Island

[Catsmate]

I wish much I could have gone up the coast this summer and visited Oak Island and seen the work you are doing -- for I shall always be interested in that romantic spot. I hope that you will let me know how you have been getting on with modern methods...
                                                                                                                                    Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Loosely inspired by the execrable TV series, a reference to which inspire me to dig out my notes and get them into some sort of shape. Also by this news story, full as it is of unverified claims and nonsense.

Oak Island was originally called Gloucester Isle (after the Duke) is a small, privately owned, island of about 57 hectares in Mahone Bay, in Nova Scotia, one of nearly 400 such small island in the bay. The island is low, rising only about eleven metres above the sea, is covered in trees, and is currently (since 1965) connected to the shore by a 200 metre causeway.

Superficially there's nothing special about the island but since about 1795 hundreds of speculators, treasure hunters, archaeologists, and explorers have been digging up the island in search of an alleged treasure. This has inspired hundreds of publications, more than thirty books and numerous television documentaries (many of extremely dubious accuracy). The island, and the treasure, is supposed to bear a curse though this is extremely dubious as the first account of such a cure appeared in 1950 and appears to be a fabrication.

This hasn't stopped people from speculating wildly about pirate gold, Spanish treasure, the Knights Templar (and their treasure), the Rosicrucians, the alleged temple treasure of King Solomon, an ancient Egyptian tomb, the Ark of the Covenant, lost Shakespeare manuscripts......

It all started in 1790s with one Daniel McInnis (or MacGuinness) he and a couple of friends attempted to dig out a shallow depression where (supposedly) he said he'd seen a block and tackle hanging from a branch on one of the oak trees.

• Back then it was still Gloucester Island.

Now McInnis and his minions found no treasure, but they did find the (alleged) oak platforms and an inscribed stone; the code on that stone was eventually 'deciphered' to read

Forty Feet Below Two Million Pounds Are Buried

• Naturally the stone disappeared soon after it's (alleged) discovery in 1805.

The men dug deeper, 25-30 metres, but found nothing and the shaft flooded.

Likewise the attempts of 1849-50, 1858, 1861-62 (which collapsed the original "money pit"), 1866, 1891, 1897-1900, 1909-10 (which included one Franklin Roosevelt misspending his youth), 1922, 1934-38, 1955, 1959-60, 1965-66, 1970-1987 and later. No treasure.
What have been found are a few enigmatic artifacts, watch chain links, scraps of parchment and similar detritus. Six people have died.

Now in all probability the "Money Pit" is simply a natural sinkhole that McInnis's youthful imagination combined with legends of pirate treasure. The geology of southern Nova Scotia is full of examples of shafts, wells, and caves all of which regularly flood, due to tidal action and changed in the water table.
Those "artifacts" that have been turned up are probably flotsam and jetsam that was sucked into the sinkhole by tides, combined with some fakes and (by now) relics of previous excavations.

• It's just possible that there was a genuine cache on the island once, perhaps 5-6 metres down under the first oak platform. The block and tackle may have been genuine, used to remove the stored items.
  

Of course this is the Doctor Who RPG so mundane reality is boring. What could be responsible for the curse/treasure in the Whoniverse?

1. The Knights Templar.
I'm not going to cover the Knights in detail, there's a lot of data for a GM on the web and in books. After the suppression of the order in 1307 elements did survive and it's speculated that they may have sailed across the Atlantic and done something mysterious. In the Whoniverse their treasure might not have been limited to precious metals, jewels and religious artefacts, there could have strange devices of alien origin, or the produce of suppressed human ingenuity. Even an alien or two.
Perhaps the Templars wanted to create a redoubt for themselves in the New World? Perhaps they did...

Oddities that could be used to 'season' such a mix for a game include:

• Lots of secret maps
• The 1545 Caspar Vopell illustration of Nova Scotia, which has a knight in Templar insignia inscribed
• Several (allegedly) sixteenth century maps showing a "Port of Refuge" on the Atlantic coast, roughly on the location of Oak Island
• A number of stone crosses that have (again allegedly) emerged from the island

One actual, and genuinely odd, fact is that someone planted oak trees on the island around 1500CE (judged by the growth present later). Oaks are not native to North America, and acorns aren't going to float across the Atlantic.


2. Pirates.
Aaarrgh!. OK, the elaborate traps and network of intersecting tunnels that has been theorised on Oak Island is far beyond the capacity, or inclination, of a group of pirates with a treasure to bury. That said there was a "Captain Kidd's treasure map" which was a map of Oak Island, did contained instructions, and which actually described a series of stones in a triangle...
Of course it was a fake, created by one Harold Wilkins, who admitted the hoax. Wilkins later claimed to be either the reincarnation of, or possessed by the spirit of, Captain Kidd.

• In the Whoniverse this might be true.
  

For something a little more plausible, maybe the Royal Navy used that stores dump (see above) to contain an actual treasure. The treasures of Havana, for example, captured in 1762 by Lord Albermarle for King George III. Or himself, which might explain their burial in Nova Scotia...


3. Dee and Bacon.
No speculation involving weird voyages across the Atlantic in the Age of Sail is complete without the involvement of Sir Francis Bacon and Doctor John Dee. Did the men need a discrete base on the North American coast? A supply dump for equipment to be used by the Secret Department in it's ongoing fight against alien incursion? Or a place to contain something that they'd captured perhaps? Or were they mining something unusual, or recovering artefcats from a crashed ship/rift to use in the ongoing war, against aliens or the Spanish.

Certainly there are some interesting oddities in the history of the exploration of Nova Scotia, the unofficial explorers in advance of Samuel de Champlain (1604-7) for example. Maybe Sir Humphrey Gilbert didn't "mysteriously disappear" in the North Atlantic in 1582 after all, but went 'underground' to assist his political masters further. Could this be linked to the Elizabethan  boatswain's whistle of ivory found on the island?

Are the digging efforts actually intended to cover up the island as a base for a continuing occult/alien organisation, in the manner of Torchwood by centuries older? What are they doing there? Do they have bases, operatives and operations elsewhere (you'll need to account for their presence, or lack of it, elsewhere). Have they been subverted by something, corrupted by the opportunities presented by alien technology...


4. An Anomaly or Rift.
Then there's the possibility of a 'soft spot' in space and/or time in the manner of the Cardiff Rift, or the stories of the Bermuda Triangle. Does it have a influence on people, drawing them to the island to search and dig? Are the out-of-place artefacts actually fakes, or merely drawn from somewhere else? Have other items been found, valuable and dangerous devices?

And are the people just digging? Perhaps for decades a network of tunnels has been under construction, lined with copper and silver cables wound around strangely shaped and powerfully magnetised stones, to channel the power of the rift. Why? And who is doing all this? Was one of the earlier explorers contaminated by something and granted extended life to supervise the working of the Great Plan....
What is going to come through the Rift

Do ships from other times drift through a strange fog bank offshore and tie up at Oak Island?

• Well no, sorry. The island is only 200 metres from shore and the area is populated. For this option you'll need a new island, one with more isolation.
  

Or do people from the modern day use the rift to travel, into past and future, to buy and sell, steal and salvage? Is there a small community of people ("swagmen") who are able to navigate the Rift trading with different eras? What happens when alien devices start popping up for sale on Ebay? Sounds like a job for UNIT/Torchwood or similar.

Of course this leaves the question of where the Rift came from; is it a purely natural phenomenon, or, say, the result of a crashed warp drive ship or time machine. Or an experiment carried out by an uncaring traveller that threatens the planet.

• Was the unnamed freighter in Earthshock destroyed entirely in the collision with Cretaceous Earth? Or were fragments hurled through time by the interaction of the damaged warp drive, the Cybermen's device, the Earth's gravity and the exploding anti-matter?
  

Does it attract passing time machines? Do the locals know this, and how do they react? Shades of The Wicker Man perhaps.

Was the Rift responsible for the disappearance of Humphrey Gilbert (above) or John Cabot (who "mysteriously disappeared" in the North Atlantic in 1498)

5. Aliens.
By now the "crashed alien spacecraft" trope is, frankly, becoming a little overused, but that's no reason not to have one under Oak Island.
When did it arrive? Are their surviving crew? In stasis perhaps, with a few robotic servitors slowly fixing the ship. Is it responsible for the supposed weirdness on the island? Perhaps alien psychic emanations cause people to fixate on digging (part of the ship's emergency system, or just dreams from aliens in suspended animation) rationalising this with ideas of a treasure...

• What happens when they find the ship?     Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door....
  

Or is the ship harvesting people who come to the island to search? Are they emergency parts for repairs (à la the Clockwork Androids) or part of a plan to subvert humanity?
Is there a long enduring trail of mysteriously disappeared people in the Oak Island area? Well no actually, but a GM can change that.


6. Atlanteans.
Doctor Who has multiple versions of Atlantis in canon (at least three), and potentially many more if the Doctor's comment to Flip (in Antidote to Oblivion) was correct.
Did a group of people survive the destruction of one of them and settle on the Canadian coast? What happened to them? Did they leave the planet or die off. Or are they still there deep under the island in a hijacked Earth Reptile hibernation pod, waiting to be awakened to restore the glories of Atlantis?


And finally.
There's no reason to shoehorn in aliens if you're prefer a more sedate and down-to-Earth plot. One possibility is that visit by Roosevelt back in 1909. Drop the players in as well and watch while they search out non-existent alien plots, just add a little red herring.

• That's not to say you can't have aliens/time travellers trying to assassinate or mind control the young FDR, if your prefer. Or have him searching for something alien on the island.
  

Another alternative is a simple treasure hunt, with no aliens present bar those PCs who qualify. Mix rampant back-stabbing, rumours of treasure, a ratings hungry TV crew and perhaps and actual find of value. Add some bad weather to isolate everyone and it's a classic recipe.


Comments? Suggestions? Ideas?

[starkllr]

Very nice!

So many interesting possibilities.  So many weird little blips of history, and regular visits by researchers, treasure-hunters and other assorted oddballs over the centuries.

Here's a thought: what if it really is just a mundane island, with no special properties, no temopral rifts, no buried treasure or ahistorical visits from secret societies?  What if all the evidence of weirdness over the centuries has been faked?  Now, that raises the question of who would (or could) do such a thing?  And for what purpose?

A bored (or curious) immortal or near-immortal?  Maybe an Eternal, amusing itself by seeing how many ephemeral humans it can trick into coming to this cold, remote place, and then tormeting them until it grows tired of their futile efforts and moves on to the next group.

What if it's a lure specifically for time-travellers?  Maybe for one particular time-traveller?  Scatter breadcrumbs of weirdness and anachronism to lead the Doctor (or your PC's) to Oak Island, where someone is waiting for them.  Maybe the Master?  Or Mortimus?  Or River Song, for whom this might just be a really elaborate method of flirting with the Doctor?  

[Catsmate]

Dec 17, 2015 15:14:42 GMT starkllr said:

Very nice!

So many interesting possibilities.  So many weird little blips of history, and regular visits by researchers, treasure-hunters and other assorted oddballs over the centuries.

Here's a thought: what if it really is just a mundane island, with no special properties, no temopral rifts, no buried treasure or ahistorical visits from secret societies?  What if all the evidence of weirdness over the centuries has been faked?  Now, that raises the question of who would (or could) do such a thing?  And for what purpose?

A bored (or curious) immortal or near-immortal?  Maybe an Eternal, amusing itself by seeing how many ephemeral humans it can trick into coming to this cold, remote place, and then tormeting them until it grows tired of their futile efforts and moves on to the next group.

What if it's a lure specifically for time-travellers?  Maybe for one particular time-traveller?  Scatter breadcrumbs of weirdness and anachronism to lead the Doctor (or your PC's) to Oak Island, where someone is waiting for them.  Maybe the Master?  Or Mortimus?  Or River Song, for whom this might just be a really elaborate method of flirting with the Doctor?  

The mundane option is a good one, just relocate the weirdness to other islands, there are plenty of them , and leave Oak Island as a venue for some weird experiment in playing with humans. I blame the cats.

Now the idea of a lure just for time travellers is an excellent one. Maybe there's a stranded traveller there, looking for rescue. Or someone who knows time machines are possible and wants to steal one.

And I'd never put anything spast River Song.

[starkllr]

Thinking more about this, I really like the idea of the various odd stories, clues and artifacts being all faked by not one, but TWO time travellers/immortals/etc.

It's a game between them.

"That fake pirate treasure map lured twenty-three treasure-hunters to their death just in the 1810's alone."

"Amateur. When the Pope got a look at my map with the Templar cross in 1603, he sent fifty Swiss Guards, AND an Archbishop to look for their hoard. Look, I've still got his hat. That has to be worth at least a hundred points!"

It's all fun and games, of course, until the Doctor gets wind of it and decides to try and put a stop to the "fun."

[Catsmate]

Dec 17, 2015 15:59:13 GMT starkllr said:

Thinking more about this, I really like the idea of the various odd stories, clues and artifacts being all faked by not one, but TWO time travellers/immortals/etc.

It's a game between them.

"That fake pirate treasure map lured twenty-three treasure-hunters to their death just in the 1810's alone."

"Amateur. When the Pope got a look at my map with the Templar cross in 1603, he sent fifty Swiss Guards, AND an Archbishop to look for their hoard. Look, I've still got his hat. That has to be worth at least a hundred points!"

It's all fun and games, of course, until the Doctor gets wind of it and decides to try and put a stop to the "fun."

I like it!