[Scenario Seed] Something in the Water?

[Catsmate]

This little idea was inspired by a discussion at work regarding safe/unsafe places in the USA. Some googling led to the oddity of the town of San Luis Obispo in California.
This is a smallish place of around 45,000 inhabitants which has seen a huge rise in violent crime over the last five years, up some 58%. OK this only puts it about 15% above the US national average and it still has less than one-third the violent crime rate of Indianapolis or Cleveland, or one-fifth that of Detroit, but it's a significant increase in a short period.
Why?

Perhaps the rise is simple a statistical blip, or there is a degree of over-spill from other areas (the town is about midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles) or displacement from town where crime is being fought more effectively (violent crime in the Santa Maria area, about 30km away, dropped 35% in the same period). Or social factors may be in play.

But from a gaming, rather than sociological, perspective those answers are boring¹. There should be a more sinister cause for the change, something the players can fix, or at least fight.
Is something deliberately influencing the town's inhabitants, harvesting the negative psychic energy generated? Or are they the victims of psionic emissions from an alien presence, something that arrived around 2010?

• The Lloigor from the Cthulhu Mythos have this effect. Has there been a noticeable increase in strange birth defects?
• Likewise the town of Derry, Maine, in Stephen Kings's books, had similarly high levels of violence and crime.
  

Or is there indeed, as one of my co-workers suggested, something in the water there². And if so, who put it there? And why? A Sinister Corporation testing a new psychotropic drug? A government agency planning to influence the populace? An independent organisation with plans for world domination?
Of course the effect could be accidental; leaking waste from an alien base or crashed ship, or the human effort to exploit such a find.


Other options.
1. Bodiless aliens taking humans for 'joy rides'.
2. Subliminal messaging (in the cinematic sense) or other technology influencing people to be more irritable. An episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. used subliminally flashing lights to do this.
3. A sinister social experiment testing a combination of minor irritants (calculated failure to deliver good, building design, road works, nightime noise et cetera) to increase the level of tension. Who is behind it? Why?
4. A landslip or minor earthquake in 2010 disrupted the dampers stopping alien psychic influences from passing through a rip in space-time.
5. Psychoactive chemicals sprayed at night in the guise of insect control A popular belief amongst conspiracy theorists.
6. A theme park for amoral, thrill-seeking, time travellers from a monotonous and boring future age. Circumstances are being deliberately manipulated for their amusement, with a massive outburst of violence for the finale of the experience. Can the PCs stop the plan? And who this town, is it fated to be destroyed in the near future anyway?

• And as with time travelling 'disaster tourism' in general there is always the potential for other problems, like futuristic knowledge or technology falling into the Wrong Hands. This could even drive the PCs and the amoral time travellers into an alliance to Save The Future.
  

Links.
Visit SLO a website of the local Chamber of Commerce, whose search function has zero results for 'crime'...
247 Wall Street report




Comments? Suggestions? Ideas?



¹ Unless the GM is planning to use the town as a red herring of course.
² Something other than lead, PCRs or sediment...

[starkllr]

It's also pretty much the exact plot of "Mark of the Rani." Updating it from Industrial Revolution England to present-day California should be no trouble at all. And you've even got a modern=-day analogue to the Master's side scheme in that episode to control all the genuises of the Industrial Revolution, with Silicon Valley being not very far away.

If your players aren't familiar with the classic series, you could just do a search and replace on the location details and run the adventure exactly as the TV story went. If they are familiar with it, you can play around - a different Time Lord (or other alien) might be involved. Or it could be a sequel to the old story. Maybe the tale of what happened in Killingworth got passed down through the ages, and eventually came to the notice of an unethical American scientist (or government operative seeking to create super-soldiers who never have to sleep) who decides to see if he can't replicate what the Rani did.

[Catsmate]

Feb 23, 2016 14:13:38 GMT starkllr said:

It's also pretty much the exact plot of "Mark of the Rani." Updating it from Industrial Revolution England to present-day California should be no trouble at all. And you've even got a modern=-day analogue to the Master's side scheme in that episode to control all the genuises of the Industrial Revolution, with Silicon Valley being not very far away.

If your players aren't familiar with the classic series, you could just do a search and replace on the location details and run the adventure exactly as the TV story went. If they are familiar with it, you can play around - a different Time Lord (or other alien) might be involved. Or it could be a sequel to the old story. Maybe the tale of what happened in Killingworth got passed down through the ages, and eventually came to the notice of an unethical American scientist (or government operative seeking to create super-soldiers who never have to sleep) who decides to see if he can't replicate what the Rani did.

Yeah, it's kind-of a classic plot in the "spy-fi" genre.
I'd forgotten about Silicon Valley, hmm, perhaps someone has bought land in SLO for company housing, and is is trying some sort of human augmentation/selective breeding programme? A successor to International Electromatics perhaps? Or one of Van Statten's companies.

The lack of sleep idea does seem reminiscent of a certain rather awful episode. Though I prefer the idea of a sequel to Mark of the Rani. Given the hurried departure of the Master and the Rani her lab probably survived (including boobytraps). What happened? Did Ravensworth collect up all that strange equipment and hide it away? And did it end up in the hands of the Torchwood Institute seventy years later.
Lots of possibilities there for unethical experimentation and black projects. Carried on at a safe distance from Britain.