Post by Catsmate on Mar 31, 2016 12:17:32 GMT
A few ideas from my 'slush pile'.
Eight thousand years or so ago three major geologic events occurred in the space of less than a century that had devastating effects on nascent human civilisation. The total human population of the world was only about six million, engaged in developing new ideas like metal working (copper, silver and gold), domestication of pigs and cows, pottery, keeping bees and constructing cities based on trade, in the generally warming climate, nature had three devastating events in store. So any alternation to history, deaths or survivals, could echo down the millennia to cause huge changes in the present.)
1. North America.
The first was what's referred to as the 8.2 kiloyear event (wiki) a sudden drop in global temperatures around 6200BCE that lasted for between two and four hundred years, leading to worldwide climate change, making the planet cooler and drier and disrupting human agriculture. It's believed to have resulted from the collapse of the remains of the massive Laurentide ice sheet covering northeastern North America, which dumped trillions of tonnes of cold, almost salt-free water into the Atlantic. This caused a sudden rise in the Atlantic sea level of several metres, and eventually an increase in global sea levels of about a metre. The influx disrupted ocean currents and changed weather patterns for centuries.
2. Northern Europe.
The second is what's called the Storegga slide, one of the largest landslides in human history. These happened underwater at the edge of the Norwegian continental shelf in the Norwegian Sea, about 100km north-west of the Møre coast. The collapse of around ten trillion tonnes of rock and sediment (about 3,600km3, sufficient to bury the current British Isles under ninety metres of materiel) into the Atlantic caused a huge tsunami that swept outward, much of the force directed south west towards the northern British Isles.
At the time Britain was changing from ice-covered tundra to heavily forested area with low-lying plains by lakes, estuaries, and salt marshes. A pleasant place to live in the gradually warming climate. Britain was still connected to the rest of Europe by Doggerland, a huge land bridge that is today underwater, the Dogger Bank. This was probably a well populated, by the standards of the time, area with rich opportunities for fishing, fowling and hunting.
Until the wall of water arrived that is.
The megatsunami hit at about 40m/s, a surge about thirty metres high that travelled more than forty kilometres inland in places. It would devastate communities in Scotland, the east coast of Britain, western Norway, parts of Iceland, and Doggerland. Traces have been found as far away as Greenland.
This is another event that has been studied because of potential implications for the modern day; it has been postulated that the development of Ormen Lange natural gas field might cause a similar event through the release of methane hydrates or triggering another landslip. This is considered extremely unlikely...
3. Southern Europe.
The third was another megatsunami, this time in the Mediterranean. The eastern side of Mount Etna in Sicily underwent a catastrophic collapse, causing an enormous landslide into the ocean and displacing a massive wall of water that devastated coastal communities in the eastern Mediterranean.
Game use.
1. Were these events natural occurrences? Did someone engineer one or more of these events? Who? How? Why? The Time Meddler is an obvious suspect. Perhaps too obvious...
2. Perhaps one or more were accidental effects of alien activity. Did Etna's eastern slope collapse because of the impact of a crashing spacecraft, or a stray missile from a battle in orbit? Did the North American super-lake collapse result from an off-world mining company project with poor project management?
3. Did the PCs cause them? Perhaps while preventing some other menace; for example rigging the power reactor of a seabed Silurian base to overload might seem like a good idea, until it causes the Storegga slide...
Will the players be reassured by the "historical inevitability" of their actions? Or annoyed by being stuck in a predestination paradox.
4. I've mentioned the idea of time travelling disaster tourists before. Such people probably wouldn't deliberately alter the flow of history, though their amoral voyeurism and jaded attitude might annoy some players, but there is plenty of potential for accidental changes. Perhaps some items are lost and discovered by archaeologists in the modern day, triggering a UNIT investigation. Or the mere presence of the time travellers changes events, leading to some humans surviving the inundation who should have died.
5. What if someone prevents one of these disasters. OK, stopping the collapse of the Laurentide ice sheet seems a pretty tall order, but the others are potentially possible, with sufficient technology and resources. When they see the consequent alteration in human society the party need to stop them.
6. Of course dropping the party into the path of a disaster they're unaware of is a time-honoured Doctor Who trope. How will the party cope? How will the actions impact others? Will they alter history?
7. Historians would be interested in the opportunity to study such events, either Companions of a Time Lord, curious independent time travellers ('freetimers') like Xavier Trelgor or academics like the staff of St Mary's Institute of Historical Research. Now add in the PCs, plundering around, interfering with research, suspicious of peoples' motives and generally causing trouble...
Links.
BBC page on the Storegga tsunami
BBC page on archaeological excavations related to the tsunami
National Geographic page on the Etna tsunami
Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?
Eight thousand years or so ago three major geologic events occurred in the space of less than a century that had devastating effects on nascent human civilisation. The total human population of the world was only about six million, engaged in developing new ideas like metal working (copper, silver and gold), domestication of pigs and cows, pottery, keeping bees and constructing cities based on trade, in the generally warming climate, nature had three devastating events in store. So any alternation to history, deaths or survivals, could echo down the millennia to cause huge changes in the present.)
1. North America.
The first was what's referred to as the 8.2 kiloyear event (wiki) a sudden drop in global temperatures around 6200BCE that lasted for between two and four hundred years, leading to worldwide climate change, making the planet cooler and drier and disrupting human agriculture. It's believed to have resulted from the collapse of the remains of the massive Laurentide ice sheet covering northeastern North America, which dumped trillions of tonnes of cold, almost salt-free water into the Atlantic. This caused a sudden rise in the Atlantic sea level of several metres, and eventually an increase in global sea levels of about a metre. The influx disrupted ocean currents and changed weather patterns for centuries.
- It's also been used a model for potential climate change in the next century.
2. Northern Europe.
The second is what's called the Storegga slide, one of the largest landslides in human history. These happened underwater at the edge of the Norwegian continental shelf in the Norwegian Sea, about 100km north-west of the Møre coast. The collapse of around ten trillion tonnes of rock and sediment (about 3,600km3, sufficient to bury the current British Isles under ninety metres of materiel) into the Atlantic caused a huge tsunami that swept outward, much of the force directed south west towards the northern British Isles.
At the time Britain was changing from ice-covered tundra to heavily forested area with low-lying plains by lakes, estuaries, and salt marshes. A pleasant place to live in the gradually warming climate. Britain was still connected to the rest of Europe by Doggerland, a huge land bridge that is today underwater, the Dogger Bank. This was probably a well populated, by the standards of the time, area with rich opportunities for fishing, fowling and hunting.
Until the wall of water arrived that is.
The megatsunami hit at about 40m/s, a surge about thirty metres high that travelled more than forty kilometres inland in places. It would devastate communities in Scotland, the east coast of Britain, western Norway, parts of Iceland, and Doggerland. Traces have been found as far away as Greenland.
This is another event that has been studied because of potential implications for the modern day; it has been postulated that the development of Ormen Lange natural gas field might cause a similar event through the release of methane hydrates or triggering another landslip. This is considered extremely unlikely...
- Of course that's no reason not to send a party of modern day investigators from UNIT to one of the most hostile working environments in the world; subzero temperatures, stormy seas, strong underwater currents and more push the limits of current human technology. A perfect opportunity for someone to deploy something more advanced, the product of Mad (or at least Odd) Science or reverse engineered alien technology. Or sabotage, can the Sea Devils operate in such conditions. Then there are the usual plotlines of stumbling over an alien spaceship, or Primord mutating slime. And don't forget international intrigue in a world dependent on fossil fuels, as a plotline or red herring.
- If the landslip were to recur today it would devastate the east coast of Britain, the west coast of Norway, the Low Countries and much else. Millions could die.
3. Southern Europe.
The third was another megatsunami, this time in the Mediterranean. The eastern side of Mount Etna in Sicily underwent a catastrophic collapse, causing an enormous landslide into the ocean and displacing a massive wall of water that devastated coastal communities in the eastern Mediterranean.
- One of these was Atlit-Yam in Israel, a Neolithic settlement which was abandoned around this time. Archaeologists have found evidence that the population left rapidly, even leaving freshly gutted fish behind.
Game use.
1. Were these events natural occurrences? Did someone engineer one or more of these events? Who? How? Why? The Time Meddler is an obvious suspect. Perhaps too obvious...
2. Perhaps one or more were accidental effects of alien activity. Did Etna's eastern slope collapse because of the impact of a crashing spacecraft, or a stray missile from a battle in orbit? Did the North American super-lake collapse result from an off-world mining company project with poor project management?
- There's no reason to limit the possibility of alien meddling to the present day or future.
3. Did the PCs cause them? Perhaps while preventing some other menace; for example rigging the power reactor of a seabed Silurian base to overload might seem like a good idea, until it causes the Storegga slide...
Will the players be reassured by the "historical inevitability" of their actions? Or annoyed by being stuck in a predestination paradox.
4. I've mentioned the idea of time travelling disaster tourists before. Such people probably wouldn't deliberately alter the flow of history, though their amoral voyeurism and jaded attitude might annoy some players, but there is plenty of potential for accidental changes. Perhaps some items are lost and discovered by archaeologists in the modern day, triggering a UNIT investigation. Or the mere presence of the time travellers changes events, leading to some humans surviving the inundation who should have died.
- The PCs could arrive after the flood and encounter a 'clean up' team hunting down such inadvertent survivors, leading to the moral dilemma of what to do with them.
5. What if someone prevents one of these disasters. OK, stopping the collapse of the Laurentide ice sheet seems a pretty tall order, but the others are potentially possible, with sufficient technology and resources. When they see the consequent alteration in human society the party need to stop them.
- Stephen Baxter, author of the Second Doctor novel The Wheel of Ice, has written a trilogy of novels set in a world where Doggerland survived.
6. Of course dropping the party into the path of a disaster they're unaware of is a time-honoured Doctor Who trope. How will the party cope? How will the actions impact others? Will they alter history?
- Are they smart enough to realise you can't outrun a tsunami and seek high ground?
7. Historians would be interested in the opportunity to study such events, either Companions of a Time Lord, curious independent time travellers ('freetimers') like Xavier Trelgor or academics like the staff of St Mary's Institute of Historical Research. Now add in the PCs, plundering around, interfering with research, suspicious of peoples' motives and generally causing trouble...
- Though if St Mary's is involved they'll usually cause enough trouble on their own. But at least they'll have tea.
Links.
BBC page on the Storegga tsunami
BBC page on archaeological excavations related to the tsunami
National Geographic page on the Etna tsunami
Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?
