Title/ Adventure Inspirations

[grinch]

As I am one to do when bored, I often come up with random adventure titles to spark the seeds of adventure inspiration. But I thought why not post them here and see what the lovely folks on these forums could come up with in terms of adventure ideas. So, here are a few. I'll leave them to you to see what you can come up with. And who knows? You might one day end up running your PCs through these very adventures.

1. Planet of the Scorchies

2. Doombringer 

3. Extinction of the Gods

4. Matchstick Men

5. When I Fall in Love

6. The Day the Penguins Disappeared

7. Zaboom

8. Until We Die

9. Penance of the Cybermen

10. The Time Lord and the Pussycat

[misterharry]

Feb 24, 2019 22:21:53 GMT grinch said:

1. Planet of the Scorchies

Sounds like an origin story to me. Clearly the PCs can't prevent the creation of the Scorchies, that would cause all sorts of timey-wimey problems. But if they arrive during the catastrophic alien invasion that destroyed their planet, perhaps they could save some of the people both from the invader and from becoming the Scorchies. And perhaps the newly-created Scorchies will want to come back and finish off what the alien invader started and burn up the planet!

10. The Time Lord and the Pussycat

Ahh, an adventure featuring a historical celebrity in the form of Edward Lear, Victorian artist and writer of limericks and nonsense verse. Perhaps the PCs enjoy a series of adventures with Lear that form the inspiration for some of his more famous creations - the Jumblies (who go to sea in a sieve), the Pobble Who Has No Toes and, of course, an encounter with a pig "with a ring on the end of his nose". What manner of aliens could these bizarre characters represent? Lear's well-documented ill-health could pose a problem for PCs wanting to ensure he survives to return home and actually write his poems!

[grinch]

Feb 27, 2019 8:44:54 GMT misterharry said:

Feb 24, 2019 22:21:53 GMT grinch said:

1. Planet of the Scorchies

Sounds like an origin story to me. Clearly the PCs can't prevent the creation of the Scorchies, that would cause all sorts of timey-wimey problems. But if they arrive during the catastrophic alien invasion that destroyed their planet, perhaps they could save some of the people both from the invader and from becoming the Scorchies. And perhaps the newly-created Scorchies will want to come back and finish off what the alien invader started and burn up the planet!

10. The Time Lord and the Pussycat

Ahh, an adventure featuring a historical celebrity in the form of Edward Lear, Victorian artist and writer of limericks and nonsense verse. Perhaps the PCs enjoy a series of adventures with Lear that form the inspiration for some of his more famous creations - the Jumblies (who go to sea in a sieve), the Pobble Who Has No Toes and, of course, an encounter with a pig "with a ring on the end of his nose". What manner of aliens could these bizarre characters represent? Lear's well-documented ill-health could pose a problem for PCs wanting to ensure he survives to return home and actually write his poems!

Ooh, just had a rather interesting thought regarding Planet of the Scorchies. Perhaps the invading force could be of the same energy that the Wire belonged to? Perhaps her/him/it’s criminal cohorts decides to attack their planet seeing its defenceless and that’s the reason she got placed on trial. Probably doesn’t fit with established canon but would make for a rather interesting scenario if the playful albeit malevolent marionettes came to encounter the same race that destroyed their planet and forced them into these current forms. That is, if they can even remember who the invaders were in the first place.

[Catsmate]

4. Matchstick Men.
Three possibilities.
I. Basically the plotline of the terrible Cage film of that name but substituting a MacGuffin of some sort for the money and having the players build a 'long con' to get it back from the con-artist. Numerous layers of betrayal.


II. People are disappearing in Manchester¹. Nothing really new there, people disappear all the time in modern cities and after all it's Manchester². But someone (a UNIT staffer with OCD perhaps?) has noticed a pattern. There are far more people disappearing soon after visiting The Lowry³ that is statistically likely.
So the PCs are dispatched to investigate, based on a tenuous, dubious, theory developed by a member of UNIT valued for her occasional brilliant insights but not really respected or trusted. She gets a team, but not exactly UNIT's best and brightest⁴.
Cue the semi-comedic scene of large military types in civvies trying to discretely investigate a Performing Arts Centre...

What is going on. Well now, remember Lowry the artist? He was known for a rather mischievous sense of humour and telling of tall tales⁶. But one tale he never told his friends, the story of what happened to him one night in 1939 on a lonely road outside Berwick-upon-Tweed and was the real cause of his wartime depression and neglect...
Did he see a vision of the future? Britain under Nazi control perhaps? What secrets are hidden in his journals, sketches and papers (mostly held in the Lowry and not open to casual visitors).
And what about the centre itself? Urban renewal is all very well but what surprises might lurk under the ground of the Manchester Ship Canal and Docks? Just why was the Imperial War Museum North built there⁷? What's the connection between the renewal, a spike in missing persons and a strange wood carving in the Lowry collection?


III. Around the world there's a new Slenderman (wiki) craze⁸. People, mainly teenagers, are claiming to see what the describe as "Matchstick Men', usually at a distance, at night or in woodland. Or in their gardens. And now in the same room.
Then the sightings end and the teens say it was all a joke.
But it wasn't, was it?

What are the creatures? Well I favour time travelling robots, but you're free to come up with your own origin story and motivation.
Rather weird robots, they're rather reminiscent of the 'ball and stick' molecular modelling sets with small ball 'feet' and 'knees' connected by cylindrical rods to a larger spherical 'chest', then arms, a neck and a head. All constructed of dullish silvery or brassy metals(?) for the limbs and a matt black material for the balls.
They're being sent back by a scientist in the fiftieth century to try and alter her present, to stop the abandonment of Earth caused by the meddling with the sun and generally fix the future she believes is otherwise inevitable; a horror of constant warfare, mass death and totalitarianism. She's right, but she also has to be stopped...

How is she Adamah⁹ doing all this? Well she has a combination of resources; a time displacement project that's being funded to a small extent as they're aware of rumours of a similar project being developed by the Supreme Alliance. But Adamah also has off-world support, the true source of which she's not aware of, a small collection of ancient alien artefacts (Osiran?) that were found buried in a bunker and an assistant who seems strangely knowledgeable about both history and time travel¹⁰...

Meanwhile in the present day (2020?) UNIT are investigating a not very high priority matter¹¹. But they're not the only ones; in a ruined not-quite-castle¹² a time traveller has been dragged back into realtime by the intersection of his craft Sinclair Field with one of the tunnels Adamah's experiments has been punching through the Vortex¹³ and he's not happy.
Neither are the vampire that call Bleakheath House their home...

Earth in the beginning of the sixth millennium is a backward, isolated and generally unimportant place. Abandoned during the Solar Flares era (the result of some ill-advised solar engineering) it now has a population approaching two billion, from cryo-stasis survivors, natural and artificial births and some immigration.

• The fiddling with the sun was an attempt to end the Ice Age era; itself the result of some earlier planetary engineering gone wrong.

The population has a bit of a grudge against the Galactic Federation who, in the view of Terran nationalists, didn't help them enough during the flare era (the advice to stop messing with technology you don't understand and leave Sol alone was not well received). Technologically Earth has regressed substantially, being a mix of 19th to 21st century, though with some advanced imports. There's a moderately effective embargo against importing advanced tech.

Of course the Feds have their own problems; the split that formed the Confederacy was peaceful enough (only a few million died) but the Confed is expanding faster and encroaching on areas the Fed think are theirs. That said the rivalry is generally peaceful.

• One thing both powers do agree on is the New Terran Empire (a rather grandiose name for a smallish, sub-galactic, power) is not getting control of Earth. Theres too much social and cultural baggage there. Plus a lot of them, especially the non-humans, remember the last human Empire and not fondly.
• The Time Agency was a joint project, it didn't last. Both factions now have limited time travel and are anxious to monopolise it. Though a few Agents simply went rogue and set up as Freetimers.
• Both the Galactic Federation (actually eleven galaxies have significant membership), the Confederacy (also multi-galactic and other powers things are peaceful on the large scale. This won't last of course.

World Wars Four through Six didn't help things on Earth much either, lots of effort (and resources) that could have been used in rebuilding human civilisation on it's home were wasted. However after WW6 things are rather better. Of course there's still the lack of useful mineral resources on planet, asteroid mining and salvaging of surviving pre-flare bases is big business. What will become the Bio-al Foundation is being planned, and the Second Diaspora isn't too far off.

During the Supreme Alliance period, both before and during WW6, various 'Weird Technologies' were evaluated and tested. Hence the 'organic distillation' setup Greel used, research which would culminate in the New London Horror of von Wachten. Bio-tech was also popular, including weird cybernetic genemod animals.

Comments? Suggestions? Ideas?




1. Actually, and to be serious for once, Manchester and environs does seem to have a missing person ('misper') problem  and there have been suggestions that Greater Manchester Police didn't investigate as well as they should have. Link

2. I've been there...

3. The combined theatre/gallery/PAC named after the painter L. S. Lowry ("He painted Salford's smokey tops / On cardboard boxes from the shops / And parts of Ancoats where I used to play / I'm sure he once walked down our street  / Cause he painted kids who had nowt on their feet / The clothes we wore had all seen better days"). Wiki

4. Every organisation has those people. The ones that don't really fit but can't be gotten rid of. UNIT will have such cases.
The flaky psychic with unreliable telepathy. The acerbic, wheelchair bound scientist. The investigator who can see patterns no-one else can (even when they're not there). The soldier with no sense of humour and a preference for force as the first option. The junior officer who annoyed her superiors and got stuck with this mob. The in-over-his-head geek student who Saw Too Much and got conscripted. The timeworn cynic who remembers the Doctor's exile. The PTSD case who had to kill her comrades to save the planet. The practical joker who takes nothing seriously, for a reason. The alien who's not quite trusted fully and has a dodgy shimmer.⁵
Think MacBride's Misfit Mob.

5. Bugger. Now I have the urge to develop this bunch further and stat them. Another one for the General Notes file...

6. He also has a large collection of clocks in his living room, all set at different times. There's a interesting seed for you...

7. I'd blame Torchwood. An old outpost of theirs perhaps? One set up to study something found under the ground there and destroyed in the Manchester Blitz in '40. Except of course it wasn't; they'd already gone renegade, seduced by the power offered to them by IT (or THEM), the power to destroy Germany and grant Britain her rightful place in the sun again. The price wasn't that bad, who'd miss a few Mancunians? In the dark days of World War Two sacrifices mus be made...

8.  Give that recently we've had the recent Momo Challenge nonsense (wiki), the Slenderman murder case (wiki) and back in 2016 there were the weird clown sightings (wiki) that caused panic there are plenty of examples of this sort of thing.

9. At this stage she's earned a name. There is no actual feminine of Adam, my usual placeholder.

10. And who might not actually be a time traveller/TDP/changed Time Lord himself. That's getting a bit hackneyed.

11. Another outing for the Misfit Mob. "Yes Prime Minister we do have a team, a very special team, investigating the Matchstick Men".

12. "It looked pleasant enough in the autumn sunlight. A solid, Victorian Gothic mansion, built of the local granite, set in a few acres of carefully-tended gardens. A breeze lifted my hair and blew the drifting leaves about my feet. The last of the flowers in the garden had died, and the first nip of winter was in the air. I walked up the long path between the low hedges and manicured lawns. Yes, it looked pleasant enough... but the windows were dark, like black holes, reflecting nothing of the blue autumn sky."

13. The experiments could also attract other time travellers, or things from other universes or perhaps time travellers from other universes? "Who's this woman on my change?"

[Catsmate]

Now for another try.
2. Doombringer.
Very evocative, got me thinking of Moorcock and a certain doomed albino anti-hero.

Possibility 1. Person.
Someone who brings doom to all that meet her. Why? Is it voluntary or involuntary? Is she aware of what happens, and if so does she care or try and avoid harming others.
Does she carry a plague (be it viral, nanotechnological or mimetic)? Is she an unwilling host for something nasty (Great Old One or other possessing entity) that occasionally gains control of it's host and goes on a murderous rampage, or unleashes alien influence in the environs, warping space around it.
Was she exiled or imprisoned because of the infection/possession, perhaps the last survivor of a group of those infected. She might be found, the last living thing on a small starship in inter-galactic space¹, or walled up in a derelict building², sustained that what which she carries.
Was she released accidentally, or has someone sought her out?

Or was the name given to her because of what she did in the past, à la "Ender" Wiggin, the Xenocide.


Possibility 2. Artefact.
Something that causes doom, either directly or merely because  it's there. Does it warp minds, turning peaceful creatures in raving maniacs, or cool and calculating killers³.

Is is something so powerful that galactic empires would crush planets and sift the dust to gain control of it, like the Moiralith

Does it control opening a gateway to somewhere else filled with horrors ready to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world/galaxy/universe?


Possibility 3. Place.
Sci-fi is full of places that people avoid, are warned away from⁴, or never return from. Planets/places hosting hostile and/or mysterious aliens, regions where the laws of nature vary, time flows differently or have been the dumping ground for dangerous material, people or objects.

But there's always someone who ends up there...


Possibility 4. The ship.
This is my favourite one, though a little hackneyed.
In the dying days of the Terran Empire many dubious projects were initiated; the mission to Avalon to gain control of the semi-sentient femtotech and the dangerous experiments with Icarons being well documented. But many other 'superweapon' projects existed, one of them was the ISS Devastation, also called the Doombrinbger.

Constructed in the Nereid orbital yards in 2997-3008, the home of many experimental naval projects that the Empire wanted to keep quiet, the Devastation was to be the first of a small class of 'hyperdreadnaughts'. Larger than even the Luna class of planetoid warships she was to carry forty 'parasite' battlewagons, plus smaller escorts, and use a modified version of the Icaron system to aid the formation of a 'hyperspace bubble' around the ship⁵. She would be faster than any conventional hyperdrive ship, even the nimble couriers that dove into the deeper bands, and carry a fleet along with her.

Her offensive armament was formidable in it's own right: in addition to realspace FTL and RKK missiles, hypercannon, particle, plasma and EM projectors in the petawatt range, torpedoes, gravity lances and more.
She was to be self-sustaining, able to crush asteroids for material to feed her internal factories⁶ and supply her needs.
The primary weapon of the class was the gravitic hypercannon, able to project gravity waves through hyperspace. This huge, spinal, weapon promised the ability to crush entire fleets from beyond their effective weapon ranges, reduce planets to rubble and even implode stars.
Her mere existence would deter defections from the Empire, her designers thought.

Launched in 3009 the huge mass of rock and hyperdense composites set off with a reduced crew on a proving cruise but was summoned to Tarrlin VI⁷ by the Imperial Sector Governor to address the offworld support of a rebelling alien species threatening the human colonists she was involved in a skirmish with a small force of light warships and encountered a minefield. There something happened, perhaps the experimental warp drive interacted disastrously with one of the gravitic mines but in a burst of tachyon and Icaron radiation (that killed most of the human population on Tarrlin VI) the ship disappeared.

The Empire fell, the Galactic Federation was born in it's ashes, expanded and itself grew peaceful and drowsy. The Doombringer faded into fable, one of the many ships that disappeared, the "legends galore 'bout shipwrecks of spacecraft a-spacing". Just another bogeyman.

Now she's back, crewed by human fanatics and packed with weapons.



Comments?



1 A plot that Tubb used in Beyond the Galactic Lens.

2. Deadgirl.

3. The plot of Babylon 4's Infection and the Ikarra n devices, or the Diadem that influenced Pakhar culture.

4. "If you go to Z'ha'dum, you will die". I seem to be on a B5 kick...

5. The Empire was beginning to develop warp drive technology, but fell into several dead ends.

6. One role for the ships was to be able to seed new Terran colonies if the Empire did fall. Hence extensive gene banks and uterine replicators were carried.

7. On the edge of the Disputed Zone, hence a hotspot.

[imajica]

One approach I've enjoyed since I saw it on the Firefly forums a _long_ time ago is to grab a CD off the shelf and use the song titles. For instance... Shetland folk rockers "No Sweat", supported Status Quo when they played Lerwick back in the late 00s, have a CD entitled "Six Whole Days, One Whole Night" (a fairly decent episode title in itself).

* Rock 'n Roll Joe
* I'll Tell You Lies
* Golden Day
* Blues Message
* Katrina Colyne
* Bulletproof
* Yell
* Some Hearts / Too Many Strings
* Siren Calling
* Blue Whiting
* Little Party Animal
* Shape Of Things To Come
And tracks 12 and 13 are definitely NSFW so we'll miss them out for a Saturday/Sunday evening family show.

Tell me that doesn't sound like a promising season based on those episode titles!

[Catsmate]

Mar 18, 2019 20:46:21 GMT imajica said:

One approach I've enjoyed since I saw it on the Firefly forums a _long_ time ago is to grab a CD off the shelf and use the song titles. For instance... Shetland folk rockers "No Sweat", supported Status Quo when they played Lerwick back in the late 00s, have a CD entitled "Six Whole Days, One Whole Night" (a fairly decent episode title in itself).

* Rock 'n Roll Joe
* I'll Tell You Lies
* Golden Day
* Blues Message
* Katrina Colyne
* Bulletproof
* Yell
* Some Hearts / Too Many Strings
* Siren Calling
* Blue Whiting
* Little Party Animal
* Shape Of Things To Come
And tracks 12 and 13 are definitely NSFW so we'll miss them out for a Saturday/Sunday evening family show.

Tell me that doesn't sound like a promising season based on those episode titles!

I like this.

[starkllr]

Mar 18, 2019 20:46:21 GMT imajica said:

One approach I've enjoyed since I saw it on the Firefly forums a _long_ time ago is to grab a CD off the shelf and use the song titles.

Shriekback is the perfect band to use this tactic with, hands down. For example:

"Black Light Trap"
"Gunning for the Buddha"
"Running on the Rocks"
"The Shining Path"
"Pretty Little Things"
"Underwaterboys"
"Exquisite"
"The Reptiles and I"
"Sticky Jazz"
"Cradle Song"

Black Light Trap is obviously a sequel to "The Mysterious Planet"
Gunning for the Buddha is clearly a historical
Underwaterboys, Exquisite and The Reptiles and I have to be a three-part epic adventure featuring the Silurians, right?

[Catsmate]

Mar 25, 2019 15:02:22 GMT starkllr said:

Mar 18, 2019 20:46:21 GMT imajica said:

One approach I've enjoyed since I saw it on the Firefly forums a _long_ time ago is to grab a CD off the shelf and use the song titles.

Shriekback is the perfect band to use this tactic with, hands down. For example:

"Black Light Trap"
"Gunning for the Buddha"
"Running on the Rocks"
"The Shining Path"
"Pretty Little Things"
"Underwaterboys"
"Exquisite"
"The Reptiles and I"
"Sticky Jazz"
"Cradle Song"

Black Light Trap is obviously a sequel to "The Mysterious Planet"
Gunning for the Buddha is clearly a historical
Underwaterboys, Exquisite and The Reptiles and I have to be a three-part epic adventure featuring the Silurians, right?

1. Black Light Trap could also refer to the Cult of the Dark Flame, which appeared in The Dark Flame and The Draconion Rage audio. Perhaps they've laid a trap for someone (Doctor 7 perhaps) and the PCs get caught in it.

2. Gunning for the Buddha. Here's a little know fact; the cabaret (or saloon) singer Sylvia Syms (wiki) was nicknamed 'Buddha' by Frank Sinatra, who was a personal friend and produced one of her albums. But who'd be gunning for a jazz singer? And why?
Might it be linked to her longtime friendship with Sinatra? Or her friendship with Billie Holiday? (Syms gave Holiday her trademark gardenia as camouflage after the jazz singer had burned her hair with a curling iron).
Perhaps part of a trilogy of interlinked stories featuring jazz clubs? With Sticky Jazz and Cradle Song.

[grinch]

As previous title/adventure idea suggestions have gone down so well in the past, here are a few more:

1. At the Bottom of the Garden

2. City of Angels

3. Mischief Night

4. Mr. Millow

5. The Lost Days

6. Who Were We?

7. Caped Crusaders

8. No One Goes to Hemlock Grove

9. The Pestilence Cometh

10. A Night at the Theatre

11. Too Many Time Lords

12. The Role of a Lifetime

Have fun!

[Catsmate]

Excellent!
OK, a quickie as I'm on my tablet.

At the Bottom of the Garden
My first thought was fairies, the fae of Small Worlds. But that's heading in the direction of the Cottingley Fairies and Doyle's gullibility.

Other things can lurk at the bottom of gardens, or be built there. A man's shed for example. And odd things can be found in sheds (like stranded cute-but-evil aliens stashed there by helpful teenagers). Odd souvenirs, perhaps, from a battle in an evacuated London that didn't officially happen perhaps, kept by a shell-shocked squaddie who was never quite the same.

A friend of mine bought a house years ago that came with a carefully landscaped Anderson shelter dug into the ground at the bottom of the garden. Where I grew up, thanks to disputes between builders there was a chunk of ground between rows of back gardens and a group of shops that belonged to neither; ideal for what's now referred to as anti-social behaviour. When living in Norwich and exploring the area I found a church cordoned off as EOD teams cleared out a WW2 dugout constructed for one of Gubbins' stay-behind Auxiliary Units. Complete with sixty year old ordnance...
My own garden was searched by Gardaí years ago, looking for a handgun tossed after a failed robbery.

There might be things buried in the garden; either centuries earlier when they crashed to Earth or recently when someone needed to hide a package from the people (or things) pursuing her. Or once(?) living creatures; a pet that died suddenly after fighting something odd in the woods one day, or that odd neighbour who disappeared suddenly one night twenty years ago, the one nobody talks about.
That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.

[Catsmate]

City of Angels.

Well this title inspired memories of the (awful) city of Los Angeles, as well as the awful film. So let's try something different.
Several other cites have names that translate to 'City of Angels'. One of these is Bangkok.

• Technically กรุงเทพมหานคร อมรรัตนโกสินทร์ มหินทรายุธยา มหาดิลกภพ นพรัตนราชธานีบูรีรมย์ อุดมราชนิเวศน์มหาสถาน อมรพิมานอวตารสถิต สักกะทัตติยวิษณุกรรมประสิทธิ์ means "City of angels, great city of immortals, magnificent city of the nine gems, seat of the king, city of royal palaces, home of gods incarnate, erected by Vishvakarman at Indra's behest".
  

A city that is entirely without Whovian connections (except a reference in Earthfall). Let's fix that, starting with Doctor Debhanom Muangman, (alumnus of Harvard [MD and PhD] and Dean of the Faculty of Public Health at Mahidol University) a student of paranormal and alleged UFO contactee^[1].
He leads a group of other interested enthusiasts, mainly in Khao Kala who seems to be the centre of Thai UFO encounters. They believe there's a Stargate there. In the Whoniverse they might be right, at least a shadow or weak point in hyperspace that attracts odd passing visitors, or even a full blown Cardiff-style rift.





[1] He also believes in past lives, reincarnation, ghosts, spirits, various psychic experiences

[markrand]

Feb 24, 2019 22:21:53 GMT grinch said:

As I am one to do when bored, I often come up with random adventure titles to spark the seeds of adventure inspiration. But I thought why not post them here and see what the lovely folks on these forums could come up with in terms of adventure ideas. So, here are a few. I'll leave them to you to see what you can come up with. And who knows? You might one day end up running your PCs through these very adventures.

10. The Time Lord and the Pussycat

This reminds me of "Tabby Cats and Time Lords", the introductory story in the FASA Dr. Who game.

Maybe the Time Lord and companion(s) encounter a cat burglar who could be either a foe, an ally, or a new companion.

[Catsmate]

Aug 25, 2019 14:26:43 GMT markrand said:

Feb 24, 2019 22:21:53 GMT grinch said:

As I am one to do when bored, I often come up with random adventure titles to spark the seeds of adventure inspiration. But I thought why not post them here and see what the lovely folks on these forums could come up with in terms of adventure ideas. So, here are a few. I'll leave them to you to see what you can come up with. And who knows? You might one day end up running your PCs through these very adventures.

10. The Time Lord and the Pussycat

This reminds me of "Tabby Cats and Time Lords", the introductory story in the FASA Dr. Who game.

Maybe the Time Lord and companion(s) encounter a cat burglar who could be either a foe, an ally, or a new companion.

A bit like Raine Creevy. There was additional backstory on Tabby and Stan in one of the Diary issues.

[markrand]

Aug 25, 2019 17:04:15 GMT Catsmate said:

Aug 25, 2019 14:26:43 GMT markrand said:

This reminds me of "Tabby Cats and Time Lords", the introductory story in the FASA Dr. Who game.

Maybe the Time Lord and companion(s) encounter a cat burglar who could be either a foe, an ally, or a new companion.

A bit like Raine Creevy. There was additional backstory on Tabby and Stan in one of the Diary issues.

I was thinking more like Tabby Fellowes or Lady Christina.

The FASA special, I have all the Diary issues on my computer.

[Catsmate]

Mischief Night.
My first thought was the Buffy episode Halloween, the one where people became their costumes. Now while Ethan Rayne, the minor villain of that story, didn't have much of a reason for his actions in a later season he pulls a similar trick, psychologically regressing the adults of Sunnydale to teenagers^[1], as a diversion for a more significant villain.

Then there's the mostly US tradition called Mischief Night which I'd assumed to have developed reasonably recently as a backlash to the rather sanitised Halloween festivities. However wiki says otherwise and who am I to disagree.

The earliest reference to Mischief Night is from 1790 when a headmaster encouraged a school play which ended in "an Ode to Fun which praises children's tricks on Mischief Night in most approving terms". In the United Kingdom, these pranks were originally carried out as part of May Day celebrations, but shifted to later in the year, dates varying in different areas, some marking it on October 30, the night before Halloween, others on November 4, the night before Bonfire Night. According to one historian, "May Day and the Green Man had little resonance for children in grimy cities. They looked at the opposite end of the year and found the ideal time, the night before the gunpowder plot." However, the shift only happened in the late nineteenth century and is described by the Opies as "one of the mysteries of the folklore calendar". In Germany, Mischief Night is still celebrated on May 1.

Interesting. So why not tweak the players expectations and have the action on another date? Two ideas occur:

1. Pulp.
A fairly gritty^[2] scenario set somewhere in Industrial England^[3] in the Pulp era, either the early-to-mid twenties or perhaps the early thirties for the full Depression era look-and-feel. Naturally we'll need a location, a plot, a villain and a reason.
I think Blackcastle is the perfect location; in 1980 it has an abandoned steel works, pointing to an industrial past now faded away. Also I liked Sharon Davies.

• Maybe she appears as a temporal echo from the future as the MacGuffin interacts with the stardrive of a certain cute alien decades in the future?

The villain should be an industrialist. It fits with the zeitgesist of the twenties; industrial pollution, workers being taken advantage of and occasionally crippled due to lax procedures.

• Alternatively, because players now the tropes too, the industrialist could be a red herring. His secretiveness could be down to psychological problems^[4], desire to keep an experimental process secret or a purely personal secret.
• How about this one: he is not who he claims to be. In fact 'he' isn't. The previous owner died leaving his (small) industrial empire to his son who was overseas (possibly sent there to avoid some scandal^[5]). However his far more capable sister ran things in is absence and replaced him when he returned. His death could be cold blooded murder, drunken accident or justifiable homicide depending in taste.
  

Or perhaps the industrialist is merely the front or backer for the actual Evil Genius (similar to the relationship between Percival Ross and Tobias Breckinridge in Evolution)

So what is the Master Plan,? Well that'll really depend on the individual game. A classic trope for the EU was someone acquiring advanced/alien tech and trying to use it for personal gain.

• Something might have been unearthed while building part of the factory complex
• A Mad Scientist may have come to the industrialist with an idea requiring backing (and a lack of scruples)
• The industrialist and scientist may have met during the Great War^[6] and either encountered something or become involved with a sinister government plan, and now plan to utilise this knowledge. Maybe they're trying to get the crashed remains of a German airship (one utilising alien counter-gravity technology recovered from a crashed scout ship) working again.
  

That leaves us with the tie-in to Mischief Night. Assuming it was celebrated on May Day night there might be an event held in the factory complex allowing the PCs to reconnoiter the place. Or the local kids could be persuaded to stage a diversion, distract the security goons, and sneak in. Perhaps assisted by some disaffected workers, emboldened by strong drink and May Day spirit.
A firework display is optional

For thirties feel I recommend a few episodes of the TV series Brass


2. 1960s Yorkshire.
Back before UNIT, or in it's very early days, something odd is happening in Yorkshire. Children, well teenagers, are disappearing and it might be linked to a travelling carnival^[7]. The PCs could be members of the Intrusion Countermeasure Group, or an under-resourced and under-appreciated UNIT, or some other agency, not quite part of the government security apparatus. Or maybe then just happen on strange events.
Back then the Fourth of November (the night before Guy Fawkes night) was important to thirteen-year-olds, part of a coming of age event, complete with dares and challenges. Mostly harmless, or minor vandalism, but in one town, let's call it Elsinby^[8], things are more sinister.
A group of older kids found something in the woods and if the young ones want to be part of the 'in group' they have to go and touch it. But the thing is alive, in a way, and has plans of it's own for all the psychic energy available on "Miggy Night".
In the meantime it sustains itself by draining the occasional victim brought by it's controlled teenagers.

Can the PCs stop the sinister plan in time and save the teenagers from having the brains drained?

• For added flavour you can mix in several investigatory groups. UNIT (standing out like squaddies in civvies), the PCs (dazed and confused) and Torchwood (fixated on that carnival)
  

3. Colony
        Inspired by the excellent Freefall.
And now for something completely different. Rituals and traditions are important for community bonding, and that won't change when humans have expanded into space. On a recently settled, mostly Earthlike planet, the locals (and a few visitors) are eagarly awaiting the Day of the Dead, a planetwide^[9] celebration of those who've died and hence become a permanent part of the planet's ecosystem. Many locally produced paper replica goods will be burned at sunset.
Meanwhile the teens are waiting for the generally tolerated excesses of the night, when a certain laxity is permitted.

But in the recesses of the mostly unexplored planet something is stirring...

Flavour with Sparkly Hitler Dolls (collect them all!),  robots trying to socially engineer the afterlife and new theological disputes. Hope you like the lichen bread. And the Quantum Physics Helper Dog.


Comments? Suggestions?


[1] Horny teenagers naturally...

[2] Quite likely literally

[3] Possibly influenced by the appearance of not-exactly-Mosley in Peaky Blinders.

[4] Shell shock from the Great War, à la Peter Wimsey perhaps

[5] Sexually assaulting a female servant or worker would be depressingly appropriate for the period.

[6] For the true period feel the industrialist should have been profiteering (if a civilian) or black marketing (if in uniform)

[7] But actually isn't.

[8] Usefully possessed of an excellent, for the time, hospital.

[9] Well the bits that have humans living on them.

[Catsmate]

Bump.

The Day the Penguins Disappeared.

Halfway down the platform, heading or the boat train, the man suddenly stopped dead in his tracks.
Something was wrong, thought Gandalf Grey. Muttering apologies to the other travellers he scanned his surroundings for some trace of what was causing his brain to, well, twitch.
He knew the sensation, most experienced time travellers did; it meant that time had altered around them. His innate exposure to artron energy granted him immunity. For a while anyway.

Gandalf backtracked into the main portion of the huge railway station and looked around trying to sense what was different.
A bookstall caught his eye and again he knew something was wrong. This time it wasn't the universe but something more mundane.
Strolling over her perused the stock looking for something odd, but the rows of books seemed quite normal.

Suddenly it hit him; the rows lacked the distinctive, nightly coloured paperback spines that were usually in abundance.

The Penguins have disappeared, he thought.

Back in 1934, so the story goes, a publisher named Allen Lane was taking a trip by railway, returning to London after visiting a friend and author, named Agatha Christie. He was boarding at the main station in Exeter and paused to purchase a book for the four hours or so he'd spend on the train, but found the station's bookstall poorly supplied and overpriced.

He was struck with an idea; cheap paperback editions of quality fiction for everyone. The following year Penguin Books was launched as a component of The Bodley Head press but later it split off on it's own. Within a year he'd published a million books at sixpence each, and demonstrated that there was a huge demand for quality books beyond the relatively expensive hardcovers. This was quite unexpected in the 1930s, many publishers and authors were actively hostile to paperbacks considering them unsuitable vehicle for 'quality' works and a threat to their income. Lane demonstrated this was utter nonsense.
Later Penguins were joined by Pelicans (non-fiction) and Puffins (for children).

Lane was also a man who pushed the bound    aries of what was allowed; at The Bodley Head he urged, and achieved, the publication of Jame Joyce's much banned book Ulysses. In 1960 he took the decision to publish an unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover as a challenge to the 1959 Obscene Publications Act and was duly prosecuted.
The jury unanimously found the publisher Not Guilty, agreeing with the defense, under section 4 of the OPA, where a work was "in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern". (wiki)

This landmark case was enormously influential on British publishing and is often cited as the beginning of the 'Permissive Society' of the 1960s. It also demonstrated the changing nature of British society, especially the (in)famous remark of the prosecuting counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones:

• "Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book?"
• "Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?"
  

An interesting legacy for a man who developed one of the first vending machines for cheap paperbacks.

But what if Lane had, for example, died in 1930? The making of good quality books affordable and accessible to all was a significant step in making reading a common and popular pastime. Without R v Penguin Books Ltd might the culture of literary censorship, and hence other forms, continued for a few more years?

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
                                                Phillip Larkin.

Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?

[grinch]

Completely forgot about this post to be honest. I imagine Lane's early death and the subsequent erasure of Penguin as a publishers could perhaps be a side effect or a result of a much larger change in history. Perhaps acting as foreshadowing for a series or session arc where the PCs begin to notice minor or almost insignificant changes in history ("What on Earth is Marmite?") and slowly begin to realise this is all the result of a much larger temporal event which threatens existence itself as they know it. Cue the obligatory final session where they confront the villain or forces responsible.

Or, perhaps an invading alien force seeking to invade the Earth ends up hiring a time traveller to subtlely change history in otherwise minuscule ways to ensure their conquest of the Earth in the future is a success. Nothing too grand mind you, preventing Hitler's rise to power, for example, would only end up drawing the attention of temporally aware species but just minor enough that the human race will be more vulnerable come the invasion.

[Catsmate]

Nov 22, 2019 18:58:34 GMT grinch said:

Completely forgot about this post to be honest.

So did I until I was looking for something else. But I have a free weekend so I may do a couple more.

Nov 22, 2019 18:58:34 GMT grinch said:

I imagine Lane's early death and the subsequent erasure of Penguin as a publishers could perhaps be a side effect or a result of a much larger change in history.

Very likely, unless there's a pro-censorship Time Meddler with subtlety out there.

Unfortunately I can't find much detail online about Lane's life. And the only bio was published in '79.
ETA: oops no. There was a newer one in 2006 that might be of use.

Nov 22, 2019 18:58:34 GMT grinch said:

Perhaps acting as foreshadowing for a series or session arc where the PCs begin to notice minor or almost insignificant changes in history ("What on Earth is Marmite?") and slowly begin to realise this is all the result of a much larger temporal event which threatens existence itself as they know it. Cue the obligatory final session where they confront the villain or forces responsible.

Or, perhaps an invading alien force seeking to invade the Earth ends up hiring a time traveller to subtlely change history in otherwise minuscule ways to ensure their conquest of the Earth in the future is a success. Nothing too grand mind you, preventing Hitler's rise to power, for example, would only end up drawing the attention of temporally aware species but just minor enough that the human race will be more vulnerable come the invasion.

I like it.

[Catsmate]

No One Goes to Hemlock Grove.

Other than the eponymous novel and TV series of course.

Hemlock Grove is a evocative name, redolent of trees, flowers and nature. And death of course.
Socrates is the most famous example of execution by means of a decoction of conium maculatum, but not the only one by any means.

• There are actually several 'hemlocks', all aromatic flowering plants in the same botanical family as celery, parsley, angelica, anise, asafoetida, caraway, carrot, coriander, fennel and parsnip.
• Only a few are toxic, but several are irritating to human and animal skin.
  

Hemlocks appear occasionally in detective fiction , most notably in Gladys Mitchell's Spotted Hemlock.

However these are all plants, not really suitable for populating a 'grove'. But there is another, biologically unrelated, hemlock, a family (well genus technically) of tall growing coniferous trees that at not at all toxic.
So 'Hemlock Grove' probably has, or had, a cluster of such trees. This means it is located in North America or Asia, in a place with a cool and wet climate and probably significant winter snow.

OK, that's enough biology.

The book and series mentioned above are set in the US East coast, Pennsylvania in fact. So let's think of somewhere else.

In the mountains of the Japanese island of Kyushu, about sixty kilometres from Mt Aso, is a small hamlet named ヘムロックグローブ (which if online translate works means 'Hemlock Grove'). A few hundred metres up a mountain it is decidedly off the beaten track, despite the hot springs in the area.
No-one seems to go there, or some from there. In fact few people have ever heard of the place, let also been or come from the village.

Now however it's come to the attention of UNIT (or the Japanese government or someone) because it seems to be near the epicentre of a number of odd deaths and odder disappearances. Statistical analysis by the new, and still rather buggy, AI supercomputer's data analytics suite has flagged the village for investigation.
Preliminary enquiries haven't found anything significant, other than the level of surprise, even unease, by people in nearby towns when the agents announced their intention of visiting the village; "No-one goes to Hemlock Grove".

Now normally this matter would be the jurisdiction of UNIT/Japan, who're known to jealously guard their dominion (and their somewhat too friendly links to both the Japanese government, military and industry) but they're under pressure to 'play nicer' with the gaijin.
Plus if something does go wrong the outsiders can absorb the blame...

That's why your team, UNIT and 'consultants' are crammed into the back of a UNIT cargo plane headed into Ashiya airbase.


Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?

[Catsmate]

A few quickies for that day that it is.

Extinction of the Gods
The players arrive on a planet (or other place) far distant on space and time.  It's inhabited by several humanoid races; "normal" humans, catfolk, dwarfs, and others. While the local technology seems approximately medieval there seems to be a degree of anachronistic knowledge and skills (printing press, clockwork, anti-sepsis, et cetera).

And then they see magic being used. Incantations, gestures and oddly symbolic ingredients¹ that, when used by a skilled practitioner, have effects far beyond the normal.

There seems to be an air of despair around the town the PCs visit; elaborate temples are either ignored and in disrepair, or ateened by manic congregations.
Investigations reveal that the people had worshipped a pantheon² of gods, whose clergy wielded magic powers; this ended a few months earlier when a spectacular light display one morning, followed by utter darkness at noon that lasted hours, left the godS unresponsive.

After that the priests had no more powers, though the 'secular' wizards did. Now even the wizards are having problems and society is beginning to break down without their contributions.

Premise: it's not magic, except in the Clarketech³ sense, but a network of psychoactive femtomatter⁴ that produce the effects. The 'gods' were computer simulations, though given they're really powerful sentient intelligences there's not really much difference. But what happened? Why has the system broken down? What do the PCs do? Where did it all come from?



¹ Anyone remember "vocal, somantic and material"?
² You'll need to create this. Or just rip one off...
³ "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
⁴ A really theoretical idea for machines that are smaller than atoms, on the order of nuclei in size. Possibly made from strings.

[Catsmate]

Penance of the Cybermen
The players arrive somewhere, early in humanity's first expansion phase¹, and find the populace interacting with Cybermen as if it's completely normal. Nor are the silver humanoids culling the populace, conquering anyone or  says "You will be deleted".
What's going on?

Well, years earlier a group of Cybermen acquired a batch of humans to convert into drones. But the process went wrong due to a mix of sabotage, systems failure and an external attack. The humans were converted, physically, but not entirely mentally. They retain their 'normal' personalities (more-or-less) but are still encased in an armoured suit, and linked to the Cyber-network.

Luckily one of the converted (a hacker and cyberneticist who was responsible for the original sabotage) managed to recover quickly enough, and retain sufficient determination and sanity, to take stock of the situation, and disconnect the base from the rest of the network. Meanwhile the rest of the 'normal' Cybermen were killed by the attackers.

This left a smallish group of people alive, but not exactly human anyone. In order to survive (and prevent psychosis from their new state) one of them, previously a pastor, developed a purpose for them; atonement for the actions of the Cybermen.
Now they have a few starships and trip to help the fledgling human expansion. They don't actively recruit, but they do offer the option of conversion to the dying or terminally ill.

So what to the PCs (and players) do? Do they accept this new faction? Assume it's a deceptive plan?



¹ Before the Cyberwars. I'd actually say before the Dalek invasion of Terra.

[Catsmate]

Mister Millow.

Millow: a feeling of complete comfort and relaxation. A portmanteau of mellow and pillow.

The players arrive in town to find.......nothing wrong. There was a crisis, they may have reacted to a distress call but everything is fixed now. As anyone can tell them, Mister Millow arrived in the nick of time and fixed things. At the mention of his name people smile, and practically sigh in contentment¹.

The players will immediately be suspicious². Possibly paranoid and expecting some form of mind control.
They'll ask questions but probably won't find out very much. Loosely the following:

1. The problem happened; threatening alien battlecruiser in orbit, mysterious plague, outbreak of ghosts, slippages in time³
   
2. When all hope seemed gone the mysterious Mister Millow arrived.
3. The locals don't know where he came from, or indeed much about him. He doesn't talk about himself much.
4. With the aid of an odd group of locals he solved the problem. Everyone lived happily ever after⁴.
   
5. Mister Millow is still around, though he's refused rewards⁵, lavish government and private hospitality et cetera. He purchased (and paid for in scarce resources) a smallish villa. He's engaged in research at a local university⁵.
6. The locals find him rather difficult to describe; he's human (no obviously alien characteristics) but highly charismatic. Pleasant to deal with (when they find a local with personal contact) but one who has a sense of 'personal space' that stops people bothering him.
   
7. There's no information on how he arrived; no spaceship, obvious materialisation or strange huts where not had existed previously. He may or may not have been accompanied by a rag-tag group of oddballs³.

If you manage this investigation properly the players should be suitably paranoid, and expecting some sort of mind-control plot. They may believe the original problem to have been faked. This could be worth encouraging.

The twist: actually Mister Millow is pretty much as portrayed. A Doctor-esque hero type who's taking a holiday after saving a planet. He does have powerful telepathic/hypnotic powers, though they're mostly automatic and passive. He radiates an image of being a nice person, who deserves personal space, but this is pretty much true.

How he'll react to a group of suspicious time travellers will be the interesting part....

• He may, or may not, be a Time Lord. This should be tricky to determine (sensor scrambler, bio-damper ring). If he is Gallifreyan he may not be aware of this.
  
• Likewise he may, or may not, be a shapeshifter, robot et cetra.
  
• Another possibility is a reformed confidence trickster (in the mold of Banto Zane) who's 'gone straight' and acquires some sort of psionic amplifier.
  

 

Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?




1. Think cat after extended dual ear skritching.

2. Especially if they've listened to The One Doctor.Or remember Meet John Doe.

3. Up to you to decide.

4. Well except for the normal problems of life.

5. Which should make the players even more suspicious.

[Catsmate]

Too Many Time Lords.
Intended for a group led by a Time Lord, or who've interacted on reasonably friendly terms with one.

The PCs arrive.
They encounter a problem.
If there's no Time Lord in the group they meet her again.
They devise a solution to the problem.
They prepare to implement the solution.

• All these are for you to develop.

Then something odd happens. There's a shimmering effect and suddenly the Time Lord is joined by another. Tis may be an exact copy, a previous incarnation¹ or otherwise but should be definitely a second of that Time Lord. This prevents them from accomplishing whatever it was they were trying to do, so the party, now with second Time Lord in tow, retreat.

They'll no doubt want to question her about where she came from et cetra, but initially she's dazed and somewhat confused. As far as she can remember she was fixing a similar problem to the PCs when something happened.
Hopefully one of the PCs will think to go back to where the duplication happened and look around. If not a little subtle prodding may be in order.

When they do so they witness another episode of shimmering and a third Time Lord  arrives.
This will continue, at shortening intervals, until quite soon they have too many Time Lords.

Premise: actually they were, or multiple almost parallel universes, utterly wrong about what was going on. There was a teeny-tiny (atto-scale) crack in reality and their efforts have worsened it. Now as various version of the Time Lord try and fix it, they're dragged into this universe².

Gradually more and more alternates arrive. Soon the rift becomes detectable and then visible. Not just the Time Lord is dragged through but companions, bystanders, enemies and chucks of scenery are pulled in. Reality in this location is endangered.

They broke it, they must fix it. And return the various alternates home.




1. Or future incarnation i they'd recognise one.

2. Because their fix was attempted first, they're the recipient universe.

[Catsmate]

Caped Crusaders.
The party arrives, somewhere in rural Canada in the more-or-less modern day (1990-2020 say). It's a coolish summer day

• Let's call the town Loganville. It's south of a large national park, a vast expanse of forest, ice and snow.
  

After the usual minor inconveniences ("Who are you? Why are you here? How did you get that London bus into my soy field?") they find it a pleasant and relaxing place. Quite like the stereotypes of rural Canada in fact.

While heaving a pleasant meal in a local diner one of the PCs finds a discarded copy of the tabloid rag, the infamous International Enquirer, noted for it's fabricated and sensationalised stories of oddities leavened with 'celebrity' gossip. Leafing through it they find a mention of the Loganville, in connection with odd happenings around the nearby park.

In summary:

• A retired man from another local community, on the other side of the park, claimed that his pickup truck had been hijacked and himself assault by three masked men. Mr. James Lloyd claimed that he stopped to help a party of campers. A shotgun belonging to Lloyd was broken, but had been fired. Several spent cartridges were found.This is the account carried in most media sources (paper or online depending on period).
• The piece in the IE had Lloyd claiming to have been kidnapped by the 'campers' and then rescued by three people who swooped out of the sky, wearing blue uniforms and helmets and glowing slightly.
• Police and pretty much everyone else are openly disbelieving about the second story. 
  
• There was a meteorite impact a few months earlier; it's believed to have struck a small lake in the national park.
  

While discussion or investigating the story the PCs hear an account of an incident the previous night; two men have been hospitalised after being severely beaten and burned. They claim to have been attacked by a trio who resemble Lloyd's saviours.
If the players decide to investigate then good luck, hypnosis or other successful efforts allow them to learn that Lloyd and the two injured men (Robert Elwin and Carter Parson) re well known as poachers.

UNIT involvement.
This is entirely optional. UNIT might have dispatched a team, given the conjunction of events. They may be useful, antagonistic or utterly incompetent.

The Premise: naturally the 'meteor' wasn't just a chunk of space debris, it was a small spacecraft piloted by a group of alien sightseers/tourists. They never planed to land on Earth, that's highly illegal, and had borrowed the small craft that's now in pieces at the bottom of the lake after having encountered, in near-Earth space, a missile left over from someone else's brush with Earth's fledgling defenses.

The ship wasn't particularly large, tough or defended. It was also operated by the equivalent of teenagers who'd partially disabled the computer system. Hence it was severely damaged by the gravitic warhead but landed more-or-less intact in the lake, where it rests under about 150m of water¹. The five kids on board were killed instantly.

During the uncontrolled descent a small escape pod was accidentally activated and separated from the craft. Rather less spectacular in it's descent it wasn't noticed and landed under power not far from Loganville. There it was found by a quartet of college students who're employed collecting samples from the park for botanical and zoological research.

The students are smart, science nerd types. They realise pretty quickly that the pod (which resembles a soft drink can scaled up to about 1.5m in diameter) wasn't from Earth. There was no-one inside but there was a stock of survival gear. They took the pod (which weighs over a tonne but has a counter-grav lift system) back to the house rented for their use.

They began examining the materials they'd acquired. Most of the gear was designed to be idiot-resistent² and simple to operated. Among the items were three metallic belts which they found are chunks of programmable nanomatter, intended as all-purpose survival and exploration suits.
After a hostile encounter with a group of poachers they decided to engage in a little vigilante work³.

So what do the players do? Stop the vigilantes (they have committed a number of crimes)? 

Complications.
1. The poachers may get more violent. They're armed (repeating rifles in the 3/7/10 range and shotguns).
2. UNIT and/or other 'official' investigations may get involved. They'll definitely want the alien gear and want it out of civilian hands. They may or may not care about the mundane criminal side of things.
3. The dead alien kids may have worried (or angry, or simply grieving) parents. Do they arrive, alerted by a distress beacon? What do they do?


Alternative.
For a change of pace scenario the players might be the students who stumble on the alien gear and go Caped Crusader. While being hunted by Sinister Government Agents and distressed alien parents.



Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?






1. That's beyond SCUBA depth. Hardsuits, mini-subs or advanced gear would be needed.
2. Nothing is idiot-proof.
3. I blame Kick-Ass...

[Catsmate]

A Night at the Theatre.

Not a scenario idea per se, but a compilation of previous ideas.

1. Locations interesting first performances.
Quite likely to attract the interest of time travellers with certain taste in culture.

1. The 14 March 1885 premiere of Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado at the Savoy Theatre in London with Richard Temple as The Mikado, Leonora Braham as Yum-Yum and Durward Lely as Nanki-Poo.
2. Debut of Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake, 4 March 1877¹ at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. The conductor was Stepan Ryabov and the performance was a benefit for the ballerina Pelageya Karpakova, who performed the role of Odette, and possibly also Odile. The work was not well received and was considered too complicated fir ballet by many critics².
   
3. The Premiere of Ibsen's The Pillars of Society at the Odense Theater in Copenhagen, 14 November 1877.
4. On 15 January 1890 Tchaikovsky's ballet The Sleeping Beauty is premiered at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, Russia. An event likely to attract any time travellers with cultural pretensions. It was better received than Swan Lake.
   

2. Theatrical fires.
Theatres have a bad history of fires, especially before electric lighting.

1. 1887 saw two disastrous theatre fires. On 25 May a gas lamp at the Paris Opera caught fire, 200 people died in the resulting blaze. While a similar accident at the Theatre Royal in Exeter on 5 September produced a comparable death toll.
2. At around 11:20PM on Tuesday the 5th of December
   1876, during a performance of The Two Orphans at the Brooklyn
   Theater (southeast corner of Washington and Johnson streets, north of
   City Hall; at the time not part of New York City) a fire broke out behind the stage. Despite the efforts of
   staff to fight it the fire spread, while actors continued to play their
   parts on the stage. Soon it became obvious to the audience of more than a
   thousand people that a fire has started,but the cast attempted to
   maintain calm. However soon panic erupted and people attempted to leave.
   More than 300 people died in the fire. Twenty five minutes after it
   started the building partially collapsed and fire-fighters concentrated
   on containing the blaze.
3. On 8 December 1881 tragedy struck in Vienna when the Ringtheater, an opera house, theatre and variety show venue at Schottenring, was destroyed by fire. Between 650 and 850 people were killed by fire, smoke inhalation, crush or falling. The fire started about 6:45PM, just before the beginning of the second performance of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann.
   The gas lights were extinguished to prevent further spread of the fire, and with no working emergency lamps hundreds of terrified patrons stumbled blindly through narrow, smoky and pitch dark passages only to find the exit door wouldn’t open.
4. On 25 November 1864 there was another outbreak of fire, this one definitely man-made. A group of Confederate agents and sympathisers attempted to set New York ablaze by starting fires at dozens of locations around the city (including thirteen hotels, Barnum's Museum, and the Winder Garden Theatre) and also on several barges carrying hay and other flammable material. The plot failed, party due to incompetence on the part of the agents and partially due to prompt police action.
   Interestingly crowds at the Winter Garden, there to see a performance of Julius Caesar, were calmed by Edwin Booth, whose brothers, Junius Brutus and John Wilkes, were also acting in the play.
   
   
   

3. Other events.

1. The Bottle Conjurer. As described in this thread this was the most notorious practical joke staged by John Montagu, . 2nd Duke of Montagu, and he was indeed a notorious trickster and practical joker.
   
2. A Quiet Day In London (thread). The second attempt on the life of King George III on the same day.
   
3. In the winter of 1893 the party take in the (unintended) last performance of the great magician Li H'Sen Chang at the Palace Theatre in London.
4. Camp Century (thread) had a theatre, albeit a small one often used for films. A rather interesting place for a scenario...
   

Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?




1. Though as Russia still used the Julian calendar it was the 20th of February there.
2. It was also rather different from the version staged today.

[grinch]

Nov 23, 2019 18:41:40 GMT Catsmate said:

Mister Millow.

Millow: a feeling of complete comfort and relaxation. A portmanteau of mellow and pillow.

The players arrive in town to find.......nothing wrong. There was a crisis, they may have reacted to a distress call but everything is fixed now. As anyone can tell them, Mister Millow arrived in the nick of time and fixed things. At the mention of his name people smile, and practically sigh in contentment¹.

The players will immediately be suspicious². Possibly paranoid and expecting some form of mind control.
They'll ask questions but probably won't find out very much. Loosely the following:

1. The problem happened; threatening alien battlecruiser in orbit, mysterious plague, outbreak of ghosts, slippages in time³
   
2. When all hope seemed gone the mysterious Mister Millow arrived.
3. The locals don't know where he came from, or indeed much about him. He doesn't talk about himself much.
4. With the aid of an odd group of locals he solved the problem. Everyone lived happily ever after⁴.
   
5. Mister Millow is still around, though he's refused rewards⁵, lavish government and private hospitality et cetera. He purchased (and paid for in scarce resources) a smallish villa. He's engaged in research at a local university⁵.
6. The locals find him rather difficult to describe; he's human (no obviously alien characteristics) but highly charismatic. Pleasant to deal with (when they find a local with personal contact) but one who has a sense of 'personal space' that stops people bothering him.
   
7. There's no information on how he arrived; no spaceship, obvious materialisation or strange huts where not had existed previously. He may or may not have been accompanied by a rag-tag group of oddballs³.

If you manage this investigation properly the players should be suitably paranoid, and expecting some sort of mind-control plot. They may believe the original problem to have been faked. This could be worth encouraging.

The twist: actually Mister Millow is pretty much as portrayed. A Doctor-esque hero type who's taking a holiday after saving a planet. He does have powerful telepathic/hypnotic powers, though they're mostly automatic and passive. He radiates an image of being a nice person, who deserves personal space, but this is pretty much true.

How he'll react to a group of suspicious time travellers will be the interesting part....

• He may, or may not, be a Time Lord. This should be tricky to determine (sensor scrambler, bio-damper ring). If he is Gallifreyan he may not be aware of this.
  
• Likewise he may, or may not, be a shapeshifter, robot et cetra.
  
• Another possibility is a reformed confidence trickster (in the mold of Banto Zane) who's 'gone straight' and acquires some sort of psionic amplifier.
  

 

Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?




1. Think cat after extended dual ear skritching.

2. Especially if they've listened to The One Doctor.Or remember Meet John Doe.

3. Up to you to decide.

4. Well except for the normal problems of life.

5. Which should make the players even more suspicious.

This was definitely one of the titles I was most interested in seeing what could be done with it. I do rather like the reverse approach of The One Doctor that you proposed, where unlike Banto Zane Mr Millow is completely legitimate in his attempts at assisting people. 

Of course, discovering his true intentions and possible origins would serve as the basis for the adventure and encourage the PCs to be paranoid about him. Lord knows by this point they've probably dealt with their fair share of shapeshifters, confidence tricksters and wolves in sheep's clothing. For some reason, I imagine him dressed and behaving rather like how Derek Jacobi portrayed the character of 'Columbus' in the Tales of the Unexpected episode A Stranger in Town or how he was depicted by Alan Badell in the original 1952 short The Stranger Left No Card. Clad in colourful clothing, and extremely eccentric he is very much the town character. 

But who is Mister Millow? As you suggested, there are a number of ways you could play him. I rather like the idea that he is a powerful psychic perhaps from a planet full to the brim of extremely power telepaths who actively and consciously emits an aura or telepathic field of goodness, kindness and sheer likeability. (Maybe he is the last of his kind? In which case, there's an adventure in itself) Or maybe he is an ordinary human who was the product of some nefarious government experiment to be used for military purposes. After all, an enemy soldier is unlikely to fire on someone they have nothing but good feelings towards. Maybe his eccentric, rather Doctor-ish, behaviour can be attributed to how his mind was scrambled as he escaped his captives? Naturally, I feel like his telepathic field could be overridden by races with particularly powerful emotions of hatred such as the Daleks and some would be completely immune such as the Cybermen. If the latter was used, then your PC's interference might have made things worse. He has too much attention drawn to himself and he must now be on his way. No doubt to be used as a recurring NPC in other Earth based campaigns. That or he could make for an interesting ally in the event they need his unique expertise in the future. Either way, I would imagine he would avoid the attentions of more supposedly benevolent organisations such as UNIT or even Captain Jack's Torchwood. 

If he is simply an alien stranded on Earth, that would explain his work at the University. He is trying to make contact with his homeworld and send out a distress signal. What could happen when he is informed that his homeworld is long since gone? Either wiped out by a natural disaster or depending when the campaign is set merely another casualty of the Time War?

For such a race to emit such an aura of positive feelings then maybe there is an opposing race which emits the very opposite? A race which exudes feelings of antagonism and hatred towards them? Maybe Millow's species and theirs were engaged in a civil war? Perhaps Millow isn't as benevolent as he seems. Could his arrival on Earth merely be in an attempt to evade the authorities for his war crimes? It was only when an alien force arrived which threatened his new home that he found himself compelled to intervene. 

[Catsmate]

Dec 2, 2019 16:56:15 GMT grinch said:

This was definitely one of the titles I was most interested in seeing what could be done with it.

Yeah it was a tricky one until I Googled 'Millow' and got the definition I included. Then it came immediately to mind.

Dec 2, 2019 16:56:15 GMT grinch said:

I do rather like the reverse approach of The One Doctor that you proposed, where unlike Banto Zane Mr Millow is completely legitimate in his attempts at assisting people. 

Again, that was part of it. The players will be expecting a fraud or scam of some sort.

Dec 2, 2019 16:56:15 GMT grinch said:

Of course, discovering his true intentions and possible origins would serve as the basis for the adventure and encourage the PCs to be paranoid about him. Lord knows by this point they've probably dealt with their fair share of shapeshifters, confidence tricksters and wolves in sheep's clothing. For some reason, I imagine him dressed and behaving rather like how Derek Jacobi portrayed the character of 'Columbus' in the Tales of the Unexpected episode A Stranger in Town or how he was depicted by Alan Badell in the original 1952 short The Stranger Left No Card. Clad in colourful clothing, and extremely eccentric he is very much the town character. 

I remember that story, I must have seen it years ago. Or something else that used the same premise.

Dec 2, 2019 16:56:15 GMT grinch said:

But who is Mister Millow? As you suggested, there are a number of ways you could play him. I rather like the idea that he is a powerful psychic perhaps from a planet full to the brim of extremely power telepaths who actively and consciously emits an aura or telepathic field of goodness, kindness and sheer likeability. (Maybe he is the last of his kind? In which case, there's an adventure in itself) Or maybe he is an ordinary human who was the product of some nefarious government experiment to be used for military purposes. After all, an enemy soldier is unlikely to fire on someone they have nothing but good feelings towards. Maybe his eccentric, rather Doctor-ish, behaviour can be attributed to how his mind was scrambled as he escaped his captives? Naturally, I feel like his telepathic field could be overridden by races with particularly powerful emotions of hatred such as the Daleks and some would be completely immune such as the Cybermen. If the latter was used, then your PC's interference might have made things worse. He has too much attention drawn to himself and he must now be on his way. No doubt to be used as a recurring NPC in other Earth based campaigns. That or he could make for an interesting ally in the event they need his unique expertise in the future. Either way, I would imagine he would avoid the attentions of more supposedly benevolent organisations such as UNIT or even Captain Jack's Torchwood. 

If he is simply an alien stranded on Earth, that would explain his work at the University. He is trying to make contact with his homeworld and send out a distress signal. What could happen when he is informed that his homeworld is long since gone? Either wiped out by a natural disaster or depending when the campaign is set merely another casualty of the Time War?

For such a race to emit such an aura of positive feelings then maybe there is an opposing race which emits the very opposite? A race which exudes feelings of antagonism and hatred towards them? Maybe Millow's species and theirs were engaged in a civil war? Perhaps Millow isn't as benevolent as he seems. Could his arrival on Earth merely be in an attempt to evade the authorities for his war crimes? It was only when an alien force arrived which threatened his new home that he found himself compelled to intervene. 

One possibility I thought about including was having possessed by a renegade Ityean or Conciliator, who provide the psionic field

[Catsmate]

Bump. Happy Generic Mid-winter holiday to one and all.

The Role of a Lifetime.
Sometimes a time traveller need a replacement for a historical personage that's been......lost. It may be a temporary measure (The Prisoner of Zenda comes to mind¹) or the person in question may have, unfortunately, died.
Then again it may have started as the former and become the latter, for example as in the film Dave.

So, you'll need an actor (perhaps one who's already got a line in impersonating the soon-to-be deceased), who can be persuaded to take over for a while. It could be (for example) Churchill, FDR, Hitler, Cromwell, King Charles or some other figure who's been incapacitated or kidnapped.
The PCs may have encountered the replacement several adventures earlier, in a completely different time period, and now must recruit him (or her: Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Margaret Thatcher...).
This may be complicated by the replacement knowing their original's eventual fate and/or not having much knowledge of  the environment in which they're being thrust.

See the aforementioned Dave for ideas. Similar themes appeared in Moon over Parador and The Magnificent Fraud (both based on the same short story)





¹ And it's Who remake, The Androids of Tara and the (rather better) Timewars version The Zenda Vendetta.

[Catsmate]

The Pestilence Cometh.
This sounds rather like my earlier seed, The Death that Came to Eyam.

But it could also be the story of a place waiting for the inevitable arrival of a plague. The early chapters of Susanna Gregory's excellent novel A Plague on Both Your Houses has this setting. The protagonist, Matthew Bartholomew is a physician at Cambridge University's Michaelhouse college, and he and his colleagues are aware of a horrific new disease sweeping across Britain, killing vast numbers in it's path. Unfortunately it's 1328 and the germ theory of disease is centuries in the future; there's very little they can do.
Complicating matters is the suspicious death of the Master of Michaelhouse nd the reluctance of the University authorities to investigate.
Soon the plague arrives and the deaths begin in earnest.

It's a relatively easy concept to migrate to various eras and settings; the disease (or perhaps a horde of biological or self-replicating machine destroyers) is coming and many people are losing hope, while others are doing their best to prepare. Then the PCs arrive. Do they help? Can they help? Can they survive?


Suggestions? Ideas? Comments?