Post by starkllr on Mar 20, 2015 12:45:53 GMT
Catsmate has been posting a lot of fantastic material, some of which plays with the various things troublemakers, con artists and thieves can do with time travel.
One of them is the classic "loot the sunken ship full of gold that history records as never having been found" and using that gold to...well, any number of things, really.
That got me thinking. What if history is wrong? Or, at least, incomplete? The possibilities for a Doctor Who adventure are endless...
Let's start with this: a Spanish treasure ship departs the New World sometime in the early 17th century. It never makes it home, and is believed to have sunk during a hurricane (based on the last confirmed sighting, the route it was supposed to have been sailing, and reports of other ships that barely survived the storm). Belief becomes certainty as the years pass. The wreck is never found, but that's no surprise, with (conservatively) 25,000 square miles of ocean it could have sunk in, at depths of up to 1,000 feet.
Sounds like a perfect target for a trans-temporal fortune hunter. Zap back a year or two after the sinking, and with 21st century (or 51st century, or alien) technology, finding the wreck is relatively easy. The gold and other valuables are duly looted, a fortune that will net our time-travelling salvage crew hundreds of millions of dollars in profit when they return to their own time. And since the ship was never found, history is undisturbed. Yay!
Except that when the time-travellers return to their present, the world is not as they remember it. It's very different indeed. And this is where our PC's come in - they show up in 2015, to an Earth whose history is radically different than it ought to be.
Why? Because in the original course of history, the lost treasure ship WAS found. Say, in 1750 AD, when ocean currents, or an undersea earthquake, or whatever, caused the wreckage to drift into shallow waters, where a British merchant ship happens upon it. And the captain chooses not to report his find, but to take all the gold for himself (and those among the crew he trusts most; the rest are either abandoned on a deserted island somewhere, or killed). So how does that alter all of history?
Well, that captain founds his own small shipping company, judiciously spending the gold he recovered, and the company he founds will eventually grow to become White Star Lines. That found gold will, 160 years later, help pay for the construction of the Titanic.
But now, thanks to our time-travellers, there is no wreck (and no gold) for that enterprising captain to find. He continues on as a merchant captain until he's killed by pirates in 1762. Which means he never has a son, who never has a son of his own, who in turn doesn't have a great-grandson who, let's say, helps crack the ENIGMA code during World War II.
AND, since the less-trusted crew is not killed or abandoned, some of them do go on to have children, one of whom has a great-great grandson who becomes an anarchist and, say, stages an attack on Parliament in 1921, killing (among others) Winston Churchill.
And of course there's the absence of the Titanic and its sinking. In the altered history, poor James Cameron never wins an Oscar, but there will be other effects, too. All the people who died on the Titanic now probably live on for several more years, with incalculable changes to history. And all the safety innovations that sprang from the Titanic disaster now take another 25 years to slowly be made. Which means that there are, say, a dozen passenger ship disasters in that time that either didn't happen at all in the true history, or which happened, but there was far less loss of life than there is now in the new history. The added deaths of, say, 2,000 or 5,000 wealthy and powerful people at sea over 25 years in the early 20th century surely would have some pretty big ripples in time!
So when our PC's emerge from their TARDIS in 2015 to see a swastika flying over Buckingham Palace, they will naturally want to find out how history was changed, and fix it. But there is no Meddling Monk or Master or even a human conspiracy behind the change, so working backwards to get to the root of the problem will be a very different kind of adventure, and a really challenging mystery.
Another scenario possibility is that the PC's are the cause of a similar derailing of history. It can happen even with the best of intentions. The Fifth Doctor fights off the Tereleptils in "The Visitation" and in doing so helps to start the Great fire of London. But that's OK, because it's established history, so he and his companions don't worry about it.
Just because history says that the fire started in a particular building, at a particular time, though, doesn't mean that's what actually happened. The fire resulting from the actions of the Tereleptils and the Doctor might have happened two hours earlier than the "real" fire did. Which might mean that some people who lived in the original history now die, because they were asleep when the Doctor's fire started (when they had been awake and out of the house during the original history). And one of those people is the great-great-great-etc grandmother of someone vital to the 20th century's history. Robert Oppenheimer? Do the Nazi's get the atomic bomb before the Americans thanks to the Doctor moving up the Great Fire by two hours? Or Jonas Salk? The cure for polio is delayed a decade (with how many thousands of deaths, and how much potential unfulfilled)? Arthur Conan Doyle? A world without Sherlock Holmes is depressing enough, but what other effects might his absence have on history? Etc.
One of them is the classic "loot the sunken ship full of gold that history records as never having been found" and using that gold to...well, any number of things, really.
That got me thinking. What if history is wrong? Or, at least, incomplete? The possibilities for a Doctor Who adventure are endless...
Let's start with this: a Spanish treasure ship departs the New World sometime in the early 17th century. It never makes it home, and is believed to have sunk during a hurricane (based on the last confirmed sighting, the route it was supposed to have been sailing, and reports of other ships that barely survived the storm). Belief becomes certainty as the years pass. The wreck is never found, but that's no surprise, with (conservatively) 25,000 square miles of ocean it could have sunk in, at depths of up to 1,000 feet.
Sounds like a perfect target for a trans-temporal fortune hunter. Zap back a year or two after the sinking, and with 21st century (or 51st century, or alien) technology, finding the wreck is relatively easy. The gold and other valuables are duly looted, a fortune that will net our time-travelling salvage crew hundreds of millions of dollars in profit when they return to their own time. And since the ship was never found, history is undisturbed. Yay!
Except that when the time-travellers return to their present, the world is not as they remember it. It's very different indeed. And this is where our PC's come in - they show up in 2015, to an Earth whose history is radically different than it ought to be.
Why? Because in the original course of history, the lost treasure ship WAS found. Say, in 1750 AD, when ocean currents, or an undersea earthquake, or whatever, caused the wreckage to drift into shallow waters, where a British merchant ship happens upon it. And the captain chooses not to report his find, but to take all the gold for himself (and those among the crew he trusts most; the rest are either abandoned on a deserted island somewhere, or killed). So how does that alter all of history?
Well, that captain founds his own small shipping company, judiciously spending the gold he recovered, and the company he founds will eventually grow to become White Star Lines. That found gold will, 160 years later, help pay for the construction of the Titanic.
But now, thanks to our time-travellers, there is no wreck (and no gold) for that enterprising captain to find. He continues on as a merchant captain until he's killed by pirates in 1762. Which means he never has a son, who never has a son of his own, who in turn doesn't have a great-grandson who, let's say, helps crack the ENIGMA code during World War II.
AND, since the less-trusted crew is not killed or abandoned, some of them do go on to have children, one of whom has a great-great grandson who becomes an anarchist and, say, stages an attack on Parliament in 1921, killing (among others) Winston Churchill.
And of course there's the absence of the Titanic and its sinking. In the altered history, poor James Cameron never wins an Oscar, but there will be other effects, too. All the people who died on the Titanic now probably live on for several more years, with incalculable changes to history. And all the safety innovations that sprang from the Titanic disaster now take another 25 years to slowly be made. Which means that there are, say, a dozen passenger ship disasters in that time that either didn't happen at all in the true history, or which happened, but there was far less loss of life than there is now in the new history. The added deaths of, say, 2,000 or 5,000 wealthy and powerful people at sea over 25 years in the early 20th century surely would have some pretty big ripples in time!
So when our PC's emerge from their TARDIS in 2015 to see a swastika flying over Buckingham Palace, they will naturally want to find out how history was changed, and fix it. But there is no Meddling Monk or Master or even a human conspiracy behind the change, so working backwards to get to the root of the problem will be a very different kind of adventure, and a really challenging mystery.
Another scenario possibility is that the PC's are the cause of a similar derailing of history. It can happen even with the best of intentions. The Fifth Doctor fights off the Tereleptils in "The Visitation" and in doing so helps to start the Great fire of London. But that's OK, because it's established history, so he and his companions don't worry about it.
Just because history says that the fire started in a particular building, at a particular time, though, doesn't mean that's what actually happened. The fire resulting from the actions of the Tereleptils and the Doctor might have happened two hours earlier than the "real" fire did. Which might mean that some people who lived in the original history now die, because they were asleep when the Doctor's fire started (when they had been awake and out of the house during the original history). And one of those people is the great-great-great-etc grandmother of someone vital to the 20th century's history. Robert Oppenheimer? Do the Nazi's get the atomic bomb before the Americans thanks to the Doctor moving up the Great Fire by two hours? Or Jonas Salk? The cure for polio is delayed a decade (with how many thousands of deaths, and how much potential unfulfilled)? Arthur Conan Doyle? A world without Sherlock Holmes is depressing enough, but what other effects might his absence have on history? Etc.
I'm all in favour of handing players a different style of puzzle, though the Master is worth keeping as a red herring or distraction as well as an antagonist.