That’s right. The whole damn thing.
Everyone’s heard of the Bermuda Triangle. If you believe what passes for information on the place, you’d hear that it’s a region of ocean roughly triangular in shape, with its points at either Miami or Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the island of Bermuda, and the island of Puerto Rico, and that it’s legendary for making ships, planes, and people disappear right off the face of the earth. One of the more famous examples was Flight 19, a group of five Avenger torpedo bombers that disappeared over the Triangle on a routine training mission on December 5th, 1945. Supposedly they wound up in this dense cloud bank, radioed back one final message, then disappeared. Two PBY Catalina seaplanes were dispached to seach for the flight, but one of those disappeared as well. There’s also been instances of ships disappearing, or just the people on them. Now, to be fair, the disappearance of Flight 19 was probably caused by the fact that the trainer had just transfered from Miami to Ft. Lauderdale and freaked out when he couldn’t recognize anything then got lost, and the PBY Catalina planes were notorious for blowing up midflight, and a midair explosion was reported where the missing Catalina would have been. Bad weather also explains a lot of the boat disappearances, as it is located right in the middle of the path that hurricanes and other strong storms take up the coast of Florida. Many theories have been pitched to explain the remaining cases, from aliens, to magnetic anomalies, to gas “bumps”, to bad weather. However, none of them have even come close.
The Triangle itself is alive. Not just a part of it, not a bunch of little things that are part of some fancy hive-mind, but the whole thing is created by one big creature. It stays within the confines of the Triangle mostly, and feeds very rarely. However, it’s method of feeding explains the more mysterious disappearances rather well. The creature itself is quite powerful, and can sense fear quite acutely over very long distances. It then homes in on the victim, and then uses that fear against them. These fears are usually enough to get them to capsize their vessel or jump overboard, and the creature then eats them.
No one’s ever actually seen the creature (as far as anyone knows, who knows if it just ate them), and it’s large enough that all the sonar scans of the creature have been dismissed as just a part of the sea floor. However, something that big can’t be ignored forever, but the issue will be seeing it without getting killed. It’s not stupid, and it knows what could happen if it’s ever revealed. It’s usually content to let people look at it because it’s just too big to notice if you’re not looking for it. However, if it knows that you’re looking for it, it wil go out of it’s way to avoid you. And if you do manage to get a photo, sonar scan, or any other form of proof, may the deity of your choice protect you, and pray that your boat has enough gas to get back to shore. Some say that it looks like a gigantic octopus, but that’s probably a bunch of shit.
The Bermuda Triangle
Points: Beyond comprehension
Body: Strong enough to tear a ship in two
Speed: Faster than a speeding motorboat
Mind: Eons of knowledge
Soul: Reveals your innermost secrets
Skills:
Besides its ability to tear almost anything into small pieces, astounding swimming ability, and its wealth of knowledge, it only has two skills worth speaking of: Mind Reading and Fear Trigger. Mind reading is just as advertized: it can read your mind. Anything you think about, it can read as if it was written out in front of it. Fear trigger allows it to cause Madness checks in any fear stimulus that it chooses, in any magnitude it chooses. If it wants to cause a mild malaise, it could whip up a rank 1 Isolation check, or if it wanted to shatter your mind with Art Man Was Not Ment To Know, it could hit you with a rank 10 Unnatural check. It’s all up to the creature.
Sounds far more Call of Cthulhu-esque than Unknown Armies… now if the Triangle was caused by an ancient ritual and a small sect of dukes were using it to get charges every so often… only they’ve stopped in recent years because the Sleepers are getting too close… that’d be more UA. But this would be a great plot bit for a CoC or other straight-horror game.
Well, UA and the Cthulhu mythos are practically synonomous… I mean, I’m sure either side of the equation has it’s share of adamant seperatists, but I can say it’s alot of fun to have your party of sexy angst gun toting teenagers be pitted against a Great Old One or Outer God.
Besides, there’s no plothook like the “We have to go up against the impossible odds” plothook.
Here’s a more UA type story, then:
in 1590, William Shakespeare perfected the art of dramaturgy. With that art, he created Prospero, a magickal mimic of John Dee, and cast him across the waters to Bermuda (a land of mystery to most Englishmen, and therefore prime material for a plausable tale of magic). That act, though, required an act of bisociation that would make Robert Anton Wilson swoon. To this day, Prospero lives in Bermuda, doing his job with the storms, and living his days in a Bermuda unmentioned in tourist brochures and glimpsed only by initiate of Voudon and, of course, touring bands of magickal hooligans.
What if it was a giant evil psychic octopus made of the sewn together and magically preserved and animated body parts of it’s many victims? And somewhere deep down i nthat mass of unliving undying flesh is form of a totally wacked and way to powerful adept of the old school traditions, a mental genius and experimental surgeon from the sixteenth century who let his love of transplantation and animal husbandry get horribly unimaginably out of control?
That’s slightly mroe UA I think.
…
If you want, I guess.
In a game I ran, about two months ago, we hit upon a likely solution; I just threw some suggestions at my players, and let them sort the lesser details.
“It’s what the first sailors saw; when they ran out shit to give names,and they got scared, and the priests stopped making sense, so they just looked to the horizon and said ‘here there be monsters’, and all was good. What they felt was the absence of ‘stuff’ for the cosmos to put their. God just wasn’t feeling creative when he made the Caribbean, I guess. So, when they gave it a purpose, it took the ball, and kept going. ‘Here there be monsters’.”
I was impressed; I was voting towards:
“Uh. Aliens. Next question, please.”
“Yeah. Can a Pornomancer with an STD still get charges through ritual sex with unpolluted GMCs?”
“Fuck you. You wake up on a boat, in the Caribbean. Enjoy.”
Anytime my players get too tricky, I get a moment of flustered panic, have a cigarette, and promptly inflict grievous humor and horror upon them. So far, two years of UA, and counting. They’ve never been happier.
since when is the Bermuda Triangle been believed? It’s like saying it moved to swallow up Amelia Earhert or something. Um, hello? She ran out of gas in the middle of a storm. And lets take a looksie… if I’m not wrong, the BT was created in a time where no one was all that interested in getting the scientific opinion. They more or less said, “Magicks!” and left it be. Come on, people. IT IS A MYTH. Of course, if you want to say you saw Free Willy outside your window, kool. He’s dead.
I read a book on the Bermuda Triangle years ago when it was really active- it said planes equipment would go haywire they would get disoriented and lost and crash in the triangle and empty boats would be found with everyone gone and tables full of food that looked like they just got up and walked away and vanished…perhaps to go see something??!! Interesting theory
Actually the whole “Giant Squid” thing is the fault of a Florida Mechanomancer who figured he could get tons of historical artefacts by sinking famous ships as they passed through one of the most heavily travelled areas of sea around the United States.
Could have worked too, if the real triangle hadn’t eaten it twenty or so years ago.