The British Warehouse 23

[Denizen]

I have an idea for an 1960s British spy genre game where various agents are striving to find and acquire what's in Great Britain's answer to the Americans' Warehouse 23. Now I'm seeking ideas for vintage British artifacts and items preferably from the 1960s Sci-Fi and Horror stories which could have conceivably taken place.

Just some basic guidelines:

1. Try to keep it 1950, 1960s, 1970s and British.

2. Avoid artifacts from Doctor Who. It’s too easy.

Some ideas I've come up with so far are:

-Various tissue and bone fragments from various giant sea-monsters in and around the North Sea. (Gorgo and Reptillicus). The real-life monsters were more vulnerable to conventional weapons and were reduced to shreds in the battles with the British Navy.

-A crashed UFO, with the corpse of an alien pilot, which are two being s fused together, and the resulting dream-machine that came out of the alien technology (Miracleman).

-A apiary of aggressive honey bees that are drawn to adrenaline, acquired from a madman on Seagull Island, and now used by the masters of the Warehouse as assassination tools. Included is also evidence that pop-star Vicky Robbin’s overdose on heroin after the incident was not an accident. (Deadly Bees)

-An energy/matter converter with storage cell, now perfected and used by the warehouse masters as a source of unlimited energy through the conversion of their garbage. Its teleportation properties still have kinks in them. (The Projected Man).

-A cylindrical capsule misidentified as a German V-2 rocket found during an excavation of the London subway, which unknowingly contains the crystallized remains of insectiod martians that altered primitive humans. Give it a source of energy and the ship will give certain individuals around it martian genetic memories, telekinetic powers and a mindless compulsion to use said powers to kill everyone who isn’t affected. (Quatermass and the Pit).

- Various sketches and letters from missing nobleman Sir Clive Folliot torn from 19th century newspapers which state that after disappearing while searching for his twin brother in Africa, he found a portal to a strange otherworld termed by the prisoners within as the Dungeon. (Philp Jose Farmer’s The Dungeon).

- A collection of live and dead rodents of unusual size captured after resulting in a danger of deaths. The two-headed rat “king” is still being studied for military applications. (Jame Herbert’s The Rats Trilogy).

- A capsule containing a large mycoplasma. Warnings on the capsule state if released homicidal madness and suicidal thoughts may result. (James Herbert’s The Fog.)

-A vial of dried blood and signet ring from Dracula after his death in England ( Hammer films Dracula movies)

-The embalmed remains of a six year-old child stabbed through the heart by long ornate stiletto daggers. The accompanying notes identify the remains as the son of Jeremy Thorn who was found stabbed to death by his distraught father in All Saints Church in London after the death of his wife, and that his chromosome is like that of a Canis mesomelas i.e the common jackal. Even embalmed, there is a look of surprise on the corpse's face. (The Omen)

[tshiggins]

An ancient scabbard sealed in a reliquary, along with the tattered remains of a flag that bears the device of a red dragon. The reliquary is surrounded by all sorts of spectrometers and other devices to detect energy, and marked as an item of considerable interest to the British military. An accompanying dossier mentions that it somehow deflects kinetic energy in its immediate proximity.

A large cylindrical object made of a lightweight metal or ceramic, that resembles a spotlight or projector. Instead of a lens, it has a bright parabolic mirror set within a cavity that points out of one end.

A bowl of silver and blue glass, inlaid with Celtic knotwork, half-filled with a clear, glimmering liquid.

A salvaged sign, circa 1935, mounted on a wall, that reads, "Capital Laundry Services."

A tall, thick crystalline column. Within it can be seen the vague outlines of a human figure.

Several sets of space suits made from a material that resembles aluminum and red lycra. They have been punctured by automatic weapons fire.

On a nearby shelf, sealed containers hold samples of a translucent green liquid.

An old road sign that reads, "Dunwich, 30 miles."

Fragments of a metal plate, coated with a thin layer of shiny metal on one side, sits atop a rack. The shiny-side is down, and the metal plate is attached to the rack with heavy clamps. The rack itself is bolted to the floor.

A misshapen skull sits on a shelf, that looks like a bizarre mutation of human and dog. Next to it on the shelf is a water-stained leather-bound diary with a handwritten title, "The Journal of Edward Prendick."

A small crystalline key mounted in brass sits on a shelf. It bears a hand-written tag marked, "prototype." Beside it are two dried flowers of unknown origin, but possessed of considerable beauty even in their dried state.

(Note: I'm trying to think of things that I don't recall seeing in the background of the frames in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." That said, you could make a really good start on the contents of the British Warehouse 23 by simply cataloging what appeared in the pages of LoEG that took place in the British Museum.)

[Agemegos]

• A 16th-Century snare drum decorated with the arms of Sir Francis Drake

• A jar of very fine seeds with dandelion-like fluff and a vial of highly-fluid pink-tinged oil, both labelled "Arctic & European Fish Oil Co."

[Agemegos]

• "Ancient hauberk, date of the sixth century, time of King Arthur and the Round Table; said to have belonged to the knight Sir Sagramore le Desirous; observe the round hole through the chain-mail in the left breast; can't be accounted for; supposed to have been done with a bullet since the invention of firearms—perhaps maliciously by Cromwell's soldiers."

[Ed the Coastie]

A large cylinder containing an apparently dormant ambulatory plant. (Day of the Triffids)

Artifacts salvaged from the Martian invasion. (The War of the Worlds)

A signed copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard. (Harry Potter)

A vial of serum with biohazard signs and labeled as "Rage virus". (28 Days Later)

(OK, so "28 Days Later" and "Harry Potter" are technically after the time period mentioned...but I thought I would toss them in there anyway just for fun.)

[quarkstomper]

A large wardrobe, made of apple wood.

A small box containing two rings made of an unknown material: one yellow and one green.

A large potsherd of a dirty yellow color, dating around the 4th Century BC, bearing a lengthy inscription painted on the convex side in uncial Greek. On the other side has been written several other notes and signatures in Greek, Latin and English, including a doggeral couplet: "In earth and skie and sea / Strange thynges the be." Along with the potsherd is a parchment with a translation of the inscription in Latin and in English.

A dossier labeled "Manor Farm" containing photographs of a small farm. There are not humans visible in the photographs, and they seem to show animals performing farm chores by themselves. A couple show pigs walking on their hind legs. Words have been painted on one side of the barn, of which the most legible reads: "All Animals are Created Equal."

A classified scientific paper entitled "On the Less-Observed Properties of Solar Radiation" by Professor Edwin Rolles Weston

[Agemegos]

• A battered cardboard archival box, labelled "Matthew Gore, debriefing". The contents are two reels of audio tape.

[Xenarthral]

In a fit of lazy helpfulness, I bring you:
THIS! (Which really is the only thing you need for a British Warehouse 23)
A few random examples from the General comic cook heroes section
(this being the British section of the site):

Captan Hornet
Danny Drew's Dialing Man
Full O'Beans
The Gauntlet of Fate
The Inky-Top Imps
The Jet-Skaters
Spring-Heeled Jackson
Steel Commando
Sammy Brewster's Ski-Board Squad
Starr of Wonderland
Danny's Tranny
Pete's Pocket Army
Six Milliobn Dollar Gran
Val's Vanishing Cream
Martha's Monster Make-up

Brian's Brain
The Cat Girl
The Danger twins
Dolmann
The Phantom Viking
The Z-bikes
Micky Marvel
Billy Binns
Brassneck
Galaxus
Maisie's Magic Eye

Robot Archie

Several of these appeared in Alan Moore's Albion (which pretty much was
British Warehouse 23 the comic/if Alan Moore was DMing).

[robkelk]

A small box filled with at least a dozen round pin-on badges. Each badge shows a penny-farthing bicycle, except that the axle of the larger wheel has been replaced with a number "2" in Albertus font.

(I'm surprised nobody's mentioned anything from this show yet - especially since there was a GURPS 3e book about it.)

[sgtcallistan]

From further back than you suggest; but if an historical artefact survives, it survives until the times you suggest...

A large photograph of a church's stained-glass window: four saints can be seen, their vestments have thick, black borders.
Next to it, an ancient book, collecting fragments and pages from ancient ecclesiastical texts; with care the four saints above can be correlated with a certain English abbey, and the latin phrases: '-they have upon their vestments words that which no man knoweth', and '-there is a stone with seven stars'.

A small bronze tube about four inches long, quite full of beach sand.
When cleaned, there can be read 'Fle, Fla, Flu, Fle' on one side, and the latin phrase easily translated as 'Who is this who is coming?' on the other.
Label: 'Aldeburgh, 1936'.

Under constant motion-sensor watch in a sealed room marked 'Danger of Death', a not over-large framed mezzotint of an ordinary English country house; small, three floors. If you should go in and look closely, one of the ground-floor windows can be seen to be open, when the video record shows it wasn't yesterday.
On the back is a torn label '-nningley Hall 1799.'

In a drawer, a soft leather bag containing a beautiful tear-shaped crystal on a string that is apprently made of golden hair. How it is suspended from the string is not obvious. Some people claim to see a whirling blue flame or a waterspout in the centre of it.
Label: 'Alderley Edge, Cheshire, 1959'.
Next to it, a photograph of a rock cliff with the words carved over a horse-trough; 'Thirsty Traveller, drink thy fill, for the water falls, by the wizard's will'.

A tall cupboard/closet containing a chipped white teacup with a pearl-pattern rim, a blocky stone about a foot across, a rusty sword that looks like a toy, and a stick about five feet long with an old bronze knife on the end.
No label.

A puzzle for the latin scholar: a strong wooden box marked 'hedge maze markers', containing 25 Square cobblestones, each one Marked with a letter: AAADEEEIIIMNNNOOPRRRRSSTT.
Label: '1750?'

In a securely-locked glass case, a slip of paper about half-an-inch by ten inches, with a line of unusual runes, similar to norse.
Label: 'Do NOT Touch'.