[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2

The Bermuda Triangle itself is crackpot theory enough for hosts of stories. And it's never been clear as to how some of the most heavily-traveled waters on Earth could also be the source of tons of mysterious disappearances.

Well, in real reality, it's because the larger your sample size (ships and vehicles that travel through), the more anecdotal evidence you can discover and instinctively look for patterns in randomness.

In my campaign, there are other explanations. For one thing, if you want to lay traps for rabbits, you don't do it where rabbits rarely go. And when fishing, you want to be where fish congregate, not somewhere they avoid.

Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2

Have you considered the possibility that the Bermuda Triangle isn't located where everyone says it is? That it lies just outside all that heavily-trafficked Carribean area? Or that the Vortice moves with the precession of the planet's axis, so that some point it could have swept over Roanoake Island?

Well, having been vouchsafed the full delightful wisdom and wonder of Ivan T. Sanderson in the original sources, to my surprise and joy available on Kindle, I shall endeavour to accept him as prophet and high hierophant of my campaign world whereever possible.

Happily, while Sanderson does not exclude any of the commonly accepted ca 500,000 square mile area of the Bermuda Triangle, he does insist it's not a triangle at all. It's a lozenge. This means that Sanderson's (and thus mine) Vile Vortex in the Caribbean extends at least as far south from the Bahamas as it does north.

At one fell swoop, it doubles in size, at minimum. Granted, that's not in the right direction, for my purposes here (though the fact that the lozenge squarely includes both Haiti and Cuba is obviously welcome news), but so far, I've found nothing suggesting that Sanderson rejects the various theories of an expanded Bermuda Triangle shape, up to some 1,500,000 square miles.

If we want to include all the areas that various crackpots have suggested as part of the expanded Bermuda Triangle, while still retaining a neat lozenge shape, we might well end up with a total of more than 3,000,000 square miles of ocean and islands, which would encompass the vast majority of the Caribbean, from a southern terminus not far north of Panama to a northern terminus that I might possibly be able to extend near enough to Roanoke Island for my purposes.

Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2

Not really. For background, sure. But the players need to feel like someone is after them personally. It adds something to the game to feel like they and they alone can Save The Day.

Indeed. So far, this is specific to each individual character.

One has an Unknown Enemy from Outside Time and Space and his memories of his sojourn in the Land of the Nommo are both incomplete and unreliable. Alone among the expedition of scientists, scholars and mercenaries who disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle, the PC survived with his mind and body apparently intact, to come back twenty-three years later. Unfortunately, he claims to believe he had not been gone more than a couple of years and his answers as regards the specifics of his means of return are somewhat inadequate.

Another is fantastically powerful as a medium and spirit magic comes naturally to him, but he is a locus of spiritual energy and serves as a beacon for all sorts of Spirit World denizens, who are drawn to his power both consciously and unconsciously. How he came to possess this power is unclear, for though the devoutly Catholic PC views it simply as a gift of God, current thaumatological research can neither confirm nor refute the existence of God in the religious sense, with no entities proven to exist whose powers come from any kind of Prime Mover, nor, indeed, any evidence that anny supernatural being claiming to be an angel or demon is in any fundamental way different from a different spirit claiming to be loa, orisha, ancestral spirit, totem animal or genius loci.

The third PC, indeed, is a Cajun swamp druid who says he was Chosen to be the Sacred Guardian of 'Papa Mangrove', a mangrove grove of great apparent age and allegedly a powerful genius loci, of the local wilderness and of the Balance in the world as a whole. Other realities infringing on Earth is something that 'Nonc' Morel had decreed to be very unchill and not even remotely in tune with Nature, Balance and all that good ****. And demons, angry ghosts, wicked spirits, Outsiders or Great Old Ones have all been ruled to be invasive species. Varmint pests at best, feral hogs at worst. Need culling to protect the ecological Balance, no? Too bad you can't cook 'em and have a fais do do when you kill Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. Probably give you Color Out of Space runs.

Other, guest-characters, part-time PCs, may or may not be Chosen, Destined or Prophecied.

Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2

Sonds good to me. the classics are classics for a reason. :D

I've just started re-reading Ken Hite's Suppressed Transmisssions, got new books he wrote for Call of Chthulu/Delta Green and am going to read The King in Yellow and selected works by the Old Master himself.

Call of Chthulu was set in New Orleans, after all.