Adventure seed: Roswell
Stop. Stop. Forget the word ‘alien.’ It’s not relevant to the situation. Seriously. Aliens would be a relief. Aliens are explicable.
It all goes back to the Lincoln County War – which won’t mean anything to most Americans until you say the name ‘Billy the Kid.’ Yes, like in the movies, which is half of the problem. The movies all went and took what was a malicious exercise in mutual, fairly ritualized vendetta and fixed it in the American cultural subconscious. Not the first time that this has happened, of course; but the Lincoln County War is mildly remarkable for the way that so many of its active participants ended up dying badly. Debt, cancer, murder, disappearances… research occultists in the area whisper that maybe something that shouldn’t be in the New Mexico desert is now there, and it doesn’t like people very much.
And, thanks to the damned Wehrmacht, its half-awake gaze is focused on Roswell.
Not that the Germans meant to do that, one hopes. But maybe they did. During World War II there was a POW camp in Roswell – and the relevant occult federal agencies are grimly determined to never let the USA make that mistake again – and some of the prisoners managed to create a stone mosaic in the symbolically significant form of an iron cross. And of course one of the prisoners spilled some of his own blood on it (you work as a mason, you end up with your blood in the work), simultaneously energizing the accidental spell, and keeping it dormant for as long as he lived; and of course the town didn’t do anything sensible about the entire problem, like bring in an exorcism team and a demolition squad. No, they just covered it up, because that always works in the folk tales!
…Sorry. It’s just that the mosaic is now a tourist attraction, and they keep making movies about Billy the Kid, and the prisoner who spilled the blood in the first place finally died of old age a few years ago. So it’s more or less become the supernatural equivalent of a volcanic caldera. Maybe it’ll go off! Maybe it won’t! You just don’t know.
But, hey, more fun to talk about aliens, right?