"Poseidia will be among the first portions of Atlantis to rise again -- expect it in '68 and '69 -- not so far away."
-- Edgar Cayce, life reading 958-3 (June 28, 1940)
Give Edgar Cayce his props. There are a limited number of years in American history where the rising of Atlantis would seem almost normal, even expected in a way, but 1968 was definitely that kind of year. It may have bombed as prophecy, but as a game setting -- call it Reality Cayce -- it's a natural. And having thus paid brief obeisance to the gods of plausibility, we can elaborate on this psychedelic alternate Earth, a GURPS Technomancer variant where it's not the Bombs, but the Bahamas, that bring the magic back.
"The magician and the other so-called Gods of our legends.
Though Gods they were --
And as the elders of our time choose to remain blind
Let us rejoice and let us sing and dance and ring in the new
Hail Atlantis!
Way down below the ocean where I wanna be she may be . . .
My antediluvian baby, oh yeah yeah, yeah yeah yeah,
I wanna see you some day."
-- Donovan, "Atlantis" (1968)
On January 30, 1968, in obedience to ancient spells cast millennia ago upon the continent's destruction, the western reaches of the Republic of Atlantis materialized where the Bahama Islands had previously basked in the Caribbean sunlight. An island only slightly smaller than Britain now sat fifty miles off the coasts of Florida, Cuba, and Haiti, glistening with towers and pyramids of solidified crystal. Its tall, perfectly formed, bronze-skinned inhabitants set about mastering this new world as they had their last, with sorceries and super-science inextricably entwined in crystal matrices and the mighty powers of mentalics.
The hippie, anti-war, and counterculture movements embraced Atlantis, supercharged by the seeming realization of the utopian dreams of the 1960s. The vegetarian, "tuned in" Atlanteans' open acceptance of magic and drug use, their eager attendance at rock concerts and antiwar rallies, and their open disdain of the United States went even farther to cement the Republic's position in the vanguard of the progressive movement. Fidel Castro's embrace of Atlantean First Philosopher Zaren may have been driven by power politics, but it delighted radicals and enraged official Washington. But political theater turned deadly serious after the assassination of Martin Luther King in April. Students and (as the FBI alleged) Atlantean agents provocateurs established an "Atlantean Commune" in San Francisco and Berkeley that easily drove off the National Guard with magical attacks. Riots broke out across America, and radicals siezed power in Baltimore, Boston, and Harlem (after Columbia University students came out in support of the rioters). Mayor Daley's storm-trooper tactics preserved government control in Chicago, but killed hundreds and further polarized the nation. In August, the riots began in Miami, and Atlantean sorcerors burned the city nearly to the ground before the Army finally broke through. Right-wing vigilantes, especially in the South, did even more damage to the fabric of America by rounding up "freaks" and "longhairs" and lynching them.
"[I]n Atlantis before destructive forces arose -- associated with communications, lighter-than-air machines, radioactive forces."
-- Edgar Cayce, life reading 1023-2 (Oct. 17, 1935)
While America reeled under this insurrection, Atlantis and the United States rapidly militarized the Florida Straits. Atlantean-Cuban cooperation paid off with the outbreak of Atlantean/Communist-backed revolutions in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. The Dominican Republic soon fell under Atlantean control, but Duvalier's high-powered vodounist allies stalemated the rebellion, and the Puerto Rican revolutionary Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) had only indifferent success against an overwhelmingly pro-American population with substantial U.S. military stiffening. But, as Atlantis found itself involved in one guerrilla war, its sorcerous advisers in North Vietnam enabled the desperate Tet Offensive to succeed, knocking the legs out of the American presence in Southeast Asia and setting off sympathetic Communist revolts in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines.
In Europe, the Atlanteans also gained strength as their Communist allies crushed the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia and the students of Paris smashed Charles de Gaulle's government in May. By June, the occultist aristocrat Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair had been elected President of the Sixth Republic, "le Republique Philisophique." Every nationalist, socialist, anti-American, radical movement in the world from the PLO to the IRA to the Japanese Red Army was adding (or reviving) an occultist wing and calling for Atlantean help -- and more often than not, getting it.
"Too many people are following the past. In this new space age, this is dangerous. The past is DEAD and those who are following the past are doomed to die and be like the past."
-- Sun Ra, 1973 liner notes to Atlantis (first recorded 1960)
The United States fought back, and although the loss of Vietnam was a blow to prestige and morale, it did enable the military to concentrate its attentions on the problem at hand. Every aspect of fringe physics from Townsend Brown's dielectric effect to the forgotten Tesla death-rays and particle-screens got a new, eager reading as Pentagon planners desperately tried to counter the Atlanteans' crystal-focus sonic weapons, contragravity vortex geometry, and sorcerous green and purple rays. As prototype after prototype scalar pulse-fighter or mercury-vortex flying wing rolled out of the secret labs, they joined the outgunned F-4 Phantoms and F-101 Voodoos in the "undeclared air war" over the Caribbean, squaring off against Atlantean vailxi and vimana craft of frightening maneuverability and deadly power. When the nuclear submarine USS Scorpion disappeared off the Azores, a shadowy sea war added its problems to American grand strategy.
"As for a description of the manner of construction of the [power] stone . . . in Yucatan there is the EMBLEM of same. Let's clarify this, for it may the more easily be found. For they will be brought to this America, these United States. A portion is to be carried, as we find, to the Pennsylvania State Museum. A portion is to be carried to the Washington preservations of such findings; or to Chicago."
-- Edgar Cayce, life reading 440-5 (Dec. 20, 1933)
While the Skunk Works and White Sands cranked out revolutionary aircraft and rockets, the Smithsonian and the University of Chicago launched their own crash program of occult and Atlantean research. Ancient hieroglyphic inscriptions, theosophical channelings, and Rosicrucian high magick -- no avenue could be overlooked in the government's desperation to close the "mystical gap" between Atlantis' sorceror-philosophers and "good old American know-how." The FBI's insistence on stringent loyalty and background investigations hampered recruitment of practicing magicians, and many American Indian shamans openly supported the Atlanteans in hopes of adding their reservations to the growing stretches of "Atlantean America." Eastern European and Cuban refugees, devout anti-Communists, could be fully trusted to work against the returned masters of sorcery, however. Under the direction of the University of Chicago's Mircea Eliade, the nucleus of MARPA (the Magical-Alternative Research Project Administration) came into being by late spring. Its first triumph was accidental -- a MARPA researcher, in Los Angeles to brief Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy on the Atlantean crisis, detected the mind-control spell on "zombie assassin" Sirhan Sirhan, saving the senator's life and exposing a major Atlantean double-agent ring in California. After Kennedy defeated Nixon in November, the grateful President-Elect made Eliade the brand-new Secretary of Magic and raised MARPA to a Cabinet-level agency equal to the FBI and the CIA. With Kennedy's inauguration in January 1969, although the Atlantean crisis has steadily worsened in real terms throughout the year, it looks like the tough, optimistic President may be able to reunite America and drive Atlantean Communism from its shores.
"We must conquer or be conquered! Are we not the master race?"
-- Atlantean Prime Minister Zaren (John Dall), in Atlantis: The Lost Continent (dir. George Pal, 1961)
The return of Atlantis has transformed at least the Caribbean basin and Bermuda Triangle into a "high-mana" zone, and the rest of the world into a "normal-mana" area with a few dead spots. Simultaneously, the sudden emergence into the psychic noosphere of Atlantis has awakened latent psis across the globe, and possibly even retroactively created such "fringe realities" as the Roswell crash or the Loch Ness Monster out of the collective unconscious. Finally, not only Atlantean superscience but the U.S. government's crash "hyperscience" programs (including, say, a possible implementation of the Majestic-12 Roswell reverse-engineering program) allow for any kind of weirdtech from antigravity to battlesuits. In short, the game is wide open for characters of any type.
The campaigns can be of any type as well. PCs can be USAF pulse-jockeys fighting Atlantean plasma craft over Puerto Rico, radicals fighting to build their own magical utopia somewhere in America's cities, Atlantean agents warring against the "materialist" enemy, MJ-12/MARPA action teams (or, better yet, Black Ops) out to steal Atlantean crystal secrets, Green Beret Special Ops in a losing war in Vietnam or an ugly one in Haiti, or just "normal folks" suddenly caught up in a chaotic America and just trying to do what's right. Atlantis can be a utopian "pure" post-economic communist republic, a Platonic caste society, an inhuman hive-mind state, a totalitarian dictatorship, a fine-tuned fascist machine, a cynical Soviet-style monument to cruelty and decadence, a fanatical theosophist theocracy, or just about anything except a democracy, depending on the GM's notions of politics or drama. The future can see continued breakdown of the United States and a new civil war between "straights" and "freaks," a more conventional struggle against an alien enemy as more and more of the American radicals realize they've been duped, the sudden emergence of more wild cards from the Antarctic Space Nazis to the Nine Unknown Sages of Shangri-La, or anything else under the sun -- or, rather, under the sea.