Thinking of examples like [Jeru]Salem’s Lot, ME; Ogden Marsh, IA; Snowfield, CO; Barrow, AK; and Périgord, OR, I thought it might be fun for Halloween to make the residents of a small American town of a couple hundred to a few thousand people just sort of disappear.
The “how” is probably less important. Vampires, zombies, military quarantine, shape-shifting aliens, interdimensional demons, whatever.
I’m also not looking to replace the population with creepy doppelgangers of their former selves (i.e. vampires, clones, robots, pod people, etc). At best there should be nothing left but a bunch of old buildings and maybe some unfinished meals or other odds and ends laying about as if their owners are going to return any minute.
So here’s the catch…is there a way to produce such a modern day Roanoke without creating a huge media frenzy at the sudden unexplained disappearance of a thousand people?
I mean, if people notice that a whole town has emptied it is pretty likely to draw attention. So it would have to be a town isolated and off-the-grid enough for nobody to pass through and notice and for nobody in the town to be communicating with the outside to be missed. Which would have to include nobody notices that they stop paying for utilities, stop paying taxes, stop ordering shipments of food, etc.
Oh no. Well at least not right away. At most I want maybe some jerk to come back to his home town after being away for a decade or so and wonder where the heck everyone went.
Like if I were a vampire, I wouldn’t want to draw attention that I just turned a whole town into an army of vampires and have the full might of the military or Catholic church or whoever descend on it.
Okay, a toxic release caused evacuation serious enough to make place dangerous. Radiation leak and contamination. Coal seam fire. The original story died 5 or 6 years ago.
Town buried under a reservoir then the dam went out.
I think you’d be hard pressed to make an entire town vanish overnight without drawing attention. Either the disappearance has to have just happened or it happened in such a manner that can be explained away. When the people of Salem’s Lot were getting eaten by or turned into vampires, they abandoned the town in droves. There was no obvious disaster so it didn’t draw the attention of anyone who wasn’t already close to Salem’s Lot.
What level of resources are you dealing with? You mention vampires, zombies, interdimensional demons–do you have access to all of those?
If so, I’m going to assume you also have access to a neuralyzer, from Men in Black. More importantly, you have access to industrial-strength, spotlight-sized neuralyzers that you can point at the roads entering town.
Sure, people will notice the lack of communication from the town. But online investigation will only go so far: eventually it’ll get to the point where someone goes out to investigate.
Flashy flashy, and they forget what they were doing.
That might not be enough, though, if they wander back to town confused: things could escalate. So you should also recruit engineers from Rekall to implant false memories in the town’s visitors.
Making a few thousand people disappear is Child’s Play (again, assuming you have access to a sufficient quantity of possessed dolls). It’s the media frenzy that you gotta prevent, and I think neuralyzer spotlights and Rekall beds oughtta fix you right up.
I feel like one of the challenges is that people tend to have friends and family outside of the town. So you’d have to find a town that’s relatively insular to begin with and then figure out how to cut ties with the outside world over time. Maybe every few years you get someone snooping around looking for some long lost estranged relative.
Or maybe media circus is a foregone conclusion and you just make it look like one day everyone inexplicably walked into a blizzard or the sound at high tide all at once. People might mull over the strangeness for a few weeks then it just becomes one of those weird legends.
The OP only wanted real small towns, a couple thousand people or less. Eureka is significantly larger than that. Making that many people disappear is a bigger challenge. You can’t persuade them all to run down the street in their birthday suit or something.
There is an incorporated town in Oregon that has a permanent population of zero. If you go there in winter, when no one’s around, you could claim to have caused them to dissappear.
How about doing the exact opposite? Make a small town appear out of nowhere that uses the rural land that didn’t have any town at that location before. That’s what has just happened to me. There’s a novel by Patrick Ryan called Buckeye in which the events of that novel take place in an imaginary town called Bonhomie. It would have to be located almost precisely where the farm I grew up on is actually located (in Hancock Country, Ohio). Buckeye was published on September 2nd of this year. It’s already getting very good reviews. I’ve read most of it at this point. It reminds me of the problems that I always had with the television series Glee. Glee was supposedly set in Lima, Ohio. The various songs that the members of the show choir in the series sang may be O.K. to listen to, but the look and the social network of the people in that series don’t really resemble Lima (twenty-five miles from the farm I grew up on) at all. It appears the one of the series creators, who apparently has never been outside of southern California in their life, just wrote the scripts and then randomly stuck their finger on a map and said, “Hmm, my finger came down on a city called Lima in Ohio, so we’ll set the series there.” It worries me that I might go back to the area where our farm was located and discover that suddenly the town of Bonhomie might have suddenly appeared out of nowhere. The town of Bonhomie in Buckeye also doesn’t really resemble the area I grew up in either.
What if everyone just one day left? No commotion, no hustle–everyone moved away. No friends nor family wondering what happened, since the people they know are still around. But not in that town.
Why did everyone move? Random chance. Everyone moves sometime. It happened that everyone coincidentally moved from that town on the same day. And also that no one noticed everyone else moving.
It’s like the slim chance that all the oxygen molecules in the room you’re in bounce to the corner and you asphyxiate before they spread out again. Everyone moving from the town on the same day is much more likely than that.
You’ve never played in a Delta Green campaign. Small towns are abandoned on a regular basis due to ‘radon leak from the local quarry’, ‘mysterious epidemic of unknown origin’, ‘hypoxia due to anomalous swamp gas release’, or whatever cover story the players come up with to conceal the fact that they murdered all of the residents who fell under control of Mi-Go overlords.
My GM, Stephen Alzis, was always a jerk about making it difficult for us cover things up. He was always good about giving us fun toys to play with though.
