Where & When
The story is set in the Lost City of Atlantis at some time in the very near future. While no date for the setting is explicitly given, Polly estimates it to be 1970, and nobody contradicts her. We can be more confident about the day, since the narrative starts on the vernal equinox, which occurs on 20th March, almost (but not quite) regardless of the year; at the most, the story finishes the day after, and it may not even be that long.
Setting
The first question that arises is where Atlantis is supposed to be. Zaroff describes it as “west of Gibraltar, south of the Azores,” a region of the Atlantic that, unsurprisingly, is devoid of real-world islands. At least three possibilities present themselves if we want to set this in an RPG campaign. Firstly, we could do what the serial itself does, and invent a barren volcanic island that doesn’t really exist. In many settings, this is perfectly reasonable; however, in a modern one, we might need to explain why it hasn’t been spotted on Google Maps.
If we want to stick with real-world geography, however, we would naturally need to make some adjustments to both the setting and the plot. The more extreme option is to have the city be entirely underwater, doing away with the volcanic island altogether. The location given matches the Azores Plateau, which is dotted with numerous volcanoes, some of which almost, but not quite, breach the surface to become islands. Thus, the city need not be anywhere near as deep as one might expect for somewhere so far out in the ocean. Of course, this requires significant alteration to both the initial and closing segments of the plot, as well as explaining how the city can survive without access to surface air.
The remaining option is to set the story in the Azores proper. The problem here is that all but the smallest of rocky islets are inhabited, albeit not heavily so. The best option is probably Corvo, the most northerly island in the group, but one with a population of just a few hundred, almost entirely in a village on the south coast. The extinct volcano is at the other end of the island, but it is so close that we would either have to remove the village in our campaign world or justify why the locals are keeping the city secret.
How far below the waves is Atlantis supposed to be? There are some clues here, but, unfortunately, they don’t make as much sense as they may have been intended to. Notably, for instance, we are told that the city is far enough down that the time travellers suffer from caisson disease and pass out when they descend to it too rapidly. Superficially, this seems reasonable; caisson disease is, indeed, caused by rapid changes in air pressure, and the city would likely have to be pressurised to match the surrounding water and reduce the risk of leaks.
The problem, however, is that caisson disease – better known as “the bends” – is caused only by a rapid decrease in pressure, such as ascending from depth too quickly. You don’t get it when you are going down, only up. The closest equivalent while descending is nitrogen narcosis, or the “rapture of the deep”, but this has to advance quite far for somebody to pass out and mainly just causes people to act as if they are drunk (although, in a suitably dangerous environment, that’s obviously very bad).
If we ignore that, we can note that the protagonists then have to recover in a “compression chamber”. This has a gauge on the wall which runs from 0 to 1500 that must, in some way, relate to the air pressure. The question is as to what units these might be in. If it’s millibars, then Atlantis has an air pressure 1.5 times that at the surface. If this reflects the water pressure outside, we are only 15.5 metres (51 feet) down, which isn’t very much. If it’s pounds per square inch, we’re a kilometre (3,500 feet) down… and dead.
It could be, however, that it reflects the relative altitude, which makes sense given that we only see it reading zero. In this case, we might be saying that we’re 1,500 feet (460 metres) below the top of the lift shaft. That entrance is halfway up the side of a volcano, considerably higher than sea level, so the shaft doesn’t have to be implausibly deep. But, with the highest point on Corvo being 2,360 feet (720 metres), we can’t know what the altitude of the cave entrance is, and therefore how far below sea level the city has to be.
We’re left with making guesses based on what we know of the environment. For instance, we know the city is far enough down for nobody to have noticed it, and for the ascent to the surface at the end of the story to be a challenge. Equally, there is enough light in the seas outside for the fish people to grow plankton and algae. Even in clear water, light levels drop off to 1% of their surface value at around 200 metres (650 feet), which makes photosynthetic plant life impossible, so we have to be higher than that. Based on these two factors alone, a depth of 100 to 150 metres seems most likely. It’s worth noting that it would still be rather dark outside, although, on the plus side, it isn’t deep enough for the temperature to drop more than a few degrees (and we’re in the subtropics).
Not much of the original story takes place out in the water, so sea life is unlikely to be a concern, and there’s nothing more deadly than a ferret on land in the Azores. Still, in a game, we might wish to add some more aquatic scenes. If so, the waters in this part of the world are home to many dolphins and whales, large fish such as sunfish and manta rays, Portuguese men o’ war, and loggerhead turtles.
Notably, the main characters are threatened with being fed to sharks early in the story. There are several kinds of sharks near the Azores, but the most likely candidates are mako sharks. These are about 4 metres (13 feet) long and, while they don’t normally attack humans, they will if provoked – and we can assume that the priests in the story have been getting them riled up and/or hungry in preparation. They are also thought to be the fastest species of shark, reaching 46 mph (74 km/h) in short bursts. So you probably don’t want to fight one.
Next, we can move to the city itself. We are told that this sank in a catastrophic flood, leaving the survivors sheltering in caves with hidden air pockets, being spared from eventual suffocation by a natural airshaft running through the main vent of the extinct volcano. A cross-section plan of the city is on display in Zaroff’s laboratory, and it shows that most of the underground city is divided between two levels, connected by stairs and vertical shafts that we don’t see on screen.
The upper level includes the council chamber, where we meet Atlantis’s ruler, and the market, along with the compression chamber at the base of the main lift shaft to the surface. The lower level includes the laboratory and the temple, with the latter appearing particularly large. There must also be some underwater access to the temple, not shown on the map, to allow the sharks in. The mines lie below the laboratory, forming an effective third level, while beneath them is the shaft being dug down through the Earth’s crust.
There are, however, some other notable features on the plan. For one thing, there is a second lift shaft alongside the main one. This doesn’t reach so high up, and may run beside the passageway through which Jamie and Polly escape in the story finale, which opens out near the beach rather than on the mountainside.
An unlabelled space is also shown on the upper level between the compression chamber and the market. This may represent the clinic where the Fish People are created, since this is the only other area we see in the story. However, there must be many more parts of the city that we don’t see at all. Residential areas, most obviously, but also workshops producing the pottery, metalwork, fabric, and so on that are clearly in evidence. Taken together, these would surely be larger than even the temple complex.
An irregularly shaped cave above the main upper level is also unlabelled, and looks to have an underwater exit allowing access to the sea. This is probably the cave where Sean and Jacko talk to the Fish People, and the submerged sections in which they live. This is important because it’s the city’s only source of food. That’s mainly the “plankton” (perhaps more accurately algae/seaweed) that Zaroff has introduced, although the Atlanteans must have eaten something before that, with fish and shellfish seeming obvious candidates alongside less nutritious plantlife than the new sort. On the downside, it spoils in a matter of hours, which is a major plot point towards the end of the story. Why it would do this when it can be stored in dry areas is unclear; laverbread and Japanese wakame are, after all, real things.
The map does not show the series of tunnels revealed to exist below the idol of Amdo. These were used by past priests to fake a voice coming out of the idol, and perhaps for other secret rituals, but have been entirely forgotten by the current incumbents.
Atlantean society is traditional in nature, with political power entirely in the hands of an autocratic king, who is probably hereditary. The priests are also important, worshipping the goddess Amdo, who one of the spin-off audios describes as a replacement for Poseidon. Amdo demands human sacrifices at the vernal equinox and probably at other times of the year as well. Beheading and being fed to sharks are at least two of her preferred methods for delivering these. In the right sort of game, Amdo is obviously going to be replaced by a suitably evil object of cult adoration, possibly Cthulhu himself.
While the Atlanteans are restricted to what appears to be Iron Age technology, Zaroff’s arrival has changed much. His men, whom he must have somehow brought with him, are either technicians or wetsuit-wearing guards armed with automatic pistols. A nuclear reactor provides the city with electricity, but raises the question of how the Atlanteans produced light before Zaroff arrived; at one point, we see them carrying wooden torches, but where they could possibly get the materials for those from is unclear.
Another key feature of Atlantean society is that it relies on slaves for both mining and agriculture – although not seemingly for domestic duties. We are told that these are survivors of shipwrecks and, since the miners are exclusively male and don’t interact with anyone else, it certainly seems that they can’t be born to the status.
This, of course, brings us to the Fish People, the slaves who provide the city with its food. In the original broadcast version, it is apparent that there are two quite different types of Fish People living alongside one another. One type looks like regular humans, wearing leotards, diving masks, and flippers. Of the four we see, three are female, and if most of the male slaves are destined for the mines, that may be a genuine imbalance. It’s never explained on-screen, but in the original script, these were apparently intended to be representatives of the original slave population from before Zaroff’s time and so less ‘advanced’ than the others.
The second type of Fish People are more heavily modified and are the only type seen in the animated reconstruction. These have multi-coloured scaly skin, fin-like structures sprouting from their ears, and what are probably intended to be dead fish-like eyes. They are incapable of human speech, communicating through babbling sounds and, at least in the animation, interpretive dance. Their gender is impossible to determine in the animation, which is likely the intent, although the extras playing the parts in the original were all men.
It’s this latter type that are created from captured surface folk in Damon’s surgical clinic in what must be an extensive operation. Alternatively, one could explain this in-game as a gradual process requiring multiple operations to turn the victim from the more humanoid type into the piscine one over the course of months or years.
Both types of Fish People can breathe both air and water, thanks to “plastic gills” implanted in them during the operation. These are not visible externally in the more humanoid form (it being hard to say in the others), so they may be located inside the throat, extracting oxygen from water to pass into air-filled lungs.
If we’re moving the story to a starfaring TTRPG, the easiest justification for the city being underwater is for the planet to be a waterworld. Technically, in Traveller, any world with more than 95% water cover falls into this category, which actually means that an Earth-sized world could have a landmass the size of North America and still count, so long as there was nothing else. More typically, however, waterworlds in science fiction games (Traveller included) are described as having a few tiny island chains, which fits with the aesthetic of The Underwater Menace.
What we’d lose, in the case of a human city, is the idea of the Atlanteans as technologically primitive. We can partly get around this by simply having them be a lower tech level than whatever Zaroff has brought. To hew closer to the original, however, we only have to make the Atlanteans non-human, never having been a part of interstellar society.
This would likely affect how we view the Fish People. It could be that they are the natives, and that those who work the farms are merely a slave class that already existed on the world, in much the same way that this was common in many human societies in ancient times. The other option is to have there be two races, one relatively humanoid and one aquatic and fish-like. The former once had a surface civilisation on whatever islands the world once had (they probably have to be more than mere coral reefs for this to be plausible, but we don’t need anything the size of North America, or even Australia). This was destroyed by a solar flare or similar cosmic catastrophe, forcing the survivors to shelter in the underground section of one of their islands, enslaving the even more primitive Fish People in the process.
This basic setup works with any setting where non-human races are common, such as both Star Trek and Star Wars, although it might be a harder fit for Traveller without at least some humans thrown into the mix. In the case of Star Wars, we already know of a few planets fitting this description – Kamino and (implicitly) Mon Cala from the films and Castilon from one of the animated TV series, so adding another is trivial.
The story requires almost no adaptation to fit in a pulp action setting, as a one-off or otherwise. With its mad scientists, lost civilisations, and sacrificial rites, it’s almost a perfect fit for such games. In the right sort of setting, we could replace Amdo with Cthulhu, and the Fish People with Deep Ones and/or their hybrids.
If anything, it’s easier to justify transplanting the setting to a fantasy world. This has the neat effect of getting around any inconsistencies in the science, since we can just say it’s magic. Here. We’ll want to replace the Fish People with some aquatic race (or two) already native to the world. In D&D, for example, tritons, merfolk, and locathah are all plausible fits, so long as we have some justification as to why they cannot escape. The use of magic to transform captured humanoids into these races, or something equivalent, would also be justifiable in most settings.
Scenario
In a one-off scenario, the obvious way to get PCs involved is to have them be the victims of one of the shipwrecks that the Atlanteans scour for slaves. This allows for a good mix of potential PCs and requires very little change to the story as written, which would become a fairly straight pulp action adventure. The PCs could also simply be explorers visiting a previously uncharted island – which need not necessarily be in the Atlantic but could be somewhere more remote, such as parts of the Pacific. It’s worth noting here that moving the story to the 1930s, or even a steampunk 19th century, would also make little difference to the setup.
Another possibility, however, is for them to be looking for Zaroff. In the serial, he is said to have disappeared 20 years ago (in the early ‘50s, if we’re keeping with the regular timeline). Perhaps a recent piece of evidence has come to light suggesting he faked his death and that he disappeared carrying valuable research notes. Alternatively, he may be using contacts on land to gather supplies such as uranium or high-tech goods, and the PCs are trying to trace where they have gone. (Here, we can note that, in the serial, his guards and technicians appear to be surface dwellers, not native Atlanteans, so some degree of contact is plausible.)
While astute players will likely figure that Zaroff is still alive, we probably don’t want them to realise he has gone insane until they meet him.
Once on the island, the PCs need to get into the underground city, whether as captives or under their own steam. Both lift shafts have rock tunnels running alongside them, which would allow ingress, although the shorter one that opens on the beach has collapsed near the exit and needs to be excavated, if it can be found from outside at all.
If they do enter as captives and avoid being fed to the sharks as a sacrifice, then Damon is in charge of assigning them to one of the slave details. We may not want to split the party, but if we do, then he has two or three options. Those who appear to be physically capable are assigned to the mines. In the serial, these are all men, but in a game, it’s plausible that some female PCs would be equally good fits. The decision here would probably be based on the character’s Strength score, or similar, since that’s likely more visibly apparent than Constitution/Health/Toughness.
PCs that demonstrate their scientific or engineering skill may be, as the Doctor is, assigned to help Zaroff, although this is only supposed to be temporary and may well require some Persuasion or Deception/Fast Talk rolls, since Damon is not keen on the idea. Instead, what he is supposed to do with anyone not strong enough to be assigned to the mines is send them to be transformed into Fish People. Which will require some extensive surgery that hopefully they can be rescued from; since they may not get much to do until this happens, it may work better for the intended victim to be an NPC accompanying the main characters; the availability of someone suitable is something we can easily ensure in a one-off game, and probably isn’t too hard in others.
Aside from escaping, the main objective of the PCs should be trying to stop Zaroff. According to the serial, his plan is to drill through Earth’s crust and pump seawater into the ‘molten core’, creating a massive pressure explosion. As the Doctor points out, even at its thinnest, the crust is far too thick to drill through with current real-world technology (the figure given of 15 miles/25 km is about right, if we start at sea level). Zaroff counters that there is a natural fissure that he can reach that will allow him to reach the ‘core’. The likelihood of that aside, the layer of rock under the crust is no more molten than it is – although it is admittedly very hot.
On the other hand, especially given that we’re in an extinct volcano, it’s entirely possible that there is a giant magma chamber under the island, and that we might be able to reach that. Any resulting explosion would not, of course, come even remotely close to destroying the planet, unless we’re in a world where Weird Science holds sway. But it could, with a bit of handwaving, cause a violent eruption and accompanying earthquake. If we don’t think the seawater would do the trick, Zaroff has nuclear power, so he could plausibly have built a nuclear bomb and be planning to use that, Dalek Invasion of Earth style.
A large eruption and possible nuclear explosion would surely kill off the vast majority of the Atlanteans, which ought to provide enough motivation for the PCs to want to stop the scheme even if they think they can escape themselves before it goes off. But if not, a sufficiently large earthquake could cause a megatsunami affecting the Azores, and probably Madeira, Portugal, and Morocco too.
In fact, it has been seriously suggested that a sufficiently large eruption in the nearby Canary Islands could cause half of the Cumbre Vieja volcano to collapse into the sea, creating a megatsunami so large that it would still be 50 metres high by the time it hit the eastern coast of the US, potentially causing millions of deaths worldwide and flooding not just Lisbon and Casablanca, but Miami, Baltimore, and New York. It has since become clear that this isn’t going to happen for at least 10,000 years, but we could perhaps justify something similar as the result of a deliberate use of science fiction technology – it’s just the natural geology that keeps us safe.
It's not the end of the world, but any reasonable PC ought to want to stop that from happening.
After the story concludes, the Atlanteans are left homeless, stranded on a small volcanic island with no access to food beyond any fish they can catch and little in the way of fresh water. That’s perhaps not an exciting story in itself, but, in a game where PCs can’t simply leave in a TARDIS, it may present something of a moral dilemma as they seek to wrap things up.
The city itself is flooded, so, assuming the same thing happens in a game, it’s almost certainly going to be taken over by the newly freed Fish People. This could also serve as an alternate use of the setting if the PCs come across it after the destruction of the city. The Fish People could be potentially hostile, leading to a story that’s not unlike that of The Sea Devils. Alternatively, they may simply want to be left alone, leading to a potential adventure if the PCs are hired to extract something valuable from the city ruins, fighting off the hostile inhabitants and any tame sharks, venomous octopuses, or whatever else they may have at their disposal. Not to mention the hazards of navigating a water-filled network of passageways.
One point of note is that, because the Fish People are created surgically, they are unable to breed more of their kind. While they could give birth above water, because they are perfectly capable of breathing air, their babies will not be and would not be able to join them below the waves, effectively dooming them to extinction. In the right sort of game, this could lead to the Fish People desperately seeking out genetic technology or magical spells that could reverse this problem, perhaps using proxies to steal from the surface world and appearing to be villains until the PCs uncover the truth. (Which, depending on what has happened on the way, may or may not lead to them changing their mind…)
Rules
As presented, the setting has a mix of technologies. The Atlanteans appear to be Iron Age, which matches tech level 2 in GURPS and Doctors & Daleks, and 1 in Traveller. The guards are armed with spears and with weighted nets for capturing prisoners; they don’t wear anything that looks like effective armour. Since Zaroff left the surface world twenty years ago, the tech level he has introduced could be that of the 1950s, barring a few superscience inventions that drive the plot. This is tech level 7 in GURPS, 6 in Traveller, and 4 in Doctors & Daleks. His guards are equipped with firearms and wear wetsuits, which are unlikely to provide much armour, either.
We are unlikely to need too many rules for underwater action, beyond some idea of how the system covers swimming and perhaps the need to hold breath for protracted periods. We’re probably best off ignoring the “caisson disease” if we’re trying to be realistic, but if not, all we need are CON rolls or the equivalent to stay conscious.
This leaves us with the Fish People, which, as noted above, come in two forms. Assuming that we stay with the idea of them being surgically altered humans rather than an actual race, as they might be in a fantasy or space opera setting, they may not be radically different from unmodified members of their species. None are individual characters in the story, but we could change that, requiring some racial templates.
Basic Type
5E: Amphibious, Proficiency with Athletics while underwater, cannot speak
Savage Worlds: Aquatic (as an Aquarian), Mute
BRP: +10% Swim skill, cannot speak, Adaptability (breathe both air and water)
GURPS [-15]: Gills, Mute
Advanced Type
5E: +2 CON, Amphibious, 30 ft. swim speed, cannot speak human languages
Savage Worlds: As an Aquarian
BRP: +25% Swim skill, Adaptability (breathe both air and water), unaffected by human limitations on underwater combat
GURPS [5]: Amphibious, Cannot Speak, Gills, Nictitating Membrane, Night Vision 2, Pressure Support 1, Ugly
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