An irrelevant long-winded post about Solomond Island in the Secret World that nobody I know will understand or really care about

I originally wrote this 4/6/2013.

I really love Solomon Island as a quest-chain, even though I have a lot of complaints about it.

At the beginning of the Secret World you discover that your character has somehow swallowed a super-power bestowing bee whilst sleeping and wakes up discovering that they have the power to wreck their apartment over the course of a week.  You're quickly whisked away to one of three factions representing a covert power struggle.  They all essentially do the same thing: tell you that you're now super awesome, that there's some evil something that needs to be dealt with, and that you as an unwitting newbie have to go sort that shit out.  Not much motivation given, but eh that's what you've got to go on.

You're immediately shoved off to Solomon Island, a "small" island off the coast of Maine, where a mysterious fog is terrorizing the place The Mist style complete with zombies, Cthulu-esque horrors, an evil cosmic life-eating infectious force, a convenient rift between the dimensions of Earth and Hell, ghosts, evil giant burrowing insects, and a few other varieties of supernatural terrors.

So here's the full back story, it comes in a few parts (if you're the sort of person who cares about spoilers and think you might want to play the Secret World someday, you're probably not going to want to read the rest of this):
-At some point a thousand years ago, a contingent of Mayans escorted by some dark evil god invaded Solomon Island looking for...something.  Unfortunately the island was then occupied by a tribe of native Americans called the Wabanaki.  The Mayans proceed to slaughter the Wabanaki, who do their best to fight back, and are in danger of being eradicated when, conveniently, a group of Norse explorers wielding a powerful light artifact show up and join the battle on the side of the Wabanaki to push back the Mayan expedition.  The Norsemen and Wabanaki together set up powerful wards to protect the even bigger even more powerfuler artifact that the Mayans were after before the Norsemen depart and are summarily sunk some distance out by what can be assumed is some remnant of the dark god's power.
--As a silly aside, the powerful light artifact which is the focus of the Solomon Island quest, is never directly named, is the source of my favorite line from the Darkness War ("TheNorsemenhadbroughtwiththemthepoweroftheirgodsandthiswassomethingtheMayanswerenotpreparedfor."), and is heavily implied to be the source of all of Solomon Island's troubles, is Excalibur (if you check the Verangian's buff when he uses it during the Darkness War, it refers to the sword by name).
-Flash forward to modern times, a fishing boat from the island goes missing for some time but eventually returns sans part of its crew and with the rest suffering from some insidious hallucinations.  They're followed very shortly by an abandoned shipping barge that had disappeared from the same area several years before which is itself accompanied by a dense fog that covers the island.  The people who escape the fog (perhaps by hiding in a supermarket), eventually find the rest of the town empty but for a few days until the missing contingent of citizens return for a mini zombie apocalypse.  Also, there's Cthulu-inspired sea horrors invading.
-It's also established in the introduction of the game that there's an overarching malevolent force called the Filth that has been popping up (and promptly covered up) all over the world.  Somehow, and at the same time, they also choose this exact moment to pop up on Solomon Island.  I think at the time that the game was released it was meant to be surmised that the Filth were the harbingers of the 2012 Mayan apocalypse and that shit was getting worse as time marched towards December.  The link is less apparent now that December 2012 has come and gone, but it's alluded to a couple times early on and promptly forgotten as though it was perhaps something that would be more present-in-mind if played parallel to 2012 IRL.
--It's implied that the shipping barge had discovered the wreck of the Norse ships and had recovered Excalibur.  From here it's not clear if the dark powers behind the fog were attached to the sword (I thought it was implied in a few places that the fog was a direct result of the sword's power being brought back to the island) or simply following in an attempt to claim it...somehow.
---A man who has been pursuing the means to open a portal to Hell so he can become Hell-Stalin and liberate the everyday working demon, conveniently succeeds in doing so RIGHT on Solomon Island AND at the same time as the fog, which also opens a ton of related unstable portals in one whole corner of the place.
---The local secretly-Illuminati-controlled college has a sudden alumni ghost flare up at the same time.  Also, there's a haunted amusement park and mansion, but it can possibly be assumed they were haunted before the fog rolled in.
---A race of evil insects who had apparently burrowed under the island for some time (I think it's implied that the Mayans brought them over but I can't quite recall) suddenly decide its time to set up shop on the surface.
---Also, every local legend about angry spirits or backwoods creatures?  Yeah, they're all true now.  Bigfoots, wendigos, angry hauntings, evil possessed scarecrows, even the village idiot who oversees the junkyard is now building giant trash heap golems.

While all of these are basically convenient explanations for a variety of quests, it starts to get comically out of control while you're on your tour of the single most supernaturally unlucky island in the world.  There's a very convoluted transition from where you go from investigating the cause of the Draug's invasion to stopping the Filth from getting their filthy hands on the Gaia Engine.  The first part of the island is the strongest, narratively speaking, especially since it's focused only on the sea monster invasion, but by the time you move on to the second part of the island everything else starts kicking into overdrive.  The entire thing kind of overstays its welcome too even from a gameplay standpoint; by the time you're done with Blue Mountain, if you've done everything there is to do, your character progression (which is tracked by an approximation based on the number of skill points you've spent and the abilities you've unlocked) should be somewhere around QL7 out of a max of QL10.

I kind of wish the Filth subplot would have played a backseat, maybe as a subtle behind-the-scenes manipulator, to the Cthuluey Draug plot, for no other reason than that the sea monster invasion was an infinitely more interesting thing to explore in an MMO than garden variety corruption #53.  Actually, now that I think about it, it could perhaps be argued that the first part of the island, Kingsmouth Town, reaches a climax when you defeat the Ur-Draug at the wreck of the Polaris, which might explain why the Draug are suddenly second-string villains by the time you reach the Savage Coast on the other side of the island.

Anyways, I applaud The Vanishing of Tyler Freeborn for at least attempting to tie things together, even if its conclusion is rather weak.  The link between the sea creatures and the Filth is extremely not clear in the base story.  Issue 5 attempts to tie them together by coming to the implied conclusion that the ancient Norse ship was sunk by the Filth, which "evolved" along its own, separate path to the Cthulu-type horrors with zombies con queso we see in Kingsmouth Town et al.  In my opinion it cheapens the Draug as primary villains, but at least the effort was made to tie up that loose end.

To top off my complaints, Solomon Island ends on a horrendous cliffhanger that's not resolved in the current content.  There's another minor kick-to-the-balls moment in the inter-mission transition for the Illuminati where it's implied that there's dozens of other weapon-artifacts that you may-or-may-not get to see, but that's maybe more forgivable.