Experiment: The Voice of the City

This is an idea I've had for a while about how players could communicate with an abstract entity that's influencing large numbers of people, like the tutelary spirit of a city, or something less benevolent. It's not a situation where solid rules would be useful, instead it'd rely entirely on good descriptions of the phenomenon to convey what's happening and how potentially unsettling it is.

The kind of entity I'm envisioning could be sentient or not, relatable or utterly alien, but it has to be incorporeal. There's no physical manifestation of it. No avatar or possessed medium or interpreting oracle that comes to speak directly to the players. It also has to have a subtle influence over a lot of people, on the scale of a metropolis. Possibly even a small country.

If the players want to speak to it, they just need to talk within earshot of any of its people and it will hear.

If it wants to speak to the players, it subtly directs the normal conversations of people within its domain so certain words occur in a distinct pattern or are emphasized. If you listen to the general hubbub and background noise of the city its messages are clear in the overlapping, overheard snippets of dozens of unrelated everyday conversations going on around you.

(You could easily have an antagonist who's using some flavor of mass mind control do this to talk to and taunt the players, but I prefer it as the work of a semi-scrutable intelligence.)

I'll try it out next chance I get and report back.

1d8 Weird Woods Encounters

1 A trail you've never noticed before appears. It connects to a trail you're familiar with and it's old, made of cracked concrete partially covered with washed-out dirt and gravel instead of the mulched woodchips the other trails use. You don't know where it goes.

2 The 'trail closed' barriers are up. They usually only close that section of the park off in the winter. What's happening back there to make them barricade those trails in the middle of summer?

3 A wooden foot bridge across the river that's been swept from its moorings and pulled several feet downstream. It's stable, embedded in the stream bank now, but noticeably skewed.

4 A secluded section of trail looks down from a bluff over the river. On the far bank someone's built a conical lean-to around the base of a tree. There's a clear path down to the river bank and a fallen log you could use as a bridge if you wanted to look closer.

5 The trails you walked and the park maps don't match. The map says there's a single mile-long loop trail in the area you were and doesn't show any hint of the switchbacks, connectors, and forks you found. It took you almost an hour to get back to trails you recognized. Whatever's on the map, it's not where you were.

6 That deer was too calm. The others in the herd ran off when they heard you coming and all you saw were tails and glimpses through the trees. That one though, it just stood there watching you. Or watching behind you? What was it looking at?

7 An overgrown footpath off the official trail leads into a secluded clearing that's too perfect. Just enough shade, no bugs, and a circle of stones all exactly the right size and shape to sit comfortably on arranged around a pile of mushroom-covered logs. It's dead silent.

8 The park's property used to belong to a family. Along one of the trails is a small private graveyard with six stone markers. Each is engraved with the names, dates, and kind epitaphs for the family's departed dogs.