Doubt Herrings

[Username17]

In Doubt, the player characters play people who are changed from being normal people into being agents fighting against vast world spanning conspiracies and horrible monsters over night. Like in They Live, or Nowhere Man, or any other thriller based on the "Oh Noes! Everything you know is wrong! Who can you trust!?" trope.

One of the key things that makes the game run is totally weird shit that honestly may or may not have anything to do with the conspiracies you are actually dealing with. The kinds of things that helped keep getting people to tune in to Lost before it got really stupid. Maybe these are clues, or ways to strike back at your enemies - maybe they are just chunks for filler episodes. Either way, you can have adventures that are like episodes of Fringe or X-Files, where you interact with them on some level. There should be enough of them that individual MCs can run with them in different directions without a lot of overlap.

Number Stations
These are Real. If you tune in your shortwave radio to obscure frequencies, you can find "Number Stations". On them, a synthetic voice will dispassionately read out a set of numbers with no discernible pattern or motive. They have been around for as long as there have been radio broadcasts and as time goes on there are more of them, not less.

Trap Streets
There are places that exist on maps, but not in reality. Sometimes it's streets, or land formations, or islands. Sometimes it's entire cities, as in the the town of Argleton, West Lancashire. But they actually do exist. They are just really hard to find. For whatever reason, normal people just don't see them. They appear to be normal places, exist totally normally within maps and directories and such, it's just that no one ever physically goes there.

Lost Places
On the flip side, there are places that everyone knows exist... but can't actually find. Like Shell Beach in Dark City or The Lodge in Twin Peaks. They are not on the map, no one can tell you exactly how to get there, but they are in peoples' memories. They exist. And while the protagonists can get there (often by "cheating" - breaking down walls or pulling emergency stops), those places are often unfinished. As in, when you get there, they are actually stage props like the world in the radiator in Eraserhead or Shell Beach.

The Blips
There are times and places where you can see the world just... skip a bit. You can actually watch the reality of the universe shift, as if it was being updated, edited, or rewritten right in front of you. People who get shifted don't remember ever having been any different, meaning that it could have happened to you any number of times.

Anyone have any other MacGuffins/Red Herrings that should be in there?

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

Similar to Number Stations, could patterns (or perceived patterns) in static (audio or video) count? Perhaps its just noise, or perhaps a clue.

It seems the Registry itself counts. Fake people could be similar to Lost Places in many ways.

Could you handle dreams and premonitions in this way? I don't know if they're suitable for this game or not. It could seriously be something as simple as the hairs standing on the back of your neck near place X or person X.

[Ancient History]

Cigarette Burns - The little floating burning holes you see in movies from time to time, which let the guy running the projector know when to change the reel. Except you see them in real life, just flitting in and out of your vision for a second.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I've had blips happen to me, usually regarding the spelling of words. For example, for the first fifteen years of my life I would have sworn blind that it was 'emnity.'

Cracked.com is just begging to be mined for this sort of thing:

Really creepy places
Really creepy places, part 2

True urban 'legends'
True urban 'legends,' part 2
True urban 'legends,' part 3
True urban 'legends,' part 4

Creepy unsolved crimes
Terrifying islands
Bizarre Artifacts

[Sashi]

I've had blips happen to me, usually regarding the spelling of words. For example, for the first fifteen years of my life I would have sworn blind that it was 'emnity.'

In Doubt, it's spelled and pronounced "bolth".

[the_taken]

Heh, the Blips sounds like a great excuse to retcon your character.

Suites and Shades - People that usually look like very average people of whatever culture they are in, but wear non-descript black business wear. They usually show up at your door to tell you not to go somewhere you've been, ask certain questions to certain people, or even the opposite. They leave no evidence of their presence after they leave. No foot prints, no finger marks, no camera footage, or even any evidence of you interacting with them, aside from your very acute memory of them showing up and confronting you in a very professional manner.

Are they part of a conspiracy? Are they even human? Are they even real?

[JigokuBosatsu]

Hush- There are times and places where normal human communication- typically speech- just does not work. This can be a terrifying experience, but also may lead to important revelations. Anyone who finds themselves in Hush must find another, more esoteric way to communicate.

Examples:

The Castle of Crossed Destinies (from Italo Calvino's novel of the same name)
Hermes Episitriptos' boardroom (from my homage to the above)
The Cone of Silence (Get Smart)
The Black School (occult legend)

[Josh_Kablack]

Technological Interference

While the Night Terrors actually cause electric lights to go out, and it's a staple of horror movies and UFO encounter that the car stalls out, here in the real world technology is sufficiently complex that nobody understands it all and it is not 100% reliable. Sometimes flashlights only work when held at certain angles because the contacts are corroded, and sometimes they don't work because something that eats light could be hiding inside that collection of Lovecraft works. Sometimes the weather or topography means you can't tune into the local radio station while you get crystal clear reception from one in another state.

Personally I still have no idea why it is that when I use the cheap headphones with my Mp3 playa, they have a oddly localized hum that's only audible when I'm in the area bounded by Butler St, Main St, Penn Avenue and 46th. Rationally, it likely has something to do with backup generators or emergency broadcast capabilities at the hospital in the area, but for narrative purposes it could just as likely be a forgotten melody of Stephen Foster trying to escape Allegheny Cemetery, a ward set up by a priest at the Catholic Church, a weird science project by middle schoolers at St John Newman School, Something funky with Complete Vending Services implementing RFID tags, or the DJ at the bowling alley waging a one-man war on FCC regulations.

Necro Edit; Since I made the original post, one of the largest marijuana growing labs ever found in this state got busted within that area: http://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/ ... 1405290247

Trap Streets
There are places that exist on maps, but not in reality. Sometimes it's streets, or land formations, or islands. Sometimes it's entire cities, as in the the town of Argleton, West Lancashire. But they actually do exist. They are just really hard to find. For whatever reason, normal people just don't see them. They appear to be normal places, exist totally normally within maps and directories and such, it's just that no one ever physically goes there.

Here's an actual reporter's piece on the local Dream Street which had a museum exhibit named after it, despite not actually existing.

[JigokuBosatsu]

You know, I like the idea of Trap Streets not only being traps for map plagiarists, but perhaps occult traps for entitities as well...

[Parthenon]

Suites and Shades

---

Just randomly brainstorming here, but you could have:

Friend of a friend: everyone knows someone who knows someone who can dream the future, or is good friends with a celebrity, or has written a series of books. Well, not really. Turns out that this friend of a friend is one of them. You know. The ones people talk about when "They say that ...". Who knows why they keep spreading ideas around.

Maybe they're the sources of memes, trying out global experiments with ideas, and the internet has just given them more scope. Did you know theres actually only about a thousand people taking part in Anonymous, and the rest are them? If they get any more powerful then the whole world could become more like the Chinese anonymous. Which is frankly terrifying.

Or maybe theres an intelligence roaming the planet that is only given form when people get together as a group. If so, maybe flash mobs are just tests, getting ready for a large enough group for them to fully come into this world.

(Sorry if this is in the big thread about Doubt. I can't remember seeing it.)

[JigokuBosatsu]

maybe flash mobs are just tests, getting ready for a large enough group for them to fully come into this world.

Sounds familiar...

I have always liked the idea of the Russian botnet as a major antagonist in a story. Could fit here very well.

[TheWorid]

So, ITT Unknown Armies rumors?

[eeuuugh]

Waiting Rooms

Readers' Digest, Highlights for Kids, a Williams-Sonoma catalog, and ancient back issues of US Weekly. The fluorescent lighting is too blue or too yellow and hums in two different pitches. An inner room in a suburban office complex, no windows and no bars on your phone. It feels like you've been there for half an hour, but the it's only been ten minutes. You doze off sitting up and have a long, unpleasant dream, and when you wake up your eyes are gummy at the corners. You feel like you've been sleeping unrestfully for at east an hour, but it's only been another ten minutes... and that makes sense, after all you don't feel hungry or anything, yet.

Localized time distortions affect the subjective flow of time. The waiting room, or the computer lab where it only takes you an hour to write a paper that would take all night at home, are the flip side of the pizza place where you and your date get to talking and all of a sudden it's closing time, or the fishing spot where the hours just flow by. Clocks are unaffected, and bodily functions are strangely suspended, though they generally catch up with you quickly when you leave. These phenomena can be exploited or weaponized.

[JigokuBosatsu]

And now I have that Fugazi song stuck in my head.

[Shatner]

Filler: There are stretches of countryside where the background repeats itself. You pass identical wheat fields each with identical trees growing along the fence and an identical tractor is out rusting near an identical barn. Driving by is like being in a Hannah-Barbara cartoon. These can go on for dozens or even hundreds of miles, but only in really remote and/or "big" places like New Mexico or the Dakotas. The few people who live in these places aren't identical but they generally are aloof and they'll think you're a kook if you confront them about the sameness of their surroundings.

[Username17]

I really like The Static, that's going in right away. Going to have to do something with Lost Time, Quiet Time, and Deja Vu as well. Not sure how I am going to make use of Cue Marks. That might actually be a power.

Anyway, format check:

---

Things We Know We Don't Know

“I don't know what it is. I don't know what it's about. It just... does that.”

There are a lot of weird things in this world that people who don't have Hyper Perception cannot or will not see. Unfortunately, not all of them can be neatly categorized as weal or woe. Some of the things that Hyper Perception allows us to perceive are simply unclear. Are they part of the conspiracy (or a conspiracy if indeed there is more than one)? Are they simply coincidences? We don't know. But it's actually important that we know that we don't know. Because it gives us a place to start.

Willowisps
“Swamp gas reflecting off of Venus. Problem solved.”

There are glowing lights in the sky. Also in the woods. And out at sea. Some of these are airplanes, kids with flashlights, reflections of lighthouses, and all kinds of perfectly mundane explanations. Some of them. But UFOs are real. There really are things that glow and fly that are unidentified. Doesn't mean that they are alien spacecraft or fairies, but those are on the list of possibilities.

Towers
“No one goes in, no one goes out. But you can see people working by the windows sometimes...”

The Towers are seemingly functional pieces of commercial real estate that have no doors. Sometimes they look like offices, or stores, or restaurants. And they have people in them during business hours. And these people are visible through the windows, and they are apparently doing normal stuff. But there are no doors. No one goes in, no one goes out. They just somehow are occupied when they “open” and empty when they are “closed”.

[TheFlatline]

Impossible Rooms: There's a picture on each wall, and you count five pictures. However, there's only 4 walls/corners if you count them. Which picture is missing? Hard to tell.

I've used a variant of this in Call of Cthulhu before, and it's a great, *great* red herring. Players have explored that room for hours. In fact, all euclidean geometry is great for set pieces. Walls that look like they bow out but are smooth and flat when you run your hand over them, corridors that go on way longer than they look like they should, etc etc.

Doublespeak: You hear what someone is going to say a moment before they say it (or are you hearing an echo a moment after they say it?)

A moment of silence: The bell tower strikes a particular hour, and everyone within hearing range other than the PCs stop what they're doing and stare at the bell tower for five seconds, and then go back to what they're doing. They don't seem to lose time and have no memory of their actions.

All Roads Lead to Rome: Some doorways lead into a nondescript room. The problem is, it's always the *same* nondescript room. And you can't intentionally find it.

[Shatner]

Unknown Obstacles: there is an unmarked, white van parked in the left-hand lane of a busy street. It's there almost every day. Traffic gets backed up and people have to merge lanes to get around it but no one honks or pays any direct attention to it other than to get out of its way. If asked, everyone will complain that the traffic sucks but no one has a clear idea why.

It's as though there's a Somebody Else's Problem Field on these obstacles... and suddenly they've become your problem.

[TheFlatline]

Chekov's Unloaded Gun: You keep seeing glimpses of the same person over and over and over again. They're in crowds, across the street, at the other side of a dim bar, etc... They always "slip away" before you can approach them. It's definitely the same person each time. They never, ever interact with you though.

MacGuffin: You get an absolute certainty that some object is important. Incredibly important. So you take it. Everyone you meet seems fascinated by the object, or feels it's important, or chases after you to get the item. It must be something important. You have no clue however how a stapler could be so vital though.

[Manxome]

White Noise: There are many quiet sounds of daily life that people habitually tune out: the hum of electronics, the whir of the ventilation system, the muffled roar of distant traffic, the clicking of someone typing away in the next room, the patter of a light rain. Sometimes these sounds are audible in places where, upon reflection, they couldn't possibly be: the power to that building's been cut for years, or that road should be deserted on a Sunday night, or it's a perfectly clear sky. If you ask a normal person if they hear the sound, they'll say yes; however, when you point out that there's no possible source, suddenly they no longer hear it, and insist that it must have been their imagination, or perhaps the power of your suggestion.

Are you hearing sounds from some parallel reality? Sounds somehow displaced from another place or time? Some supernatural entity whose sound happens to resemble an everyday one? Or perhaps it's all in your mind...


Hour Glass: Sometimes the reflection in a mirror isn't quite right: it reveals objects in their present locations, but in the condition they were at some time in the past, or occasionally the condition they will be in a short time into the future. You might see the reflection of an apple, where there should only be an apple's core, or a blank piece of paper where a recently-written one should be. Recent injuries seem to vanish (or future ones appear), your empty glass looks full again, or that window is open instead of closed.

Hour glass is generally only found in dimly-lit or little-used rooms, where the inconsistencies are harder to spot. Possibly because moving one invariably turns it into a regular mirror, and its time-distorting effect cannot be restored by any known means (returning it to its original position doesn't help).

Normal people don't seem to notice anything weird about the reflection. If you tell them there's something weird about it, for some reason they always try to reposition the mirror in order to try to see what you're seeing (and thus destroy the effect, if they are not prevented).


Ramblers: Occasionally, you may be greeted by a complete stranger who insists they have something important to tell you. If you agree to listen, they will begin describing some perfectly mundane part of their life in exacting detail: the walk they took with their dog that morning, the contents of their office, a vacation they took with their family, a fingerpainting they drew as a child. After a few minutes, or if you ask why this is important, they will apologize, saying that wasn't what they meant to talk about, and launch into another monologue on a different but equally mundane topic. If you continue to let them speak, they become more and more flustered, until eventually they apologize and leave.

Is this some kind of coded message? Are these people privy to some supernatural event they are unable to talk about - and if so, why talk to you? Perhaps they are serving the Conspiracy, using an elaborate ruse to delay you a few minutes while something around the next corner hides itself? Of course, they might just be insane.

[Grek]

Instructions/Bloody Maries: There appears to be a a group of writers who are disseminating instructions in public forums, in the margins of books, in emails and elsewhere, all promising to do strange or supernatural things if you follow them exactly and chant 'Bloody Mary' thirteen times at midnight on Halloween in front of a mirror. Most of these instructions are fakes. But a few seem to actually work, and about half of those that do work seem to be designed to get anyone that follows them killed or worse.

[rampaging-poet]

Vanished Objects: The keys you're sure were on the table a second ago. The spoon you dropped that never hit the floor. Small objects that simply vanish when nobody's looking. They often turn up somewhere nearby after a short search, sometimes even in the same spot they vanished from, but are the ones that come back the same? Where did they come from? Where do they go? Did you actually see your keys on the table, or had they simply been in your coat pocket the whole time?

The Safe Place: Everyone's had something that they want to put in a "safe place" to keep it hidden, out of reach of children, or otherwise safe from harm. Sometimes, when you look for them it, you can't remember where the safe place was. No matter how hard you search, the things you hid there are never seen again. Maybe the "safe place" was some kind of pocket dimension. Maybe the universe decided to cull some objects not currently in use. Maybe there's somewhere you just haven't looked yet.

Street Lights: Have you ever had a street light turn off just ahead of you? A string of consecutive of street lights? A string of lights that turn back on as soon as you pass? It could just be an electrical failure or the result of interference, but it seems far too directed to be a coincidence. Who is sending you a message, and what are they trying to say?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Hollow History (abridged from a column by Ken Hite)
According to conventional chronology, Mycenean Greece holds the Trojan War around 1200 BCE, only to get swarmed by barbarians, have all their cities burn down, 90% of the population vanish into the hills for 250 years; then come back, rebuild the cities and start making the same pots they did before their two-and-a-half century vacation. The history of Greece from 1200 BC to 950 BC is a big blank spot with the exact same archaeological evidence on both sides. Some historians take this as evidence that the Greek Dark Ages never happened, since the dates are set by Egyptian chronology resting on the Bible. Of course, many people touched by the conspiracy have experienced *missing time*; what if the conspiracy stole 250 years from an entire region? Why and how are similarly troubling questions.

This could lead to stuff like the theories of A.T. Fomenko, who says that ~1400 CE is as early as we have any real records of, and any more distant history is the same stories being told over and over with the names changing and backdating. What happened before 1400? It could have been anything!

Hell, the latest reality quake could put you in Philip K Dick's VALIS, where

we're all living in 94 CE with memory implants

.

[Agrinja]

Weak Lights: The room is unusual dim, you've got a flashlight but it seems like the beam is falling flat as though the batteries are dead. It's only in this one place, as soon as you come up from the basement the beam seems as bright as it ever was.

There's Something Behind You: Just something in the corner of your eye, a smudge of black where there shouldn't be one. You look, it's gone, if you try to ignore it it seems to move a little closer. Perhaps you feel a presence, nobody's there.

Thickening Lids: Why is it when you close your eyes, the room seems to dim? The orange glow through your lids just seems to dim down until it's gone, giving you the sensation of perfect darkness until you open them and everything is fine?

The Man In The Mirror: There's a mirror, and it reflects normally but...something is wrong. You wave your hand and notice that there's a slight delay in the reflection, and it takes a moment to catch up. Perhaps you look a little closer, and there's something slightly wrong. Maybe the image in the mirror isn't perfectly your expression, there's something cold about it. Or the reflection isn't reversed like it should be. Nobody else notices this.

A Place Of No Fire: It's cold here, not a biting cold, it feels like the heat creeps out of you as you rest on the bench. As you watch the people around you, you see a man smoking a cigarette that goes out when he enters a space. He tries to relight, the lighter won't strike. Matches fizzle, people feel cold, incandescent lights look dim and feel cool to the touch.

That Same Old Taste: Everything you seems to eat has the twang of something chemical, and it's only just started. It happens at places you've eaten at a hundred times before, there's that strong smelly flavor that vaguely reminds you of industrial cleaners. Sealed food doesn't have it, your can of Coke is fine, but the hamburger you just ordered hints of bleach. Other people can taste it, the waitress cringes, takes it away, brings you back a perfectly fine burger. But in the future? It will happen again.

People Are Strange: You turn a corner down onto a street, and a tingle creeps up your back. The people here are wrong. They don't quite move right, the shadows on their faces don't fall correctly. Their voices grate the ears, and everybody seems to be staring at you in an unfriendly way. You turn to your companions and they don't look familiar to you. You look at Jim, and the name Jim comes up in your head, but the memories in your head don't match the man before you. You point this out, or talk to him, the whole effect ends, nobody noticed a thing.

[CatharzGodfoot]

回路(circuit) is an absolute goldmine.

The dead are spilling out of hell (overcrowding, natch), and they're getting put up in temporary housing in the real world. This take the form of perfectly normal unmarked doors in perfectly normal apartment complexes, basements, office building, etc, which are filled with ghosts and then sealed off with actual red tape.

If you go inside one of these places, it implants some kind of mimetic virus that causes you to eventually turn your own living quarters into a 'ghost room' and then kill yourself (or possibly just turn into a black stain on the wall).

Also, the ghosts are spilling over into the internet on phantasmal live feeds.

Plus Butoh dancing.

---

Hell, the latest reality quake could put you in Philip K Dick's VALIS, where

we're all living in 94 CE with memory implants

.

Damn, I do not remember that. All I remember is the actual pot from the pot dealer that shoots a purple laser from God.