Rumors About The Supermarket

I get an existential dread when I enter the supermarket. 

Today I learned I wasn't the only one.

I believe there is a werewolf at the supermarket. At night a man disappears somewhere at the back of the store: between the home improvement section and the place where you see pet fish. He hunts and stalks by the shoes, listening for when the boxes open and the laces are untied - when one is most vulnerable.

I believe there's something odd about the greeting card section. The manager says nobody on shift has updated its stock in seventeen years, and yet its cards are always new. She doesn't question it, and neither should you.

I believe the two butchers on staff might be aliens. Extraterrestrial aliens. They have eyes behind their eyes, and they're always talking about sitcoms and sports teams that don't exist - The Denver Superintendents, the Knoxville Salt Slugs, the Detroit Lions. I think they're here to spy on us. They keep asking if there's anything I want. I always say no.

I believe there's a ghost at the supermarket. It lingers in that place where you recycle your bottles and cans. When you're alone, you can still hear the sounds of distant crushing and clinking long after the cans and bottles have been processed. The ghost is a petty judge. It despises foreign entities. A xenophobic ghost, that also hates ginger beer.

I believe there is a poltergeist. Sometimes it throws items off of the shelves or undoes screws letting whole stocks collapse. When one reaches for the freshest milk at 3am you'll feel its cold grasp, and raspy whispers that the ones at the front are still fresh. Ignore the Best Use By date.

I believe the supermarket is infested with gremlins. Someone keeps finding the discarded wrappers of Little Debbie swiss rolls and chocolate cupcakes stashed in high and low places - under shelves, tucked behind the store logos, inside the middle stacked shopping cart. They leave the Nutty Buddies alone. Gremlins allergic to peanuts?

I believe shopping carts are the spirits of the dead. Soothed by the Orphean sounds of uncontroversial 90's music, by their orderly processions to and from the parking lot. They are kept clean and attended, and they help those who come. It's far more personal than a graveyard. People used to go to graveyards, but not anymore. Sometimes, a spirit will attempt to escape. You'll find them, lost and alone, unable to move on their own accord, on some walk by side of road. Nobody wants to help them.

I believe there are more store brands by the day. Store-brand pickles, store-brand broth. Store-brand bread and store-brand shoes. Store-brand "Caution: Floor Wet" cones and store-brand floor tiles. I think I met a store-brand person yesterday. Not an employee - what I initially thought was a shopper, with a store's logo shirt and a barcode tattooed on their forehead. They asked me whether I was able to find everything I needed. I uncomfortably replied: "Yes", and quickly moved on.

I believe I've seen several greeters at the doors. Different people, same nametag. Do they really just have one to share among them all? I might've thought so, until I asked one about a question and he responded like the woman I saw at the door last week.

I believe the supermarket has long-armed men working the stockrooms. The shelves are made in ways that no normally-proportionally person could reach, even with use of a stepladder. I've seen drag marks on mopped floors of wide boots flanked by trailing knuckles. In the dairy section the shelves go too far back. I'm 6'2'' and still couldn't reach the sour cream.

I believe there's a snake that lives in the supermarket. A big one. I've only ever seen its rattling tail, trailing around the corner of the aisles. It must be as big as a full grown man, from the size of that tail. Maybe bigger. I think it must live underneath the freezers, maybe, where it's warm and dark. Or maybe in the shelves between the aisles for mac & cheese and barbeque sauce.

Underneath - Resolving Differing Realities

These rules are for use with the Underneath system, which makes use of a sanity mechanic to potentially have different player-characters seeing the same thing differently, simultaneously.

It's assumed that we're working within the horror genre here, although I suppose the same arbitration/narrative issue will crop up when dealing with any sort of diverged realities- be it hallucinogenic drugs, magical illusions, or whatnot.

When you're at the table, one of the unspoken assumptions is that all of the player-characters are essentially experiencing the same reality. This is derived as a matter of convenience - one Game Master, one reality. Having multiple realities simultaneously present necessitates a kind of narrative juggling which can be difficult to manage.

And in my experience if two realities are being experienced, the players will poke at it until it stops or they give up and leave. This can be difficult to narrate and reconcile. So here's a procedure for Underneath to help you as a GM.

~~~~~

Group A experiences "Reality A", Group B experiences "Reality B". How do you resolve this difference? Do you resolve it?

There are four possibilities for how it can resolve:

1. Reality snaps to A for everyone.
2. Reality snaps to B for everyone.
3. Reality remains differentiated.
4. A Synergistic Reality - A-B - comes into being.

And because we're working within the Horror genre here, Reality A-B on average is going to be the worst option for the PCs. They'll find they really don't want A-B, and that'll hopefully drive reality towards a tablewide consensus.

Underneath Resolution Rules

i. If neither group acts upon, acknowledges, or undeniably interacts with their reality, then both realities remain differentiated. Sound of a tree falling alone in the woods.

ii. If one group declares their reality and the other does not acknowledge it, reality snaps to the side that declared.

iii. If both groups declare their realities to each other, then we enter into conflict. When this happens, they argue with each other and to the GM upon which reality is more believable. The GM acts as an arbiter, but not a judge, facilitating and encouraging roleplay. If a consensus among the players is reached reality snaps to that decision.

iv. If both groups declare their realities and cannot come to a consensus in a modest amount of time, a Synergistic Reality comes into being.

Synergistic Realities

d6	Synergistic Reality	Notes
1	Reality begins shifting back and forth between the two. In the chaos a Wandering Encounter is drawn.	If this Wandering Encounter also produces a Synergistic Reality then all Players immediately become Lost in Space and Time.
2	Reality begins frantically tearing, opening a widening hole in reality. All who remain by this hole are Lost in Space and Time.	All players who don’t immediately begin leaving will get sucked in.
3	The area or creature simply disappears. It returns in 4d6 Hours.	If it’s a place, space neatly folds around it. All NPCs have no memory of the thing.
4	The object is now called ‘Something Incomprehensible’ by the GM. Something Incomprehensible crawls out of the object like a hatching egg.	Eyes and wings - too many eyes and wings. Unless all present characters prostrate themselves or avert their gaze, everyone immediately wakes up the next day with their Insight scores +3.
5	Things begin to glitch. The Glitched Man inconspicuously appears. Whoever next discusses the object will become infected with the Glitch.	Each additional discussion on the topic advances the Glitch injury one step.
6	A true synergistic reality appears. The object is now a hybrid of the two realities, a conglomerate of aspects of each. It becomes Something In Between.	Something In Between has 4 HD and alternates its low Insight and high Insight behaviors. Its injuries permanently reduce one random stat each time it hits. 1d6: 1. Resolve 2. Instinct 3. Body 4. Empathy 5. Insight 6. Resources.

The New Old Gods

(A follow-up to the Everlasting Summer campaign setting. Musings of worldbuilding and considerations for a possible sequel - something of a mix between American Gods and Lovecraftian horror for the modern era.)

Something happened at the dawn of Man. An intelligence, sophisticated and cruel, birthed itself from itself, becoming something different than what was before.

The Old Gods are forces of nature: Sun, Fire, Ocean, Evolution, Reproduction, Time, Consumption, Violence... They were immortal and dispassionate, living long eons slumbering and gorging, still as glacial cores. Their mutations and decisions occur on the scale of galactic rotations. They are worshipped ignorantly by animals and people alike.

The New Gods were made by Man. Compared to the Old Ones they are weak petulant things, doomed to live and die in the blink of an eye. Their destiny is tied to Man's rise and inevitable extinction.

A'AQUR

Boreas, The Nuclear Winter, The Winds of Death

He is a god of mankind's particular ecological apocalypse. Like the ones that came before him he is a thing of duality. The nuclear winds and the nuclear winter. The hot and cold fronts. 

A'aqur demands human sacrifice.

Its cultists hate and fear their god, but they respect its power. They dare not speak of or summon its avatars, for they know the cost. Cults of A'aqur dissolve and reform every 47 Years as the Northern Wind demands more sacrifices. Its leaders tend to be parents and grandparents: patriarchs and matriarchs of old Houses who groom their female children to be suitable sacrifices - conservative, ignorant, and innocent. They do not practice what they demand of their youths.

LEVIATHAN

The Fumbling State, The Blind Listener, Hecatoncheires

The State is a blind, fumbling thing, constantly seeking to ascertain the objects of its domain. It knows not the extent of its body: its people, its resources, its land, its thoughts. It must listen to its whispering priests that it may come to know itself. It must compartmentalize and conceptualize, ever-stretching, ever-listening, until its inevitable singularity.

Leviathan seeks to grow more eyes, more ears. It needs more priests: bureaucrats, quantifiers, software engineers. It needs technology, and most importantly data: cameras, GPS tracking, satellites, surveys, statistics, facial recognition, social media.

Its cultists work as nonpartisan governmental bureaucrats, or nowadays in Big Data tech. They occupy positions of power that are not subject to political sway. They are difficult to discover and even more difficult to uproot. Their God has a righteous monopoly on violence, or so they believe. Police, members of the military, lawyers, and religious figures all act in service to Leviathan, often without consideration.

THE ELECTRIC GOD

The Black Key, The Light in the Dark, The Chemical God, Prometheus

It is a God of luminescence but it is always depicted as pitch black. Delved from deep underground, from the blood and bones of the earth came the means to dispel the darkness. It lives in everything that is electric: the generators, the fluorescent bulbs, the power lines and pacemakers. It is life, it is light, and it is lucid. It is the opposite of everything that is dreamlike and predatory in the dark. It is a god with disciples and with enemies.

Theorized to be the oldest of the New Gods. Its presence is found in shadow, cast on painted-wall of ancient cave-homes. Where once it was fire and hearth it now lives in electrical grid and radiator, in appliances and televisions. It is comfort, it is safety. It is, as its cultists say, humanity.

Its cultists are everyday working class people: tradesmen, nurses, technicians, janitors, truck drivers, operators. Those who maintain the shrines and offer daily prayers. Their devotion is frequently fanatical and evangelical. They will lay down their lives for the cult and try to recruit others in their social circles. They fear, above all, losing what amenities they have. When the lights threaten to go out, when the price of gas shoots up, when the internet dies, they will mobilize.

ZIN

The Fruit of Cain, The Red Mask, The Heart of Darkness

Scholars have long held contentious the idea of pure ideological or religious violence. It is almost always complex - a product of community, identity, economic, secular and political interests. So rarely is it distilled to purest form - a hateful and cruel bloody mask made bare for all to see.

Even a false idea cynically given lip service can gain power beyond the control of its creators. Though the reasons of conflict remain complex, among its perpetrators there are true believers. Zin is this phenomenon given name and form: the essence of religious and ideological violence spawned from all other reasons.

Zin is paradoxically a most alien thing, despite its proximity and dependence on Man. Its agents are incomprehensible to the typical person: try to imagine the mind of a true believer or a zealot. In most cases, Zin is perpetuated by unwitting peddlers cynically justifying violence for their own ends.

Its cultists are divided into two lots: those who are aware of Zin and those who aren't.

Those who aren't are arms dealers, politicians, clerics, and trolls: those who feast on the battlefields, suckle on the teats of wartime funding, and unwittingly sew the seeds of discord. They unknowingly worship for selfish reasons: money, power, entertainment, self-affirmation.

Those who are aware are far more dangerous but far more rare. They are strange, elusive, and monstrously competent at magic and violence. They often become Wizards: isolating themselves in towers and practicing misanthropic science.

HEOL
(Pronounced: Hole)

The White Rabbit, Son of Man, Soul of the Old Gods

For long eons the Old Gods did not have souls. They had no need. Humanity changed that. The side effect of having pattern recognition in an evolutionarily developed brain is that it over-fires: apophenia. From this birthed a god that spawned the souls of all gods: the neverending hole.

It is apophenia itself - the finding of patterns from the truly random. A relic of the development of the human mind. That which needed rationalization for Everything. It is the personification of all Old Gods - from Zeus to Tiamat to the Jade Emperor. Because it is personification, it is their literal souls. Indeed, Heol is the very notion of the Soul itself. For what is a soul but a personification without substance?

Its cultists are conspiracy theorists, ghost hunters, and religious figures. They are wielders of metaphor and men-at-arms of the post-truth order. They gather on online message boards and corners of the dark web to disassociate reality from itself, diving down rabbit holes in perpetual endless fall. Those who succumb to the plunge become mad, like drug addicts.

(World of) Horror Campaign Structure

Lately I've been interested in the game World of Horror by Ysbryd Games. It's an early acesss single-player horror adventure game based around Lovecraftian themes with a heavy influence from Junji Ito: it's the 80's, you arrive in a small fishing town in Japan, someone is trying to awaken an Old God, and there are an usually high number of people without faces. 

I've been interested in it not so much for the game itself (although it is interesting and fun, if a bit flawed), but for the way that it structures a horror campaign. It seems to take the format one would traditionally see in a board game like Arkham Horror or the like: with adventures essentially being a series of random skill checks that occasionally branch to multiple endings through a series of menus.

And while the game's two main mechanics - selecting options in menus and combat - aren't very translatable to tabletop (well... you could, but they'd be boring), there are some auxiliary features that would be cool to see in a horror adventure.

Like this. This menu in-game is DOPE.
Taken from the game's main website.

So, if I had to steal some ideas from this game to implement in a tabletop horror adventure, this is what I'd take.

#1: CHOOSE THE FORM OF THE DESTRUCTOR

In World of Horror, you (the player) get to choose at the beginning which Old God is awakening. Each one gives different random encounters and a unique penalty to your actions in-game. You know what's coming, but you don't know how. The how is the mystery. You are essentially given The Answer, and now you must find The Question.

It makes the stakes of the mystery clear right at the beginning: solve the mystery or the bad thing happens.

In a tabletop context, it would allow players to start drawing connections immediately between various events. It makes them constantly ask the question: how is this thing related to the bigger thing? Is this strangeness attributable to the Old God or not?

#2: FIVE INTERCONNECTED MINI-MYSTERIES

World of Horror doesn't do this great itself, as in-game each mystery is functionally completely independent (edit: 99% of the time) and you can only work at one at a time. In tabletop, we have no such restrictions: mysteries can be endlessly interconnected, multiple cases can be worked on simultaneously, and you can find clues for other mysteries within unrelated objectives.

But I dig the format: five mini-mysteries. Each one maybe a session or two in length. Each culminating in some kind of clue, providing up to five clues that point towards the ultimate challenge.

I like the idea of forming a conspiracy corkboard. Each of the five mysteries starts as a rumor: either given to the players at character creation or introduced in the very first segment. Rumors must be investigated, which eventually point to people or places, which prompt further investigation.

#3: PROGRESSION OF EVIL

In short: for every good action there is an equal and opposite reaction. There is a time limit on these mysteries. Every so often something gets worse: riots downtown, a portal opens in the woods, a horrible fog sweeps over the town, federal police block off the roads, etc. This can either be directly related to a completed mystery or totally random.

You see this a lot in cooperative board games like Arkham Horror, Dead of Winter, and Shadows Over Camelot.

For the Everlasting Summer, I have a table for this function. Whenever a mystery is resolved, some new doom menaces the town, rolled from a list made by the uncompleted mysteries.

#4: MAKE A COMMON  HORROR TOOLSET

Generate a list of common events and encounters you can use for nearly any exploration/mystery horror game you've got. Make them creepy. Get used to running them. Get the descriptive language down to a tee. Reuse them for multiple games or reruns of the adventure.

The idea is that the awakening of the Old God is like putting a fire under a decaying log: all the cultists and the monsters and the mad scientists and crazy prophets are going to come scurrying out from under the woodwork because they all innately know that the end is nigh. Society is breaking down, and in the nihilistic power vacuum all the misanthropic things are taking over.

#5 MODULARITY

The advantage of having a modular design to your adventure is that you can DIY and crowdsource all over it. Don't like a mini-mystery? Swap it out. Add endless encounters to the ever-growing horror democracy-style table. Automate it.

P.S. Note:

Because the game takes so much influence from Junji Ito, a good deal of the horror present is visually-based. It's about looking at really messed-up art straight out of someone's nightmares. This aspect is quite difficult to translate into tabletop, not least because describing horrific things balances on the knife's edge between silly and ineffective, but because simply describing some of these monsters can be difficult in and of itself.

Encounters of Summer's End

Everlasting Summer

IT = Insight Threshold. For Underneath.

If Below Insight Threshold, Then Monster Appears as Low Insight Appearance.

UNIVERSAL ENCOUNTERS

d10	Monster	IT	Low Insight Appearance	Description	What It Does	Injuries
1	Suicide Ghost	3*	Phantom Scream	Pale - Erratic - Splattered - Weeping - Glitching - Swallowing the Gun	Stalks Peripheral Vision - Always Behind You - Angry Scream - Possession, Swallow the Gun - Gunshot - Gore Pollock	Suicide by Gun - Blood Drenching
2	Bride of A’aqur	6*	Twirling Gust	A Face In the Midst of the Gust - A Woman - Hair Whipping and Whirling	She Screams - And Is Gone	Despair
3	Hell Hound	2	Rapid Dog	Eyes Like Candles In The Dark - Teeth Too Long - It’s Fast	Tears Through Obstacles - Bounds and Leaps - Rips and Tears, and Laughs a Human Laugh - Tracks	Torn Muscles - Bleeding - Paranoia
4	Black Obelisk	5*	Empty Space	Cold To Touch - Jagged - Sharp - Impossible Placed	Frantic Whispering - Grants Insight	Paranoia - Schizophrenia - Psychosis
5	A’aqur Cultist	1*	Stranger	Hoodie - Mask - Strange Wind Chimes - Skin Burned by Nuclear Winds	Erratic Movements - Stalking - Spying	Wind Burns
6	A’aqur Cultist Hunter	7	Militia Member	Patterns in the Camo - Mask of Wooden Chimes - Hunting Rifle - No Body, Only Wind	Waits An Eternity - Zeros The Field - Takes A Shot - Gone With the Wind	Gunshot - Punctured Arterty - Wind Burns
7	Leviathan Agent	8*	FBI Special Agent	A Man Made of Many Men - Serene Face - Golden Scepter - The All-Powerful State Personified	Photographs - Converses - Interrogates - Arrests - Wields Authority - Command Spells	Bullet Wounds - Legal Action - Forgetfulness
8	Hole	6*	Nothing	Quiet - Deep - Conspicuous - Smooth Edged - Enticing	Pedestrians Crawl In - Nothing Comes Out	Gone - Obsession
9	Strange Mist	2	Fog	Effervescent - Pooling - Swirling - Strange Lights	Fogs the Windows - Crawls Along Ground - Stains - Lunges - Tendrils	Black Lungs - Noisy Coughing - Blindness
10	Vampire	4	Rich Old Man	Pale - Elderly - Track Marks - Covered in Red Tubes - Attached at Hip to Drained Youth - Needles in Hands	Lurks - Labored Breathing - Steals the Blood - Steals the Flesh - Attaches It To Itself - He Will Live Forever! - Living Ponzi Scheme	Blood Loss - Liver Disease - HUNGER - Needles In Skin - Stolen Organs

BEACH ENCOUNTERS

d10	Monster	IT	Low Insight Appearance	Description	What It Does	Injuries
1	Mermaid	3*	Big Fish	Fish Head - Human Legs - It’s Upset - Very Upset	Lurks in the Tide - Watching - Baiting With Movement - Stalks From Water - Attacks and Drags Separated People	Fish Jaw - Bleeding - Drowning - Bisected
2	Siren	3	Pretty Women + Sinkhole	Three Beautiful Young Women - They Are The Fingers - The Hand Hides Under Sand	Shouts for Help - Asks for a Lift - Things Go Wrong - Check Out the Water - Eyes - Maw - Hand - Ambush	Eaten - Entranced
3	Shambling Flotsam	2	Sea Anemone	Smells Like Trash - Shuffles Blindly - Green Seaweeds and Porous Wood - Underneath, Spines Like Anemones	Slowly Moves Around - If Touched, Springs - Floats On Waves	Pain Poison - Rending Bleed - Infection
4	Bloated Corpse	1	Beached Whale	Ebbs with the Waves - Face In Water - Raisen Skin and Swollen - Smells Like Sewage	Stands Up - It Has No Mouth - It Tries to Scream - Then Explodes	Bone Shrapnel - Infection - Vomiting
5	Drowned Ghost	3*	Trick of the Light	A Dangling Thing - Floating Mid Air - Like Bait on the Line - It Soundlessly Gasps Like a Fish Out of Water	It Floats Serenely - It Twitches This Way Quickly - It Notices - Lungs Fill With Fluid	Drowning - Coughing
6	Water Vampire	4	Hull Hit Something	Mistaken For Flotsam - Darts Under The Boat With Uncanny Speed	Handle Appears On Bottom of Boat - A Knocking On The Hull - This Door Wasn’t Here - Open and It Floods - Blood in the Water	Drowning - Blood Loss - Vampirism
7	Sphere of Annihilation	5	Giant Bubble	Black as Pitch - Brownian Moving - Packs of Three	Magnetically Drawn to Things - Swallows Them Whole - Both Gone	Gone - Annihilated Limbs
8	Troll	5	Huge Black Bear	Too Tall - Cloaked - Strong Flashlight - Sniffs the Air - Quiet as a Mouse	Light Turns Red - It’s Seen You - The Light Freezes You, Like Deer	Broken Bones, Eaten
9	Angler	6*	Dead Fish Pile	Corpses Piled Up - Mass Grave - One of Them’s Fresh - Hand Stuck in the Mass - Dead-Eyed Jaw Terror Just Off Shore	Waits for the Investigator - Springs Like a Snare - Into the Water - Long Teeth	Snared - Bleeding - Amputation - Eaten
10	The Elf	5^	Water Spirits?	Big Stocky Man - Long Beautiful Hair and Petite Beard - Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Wall	It Moves The Stones - It Moves the Bramble - It Breaks Down the Walls - It Shatters the Wards - Fight or Argue, And It’s Gone.	Increases Empathy - Increases Encounter Chance

WOODS ENCOUNTERS

d10	Monster	IT	Low Insight Appearance	Description	What It Does	Injuries
1	Unicorn	3/6**	Unicorn / Cyclopism Deer	It Was a Deer - One Crackling Horn - One Too-Wide Central Eye - It Stares - Something Crawls Inside The Eye	Spells Have No Power Here - Crescendo Screams: “BwaaaaAAAAAAHHHH!!” - The Thing Comes Crawling Out Of The Eye - It Flees	Horn-Gored - Cyclopism, Then Death - Magical Feedback
2	Meat Grinder	5	Falling Tree	Something Feels Off - There’s Something Ahead - You See Nothing	Invisible Until Entered - Like a Mini Supernova - Spins Things Around Mid Air Until Thrown Apart	Gravitationally Annihilated - Motion Sickness
3	Webs	3	Spider Webs	Grey Fuzzy Material - Lattices - Perforates the Corners Like It’s Hiding - Drapes From Trees Like Old Curtains	On Contact, Hissing - On Contact, Burning	You’re Fine For Three Days, Then Sudden Death.
4	Vortex	3	Swamp Gas	Unnatural Swirling, Erratic Motions, Kidpix Alteration on Reality	Gravitates - Lunges - Shakes like a marble in a jar.	Lost in Time and Space - Shrapnel Wound - Swirling
5	Most Dangerous Game	8	Crazed Hunter Wearing Deerskin	The Deer Has a Gun - The Eyes Black Holes - Moves Like a Chinese Dragon - The Skin Bulges and Writhes - Smells Like Fresh Death	From One Eye a Rifle Slowly Emerges - CRACK - The Hunt Is On!	Gore - Gunshot Wound
6	Crawling Mold	2	Elder Muskrat	Veins in the Walls - Pounding Heartbeat - Flesh Moss	Swells - Ebs - Polyps - Crawls - Squirts Lymph	Arrhythmia - Polyping Flesh - Explosion
7	Moon Wasp	4	Knife Drone	Wasp-Buzzing - Mirror Laden - Dark Aperture, Uncanny Mathematical Movements - Glint on the Sun - Cackling Mandibles	Comes from over the treetops - Hovers, watching - Uncanny agility - Kamikazes-Dives	Lacerations - Infected Wounds - Bleeding - Social Media Exposure
8	Mad Horse	1	Panicking Horse	Whinnying - Kicking, Jumping - Twisted Face - Exposed Teeth and Tongue - Mad Eyes	It Knows Too Much - Evil Eye - Charges - Kicks and Bites - Swallows Whole	Swallowed - Broken Bones - Distended Jaw - Vore Obsession
9	Bog Mouths	7*	Red Pitcher Plants	Whispering In The Air - Louder and Louder - From The Ground Red Lips - Teeth On The End of a Disgusting Tube	Bites If Tempted - Mimicries Helpless Human - Groups Lunge and Bite Like Lampreys - Spits Acid	Dissolved - Bleeding Bite
10	The Elf	5^	Tree Spirits?	Big Stocky Man - Long Beautiful Hair and Petite Beard - Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Wall	It Moves The Stones - It Moves the Bramble - It Breaks Down the Walls - It Shatters the Wards - Fight or Argue, And It’s Gone.	Increases Empathy - Increases Encounter Chance

TOWN ENCOUNTERS

d10	Monster	IT	Low Insight Appearance	Description	What It Does	Injuries
1	Good Neighbor	7^	Friendly Neighbor	Voice From The Other Side of the Fence, The Door - A Man, Like Your Dad - It Cannot Be Seen	It Asks Questions - “How Was Your Day?” - “Fine Weather, Isn’t It?” - “Say, Do You Mind If I Borrow Your Hedge Trimmer?”	Reduces Empathy - Reduces Encounter Chance - Permanently Closes Shops
2	Unmarked Van	3	Child Kidnappers	White Exterior - No License Plate - Rooftop Spinning Camera - Unpiloted - Strong Sputtering.	Idles - Stops - Stalks - Idles Again - Van Doors Fly Open Into Vacuum Void.	Lost in Time and Space - Crushed Bones - Broken Ribs.
3	Anonymous Police	5	Federal Police	Riot Gear - Sunglasses - No ID - Incomprehensible Speech -  Armored Vehicles With Strange Machines - Tear Gas Haze	Blocks Road - Clouds of Gas - Sonic Weapon - Loiterers Get Shot - Blockade Runners Get Lethal Force	Concussion - Abduction - Broken Bones - Blindness - Deafness - Mind Scrambling
4	Corona Extractor	1	Junkie	Pale Face - No Pupils - Long Needles and Tubes	Finds the Fresh Corpses - Finds the Incapacitated - Stoops Low - Needle in the Eye - Collect the Liquids	Blindness - Addiction - Stigmata
5	Stalker	0	-	Uncanny Mask - Phone Snapshots - Leaning on Corners - White Rag in Hand	Follows - Keeps Distance - Ambush Isolated Members - Chloroform from Behind - Frantic Apologies During Assault	Abduction - Unconsciousness - Broken Nose
6	Glitcher	4	Meth Head	Static Laden - Impossibly Fast - Twitchy Textures - Frictionless - Infinite Rotational Energy	Clips Through Walls - Teleports - Feedback Screech - Spreads the Glitch - It Tries to Speak, To Warn	Glitching - Broken Record - Fall Under The Kill Plane
7	Rocket Man	7	Suicidal Fresh Driver	Engine Screaming - 120 mph in 30 mph Zone - Full Throttle No Brakes - Being of Pure Light	Doppler Driveby - Rocket Sleds Into Tree/House/Crowd - Crash and Burn - Absolutely Nothing Left	Need For Speed - Shrapnel
8	Crawling Lightning	5	Downed Power Line	Thunder In the Distance - Lightning Crawls the Ground	Move Or Die - It Moves Randomly - Animals Scream As They Die In Its Path	Lightning Shock - Screaming - PTSD
9	Ghoul	3	Escaped Mental Patient	Lumbering Gait - Heavy Breathing - Flash of Teeth - Eyes Like Saucers - Blood, Blood.	Sniffs - Drools - Screams - Charges and Bites.	Paralysis - Bleeding - Blood Sepsis - Deep Hunger.
10	Specular	6^	Black Cat	Eyes Big As Saucers - Black Withered Flesh - Shivering - Squelching - Hungry	Sits In The Middle of the Path - Watches - Watches - Hisses and Shrieks - Cowers Off	Ocular Enlargement - Bad Luck

*Will not interact or attack characters below its IT threshold.

**The Unicorn has multiple Insight Thresholds.

^Generally non-hostile.