Post by Disparagingtheboot on Nov 17, 2016 15:51:27 GMT -5
Urban legends, rumors, sightings, and other weird phenomena for your characters to hear about and investigate.
1. Multiple witnesses claim to have seen a black beetle-like creature running across rooftops at night. Some described it as a humanoid insect, while others claim that the creature appears to be wearing shiny black armor.
2. A man was arrested last week for attempting to sneak into the basement of a casino to perform animal sacrifice.
3. The students at a local high school claim that a device in the boiler room can alter the weather.
4. Bodies keep showing up without teeth.
5. Anyone who eats the new Double Bacon Blast from Burger King is scorned by all things that crawl upon the earth until the burger leaves their body.
6. Ten people in New Jersey regularly receive mail from other universes.
7. If you flush ten dollar coins down a certain toilet on a certain college campus, one of your enemies will suffer a minor curse.
8. There's a warehouse somewhere in the southwest filled with x-ray goggles, freeze rays, jet boots, snake oil patent medicines, and anything else you could find advertised in an old comic book.
9. If you place a mirror on the floor of a building and jump down into it from a great height, you will fall through it into the building's mirror image.
10. Fur coats have started showing up in clothing stores made from material that does not correspond to any known species.
11. The crew of a fishing trawler claim they saw a large mechanical squid-shaped vessel emerge from the water and ensnare a passing yacht.
12. There's a rumor that every cruise always loses at least one passenger. That's only true for Disney Cruises.
13. Technically, it's true for all cruises. It's just that most of the time something comes back that looks enough like the person that people don't get suspicious.
14. Various highly sensitive government jobs require that the base of the applicant's spine be examined with a kirlian camera before security clearance is granted. It is unknown what they're looking for.
15. One popular soft drink is derived primarily from the cerebrospinal fluid of a non-human but intelligent creature. If you think you've figured out which one it is, write it on a piece of paper and burn it in the woods during a full moon. If you guessed right, you will receive a small cash prize.
16. You found a box of videotapes in the basement of your house. These contain soap operas that seem to star you and your friends, even though you of course never remember acting in them. The plots cryptically refer to current and future events in your lives, but in an exaggerated, florid, 80s-as-hell style. The soap opera also seems to take place in a universe where the primary religion is something called "the Faith of the Clockwork Goddess" and occultism seems to have replaced sports.
17. Whenever an animal becomes extinct, three random people gain the power to shapeshift into that animal.
18. Leave an offering of milk, raw fish, and gold jewelry on the banks of Lake Carnegie during the witching hour on a night when the moon is new. The inhabitants of the lake will rise up from its depths, and are willing to trade soviet-era weaponry for secrets.
19. The reptile-breeding industry has reached new heights. This year's most popular leopard gecko morphs are the Strawberry Tesseract, the Chartreuse Hedgedelver, and the Chronomaly Plus Pro. These geckos are highly intelligent but often have trouble grasping human customs and mores.
20. Many of Japan's famous weird vending machines seemingly manifested overnight in various places throughout Tokyo, and residents say that sometimes, in dark alleys, you can find vending machines that sell even stranger wares. Unconfirmed reports claim that this phenomenon has spread to certain Canadian cities.
21. Your computer is automatically "flagged" for investigation if you frequently search for items related to lasers, directed energy weapons, or "death rays". This is because the number of death ray murders in the United States has skyrocketed over the past few years and the government wants to cover it up.
22. Last month, several bookstores received copies of "North Sea Cooking: New and Traditional Riemannian Cuisine". This book's publisher and author do not seem to exist, and the book references countries, customs, people, and several species of fish that also do not exist. The books are otherwise non-anomalous, and the recipes are quite tasty.
23. You can permanently give yourself a really useful sort of clairvoyance by drinking a potion made from horse tranquilizer, ginseng, and bone marrow from any actor who has ever played the main villain in a James Bond movie.
24. Disney World, and all other Disney parks and cruise lines, are formally considered neutral ground by all of the world's major conspiracies. The secret U.N. operates out of a rotating sequence of restaurants in the parks. Universal Studios is under no such treaty.
25. Every trucker is instructed to burn a small pile of toothpicks and pennies for every thousand miles they drive.
26. Great Lakes fishermen keep catching fish with too many eyes.
27. There's a store in Manhattan that will extract your thoughts and memories and save them to any medium you request, from DVDs to USB drives.
28. It is impossible to make an accurate map of any urban sewer system, as the pipes and passageways periodically shift and change. Sewer workers and other "under folk" eventually develop a sixth sense that lets them navigate despite this.
29. The moon landing wasn't fake, but the U.S. didn't just want to get up there for the hell of it. There was something up there they wanted to get their hands on, and they did some majorly shady shit to get to it before the soviets did.
30. You can buy stamps from a few dealers that cause your mail to spontaneously disappear and manifest at its intended designation as soon as you look away from it.
31. There is no such thing as high-fructose corn syrup.
32. Every commercial airliner carries at least three iron horseshoes hidden somewhere in the fuselage.
33. Bigfoot is learning to use tools.
34. Last night, one of the regular reruns of the Simpsons was replaced for six minutes by instructions on how to summon and imprison demons.
35. Go into any hardware store and ask to join the Value Club. If you pass a series of tests, you will be inducted into a secret buyer's club of mad scientists who frequent hardware stores for equipment. You can pick up some great tips from them on how to make a good jetpack for under two hundred dollars, magical rites that consecrate power tools as sacred weapons using a bonfire fed with VHS tapes of slasher movies, and lots of other useful knowledge.
36. This morning, every bird in the world landed, looked upwards, and sang in unison. This happens every time an apocalyptic event is successfully prevented.
37. The Mafia is trawling online pagan communities, looking to recruit those with actual magic to help them move drugs across state lines.
38. The U.S. government recently increased security around its various airplane graveyards. This is because a cabal of necromancers recently discovered a new and much easier method reanimating dead aircraft.
39. Fliers have started showing up across the city, advertising "Discrete Body Disposal Services". These flyers vanish if more than one person comes near them, or if someone tries to photograph them.
40. If you've ever handled a penny, the government has your DNA.