Anomalous Radio Transmissions

If you're asking about the game, it's called "OXENFREE." If you're asking about the image itself, I found it on an image board a while ago and am unsure of the source myself.

I fucking love numbers stations and spend way too much of my free time listening to them (priyom.org/number-stations/station-schedule). Just need to find more excuses to include them in games, but most of the folks I know are highly resistant to playing anything other than fantasy.

danke

I remember a creepypasta from back in the day, if two metropolitan television areas overlapped, sometimes you could get the other city's channels come in, low quality but understandable. Sometimes, if you watch the news, they would report on things that aren't happening in our reality, the news from a darker and bleaker world. That could translate to radio as well.

It would be cool to make a numbers station integral to the plot.

Let's say that in the course of the game, the characters come across an old photocopied code book filled with a list of three-digit codes and the words that they correspond with. A quickly penned note tells them to tune into a certain radio frequency for further instruction. When they do, they can listen in to "Doorbell Station," which broadcasts three doorbell-like chimes followed by a string of numbers.

The gamerunner produces these broadcasts using a text to speech program and sound effects for the doorbell and static. The players then have to use a physical copy of the code book to decrypt the message.

Sometimes these messages would give hints or warnings or clues. Sometimes they would be inane conversations, but mostly they'd be used to put the characters and their players on edge.

I ran a sci-fi game once where I used my friend's drum machine to sample a few clips that I played over some static that played the whole game.

How jarring would it be for the players if this constant background noise just stopped whenever danger was about to manifest?

Maybe a page can be taken from Oxenfree's book and tuning the radio to certain frequencies can open rifts to alternate timelines or dark dimensions. The PCs are trying to traverse the city, maybe using clues provided by the anomalous radio broadcasts, and must pass through dangerous unreal spaces in order to bypass certain obstacles.

The city is a frequency and the cities-that-could-have-been are other frequencies.

The cities-that-could-have-been hate you.

Using old timey music broadcasts is always a nice twist.
I also feel that trying to make a Silent Hill radio type thing might be a good idea to impliment. Jack up white noise, static, when close to wrongness or monsters.
unrelated picture is probably unrelated

Ghostly sos signals

I got the reset ending, were there more endings in this game?

What game is it?

There are several endings, though I can't remember how many, and additional play-throughs see the story change.

The game is called Oxenfree.

There is a phenomenon called ducting where a radio transmission gets trapped in the lower layers of the atmosphere between layers of air that have different density due to temperature differences.

My favorite story about it is some ham operator in the 50s getting top secret communications that had been bouncing around trapped in a duct of air for years.

There was a line from the movie version of John Dies at The End.

Hell is a real place, its not deep below us full of fire and brimstone, no it is all around us. Its in the air, like the country music station, we just can't see it, we're not tuned into it.

I really like that description. I think it would work really well for a sort of "otherworld" laid over some city in which a game is set. Doing certain things, like tuning into a specific radio station, allow the two to bleed and blend together.

>that op image
youtube.com/watch?v=m1GIFsT5Yng

Fuck me, stories are allowed? I got a small one. Not gonna bother greentexting because of the headache but here goes:

I used to have a grand dad who loved HAM radios or whatever they're called, the ones you always see being used as a hobby thing. He collected them a bit, had like 4 different setups he never used and one he mostly used whenever me and my cousin visited. I couldn't tell you what the differences were between any but he did put a betty boop sticker on the one he liked so there's that. Now when he had it everything was pretty normal, he broadcasted some music and did old man ranting on it, sometimes he found a guy to talk to, sometimes we got to have a chat on it too.
But when I was around 14-15 he died of some kinda blood clot, had his will all in order and I was the one to inherent one of the non-favorite radios. Think one of my uncles has that one, but thats not important.
Now I had no clue how to work this thing, and I hadn't actually seen him in a couple years so I couldn't just did what he did so I left it be for a while. One day I got bored, remembered I stashed it on a top shelf and got it out to play with. Mostly just got static and local radio, learned we have a really paranoid guy somewhere within range with a radio, and not much else. Except out of no where while I was trying to go back to listen to the crazy guy I caught something in the static, like banging on the door (Actually thought someone was at the door pranking me).
I fiddle with it and get it to where the knocking was broadcasting and gave it a listen for about 15 minutes. Sounded like someone just trying to get attention at first like you would to get a door open (Also the crazy part of me thinks it might've been morse but I wouldn't know), stops for a second or too and whoever it was just goes ham on whatever he was hitting. Like both hands fisting a desk, you could hear him grunting and saying 'Hey' or something.

Cont

I tried to talk to him, but either I didn't know how to turn that on or he didn't hear me. Kept at it going from just stopping to going at the door for a minute or two, gave it a couple real hard slams I think and gave up. I think he said something but the radio didn't give me the best reception, didn't sound like english but definitely had a pissed off tone. Spent a while in silence, think he was tapping or something judging by the little bumping sounds and a fucking hard slam, dude starts crying. Tuned it away after that since fucked if I was going to listen to a trapped dude or whatever his deal was, I was scared shitless by it.
Kinda wish I remembered the frequency, I would check back now just to see if anything's there.

>OXENFREE
Freaky, man. Good story.

Diary of a trucker, or live off-time broadcasts, like in Alice Isn't Dead.

a what now?

That's a rather strange and unsettling story. I've always wanted a ham radio to play around with, and would like include one in a game someday, somehow.

I'm reminded now of the movie called "Frequency" in which anomalous weather conditions allow radio communication between a son and his father, 30 years in the past, before he'd died.

You could try dropping some shortwave radio oddities in the middle of regular broadcasts. I'd think it scary if you were listening to music and the sound of a pre-war numbers station drowned out the chorus.

Apparently, Alice Isn't Dead is:

>A new serial fiction podcast from the team behind Welcome to Night Vale.

>A truck driver searches across America for the wife she had long assumed was dead. In the course of her search, she will encounter not-quite-human serial murderers, towns literally lost in time, and a conspiracy that goes way beyond one missing woman.

There are three completely divergent endings; the Reset is one of these. The Reset Ending has a lot of individual variance because every one of the characters can leave neutral to you, hating you, or liking you, various of the characters can be alive, various of the characters can be changed for better or worse by this, and various of the characters can be pushed into a relationship by this.

One of the Reset endings is almost a fourth ending because if you play the back-in-time sections and twisted-reflection sections just right you can make your brother decide not to leave, so he isn't killed in a car crash. If you do this then you wake up in the boat leaving the next day, with everyone talking about the fun-but-normal time they had with no memory of your horrid time, and you can either get really mad at this or just accept this reality because you like it more. It's so divergent it is ostensibly a fourth ending but isn't because that just resets too, so is as meaningless as every other Reset ending.

The other two ending are Escape where you let the Sunken try to escape, which completely changes the denouement and makes everyone completely hate you, but just creates a spin-off bubble that also doesn't go anywhere so it loops back to the Reset ending.

There is also the Cancel ending in which you play the game a second time and encounter weird recordings that aren't in regular New Game and that let you send a message not just back in time but off the island. In this ending you get a message from yourself warning you not to go to the island, and even though you don't believe you, it weirds you out so much your friends agree not to go, so there was never a loop.

This is the best ending until you realise they never came but you are still trapped anyway, and that because they never come then-you never warns yourself, so a third you comes anyway.

THIS is why it is a neo-Lovecrafting work. There re no spooky aware forces of nihilistic dread - just the happenstance of the universe, of casuality, of nonlinearity, creating by coincidence a situation as cruel as it is utterly irrevocable.

All you can do is either claim your small victories and take what joy you can, or dash yourself against the rocks endlessly in the search of a 'perfect' outcome that was never possible.

I still think the warning ending is the best, because in that at least one of Yous-and-friends is saved from a terrible fate. Because it is a time loop and this can happen 1/3 times, if you do this then 1/3rd of the infinite instances of this event end okay.. It's not much of a victory, but hardly a loss. Although the endless scope of an infinite multiverse could be said to make any action infinitely meaningless, you could also claim it makes any act of compassion infinitely powerful.

That's an interesting analysis of the game's endings. I would definitely say that Oxenfree has a Lovecraftian bent. The history and nature of the Sunken are especially interesting.

>Crazy woman has a cross country trip in America in a basically stolen truck, chasing the delusion that her dead lover lives

Well that's something

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the birb is indeed from somewhere
everyone heard about it
the birb

Gr8 thread mates

I've been gearing up for a Gumshoe game set in a quiet mountain town, been meaning to have a vaguely sinister disc jockey on the radio.
Basically between oddly precient news posts, and maybe eventually directly acknowledging the players, he plays music. Stuff that either fits with what is going on, or stuff I like.

youtube.com/watch?v=6AKkUWnkTag

Basically I've been partially inspired by Fallout Radio, Nightvale's Weather, and whoever/whatever was on the radio in Silent Hills.

One thing you can do, if you're GODTEIR is use some edditing software to make white noise static shit, turn it down low and play it when appropriate. Let the players get used to it and kind of tune it out. Then you play the track that has you giving them a HUGE clue, slightly distorted using said edditing software, in the middle of the white noise.

youtube.com/watch?v=McFRonD-sjg

Well said.

Alice Isn't Dead is some of the most genuine horror I've listened to in a while. It's if Night Vale decided to stop playing nice and go full post-modern horror story. The Thistlemen are some of the creepiest antagonists I've ever stolen for a game and the episode about the burger joint that was everywhere all at once has given me some fodder for my UA campaign.