Sounds in the Distance - Whatre Those Hepcats Up To?

Riffing off my pal Anne H.'s great post about signs of an upcoming encounter

Anne is one of my favorite players, bar none, and she's a terrific thinker in terms of DM side stuff. In our exchange on MeWe (yuck, btw, still not a fan of the UI or ease of finding conversations)...

excuse me - in our exchange I pointed out that Moldvay has the DM determine the distance until the encounter happens with a 2d6 times 10', the direction as she or he might wish. That's what all those empty rooms are for in the Moldvay stocking process: to have free spots to put random encounters.

I also have a "Gang Names" generator that's pretty amusing

 I guess one part of the artistry of being a DM is knowing and conveying what those weirdos are up to. Luckily, I've done a miniscule part of that for you. I play with Tablesmith a great deal and I like to do this sort of thinking a couple of times and then not again... So I made a "What Those Folk Up To?" thing in Tablesmith that helps me stock nefarious weirdos and their strange and inscrutable motives. HOW you convey those things they are doing is up to you, I suggest with sounds and smells since (hopefully) the party won't see those creatures if they are more than 30' or so (so out of lantern light).

Here's a list. You could use a d100 and keep rolling until you got something. All this stuff might lead to combat, I guess, or probably (in my game, at least) more likely to get into a roleplay thing. I stick with gibberlings because of the swords, hair, and chicken feet lets me use my Greaser voice from The Outsiders or maybe Grease or some Jersey variant.

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# NMS_HumanoidMotives

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1. searching for food
2. eating food
3. searching for mates
4. mating
5. gambling
6. squabbling about betting
7. in a war party
8. in the midst of battle
9. trading
10. squabbling about trading gone wrong
11. scavenging
12. hiding food stores
13. digging a hole
14. painting glyphs
15. painting historical scenes
16. painting mythical scenes
17. dancing around a fire
18. engaged in a religious ritual
19. burying their dead
20. entombing their dead
21. building a funeral pyre
22. cremating their dead
23. disposing of evidence
24. caring for their young
25. instructing their young
26. building a shelter
27. building a fire
28. healing their wounded
29. telling tales
30. telling jokes
31. on the lam
32. recovering from a battle
33. building a shrine
34. building a temple
35. capturing livestock
36. hunting game
37. in a courting ritual
38. gathering supplies for a shelter
39. preparing to hibernate
40. escaping from persecution
41. escaping from imprisonment
42. capturing prisoners
43. looking guilty
44. looking unsettled
45. looking anxious
46. looking terrified
47. fleeing a powerful enemy
48. dismembering a large carcass
49. cooking soup
50. bickering
51. wrestling
52. carousing
53. drinking liquor
54. drinking hallucinogens
55. consuming drugs
56. passed out
57. recovering from illness
58. suffering from illness
59. dying of some plague
60. laughing uproariously
61. tittering
62. hiding
63. hiding badly
    64. to 75 (roll twice - included for your ease and merriment)
    76-100 Getting ready to mess you up, interloper (this isn't in the original Tablesmith thing)

Interdimensional Wrong Numbers

I try to think of stuff on my once-weekly tedious commute while I am listening to the Cramps or maybe some gaming podcasts. I've been playing a great deal of Dark Souls on the playstation and so I'm full of self-hatred and really want to sit next to a campfire and sulk

This week I think maybe I'd heard that there's a third Bill n Ted movie in the works, and somebody looking for EUGENE called me yesterday while I was driving, maybe a police fund raiser and it got me thinking that usually I just threaten to murder cold-callers (especially if they hassle my wife or won't take a hint, I mean c'mon bro I know you need to make a living but if you suggest to my wife that my daughter is not safe a couple of times then it gets me in the mind of conspiracies and kidnapping and such and my brain just wishes to remove some irritant and threat and make your skull into a pearl last time the manager of the poor dude even called me and I screamed at him in my underwear under the moon for a few minutes, too)

it occurs to me that Bill n Ted are good DCC PCs

Where was I?

Oh yes, wrong number calls.

So, the party finds this device, like a telephone pad, or maybe an Enigma device, or something with a couple of gizmos that have readily identifiable (but not probably understandable) runes, markings, whatever

Any party worth its salt will discard the thing, but we don't play with those people.  The wizard will try to figure it out, of course. Just noodling with it will cast a random LoTFP summon, which to my mind is the greatest meta-gaming spell there is and I am pretty sure Ramanan S. had a great automator for it a while back so it's a bit iffy if they'll keep it, but what they have is a cosmic cellphone handset and every so often you CONTACT OTHER PLANE and it could be a good one, so keep that number

FUTHARK 8675309 gets you a deva
TV6-5000 gets a vampire lord
MUDHONEY gets you an elemental of stickiness

like, there's an order to it, but not much, and you ought to be sort of careful 

keep a pokemon card deck handy, or maybe the Random Esoteric Creature Generator, or YuGiOh. I don't know, I'm torn about the RECG since it's Raggi, and it's Goodman Games, but fuck Jordan Peterson and those Kekistani guys and people that make a living by being provocative, I guess. YMMV but too close an association with scumbags makes one suspect, I guess? If a bunch of nazis latch on to your ideas then something is amiss

The trick will be for the user to remember the long (and sometimes complicated) sequence of runes/symbols/moves/whatever that will dial who/what they want, and maybe if they hit upon a good combination then kablammo now you've got a Deus Ex Machina device like some big ass giant eagles but these ones don't owe you nothing, man, in fact very time they bail your lame newb ass out you're getting in deeper to them and they could use some purple worms for breakfast


Anyway, if you want, you could use this thing I have made a while back to insert some entity (in fact, the principles are the same)