Short waves, toadstools and hodags

[Quixotic1]

Been working on this concept for a while now, and I've finally gotten to a point where I'll be ready to roll soon. I figured I'd put it here to see if I could find any additional ideas, suggestions, concerns, etc.

Each player has received a key in a padded manilla envelope with the numbers 1-9-8-2 written on it, as well as a series of strange instructions. These notes lead them to a numbers station (nicknamed "Growl PSK" by people who give such things nicknames) and an underground complex that seems to be part bomb shelter, part mushroom grow project.
The variant species of fly agaric mushroom that grows in the abandoned trays, when consumed, is a powerful psychotropic that seems to send the user back in time. Specifically, forty years ago.

The central concept of the game (totally unsure how much they'll figure out in the course of actual gameplay):

The mycellium network (the root-like system of fungi) beneath the forest floor connects all of the plant and fungal life in a way that is very similar to the way neurons are connected within a brain.
The Network is a brain. A massive, utterly alien brain with inscrutable goals and desires. Many--perhaps all--people in the area (or in the world?) are a part of the Network as well. Fungal spores release phramaones and take root in grey matter, and the Network has been slowly, subtly manipulating the human population since they first walked upon the earth and breathed it's air.

The Agency (looking for a suitably ominous and vague name for them that condences to a short acronym, a la FBI, CIA, etc.) used Growl PSK to communicate with the Network, using the whole of the forest as a massive receiver.
They have made some kind of deal with the Network--every 40 years, they offer it a human child (cue themes of faerie and alien abduction).
What the Agency gets out of the deal is further attempts to understand what they at first see as a potential source of power or a biological weapon, but later (when they realize the breadth and scope of it's influence) they are simply trying to appease it, like frightened cultists making sacrifices to an uncaring god.

So the game will consist mostly of the players trying to unravel the mystery around the numbers station, the missing children, etc. while avoiding the attention of the Agency and those under the influence of the Network.
Been doing a lot of reading on running mystery games and the like. The Angry GM is invaluable, as usual. The Alexandrian isn't normally as helpful for me, but the Three Clue Rule and the concept of Revelations were great points.

Now I need to solidify the essential plot points (i.e. the scenes that are necessary for the game to be complete), the revelations (and at least three clues for each) and how they might be connected (looks like largely a branching structure with some open elements and a couple linear ones).

I've got a list of people from different parts of town they can meet, places they can dig around for clues.
I'm not sure how this will go. Especially the time travel aspect related to the varient fly agaric mushrooms in the underground facility.
I've also got the idea that there's *something* in the woods. A distant, thin wailing. A sudden rumbling crash like a freight train in the forest. A thousand people and beasts screaming and growling and dying--but it's just "soft places" in time and space, most of them sort of worm holes leading to the night of the blizzard when the children are taken.

I'm not sure I included everything necessary to understand the game in the above description (trying to transcribe it from two different notebooks, the note function on my phone, a computer and three different forums), so I'd be happy to clarify anything.

This game feels really big and unwieldy and I'm doubting my skillz as a gamemaster for the first time in a long time. So any comments are welcome. Worst case scenario, this has been a good sounding board for all my ideas.

[TheStranger]

My initial reaction is to say, "and then what?" The mystery of what's going on is like 90% of a cool game concept, but IMO there needs to be some conclusion wherein the players *do* something with that information. Do they try to stop the Agency from sacrificing children? How does the Network respond to that? Do they need to kill the Network? Speaking of which - why aren't the PCs subject to its mind control spores, especially if they're widespread?

That said, here are some ideas:

The Agency is either directly or indirectly controlled by the Network, and in fact was established for the sole purpose of providing it with children.
Versions of the Agency have existed in civilizations around the world for thousands of years. In fact, the 40-year cycle of child sacrifice has been unbroken dating back to ancient Sumeria, and there are hints that it goes back even further. Imply that other notable human sacrifice such as the druids or the Aztecs was also related.
The children are incorporated into the Network and enhance its intelligence and understanding of humanity greatly (I suggest ages 3-6, btw, this being a period of intense mental development and adaptability)
Growl PSK is directly related to this - the purpose of the mushrooms is to connect the child-minds across time. If you know where to look in 1982, you can find some mushrooms that connect to 1942, and so on.
The Network, then, consists of a gestalt of thousands of human children and an ancient fungus, connected across time and space. The Network is not growing in power as it absorbs more children, it has always had all of the intellect of all of the children it will ever absorb. It perceives all of the places and times it has ever existed or will exist.
(Optional) Despite that, there is a time, coming soon, beyond which the Network has no awareness. And it (and its agents) are very freaked out by that.

[Quixotic1]

Wow, so first let me say: whenever I post anything ttrpg-related, I expect about 95% of the responses to be, ultimately, not useable. People often seem to miss the point of my posts in other forums, or their suggestions are just wildly off-brand for what I'm aiming at...but this is gold. All of it. So thank you. It's really impressive stuff.

To answer your "and then what?", the three characters will be suitably motivated to stop some kind of shadowy organization from doing shadowy stuff, to try and save children from what they assume is a terrible fate and to simply understand this bizarre mystery in their own backyard.
The players will be motivated in turn to rise to the challenge, to discover and to do some kind of in-game good.

I have a few timelines written out for what happens when the characters do this or that--if they save the kid in the '82, the blizzard in '22 is much more severe and 40 kids go missing over a larger area. If they stop Growl PSK from sending a signal in '82, the whole town is nearly destroyed and a horrible *thing* comes in the blizzard in '22 to take every man, woman and child back with it. So, assuming they survive that far, they'll need to try and understand the station, the signal and the network enough to alter the message Growl PSK sends out and, in some fashion, cancel the contract.
I also have this idea that the people who gave them the envelopes and the keys are, in fact, themselves. But I'm not quite sure how that'll play out yet.

As for why they're not influenced, I was thinking that they are. That for some reason, the network wants them doing what they're doing.
But they'll be pretty deep in it by the time they reach that conclusion, if they ever reach it.

I don't want to fill in too many concrete details regarding the network and the suits; unknowable horror and all that. But you've got so many brilliant ideas that I'm definitely going to add most--if not all--of them in. The characters may never learn half of it, but there will be snippets for them to find, if they're clever.

Thank you again. Brilliant stuff.

[TheStranger]

Hmm… reasons for the Network to want the players to investigate. He about this?

Despite being an ancient, world-spanning superintelligence that’s been manipulating large parts of humanity for millennia, the Network is dying. A combination of climate change and desertification is breaking the global fungal network (starting with the dust bowl, making the Soil Conservation Service a Network ploy - maybe the Agency is the black ops arm of NRCS). Despite the Network’s best efforts (Black Plague? COVID?) there are just too many of us and we’re too smart to keep in check forever. One way or another, humanity has reached a critical mass. The planet is now shaped by our actions and the Network can’t maintain the status quo any longer.

I wouldn’t necessarily present this as some sort of environmentalist morality play. It’s equally accurate to say that we’re finally becoming powerful enough to free ourselves from the alien overlord that’s been treating us like livestock since we first started walking upright. Play it down the middle and let your players decide.

Letting the players become aware of it is something of a Hail Mary by the Network, a last-ditch effort to continue its existence by coming out of the shadows. It’s using the players for this because it can’t reveal its vulnerability to the Agency; the Agency would try to control it for whatever sort of sinister supersecret government agency agenda it has.

You might have a semi-climactic confrontation when the players descend into unmapped caverns beneath Siberia (or wherever) to meet with thousands of mummified fungus-lich children. If you can think of a suitably famous disappeared child, maybe make them the spokesperson. Either way, they make the expected cliché speech to convince the players to aid the Network. Explain that they are not to be pitied, if not for the Network they would have been a thousand years dead and forgotten, etc. Play them just human enough to be sympathetic and just borg-like enough to remind the players what they’re dealing with. Either way, the spokesperson makes the case for the Network’s right to life and asks for help.

There are a few different ways your players could go from here. They could double down on destroying the Network and freeing humanity to control its own destiny. In which case, the final act of the story is players vs Network, starting with getting out of the cave alive.

As a variant of the above, the players could ally with the Agency to control the Network. Keep it alive, but make it humanity’s servant. Promise them some sort of a sci-fi utopia where humanity goes to the stars by leveraging its enslaved superfungus or something.

Or they could throw in with the Network and try to take humanity down a peg or two. Most groups probably won’t turn to the dark side like this, but it’s an option. In that case, the final act is probably the players working with the backing of the Network to cause the total collapse of civilization (a last resort the Network didn’t want to take after spending so much effort building civilization up in the first place, but better than oblivion). If you want to really dark, this could result in the effective end of humanity as we’re all reduced to fungus zombies. This also works as the goal the Network pursues if the players decide to oppose it, which should make any victory resulting in the destruction or enslavement of the Network feel satisfying by comparison even if it’s not perfect.

There’s a tempting middle road, where the players somehow solve climate change and deforestation, humanity lives in harmony with nature, and everybody lives happily ever after. Your call, but I wouldn’t let this be an option. This is what the Network has been trying to do ever since it had Rachel Carson write Silent Spring, and three more environmentalists in the world isn’t going to make a difference. The Network has given up on this plan.

Dark horse option: figure out a way to replace the fungal network with the cloud so the Network can continue to exist on a digital substrate. Just make sure there’s a really good firewall, or the players might inadvertently create Skynet. You could play this one with the Network ending up as a relatively benign AI coexisting with humanity, as our AI overlord, or as the high-tech version of the enslaved fungus option above. If you want to give your players a “good” ending, you could probably set up a scenario where the Network realizes it can no longer control humanity and instead becomes a willing ally, implying some sort of post-campaign golden age.

[Quixotic1]

Again, really cool stuff!

I'll be using the Chronicles of Darkness system for this game, so I definitely want to hint at impossibly huge, horrible things without shining a direct light on them. "Behind every door is more doors. Behind ever answer is more questions" --it's a jazzy little snippet, but it's hard to deliver in-game without players getting frustrated or just too confused to keep paying attention.

I don't think I can get too specific with the conclusions for that reason, and because the scale of this game is more or less local, with hints at regional, global and possibly cosmic stuff, but ultimately it's a story about a remote area in northern Wisconsin.

The characters are a veteran of the Gulf War who's trying to go off-grid, the owner of an eclectic new-age lifestyle shop and a wannabe Yoga influencer. I'm not sure how plausible a final showdown with something like the Network really is; the game won't go on long enough for them to grow and change beyond those initial concepts to become the sort of people who could try to tackle a job like that.

I think I'm aiming for something smaller and more intimate. They manage to save some kids and break the contract made with the Network. Or, armed with this knowledge, they sally forth to peer into other shadows, perhaps to form some sort of resistance against the Network. But such will make another story. Something like that.

Why they were chosen, what exactly happens to the kids, what the Network's ultimate plan are--I think I'm comfortable leaving these as blanks. But who knows...these are some sweet ideas.

The next thing I'm working on is a list of revelations (things the characters understand or learn) and at least three clues for each.

Part of where I'm struggling is, to take my GM'ing to the next level, I'm forcing myself to do a lot of things consciously that I'd normally just fill in on an instinctual level.

I'll try to post some more stuff that I have for sake of completeness. But once again: thank you for your time and effort. It is greatly appreciated.