StranaMente

I ran two games, one with Tales from the Loop and another shorter one with for Things from the Flood.

The first one had a city with three main paranormal things going on:

• Premise is SCP 026. Some kids are missing, someone thinks they're being kidnapped. Truth: someone went in the abandoned school for a dare and later got back in the school and ended up trapped. Variation on the original scp to help the narrative: there is a mold infestation that has supernatural properties, it influences dreams and the perception of reality, the basement holds the root that can be destroyed with fire, but being exposed to the infestation alters one's perception of reality more and more (every body-force check failed they get one point of mental strain due to exposure). If the infestation is destroyed the people trapped there will be freed.
• Premise is SCP 105. A guy has been murdered, his SO is Iris Thompson. The way he has been murdered may either suggest that someone got into the house without him knowing, or it was Iris doing it with her powers (in my case during the game I decided that there was a co-worker of her boyfriend that killed him, but Iris was scared and asked the kids to help her prove it wasn't her).
• Premise is SCP 193. The mother of one of the kids is getting sick, although she gets better at home, when she works she feels way worse. Truth: near her workplace is a military base, scp 193 is an experiment from the secret base underneath that, and has recently managed to escape containment and now resides in the building where the mother works. Investigating it, it shows that it is a silicon based life form and can be killed, or at least made inert by exposing it to fire.
• Premise is SCP 1230. theme is darker because I set this mystery in the Things from the flood setting. There has been several suicides among kids recently and people in school talks about a mystrious magical book, one day a kid jumps from the top of the school and lands in front of the Teens and dies. For a second a green book is seen in their hands before disappearing. Truth: there is a book that with the words "A hero is born" on one page that when read will allow one person to experience very vivid dreams. A teenager ripped a page from the book and wrote "A hero died", and now he manages to enter other people dreams who read the book to manipulate them and inducing them to suicide. After the death, the book will go to another person (friend or random) and only them and the "killer" know the identity. The killer has the "hobby" to take pictures of the people before they die. The book can't be simply destroyed. If one of the players reads the book, a scenario specific to their background will appear in their dreams that night, but a boiling, black cloud will be brewing on the horizon, that is the corruption that the dreamer will experience in their dreams that will appear heroic, but too violent or crude and then degenerate to be more and more evil. The face of the killer will start to appear on random people in the dream.

They're useful if you have kids, otherwise I haven't found them really useful.

I use Google assistant to set timers and alarms, and check the weather. Besides that, nothing. The times I tried, I wrestled with it for a few minutes until I did it myself.

Agreed on the wheel of time. Every character has one and just one quirk and they repeat it in every occasion. Also it's quite troubling, once you start thinking on it, this fixation on men/women relationship.

There's a reason behind it. When it was first published, it was serialised, so Dumas had an incentive to drag it along, also it romanticizes travels around Europe because it was fancy at the time.

The plot behind it is still one of the most compelling I have ever read and a revenge story that few modern works of art can match.

I have my players on a bridge over a river of lava, in front of them a hurt, but still alive beholder. Behind them two ropers. One player is down, and it will be lair action on the count of 20 when we start next time. I'm still teasing them.