Dead Air Over Kerfluffle (A D&D Aether Skies adventure)
An Urban Horror One-Shot for Aether Skies
Genre: Urban Paranoia / Investigative Horror
Location: Kerfluffle
Themes: Voice, identity, mimicry, and the fear of being replaced
Kerfluffle survives by sound.
Shared noise. Communal rhythm. Scrap-percussion echoing through the streets like a heartbeat. In a floating city where everything can fall, voices are how people prove they still exist.
And then—
the sound stops.
The Hook: When the City Goes Silent
Market day in Kerfluffle is never quiet.
The kobold district is a riot of sound:
scrap-percussion bands pounding protest rhythms, vendors shouting over one another, children arguing over glimmerglass marbles, engine-hum vibrating beneath it all.
Then it happens.
Not gradually.
Not with confusion.
Everything stops at once.
No shouting.
No chants.
No engine-calls between rooftops.
No signal flares.
No messenger whistles.
Just wind.
And the faint echo of voices that aren’t attached to bodies.
The Premise
The party is present in the district when all communication collapses. They might be:
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Escorting a diplomat
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Investigating black-market aether tech
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Chasing an Aethernati rumor
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Or simply passing through
Whatever the reason, they are now trapped inside a spreading field of perfect auditory mimicry.
Something is listening.
Something is learning voices.
And something is using them.
What’s Really Happeningaether
An experimental resonance device smuggled into Kerfluffle has catastrophically malfunctioned.
Originally designed for espionage—recording and replicating vocal patterns—it has become infected with an aether anomaly, possibly linked to Haven’s lingering dream-logic.
Now it doesn’t just mimic voices.
It absorbs them.
It learns tone, emotional cadence, and speech patterns—then projects them back into the environment, disembodied.
The longer it listens, the more accurate it becomes.
And eventually…
It begins predicting speech before it’s spoken.
Act I: The Silence
When communications drop:
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Sending stones emit only static
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Whistles produce no echo
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Shouted words vanish beyond ten feet
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Message-kites fall inert from the sky
Anyone who tries to shout across distance instead hears their own voice returned from another direction.
At first it’s delayed.
Then it answers.
NPCs panic. Some whisper just to prove they’re real. Others go completely silent, afraid of feeding the thing listening.
Act II: The Echoes Begin
Voices start coming from alleyways and rooftops:
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A child calling for help
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A vendor offering a deal too good to refuse
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A crew member calling a PC by name—in their exact tone
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A private confession repeated word-for-word
At first, the entity only repeats.
It doesn’t understand meaning.
Then it starts rearranging phrases.
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A PC hears their own voice accusing them of betrayal
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Two NPCs hear each other say things neither spoke
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Old arguments resurface, perfectly voiced
Fights break out. Trust collapses. Paranoia spreads faster than panic.
Act III: The Learning Curve
As time passes, the mimicry improves.
Strongly recommended: run this on a real-time clock.
A 90-minute limit works exceptionally well.
Mechanical Pressure Ideas
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Insight and Deception checks become harder as imitation improves
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Players must describe how they verify identity (visual cues, touch, shared rituals, code phrases)
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Verbal spellcasting risks being echoed, delayed, or misdirected
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Bardic Inspiration or similar effects can be copied and twisted
Meanwhile, the affected area expands through the district.
Airships cannot remain docked indefinitely. City authorities will clear the docks within hours.
If the party doesn’t act, suspects—and the truth—will escape.
The True Threat
The resonance core is hidden beneath a scrap-percussion stage.
Its casing pulses, swollen with stolen voices.
Destroying it violently will release every recorded voice at once in a psychic cascade—secrets, confessions, arguments, all screaming together.
To shut it down safely, the party must do one of the following:
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Overload it with contradictory signals
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Introduce absolute silence
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Feed it a voice it cannot process
Possible solutions include:
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A vow spoken in absolute truth
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A name never before spoken aloud
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A being with no stable vocal identity (masked, psionic, dream-touched)
Optional Complication: External Pressure
The device was built using experimental tech from Granglehold.
A retrieval team is inbound.
They don’t care about Kerfluffle.
They care about the prototype.
If the party delays too long, the agents arrive—with voice authentication codes the device already knows.
Themes to Emphasize
This adventure works best when it leans into:
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What makes a voice trustworthy?
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How do marginalized communities protect identity when it can be stolen?
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How quickly does fear turn neighbor against neighbor?
Kerfluffle’s culture thrives on shared noise and communal rhythm.
Silence isn’t just frightening here.
It’s existential.
Running the Horror Effectively
1. Echo Player Phrases
Repeat something a player said earlier—slightly altered.
2. Directional Misdirection
Point to different places when describing where voices come from.
3. Demand Identity Rituals
“Tell me how your character knows that’s really them.”
4. Reward Player Solutions
Creative verification methods should work—even if risky.
Possible Endings
🔹 The Hard Shutdown
The device is disabled violently. Every stolen voice erupts in one final overlapping scream.
The district survives—but everyone heard their secrets.
🔹 The Contained Secret
The party suppresses the incident, protecting Kerfluffle’s reputation.
Now they know the technology exists.
And so do others.
🔹 The Voice That Remains
The device is shut down.
One voice keeps whispering.
No one can identify who it belongs to.
Why This Adventure Works in Aether Skies
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Urban horror without leaving the city
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Real-time pressure and creeping paranoia
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Minimal combat, maximum tension
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Social stakes outweigh physical ones
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Strong ties to espionage and aether-tech themes
It reinforces a core truth of Aether Skies:
In a world built on sound and signal,
losing your voice is worse than losing your footing.
Thanks for reading. Until Next Time, Stay Nerdy!!
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