Plot hooks, encounters, and technology for the Lumberjeses, material horrors

This is a short sequel to the post on trees and eldritch horror, fulfilling my promise to make some gameable material just in time for Samhain! You should read that post first, or this is going to make no sense. If you're short on time, just read part 3 where the Lumberjeses are explained, but be warned that it’s going to seem quite left-field without the earlier bits.

The strategy I've adopted for making these lists is to write as many ideas as I can and then cut 25-50%, keeping and developing the best, keeping to 75 words max unless essential. (Fairly sure I learned that method on a blog somewhere, but not sure where.) This means they aren't really very useful as random tables IMO - I think a good table needs lots of little bits that slot together into a whole, producing a massive range of options - but if you’re going to do lists why not make them conveniently rollable?

d6 Lumberjes-related encounters that could be inserted into an otherwise-normal plot or used in the specific adventures and won't just instakill the party but will give them something meaningful to do

1. A colony of 3d20 young people (aged d20+5 each), a small paradise in an otherwise-uninhabitable environment. All were moved here before 10 and they've built a reasonably stable community. Only a few Lumberjeses patrol the ‘garden’, and quick PCs might go unnoticed. Removing the youths by force will lead to lethal reaction; they’ve seen this before. Some of them fear and hate the outside world, others want to leave but fear the wilderness.
2. PCs see a large crowd of people, such as an army or city populace on a festival day, begin to be harvested. For an hour, a red swathe is cut as those nearest a given point are dismantled, 200 per minute. PCs are some distance away and can see the pattern; now, they must choose whether to try to help people (getting closer in the process) or stay safely out of it.
3. A Lumberjes 'path' cutting through the quiet and hidden areas of a city, a step away from busy thoroughfares. Like a nature trail to them. Narrow, winding, no respect for verticality. Anything that lingers on it is "cleared" - roll d100 every d10 seconds. 01 transported to a far-away Lumberjes reserve in the wilderness or a pocket dimension; 02-16 shifted suddenly to the nearest place along the trail with ample water and biomass - adult humans and larger must save versus organ damage from the forces involved in their jaunt; 17-32 sudden catastrophic stroke (save or die), dead bodies flung out to a random side of the trail; 33-80 consciousness severed, body left to fall to one side or the other of the trail, chance that consciousness might be coaxed back in; 81-95 flesh stripped apart, muscle and bone vanishes whilst everything else explodes in a cloud of gore; 95-100 - unharmed. 
4. An oasis full of bizarre mutant creatures, energy barriers containing hives of giant wasps, and a couple of dismantled human corpses stood near an injured animal. The PCs can stop and rest safely enough here, but the water is full of chemicals which will first make them sick and then begin to distort parts of them even they cannot sense, and any attempt to harm the animals leads to lethal Lumberjes reaction.
5. Vein of fused bone running through the earth, steely if hit hard but malleable to a gentle touch. Like morbid cornflour. Some can be taken and used for whatever you need that for; mining to the centre, however, draws a Lumberjes ‘repair team’ who arrive in 1d3 minutes and disassemble mortals causing damage.
6. A Lumberjes ‘druid’ (in fantasy) or ‘hippy mad scientist’ (otherwise) who uses powerful magic or tech to communicate with humans as if they were real people. Will ask odd questions about the health of the local city, say ‘oh my’ and suddenly vanish in response to negative answers.

d6 'treasures' that the PCs might find around/as a result of the Lumberjeses, and actually be able to use even if not for the originally intended purpose

1. Nutritional mulch - don't ask about the contents. There's a vat of it, enough for 100 man-days. If a creature eats it for at least a month, they grow about 25% larger, more muscular, and gain a curious form of synaesthesia where they can literally feel colours, even without looking at them. The vat’s barrel-sized and ridiculously heavy.
2. A metallic arch which buzzes slightly for d50 days, then becomes inert. If placed to damaged animal matter, will knit it with thick, knotty scar tissue over about a minute. (Rule as a day of expert medical attention.) Getting flesh to knit in the right shapes can be problematic; getting it to knit in the wrong ones can be a fun art project. Skin contact for over an hour requires a save versus cancer.
3. A 3D 'rubbing' of a probably-already-dead human nervous system, in single-micrometer detail, made of rare actinides sketched onto the interior of a shimmering prismatic glass statue. Of great potential scientific value in premodern periods, otherwise valuable for the rare elements within (at least until they decay), the accurate picture of the brain of the subject, and its strange beauty. 
4. A low vibrating hum, a camouflaged 'defence system' designed to fly under the radar of most Lumberjeses by existing primarily in precisely mechanized, self-replicating sound. Shimmers at the centre - standing there transfers the vibration into your body, causing you to age a year per day but also destroying any Lumberjeses that come within a mile of it. 2% chance any given Lumberjes encounter includes one that can deactivate it, taking a minute. Supernatural beings hearing the hum assume the bearer is a Lumberjes, and most flee if within range.
5. A spiked disc for the neat storage of severed consciousness. Nothing resembling a mind left in there; it's purpose is more composting than preservation. Largely coincidentally, keeping it in contact with the skin (such as by wearing it as a circlet) makes the wearer more imaginative. Each session, the GM or other players may give the PC INT good ideas they would not otherwise have had.
6. A branched flower-shape of melded human and animal flesh and bone, about the size of a round shield, that prevents any senses from passing through it, from X-rays to telepathic bonds.

d6 Lumberjes-related plot hooks (medieval fantasy)

1. A powerful wizard has a spell that will let them ride the wave of forms along the Lumberjes 'paths' that criss-cross the world without being ripped apart, giving them a highly reliable personal transport network. First other sorcerers, then nations, compete to learn their secret, but mass uptake risks drawing the Lumberjes’ attentions to what’s going on and they’re unlikely to be too happy about the suddenly-mobile scenery.
2. The local Lumberjeses have a war, noted only as a few humans mysteriously collapse into clouds of gore, demons flee trembling into visible reality, and small stroke-waves are released over the course of a day or two. Then all sides retreat, and abandoned giant wasps and other mutant creatures begin to spread out of their hidden breeding-grounds.
3. Almost everyone in the capital of the nation suddenly and mysteriously dies. The few survivors are badly brain-damaged. The Lumberjeses, frustrated at recent 'growths' of human explorers damaging the bounds of their territories, released a strokewave to kill the nation at the root. A comfortable high-fantasy realm suddenly becomes a brutal borderland as the economy collapses and surviving factions scramble for power.
4. After a plague wipes out half a region's population, the scattered survivors suddenly find that their crops grow in strange colours. A year or so down the line, they bear unusually large, uncanny-valley children who grow to maturity at great speed. Many local churches are horrified by the children and ready to kill them, but divine power will not touch them. What do the gods fear? (Probably best in the background of a long campaign, with the PCs being either from the region or a neighbour.)
5. When a powerful but aged necromancer enemy/rival of the PCs tries to possess his niece's body, a Lumberjes investigates the bizarre consciousness-flow and muddles the working. The foe’s body does now hold a mostly-innocent child; but the necromancer's intellect wanders as a soulless psychic ghost, whilst in the niece's body squats an alien hyper-intellect, tormented by its sudden and terrible loss of agency, and retaining the arcane power of the necromancer's soul.
6. Rumours tell of a room full of 'floating spheres' in a dungeon - actually hundreds of Lumberjeses trapped in a magical patch of frozen time. A few escaped when a wizard’s Antimagic Field passed nearby decades past, and built fleshmetal wormhole-gates out of nearby creatures, departing through them. (The 'monstrous' inhabitants of the dungeon still have folk-tales about the brief, bloody reign of the 'ripper ghosts'.) The crude gates have decayed into uselessness, but if more Lumberjeses are unpaused they will find and reconstruct them

d4 Lumberjes-related plot hooks (sci-fi)

1. Orbital scans of an important new world by the PCs reveal massive Lumberjes activity and ‘colonies’ of captured humans. Human authorities want to nuke it from orbit. If the PCs use their ship super-AI to process data, or to communicate – which it can! – it begins to take on alien priorities as it gains perspective on just how limited its creators are and the Lumberjeses treat it as the only peer in the metaphorical room.
2. The outer inhabited planets of a system are going dark, and strange bio-metallic conglomerations appear on their surfaces. Lumberjeses arriving via a wormhole-gate are attempting to convert the system into a Kardashev II outpost. In space's vastness, the Lumberjeses are somewhat more comprehensible, moving only as fast as humanity’s nimbler craft, gathering in faintly detectable droves and potentially damageable by spaceship weapons. It might almost seem for a while that they could be fought.
3. A Lumberjes ‘city’ is found built inside a long-dead colony ship. What are these miraculous and bizarre, seemingly-pointless structures in amidst the still-thriving cattle? What happened to the original crew (they were turned into the structures). Where is whoever did this now, and what can the PC team learn about/steal from them before the whole vessel is taken apart by scavengers?
   
4. Space pilots begin to be found murdered, sliced into extraordinarily precise chunks some of which are missing. An enemy power is suspected, risking reigniting a recently-halted war. PCs are spies sent to investigate and may find that the enemy’s pilots are also dying, along with weapons technicians and designers. It transpires that all been irradiated by an advanced new weapon, and the Lumberjeses are taking ‘samples’ to investigate the effects on human biology.
   

d6 Lumberjes-related plot hooks (modern horror)

1. After completing an expedition to the Antarctic with his latest scanning equipment, a scientist shuts himself off from the world and begins trying to build tactical nuclear weapons and accelerate lumps of flesh from various creatures to insane speeds using increasingly advanced railguns. If confronted about his increasingly unethical experiments, he insists he’s just trying to ‘put us on an even footing.’
2. The reduction in the number of creatures in a specific area due to Lumberjeses taking them into their territory to eat appears to be driving a rare species close to extinction whilst also undermining part of the local fabric of reality. Scavengers from between the metaphysical cracks, beings of legend and nightmare, begin to manifest, making the job of human conservationists working to save the creatures even more dangerous.
3. A group of Lumberjeses 'adopts' an elderly grandmother. Other humans, Lumberjeses, and creatures that hurt her are remorselessly ‘pruned’; any harm to her is quickly repaired. Sadly, said now-nigh-invulnerable grandmother has long been stubborn, opinionated, and bigoted, a terror to family and parish council alike. As some of the Lumberjeses die or move on, her protection wanes, but for at least a year she's free to do whatever she wants. This could get bloody...
4. After an archaeological expedition using drones to look for pre-Islamic ruins in the Rub Al-Khali travels in themselves to investigate some strange structures, they go missing. The PCs could use the team's drones and the remote cameras of their vehicles to work out that they've strayed dangerously far into the territory of something that does not wish to be disturbed, and possibly retrieve their remains, but can they overcome their curiosity?
5. An obsessive ghost-hunter notes bizarre energetic blurs around a particular abandoned tenement. They need a team to investigate, and to help circumvent the building’s vicious landlord. The triad of isolated Lumberjeses causing the blurs don't want humans mucking up the deeply meaningful and unknowable activities they pursue there; when they notice the team’s proximity/energetic emissions they'll act to remove them, first by 'merely' hurling them out of windows, later by active disassembly. Survivors shortly learn that the landlord is planning on renovating...
6. A group of scientists researching dark matter suddenly 'goes mad', destroys their notes, and commits apparent mass suicide. A rival university hires the PCs to steal the CCTV footage of the building where they worked from the investigators or the private security firm who hold it, hoping for clues as to their findings. Along the way, they might note that the lead researcher was paranoid, worsening, and constantly clashed with her faculty…

One final thing in parting: it's been pointed out that 'Lumberjes' is a really silly name, to which I say - yep! But it's not diegetic, it's convenient(?) shorthand for you as GM. You probably shouldn't be namedropping your horror monsters anyway, right? Let the PCs name them if they even realize that they exist.