Mapping Noise - A Simple System for Informed Fog of War (Map Blogwagon)

This one is gonna be short because I'm once again being emotionally, physically, financially and temporally drained by teeth issues completely out of my control (the horrors persist but so do I) BUT I wanted to throw in my hat for Warren's lovely little Map Bandwagon with a megagame adjacent idea I've been mulling related to my continued addiction to Bungie's near-masterpiece Marathon: Noise Maps as a means of presenting standardized, readable information to a large group while preserving the fog-of-war.

This all started because I was remarking to my EXCOMM conspirator about how I kept thinking of the extraction shooter in the context of a mega-game; What would it look like for several groups of players running through the same dungeon at the same time? Could the tension, politics and twitchy decision making that makes the genre so special be adapted in some form to a tabletop raid? After all, the old-school dungeon crawler rhymes so heavily with every other aspect of extraction shooters, why not try to adapt the whole lobby?

He aptly pointed out that in many ways the PvPvE lobby is the origin of those very same dungeon games and pointed me specifically towards BROZER and its mantra that the core of a Braunstein is "multiple actors operating in conflict under a fog of war" - A phrase that echoed in my mind over and over, esspecially as someone who greatly enjoys map-based warfare and has struggled with adapting fog-of-war in a way that feels satisfying to my "lots of funny little models and tokens" sensibilities.

A solution, I've reasoned, is to take a book out of the self-same extraction shooter that got me thinking about this: Have the map, its POIs and important "event" information be universal and public knowledge - Now layer on top of this the information of noises coming from certain areas or directions (in a shooter this adds a layer of skill, trying to judge where a particular sound came from, here things are much more directly abstracted cutting right to the "you heard this here, now what?" stage).

Imagine, if you will, a public map on a big table near the GM that all players can see. At set intervals new event information may appear on the map (ex: now there's a blue token over Green House meaning "there's an anomalous rift here") and specific noise tokens may be placed accordingly (ex: a place a "key room" noise token on Algae Ponds, meaning someone opened a key room there) - Add to this another layer of "general noise tokens" that can be caused by everything from gunfire to detonating supply containers and now the player has interesting and informed decisions to make: Do they take a loud fight with a commander knowing it'll drop a ton of noise tokens likely alerting other players to their location? Do they avoid Quarantine because there's been nothing but noise tokens on it since the beginning of the game and they're trying to sneak out their haul from a cache?

In this way a player's movement, progress and impact can be visually and clearly tracked on the map without explicitly showing who nor giving away the position of players who are lying low. It's a pretty simple idea, but one that'd be fun to deploy eventually and fits the theme here well. Heck, it'd give me and excuse to pull out Zombicide and use its noise tokens (which topically, this kind of mechanic also works great if there's wandering NPC enemies [or zombie hordes] that'll gravitate towards the place with the most noise) - You could even add noise-makers and noise-dampeners as desirable loot to aid in misdirection. Even a more cooperative dungeon game could find use in this - Are you spending turns carefully tip-toeing or are you leaving a bread-crumb-trail of noise tokens only to see far bigger noise tokens follow after. What do y'all think? Is tracking the rumble of your gunfire any substitute to seeing your little guy on the board?