D&D General Radio Broadcasts in a D&D Setting?

[Bohandas]

Maybe the receiver does the heavy lifting and its based on Scrying or Clairaudience/Clairvoyance

In one adventure I ran (or, tried to run, at any rate) had a scene in a "sports bar" in the Abyss whose "TV" was a magic cauldron which poured out a curtain of water that acted as a scrying pool (and the "sporting event" they were watching and betting on was a violent Blood War battle somewhere on one of the neutral evil planes)

Spoiler

 

[Mannahnin]

Magic Mouth can be used to cast another spell? That's new...at least to this old dog's ears...

It's super old, IIRC. They issued a specific ruling against it in AD&D 1st Edition because people were doing it in OD&D.

 

[Argyle King]

Sending Stones?

I could see one-way sending stones ("receiving stones"?) existing, with a set of stones being attuned to a larger stone (effectively a radio tower) somewhere. It would be a mix of how sending stones work and how permanent teleportation circles work.

 

[Bohandas]

Another potential source of mass communication is the gods. Shared dream visions, signs in the sky, stuff like that. Possibly mediated by some kind of magic to increase the number of people/area of the sky that it can affect

 

[tetrasodium]

I'm reading a book (throne of magical arcana) that eventually has one in an eberronish magic as a science region of the world

 

[Tonguez]

Another potential source of mass communication is the gods. Shared dream visions, signs in the sky, stuff like that. Possibly mediated by some kind of magic to increase the number of people/area of the sky that it can affect

Yeah, but the gods are more biased than Foxnews and CNN

 

[see]

What kinds of radio programs would air? How else might they be used in a setting?

How could it be made to be affordable-enough in a larger city like Waterdeep that a decent number of people would have one and listen to shows?

For programs, well, the programming from the Golden Age of Radio is a pretty decent guide to what would attract listeners (pretty much any type of show you see on broadcast TV pioneered on radio). Advertising might manage to pay the bills for commercial programming in large cities, where enough customers live within foot traffic of the businesses for there to be a return. If the magic's transmission can be limited to broadcasting to "subscriber" devices, then a subscription model can work. Otherwise, the model will probably more closely resemble shortwave radio, where governments and religions bear the costs of making programs and broadcasting them in order to get their messages out.

On the affordability, the key is to make the broadcasting the expensive/difficult part. Have the receiver be one of nonmagical, created with a low-level spell of permanent duration, or a "common"-rarity magic item. If they're expensive relative to the household income of workers, the more likely that they'll be owned by businesses where people gather (taverns, baths, etc.) as an incentive for people to patronize those businesses, rather than by individual owners.