Post/Author/DateTime	Post
HuManBing 10-06-07, 01:01 PM	[Edit: This thread is being continued at the Fraternity of Shadows (http://www.fraternityofshadows.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4677), who have better policies towards their readership than Wizards does on these forums.] I'm thinking of introducing this concept to my PCs in about two or three adventures' time. This was all inspired by my previous adventure (Scourge of the Howling Horde) where they found a large harmless mushroom, and took it with them in a sled. Anybody who's played the Mario Brother games will be familiar with the concept - evil Turtles have enslaved the Mushroom Kingdom and taken Princess Peach (nee Toadstool) captive. You as Mario and Luigi must take on the Koopa Turtles and save the kingdom. Any references to Mario Brothers games are included [in square brackets like this]. This is intended to be a somewhat darker and menacing version of that familiar tale. Here, the mushrooms have latent psionic powers, and they serve a massive country-sized sprawling organism made up entirely of fungus. The Reptilians have various sorcerous means at their disposal, including the ability (like a basilisk) to turn things into stone. With the rural mushrooms on one hand, and the militaristic industrial Reptilians on the other, the PCs have to decide which side to support, and how to remain alive through it all. Tell me what you think! Overview Far to the north lies a secluded valley surrounded by impassable peaks on all sides, some 250 square miles in surface area. Resting in the valley is the single most massive living organism on the face of the planet. The Fungal Sprawl exists there, in its last stronghold, protected by treacherous mountain passes on all sides. To the east of the Sprawl Valley stretches a monstrous city of stone, built by the sorcerous Reptilians, who have mastered technologically advanced concepts and sends lighter-than-air vessels around to try to find the last Sprawl Valley and eliminate the fungus being. [In Super Mario Bros. 3, the Koopa had access to airship technology.] To the south of the Sprawl lies humanity. But between humanity and the Sprawl, rests a tiny village of myconids (mushroom men) who were created by the Sprawl in its most recent battle against the Reptilians. The myconids are aimless, ever since losing contact with the psionic communications of the Sprawl several centuries ago. They live a simple, unguided life, merely subsisting day to day in their hidden village, unaware of the Sprawl's desperate dependence on them, and unable to break the Reptilian's encirclement of their homeland. The Fungal Sprawl Formed approximately 240,000 years ago, The Sprawl was once a sentient being - a vast conglomeration of fungal roots, stems, and cortexes that soaked in the sunlight and computed who-knows-what with a massive brooding intelligence. Then, about a millennium ago, its nerve centers came under attack from lizardlike creatures - the Reptilians. Although the Sprawl had a mighty array of psionic defenses, the Reptilians bred quickly and introduced mutations into their own breeding stock. Within twelve generations of breeding (a blink of an eye for the Sprawl) the Reptilians had soldiers that were immune to psionics. The fungus eventually spawned a race of bipedal mushrooms that were mobile and were able to innovate. Then the Sprawl's intelligence centers were captured or destroyed by the lizardmen, and the little mushroom bipeds were left on their own. All this backstory takes place a long time ago. The bipedal mushrooms share a fragment of the Sprawl's massive memory, and they recently acknowledged that "three fulfilled threes of dreams have passed" since the Sprawl came into existence. The Mushrooms A "fulfilled" number, to the mushrooms, is a number to the power of something. So three fulfilled threes is 3^3^3, or 3^27. The Sprawl dreams more or less every second, so this means the Sprawl has been around for just over 241,000 years. The mushrooms, when they sleep, share the dreams of the distant Sprawl, which is what keeps them animated. (If a mushroom is taken too far away from the Sprawl, the psionic powers that animate them fail and the mushroom becomes a normal immobile fungus until brought back again. My PCs discovered a Mycinopio far from its homeland and so far have no idea it's anything except a weird large purple mushroom.) The mushrooms have three fingers so their numerical system is 3-based, not 10-based. The number one is represented by a word that means “forage”, two by “friends”, and three by “family”. Addition is represented by a word that means “seeking”, multiplication by a word that means “meeting”, and one particularly far-thinking Mycinopio came up with the term “fulfilled” to mean exponential. The small wandering mushrooms naturally look like vaguely purple wrinkled fungi standing about 4’ tall. They tend to stay in one place when resting and look entirely indistinguishable from any other fungi. When they walk, they sprout two feet and retract their roots, and sometimes can grow up to two arms with three fingers each. They generally have tremorsense, but can also grow two eyes. When not sapping nutrients from the ground, they can produce a mouth to eat things. They can only digest vegetable matter (this precludes not only meat but also mushrooms and other non-vegetables). Anything they cannot digest must be vomited. The mushrooms do not have the ability to excrete their food. Most vegetable matter is digested completely, as fungi can break down cellulose cells. The Amazonian wanderer Nelaveria Vespersica was the first human to discover these mushrooms. [Vespersica is the Latin name for peaches. Hence, Princess Peach.] She called them “Mycinopio”. After she was originally intimidated by their alien appearance, the Mycinopio rearranged their own appearance to seem more harmless – they appeared to her to be plump, round mushrooms with two round legless feet, two arms with three fingered hands, and a large head covered with an ovoid cap. [The classic appearance of Toad, from Super Mario Bros. - also known as Kinopio in Japanese.] Before her untimely disappearance into the Clearing, Nelaveria Vespersica left behind a detailed diary chronicling her life among the Mycinopio. Most of the observations above can be found in her notes. The Mycinopio are fascinated with change and mimic a newcomer’s actions. From her, they learned how to build huts from wood, though the practice fell into disuse after her disappearance, as the Mycinopio are comfortable sleeping outdoors. Similarly, they learned how to sleep lying down, which some still like to do today as it prevents them from morphing back into a featureless mushroom. They also learned how to cultivate vegetables, a practice that stuck, and she even was able to teach them a little rudimentary arcane skill. In return, they developed some mental exercises for her that taught her psionic abilities. They also learned to tame the large, furry Wiggler larvae and use them as pillows, keeping them well fed on a diet of tender leaves, which stops them from moulting and becoming adult Wigglers. [Super Mario World introduced the Wiggler worms, which appear to be indestructible.] The Mycinopio communicate primarily through psionics and spore releases, although they learned how to speak by imitating Vespersica. Anybody entering the Mycinopio community feels like everything is watching them, even inanimate objects. [In most of the Mario games, most of the sprites have eyes, even inanimate objects. The hills, clouds, bricks, and even the sun had eyes.] The Clearing of the Sprawl: The lizardmen fought furiously against the Sprawl some 1000 years previously and inflicted a massive defeat. Of the five main neural centers scattered throughout the Sprawl’s biomass, the lizardmen found and destroyed one neural center before the Sprawl could biologically react. After that, the lizardmen experimented with various mutations to wage their ground campaign against the Sprawl, resulting in various abominations. To counteract this threat, the Sprawl created semi-organic, semi-psionic fungal creatures that met the lizardmen in the fronds of fungus and fought them. These would become the precursors of the Mycinopio. After a fierce and desperate fight, the lizardmen found and destroyed a second neural center in a protracted ground war. At that point, the Sprawl began working on an array that would trap sunlight and allow it to use the power of fire against the lizardmen. It also planned to focus a considerable amount of power to create a psionic avatar. However, before this innovation could be completed, the lizardmen beat the Sprawl in the race to develop war machines. They completed a lighter-than-air device and used it to arrive quickly at the third neural center. Bombarding it from the air, the lizardmen bypassed the Sprawl’s land based defenses and destroyed the neural center. With more than half the Sprawl’s mental capacity burnt, the rest of the biomass plunged into a catatonic state, able only to act in reflexive defensive actions when directly threatened, and unable to plan for the long term. The biomass fell to a state of periodic dreaming. During one of these dreams, the Mycinopio were born, and the Sprawl’s last instruction to them was to leave the Sprawl and seek safety elsewhere, away from the lizardmen. The Reptilians The lizards have a magic (akin to basilisk gaze) that can turn flesh to stone, and they use this to put up massive buildings in the Clearings – massive underground and overground areas where the Sprawl has been burnt, uprooted, and stoned away. They are currently led by a very large dragonlike turtle creature and his seven offspring. [Bowser Koopa and his Koopa-kids from Super Mario Bros. 3. In Super Mario Bros. 1 it was said that Bowser turned mushrooms into bricks.] The lizardmen used fire and acid to bolster their petrifying powers, and began clearing the Sprawl. This defoliation took place above ground and underground, burning out the rhizomes and roots to make for substantial underground complexes. The last two neural centers are both located within the Sprawl Valley, which is completely inaccessible - even by air - from the outside. The only exception is the Mycinopio's village, which lies to the south of the Sprawl, and which can actually access the Sprawl through a large underground cavern complex. The Sprawl's avatar plan Clearly, the Reptilians are a bad lot. They are militaristic, ruthless, and intent on subjugating the entire world if they can. However, the Sprawl is not entirely benign either. It has a far ranging plan that will unleash untold destruction and sorrow upon the Reptilians, and quite possibly the rest of the world as well. The Sprawl is currently unable to progress with its plan unless it develops a new neural center (which will take the best part of 40,000 to 50,000 years) or unless the thoughtpearls taken from its two ruined neural centers are recovered and replaced in its biomass. Once done, it will take about ten years to reassemble a new neural center using the thoughtpearls, and then to complete its avatar plan, putting forth thick forests of leaves to gather and store solar power. This plan will call down a fungal avatar, which sets in motion a focusing of psionic and solar power such that an explosion of atomic scale will center on the Clearing, wiping out most of the lizardmen. If this is allowed to happen, Mycinopio will gaze upwards in rapt wonder as a massive mushroom, the avatar of the Sprawl, ascends towards the heavens. The lizardmen: Sorcerors and fighters are their preferred classes, with one elite cadre of sorcerous lizardmen ruling over the brutes of the fighter class. The Mycinopio: Mostly phrenic (Psionic template) myconids, with a few holding actual class levels in Fighter, Rogue, Psion/Wilder, and a very few in Wizard/Sorceror (showing a very faint memory of Vespersica's teachings all those years ago). The PCs: They will discover clues about Vespersica's expedition to find the Mycinopio, which will be about 100 years in the past. They'll go to the village and find the Mycinopio, who will tell them all the need to know. The Mycinopio themselves are not vengeful and not warlike. They will clearly continue their humble cycle of subsistence farming until the Sprawl reawakens (in 40 millennia) or until the Reptilians find and slaughter them (presumably much sooner). The PCs will be inspired through pity for these gentle mushrooms to help take the fight to the Reptilians. Alternatively, they may join in to help rescue Vespersica, who disappeared about a century ago but who is rumored to still be alive... or at least still around. The truth is that she attempted to assassinate the supreme chief of the Reptilians, but failed. The chief stripped her of her magical items and then turned her to stone with his petrifying gaze. The statue of the "Peach Princess" is now on display at the gates of the Reptilian's outpost, showing their determination to subjugate the humans after they have eliminated the Sprawl.
Goon_for_Hire 10-06-07, 02:26 PM	I'd say you just won the Internet for that. Hilarious! I hope you have plans to keep a campaign journal or something online. And extra kudos for avoiding the temptation to make too much reference to the SMB movie that came out in the 90s.