Alright /tg/, I've had an idea, but I"m not sure it's even possible for the party to kill this thing
>Due to a leyline of arcane energy, a fungus has grown to immense size
>It's in fact the entire forest, plus some critters living on top of it
>There's a tribe that lives symbiotically with the fungus, and they're worse than /pol/s view of Abbos
>Further, they have seemingly no understanding of death or aging
>This is because they're no longer human, they were regrown by the fungus
>Every time something dies within the fungus, it is absorbed and replicated, /almost/ perfectly
>In the first layer of tunnels into the fungus, there are tribesman and forest animals
>In the second, there are larger monsters that roamed in and were killed
>In the third and final, the ruins of an ancient city are still supported by the fungus
>Here it creates chimeras by combining the genetic memory of everything its absorbed
>The fungus is aware enough to know it needs the macguffin, and can slowly reshape tunnels to trap you within
>Should you lose your way, you'll be slowly killed by attack after attack of fungal chimeras led by pseudo humans
Given I ban teleportation (and resurrection) in my games, is this just a TPK?
>a fungus
Yeah, that's not easy to kill.
Fungi don't have organs. The only purpose that weapons would have would be to cut a path. This thing can only be killed with fire or poison.
The amount of fire required would be extraordinary. Like, "affecting the weather of the neighboring countries for months" extraordinary.
And the poison? The necessary amount of that is even more unrealistic.
The best way to do this is to throw your players some really aggressive bacteria to fight the fungus with.
Are you ready for biological warfare in your campaign?
>>46652195
>Are you ready for biological warfare in your campaign?
That sounds like a bad time. Also, doing something like that would collapse the dungeon down on top of them, wouldn't it?
>>46652071
Sounds like a bad time. Like >>46652195, you could use fire or poison; you could also use frost to quickly kill it and hold it in place. A goal for the party to be able to penetrate this fungal fortress is to find a minor macguffin that will mask their presence from its senses; iunno, maybe pods from a closely related species. To fight it, maybe some sort of slug, maybe an insect colony. Hell, you could even use another fungus!
>>46652071
Sounds like your party are going to need bigger guns.
who gives a fuck, the premise is great. Neuter the fungus if it gets hard and give the players opportnity to break contact. They don't need to kill it to be able to check out the stuff inside and loot it. If you want you can always lead into an underground portion where a central root system supporting the aboveground colony exists that can be chopped/poisoned etc
>>46652595
>you could also use frost to quickly kill it and hold it in place
Oh, now there's an idea. It's a seasonal dungeon. Inaccessible in spring due to snowmelt flooding. A death sentence in summer as it's regrowing from the water rot. Magical fluctuations cause chaos in the fall as it finally has enough energy to expand. But then the ice falls and 90% of the fungus goes dormant, so they only have to cut their way out the core.
>>46652071
Is it nescessary to kill it? It could just be a cool living dungeon where fool hardy adventurers die and their stuff gets scattered around everywhere and they keep reliving part of their previous adventure because it's literally all they know.
This could give you ideas for helpful NPCs who did die and want to help the PCs escape even though they themselves can't and cal also provide interesting side-missions
>I'm stuck down here forever and I've come to accept that, but can you take these research notes of mine back to my apprentec ? I'm sure she's become a fine wizard by now
Or
>This sword is a family heirloom and I want it returned to my family so my son can carry it by his side. please do this for me.
>>46652071
bump
>>46652414
>collapse the dungeon down on top of them
eh, just do it from the outside or send some hirelings in with the stuff, and dig the treasure out later
>entire fungal entity is connected
the perfect target for a fungicidal organism
That sounds fucking terrifying.
>Given I ban teleportation (and resurrection) in my games, is this just a TPK?
I have no idea what system you're using or the stats for anything but my party sure isn't fucking going in there.
Seriously fuck that. You're going to want to make a lot of sidequests to make it easier.
>>46652681
>>46652983
I'd do that what these guys said.
>>46652071
So, this seems to in fact be a campaign taking an in universe year, starting with exploration in spring in the upper layers, establishing a base of operations and exterminating the tribe on top during summer, perhaps dealing with a second band trying to breach into the fungus for the macguffin, getting to the second layer during fall as the other band blasts a hole down to it, and then the final dive come winter when the party is finally in tier 3.
You champion.
I had a forest that had all the surviving elves flee from it without warning, but didn't really have a reason why. This works perfectly.
>>46652071
This sounds more like an entire campaign setting than anything desu. I could easily see a party go from level 1 to 20 exploring this place.
>>46652071
The only option is to awaken an ancient bioengineered giant soldier to lay waste of the forest and its inhabitants
>>46652071
I like this. This sounds fun.
Turn up the body horror to 11 as the dungeon draws on. I mean really sell it. Not like this picture. It's too tame.
>>46652071
reminded of some stuff that came up in that Natural Cosmic Horror thread we had recently that I'll repost here;
Imagine you're still a caveman, fire-hardened wooden spears are your prized possession.
Now fight these:
http://www.philipsibbering.com/whf/03-02-orcs.shtml
--
Either focusing on the universe or just Earth, you, individually, are insignificant to Nature anon. Who needs Cthulhu when we have real life?
--
Have nature actually fight against civilization like it had a grudge. It's doing it for the last 1000 years, but the PCs are the first to connect the dots and understand the Green Will which does not depends on a single lifetime or fear of death. Once the cover is blown, all carnivores attack people instead of anything else. All horses resist riding. All dogs became feral. Crops die. Kudzu is found everywhere. Ants now know they match us on global biological weight. Spiders fall down on you from eagles.
I'm reminded of this; https://plus.google.com/+BenjaminBaugh/posts/gPKAuyJHTTj
Just want to throw this out, but in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the woods aren't just a hivemind of truly ancient terror and magic embodied by the Forestal Caerill Wildwood. They re all that, including the uncanny ability to distort one's perception of time, and they hate, hate, murderously hate the entire human species.
When the Woods themselves are capable of felling demon-possessed giants AND they hate your very existance, you better stay the fuck outta da woods.
1/3
>>46652071
So the fungus itself isn't an active threat? Maybe an obstacle via fungal walls popping up but not attacking directly? Shouldn't be any more dangerous then than any other dungeon full of monsters.
Sounds like a really cool idea too. Might have to steal some elements for my own game.
>>46665916
I supose there is something I can add.
After taking a fairy tales course, I learned how the versions Grimms, Disney and others wrote down congealed what were dynamic oral stories, in which characters and dangers were freely swapped according to the boredom of your audience. In most tales, only two elements were constant and immune to anything: the narrator and the florest.
I combined those into the Ent Narrative: the combined talking and description of countless sentient trees, shaping their territory through a form of true word magic.
They covered the entire continent, and kept the young humanoid races in the paleolithic so that they would never become a threat as the primordial race they descended from was.
Accepting gifts, food and water, interacting with the feyfolk, all were ilusionary ways of enthralling mortals into the Narrative, dissolving their individuality. Fey do not live or die, they just pop and are gone as the Ents tell it so.
The continent 'Culture Heroes', the Unmaginables, contested this, created space for mortal expansion, for nomads to become sedentary farmers, to writing to be. They also were the archetype from which all adventurers are based on.
Farms needed that trees be cut down, writing something made it resistant to the Narrative.
The Ents lost most of the continent, until they created a river to divide feyland from any other land, the 'Liminal Border' which usually marks enchanted forests.
The Unmaginables' bloodlines provide the blood catalyst that makes iron into cold iron, the most horrifying poison to fey.
Full of grief, loss and hate, they made a weapon from such bloodlines: the orc.
A orc is like a gorilla or a Frazetta's beastman, except for: their scar tissue is made of bone; their bones accumulate the iron they digest; this iron is metabolized into cold iron; an orc corpse will scab over wounds and become a womb for a new litter.
2/3
>>46652195
As it's fantasy (or something like it, I presume), he could give the fungus a sort of "brain" or other such central control, and they could kill that. Of course it would be deep in the city and it would be a challenge to get to. Then of course you have to get back out before it collapses.
>>46665953
Over time a orc becomes naturally armed and armored, with rusty growths of bone laced with cold iron.
They don't know how to use fire or any tool. Their purpose is to eat and topple civilization itself, revert the races to the status before the Heroes came. All people and animals on a village will vanish, all shovels and axes will be missing, but valuables are left untouched. Clearing an infested iron mine is the stuff of nightmares, because orcs may gorge and cut themselves to the point of looking more like big, hunched iron golems than hairy beasts.
Without their stories and tricks wrote down, burnt and forgotten, the Ents will be able to freely use them again, to make mortals fearful of the dark and the woods, the strange noises and the unnatural beasts.
Because orcs spawn from the borders of the fey river, opposite to the fairy florest, and have cold iron into their organism, most people think they are some kind of predator or parasite of fairies, and may be the reason of their retreat.
But for the last 4000 years, the Ents are attacking all civilizations of the Sarba landmass, as hateful and patient as they were in the first day, beyond the attention spans of even most dragons.
Anyone that writes, that plants, that uses tolls. Anyone that lives instead of surviving, that uses fire to light up the night; all those are targets for a communal inteligence older than the gods, and the orcs are their main weapon.
3/3
>>46652983
>helpful NPCs who did die and want to help the PCs escape
Just add in the dicks who want to fuck everyone over as hard as they got fucked and you've recreated Dark Souls.
>>46652071
To actually try and kill the thing you could have the party work to redirect the leyline, or otherwise suck all of the power from it before it gets to the fungus. Maybe create a magical or divine method of purging the fungus from a given area, such as giving the party some enchanted/blessed stakes of some sort to pound into the fungus that will prevent it from growing in the area around the stake. Maybe use such stakes to allow the party to create a safe path to travel back out. Other options for the stakes could be divine idols to place about, symbols to carve into an area, or spears, arrows or bolts so that they could launch them at areas further in, or to be particularly effective against the creatures there.
>>46652071
Depends on the setting and\or system.
Since it's magical setting, most of the time there is magic of the level, that can be countered only with magic. And your fungus so far have (relatively) mundane tools.
So, my bets are:
- Biological enemy (another fungus, bacteries, etc)
- Avoid or kill it with magic (incorporeality, plane shift, etc)
- More dakka (destroy everything there, and only then enter)
Also, I recommend you to read about SCP-610.
>>46666032
SCP-253 isn't bad for this sort of thing, either. The incident report, at the very least.
>>46657587
The things so fucking massive you'd want one hell of a fungicide
Try this:
The fungus is a mutated version of a common underground fungus. Think of something like the Underdark, where you have massive cave networks with their own ecosystems. The fungus has expanded to the surface and is slowly mutating to expand and adapt, the "fungal forest" above has green tops for example, but for now still needs nutrients that only exist in the underworld. Unfortunately, there's a massive cavern system in the way, so the only way to get the necessary nutrients is to extend large fibrous root trunks into the ground below the caves.
This thing will eventually expand or mutate beyond the point of needing the roots, but if the heroes can get down into the caves below they'll find three large fibrous trunks guarded by the fungus' spawn. They'll need to destroy the roots and then prevent the fungus above from simply growing back down, like burn or freeze out the stump. Maybe salt or acid or something. After that, the fungus above should die off within a matter of weeks.
>>46665953
>>46665974You liked my orcs? Were you the same anon that thought this was good to start a setting?
