Escaped gaming meme
Mar. 16th, 2004 05:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mithriltabbyIt’s always challenging coming up with a good Hallowe’en adventure. Horror is tricky to pull off well— splatterfests are tacky, and the unpredictability of players makes it difficult to set up particular horrific scenes. To add complications, I can’t make things so nasty and vivid that my wife gets sick.
So I decided to do an absurd homage to H P Lovecraft, based on the premise that Cthulhu’s little brother Xaphrolon had a sweet tooth and generally inspired by the cartoon “the Fungi from Candyland” in Murphy’s Rules.
Background: the game world in which the high fantasy stories take place consists of mobile islands (some quite small, some the size of a continent) floating on a sea of Moorcock-style primal chaos. Each island can have different laws of nature, physics, and magic. Adventurers travel between them on balloons and dirigibles. This makes it possible for multiple game masters to run in the same world without worrying about anyone’s ruling affecting anyone else’s. If one GM doesn’t want the Lost Hoobajoob of Iskheis derailing his plotlines, it just doesn’t work the same as where the player got it.
Candyland is an island where the basic building block of life is sugar. There are three general forms of life: gummi, marshmallow, and chocolate. (Chocolate beings often have caramel and/or nougat inside.) Everything there is a candy parody of normal life forms— the local sentients are the Chocloths, which are human-sized upright rabbits made of chocolate, capable of communication but not really tool-using, and the Zim-Zims, which are human sized upright bears made of gummi, who make primitive tools out of the red and white striped peppermint bamboo and by chipping the rock candy outcroppings. The Zim-Zims live in the pixie stick desert, where they can ride the giant gummi worms, Fremen-style, and worship the dark god Xaphrolon, who sleeps in a lake of syrup at the heart of the island, awaiting the proper stellar alignments for the time for him to rise and take over the world. And these odd puffball mushrooms that spray spores that grow cotton candy on all the holes in a being’s head and make their brain part of a networked intelligence run by the mushroom.
Physics is also a little different: heat only melts things, but does not cause combustion. This is a land without fire. There’s also a warping effect, analogous to magical radiation, that mutates anyone living there into a candy-based life form. Someone bringing their own supplies of food can last for months before they begin showing signs of mutation, but someone eating local matter— to anyone who can metabolize sugar, it’s all edible— will begin transformation within a week.
My character, Narya, is a ranger (the sort with access to druidical magic) with a fairly potent magical aura that sustains her power in adverse conditions and is bad for undead in her physical proximity. (Aura of Theurgy and Toxic Karma, if you play Feng Shui.) This turned out to be a mixed blessing: on one hand, more normal laws of nature asserted themselves around her, and many of the PCs stuck close to her to avoid getting warped. On the other hand, she left footprints of death wherever she walked and native beings attacked her on sight unless she expended effort to pull in her aura. She was able to verify that the local power was inimical to ordinary Nature.
The player characters were not the first people to wind up there; Candyland is off the trade routes, but some humans had wound up there as a result of being blown drastically off course by storms. The local humans had mutated into gummi creatures with rock candy bones, and were divided up into roughly three groups: the hunter tribes (named the Bloody Spears, the Skull Breakers, and Fierce Eaters), who were just nasty pieces of work but only at a human level; the Zim Masks, who wore masks made from the flesh off the heads of Zim-Zims, who practiced the rites of sacrifice learned by observing the Zim-Zims and hoped to replace the Zim-Zims in Xaphrolon’s affections; and the Earth Carvers, a group of farmers who tilled the soil to grow candy corn, got raided by the hunter tribes for food and target practice, and by the Zim Masks and Zim-Zims for sacrificial material.
The player characters were there because one of them had accepted a quest to retrieve a lost magic sword, so they had wound up in this benighted place, attacked by giant peeps that sprayed hot marshmallow entanglements, finding Swedish fish in streams, and encountering other such deranged creatures inspired by walking through candy stores. They managed to interrogate some gummi humans, where they learned about the various sentients on the island and the fact that raiding parties that were controlled by the cotton candy mushrooms would attack anyone carrying magic items.
It turned out that a priest of Corruption had arrived on Candyland a few generations ago with the intention of controlling Xaphrolon as a way of controlling the world. The fellow uploaded himself into the mushroom consciousness of the cotton candy puffballs, and set about consolidating power on Candyland, with the plan that if all the worshippers of Xaphrolon whispered the same thing into the ear of the sleeping god, he would be able to influence the deity. He was consolidating all the magic items on the island to provide an advantage in conquest.
So not only did the player characters have to deal with rampaging human tribes and killer Zim-Zims, they also had to cope with task forces from the evil mushroom consciousness. They wound up defeating the mushroom consciousness and helped save the farmers from the rampaging tribes, but Xaphrolon still lies dreaming at the bottom of his lake of syrup, and the PCs are determined to make sure he doesn’t get out.
