Bugs Bugs and More Gross Bugs

Another article on Cracked, another post of creepy bugs.

Malaria apparently makes human hosts more attractive to mosquitoes. Humans carrying malaria at all are more attractive than non-malarial humans but the most attractive are those who carry malaria in its contagious or transmittable state. How about a disease that, if caught, makes a PC more attractive to the local beasties? In old school, this could be any monsters (as it fits with mythical underworld) and increase the rolls on wandering monster checks. A more realistic vein would be to attract one type (insects/rodents) or subtype (giant caterpillars/rats) of monster that is known to live in the area. The PC would emit a scent (perhaps perceptible by the PCs themselves, perhaps not) that attracts the monsters and the infected PC(s) would be preferentially targeted. Somewhat similar to a shrieker, I suppose.

Gall wasps form galls on certain plants (usually oak trees). The eggs are laid on an oak blossom (or other part of the tree) and they signal the formation of a gall, or ball-like outgrowth, that encases the eggs and protects and feeds the larvae when they hatch. This by itself is an idea for a forest (or cavern) encounter where the landscape has numerous gall growths on trees (or outcroppings of rocks) that, if disturbed, burst open and pour forth regular-to-giant-sized wasps. On top of the galls, there are a number of other wasps that specifically prey upon gall wasps. These wasps have a metallic appearance and an extra-long ovipositor (egg laying spike/tube) that is used to penetrate the gall and lay their own eggs within, which then pray upon the gall wasp larva. As a further counter to this, some gall wasps actually develop a sweet-smelling gall that attracts ants. The ants then serve as defense against the hyperparasitoid wasps. For this, the PCs would need to be seeking out the gall and hoping to kill the larva (or otherwise retrieve something from inside) and the giant ant guardians (or whatever creature it attracts) are just an extra layer of defense.

Baculovirus preys upon gypsy moth caterpillars. The virus infects the caterpillar through contact or ingestion and forces the caterpillar to climb up to the top of a tree or branch and hang upside down, all the while replicating within the caterpillar's tissues. Once the caterpillar is in position, the virus begins replicating digestive proteins that liquefy the caterpillar's body and rains its infectious tissue down on other caterpillars, spreading the virus further. The idea is somewhat similar to the infectious troll idea posted earlier. It works best as a way to spread disease to the PCs, perhaps the malaria-smell virus from above or a more demonic strain (literally demonic).

Xenos vesparum is an insect that infects wasps and literally controls them from the inside. This might work to make a wild giant wasp nest more dangerous. In a sandbox style game, the PCs encounter the wasps and steer clear. When X vesparum shows up, it specifically makes wasps antisocial and leads them away from the nest to mate with other X vesparum (who arrive in their own possessed wasps). This would allow a giant wasp attack away from the site of the giant wasp nest and, if PCs investigate the bodies (who knows? maybe it swallowed a jewel) they would find another large insect literally living inside the wasp. And maybe if the wasp stings a PC, one of the X vesparum eggs end up inside them ... mwahahahah!!!

The final insect on the list in the article is a wasp that preys upon a special butterfly caterpillar. The caterpillar smells just like an ant larva, so after feeding on leaves for a few weeks, it falls to the ground and foraging ants, thinking it is one of their larva, take it back to the nursery in the ant hill. They then feed and protect it while it finishes fattening up and turning into a pupa. The wasp is somehow able to tell which ant hills have the butterfly larva engineers a distraction to get inside and lay its eggs in the caterpillars. It enters the ant hill and, after getting attacked by the ants, sprays a pheromone that drives the ants to attack each other (ignoring the wasp). It lays its eggs in the caterpillars and leaves. The wasp egg hatches after the caterpillar forms a chrysalis (which also smells like an ant pupa, so it remains protected by the ants) and develops within while eating the caterpillar. Both the hatching butterflies and wasps then leave the ant hill without incident (perhaps still smelling like ants due to the chrysalises). I am not as certain how to use that idea.

The Dream Queen

Inspired by the Fievel Goes West song "Dreams to Dream", particularly the lines, "When the world goes wrong, I can still make it right. I can see so far in my dreams. I'll follow my dreams Until they come true. Come with me. You will see what I mean. There's a world inside no one else ever sees. You will go so far in my dreams. Somewhere in my dreams your dreams will come true. There is a star waiting to guide us, Shining inside us, when we close our eyes." The initial idea came from the "you will go so far in my dreams" part because, taken by itself, it can seem like a threat more than an opportunity. The Dream Queen is a powerful witch/sorceress/fey creature who takes an interest in one or more of the PCs. I like the idea of a fey queen falling in "love" with one of the PCs (fey love is not like our love nor is fey love for a mortal like love between two fey). She starts to invade his dreams, giving him fitful nights of poor sleep. Later, however, she begins to pull him into her dreams. Because she is fey, her idea of a good time with a mortal involves weird things like turning him into a horse to ride across a dreamscape plane or transforming into a giant Lolth-like spider to wrap him in a web cocoon (whereupon he wakes up). Just weird, twisted, non-overtly sexual fey activities (while there can be an undercurrent of sexual imagery, as with the horse, I am not purposefully putting it there). As the song says, there is an opportunity to go far in her dreams and make his dreams come true (some bit of useful information or a dream artifact he can bring into the real world or unlocking strange new abilities having traversed the dreamscape). Part of that will be following a star that may or may not belong in the Queen's dreamscape but shines ever before the PC as he seeks surcease from sorrow in his morphean prison.

Elemental Temples

I am watching Retsupurae's Mortal Kombat Mythologies video where Sub-Zero is going through the four elemental temples. None of the ideas are particularly inspired but why not steal the easy stuff too.

1. Water temple could be completely underwater (lake or ocean bed) or it could just be a sewer level.

2. Fire temple has metal rooms that grow increasingly hot. Early rooms could have metal ceilings, then walls, and finally floors. The ceilings and walls cause fatigue (and damage if you got too close to the walls) while the floors would damage and sear characters due to the direct contact and heat convection.

Trokair Sandbox - Challenge Areas

This idea stems from part of a D&D cartoon episode (not really explored there but watching it reminded me) and one of my brother's favorite dungeon locale ideas.

My brother was really interested in created a dungeon called Magnet Mountain. As the name suggests, the mountain would contain a large iron core that was magnetized, and the deeper you went into the dungeon, the stronger the magnetic attraction. This would make fighting with metal weapons difficult and just walking in metal armor very difficult. He mostly meant it as a surprise/difficulty rather than as I intend it below.

I anticipate making certain areas of Trokair difficult, if not impossible, to explore with certain equipment or as a certain class as well as areas that require specific measures in order to survive the environment. Examples include the abovementioned Magnet Mountain, areas inhabited by copious rust monsters (again, no metal equipment), an aerie or pass blustered by constant wind (no ranged attacks, difficult to stay standing), an enchanted glade that will not suffer one to tread the grass (cannot touch the ground), a tomb wherein nothing may breathe (poisonous gas or a magical curse), and a wizard's tower containing an idol that devours magic (no spells or magic items).

This would feed into player-driven research of these mythical areas as well as diversifying parties (as the original Western Marches campaign had a flexible player base with different people showing up to each session).

D&D Cartoon Ideas

There are probably lots of these that I have forgotten as I watched the episodes over the course of days, even weeks.

Season 1, Episode 11 - The Box

A magic chest that, when opened, reveals a portal to another world or pocket dimension. The portal changes with the chest's location, so to access a particular world/dimension, the chest must be placed in the correct spot. Particular worlds have their own portal locations throughout the world. If the chest is not palced in a portal spot, then whatever is placed inside at that location remains in a pocket dimension until the chest is once more opened in that spot. What this means is that if you put something in the chest, then moved the chest a few feet to the side, then it would be empty when you opened it.

Headcleaver

As inspired by Diablo 3.

Headcleaver is a large skeletal headsman wielding either a greataxe or a greatsword. Within its lair is a wood or stone or iron block that was once used to execute prisoners by beheading. Headcleaver can use Suggestion as the spell to entice characters to "take a nap on the stone" and thereby grant him a huge bonus to hit/damage/crit.

Retarded

The chick who is opposed to the word retarded uses the following analogy:

Imagine your name is Kelly, and one day, people decided to use the word "Kelly" to mean "gross." "Yuck! This food tastes so Kelly!" Wouldn't you want them to stop using your name like that?

Wow, I never thought of it like that. And, like, imagine your name was Rob, and one day, people decided to use the word "Rob" to mean "steal from." "Hey, let's go rob that liquor store!"

Okay, that's not the best example. But imagine your name is Retarded, and one day, people decided to start calling you Kelly. And they're like, "Hey, Kelly, let's go retarded that liquor store." And you're like, "What? I'm completely lost." And they're like, "That's because YOU'RE RETARDED, KELLY."

Hurts, doesn't it?

Trap Ideology & the One Man Left Behind Trap

I want(ed) to do a video about this but I never sat down and did it.

It came out of DCC RPG and the 0-level character "funnel." Each player gets 3-4 0-level characters and most of them are expected to die in the first 1-2 adventures, leaving only one character that gets to attain 1st level and pick a class.

One of the major design decisions in DCC RPG is the use of player intelligence and reasoning to figure out traps and puzzles instead of relying on dice rolls for adjudication.

The video would have compared two traps: the first is my classic 10-count crushing ceiling trap (where each time you press a button, the ceiling retracts to its original position and the count-down starts over from 10; the only way out of the trap is to not press the button and let the count down reach 0, at which time the ceiling stops a foot or two above the floor and a secret hatch lets you escape) and the second is the One Man Left Behind trap (a piston-mounted lever concealed inside a column that requires one PC to seal himself in the dungeon in order for the others to escape).

The point of the video was to contrast the two traps to reveal what each taught the players.

The 10-count trap is nice for a mind screw but it is counter-productive in the long run (and especially in a game like DCC RPG). In the short term (while they are trapped), the PCs will become experts in exhausting every last idea on how to escape. Unfortunately, they are all in vain, as the only way out is to do nothing. This teaches players that anything they do is pointless. It also teaches them that the DM will not kill them and they should just trust him and let him direct the story without any interference. Bad bad bad. But fun for the DM.

The OMLB trap can have any number of details (i.e. exactly what is going to kill everyone unless someone holds down the lever) but its actual purpose is to allow roleplaying and, in particular, for the emergence of a true hero. Say the 0-level party has worked its way through the funnel, whittled far down in numbers, and vanquished the evil high priest in the last room. They then find the column at the beginning of a long hallway with a door at the other end. Inside the column is a handle attached to a cylindrical weight that just fits inside the column. When someone twists the handle and lifts, the door at the other end opens. As soon as the handle is released, however, the door slams shut. So, one PC must remain trapped in the dungeon in order for the others to escape.

Watching a party decide which guy stays can be entertaining and enlightening, especially since these are the PCs who survived the rest of the funnel and, if players utilized the "send in the red shirts" method of play, presumably the 'best' characters by roll or race. It can end pretty anticlimactically if one players has multiple PCs remaining while the rest have one each, or if one of the PCs is a really crappy roll. But the trap works well with the 0-levels because no one's favorite character moulded over months of play has to die somewhat arbitrarily (and no one has much equipment available to jerry-rig an alternate way of holding the door open).

Glow-in-the-Dark Monsters

I accidentally closed the window and now I am not going to write as much.

Idea - underground monsters that are nearly (or actually) invisible in torchlight but grow increasingly visible (almost or even to the point of glowing) in shadows and darkness.

The Hellcat devil already does this. I was reminded of the idea by a Terraria video where black slimes become transparent and gray as they approach a light source.

Wiggler's Cave

I think Wiggler is the name of the caterpillar enemy from Super Mario World.

One of the levels in New Super Mario Bros. Wii involves an underground cave system where giant wigglers march around at all angles. You are forced to dodge them in areas in order to get ahead and, in other areas, you are forced to jump off them to reach platforms.

An underground cave system criss-crossed by purple worm tracks (or other delvers, such as delvers, bulettes, anhkegs, etc) and still inhabited by those creatures could serve as an unusual venue. In addition to dodging the diggers, PCs would have to utilize their newly built tunnels to get around.

DCC RPG - The Obituary, Memorial, Graveyard

Not sure what to call this idea.

The Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG balances character creation not through complexity and trade-offs but through a funnel. What is a funnel? Each player makes multiple 0-level characters (2-4) and runs them all concurrently through the adventure. Those that survive get to take a class level. Those that died ...

Well, that is where my idea comes in. There is very little upfront investment in character creation in DCC RPG. You randomly roll about 10 things, make no choices beyond name/sex/appearance, and then promptly see most of your characters die in the first adventure.

In order to capitalize on that wasted potential, I want to create a memorial for dead 0-level characters. I had this flash after reading a DM talk about "another notch on your DM's screen". My first idea was to literally put notches in my DM screen. The problem is that there are no details to go along with it; just like the dead 0-level characters, it is nothing more than a number.

My second idea was to have players fill in some information on a post-it note and attach them to the outside of my screen. That way the players are constantly forced to look at their own dead characters (albeit ones that were not particularly meaningful to them). This might still be a good idea.

My third idea was to have the players write the characters' names and means of death on a blank DM's screen or large piece of paper. There would be no rhyme or reason to the order; the first dead could start in the top left corner or could write the details in huge letters right across the center. This generated the scene where a player writes his character's obituary in the middle of another character's name (like inside an "O") to find room.


It makes more sense to use the post-it note idea for a particularly deadly dungeon and keep track of which 1+ level PCs die within (to amp up the mocking factor) while using the paper for the otherwise "nameless" 0-level deaths.

Disguised Dungeon Animals

A follow-up to Dungeon Jellyfish, I was reading more about weird animals.

The first article covered animals with amazing disguises. There were:

A spider that looks like bird poop (somewhat similar to the carrion spider I wrote about long ago);

Caterpillars that can make themselves look like miniature snakes (by semi-retracting their head into their body, they produce the wedge-shape of a serpent's head and spots on the side look like eyes); Caterpie from Pokemon is one of these caterpillars; the Y-shape on its head is supposed to resemble a snake's forked tongue

Walking sticks, Leaf insects, and dead leaf butterflies are damn near invisible in natural settings. Walking sticks actually sway back and forth to mimic branches in the wind. Leaf insects not only resemble leaves, they actually resemble leaves with a little bit of damage (like dead edges where caterpillars have eaten away the leaf). Dead leaf butterflies can simply fall to the ground and look exactly like dead leaves due to the markings on their wings (they can also cling to trees and look like dead leaves that have not yet fallen).

There is a clam whose "lips" resemble a minnow (I believe it is actually an egg sac). When a predator attempts to eat the minnow, the eggs burst open to release burrowing, parasitic larvae who then infect the predator.

There are spiders who look exactly like ants. One species has very large fangs/mandibles for mating rituals and fighting; however, since the ants it mimics do not have large fangs, it disguises them by looking like the front half of a second ant. Imagine fighting a giant ant coming up through a hole in the ground (with another ant visible behind it) when suddenly the ant splits in half right down the middle to reveal that it is, itself, a giant pair of mandibles.

The stonefish looks exactly like ... a stone. It sits motionless on the bottom of the ocean and sucks shrimp and small fish into its mouth. It also has poisonous spines across its back that can kill a grown man in two hours. A living stone in the floor that eats vermin and can poison adventurers who step on it is a jerk.

The king of disguise, however, was the Indonesian mimic octopus. It is able to bend and shape and recolor/repattern itself to resemble a number of other creatures, such as hiding in a hole and using two of its tentacles to mimic a deadly sea snake or pulling all its tentacles around it to resemble a foul-tasting flatfish.

You could take this octopus pretty much at face value (changing it to a land-dweller who just mimics other deadly creatures; Spot check DC X to notice the creature, DC Y (Y>X) to realize the mimicry), or dial it up (allow it to utilize some of the attacks of the mimicked creature (poison pneumocyst in the tentacle doubles as a snake's bite), or dial it WAY up (make it an actual shapeshifter).


Some of these creatures just follow in the footsteps of classic dungeon mimics, like lurker above, trapper, darkmantle, piercer, and, of course, the eponymous mimic. As such, their use must be deliberate in order to maintain effectiveness and not bog down gameplay by making the PCs paranoid.

How Ancient Trokair Sank

There is a real world city that sank into a limestone cave like Ancient Trokair.

It is called Ubar and it was a city in the Middle East that existed for 5000 years before finally being swallowed whole in 500 or 600 AD. The city prospered as a trade destination (particularly for frankincense, apparently) and its main advantage was the existence of an oasis. Over the centuries, the inhabitants drew up fresh water from a limestone cavern beneath the city. Once it was depleted enough, the cave roof collapsed and the city fell into the earth. It was subsequently buried by sand.

--------

There is another ancient city that was buried three times in a row.

Helike was a Greek city that sank into the earth during an earthquake. The displacement of the city and the earth beneath it caused a huge wave that traveled across the Mediterranean and rebounded back as a tsunami. This tsunami created a lagoon atop the buried city. Over the centuries, river silt deposited atop the city until the lagoon was no more and ground stood in its place.

Deadly Animals & Dungeon Jellyfish

I am reading an article on deadly creatures and I had ideas to steal.

1. One of the creatures was the box jellyfish. While reading, I had the idea of a floating, jellyfish-like creature in a dungeon (like a grell) with poisonous tentacles that dangled beneath it. But then I thought, "just use a grell." Then I suddenly had the mental image of a jellyfish "swimming" in the dungeon corridor like a blooper in Super Mario Bros the Lost Levels. Despite the complete lack of water, that creature (and likely other aquatic menaces) "swim" around the dungeon. Perhaps they are ghosts. Perhaps there is a slight overlap with the Elemental Plane of Water.

2. An earlier article about other deadly creatures featured the huge swarms of giant jellyfish plaguing Japan. The article mentioned that these swarms arose out of nowhere and that killing the jellyfish is useless because they release millions of eggs/spores that can mature into jellyfish when they die. Also, these jellyfish weigh 440 lbs. Whether actual jellyfish in the ocean or similar creatures who float along on land, this is scary.

3. Yet another aquatic creatures, the blue-ringed octopus looks cool and reminds me of a tako from Oriental Adventures. I like the idea of an unusual marking to warn PCs to stay away. I also like the fact that they are the size of golf balls and paralyze a victim of their bite (which is strong enough to penetrate wet suit gloves).

4. There was also mention of the deathstalker scorpion, one of the most deadly scorpions known. Good reference for a black scorpion.

5. Another article mentioned the Malaysian/Bruneian ant, whose mandibles contain large sacks of poison. When threatened, the ant detonates these sacks, spraying poison at its enemies while also causing its own head to explode.

Sandbox Trokair Ideas

Stolen (or adapted) from Actraiser:

Pyramid full of the reincarnated human slaves who built it (now monsters and undead)

Bloodpool (a literal lake of blood inhabited by a sea monster)

- A source for the bloodpool could be a massive giant inside of a mountain (he is as large as the inside of the mountain) and a wound in the earth has caused him to bleed a literal river.

A fortress carved into the ice of a frozen lake (almost the entire thickness of the lake is frozen, with small pockets of icy water in the fortress and a small lake below; most likely something would allow the PCs to thaw out the lake and destroy the fortress)