Environmental Miscellany - Hideous Forest, Underland, Speculative Evolution

 

  
The Lessons of a Hideous Forest
William Bryant Logan & Damon Winter
New York Times  

"The deeper we walked, the uglier the woods got. The invasive oriental bittersweet and porcelain berry, along with the native grape and the poison ivy, fought it out to win the game of overtopping trees, bringing them down in a heap. The carnage looked like Mathew Brady’s photos of Civil War corpses, piled along hillsides and behind walls, in leafless, lifeless winter, as dead as dead can be. But unlike the soldiers, the trees were not going to perish."

"The vines moved on in search of new upstanding hosts. Noticing that their tormentors were gone, the trees had sprouted. A few lateral branches on a black cherry, now standing straight up from its fallen trunk, were rising as new trees into the sky. Most would die as the old roots rotted, but some would put down their own. One hollow mulberry had been dangling root filaments from inside its trunk into the soil, so when the mother went down, a youngster was already arising. This is called phoenix regeneration. There couldn’t be a better name."
   

 
What Lies Beneath
Rebecca Giggs
The Atlantic

"Of all the earth’s terrestrial vertebrates, humans make the deepest incursions into the underground. The farthest that any animal, other than us, is known to burrow from the surface of the planet is 13 yards - the feat of, unbelievably, the Nile crocodile. Below this level live permanent troglodytes, organisms that never see the sunlight. Microbes and minuscule stygofauna - glassy snails, shrimplike creatures - bob in groundwater systems, and pale amphibians furl in the murkiest reaches of caves. A species of roundworm has been detected more than two miles belowground. Yet humans go even farther. Aided by excavating machines, people have delved to a record depth of 7.7 miles, straight into the rock off the Russian island of Sakhalin, and deeper (as far as we know) than the most cavernous marine trench."

   
Wild Speculation: Evolution After Humans
Lucy Jakub
New York Review of Books

"It’s an almost nostalgic vision: the megafauna that were driven extinct during the 'Age of Man' have been replaced by new species that bear an uncanny resemblance to their predecessors. Humanity’s enduring legacy is not its alteration of the environment - but that the extinctions we have precipitated will have left behind an array of empty niches, to be filled by whatever adaptable species are able to take advantage of them. Imagine a game of biogeographical musical chairs in which penguins have evolved comb-like beaks to sieve plankton as whales do, rats have replaced the big cats as dominant carnivores, cats swing through the tropical canopy chasing monkeys, and monkeys glide on flaps of skin like flying squirrels. The book’s central idea is convergent evolution: that similar traits arise independently in different species, to perform similar functions in similar environments."
  

Dungeon Alphabet Dozen - A is also for ADVENTURERS

A is also for ADVENTURERS
Roll 1d12!

Rival adventuring parties usually have a leader plus 1d6 additional members. Whenever the player characters encounter a rival party, there is a cumulative 2-in-6 chance per party that they've re-encountered a rival they've met before. (As a result, there are never more than three rival teams at one time, but if one team dies...)

When first encountered, each member of a rival party is a random level. Roll 1d12: 1 Two levels lower than player characters, 2-3 One level lower than player characters, 4-9 Same level as player characters, 10-11 One level higher than player characters, 12 Two levels higher than player characters. Each time a rival party is re-encountered, there is a flat 1-in-12 chance that they've leveled up since the last encounter.

When determining reactions, roll 2d6, modified by Charisma: 2 worst, 3-6 bad, 7-11 good, 12 best. (Reactions are listed in best-to-worst order below for added inconvenience.)


Random Rival Adventuring Parties

1 A fantastically wealthy and idiotically foppish 0th-level dilettante is escorted through the underworld by a hyper-competent team of seasoned adventurers he's hired as "porters" and "torch-bearers" to show him around.

2 Handsome but generally clueless and romantically oblivious young man followed by entourage of wide-eyed and exceptionally talented young women in a variety of military and school uniforms who are obviously in love with him. The women will consider any female player characters or retainers to be dangerous rivals for the young man's affection, but some of them might develop competing crushes on a high-Charisma male character or retainer. Despite his general obliviousness, the young man is an unbelievably effective monster hunter, capable of hitting seemingly invulnerable opponents for massive amounts of damage.

3 A genius inventor leads his extended family of plucky adventurers. There's a cumulative 1-in-12 chance each per encounter that they've been transformed into anthropomorphic ducks by an experiment gone wrong. Each time they're encountered, they're out testing a new invention and insist on demonstrating it to/on the player characters. Depending on the reaction roll, the invention might be beneficial to the test subject, a random piece of anti-diluvean technology that the inventor will offer to sell to the player characters because he considers it a failure due to its lack of originality, completely ineffectual, or a dangerous weapon. (The inventor and his family are always friendly and affable - the reaction roll merely determines what kind of device they are friendly and affably trying to test on the player characters.)

4 A family of master criminals wearing black-and-white striped jumpsuits and black domino masks. Depending on the reaction roll, they might ask the characters to hold some treasure for them "until the heat dies down", open some locked doors and disarm some traps for the player characters as a demonstration of their skill, ask the player characters to join them on a "heist" before inevitably betraying them, or target the characters for a stick-up. When unloading goods from the characters during a betrayal or stick-up robbery, the criminals will prove to be far more interested in one random type of mundane object than in coinage or other treasure.

5 A team of adorable woodland creatures with whimsical names bearing miniature adventuring gear made from twigs, leaves, and acorns. They tend to like druids and elves and to dislike any other "giants" they encounter. Each time they're encountered, they're on a "mission" to rescue the victim of a kidnapping. Depending on the reaction roll, they might ask the player characters for help, attempt to detain them for questioning, believe that the characters are trying to thwart their rescue, or believe that one random character is the "victim" and attempt to return them to the nearest city the next time the party is asleep. They prefer to lay traps (pits, snares, deadfalls) and ambush the characters in their sleep rather than initiating direct combat. They have few hit points, but are hard to hit due to their small size and use of cover.

6 A hyper-intelligent talking dog leads a team of under-qualified amateur detectives. Each time they're encountered, they're searching for "clues" to solve a mystery. Depending on the reaction roll, they might ask the player characters for help, attempt to detain them for questioning, demand random items of mundane equipment as "clues", or be certain that the characters are guilty of the crime at the center of their "mystery".

7 A team of outcast mutant superheroes. Each has a garish spandex costume, a silly code-name, and a single MAGIC power they can use at will. Each time they're encountered, they're on a new "mission" to defeat a different "villain". Depending on the reaction roll, they might see the player characters as potential victims in need of protecting, as potential allies in their fight, as an unnecessary distraction from their "mission", or as their "villain" of the week.

8 Self-aggrandizing and belligerent "captain" wearing a yellow jumpsuit is accompanied by 1d3-1 intelligent and reasonable scientist advisors in blue jumpsuits and 1d12+1 security personnel in red jumpsuits. A reaction roll is only possible if advisors are present, otherwise the "captain" is unerringly hostile. The security personnel have only 1 hit point each and are incompetent combatants. When they're all defeated, the "captain" will teleport to safety. He always possesses a random piece of anti-diluvean technology that he drops on any roll of natural 1.

9 Mysterious figure in a space suit leads a team of technicolor plant- and fungus-humanoids. If the player character have lost a character or retainer to olive slime, purple moss, russet mold, or the like, that character's transformed body will definitely be present. Depending on the reaction roll, the figure may be willing to trade unique MATERIAL COMPONENTS for a proprietary medicine that cures the effects of such transformative threats, or may attempt to "recruit" player characters by transforming them.

10 A bright yellow giant is accompanied by technicolor spectral undead. If a player character or retainer has recently died, they will definitely be present. The giant is insane, always hungry, and utterly paranoid about the "ghosts" he claims follow him everywhere. Depending on the reaction roll, he may believe the player characters are "ghosts" and be terrified of them, warn the characters about the nearest actual undead threat, demand to eat all the characters' rations, or believe himself to be temporarily invulnerable and attempt to eat the player characters whole.

11 An angsty human barbarian with a random magic SWORD leads a group of half-animal, half-mineral monsters. Each creature has a natural attack that mimics the effect of a random spell, and makes a single weird alien sound that is nonetheless intelligible as conversation to the barbarian. He is determined to slay any "evil wizards" and destroy an "unholy magic items" he encounters, with predictable results for the player characters.

12 An undead anti-cleric with the power to "turn" living humans leads a party of undead crusaders to recover unholy relics for the glory of Hell. If a player character or retainer has recently died, they will definitely be present. The crusaders will demand the destruction of any holy symbols or divine magic items the characters posses, and will attempt to "convert" living characters and "recruit" recently dead ones to their anti-religion. Happily, they are also eager to trade to acquire any CURSED items in the characters' possession.

Three Alternate Monster Lists

Brother Juniper from Goblin Flowers recently asked a question about alternate monster lists that jogged my memory for a few classic ones.
 

 
Roger G-S from Roles, Rules, and Rolls made Varlets & Vermin, 28 pages of low HD monsters and a smattering of public domain woodcuts that are exactly what you'd expect from the author of the Pergamino Barocco.

"Demi-Real Monster - When a summoning goes partly wrong, or an illusion of a living thing takes on existence, a demi-real creature is created. The monster starts out half-transparent and shaky in form. The monster gains hit dice by leaving its mark on the world - most often this means scoring damage in combat. Once it has its full hit dice it is permanently real. If killed before then, its body will waver and wink out of existence. A demi-real creature that is aware of its existential condition, and able to communicate, may very well try to negotiate a different way to gain full reality than fighting a dangerous group of adventurers."
 
 

 
Zenopus Archives wrote One Hit Point Monsters, which is 20 entries of exactly what it sounds like. I've admired this blog's creativity before, so I'm not surprised I enjoy these.

"Danse Macabre - Finely-dressed skeletons emerge from the ground. One plays the violin while the others try to dance with characters for 2d6 turns. Only attack if resisted. If danced with for the entire time, skeletons sink back into ground leaving a reward. Entire group turns as ghouls."
 
 

 
Al Krombach from Beyond the Black Gate made 6 tables of 20 monsters as Alternative Wandering Monster Tables. There are no descriptions here, so the evocative names do all the heavy listing. Al is coauthor of Warlords of Mars (which really would have looked lovely in a color edition), and his collaborator Thomas Denmark wrote his own OD&D monster book called Beasties.

"Level One - Beetle, Nuclear; Level Two - Ooze, Stop Motion; Level Three - Obsidian Judge; Level Four through Five - Wereslugs; Level Six through Seven - Spiderbear; Level Eight - Toad of the Abyss."

Dungeon Alphabet Dozen - E is for ECHOES

E is for ECHOES
Roll 1d12!

Random Inexplicable Echoes of the Underworld

1 Everything player characters say is repeated back in Igpay Atinlay.

2 Echo has a horribly unconvincing French accent.

3 Second character to speak (and ONLY that character) has no echo.

4 Second character to speak (and ONLY that character) receives an addendum to their echo, making it sound like they're insulting the other player characters under their breath.

5 Rude echo repeats everything the characters say, but in a really mocking and sarcastic tone of voice.

6 Menacing echo repeats everything the characters say, but somehow makes it sound like a threat.

7 Immature echo inserts as many sexual and scatological references and Freudian slips into repeats as possible.

8 Annoying echo repeats everything the characters say, but replaces the original subject of every sentence with "Your mama..."

9 Searching the area for any purpose reveals that the "echo" is actually a KOBOLD hiding in the shadows.

10 Echo definitely sounds like a parrot, beginning every sentence with "Awk!", ending with a whistle, replacing every instance of the word "I" with "Polly" and any mention of a desired object with "a cracker". No amount of searching can find the bird though.

11 Echo repeats only the last word of each sentence, and repeats it three times times times.

12 Echo repeats everything the characters say, and every time there's a break in the conversation, also repeats the words of a party of rival ADVENTURERS who have heard every word the player characters have been saying.

Two Salt-Throned Alien Cultures

Over at Throne of Salt, Dan has set up a series of generators for making alien cultures, at least partial inspired by Ursula LeGuin's Hain Cycle of books and stories. Dan recommends choosing 3 of his 25 cultural trait tables, and maybe 1d3 mutations from Coins & Scrolls biological mutation list. I'm also going to assign each culture a trait from one of Melsonian Arts Council's planar culture generators.

These took quite a bit of thought to make coherent sense of, so I can't recommend trying to do this at the table. These procedures should be used during preparation only.
 
 
Culture 1 - The Skyminders
 
Danscape cultural traits - age, learning, rank
Age: "Transitions celebrated: child to youth, youth to adult, adult to elder."
Learning: "Learning must be active, rooted in traveling and interacting."
Rank: "Higher status means more trepannations, so as to let more spirits of the open sky into the mind."

Melsonian cultural trait - dress
Dress: "Nudity as social scale. The rich wear nothing while the poor dress in endless filthy layers. Nudity represents the access to warmth? The opposite may be true, where the rich wear clothes 'cos it's valuable, the poor are prevented. Like the the old Imperial Purple. Origins or traditions may be misty. Skin painting a distinct possibility."

Biological mutations - burst of speed, cilia lips, mirrored hands
Burst of Speed:  "Once per day, can double movement for 10 minutes."
Cilia Lips: "Wriggly. Seals food inside. Like kissing a millipede."
Mirrored Hands: "They swap sides."

The Skyminders' ancestors were fully aquatic, and their lowest classes are still required to dwell fully underwater, their minds closed to the sky. The working and middle classes live in partially flooded districts, the water level in any given neighborhood carefully indicating its status. Only the elites live fully on land, atop spires, in fact, to be closer to the sky-spirits and further from the sea.

The Skyminders' bodies and attires are as closely calibrated to their social position as their homes are. The elites have the entire tops of their skulls removed, so that their brains are fully opened to the air, and their minds fully opened to the sky-spirits. They alone are permitted to go nude. Beneath them, the middle classes may, over the course of a distinguished life, attain a filigree of trepannations, while a worker at the start of their career has only their fontanel open to the heavens. It is a crime to wear fewer clothes than the holes in one's head would indicate, and a mark of shame to wear more. The lowest classes go swaddled in public, with even their heads and faces wrapped tight to prevent them from polluting the sky-spirits by contact. Criminals are welded into a prison of metal masks and clothes that block them from the sky.

Outsiders, of course, are the lowest of all, though it is confusing that they arrive from on high, closer to the sky-spirits even than the highest of spire-dwelling elites. But they must be low, for are they not covered completely? Do they not wear impervious suits to separate themselves from the sky? Do they not bring their own gasses in tanks, so that they may breath without inhaling the sky?

Skyminders are born shelled, and as they age, shed their stiffer skins for the supple blubbery leather of adulthood. Each shedding is a great occasion, celebrated as fully as a new trepannation, or the glorious skull removal ceremony. Each upward (or downward) movement in status is also a going-away, it must be accompanied by travel to a new place, to be around others who now share one's new caste, and away from those who might remember one as they were before. The Skyminders' bodies still bear the signs of their aquatic past. Their hands are fins, their mouth adapted for bottom-feeding, their thick skin requiring no clothes to stay warm atop the coldest peaks.

Though outsiders are obviously the lowest of the low, still when they visit, they are sometimes allowed to accompany a Skyminder into areas where their level of clothedness would otherwise be forbidden. For though they must surely be great sinners and criminals to be locked in such suits and shunned from the heavens, still, the Skyminders appreciate the tales of anyone who has traveled so far.


Culture 2 - The Dragonkin
 
Danscape cultural traits - learning, child-rearing, work
Learning: "Oral histories and folklore, taught by extended family members."
Child-rearing: "Members of eunuch caste act as teachers and caretakers."
Work: "Labor ought serve the public good first, and the personal good second."
 
Melsonian cultural trait - family
Family: "All social engagement is official. Marriage ceremonies, friend ceremonies, enemy ceremonies. Most significant interactions must be played out within the confines of a relationship or else is considered illegal/immoral."
 
Biological mutations - snake tongue, the vapours
Snake Tongue: "Can extend up to 1'. "
The Vapours: "Your breath comes out in foggy white burps. -2 Stealth."

The Dragonkin are the descendants of dragons, those great firebreathing beasts that still dwell in the Kins' zoological gardens and nature preserves and on the Forbidden Continent. The Dragonkin still hatch from spherical amphibian eggs like their ancestors, and their juvenile forms look just like miniature dragons, until they metamorphose into their adult bodies.

Like the ancestral dragons, the Kin possess tongues that extend half their bodylength, and blazing chemical furnaces inside their chests that superheats any moisture they inhale past the boiling point, so that their breath comes out in a great billowing fog. The poets of the Dragonkin have always practiced a form of cloud calligraphy, using their long tongues to shape their exhalations into cloudforms that either mimic or provide ironic commentary on their words - although few lay Kin possess the skill to practice this art.

The dragons are a perpetual reminder to the Kin of their animal past, and so the Dragonkin place great importance on rules and rituals, the only things (or so they believe) that keep them from reverting to their ancestral brutality. The most fearsome monsters in Dragonkin folk tales are monsters with the hearts and minds of dragons hidden in the bodies of Kin.

The Dragonkin have ceremonies for all good behaviors - and any behavior not honored by the proper ceremony is automatically not good. Every interaction between business associates, friends, even family members, plays out in a choreographed ritual, a scripted dance that allows slight improvisation, but only within strict confines. There are rituals for working, for shopping, for eating and bathing, for sports and games, for love. Every ritual is for the benefit of others, for the good of the community of Kin.

To take any action outside the prescribed ritual, to perform any service purely for the good of oneself, is to give in to the beating heart of the dragon that races inside every Kin's breast; each step outside the path is a temptation to wander further and further away, to venture into the Forbidden Continent of the soul. The choreographers who devise new rituals are among the Kins' greatest artist, but they are also seen as heretics, their new dances perhaps invitations to enact the old and bestial ways.

The tales of the dragons, the history of the Kin, every dance and ritual, every useful skill, these are taught to the young by a blessed caste of sacred eunuchs, who perform a special rite just before the final metamorphosis into the Kin's mature and gendered forms. The eunuchs give up the chance to lay eggs or fertilize them, to become the matriarchs and paters of Kin society, in order to birth adult minds rather than infant bodies, in order to become the parents of civilization itself.

It took some time for the Dragonkin to recognize the morality of the outsiders, who wear Kin-shaped eggs over their entire bodies, for the outsiders' behavior did not initially conform to the Dragonkin's own ceremonies, and the ceremonies of the outsiders are strange and all but invisible to Kin eyes. Many Kin still fear the outsiders, who (though they have eunuchs) have no single caste that fulfills all the eunuchs' sacred duties. Many Kin fear that the outsiders, inside their strange eggshells, have the hearts of dragons, the secret sinful souls of the ancient monsters.

Lost World Miscellany - Greater Adria, Lotharingia, Doggerland

 
Lost Continent Revealed in New Reconstruction of Geologic History
Robin George Andrews
National Geographic

"This continent first separated from what is now Spain, southern France, and northern Africa, forming a separate landmass the team has formally dubbed Greater Adria. But as the planet’s rocky plates continued to inexorably jostle about, this continent tumbled down into several subduction zones, Earth’s destructive geological maws."
 
 

 
Did the Vanished Kingdom Foreshadow the EU?
Michael O'Loughlin
The Irish Times

"Lotharingia can be defined as that huge stretch of land, including the Netherlands, Belgium, and large parts of France, Germany and Switzerland, that runs down through the heart of Europe from the North Sea to the Alps. Squeezed between the great states of France and Germany, it long ago ceased to exist, becoming one of Europe’s vanished kingdoms, like the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. But it continues to lead a ghostly afterlife."
 
 

 
Searching for Doggerland
Laura Spinney
National Geographic

"Eighteen thousand years ago, the seas around northern Europe were some 400 feet lower than today. Britain was not an island but the uninhabited northwest corner of Europe, and between it and the rest of the continent stretched frozen tundra. As the world warmed and the ice receded, deer, aurochs, and wild boar headed northward and westward. The hunters followed. Coming off the uplands of what is now continental Europe, they found themselves in a vast, low-lying plain."

"Archaeologists call that vanished plain Doggerland, after the North Sea sandbank and occasional shipping hazard Dogger Bank. Once thought of as a largely uninhabited land bridge between modern-day continental Europe and Britain - a place on the way to somewhere else - Doggerland is now believed to have been settled by Mesolithic people, probably in large numbers, until they were forced out of it thousands of years later by the relentlessly rising sea."

 
 
 
Note - I've decided to adopt the "Unholy Misc" format from Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque (a blog so gothic, even its miscellany is unholy!) This will be an occasional feature, because I don't want to overdo it, but I have always considered inspirational media to have a home on my blog. This first miscellany is devoted to recent (-ish) news about "lost worlds" in Europe.

Dungeon Alphabet Dozen - D is for DOORWAYS

D is for DOORWAYS
Roll 1d12!

Random Pain-in-the-Ass Doorways of the Underworld

1 The door opens draw-bridge style, falling on whoever opens it for 1d12 damage and pinning them to the ground, unless they save vs paralysis to dodge out of the way.

2 Thick, oversized door has another smaller door right behind it, 1d12 smaller doors in fact, each new door revealed as the previous one opens.

3 The door revolves on a central axis instead of opening on a hinge. Each time a player character tries to go through, flip a coin. Heads they make it through, tails they're back where they started.

4 Door flies open violently at the slightest touch, throwing the first player character who attempts to open it 10' into the next room. They're unhurt, but spend 1 combat round lying prone.

5 Astonishingly transparent sliding glass door does 1d3 damage to anyone who walks into it (unless wearing a helmet.) Impossible to tell there's a door there at all until someone blunders into it, 1-in-6 chance of silently closing after each person passes through, super-slick surface frustratingly causes all attempts at marking the glass to slide off onto the floor.

6 Door loudly slams shut between each player character who uses it. It's no trouble to re-open it, but the noise means that there's a 1-in-6 chance that a wandering monster will appear in the emptier of the two rooms immediately after it closes.

7 Door cannot be opened by any means by player characters, but each exploration turn they spend attempting to open it, there's a 2-in-6 chance that a wandering monster will come through the door, opening it with ease and shutting it too quickly for the characters to keep it open.

8 Door was the entry-way to previous room occupant's lair. Previous room occupant was utterly paranoid, and door has 6 locking mechanisms. They all use the same key, but unless the player characters have it, they all have to be picked separately. All those locks also mean that it's twice as difficult as usual to batter down.

9 Door has a coin-slot and opens automatically after player characters insert 1d12€.

10 Largest available reasonably-intelligent wandering monster serving as a "bouncer" for the door, with an identical monster on the other side. It demands to see identification papers or hear "the password" before letting anyone through. It will also accept a bribe of 1d12€ per character, but would never be so gauche as to broach the subject itself. If the player characters attack, two more bouncers are nearby waiting for the shift change.

11 Door features large red button next to it. If player characters push the button, a bell dings, a light goes on above the door, soft music plays, and the door opens 1d6 exploration turns later. The door can be pried open without waiting, but reveals only empty black space, and anyone who passes through falls 50' before landing on back in the original room.

12 Door cannot be lock-picked or bashed down, but whenever player characters knock, instead of knocking sound, they hear a voice saying "Knock, knock." If they answer "Who's there?" and allow the door to finish the entire joke, it opens on its own.