A bit of a fill-in article this week (and maybe next week, too), so that I can put additional effort into a larger article on Economies in RPGs.

Pieces Of Creation Logo version 2

In the original version of this article, it was illustrated with a composite image created from three DALL-E (Ai-generated) images. Part of the reason for doing so was because I knew from past experience that actual photographs of the environment I wanted to display would be extremely hard to find, and part of it was to see if DALL-E could provide a more efficient solution.

Long story short: No, it couldn’t. To get something half-way passable required just as much manual editing as working with actual photographs would have done, maybe more. I had to composite three separate generated images to get something approaching the look and textures that I thought necessary, and the results were still only just good enough – after hours of editing work. The artificial results were too cartoonish in style, for one thing.

It’s not an experiment that I will be repeating any time in the near future.

Furthermore, some creators and backers of this site refuse to support any work that is or that features AI-generated content, because they want to back human creators. As a human creator myself, I can’t argue with their position – and so I am reposting the article without the offending AI-generated content. Which means, no featured image this time around.

Now, on with the post!

With the recent return of the Warcry campaign, I thought that I would describe a couple of the more interesting creations that have appeared in the campaign. One of these is part of the current adventure, another is part of the campaign’s history that is still remembered vividly by the players.

I’m framing this as part of the occasional “Pieces Of Creation” series, which contains material created for my own campaigns (or, in this case, re-created from memory). It’s been a while since I’ve done of those – the last one was The Artificial Mind: Z-3 Campaign Canon about eight months ago, and it came so close to not being done in time that I didn’t even include the series logo!

Acknowledgment
I am sure that the Land Of Green was based in part on material published elsewhere, and would happily acknowledge that intellectual debt, but I can’t locate the source. I do know that part of it also derived from expanded material that I prepared for the Living Land in my TORG campaign.

It is almost certain that the source was an I.C.E. module for Space Master, but I think I took a small part of one and blew it up in significance. But I’m not even sure of that, any more.

Use in other campaigns

While the material is obviously sci-fi oriented, and would work in most superheroic campaigns, it would not take much to adapt it to a fantasy setting. You might need to set The Land Of Green on an island instead of making it a whole planet, though.

I also have to add that the ‘explosive evolution’ theory is no longer in vogue. But with alien genetics involved, who knows?

The whole genetics / evolution question becomes more difficult in a fantasy setting; while it may be useful to the GM for analyzing just what is there for the PCs to find, it will be far more common to simply take the environment as found.

Plot problems are largely going to center around the issue of whether or not it’s acceptable to addict a PC against his will with little or not saving throw. I know that I’d be pissed if that happened to one of my PCs, no matter what the GM thought was realistic. Overcoming this problem entails doing one of two things:

  1. Conferring some sort of temporary immunity or protection to the PCs, probably magical.
  2. Making the addiction weaker, so that it’s both harder and less frequent that characters become addicted and easier to recover.

Or both, of course.

All right, without further ado:

The Land Of Green

An exploration ship has discovered a planet completely covered in plant life with virtually no animals, but a series of massive fossil deposits testify that animal life was once dominant on the planet. The ship is searching for resources that can be exploited as well as scientific discoveries; if these are significant enough, a specialist ship will be dispatched.

In time, the exploration ship may be able to determine the following:

    Beginnings

    Once, GRN-7244 was home to a rich biosphere, reaching a stage similar to the late Cretaceous / Jurassic eras here on earth – think dinosaurs, mega-fauna, birds, insects, etc. Then one plant developed a novel means of dispersing its seeds over a much wider area; it included a combination of mild psychotropic and euphoric compounds in the fruit wrapper that contained its seeds.

    Animals that ate the fruit liked it, a lot, and wandered off in response to the fantasies created by these compounds, breaking even life-time mating bonds, and venturing into areas that would normally not have been considered safe had the creatures been in their right minds.

    It mattered not a bit if the ‘host’ was killed and eaten in the process; this still provided the plant with the opportunity to spread into areas that might otherwise have been inaccessible.

    Mega-fauna Appetites

    Of course, the problem with mega-fauna is that they eat a lot of vegetation. Plants evolved many strategies to protect themselves from this; prolific spread or heavy fruit yields amongst them. Evolution cares not a whit for the survival of any individual representative of a species; it is always focused on the spread of the species overall.

    The mega-fauna appetite becomes a much greater problem if your produce is perceived as an attractive part of the available diet. 80-ton creatures might be drawn to consume the fruit, but they were rarely discriminating, and would strip the plant of its foliage in a psychotropic daze. The very success of its strategy for increasing the range of its spread was placing the survival of the species under threat.

    A New Strategy

    When species are ‘stressed’ in the environmental / survival sense, there is far greater pressure for evolutionary change and diversity; when existence is comfortable, change can proceed at a more leisurely pace. In one of the threatened plants, genetic chance brought forth a concentration of the psychotropic compounds in the leaves and an ability to spread it like a scent through the air.

    The plants became toxic; even being close to one could administer a lethal dose of toxin. At a greater distance, their presence caused breakdowns in the social structures and habits of any species that crossed the path of the plants. In effect, they turned from a spread-far-and-wide protective path into a survival-in-isolation strategy.

    The Wave Of Death

    These disruptions provided a new evolutionary pressure on the survival of the mega-herbivores, but before they could respond to it, species began to vanish, all cohesion lost. This was strictly a regional issue at first – how is a species to be propagated if its members lose interest in mating for a generation or two? Like a blight, these regions grew and grew; on an evolutionary scale, the net effect was a mass extinction without warning.

    There were many domino effects in consequence; without their prey to nourish them, the super-predators were the next to feel the blowtorch, triggering a second wave of the mass extinction of the mega-fauna. Birds and larger insects soon followed. But many plant species have evolved to require the intervention of animals as part of their life-cycles; some of these also began to vanish.

    All At Sea

    Coastal waters became contaminated whenever rainfall washed some of the fruit from these plants downstream. When a plant fell, for whatever reason, that waterway carried the psychotropics all the way down to the sea. Larger species of marine life joined the wave of extinction save a few species at home in the deepest seas. Over time, the surface water and upper oceans all became contaminated and any species that did not derive nourishment directly from plankton, fell.

    Green Explosion

    With the decrease in competition, the plants carrying this compound flourished, but they were no longer alone; several others had taken the compound on board through contaminated water supplies. Those that learned to use it as did the originating source, as a toxic protection, also gained a significant evolutionary protection against the smaller surviving herbivore species.

    As those species consumed the plants that were capable of sustaining them, it presented an opportunity for spread to those plant species not being eaten, so the non-toxic food supplies continued to dwindle, and the poisonous species spread far and wide, adapting to any environment that supported plant life.

    Green Implosion & Revolution

    Many plants require the existence of animal life to prosper; they revitalize soils, recycle plant material, convert oxygen into CO2, and provide many other vital links in the biosphere. Those links were now failing, one by one, and whole ecologies were once again under threat of total collapse. The result was a ‘Green Implosion’ in which less hardy plant species began to die out, creating still more capacity for those plants which were not so dependent on animal services to thrive.

    The Green Implosion became a time of explosive growth in the number of subspecies of plant life due to the many empty micro-environmental niches that had been emptied, and the psychotropically-toxic plants took full advantage. They were now the undoubted dominant species of life on GRN-7244, and exploded in subspecies to fill those empty niches.

    New Tricks

    Where it was needful, some of the new species of toxic plant learned new tricks – like the trees whose spore-like seeds contained a surface covered in fine hairs bearing barbed hooks; once these would have made it easier for the seeds to latch onto the fur of small mammals or feathers, but now they learned to come to rest on the flowers of other plants, where they waited for the next strong gust of wind to resume their journey, in the process conveying pollen captured by these surfaces to parts unknown, assisting in the spread of both species.

    It was a short step from such arrangements to symbiosis between the species; others joined in, until whole biosphere colonies were carried aloft in summer breezes. It wasn’t long before these began to supplant the remnants of the original psychotropic species, the latest victims in the ongoing ecological war for survival.

    Other animal functions were mimicked by other species. One vine-like species learned to perambulate from one tree-limb to another in a semblance of locomotion, and some of those trees in turn evolved to use the vines as go-betweens in the reproductive process. When the trees began to reward the vines with nourishment, making those trees a ‘preferred’ species by the vines, symbiosis between the two was complete.

    Some have even learned the art of respiration, thriving on oxygen and releasing carbon-dioxide back into the atmosphere.

    Remnants Of The Old Guard

    There were a few species of animal life who also employed toxins as defenses against predators or to hunt. Now, there were no more predators and little enough prey. In particular, a few species of snakes found that they no longer needed to produce their own venom (there was nothing to use it on) but that if they ingested plant mater from these bio-toxic plants, they could concentrate the dangerous compounds in their own (disused) venom sacs, keeping them safe and viable. Of course, they remained somewhat unpredictable immediately after feeding, so their spread has been slow. They are now the dominant form of animal life on the planet.

    The Current Picture

    The ecology and biosphere diversity is very similar to that of the earth – but for any animal role, there is a plant doing it instead. Virtually every plant on the planet contains psychotropic drugs in sufficient quantity to cause addiction with a single bite.

    Low-level doses of these compounds float through the air all spring and summer, sufficient to cause hallucinations and an unquenchable desire to eat the fruit of the trees that are everywhere. Even a small dose is enough to cause delusions, such as the captain giving permission for crewmen to leave the vessel and harvest the fruit.

    The water is similarly toxic except in the depths of winter. The greater the proximity of plant life to the edges of a watercourse, the more toxic it will be; the worst cases of contamination are enough to kill instantly, and to addict any not so killed.

    Going outside of a sealed and controlled environment, even in a sealed spacesuit, simply allows the compounds to adhere like pollen to the external surfaces; if decontamination is insufficient on return to the sealed environment, crew may be affected. Merely touching an exposed object is enough to create mild audio and visual hallucinations.

    Some of the colony spores may be hardy enough to survive exposure to vacuum, so visiting spacecraft may inadvertently be responsible for spreading the Green Revolution to other worlds and environments.

    Snakes can be up to a meter across and forty meters in length. Their bite is instantly fatal, but they are less inclined to act in this way than terrestrial snakes, because they no longer perceive animal life as a food-source.

In-game

Warcry and companions arrived just as the explorer ship was preparing to test the atmosphere on lab animals. They had detected the low concentrations of euphorics and psychotropics in the air, and were concerned as to what the effects would be, so they were proceeding cautiously.

Accidents happen from time to time in even the best-run labs. Such an accident caused a number of crewmen to be exposed to the atmosphere before the results of the testing referred to were fully analyzed. One crewman made it all the way to the fruit before being recaptured.

Those exposed went through withdrawal, experiencing berserker rages in which they exhibited unusual strength and a singular need to consume the fruit of the trees near the ship. They broke free of their confinement and once again reached the fruit; several consumed some of it and died instantly, an expression of euphoria on their faces. In the process, several more members were exposed.

When the ability of the ship to return to space became threatened due to crew members becoming untrustworthy, the captain elected to depart the planet. Several crewmen mutinied, and were confined, creating a new puzzle – they were not known to have been exposed, how had it happened?

That was how the spore effect was discovered. When Warcry deduced that the ship’s exterior would have been covered in spores, the Captain decided that he had no choice but to list his vessel as the victim of a plague and carry out a self-destruct action. He could not risk carrying colonies of the Green to a new world.

Warcry, who had made a number of friends amongst the crew while they worked to discover the secrets of GRN-7244, decided that this was one world that the universe could do without, particularly when he discovered that some of the spores had burrowed into the atmospheric seals of the explorer ship and space suits. Luckily, his worked on a different principle.

Simply blowing it up would have been the easy option, but would have created an asteroid belt rich in valuable metals; someone sooner might have mined it and come across a viable colony spore. So his solution was even more drastic (and difficult to arrange) – he caused it to plunge into its star, reasoning that if any plant could survive that, everything else was already dead, they just didn’t know it yet.

Next Monday: two more creations for the Warcry Campaign, this time from the current adventure, ready to be copy-and-pasted into your sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero campaigns.


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