Natural Cosmic Horror

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


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.


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.



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.



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?



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



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.




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.


Just add in the dicks who want to fuck everyone over as hard as they got fucked and you've recreated Dark Souls.



The only option is to awaken an ancient bioengineered giant soldier to lay waste of the forest and its inhabitants



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.