Spelljammer Banestorm: The Moon

[Delvidian]

I promised I’d keep notes as my GURPS Spelljamer/Banestorm mashup campaign progresses. I thought I’d break the Moon series into a distinct thread. If you haven’t read the earlier thread, you need to know that my campaign is a cinematic campaign for my teenaged children. In all things, the Rule of Cool wins.

In the first episode, the party discovered just what a helm does and took a trip to Yrth’s moon. They found a hole in the bottom of a crater and carefully descended several hundred yards down a shaft. At the bottom lay a derelict ether-copter of Dwarvish manufacture. Following tracks down a tunnel they run into shriekers – well, more moaners and sighers -- and violet fungus. With that, Episode 2 begins.

The tunnel opens into a large (~80 yard diameter) cavern of white rock. Scattered throughout the room are natural pillars that reach the ceiling (average 36 yards high) and pools of water. Among these are many more groupings of shriekers and violet fungi. The floor is also littered with loot: backpacks, helms, swords, etc.. Looking up, one sees a similar scene (sans loot). There are mushrooms and pools of water on the ceiling! The air is very dusty. GM Note: The entire cavern is made of moonstone, a mineral that is gravity-aspected. In this large a quantity, the floors, walls, ceiling and pillars all attract at .5 g. Characters with Lunacy and Lycanthopy automatically succumb to their respective effects.

Seeing all that shiny loot (those who must save vs. Greed or Kleptomania) the players cautiously enter. GM NOTE: An IQ or Observation roll will reveal that although there are lots of items littering the room, there are no corpses or bones. One of the characters begins to swat at an unseen opponent. GM Note: The dust in the cavern isn’t moon dust, it is hallucinogenic myconid spores. I rolled HT-2 secretly on the characters. Three failed, but I began with only one seeing something that the others couldn’t see. I tried to keep it plausible. For instance, the hallucinating character was one who owned a ring of shadow form. I had him roll a Fright Check when he saw a shadow snake lunge at him out of a sack. Then, after several turns of the party trying to help him, I told another character – an elf vain about his glorious mane of hair – that he could feel an unseen something breathing down on his head. I tried to milk this for as long as I could. Eventually, the third hallucinating character – a red dragon hatchling completely incapacitated because he thought he was frozen into a block of ice – tipped off the party that these were hallucinations, not moon-ghosts.
The remaining characters get their hallucinating colleagues under control (Psychology, Cure Disease or Cure Poison are good) and continue exploring the bits of treasure. They also find mining carts with metal bars running along the side. These must be what the clamps on the Dwarvish ether-copter fasten onto. Suddenly, mushrooms with eyes and limbs poke out from several locations at once and blow jets of spores at their faces! GM NOTE: These are deathcap myconids, who had plenty of time to walk down the backs of the columns facing the party while the characters were dealing with their hallucinating brethren. Some of the characters begin to fall into sneezing fits, making it hard to defend themselves from the mushroom-people. GM NOTE: I’ve combined the idea of deathcaps with vegepygmies (fungipygmies?). These are the dwarves, whose bodies have been turned fungal. In addition to sneezing, characters who fail their HT rolls will be infected. After several hours, they’ll begin to lose an HP an hour to a fungal infection until they reach 0, when they turn into deathcaps themselves. The characters defend themselves against the ambushing deathcaps, finding that cutting weapons work best (Injury Tolerance: Homogenous). Once they deal enough damage, their opponents burst in a puff of spores (GM Note: I didn’t even bother with HT checks. When the little guys reach 0 HP, poof! Of course a character in front of an exploding deathcap has to save vs. HT or sneeze/gain the fungipygmy infection). Once the deathcaps are dispatched -- which involved a lot of character super-jumping and acrobatic use of the pillars -- the mage casts Gust of Wind and clears the area of spores. Several characters use the pools of water to wash themselves. They get down to examining their loot. GM Note: DF Treasure Tables. Yeah! They also harvest piles of moonstone chunks already chipped free. GM Note: I rolled dice for the weight. One of the attributes of moonstone is that its weight keeps changing. If you like torturing players about encumbrance, this can be fun.

While they examine and fuss over the treasure, the more perceptive among them notice more mushroom men peering at them from a distance. These look different from the deathcaps. Taller. More thoughtful looking. No mouths. One of these slowly approaches the party. It gently poofs some spores at the elf, who finds he can now communicate with this new kind of myconid. Is it telepathy? Or are messages being passed via the spores? They learn that there are 2 kinds of myconids. The deathcaps, a violent mutation, and the myconids proper, who are peaceful (Pacifist [self-defense only]) philosophers. The session ends on the beginnings of their dialogue. They learn that the myconids use the hallucination spores to chase noisy visitors away. GM Note: It just felt better to make quaint mushroom men peaceful and the deathcaps the result of a fungus/dwarf merging. And I have a session planned about a favor they can do for the moon myconids.

[cognate]

Thanks for your post! This has given me lots of great inspiration.

And if anyone minds that I've necro'ed this thread (is that even actually a problem?), I'm sorry, but I couldn't just leave this fantastic session report unthanked!