A Cynical Reinterpretation: Of Mushrooms and Reptiles (Super Mario Bros campaign)

[HuManBing]

In the tongue-in-cheek spirit of LateCustomer's campaign, I am planning a darkly humorous and somewhat absurdist campaign featuring the Mushroom Kingdom from Super Mario Brothers.

Main theme:

The human civilization has fallen from a Classical Romanesque height. They discover a freak of nature: a massive fungal intelligence is locked in a war against a hive of brutal reptilians. Humans must choose sides between the passive psionic fungal Sprawl, or the sorcerous and aggressively-mutating reptilian Kopelisks. All the while, the scattered human tribes and petty kingdoms could be the next target once this war is over.

The humans stand for squabbling individualism. The Sprawl stands for communitarian unity. The Kopelisks stand for utter subjugation of self to the dictates of leadership.

Secondary theme:

An alien intelligence, Exldirs the Unrelenting, crash landed on the planet about 1,000 years ago and inadvertently destroyed a human empire in doing so. It then spent about 500 years manipulating humanity to reunify, partly out of a feeling of regret for having shattered the empire, but mostly because it wanted to repair its fusion drive and get off the planet again.

Exldirs gave up after 500 years' worth of work collapsed, and decided the humans were too unreliable to work with. It located the Kopelisks and found them much more regimented and obedient. It spent the next 300 years gifting them technology, even getting to isolating some crude radioactive compounds. Unfortunately, the Kopelisk leader, the Basylisk Kopelisk, decided he could destroy Exldirs and use its tech to continue the war against the Sprawl. Exldirs survived as a retrovirus encoded in a radio wave and it escaped to the mountains.

The heroes will be hard pressed to find clues of Exldirs in the middle of all the fighting but if they do, the campaign will progress on to neutralizing the alien threat. If they don't, it's no problem because they'll have enough to do with the Kopelisk-Sprawl-Humans balance of power anyway.

[HuManBing]

Overview
Far to the north lies a secluded valley surrounded by impassable peaks on all sides, some 250 square miles in surface area. Resting in the valley is the single most massive living organism on the face of the planet. The Fungal Sprawl exists there, in its last stronghold, protected by treacherous mountain passes on all sides. To the east of the Sprawl Valley stretches a monstrous city of stone, built by the sorcerous reptilian Kopelisks, who have mastered technologically advanced concepts and sends lighter-than-air vessels around to try to find the last Sprawl Valley and eliminate the fungus being. [In Super Mario Bros. 3, the Koopa had access to airship technology.]

To the south of the Sprawl lies humanity. But between humanity and the Sprawl, rests a tiny village of myconids (mushroom men) who were created by the Sprawl in its most recent battle against the Reptilians. The myconids are aimless, ever since losing contact with the psionic communications of the Sprawl several centuries ago. They live a simple, unguided life, merely subsisting day to day in their hidden village, unaware of the Sprawl's desperate dependence on them, and unable to break the Reptilian's encirclement of their homeland.

The Fungal Sprawl
Formed approximately 240,000 years ago, The Sprawl was once a sentient being - a vast conglomeration of fungal roots, stems, and cortexes that soaked in the sunlight and computed who-knows-what with a massive brooding intelligence.

Then, about a millennium ago, its nerve centers came under attack from the Kopelisks. Although the Sprawl had a mighty array of psionic defenses, the Reptilians bred quickly and introduced mutations into their own breeding stock. Within twelve generations of breeding (a blink of an eye for the Sprawl) the Reptilians had soldiers that were immune to psionics.

The fungus eventually spawned a race of tripedal mushrooms that were mobile and were able to innovate. Then the Sprawl's intelligence centers were captured or destroyed by the lizardmen, and the little mushroom tripeds were left on their own.

All this backstory takes place a long time ago. The tripedal mushrooms share a fragment of the Sprawl's massive memory, and they recently acknowledged that "three fulfilled threes of dreams have passed" since the Sprawl came into existence.

The Mushrooms
A "fulfilled" number, to the mushrooms, is a number to the power of something. So three fulfilled threes is 3^3^3, or 3^27. The Sprawl dreams more or less every second, so this means the Sprawl has been around for just over 241,000 years. The mushrooms, when they sleep, share the dreams of the distant Sprawl, which is what keeps them animated. (If a mushroom is taken too far away from the Sprawl, the psionic powers that animate them fail and the mushroom becomes a normal immobile fungus until brought back again. My PCs discovered a Mycinopio far from its homeland and so far have no idea it's anything except a weird large purple mushroom.)

The mushrooms have three fingers so their numerical system is 3-based, not 10-based. The number one is represented by a word that means “forage”, two by “friends”, and three by “family”. Addition is represented by a word that means “seeking”, multiplication by a word that means “meeting”, and one particularly far-thinking Mycinopio came up with the term “fulfilled” to mean exponential.

The small wandering mushrooms naturally look like vaguely purple wrinkled fungi standing about 4’ tall. They tend to stay in one place when resting and look entirely indistinguishable from any other fungi. When they walk, they sprout three feet and retract their roots, and sometimes can grow up to three arms with three fingers each. They generally have tremorsense, but can also grow three eyes. When not sapping nutrients from the ground, they can produce up to three mouths to eat things. They can only digest vegetable matter (this precludes not only meat but also mushrooms and other non-vegetables). Anything they cannot digest must be vomited. The mushrooms do not have the ability to excrete their food. Most vegetable matter is digested completely, as fungi can break down cellulose cells.

However, their natural appearance is disturbing to humans and they all know this (because of inherited racial memories). Near humans, they assume the harmless and cute form with only two of the body parts.

They have a finely developed sense of taste. They can deduce an organism's crude genetic makeup by ingesting some living tissue. Many mushrooms use spores among themselves, but among humans, they like to nibble gently on a finger or elbow to learn the individual's "name", which essentially comprises their individual DNA genome. Vespersica found this rather disquieting when a line of young mushrooms crowded her, trying to nibble on her fingers. They also have a keen sense of smell and will sniff humans.

Mushrooms never stop growing but they do suffer aging and may grow too tired, falling asleep and becoming immobile mushrooms, dreaming as one with the Sprawl.

The Amazonian wanderer Nelaveria Vespersica was the first human to discover these mushrooms. [Vespersica derives from the Latin name for peaches. Hence, Princess Peach.] She called them “Mycinopio”. After she was originally intimidated by their alien appearance, the Mycinopio rearranged their own appearance to seem more harmless – they appeared to her to be plump, round mushrooms with two round legless feet, two arms with three fingered hands, and a large head covered with an ovoid cap. [The classic appearance of Toad, from Super Mario Bros. - also known as Kinopio in Japanese.]

Before her untimely disappearance, Nelaveria Vespersica left behind a detailed diary chronicling her life among the Mycinopio. Most of the observations above can be found in her notes. The Mycinopio are fascinated with change and mimic a newcomer’s actions. From her, they learned how to build huts from wood, though the practice fell into disuse after her disappearance, as the Mycinopio are comfortable sleeping outdoors. Similarly, they learned how to sleep lying down, which some still like to do today as it prevents them from morphing back into a featureless mushroom.

They also learned how to cultivate vegetables, a practice that stuck, and she even was able to teach them a little rudimentary arcane skill. In return, they developed some mental exercises for her that taught her psionic abilities. They also learned to tame the large, furry Wiggler larvae and use them as pillows, keeping them well fed on a diet of tender leaves, which stops them from moulting and becoming adult Wigglers. [Super Mario World introduced the Wiggler worms, which appear to be indestructible.]

The Mycinopio communicate primarily through psionics and spore releases, although they learned how to speak by imitating Vespersica. Anybody entering the Mycinopio community feels like everything is watching them, even inanimate objects. [In most of the Mario games, most of the sprites have eyes. The hills, clouds, bricks, and even the sun had eyes.]

The Clearing of the Sprawl:

The lizardmen began their war against the Sprawl some 1000 years previously and inflicted a massive defeat about 500 years ago, plunging the S. Of the five main neural centers scattered throughout the Sprawl’s biomass, the lizardmen found and destroyed one neural center before the Sprawl could biologically react. After that, the lizardmen experimented with various mutations to wage their ground campaign against the Sprawl, resulting in various abominations. To counteract this threat, the Sprawl created semi-organic, semi-psionic fungal creatures that met the lizardmen in the fronds of fungus and fought them. These would become the precursors of the Mycinopio.

After a fierce and desperate fight, the lizardmen found and destroyed a second neural center in a protracted ground war. At that point, the Sprawl began working on an array that would trap sunlight and allow it to use the power of fire against the lizardmen. It also planned to focus a considerable amount of power to create a stronger race of Mycinopio.

However, before this innovation could be completed, the lizardmen beat the Sprawl in the race to develop war machines. They completed a lighter-than-air device with the covert aid of Exldirs the Unrelenting, and used it to arrive quickly at the third neural center. Bombarding it from the air, the lizardmen bypassed the Sprawl’s land based defenses and destroyed the neural center. With more than half the Sprawl’s mental capacity burnt, the rest of the biomass plunged into a catatonic state, able only to act in reflexive defensive actions when directly threatened, and unable to plan for the long term. The biomass fell to a state of periodic dreaming. During one of these dreams, the Mycinopio were born, and the Sprawl’s last instruction to them was to leave the Sprawl and seek safety elsewhere, away from the lizardmen.

The Sprawl is currently unable to regain sentience unless it develops a new neural center (which will take the best part of 40,000 to 50,000 years) or unless the thoughtpearls taken from its two ruined neural centers are recovered and replaced in its biomass.

Once done, it will take about ten years to reassemble a new neural center using the thoughtpearls. Then it can focus again on long term plans, which at the very least will involve creating more Mycinopio.

[HuManBing]

The Kopelisks
The lizards have an innate gaze-based magic that can charm people, dazzle them, and in the case of the most powerful Basylisk Kopelisk, even turn flesh to stone. They use this to put up massive buildings in the Clearings – massive underground and overground areas where the Sprawl has been burnt, uprooted, and stoned away. They are currently led by a very large dragonlike turtle creature, Basylisk Kopelisk, and his seven offspring. [Bowser Koopa and his Koopa-kids from Super Mario Bros. 3. In Super Mario Bros. 1 it was said that Bowser turned mushrooms into bricks.]

The lizardmen used fire and acid to bolster their petrifying powers, and began clearing the Sprawl. This defoliation took place above ground and underground, burning out the rhizomes and roots to make for substantial underground complexes. The last two neural centers are both located within the Sprawl Valley, which is completely inaccessible - even by air - from the outside. The only exception is the Mycinopio's village, which lies to the south of the Sprawl, and which can actually access the Sprawl through a large underground cavern complex.

Exldirs at first thought the Kopelisk (Koopa) would be far better subjects than humans - and they were, at least to begin with. Firstly, they were much more obedient, with a racial tendency to communitarian behavior and a rigid rank system. Any given human may or may not obey an order given to it, but any given Kopelisk is almost physically incapable of disobeying an order given by a higher ranking Kopelisk.

The older a Kopelisk became, the more powerful it grew, and the higher rank it would hold. Apparently the concept of rank was not merely social, it was genetically imbued into Kopelisk consciousness, to the point that betrayal was impossible. One startling characteristic was that lower ranked Kopelisks would mindlessly continue to obey the last order properly given to them, even when the commander was dead or the reason for doing so had long expired.

Exldirs decided the easy thing to do was to contact Basylisk Kopelisk, who was the oldest Kopelisk and held supreme rank. However, it became clear that Basylisk was as individualistic as the human leaders had been, though about different things. Exldirs started up a metallurgy industry, then a massive lighter-than-air warship industry, and also weapon systems like gunpowder and cannons. It even got a rudimentary radio network going, with flagpoles at each Kopelisk holding broadcasting new orders.

[In Super Mario Bros, each level had a Koopa flag that Mario had to jump onto and tear down. This may have been the reason why...]

Exldirs hoped that the Kopelisks would tire of fighting the fungus eventually and turn back to helping it construct its fusion drive and get it back home. It made much more progress than it did with the humans, even isolating radioactive isotopes of a mineral called "The Blight" and mutating new combat-ready breeds of Kopelisk drones... but in the end the Kopelisk leaders expelled it and tried to kill it.

Although the Kopelisks were not as ignorant as the humans, they were far more treacherous, and decided that they had benefitted enough from Exldirs' help and they could gain nothing from further collaboration. Exldirs was cut down by an elite squad of Kopelisks that it had helped to breed. Evidently, the genetic obedience did not extend to high-ranking aliens.

The main campaign against the Kopelisks:
The players will discover clues about Vespersica's expedition to find the Mycinopio, which will be about 500 years in the past. They'll go to the village and find the Mycinopio, who will tell them all the need to know. The Mycinopio themselves are not vengeful and not warlike. They will clearly continue their humble cycle of subsistence farming until the Sprawl reawakens (in 40 millennia) or until the Reptilians find and slaughter them (presumably much sooner). The PCs will be inspired through pity for these gentle mushrooms to help take the fight to the Reptilians.

Alternatively, they may join in to help rescue Vespersica, who disappeared many centuries ago but who is rumored to still be alive... or at least still around. The truth is that she attempted to assassinate Basylisk Kopelisk, but failed. The chief stripped her and her human allies of all magical items and then turned them to stone with his petrifying gaze. The statue of the "Peach Princess" is now on display at the gates of the Reptilian's outpost, showing their determination to subjugate the humans after they have eliminated the Sprawl.

The fight against the Kopelisks will involve liberating the various climes and locales of the Clearing so that the Mycinopio can reclaim their ancestral lands. Each "level" must be completed by clearing the Kopelisk defences and then tearing down a flag from a flagpole, which will disable the radio communications and prevent the rigidly regimented Kopelisks from regrouping effectively.

They must find and face the seven children of Basylisk, each of which has a different set of magical powers, and then face Basylisk himself. Key to their success will be finding a way to unpetrify Vespersica and her allies and drawing on their knowledge to help them.

[HuManBing]

Exldirs the Unrelenting

Human history: About 1000 years ago there was a massive human empire that had good technology, rather like Rome. That was destroyed by a massive fiery cataclysm, and a month of black rain. Since then, the area plunged into a Dark Age for about 100 years.

[The truth: a malfunctioning fusion reactor caused an extraterrestrial craft to crash at immense speed, leaking Cobalt-Thorium-G everywhere and creating a doomsday shroud for a month. The extraterrestrial traveller, Exldirs, was marooned and took a century to reassemble its consciousness and make contact with the local humans, who by that time were hopelessly backward. Exldirs is roughly human sized and strongly resembles a lich, but needs no phylactery to reform. It merely wills it, and it will do so, albeit very slowly.]

After about 150 years P.E. (post-event), the tribes had coalesced into a feudal conglomeration. The extraterrestrial made tentative contact and began possessing individuals to "gift" them technology, and to prod their civilizations towards key advances.

By about 400 P.E., the kingdoms had fallen under the banner of a great uniter, Maerval "Hammerfist". Although Maerval's rule brought standardized currency, great advances in medicine, and a rudimentary chemical industry, he himself remained a controversial figure. Maerval appeared to be hedonistic and flighty, and appeared to be manipulated by some advisor known only as the Keeper.

[The extraterrestrial lich manipulated Hammerfist's genetic conception through centuries of careful arranged marriages and matings between humans it viewed as being eugenically superior. (Note: this does not make Exldirs a Nazi.) Politically, it also safeguarded those chosen ones by covertly killing off rivals. The Great Plague of 344 P.E. was caused by the lich in part to weaken rival kingdoms, while it knew its favored families would be genetically immune. It also manipulated social advances to better serve its goals, most notably introducing a precedent-based legal system, a working banking industry, and most importantly many public libraries in every town. Another important development was that Exldirs supervised a careful population boom, to give it a much greater talent pool to choose from. Most females were pregnant by the time they were 12.]

During this time, a female traveller from a faraway land (Vespersica - Princess Peach) arrived with findings about a massive fungal sprawl. She had a magical stud in her tongue that allowed her to speak many languages, and magical earrings that allowed her to hear the same. She was considered an "old woman", as she was already 24 and had never had children. Hammerfist took pity on her plight and attempted to have one of his plenipotentaries, a plump man named Morrow [Mario], deflower Vespersica in her guest chambers. (The custom being that whatever the plenipotentary claimed, the ruler would get.) Things could have turned out very ugly, but fortunately Vespersica mistook the intrusion for a mere burglary and even more fortunately she overpowered Morrow with magic, tying him up in his own clothing and leaving him there to hang for a while.

They became good friends after this, though Morrow carefully kept the nature of his failed mission secret from her.

The two, accompanied by the court scribe Laverdael [Luigi], headed an expedition to the Sprawl, which turned up the tale I've told above: the mushrooms and the reptiles are engaged in a war of attrition. Other than fanciful tales, nobody took much notice among the human realms.

[...except for Exldirs, who was tiring of Hammerfist's incompetence in particular, and of humanity's incompetence in general. Already two centuries behind schedule, the lich despaired of ever rebuilding its spacecraft and fusion drive, and all that its ungrateful human ally Hammerfist wanted to do was sit around eating grapes and having sex with a large volume of women. Exldirs took great interest in the reptilian race, called Kopelisks [Koopa in Mario games], and wondered whether they might be more industrious than homo sapiens.]

In 423 P.E., Vespersica was firmly allied with the mushrooms and led an ill-fated legion of soldiers to assassinate the Kopelisk leader, known as Basylisk-Kopelisk [Bowser Koopa] whose ability to turn things into stone was legendary. She failed in her attempt and everybody in her attack squad, including Morrow and Laverdael, was turned into stone. Hammerfist's court never heard from her again and made no attempt to contact her either.

[Part of this was the lich's slow withdrawal of materiel from the Hammerfist court, which destabilized the human kingdom. Also, it made first contacts with the Kopelisk reptilians. Exldirs sealed its allegiances by leaking information about the Vespersica raid to Basylisk Kopelisk, who easily survived her assassination attempt and decided to extend succor to Exldirs. This cooperation lasted for a few centuries, then the Kopelisks betrayed Exldirs and expelled it from their territories, creating a lasting enmity between the extraterrestrial and the reptilians.]

In 433, a bad grape harvest led to the dissolution of the Hammerfist court and the imposition of martial law, and from 500 P.E. to 700 P.E., all the good that Exldirs did for humanity was quickly undone, as the empire under Hammerfist splintered. The only thing Exldirs itself had to do was to burn all the libraries, to carefully cover its tracks - human ignorance and superstition and bigotry did all the rest. Invading hordes toppled aqueducts, burnt granaries, and looted banks of their variable-rate housing mortgage loans. A second dark age occurred, leading to 1000 P.E., when the current campaign begins.

The Covert Campaign: Against Exldirs the Unrelenting:
Recreating the human history of Hammerfist will take some time, and the biggest clue is in fragmentary writings from that time, most of which bear the Keeper's seal. A few bear the personal signature of the Keeper.

In fact, Hammerfist's own tomb preserves many ancestral papers, all with the Keeper's seal or signature on them. The handwriting and autograph is exactly the same throughout 300 years of the Keeper's post!

The hunt for the Keeper's identity can begin. (It's Exldirs, of course, changing its face through mortal generations but not its signature.) Getting the evidence will require journeying to other human kingdoms, negotiating with the kings, and brokering a deal to access the archaeological records of each one to see the Keeper's seal and signature. This will underline the chaotic state of the once-unified empire.

For most of the time, Exldirs communicates telepathically to the players, pretending to be the Fungal Sprawl and helping them in their attacks against the Kopelisks.

However, after the players smuggle a device into the Kopelisk capital at its bidding, they realize something is terribly wrong: the device detonates and reduces the city to radioactive rubble, while creating a terrifying mushroom avatar. The voice in their heads reveals itself to be Exldirs The Unrelenting, forgotten shaper of history and future uniter of all mortal realms. The device they delivered to Kopelisk's throne was just a successful prototype of another such device that is currently headed to the remnants of the human empire.

Exldirs will go to the human kingdoms and do exactly what it has done with the Kopelisk empire: it will wipe clean the curse of woolly thinking once and for all, and harness civilization to more worthwhile causes, in the name of efficiency and the unfailing need for good design of fusion drives.

It's up to the PCs to stop the extraterrestrial lich before this happens. They can do this in a number of ways.

1. They can kill it in combat. This is only effective for about 100 years, as it will be back (and they likely won't be). Also, combat against a creature of Exldirs' power is near-suicidal.

2. They can redirect the second device to the extraterrestrial lich's mountain hideout and then detonate it there. This will assuredly kill them, but it will bury Exldirs beneath miles of stone and will probably keep it out of mortal affairs for a few millennia as it digs its way out.

3. They can negotiate with it. Exldirs is not interested in anything they have to say, but they can convince it that mortal civilizations are simply too stupid to be worth bothering about. It can be persuaded to leave humanity alone, if the PCs point out that humans can and will continue to lie, steal, cheat, backstab, and rebel - and that honestly, it's better off trying to construct the fusion drive by itself rather than trying to get a nation of mortals to do it. It would probably take less time, too.

If the PCs are smart enough to persuade the extraterrestrial lich that humans are basically irredeemably stupid, the lich will leave humanity alone forever and stay at its mountain, working on its spaceship ever after. Left alone, it would probably succeed after a few thousand years and return to its home in a futile attempt to claim its warranty.