The Monkey Tree Puzzle - Part 2

Re-Group...

Having suffered this reversal, the party may wish to gather its forces and mark out some kind of plan of attack. As well it’s likely that some characters have been poisoned (or poisoned again) and must be cured before the party can continue its investigation.

Those interested in the matter of Colonel Mayberry and his headstone, can check details in the local church records, the register of births, deaths and marriages at the town hall, or in the archives at the local newspaper office; alternatively, they can talk to the sheriff about the situation.

It’s revealed that the Colonel met Dulcinea Estevez, daughter of a shipping magnate, while stationed in the Philippines. She was much younger than he and theirs was a typical “May-December” romance. The Colonel, who had resigned himself to bachelorhood, was completely besotted and showered his love with presents and attention. He built Pinecrest for her and she adored the place, throwing lavish parties and inviting friends to stay for long periods. Like her new husband, she delighted in the wilderness and they declared that their estate would remain a wild enclave; the only change that Dulcie made was the planting of a monkey puzzle tree – her favourite species and a reminder of the home where she grew up.

Sadly, tragedy struck. During a particularly harsh winter, Dulcie contracted pneumonia and it quickly escalated into pleurisy. Treatment arrived too late and she succumbed to the illness. The Colonel was inconsolable. He buried his love beneath her beloved tree and took to the solitary life of a recluse.

With this information to hand, the players may find themselves better equipped to tackle the situation.

Rainfall

The day after the encounter in the clearing, it rains heavily for almost 48 hours. This gives the players time to think about what lies before them and also to do research and deal with any damaged party members (or to call in some reinforcements if too many characters have been eliminated). The consensus might be that the rain will keep the dust from travelling too far afield, but upon reflection (and a Biology or Wilderness Survival roll) might realise that the material will probably wash downhill and into the river at the bottom of the hill, to do who-knows-what damage to animal and plant life downstream.

If nobody else thinks of it, the sheriff will travel up to Pinecrest and see how the Colonel is doing. He reports back that Mayberry is at home in his house and apparently unaffected by any spores. He says that the colonel hid within the canopy of the monkey puzzle tree and waited until the rain popped enough of the puffballs to form a break in the ring through which he clambered up the hill to his home. Of course, the party may wish to undertake this option themselves: Mayberry will report the above information while standing in his front doorway - he will not let the party inside his house, and Psychology Rolls will discern a strong disinclination for company, even moreso than usual.

If the party discusses their findings with the sheriff, especially the notion of the spores contaminating the water table and local waterways, he will immediately set about planning to build a bulwark along the river below the site of the infestation. To this end he will commandeer local earthmoving equipment and drivers (if this is a modern setting), or diggers, and lead this crew to the base of the hill, following the riverbanks from the main road. The party are more than welcome to join in this endeavour; while underway, they will notice the Colonel watching distantly through the windows of his home, but – unusually, it would seem - he never leaves to investigate the activity.

Hallucinatory Terrain

With characters poisoned by fungal spores and experiencing nightmares and other hallucinatory effects, it now behoves the Keeper to start bringing these visions into the real world. From this point onwards, as the players begin to deal with the threat in their midst, the powers of the fungus start to grow stronger and to target those who have already suffered from its effects.

This is a good opportunity for the Keeper to re-introduce old fears that the party may have experienced. Perhaps one of the party was stalked by a shadowy figure in an earlier adventure: now they catch glimpses of just such a stalker from the corner of their eyes. As things escalate, this bogey-man becomes seemingly more real until the character is convinced of its reality and forgets all about the fungal threat. Reintegrating elements from the party’s history is a good way to distract and disorientate them.

Alternatively, they may start to feel the effects of a bizarre physiological hallucination. Perhaps they hear a sound that they can’t pin down and no-one else seems to be aware of? Maybe they become fixated by the notion that some kind of fungal organism has burrowed beneath their skin and is roaming about their body laying eggs? Perhaps when they saw another party member putting on their gloves it seemed as though they were hiding the fact that their hand was in fact some kind of fleshy claw? The possibilities are literally endless but it will take some skill to sell these delusions to your players.

Remember to keep nightmares coming too. Waking up from what seemed to be a daytime situation gone horribly wrong can be jarring and unsettling, possibly worthy of a SAN Roll. (This also allows the Keeper to re-set the adventure if things go horribly wrong...)

A sensible party will bring all of this to a table and compare symptoms, constructing a strategy for dealing with it effectively (anti-psychotics; incarceration; therapy; what-have-you); but few parties are this organised. The Keeper should keep it in mind that the fungus is deliberately targeting those people it feels to be a threat, and it knows who they are if they’ve been infected by it in the past; keep the pressure on!

(As a side note, novels and movies like William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, or David Cronenberg’s “Videodrome”, offer myriad different kinds of psychedelia as inspiration.)

Where To From Here?

With levels of paranoia peaking, it might be difficult for your team to get motivated; however, there are greater issues at hand than any one person’s personal bugbears. The sheriff is useful here for trying to keep the party on track, so keep him ready to prod your players along, at least until his messy demise...

There’s a notion that you’re not really paranoid if someone is actually out to get you, and when an imaginary stalker suddenly becomes objectively real, it’s a great sense of relief to the paranoid player. There is a shadowy figure lurking on the fringes of this tale and having it emerge while the hallucinations are raging is a neat way of introducing it.

The missile was a test strike against a remote human populace to examine its effectiveness. Having landed and deployed, its originators need to collate data to see if it works as expected. To this end there is an observer hanging around the test site, watching and recording.

Missile Researcher from Yuggoth

char.	value	char.	value	char.	value
STR	10	POW	13	Age	n/a
CON	11	DEX	14	HP
SIZ	11	APP	n/a	Magic Points	13
INT	13	EDU	n/a	SAN	n/a

Damage Bonus: None

Weapon: Nippers: 40% (1d6+grapple); Electric Gun: 40% (1d10+Resistance Roll to avoid heart failure; Mist Projector: 30% (20 shots: 1d10/round)

Armour: 8 points of Bio-Armour; all Impaling weapons do minimal possible damage

Skills: Conceal 60%; Hide 80%; Sneak 75%

Spells: None

SAN Loss: It costs 0/1d6 Sanity Points to see a Mi-Go

This entity is one of the Mi-Go. It creeps about Pinecrest estate initially, but as the effects of the spores start to spread, it increases its range to take in parts of the nearby human settlement. As the fungus begins to target the party specifically as a potential threat, the Mi-Go scout also starts to take an interest in them.

This lurker in the darkness has all the toys for which the Fungi from Yuggoth are known: bio-armour, weapons, whatever. Keep in mind that these creatures can fly and crawl up vertical surfaces and along ceilings; they are also telepathic, so they can really mess with your hallucinating characters’ heads. The scout is constructing an escape vehicle on the estate and needs to wait for this to be completed before launching back into space: it’s on a timetable, and will fight to ensure that its plans don’t go pear-shaped.

Oh, and remember all the Colonel’s dogs? They don’t work for the Colonel anymore – they have undergone a subtle change and they now work for the scout...

Fungal Hounds

char.	value	char.	value	char.	value
STR	7,7,6,6,6,5,5	POW	7,7,7,7,7,7,7	Age	n/a
CON	11,11,11,10, 10,10,10	DEX	13,13,13,13, 13,13,13	HP	8,8,8,8,8, 7,7
SIZ	5,5,5,5,5,4,4	APP	n/a	Magic Points	n/a
INT	n/a	EDU	n/a	SAN	n/a

Damage Bonus: -1d6

Weapon: Bite: 30% (1d6);

Armour: All Impaling weapons do minimal possible damage

Skills: Listen 75%; Scent Something Interesting 90%; Track 75%

Spells: None

SAN Loss: It costs 0/1d6 Sanity Points to see a Fungal Hound

The flesh of the dogs has been replaced by the action of the fungus. The alpha male of this pack was killed by the scout with its electric gun, which blew the dog’s head off; despite this, the dog has no problems carrying out its duties for its new master. All of these dogs are now made of a substance which more closely resembles the Mi-Go than a normal hound, wrapped around their original skeletons. In combat, these minions are unnerving (especially the headless one) but not especially effective; however, they are particularly useful to the scout for tracking down its enemies.

Once the scout and its sinister pack animals have been introduced, the worst thing that can happen is for one of your players to get all meta on you and say ‘Oh, it’s a Mi-Go. I know how to deal with these guys...’ As Keeper, you should keep your description of this horror as bizarre and unreal as possible, using all of your descriptive powers to throw off the party’s attempts to identify it absolutely. After all, fear of the unknown is one of the primal fears...

Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch...

The last we saw of the Colonel, he was ducking for cover beneath the monkey puzzle tree. After that we saw him regarding the sheriff’s digging activities from the lofty perspective provided by his rambling house. But what’s of most interest to us at this point is what he found underneath the monkey puzzler...

As we’ve seen, the fungus has a cunning way of invading the cells of living or dead animals and animating them by replacing their flesh with quasi-animal fungal matter. This stuff has grown beneath the monkey puzzle tree and coated the bones of the Colonel’s dead wife bringing it to a vague kind of half-life. Unfortunately, Dulcie Mayberry is too far gone to be any kind of living breathing entity, but the hallucinogenic effects of the fungus have worked upon the Colonel’s mind to fill in the blanks: as far as he’s concerned, she’s alive once more, just weakened by her exertions in coming back to life.

If any members of the party get a clear sight of her, they will see a horribly decayed skeleton packed full of toadstool-like growths and fuzzy mouldy adhesions. Most startling, her skull, with its empty eye sockets, is covered in a somewhat transparent slimy film which periodically bubbles up in cilia-like activity whenever it tries to scan its environment: these filamentous extrusions twitch, wriggle and pulse with various colours, in exactly the same manner that the head of a Mi-Go does when communicating. Any character who has had dealings with the Fungi from Yuggoth before, can make an Idea Roll to form this connexion, but only if the party has discovered a solid, logical rationale to implicate the Mi-Go.

In time, this creature will dispose of its skeletal frame and stand forth as a new Mi-Go; for now though, its movements are slight and its main form of defense is its ability to project hallucinogenic illusions to those around it. Characters encountering “Dulcie”, if they have previously been exposed to the spores of the missile, must make a Resistance Roll against the horror’s POW stat with their own POW. If they fail, they see a petite and beautiful (though somewhat pale and subdued) Spanish lady, well-dressed and polite, although tired. If they succeed with their roll, they see the fungus-clad corpse as it truly is, and feel the full weight of the monster’s animus.

Dulcinea Mayberry, as was

char.	value	char.	value	char.	value
STR	2	POW	17	Age	n/a
CON	6	DEX	2	HP	8
SIZ	9	APP	n/a	Magic Points	17
INT	13	EDU	n/a	SAN	n/a

Damage Bonus: 0

Weapon: Scratch: 10% (1d2); Grapple: 20% (special)

Armour: None

Skills: Call Telepathically for Help 75%

Spells: None

SAN Loss: It costs 1d2/1d8 Sanity Points to see Dulcie unshielded by her hallucinations

The Colonel is beside himself with joy. A miracle has occurred! His beloved has been restored to him through some strange power and his old life can resume once more! He has installed Dulcie in a small bedroom in the house where he can dote upon her, bringing her treats and her favourite baubles from the days before her sickness. He believes that she sees and hears him and that she speaks to him in response – this is all part of the psychedelic web in which he is enmeshed. He has become not unlike Norman Bates from Psycho, talking to a corpse which has become the centre of his world.

Having installed this horror in his house, Pinecrest has become Monster Central. The Fungal Hounds come and go as they please, monitoring the Colonel and relaying warnings telepathically to the Mi-Go; Mayberry sees them as normal dogs, when he notices them at all. Anyone observing the headless alpha male dog unscreened by illusions, will see an emerging cilia-covered ellipsoid growing from where its head used to be. As well, the Colonel believes that the Mi-Go scout is some kind of doctor sent to help his Dulcinea recover from her ordeal. In fact, the scout is concerned with the progress of its launch platform growing on the monkey puzzle tree outside and wants nothing to interfere with its getaway plans.

What’s Happening To The Tree?

Monkey puzzles have a very long lifespan. In their youth they look very much like standard pine trees – a vaguely conical shape with a pointed top. As they get older, they begin to “mast” – the trunk shoots upwards, uncovered by branches or greenery, and the foliage reduces to a wide platform of branches at the very top. If any party members decided to go back to the clearing and its single tree, they will see that a lot has been going on in their absence.

First, the monkey puzzle’s growth has massively accelerated and it has almost reached its maximum 60 metres (180 feet) in height. It is still an unearthly blue colour and the texture of the bark has become somewhat fleshy and moist, rather than being woody and hard. In fact, the top of the tree is now fairly level with the house on the hill behind it.

Characters will also note that the puffballs have reduced in number, concentrating at six equidistant points around the margin of the clearing. From the centre of each mushroom cluster, a single puffball has massively grown into a columnar shape, projecting upwards about 20 metres (60 feet) with a vaguely luminous, blue pulsating crown. Those who saw the “meteorite” land, several days earlier, can make Idea Rolls to realise that these are more missiles, like the one which started all this mayhem.

The Mi-Go spends much of its time at the slowly growing launch platform at the top of the tree, monitoring the progress of the fungal bloom and the growth of the ancillary weapons around it. The launch platform is almost complete and only a few more hours remain before take-off can occur. The nascent Mi-Go that has grown from Dulcie’s remains and the others forming inside the dog pack, will be abandoned as soon as the vehicle is ready, but they will inherit a world transformed by the missiles when they start to spread the fungal bloom across the planet.

In Conclusion...

At this point, everything is poised ready to come crashing down, either in favour of the Mi-Gos’ evil plans or to the gratification of our party of Investigators. Will the Mi-Go launch back into space? Or will it be brought down by our heroes? The party will have to gain access to the Colonel in order to oust the monstrosity which has corrupted his mind, and it’s highly likely that he will blow away the sheriff as they try and get inside his house. Of course, undead-mushroom-Dulcie might well gloat telepathically at anyone confronting her, revealing some of the insidious plan which is afoot.

The party needs to work out a plan to defeat the fungus. Those will Chemical or Biological nous might be able to commandeer a laboratory and create some industrial strength fungicide. Common fungicides are typically high in sulphur, at 0.5% concentrations for the more powerful liquid fungicides, while powdered forms tend to be 90% sulphur (and therefore very poisonous). Professional aviaries - for chickens or canary breeders and the like - often have stores of food-quality powdered sulphur to prevent fungal outbreaks amongst their birds. (Note that messing about with raw sulphur will turn silver black, requiring heavy polishing to reverse; so if your characters have a penchant for silver jewellery, are carrying photographic plates, or have magical accoutrements that might be affected, take this into account.) Naturally-occurring anti-fungal agents are oregano, rosemary, or jojoba oil, citronella, powdered kelp (often added to cattle feed) and milk. Failing this, good old-fashioned fire is a tried and trustworthy ally and a scorched earth policy might just be the way to go.

Critical to succeeding in this story, is the destruction of the ancillary missiles surrounding the monkey puzzle tree. If these are allowed to develop and launch, the incident will replay itself in six other locations across the globe, then 36 more locations after that, and so on. Of course, there won’t be any monkey puzzle trees in these subsequent events, but no doubt the spores will invade and mutate many other life-forms which they will encounter, twisting them towards their own insidious ends...