Monday, June 20, 2011

Monster-Based Campaign Design: The Fungal Tombs


Any potential players of mine, stop reading now! Spoilers below.

Now that that's out of the way...

I've started work on the first dungeon for my monster-inspired campaign setting: the Fungal Tombs. I've got about 30 rooms mapped out, about a quarter of those keys, and many of those left to actually put down on paper floating around my head.

The Fungal Tombs are loosely based off of James Raggi's Death Frost Doom and inspired by an old post done by Michael Curtis from the Knights and Knaves Alehouse forum considering fungal mummies. How much more awesome does it get, right?

The basic gist of the the tombs are that a group of chaotic cultists once disguised one of their strongholds as a shrine to Artemis. They specialized in the cremation of bodies after death, but instead of cremating the bodies, the cult kept them below in the catacombs, slowly transforming them into fungal mummies. When the catacombs filled up, the cultists destroyed the village and likewise killed themselves within the catacombs, leaving the mummies to fully mature and themselves to immortalize as the greatest of their specimens. The cult left the tomb moderately filled with treasure, to encourage adventurers to wander into the bygone temple and one day awaken the spongy flesh that has waited for decades below the ruined temple.

Fungal Mummy

Armor Class: 3
Hit Dice: 5
Move: 60' (20')
Attack: 1 touch
Damage: 1d12
No. Appearing: 2-8 (50-500)
Save As: Fighter 5
Moral: 12
Treasure Type: D
Alignment: Chaotic

After decades of transformation, the flesh of a fungal mummy has become a spongy, greenish-fungoid mass. The usual mummy wrappings are covered in vines and poisonous mushrooms--which have a 1 in 6 chance to explode in a mist of violet spores, engulfing all within 10' whenever the mummy is hit. Creatures caught in the spores must make a saving throw versus poison or fall dangerously ill with hypnotic flashes, overcome by the effects of confusion, as per the magic-user spell, for 1d6 melee round. Furthermore, the spores are extremely convulsive and will completely ingrate if there is a torch within the cloud, sending fiery blast out to a 25' radius for 2d6 points of damage.

The fungal flesh renders the mummy immune to the attacks of blunt weapons that rely on impact rather than the splitting of flesh to deal damage, such as maces and flails. They are, however, extremely susceptible to fire. Burning oil or fire-based spells which cause damage deal an additional 1d6 points to fungal mummies. Torches can be used to set a mummy afire, dealing 1d6 points of damage the first round, and 1d4 points of damage each subsequent rounds until a 1 is rolled for damage. Fungal Mummies can be turned my Lawful clerics as they do normal mummies.

Any creature killed by a fungal mummy will rise as a fungal mummy in 2-12 years until the body is completely burned to ash or left in a climate nearly complete devoid of moisture.

Greater Fungal Mummies have 7 hit dice, save as level 7 clerics, and attack twice each round per 1-10 points of damage with each attack. Their spores instead send out a lethal poison (save versus poison or die) and cause confusion on a failed saving throw. Greater Fungal Mummies can likewise be turned by lawful clerics, but as vampires rather than mummies.

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