Green Apocalypses

[Yora]

I am working on a campaign in which the entire world is covered in a forest that grows back faster than land can be cleared and what little civilization exists consists of small strongholds scattered throughout the wilderness. It's a fantasy world where supernatural forces are at work, but I think that doesn't make much of a difference and you could just as well have that in a cosmic horror or modern post-apocalypse setting. The key idea is that the forces of nature are indifferent to what happens to humans and simply do their things while people are getting underfoot. In a past campaign I had tried to approach this general idea as a survivial game with supply management and wilderness navigation, but that turned out not much fun. Instead I moved on to focus more on encounters and scenes, where the players run into a creature or phenomenon and have to deal with it.

However, I don't have a lot of ideas to work with yet, and I am always looking for more. Nature themed creatures are always cool, but I am particularly looking into strange and dangerous plants and fungi, or even bacteria if you have any cool ideas there.

My intention is to make it feel that being in the forest is very dangerous, and not just because of predatory beasts that eat people. Plants and plant spirits are ruling the world, and humans are just little critters crawling between their roots.

One idea that I find very evocative is very unpredictable and extreme weather. Storms that come out of nowhere, blizards with massive snowfall, rapid floods, and really heavy fog. Not necessarily life threatening to PCs in themselves, but setting the stage for intense encounters with beasts that come out to hunt during such events.

[Eldan]

Have you seen Nausicäa of the valley of the wind, or preferably read the manga? I'd say that's the classical go-to for dangerous plants, fungi and insects in a post-apocalypse setting.

[Yora]

No, but I'm a huge fan of Princess Mononoke. One of the primary inspirations for the campaign. Planned on watching it some day for a good while now.

[Seto]

Have you seen the Miyazaki movies? The first thing that sprang to mind when reading this is: so basically, it's a reverse Princess Mononoke where Princess Eboshi is the conquered instead of the conqueror. I know that movie mostly has giant animals, but it casts them as spirits, which is interesting. Plus the Deer-God is the force driving the forest made manifest, and for atmosphere the little white fey-like spirits are pretty cool.

Whereas Mononoke provides some Fey and Animal inspiration, Nausicaa goes the Vermin and Plant route: it's about the expansion of a toxic forest in a post-apocalyptic setting, basically. It is filled with alien bugs and expands via invasive spores, sort of like a disease. Whenever someone or something comes back from the forest, or if simply the wind blows too strongly, it risks bringing spores that spread insanely fast, and then boom! The next morning, you wake up among "infected" trees.
If you want the players to fight the spread of the forest, the board game Pandemic could provide some cool mechanical inspiration.

Edit: oh well, double-ninjaed :P

[Eldan]

No, but I'm a huge fan of Princess Mononoke. One of the primary inspirations for the campaign. Planned on watching it some day for a good while now.

It's probably worth it to find the Manga, too. The movie just kinda stops halfway in without finishing the story. It is my favourite Miyazaki movie, though.

[Yora]

We're all on the same page, that's good.

I was quite impressed by the mutants in the Metro 2033 game. They actually behave like animals in most situations and don't all immediately beeline to you and bit until they are dead.

There's big rodents that silently dart out of their holes while you're not looking to bite you in the legs and immediately run away when they get hit.

There's wof-hyena things that often sit on heaps of rubble as sentries that will call the whole pack to them when they spot you. You frequently encounter packs running through open spaces and when they have been spooked by larger predators they will just run right past you.

And big gorilla mutants that try to intimmidate you but won't attack while you're looking at them.

And then there's giant spiders that can't stand exposure to bright light.

Hard to do these things in something like D&D, but I think in Fate or Apocalypse World it should work reasonably well. I think the general idea is beasts that threaten to attack you but won't do so until specific circumstances are met. And they have to be dangerous enough so that you really don't want to fight them. Being safe while looking at a creature seems easy enough, but what if you want to climb a ladder or clear the rubble blocking a door? Then you have to start thinking of alternative approaches. There's a lot of exciting play with trying out methods to distract or chase them away without making them attack. Or you could simply wait for them to move on while you're already under some time restriction.

But I think the basic concept of "monster that won't attack until you set it off" should work in any game.

[Khedrac]

I would suggest reading Midworld by Alan Dean Foster (at which point I would also feel very sorry for your players).

Something I caught recently on a TV documentary - trees (and other plants) communicate via the fungi in the soil, so if a tree starts getting attacked in one particular way, the other trees will start to enact defences against that attack (release certain chemicals, close flowers or leaves etc.).

[Eldan]

Oooh, seconding Midworld. It's really good, too. Also, while not often officially named, clearly a major inspiration for Cameron's Avatar, except actually good?

[VoxRationis]

I haven't read Midworld, but I did read the Flinx book where Foster revisited that planet. Yeah, that would be a steep learning curve for your players.

You're probably aware of this, but keep in mind such fungi as Cordyceps. In real life, such horrors only affect insect life, but it's not implausible that they could affect mammals.

The book Uprooted, by Naomi Novik, focuses on a very malevolent spirit controlling the forest nearby which the main character lives. Its magical influence spreads easily, and like a disease, and there are few, if any, ways to fight it save to kill the infected and burn the bodies. The spirit, though sometimes regarded as an unthinking force of nature, actually despises humans and comes up with very long-running, carefully crafted plans to kill humans and destroy their works, so it is trying to bring about a green apocalypse.

[Yora]

Chestnuts poison the topsoil above their roots, preventing anything from growing there.

And eucalyptus secrets a mist of flamable oil to cover the gras and shrubs around their trunks to make them easier to ignite. Short shrub fires don't do any real damage to tree trunks or green canopies.

There's probably a couple of fun things you can do with plants that are dangerous to just get close to. The sap of giant hogweed undergoes a chemical reaction when exposed to sunlight that can cause severe burns just by touching it. And then there's henbane that is so toxic that just breathing the air next to it can make people faint.

Another plant that I find really interesting is blackberries, and brambles in general. These things are like flexible barbed wire. The vines aren't that tough, but cutting a path through a big patch would take hours, possibly even days. It makes for very efficient barriers.

[VoxRationis]

Chestnuts poison the topsoil above their roots, preventing anything from growing there.

And eucalyptus secrets a mist of flamable oil to cover the gras and shrubs around their trunks to make them easier to ignite. Short shrub fires don't do any real damage to tree trunks or green canopies.

There's probably a couple of fun things you can do with plants that are dangerous to just get close to. The sap of giant hogweed undergoes a chemical reaction when exposed to sunlight that can cause severe burns just by touching it. And then there's henbane that is so toxic that just breathing the air next to it can make people faint.

Another plant that I find really interesting is blackberries, and brambles in general. These things are like flexible barbed wire. The vines aren't that tough, but cutting a path through a big patch would take hours, possibly even days. It makes for very efficient barriers.

No kidding. I grew up in Oregon. Blackberries are vicious. It is fortunate that they do not have any of the other defenses plants can have, since the main way to clear them out is to come at them with a heavy tool, and that usually leaves the clearer covered in scratches.

[Yora]

Thinking of poisonous plants I was reminded of algae. Red and blue algea often produce pretty nasty toxins. Real ones require you to either drink it or to eat contaminated fish to cause serious harm to humans. But its perfectly feasible to imagine algea that can harm you just by falling into the water. Which makes using bridges and boats way more exciting.
And algae blooms can cover massive amounts of water, which can look very visibily intimidating.

At work we have a small pond for runoff water from the roses we grow. The concentration of fertilizer in that thing is probably way off the scale and in summer you don't just get a green color but a pretty substential layer of green goo floating on the top. Rowing a boat through that stuff probably wouldn't make a lot of players feel very happy.
Not pictured: Land.

[Eldan]

No kidding. I grew up in Oregon. Blackberries are vicious. It is fortunate that they do not have any of the other defenses plants can have, since the main way to clear them out is to come at them with a heavy tool, and that usually leaves the clearer covered in scratches.

Yeah. I did that as a summer job. Leather gloves to the elbows, rubber boots, heavy jackets, pruning shears and mattocks. And the thorns would still go through leather gloves ever so often.

Edit: allelopathy/allotoxicty is quite common. For other trees that do it: Eucalyptus (the leaf litter, not just the oil) black walnut. Also, cultivated rice. The invasive Garlic Mustard is interesting too, it poisons mycorrhizal fungi (fungi which grow with or even into plant roots), which most plants need to live.

[Eldan]

Oh, and algal blooms can get more extreme than that. THis is Lake Erie from orbit in 2013:

Spoiler: Big Picture

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Or up close:

Spoiler: Big picture

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[Khedrac]

You're probably aware of this, but keep in mind such fungi as Cordyceps. In real life, such horrors only affect insect life, but it's not implausible that they could affect mammals.

In D&D it's called a Yellow Musk Creeper.

[LibraryOgre]

You might also look at Shadowrun, and things to do with Amazonia.

[stack]

The 3pp pathfinder Skybourne campaign setting is set after a green apocalypse. Woodfaring adventures would be the most relevant book.

Basicslly, everyone who could took off to flying or floating cities or live in extreme environments (desert, ice, high mountains).

[Mechalich]

I am working on a campaign in which the entire world is covered in a forest that grows back faster than land can be cleared

The trick here is that land can be cleared by fire which tends to render most defenses the forest has irrelevant, especially if you're willing to burn multiple times in succession - you can clear the freaking Amazon that way (takes about 4 sustained burns). Doing so if not necessarily going to leave any fertile land behind and may in fact produce a wasteland, but if the forest is super dangerous, surrounding your settlement with a burned-out wasteland is almost certainly preferable.

As a result, for this to work you need some means of fire suppression. Possibly this can be simply having your world being extremely wet - there are places on Earth where it rains all the time - but then you have rain world and not forest world. So you're probably looking at a supernatural means of fire suppression. One method might be to have gaseous organisms or spirits that normally live in the atmosphere but can descend lower at need. If they have bodies composed of inert gases they can choke out fires.

[Yora]

Magic. It's a fantasy world.

[Eldan]

That link provides some extremely great pictures, though. I mean, those bridges. And those rain hats. Gorgeous.

[gkathellar]

Have you seen Nausicäa of the valley of the wind, or preferably read the manga? I'd say that's the classical go-to for dangerous plants, fungi and insects in a post-apocalypse setting.

Emphasis mine. I'll second this - while the film just sort of vaguely deals with "war is bad" and "plants are cool," the manga presents a forest hostile to most life as a complete ecosystem and uses it to articulate a lengthy meditation on what makes life valuable, and how one form of life can be evaluated relative to another. It also has the best telepathic duels I've ever seen in fiction.

The funny thing is that Miyazaki started writing the comic so that he could do the movie, back before he had the credibility to do whatever he wanted, but it ended up vastly outgrowing the film.

[Yora]

there are places on Earth where it rains all the time

There's also the place that has lightning all the time.

And there's a mountain in central Germany that is only a thousand meters high but still has snow for eight or nine months of the year, with 300 days of fog. And it sits next to a plain where the next mountain to the east is in the Urals on the border to Asia. It's no wonder that in German folklore it's the place where the Devil hosts an international Witch convention on All Hallow's Eve.

Though as freakish weather goes, Mount Washington in New Hampshire seems to be even worse.

Places with permanent supernatural weather always strike me as really evocative. Not really plant based, but a really cruel and unforgiving form of nature.

[Aneurin]

You might want to take a look at Hothouse by Brian Aldiss. It's not exactly what you're after - it's so far in the future of the Earth that humans are unrecognizable as such, the Earth is tidelocked so one hemisphere is eternal day and the other eternal night - but it's very much a plants-now-rule-the-world deal, and it's got some interesting ideas about relationships between plants and humans, particularly symbiotic ones (positive and negative).

It's a bit odd in places but some of the ideas are really fun - the Earth and moon being connected by the webs of giant space-faring spider-like plants falling neatly into both 'odd' and 'awesome'.

[AceOfFools]

My first thought about reading this was: "That's a lot of food for plant-eating creatures."

You could have locus swarms picking areas dry every couple of days. Which means locus eating animals would have plenty to eat, and so on, until the absurd density of predators used in adventure games actually makes sense.

Incredibly dense fawna everywhere making maintaining agriculturally useful crops a serious and sustained challenge.

It also means there could be tremendous "waste" production, resulting in usually fast soil growth, more quickly burying settlements unable to do continuous maintenance, and further punishing long-term structure building.

...is that how soil production works?

[gkathellar]

My first thought about reading this was: "That's a lot of food for plant-eating creatures."

You could have locus swarms picking areas dry every couple of days. Which means locus eating animals would have plenty to eat, and so on, until the absurd density of predators used in adventure games actually makes sense.

Incredibly dense fawna everywhere making maintaining agriculturally useful crops a serious and sustained challenge.

It also means there could be tremendous "waste" production, resulting in usually fast soil growth, more quickly burying settlements unable to do continuous maintenance, and further punishing long-term structure building.

...is that how soil production works?

Somewhat. A Mayan ruin tour guide explained to me that “buried in the jungle” doesn’t just mean, “covered in plants.” It means that when those plants die, they turn into dirt, and then more plants grow in that dirt, and soon the structure is buried much more literally. The denser the ecosystem, the faster it’ll bury stuff.

[Yora]

I had not considered that. And I am actually learning about soil cycles professionally and plan to study that stuff next year. Dead wood is mostly carbon and nitrogen, which both come from the air, while nutrients get passed down from dead rotting plants to new growing plants. In theory, as long as there's carbon in the air, the sun keeps shining, and rain keeps falling, the cycle can continue forever. In practice it doesn't because of errosion, but in specific places with favorable conditions, whole buildings getting burried sounds completely reasonable.

Soil buildup, especially in a supernaturally fast growing forest, is a great way to create dungeons. Something build from big stone blocks should remain pretty stable even when burried and with lots of soil on the roofs. And if a roof collapses, you get trees growing inside buildings pretty soon as well.

[LibraryOgre]

My first thought about reading this was: "That's a lot of food for plant-eating creatures."

You could have locus swarms picking areas dry every couple of days. Which means locus eating animals would have plenty to eat, and so on, until the absurd density of predators used in adventure games actually makes sense.

Incredibly dense fawna everywhere making maintaining agriculturally useful crops a serious and sustained challenge.

It also means there could be tremendous "waste" production, resulting in usually fast soil growth, more quickly burying settlements unable to do continuous maintenance, and further punishing long-term structure building.

...is that how soil production works?

I have to say, I really like the "swarms of locusts that briefly denude an area". Depending on the magic system involved, you might even have people taking advantage of this... summoning swarms of locusts to hold the jungle at bay for a while, or summoning flocks of birds to consume the locusts.

[Mr Beer]

Deathworld I by Harry Harrison is mainly set on a planet whose biosphere is trying to rid itself of those irritating humans. It's not exactly what you are talking about but there are numerous well described nasty animal, plant and fungal attacks. I would definitely rip this off.

Also, being Harry Harrison, it's an easy and entertaining read.

You can pick up a copy from Project Gutenberg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathworld

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28346

[Erloas]

Chestnuts poison the topsoil above their roots, preventing anything from growing there.

And eucalyptus secrets a mist of flamable oil to cover the gras and shrubs around their trunks to make them easier to ignite. Short shrub fires don't do any real damage to tree trunks or green canopies.

There's probably a couple of fun things you can do with plants that are dangerous to just get close to. The sap of giant hogweed undergoes a chemical reaction when exposed to sunlight that can cause severe burns just by touching it. And then there's henbane that is so toxic that just breathing the air next to it can make people faint.

Another plant that I find really interesting is blackberries, and brambles in general. These things are like flexible barbed wire. The vines aren't that tough, but cutting a path through a big patch would take hours, possibly even days. It makes for very efficient barriers.

Fungi, and their spores are another common one, and some of those can be very powerful, both hallucinogenic and just straight up death.

Pine trees keep other plants from growing around them by acidifying the ground with their needles.

Caffeine is in many plants as an insecticide, we just don't get enough to kill us (the caffeine buzz is enough to fry tiny insect brains).

Carnivorous plants are pretty well covered in fantasy, but the pitcher plants would make great traps.

And of course the largest living thing on the plant is a 100 acre aspen forest (single root system) in Utah, that idea could be played with.

[Yora]

I just had the idea of a big tree that makes people sleepy and anyone who falls asleep in contact with its trunk slowly transforms into part of its bark.

For extra weirdness, anyone who can communicate with spirits can try to get at the memories of anyone who's been absorbed. Some tribes and cults might even do it deliberately with their dying leaders and sages.