Wicker Valley, episode 32: Big Magic

I got to work on the book with Arthur, but it wasn't long before another black car, like the one Great Aunt Gertie showed up in, pulled up next to the van and a bunch of people got out. Arthur assured me it was fine and went away with them. I was starting to get a handle on what we needed to do to close the portal, when I got a text from Michael telling me to bring the water feature.

I teleported in to find him fighting an absolutely massive spider, put down the water feature, and went right in with my claws. It didn't like that, and made a horrible screeching noise, which I ignored, then sank a fang into my shoulder, which was harder to ignore. Michael sliced some legs off it, which separated it from me, and then I'm not sure what happened as Elizabeth put up a wall of ice around me and Michael. I suggested to him that we should start trolling Elizabeth, but I didn't have any good ideas for how to do that.

Anyway, by the time I got out of the ice wall, the spiders had disappeared. Outside, Adam was patching up Eddie who'd had a rough time with the spiders before I arrived. Elsa added a little healing magic, and he looked a lot better.

Back at the junk yard we collected everything we needed for closing the portal. It was a mobile portal, I'd learned from the book, so first we needed to move it close to some water. Specifically, Wicker Lake, which oddly enough some people seemed to have forgotten the existence of. It was going to take three of us, and I was a bit worried about that, as that morning's curse-delaying aside, Elizabeth and me didn't have a great track record of working together, and Arthur was out of the picture. Elizabeth assessed the other three. Adam was a no-go, and Michael kept insisting he wasn't magical despite a certain amount of evidence to the contrary. But Eddie, she said, had talent.

I suggested he cover his hair, to make sure we didn't accidentally set it on fire, and helped Elizabeth set up the magic circle. Then the three of us held hands and began the chant, and soon had the portal relocated. Then it was mostly a matter of holding it open while all the various yokai were pulled back into it, although the fact that they were trying to stab us on the way past made it pretty uncomfortable.

Adam and Michael were kept busy fending things off, and Adam clearly wasn't ready to use his flamethrower again after the djinn incident. Unfortunately, Michael wasn't ready to use it at all. Fortunately being right by the lake there was plenty of water handy. Now we had to try to keep going while being bitten by spiders and that was much tougher, as we had to sit there and keep the magic going while they swarmed over us. But in the end we got there. Big spider back in the hole, the hole closed up, and nothing on fire except some of the grass nearby. Apparently Eddie was exactly what we needed to balance our magic.

Adam tried to patch up my spider wounds after that, which I wasn't keen on, and it's only because of my demonic nature that he didn't make things worse. So I took myself to the hospital, where a lot of staff were suddenly freed up as the unconscious people started waking up. Kenji got his mum back. Not his dad though. He woke up again, but the spider curse had hurt him too badly, and he died later that day.

I got another visit from Toby the definitely not a gargoyle while I was at the hospital. He told me that since I had continued to not do the thing I was supposed to be doing regarding Michael, that I was getting my armour confiscated. Which I wouldn't mind so much if whoever They are would stop being so bloody enigmatic and just tell me what I was supposed to be doing!

I got the answer that night, via a dream. Combat training. Teach him to fight with weapons other than a cricket bat. Well that I can do. I normally rely on my claws, but you don't grow up demonic without learning a few weapons along the way. The challenging part is going to be getting Michael on board. We're in a different timeline, but he's still been chosen by someone for something, and I know it's important, even if he's still in denial.

Once we were all out of hospital, we met up again and discovered that Eddie has quite a collection of interesting items from the history of Wicker Valley. We decided it was about time our town had a museum, and since there's that abandoned warehouse full of teeth and scorch marks that nobody wants, we managed to get a venue for a good price. Elizabeth still doesn't have a job, so she's going to run the place. And once we've installed the scrying map and the healing water feature, it should be very useful.

Concrete Cow 24

The problem with volunteering to make the signs to direct people to the entrance is that you then have to arrive before the start in order to put the signs up. Accordingly I arrived 20 minutes early, a new record. Soon everyone else was arriving though, and we got down to some shopping at Leisure Games. I'd been thinking of picking up Dragonbane, and there it was.

Game 1: Monster of the Week

I kicked things off with my own scenario, Who Ate All The Pies? Each time I run this it gets a little more polish, and this one was fantastic, with the three players all playing off each other, and culminating in a scene involving a gas station hot dog and a nerf gun that will take some beating. Between that and some very bloody horror, this is a really fun scenario to run, and I think it's got a few more outings in it.

Game 2: Watford Paranormal

There were a lot of fantastic options for afternoon games, and it was a tough choice, but in the end I used my golden ticket to get into Watford Paranormal, a game based on the TV show Wellington Paranormal, and using a cut down version of Public Access.

We quickly assembled our team of dubiously qualified police officers. My own PC Sweets was joined by PC Darling, CSO Turner, and Dex the PRIC. We set out to investigate a variety of vegetable related crimes, in which Sweets and Turner both managed to vault over a fence in the style of Nicholas Angel from Hot Fuzz, and Darling and Dex arrested a very aggressive onion.

Eventually we saved the world from an alien invasion, using a troupe of dancing carrots and an impromptu concert on TikTok. It all seemed to make sense at the time.

Then it was time for takeaways, and the raffle, in which my ticket was pulled first, meaning I got away with a copy of Heart.

Game 3: Escape from Dino Island

I wanted to run something relatively quick and uncomplicated in the evening, so it was time to bring out the toy dinosaurs and run a game of Escape from Dino Island. The group chose to be a group of criminals on a score, with the Kid character being the son of the Don who they all worked for. And so began another exciting journey across Dino Island, discovering and occasionally killing dinosaurs with radio collars and bar codes along the way, until they completed their mission by getting hold of some triceratops horns for the Don, made it to the radio tower, and sent a message that got picked up by International Rescue who immediately deployed Thunderbird 2. But first they had to escape the team of ninjas sent by a rival crime family, resulting in the team's engineer getting turned into three dinosaurs, the rescue of a paleontologist, and the discovery that the genetically engineered quetzalcoatlus really liked popcorn.

Post-Con

The intention was to do another Sunday get-together, but with many people unavailable, it became a much smaller outing. Nevertheless, we had a lovely visit to the National Film and Sci-Fi Museum followed by lunch at Pho.

Reflections

Just a really nice day's gaming. The only downside is that I didn't get to talk as much as I would have liked with some of the people there, due to some games running a bit long. I came home exhausted but happy.

Wicker Valley, episode 31: Big Spiders

During the house search we'd found some kind of dimensional portal, which Arthur had temporarily disabled with one of his magical wards, but we knew that wasn't going to last. Up the ladder we went into the loft, where Arthur immediately got bitten by a giant spider.

There were a lot of spiders up there, and they were big ones, with human eyes which did this thing where blinks were rippling around the attic in a kind of Mexican wave of awful. Eddie made an attempt to communicate with them, and got bitten. They didn't seem to understand either English or his polite gestures. So I pulled up a translation spell from my grimoire.

Hive minds are the absolute worst to communicate with. Voices slightly out of sync, coming from different directions - it's enough to give me a headache. I couldn't persuade them to leave, but I did get out of them that they had a queen, who was going to be out and about pretty soon, and also that we were going to be in big trouble if we didn't leave ourselves pretty quick. The others did not seem to need to be told that. I asked if they were fae, given the mention of a queen, but clearly not. They were yokai.

Outside, Eddie spotted something - an old man with a gourd shaped head, slipping away towards next door. But first we had to deal with Arthur's spider bite. Eddie and Michael had both been bitten but it didn't look too bad. Arthur looked bad. I tried laying on hands, but all I got was a bit of magical curse backlash. Which did at least tell me it was a curse.

Adam took Arthur and Eddie back to the junkyard to do some research, while Michael, Elizabeth and me followed the mysterious figure. Michael recognised it as a Nurarihyon, which he'd seen in an anime before. It had got into the neighbour's house, despite it being locked. Fortunately I could see enough through the window to teleport inside and let the others in.

We found it soon enough, leaving cracker crumbs all over the floor and heading upstairs to use all the toilet paper. I asked it if it was the kid's grandfather, just in case, but no, just another yokai. Michael distracted it, and Elizabeth and me made use of that for a magical banishing.

I tried to teleport us back to the junkyard, but must have thought of Adam at just the wrong moment, and we ended up in a heap in the back of Vanessa, which was a bit of a surprise for everyone, especially Adam.

We had the right books and gear for the kind of curse breaking magic that Arthur needed, but neither I nor Elizabeth were feeling at our best magically, so Arthur called his great aunt Gertie for some magical assistance. Gertie arrived in a chauffeur driven car, wearing a hat with a full size vulture on it, which I'm sure looked at me. I offered to assist, and frankly I nailed my part of it. Shame Gertie didn't. She got hit by even more backlash than me, getting flung across the room.

Gertie left, leaving instructions that Arthur needed to be kept close to running water. Adam made him up a camp bed in the oubliette, and I put on a disguise and teleported to the garden centre to 'borrow' a water feature. This tracked with what the research team had dug up. They had a name for the queen spider: Tsuchigumo. And being near running water was the only way we'd be able to kill it.

The next morning Arthur wasn't better, but wasn't significantly worse, so Elizabeth and me had another shot at the curse breaking. I'd really got the feel for it by now. Elizabeth found it a bit tougher, but with some help from the mystical library we managed to de-curse him enough that he was going to live long enough for us to have a shot at taking out the big spider, which was going to be the only total cure.

One thing was clear. We needed to talk to the kid again. He'd mentioned a book, and that was probably going to have all the answers we needed in it. So we went to his aunt and uncle's house again, to deliver the Switch which we'd completely failed to hand over during the previous day's excitement, and offer to take Kenji to the park for a bit. The utterly exhausted looking uncle answered the door. His wife was at work - apparently the hospital was busy with more coma cases. He was only too happy for us to take Kenji away for a bit.

Kenji wanted to play hide and seek, and I don't think we've ever had such a united chorus of "No!" before. I suggested the assault course on the adventure playground, in the hope of tiring him out a bit. Nobody was particularly keen to talk to him. How we managed to assemble six people with absolutely no skill in talking to children, I don't know. Anyway, I was forced to use my demon voice, and ended up overdoing it a bit, and now I'm Kenji's new best friend.

He told us about the book, which had belonged to his grandfather, and which he was 'given' in very much the same way as I 'borrowed' that water feature, after his death. He didn't know Japanese well enough to read it properly, but he was able to read the words out loud. So it was pretty clear that his grandfather had been a bit of an expert on yokai, and had used the book to summon them to play pranks and stuff, but Kenji had no idea what he was doing and had just opened a random portal and all sorts of awful things were coming through.

I tried to discourage him from doing things like that, saying it might be dangerous, which he argued with, saying that I wasn't dangerous. Which didn't seem to be something I should argue about, despite it being very much not true. Then he mentioned my armour, which surprised me, since I didn't think I was wearing it. I wasn't wearing it.

But we knew where the book was now, so we delivered Kenji back to his uncle who looked much better after a shower and a coffee. We reunited the kid with his Switch, and peace reigned once more.

Back at Kenji's house, Arthur used his scrying knife to take a look at the book and check for spiders. There were spiders. Spiders that looked back at him, and for a moment I thought it was all going to go a bit The Ring, but he covered the knife up quickly. I teleported in to the room, but when I looked under the bed, the book had gone. I teleported back out quick.

Another scry, and Arthur said the book was now in the under stairs cupboard, but there were a lot of spiders. This time we went in as a group, Adam bringing his shotgun, which wasn't the best idea as he accidentally shot the book and then had to explain to our police friend why he was getting reports of gunshots from Eddie's mum.

One very unpleasant spider fight later, we had the book, but we also had a massive hole in the wall where Tsuchigumo had left before we got there.

I got back in the van with Arthur, who was still feeling pretty rough, and we got to work on the book. Opening the portal was a simple matter of reading some words. Of course. Closing it was going to be a bit more involved, but we could do it. Meanwhile, the others were pursuing the spider, with instructions to call if they needed us to teleport in.

Wicker Valley, episode 30: Jack in the box

A few weeks passed peacefully in Wicker Valley. I was kept busy at the Wicker Stop, while fully expecting some kind of Christmas fairy to show up and make December very complicated, but no. We actually got through Christmas quite peacefully. No, it was January, just as I was getting to the last of the cranberry scones I'd been keeping frozen for the Whisper Sisters, when things started happening again.

Two people taken out of their house in comas, leaving a young child to be cared for by his aunt, not long after the kid's grandmother had died. Not much to go on, but it was Eddie's neighbours. He thought it was worth a look, and his instincts for this kind of thing seem pretty solid. Also Michael was acting a bit weird, which usually means something's up.

Anyway, we had two lines of inquiry - the house, and the child. It was a while since I'd done any breaking and entering, but we decided on visiting the child first. Eddie had an in with the aunt and uncle based on being neighbours, so I packed up a nice cake from the café and off we went.

It was soon apparent that while not technically demon spawn, the kid would have been right at home in my family. To be fair, his love of pranks were a little less insect themed than Rusty's, but I could see why his aunt was so stressed. Then the kid started dropping bombshells. An invisible hand buzzer, or possibly just an imaginary one that still worked. Something that came out of a jack in the box. A big spider. And something about a yolk eye, which I didn't understand but hoped Adam would.

We got around the breaking and entering by offering to pick up the kid's Nintendo Switch, which was still at his house, since Eddie would be going that way anyway, and borrowed the keys. We found the Switch easily enough, but looking for the jack in the box was trickier. Notably, the kid's room absolutely did not look like the room of the hellspawn in all but name we'd just encountered. He had to have a separate play area.

Then Adam found a demonic lantern face thing in the under stairs cupboard, and that's where things got complicated. There was a snake, and something about Michael drawing a picture of a spider with human eyes, and naturally there was the usual coin toss between attic and basement, this time settling on attic as there was no basement.

Anyway, we found the jack in the box, and apparently it's spelled 'Yokai'.

Drawing Inspiration From The Natural World: Fungi

At A Weekend With Good Friends in March 2024 I took part in a panel discussion on drawing inspiration from the natural world. While I'm no biologist, I am absolutely fascinated by nature in all it's beauty, horror and downright weirdness, and often make use of it in scenarios.

Over the course of this panel I talked quite a lot about fungi, but still had plenty more that I could say. So...

A Few Favourite Fungi

Cordyceps

Photo by Andreas Kunze

This is Cordyceps militaris, the Scarlet Caterpillarclub. A pretty innocuous fungi on the face of it, but the fun stuff is happening underground. The spores of this fungus grow on an underground moth pupa, taking over the body of the caterpillar inside and filling it with mycelium.

Chances are though, if you've heard of cordyceps before, it's Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the zombie-ant fungus. As the name suggests, rather than just attacking an immobile pupa, it goes for the live ants, infecting their brain and changing their behaviour to make them move to an area good for spore distribution. There the ant is forced to bit onto a leaf, where its mandibles lock in place. Only then is the ant allowed to die, as the fungus consumes it and produces its fruiting bodies. And there is a reason I only included a picture of the Scarlet Caterpillarclub in this article. Feel free to google your own nightmares.

Some types of cordyceps are edible, and they also play a part in traditional Chinese medicine. Googling them gets you articles about the many health benefits of cordyceps and how eating them will improve your life.

Nice try, cordyceps.

Stinkhorns

Photo by Jörg Hempel

On to something a bit more lighthearted. Stinkhorns, as their name implies, stink. Many of them also look a bit like penises, hence the Latin name of the pictured common stinkhorn, Phallus impudicus. The stinking serves a purpose. The slime on the top there is gleba, a goo containing spores. Much like a flower offering a sweet perfume to attract bees to spread their pollen, the stinkhorns use the smell of rotting meat to attract carrion eating flies who carry the gleba to new locations on their feet.

But those aren't my favourite stinkhorns. My favourite is Clathrus Archeri, commonly known as Devil's Fingers or the Octopus Stinkhorn.

Photo by Oilys

They first appear as strange white eggs. In time the red fingers start to become visible under the egg surface, until they burst out in strange shapes, covered in black slime. Of course they are stinkhorns, so that black slime is the stinking spore-filled gleba.

Stinkhorns come in all kinds of weird and wonderful shapes and forms! If you need inspiration for alien looking entities for your games, take a look at the incredible variety of stinkhorns.

Photo by Pseudopanax

Amethyst Deceiver

Fungi names are absolutely wonderful. Many of them sound like they came out of some kind of random word generator. Although when you look at a Laccaria amethystina, you can at least see where part of the name came from.

Photo by GaryGMason

Aside from the charming colour scheme though, what makes these mushrooms interesting is that under normal circumstances they are edible, but that changes if they grow in certain locations. Amethyst deceivers are a bioaccumulator of arsenic, meaning that if they grow on soil contaminated with arsenic, they become poisonous.

These mushrooms are a good reminder that conditions that seem hostile to life, often aren't. Fungi, bacteria and other microbes can exist in conditions that seem absolutely hostile to life, whether through heat, cold, pressure, or excessive quantities of arsenic.

Bleeding Tooth Fungus

But sometimes it's just fun to look at something really weird, and stinkhorns aren't the only bizarre looking fungi out there. The tooth fungi are named for the spiny protrusions that grow on the underside of their caps, but if you ever encounter Hydnellum peckii in the wild it probably won't be the teeth that get your attention.

Photo by Bernypisa

The bleeding tooth fungus, also known as strawberries and cream by people who've clearly encountered scarier strawberries than me, exudes a red liquid which contains an anticoagulant. Nobody knows how or why it does this.

It's not just a bloody face though. Like with all fungi, the fruiting body is only half the story. The bleeding tooth fungus is a mycorrhizal fungus, which means it forms a symbiotic relationship with plants. Its hyphae grow sheaths around the roots of trees, allowing it to exchange nutrients with the tree, benefitting both organisms.

Fungi In Media

There's a number of interesting works of fiction out there that make good use of fungi to bring the horror. Here's a few examples.

The Last Of Us

This video game and its TV adaptation show a terrifying future in which a mutated cordyceps fungus has infected humans, resulting in a zombie apocalypse. A BBC nature documentary provided the inspiration - you can't beat a David Attenborough show for inspiration from nature.

What Moves The Dead

In this novella, T. Kingfisher sets out to retell the story of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. The original story focuses heavily on decay, but T. Kingfisher is all too aware than in decay there is life, and fungi have a major part to play.

The X-Files

The X-Files has two episodes heavily based around fungi. Firewalker makes use of the cordyceps fungus in a manner that's far closer to the way it actually operates than the fungal zombies of The Last Of Us. And Field Trip gives us a hallucinogenic fungus that's notable not just for the hallucinations it induces, but also for the sheer size of the thing, as the creators remember that mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of the vast underground network of mycelium.

Fungi In Gaming

There's plenty going on with fungi to make use of in gaming.

First there's just the absolutely weird appearance of some of them. Need inspiration for a monster? An alien? Fungi have you covered.

Then there's the way they can affect your brain, whether that's with hallucinogenics like the liberty cap, or more directly like the zombie-ant fungus. They can change your perception of the world, or force you to act against your own nature. They are parasites that you can pick up through invisibly small spores and not even know you've got.

But let's go back to the stinkhorns. They're mimics. Lures. Imagine a fungus that gave off the scent of something delicious to humans - strawberries, perhaps - and then hid its spores in strawberry-like structures on its surface. How many of us could it infect?

Remember the extremophile nature of some fungi. Just because the PCs are in an inhospitable place like outer space, doesn't mean they aren't going to encounter life. And what might that life look like?

And finally, there's the symbiotic relationships of mycorrhizal fungi. It doesn't have to be a tree. What would it look like if a fungus formed a symbiotic relationship with an animal?

Conclusion

Fungi are fabulous. If you've only thought of them as food, poison or hallucinogens, get ready for a journey into these amazing organisms that are ready and waiting to appear in your games. Happy googling!

Photo by Jean Roulin