Obliviax and Wonder Overload

Less is more. Consider our creaky old friend¹ Dungeons & Dragons. High fantasy is a genre where anything can happen, and then everything does and it turns out it's all pretty dull. I've been saying for years that Yahtzee Croshaw nailed it when he bitched about the very concept of a generic fantasy setting, and D&D is the purest essence of that trope - A whole galaxy of interchangeable settings with the same kitchen-sink cast of races, magics, items, and Eternal Ren Faire politics and technology². Hell, some of them even share gods. There are some exceptions, and these are often considered the best of the breed, but even the most wackity-ass worlds still carry over a lot of the generic baggage of fantasy. There are so many of the old marvels to be accounted for before we can even get to the new stuff.

Of course, my smugness on this matter isn't completely justified - I love Over the Edge, and it has this exact kind of kitchen-sink "everything is true" arrangement, but even more so because it includes the modern world and all its postmodern mythologies; ditto Conspiracy X, which covers X-Files knockoff ground from Greys to wizards to Atlanteans to werewolves to psi, albeit with a pretty good rationale tying it all together (which I'll spoil in a later W.I.L. post). But for all that I enjoy those games, I admit that their overstuffed worlds miss out on the subtleties of simpler premises: If everything's possible, nothing is interesting, and other such cliches. As an example of what I'm on about, I'll to steal a random³ monster from D&D and extrapolate the changes its could ring on an otherwise mundane world.

Very upset about something.

Obliviax is an "evil⁴ black moss" that absorbs memories, and, if eaten, can potentially give those memories to the eater (or just make them sick as dogs). In D&D, it's a minor annoyance, yet another wad of hit points with a boogah-boogah face and an unusual power which amounts to stealing spells from wizards and confusing everyone else for a few hours. If attacked, it sprouts a little "mossling" man to cast stolen spells. Just another day in the dungeon. Meanwhile, in a world less demon-haunted, where miracles and magics aren't a dime a dozen, this shit is crazy.

Let's say we dump the bit about forming the spellcasting mossling, which is legitimately stupid and really just D&D fulfilling its obligation to provide a Big Dumb Fight Scene at any opportunity. What we have here is a single organism which changes the world in a number of major ways:

• Psionic powers are real. This is big, but done. The capacity to alter the world with nothing but your will and rubber face is the cornerstone of a lot of existent settings. A thought here is that perhaps prolonged exposure to obliviax's telepathy can trigger psi abilities in humans: Cue hideous government experiments, or eager beavers forgetting weeks at a time trying to unlock their inner potential. Certainly memory moss is going to be at front and centre of psi research.
• ...and plants can have them. And suddenly we've taken a hard left into Batshit County. To quote Hermes Conrad, "That just raises further questions!". Our normal understanding of telepathy is kind of dependent on the critter in question having an actual brain and intelligence, usually quite a lot (human level or better⁵). A psychic plant leads to a questioning of our whole concept of will and intelligence, to say the least. And where there's one psychic plant, there are most likely more. Can they communicate with one another? Do they form a hive mind⁶? Greenpeace is going to go apeshit.
• Memories can be stolen. And then there's this. Why would a plant evolve the capacity to steal memories at all (robbed as we are of the "crazed wizard" all-purpose explanation)? That's a hell of a long way to go for self-defense that could be had just as easily by becoming poisonous. Maybe the brainwave patterns of animals are a part of the moss's diet or reproduction cycle - It's a fundamental assumption of any world with psi that psionic energies are just that, energies, so it's probable that obliviax draws nourishment from them, perhaps even emitting a low-level psychic lure to draw in prey.
• Ahem. Memories can be stolen. "Basic" obliviax as described above just drains your memories of the last 24 hours, which is not going to be a major concern for your typical D&D party, aside from throwing off the goblins-slaughtered count. Surely, there are plenty of other strains of obliviax - ones which take weeks, or hours, or maybe even years before being satisfied. Perhaps there are strains that feed on your most important memories, or your least important, or your name - If there aren't, our scientists are doubtless working day and night to create the most flexible arsenal of memory-erasing mosses possible, for their dire and inscrutable purposes. Or maybe to help treat victims of horrible trauma. Mad science doesn't have to equal evil science, you know.
• Memories can be stolen. And of course, like any means of memory-editing, this just reeks of potential Prisoner-style mindfuckery: Stealing memories and force-feeding new ones, the whole brainhacking thing. People could even sell their memories, like a biopunk Strange Days. It'd be fun if the PCs investigate their couldn't-think-of-a-back-story missing time and, instead of finding Greys or government conspiracy, just find a gigantic naturally-occurring obliviax patch out in the woods. And then get zapped, forget it, and wander off confused.

And all this from one filler entry in Monster Manual II, with a name like a hastily-conceived fake drug⁷. I might still be on a continuity kick from yesterday, but this was fun. I think I'll start another series of posts along these lines, settings based on single, obscure D&D monsters as the sole source of Weird in the world. Even if it means having to eventually write up Flumphworld.

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1. "Friend" here in the sense of a guy you knew back in elementary school who has since turned into a total knob.
2. A big part of this is that it means characters from one world or campaign can be easily ported to another, which is a double-edged sword in a hobby where everyone has at least read stories of campaigns completely destroyed by such transfer PCs. Despite this, with the ascendancy of the "running encounters at the game store" model of 4E (and WotC's new, staggeringly evil plan of actually selling  fucking booster packs of power cards to play in said encounters) the need to balance out everyone will make sure that this interchangeability isn't going anywhere.
3. Heyyyy Stewart!
4. Yeah, evil moss. Neutral evil, to be precise. Because a moss with an understanding of order and chaos would just be silly 
5. This is as good a chance as any to mention the Dogpocalypse setting I conceived in the old /tg/ days, in which testing on animal psi led to a Collie name Sandra getting scared and telekinetically nuking Salt Lake City. 
6. Like an even-more-bizarre version of Kult's Pazuzu, which is the collective consciousness of all insect life on Earth: A truly alien, ahuman consciousness which is constantly consuming itself. Pazuzu is one of those ideas (of which there are many in Kult) that you could build an entire campaign world around (with a tip of the hat to Philip K. Dick's "Expendable"), but in that game's incredibly overcrowded cosmology, it's strictly a third-string threat at best.
7. Actually, some gomer apparently decided to name his band that as well. Since it's an 80s fantasy metal band, I doubt that the D&D connection is a coincidence.