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. 

Stapp and Borey

Ethan Stapp and Elinor Borey were the perfect couple. Charming. Elegant. They never fought, yet never gave the impression that one or the other was dominating the relationship. They were so perfect that it didn't seem humanly possible - and in a sense, it wasn't.

Stapp and Borey were telepathic agents of the Company, unflinchingly loyal and extraordinarily capable. Elinor worked as a frontline agent, reading the minds of enemy agents without their ever being aware of it. Ethan was a psychic interrogator, adept at cracking through psychic defenses and purloining secrets without damaging to the subject's conscious mind - leaving the enemy agent ideal for turning. In the course of their service, they provided untold services to the Company. But the relationship they struck up after they were both assigned to the Criswell Affair had the potential to be the greatest service either would provide

Most telepaths avoid each other because they find the experience of being scanned disorienting and uncomfortable - the feedback loop of reading your own thoughts at one remove can even cause neural damage or psychic burnout. Ethan and Elinor didn't experience that feedback, or if they did, they didn't find it at all painful. That they were both powerful and well-disciplined may have helped; likewise their mutual attraction. They were delighted by each other - Elinor told other agents she had never felt anything like the comfort she felt with Ethan, and Ethan presumably felt the same, though he wasn't the type to declare it. Their relationship led to a pregnancy, and the Company watched with interest - their daughter would provide unmatchable insight into the genetic basis for psi, as well as being (it was hoped) a powerful psychic in her own right.

In a burst of excess enthusiasm, one researcher who had become friendly with and fascinated by the couple, Professor Heisler, proposed trials to determine the nature of Ethan and Elinor's "mutuality", and whether it could be induced in other telepaths. Despite his protestations that he was merely trying to help the Company's perpetually lonely mind-readers, the proposal was interpreted, and savaged, as the first step towards a psychic breeding program. The usual rumours suggest that Heisler wasn't given stick for suggesting a eugenics program, but for making the idea public.

Regardless, the Company's idyllic scheme was shattered yesterday. Stapp and Borey were found dead in their apartment following a report of gunfire at 3 AM. Stapp was shot in the chest twice at point-blank range and died almost instantly; Borey was found holding a pistol matched to the bullets that killed Stapp, without a mark on her. Telepaths are usually extremely pacifistic, as they experience pain they inflict almost as if it were their own: Current thinking is that the pair's telepathic link was so strong that Stapp's death killed Borey as well. Postcognition confirmed that, nevertheless, she shot him without warning. The question now on everyone's mind is, why? Even if she hadn't known that the telepathic link would kill her, what could have driven her to such an act - and how could she have hidden her intent from him? The possibility of outside psi-manipulation has been advanced, but the Company's continuing faith in Borey makes them doubt it - As does their unwillingness to believe that any rival has a dominator that powerful.

("The Company" here refers to any clandestine paranormal organization - May combine this scenario w/ the Wizard previously mentioned, or leave it as is. Need to fill out details - the couple's friends, their relationship w/ Professor Heisler, whodunnit and how.)

Current possibilities: A psi virus of unusual power, dormant in Borey for months, finally comes out and forces self-destruction (variant: First wave of a general burst of insanity among psis - Stapp and Borey affected earlier because their shared consciousness is doubly vulnerable); Stapp was a double agent, hiding it behind a mental partition, Borey killed him as much out of betrayal as loyalty to the Co.; Both killed and framed with fake psi signatures to allow enemies (or even the Company itself, if we want to get proper trust-no-one) to steal the foetus.