At the New York Society of Play, we have a party of players ages 12-14. They were hunting down an ancient gem dragon in the jungles of Katashaka and made camp for a long rest. On this rest, they decided somewhat impulsively to not have anyone take watch. They placed their bedrolls on the jungle floor, decided not to light a fire because it would attract enemies, and fell asleep.
“Your move, DM.” they seemed to say.
“Game on.” I replied with a silent smile.
Rather than just throw a combat encounter their way I decided to roll on a d100 list of random jungle encounters. The encounter read: You find a strange length of neatly coiled rope on the jungle floor. I figured I could work with that!
As the party woke up they looked around to see five stacks of neatly coiled rope stacked around them perfectly like points on a star. The eldritch knight, Oleck, cast a Detect Magic spell on the ropes only to find they were completely non-magical. They decided to look for tracks or clues.
A group survival check uncovered a strange scent in the distance. They followed this scent a short distance from their camp to discover a small sentient mushroom village. Two-to-six inch tall, robed, sentient fungus could be seen going about their day-to-day business.
“The sleeping gods have arrived!” one diminutive fungus villager shouted to his fellow townsfolk while pointing at the adventurers. The village of mushrooms began bowing to the party. The eldritch knight, still under the effects of detect magic, could tell that one of these mushrooms had some latent magical abilities.
“Cool! I’ve never been a god before!” Oleck gleefully commented as he walked towards the mushroom worshipers. “I walk right up to the mushroom with magical abilities and tell him he is the new high priest of my religion. I ask his name.”
“I…I am honored, oh, great one! My name is Persnickety!” he replied.
The dragonborn paladin, Padorim, became a bit suspicious and decided to use their feature to detect good and evil. The party was a little bit nervous to discover that this was the most evil presence that Padorim had ever felt. The party had already gone toe to toe against devils and demons, and their level of evil was completely dwarfed by this tiny mushroom worshiper.
The party decided to continue on with their quest and hoped that they didn’t just cause an apocalyptic butterfly effect. As the session ended we cut to a quick cinematic sound of evil laughter echoing through the jungle that became louder, crazier, and more evil with each breath. We saw Persnickety’s eyes glowing through the jungle brush, pure white at first and then a sudden shift to dark red.