What Went Wrong in the Stygian Garden: Plant Life
In the Atrium there are flowers which induce hallucianations. When the characters began suffering the effects, their players immediately pinpointed the cause and – rather stereotypically – set everything on fire.
In hindsight, the flowers were an obvious target; they had been described in more detail than other plant-life. So I began including some form of vegetation in every scene description thereafter.
Tables to the Rescue
These were created after that session; Roll for the shape and one or more of the other details at your discretion, then contextualize.
Shape | Color | Odor | Feature | |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | moss | green | ammonia | dead and decaying |
2 | fern | brown | minty | fruit-bearing (50% edible) |
3 | herb/grass | yellow | fetid | insect-infested |
4 | shrub/bush | white | sweet | allergenic |
5 | tree | red | fresh | flowering |
6 | fungus | blue | sulfur | petrified |
Prep Will Set You Free
I pregenerated several in advance of the next session and just used them in order rolled. These paired well with the encounter matrix. For example, a specific scene I narrated was:
In a soft patch of earth, there are deep boot prints. They head to the southwest between two tall bushes with deep red leaves.
- two tall bushes with deep red leaves
- bed of moss with tiny white flowers
- flat oval stone with fossilized leaf imprints
- white-leafed hedgerow with dark, inedible, berries
- blue-splotched toadstools growing inside a ring of stones
- frilly red-and-brown moss climbing a fallen pillar
- several small trees with unripe citrus fruit
- long yellow grasses that smell of brimstone when stepped on
- flowering tree with visible pollen floating around, triggers sneezing
- sickly bush with a few brown leaves and a visible hornets nest
- small field of reddish grass
- old tree with broad leaves, cracked in twain and leaking ammonia-like sap
- fetid-smelling mushrooms growing out of a mud puddle
- minty herbs in a raised bed
- long vine of yellow gourds
- petrified logs in a triangle around a single small tree
- brown moss being eaten by several large slugs, each longer than your hand
- sweet-smelling but non-descript brownish flowers
- single very large and greenish mushroom, a full arm-span across
- waist-high grass with fat seed-pods spliting open