"Holiday" Proposal Version 2

-------------------------------------------"Holiday" Version 2

 

Ponies invited: Able Tome, Liven, Hardboil, Green Light, Ruby McCoal.

NPC: Mysterious Cloaked Unicorn

 

Summary: Spark Chaser finds a field in the woods central to the town. The field appears to be existing in full summertime. He decides to invite those friends who were there to save him from his nightmares for a picnic in this strange zone of summer. There they find a strange fungus as it originally was, and its hallucinogenic effect gives the adventurers a perfect holiday.

 

"Holiday" is a set-up for "Starcrossed", and provides the beginnings of an explanation for the G-Infection enemies we've encountered in "Tower Defense". These enemies will be a recurring challenge, and are available to all GM's to use, given they keep to the established guidelines for their origin and behavior. The primary portion of this SOL quest involves a picnic in the field. In the center of the field is a fungus called a "Holiday Horn", or Orphiocordyceps Communus. It appears to be a green changeling horn, and the spores that it gives off have a hallucinogenic effect that draws from a psychic networking of the spores.

 

To put it simply, it causes the ponies who enter the field to have a shared hallucination. They see each other in their original human form, and get to spend the day as they once were. This allows for the players to develop their characters and backstory. (They are not forced to provide an accurate image, but are asked to give AN image for us to see as they were. Therefore, those uncomfortable telling us how they look can fudge it, and it won't matter.)

 

How is this Holiday Horn important to the G-Infection? This is actually the primal form of the Infection. Long before, when Project-G began their experiments in Four Cannon, their work had an unexpected side effect. The Holiday Horn mutates, becoming a parasitic organism. It attaches to its host, and uses its networking ability to have a range-based communal intelligence. All creatures with the G-Infection on them become a parts of one mind, which grows more intelligent the more hosts are in a certain radius. Ponies are almost immune to G-Infection. They must be willing in order to be infected. It is important to note that the Holiday Horn no longer exists in the modern day. It has all mutated into G-Infection (Classification: Ophiocordyceps Gygax).

 

At the end of the adventure, the Horn bursts open and dies. Underneath it lies a scroll in a case. It describes the original Orphiocordyceps Communus, and how it operates. The scroll is signed with the three stars in a vortex symbol we saw on the empty scroll case in Mist Veil, which we will find in "Starcrossed" to be Star Swirl's.

 

Version two discards the time regression used in the original, instead using the sole live sample and a hidden scroll to describe it.