Giving Your Players Parasites: Fey Parasites; Ashmaker.
Special thanks to Laura Kneeshaw for letting me use her Zombie Elf as the cover art for this post. You can find more of Laura’s beautiful work HERE.
-from the Book of Wretchedness-
AS THE STARS ROT, SO FOLLOW THE FEY
Cryptosporidium Facerespodium, Allight Madness, Stellar Dasomysium, Ashmaker
It is said that after the Gargant fell, after the Day of the Burning Blade, through the Great Ice Age, the First Age of Shadow, and the Age of the Lash, the fey peoples shone like the stars above, their light cold, and pure, and indifferent.
In this modern age, an era we common folk refuse to name, an era the plutocrats and their twisted spires of twisted scryers call in frightened murmurs the Second Age of Shadows, the darkness draws in, congeals, grips like shallow brackish water. The night sky grows greasy and dim in slowly expanding patches like tavern lights seen through the bottom of a filthy pint glass, and the fey, the Children of the Heavens, grow ever more susceptible to the machinations and predations of the low animals of the world.
PRELUDE
As a prelude to the post let me say this: I’m going systemless. Posts so far have been catered to 5e D&D and while I love playing in that system, its quite rules-heavy and confining, and I, for one, don’t give a damn about rules. About any rules. For ANY system.
The reason I DM is because I like telling a story that my players get to navigate. A sort of choose our own adventure, if you will. Yes, I also like rolling the fancy math rocks and doing quickmaths, but ultimately every book, every character sheet, every online forum, every roll of the dice is in service of the story. So I’m going to strip away all the non-essentials and give you something fun to add your stories however you see fit.
INTRO
My mother taught me at a young age that all meaningful discussions must begin in the same way: with definitions.
So.
Fey: giving an impression of vague other-worldliness. Able to see the future. Cowardly. Excessively refined and dandy. “Fated to die or on the verge of death” when used by the Scottish.
In this post, “fey” will refer to the fey races found in mythology, classic fantasy novels, and common fantasy RPGs. “Fey” includes but is not limited to: elves, gnomes, brownies, pixies, sprites, hags, sylphs, nymphs, dryads, and the variations and bastardizations of all aforementioned beings/races. Also Freddie Mercury is, according to my research, technically fey. The dude was magic incarnate.
Feel free to add/subtract races from this list as you see fit. Perhaps you feel compelled to gripe and groan. Perhaps you disagree with my classifications or my treatment of the beings therein. Perhaps you feel compelled to invoke the mythology and lore of your favorite popular RPG system, banging away on your grease-smudged copy of the Monster Manual as a bearded zealot pounding their favorite religious text. Perhaps you had a shitty day at work and feel compelled to vent the venom you feel for your reptilian boss, a beast known as “Kathy”, on me.
For such issues as these, I recommend the following curative:
Relax, friend, and remember: none of this shit is even REAL.
FEY PARASITE NUMBER ONE
THE ASHMAKER
The ashmaker parasite is a rare thing, and, thank both Holy and Unholy alike, it strikes the fey and only the fey. This, however, is a small blessing; infected fey wander far and wide, and in their wake they leave only smoke and fire and ash and death.
Every year the world passes through a region of space, a path where an ancient crumbling planet from the dark outer orbits, once rich with feylife, fell towards the sun. So long ago did this planet pass that little is left but a thinning field of rocky debris. These space stones are rich with strange materials, substances utterly alien to the planet we know as Holm, and one of these strange materials is the ashmaker germ. These stones fall to the land below during the month-long Allight Meteor Showers, where the sky is lit with a thousand falling and burning meteorites of impossibly wild colors, some bearing that very same germ, to find purchase in water or food or naked flesh.
Only those unafraid of looking to the heavens with truly open eyes, eyes lit from behind by divine chemistries or mystical powers, know the awful truth of these meteor showers. The gawping masses know nothing of the ashmaker’s celestial origins and think of it as a simple seasonal madness, a demonic obsession, pyromania, arsonophilia. An oppressive and perverting “bug”.
The individual parasites themselves are microscopic fungal worms, similar to the common cryptosporidium parasite. They infest the lungs, the eyes, and the gastrointestinal tract. They seem to flourish when the host is surrounded by fire, when their lungs are filled with smoke and ash.
There is more.
We know that the ashmaker comes from the heavens, but it seems to operate outside the bounds of strict materialism. Those that study it often abandon the quest, frustrated and disturbed. Haunted. The ashmaker is a type of biological parasite. Yes. But there are hints gleaned from its victims that it is more. That it is the sum total of its biomass and the ash it creates. Little is known, less is understood.
The Thing That Feeds, whatever it is that the parasites are enslaved to, has been seen in fragments by the Divine Chemists. They say it does not care about those that live here, that it does not wish to participate in our biosphere. It exists in the shadow of our biosphere. Some call it the Throat of Ash. Some call it the Greyslime. It is said to be a world unto itself, a parallel world that would see ours reduced to cinders and poured down its gullet. The Thing That Feeds looks upon our universe with mountains of greedy, tumorous eyes. The Thing That Feeds does not care that we think ourselves valuable and worthy, think ourselves sentient, think ourselves more than electric meat. It laughs at us. It hides from us in plain sight. It occludes the wide hidden pathways of the ancient forests like a huge invisible blood clot.
The Thing That Feeds will see the world burn, and it will use the god be-damned fey as sparks to set every farm, fortress and forest ablaze.
CONTRACTION/INCUBATION
Every year for a month the Allight Meteor Showers rain the seeds of the ashmaker parasite down upon the earth. The seeds sometimes land on a meteorite as big as a melon, but more often they are no larger than a simple fruit fly when they pierce the skin. Direct meteorite-to-skin transmission is quite rare, however. More often, ashmaker is contracted by drinking contaminated water or eating food prepared with contaminated water. Once the parasite has gained access to its host, it will require anywhere from three to seven days to incubate.
PROGRESSION/SYMPTOMS
Infestation begins with respiratory symptoms (coughing, shortness of breath), fever, headache, and visual disturbances including blurred vision, dimmed vision, and hallucinations. Victims soon develop pica, finding ash and cinders ever more appetizing. Next they exhibit a widening spectrum of psychological disturbances including pyrophilia, psychotic violence, and pyromania. Once the infestation reaches its terminal stage its victim will stop at nothing to spread fires, eat ash, and inhale smoke. They will try to burn down trees and buildings (the bigger the better) with equal joy, and often their final moments are spent dancing rapturously in the flames, singing into the smoke through a mouthful of cinders.
EFFECTS
Victims of the ashmaker become resistant to pain, fire, and smoke inhalation, which is a vital adaptation since they are drawn to those things like moths. Their vision can pierce the thickest smoke. Their hands and forearms are nearly immune to fire and heat. While highly resistant to the wages of flame, they are not truly immune. In their final moments, before succumbing to the conflagration, they appear as scorched horrors; hairless, lipless, the fluid from their burst eyeballs baked onto their ash-streaked faces.
CURE
Prompt excision of contaminated materials can prevent incubation. Means of treating and killing the infestation include ingesting or inhaling near-lethal doses of radioactive materials and high doses of anti-parasitic herbal agents, including epazote, thyamsy, hollarhena, and bark from the sweet wormwood tree. Many of these herbal remedies, if taken in appropriately high doses, can cause negative side effects including seizure, hallucinations, and death; great caution must be exercised with their use.
It seems that due to the ashmaker’s non-terrestrial origins it is highly resistant (read: immune) to terrestrial magical cures.
LORE
When the ashmaker befalls a human settlement, brought there by a wandering contaminated fey being, the loss of lives is tragic and the toppling of edifices is demoralizing. But when the ashmaker befalls a fey settlement, the Glamourwood for example, it is nothing short of a catastrophe. Trees as old as the continents and pixies and dryads and elves along with their ancient oral traditions alike die hideously in flame. Many fey relics and legends have met their end in blazing forests.
The non-fey denizens of the world look upon the fey with distrust. This distrust can spark to violence during the Allights meteor showers and the weeks that follow.
All fey know of the dangers of Allight nights, and all seek shelter to prevent contamination and conflagrations. Each of the vulnerable fey races has their own mythology and traditions surrounding the ashmaker. Despite these traditions, there are always the young, the naive, and the inattentive. And there are always those that seek power, seek an audience with The Thing That Feeds by any means, those that would throw the world on the cosmic pyre…
IDEAS TO PLAY WITH
The ashmaker parasite seems to connect the mind of its victims with the mind of the Thing That Feeds, a sort of interdimensional hungry god. What would this connection feel like to an infested player? How would it feel as it grew in bandwidth?
How can you describe the gradual slide into madness to players as they either witness it in a party member or as they experience it first-hand?
Meteor showers (such as the Perseids), while most visible at night, still fall during the day.
Victims of ashmaker see a gradual increase in their resistance to fire and smoke. Use this to give them clues that they’ve been infested.
Victims of ashmaker see a gradual increase in their desire to eat ash. Eventually it becomes a ravenous hunger, but it will begin with small, even subconscious actions, like licking a spent match, or putting a piece of charcoal in their mouth to “test for clues”.
Ashmaker is more often transmitted by contaminated drinking water than by micrometeor impact.
PLOT HOOKS
The gnome quarter of town seems to be rioting, and the smell of smoke is on the wind. Someone better get in there and check it out before the whole city goes up in flames.
One of the younger elves living somewhere in the Skyforest has been talking about how they’re not afraid of watching the Allights, how they dare the heavens to even try to afflict them. The Allights begin in three days, and if he’s caught out in them, there’s no telling what’ll happen.
There are rumors of an alchemical laboratory, buried in the foothills of Mount Dyr. It seems they’ve been sending agents and golems into the nearby settlements, and whither they go, the fey disappear in the night, never to be seen again. A town thinks this is where their prized pixie jester disappeared to, and they want to hire a band of heroes to go and get her back, pronto.
An agent saying he works for an alchemist in a hidden lab contacts the heroes and tells them a tale of a meteorite that landed in yon desert that’s been claimed by a group of “holy men”, no doubt a cabal of devil-worshiping fey-hating witches that seek to undermine the very foundations of the world! He wishes to hire the heroes to retrieve this priceless stone by any means necessary and hie it back to his master for a generous reward.
NOTE: Several of the herbal cures I listed are actually claimed to be herbal cures for cryptosporidium and similar real parasitic infections. If you or someone you love is suffering from a parasitic infestation, I recommend you seek consultation with an appropriately educated/experienced physician/parasitologist and use scientifically proven western medical cures. They hit hard and they work. If tansy or ayurvedic cures actually worked then the WHO would be planting embelia ribes ("vidanga fruit”) shrubs on every square inch of the malaria belt.
OUTRO: PLAYER-HATING, JEREMY RENNER, AND RATBASTARD SUPREME
The more I think about it, the more I realize that my hatred of elves is not based on any sort of high philosophical or moral reasoning. I bear no grudges: Santa and his elves have always been good to me. Never once parked their gift-laden sleigh on my nan. Hell, those little bastards gave me the fucking Avalanche when I was six. I didn’t even have to ask for it! They just gave it to me.
Elves have been nothing but good to me.
The reason I hate elves is simple, really.
I, you see, am a straight-up player hater.
Elves are a bit like Superman. They have all the powers, all the strengths, plus the looks and the girl and the personal history and the solid family and the humble upbringing. It reminds me of when I learned that Jeremy Renner is in a band.
“He’s in a band too?! How the fuck is anyone going to get a girl with a dude like that out in the world? Hey, Jeremy! Save some for the rest of us, you overachieving dick!”
Seriously, Jeremy Renner. Seriously.
Elves are just too much, man. They’re gorgeous. And smart. And elegant. And they never get sick. And they barely age. And they’re magical. Without even trying. And dogs love them.
They’re just too much.
So, as all-time GM, as omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent Ratbastard Supreme, I get to do what whomever-the-fuck-it-is-that-lords-over-the-hapless-people-of-Earth’s-equator does and I get to riddle them with horrific body-violating parasites.
And with my help, you can too.
Alright. Thats it for now. I have several more fey parasites on the loading bench as we speak (one that’ll make them shave their gorgeous locks of gossamer hair, one that’ll make them all oily and gross, one that’ll make them age like white bread on a Louisiana porch, one that’ll fill the villagers with a rapacious hunger for elven flesh) along with a slew of other nasties for rogues, paladins, dwarves, and people that still listen to “nu-metal”.
Until next time…
Be creative. Have fun. Get weird.
