NaturalWondersOfCreation/Greymane
Red Beast’s Cap
Region: East
In the shadowy hearts of the deep Eastern forests, one can often come across enigmatic rings of mushrooms and toadstools lining the edge of beautiful forest glades. The mushrooms are almost always plump and savory looking, the grasslands they rest in beautiful and sunny. Yet despite this, few among the native populations dare wander into these lands. Spirits guard them, they say. Strange and unholy creatures, who stand in antithesis to the wrathful but comprehensible gods they know. Those that guard the clusters of bright red mushrooms with white spotted crowns, called the red beasts caps, take the form of walking brown fungus. With watery black blisters for eyes and tiny stubs for feet, they shuffle slowly across the ground and tend to the mushrooms with greasy gray tongues. Unwise youths often think themselves quick or clever enough to snatch the mushrooms before their keepers can notice, only to uncover too late how quickly the strange spirits can move in defense of their crop and just how many fangs hid under their sloping caps.
It is a rare thing then, for one of the mushrooms to ever leave the forests of the east. Even those tribes who have made devil’s bargains with the alien gods to pick the mushrooms freely are rarely eager to trade them away. The mushrooms are considered sacred or cursed, depending on the perceptions of the tribes, but always held to be a powerful tool. They can turn even the most feeble and sickly of men into a mighty warrior whose shadow stretches over the battlefield. Stories run of those who eat the mushrooms ripping fully grown trees out by the roots and using them for clubs or scattering enemy tribes by simply stomping them flat underfoot.
Effect: Consuming a Red Beasts Cap raw causes a mortal’s body to suddenly and drastically grow, nearly half again his original size as if he had just gained the Huge mutation (E:L p214). The process is neither pleasant to behold nor experience, as muscles and veins all bulge hideously and bones crackle and pop as they thicken. The blood boils up under their skin, turning it bright red and their brain actually shrinks as the skull grows thicker, reducing the consumers Intelligence and Appearance attributes to only a single dot. The pain of this transformation is so overwhelming that anyone eating one of the mushrooms must make a Stamina + Resistance roll at difficulty 4. Succeeding in this roll still stuns them for a single turn, barely able to speak and completely unable to act. Failure means the agony all but breaks them, leaving them rolling on the ground for at least three turns before it fades. The effects of the raw mushroom last for a single scene, at the end of which the warrior will shrink back to his original size in a process as equally painful as his growth and requiring the same roll.
However, wise men and witches of the forest know other, better ways to use the mushrooms. Over time, they have learned how to brew several of the mushrooms into a potion that is at once more effective and less dangerous: The Crimson Heroes Elixir.
In some regions, there grow similar mushrooms that cause those who consume them to shrink rather than grow (giving those who eat them raw the Tiny mutation and those who consume an alchemical potion brewed from them the Minuscule mutation with the same drawbacks as listed above). Stories have even been told of ones that, at a touch, will grow into an exact copy of a man which sleeps until the moment of his death, then awakens with all his memories and no knowledge of it’s true nature. Savants and kings alike have all fruitlessly sought after these for years.
