Life-Cycle of the Parasite

Further brainstorming for a future campaign, continuing from this post: D12 Reasons Why This Small Town Is Isolated From The Outside World And So Your Merry Band Of Misfits May Go About It Solving Mysteries

Have recently watched and enjoyed Cuckoo, Wormtown, and the Mothman Prophecies. Have also been reading Tonari no Jii-san. As the premise of the Seven Mysteries of St. Fiachra's was ripped off from Summertime Render, I intend to similarly rip off these works for what I am work-in-progressingly titling Airce, Alberta.

The supernatural threat of Seven Mysteries revolved around the Branch of Mag Mell - an ultra-terrestrial plant - the duplicates it could create by consuming humans, and the hypnotic control these duplicates could exert over humans who'd consumed beer brewed with parts of the Branch. In the end, this stuff didn't amount to as much of a threat as I'd intended - the duplicates were no stronger than the humans they were made from, and the Branch was passive, and in the process of dying before the campaign even started.

Parasites - gross, creepy, interesting. They can have complex life-cycles, environments, etc. - another of the things I want to improve on from Seven Mysteries is to increase the dynamism and complexity of the scenario, give more to investigate and reward investigation - centering it around a parasite could give that.

Sacculina is a parasitic barnacle that preys on crabs, castrating male crabs and altering their hormone balance to make them perform female behaviours such as stirring the water to better distribute ejected sacculina larvae. More complex human social behaviours lend themselves to even more interesting parasitic manipulation.

So - Airce, Alberta is a resort town in the Rockies, and a natural reservoir for a particular parasite. However, as Banff and so on become more unaffordable, more people are going to Airce, overwhelming both its infrastructure and its delicate ecological balance. Also the whole area is technically the private fief of a Scottish lord because themes and such. I'm also thinking of a way to put in a cell of Japanese communist exiles.

Humans are not the primary host of this parasite - they are the intermediate host. Humans are like the snails infested by Leucochloridium paradoxum, whose eye-stalks are inflated into pulsating brood-sacs to get birds to eat them (birds being the primary host, who then distribute the parasite via their feces).

The primary hosts are some kind of cryptid that lives in the mountains and caves around Airce - probably a bigfoot or sasquatch of some kind... but that's kind of boring... I will consider...

I like bright light as a weakness of the parasite - the sun, flashes from cameras, etc., revealing or repelling hosts. Light's accessible but also take-away-able, lends itself to creative play & counter-play. Believe friends of the blog Louis and Arnold-sama have been working on light-themed dungeons for some time... Perhaps implies that the parasite lives in the eyes - further implies they perhaps spawn in a mountain lake that mimics the salinity and so on of vitreous fluid. For association with light and Mothman Prophecies, I like giving them a moth-like aesthetic.

Ah - Bergmann's rule - the colder the environment, the larger the organism. The sasquatches aren't the primary host - they're what becomes of advanced intermediary (that is to say, human) hosts. They get bigger and hairier to drive them up the mountains, and into the feeding grounds of the primary hosts. Things like wolves or bears in the forest. Going out there at night is dangerous. Tormented human minds in animalized bodies. Tear apart deer and moose and mice and whatnot and arrange their carcasses in ritualistic sculptures.

I like the idea of there being a "queen" parasite whose host is able to command the other hosts. Yes, like Resident Evil 4. Situation: that aforementioned Scottish lord who legally owns the area Airce sits on runs this pretendian Wicker Man cult thing that secretly worships the parasite, and publicly holds festivals alluding to its existence, the bigfoot-esque transformed hosts, etc. The First Nations people who used to live in the area and have some knowledge of the parasite are pissed off at this, but private security keeps them away.

Anyways, the Scottish lord guy kept an indoctrinated queen-parasite host in order to control the other hosts - perhaps his own child - and would periodically have another host eat the queen-parasite host to transfer it before they went intractably yeti-mode. The latest transfer was interrupted, and the queen-parasite was stolen by an unknown party. Yeah, that seems like a good spark for the powder keg. There's secret tunnels around town and runic graffiti the cult uses to surreptitiously communicate and a lot of the senior staff at the resort places are part of it.

You can extract a longevity serum from the parasite or something. That's why the cult worships it. Yes I return to the same few themes over and over again (woop woop wanna fight about it?). 

Climate change fucks up the spawning ground/releases more of the parasite into the water supply. Yes like The Thaw yes like Fortitude. Yes like Aterrados the parasites in the water & snow exert some psychic influence so people thinks there's ghosts but it's the Germ, son. Lake Mungo.

And another faction - aliens. These guys are the higher-tier faction, where even knowing they're on the board, let alone what they want and how to negotiate with them - even if you'd want to negotiate with them - requires advanced research. They might not literally be aliens, but fill that niche. Somewhere between Men in Black and BOB.

Anyways, the aliens probably first planted the parasite on Earth and now that it's getting out of control they're like aw geez oh man my space-boss is gonna kill me better put my star-coffee down and get down there and find out what's going on. Maybe the aliens eat them or something? Probably too close to the cult's motivation.

Okay - for the primary hosts - they're lake monsters. Alberta has Kinosoo already but that's on the other side of the province. Airce's lake monsters are rubbery, they can squeeze through pipes and such and drag bodies down the toilet. Because of ecological disruption or the parasite population boom or somesuch they're getting more aggressive, coming down the mountain and into people's homes to devour the infected.

I keep mentioning parasites being in the water but that could be kind of lame without real strong foreshadowing to not fuck the players over before they even realize something's amiss, if I don't also include an accessible cure (which would make it lame). Stick tweezers into the super-dilated pupils and yank the caterpillars out. Shine strobe lights into their eyes and hope the larvae chew their way out the right way around. Maybe whoever turns the party onto the town just straight up tells them "don't drink the water". Maybe the water's a risk factor but drinking/bathing in it isn't close to a guaranteed infection. Maybe the cult manufactures a recreational drug, eyedrops or somesuch, to spread the parasite. They've also used the queen-parasite to push infested tourists into risky behaviours so their bodies could be harvested for the longevity serum. Harvesting the longevity serum kills the host. Maybe the infestation-drug is also a healing potion so the daredevil host tourists take the drug and think they're invincible and then they fall into a ravine and snap their necks.

There's a gang of daredevil host tourists or ski instructors/chairlift operators or whatever and they're like the gang in Point Break except instead of robbing banks they break into chalets and rob people.

If the parasite is allowed to reach maturity within the intermediate host (which probably by definition means they're not intermediate hosts, idk parasitology too well) you get a mothman. This is like the worst case scenario for the aliens... probably. It's happened, and the mothman is like a psychic parasite messiah or something. His is the voice you hear through the water.