If you are wounded in the mysterious underworld you may become infected by a small parasitic tree. These tree sprout from the back and shoulders like tiny bonsai. They eventually bear fruit of many colors and flavors that look a bit like plums. Each fruit is a secret of the host that is then lost to them. Memorized spells, locations of buried treasures, magical passphrases, simply gone from the memory. If someone other than the host eats one of the fruit, they gain one of those lost secrets.
That's neat. What happens if the host eats their own plums? Even if they don't regain the memory, at least it would be out of circulation that way - same with just destroying them. Or you could have an ally eat them and just tell you what you've forgotten. "Wait, I knew that? How did I know that?"
ReplyDeleteAlso wonder what would happen if you harvested a bunch of plums (maybe even from different hosts) and made a sauce or cobbler or somesuch out of them? Would everyone who tastes it get the memories, or parts of them all jumbled up?
Also, do illithids eat plum cobbler? I bet they'd eat this one. :)
ReplyDeleteThanks, your comments give me energy. I was imagining a evil sorcerer keeping a bunch of slave mages and then infecting them with this affliction and then harvesting the fruit for essentially free spell scrolls.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't thought of cobbler but maybe wine.
I think if the sick person eats the fruit they should have false memories or believe they remember the passphrase but they don't actually.
I wonder what would happen if a healthy person drank wine from many different fruits? Sound like a fun chart to make.
Oh, this post has a list of possible memories to receive from eating the fruit of others'
ReplyDeletehttps://recedingrules.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-angel-of-memory.html