A new moon appears in the sky, meteorites crash to the ground, releasing a flood of mimics to spread across the land and consuming everyone in their way. What are the mimics hunting? What brought the Mimic Moon here? Who can stop them?

Note to GMs. The Rise of the Mimic Moon series details a disaster scenario, a wide-ranging, cataclysmic event with potentially setting-altering ramifications. Countless movies, books, and games tackle this well-known trope, incorporating alien invasions, extraplanar incursions, zombie hordes, or the approach of world-ending space rocks. These disaster stories offer amazing opportunities to raise moral questions as the players struggle to decide who lives and dies. However, a disaster scenario is one that GMs should consider carefully before adding it to their campaign.

The events detailed are designed to be as large or as focused as GMs need in order to incorporate the disaster into their campaigns. This could be a world-spanning, setting-changing event, or it could merely be something that impacts a single kingdom, island, or region. One of the most important aspects to remember is that disasters tend to be turning points in most settings. Those who survive can never really go back to how they were before the event.

Background

The Mimic Moon is a planetoid-sized entity, awakened at the dawn of creation by unknown or forgotten gods. Over the eons, it has been called many things—Oreimong the Eater, Nyangazi, Mo’suum’ak, and Gorger in the Dark to name but a few—but those who dwell in the Void call it Odlayo. 

Though of a similar species as the common mimic, Odlayo long ago lost its shapechanging ability and is permanently locked into its spherical guise. The moon wanders through space, through the void between planes, hunting the gargantuan beasts native to those realms and the vessels mortals use to cross that inky darkness. The sheer mass of the mimic produces a gravity field and holds a limited ecosystem on its surface. Odlayo’s thought process spans decades and millennia, and most mortals can’t truly fathom its intent. 

Since its creation, Odlayo has been alone, but centuries ago, it began the long process to self-replicate. Over a thousand years, it nurtured a gem-like seedling, feeding it power until it had the potential to grow into a new Mimic Moon. However, on the verge of its awakening, the seedling was stolen. 

Enraged beyond measure, Odlayo pursued the thieves to a planet on the mortal plane, determined to recover its offspring or make the world pay for the kidnapping by scouring it down to the bedrock.

Setting Up the Rise of the Mimic Moon

The first question a GM needs to answer is who stole the seedling? Certainly this could, and probably should, be a group who are already antagonists of the PCs. Why someone might want the seedling is clear to see. It possesses a thousand years of imbued power, and what evil cult or nihilistic lich wouldn’t want to control a planet-destroying entity? Ideally, the group or individual chosen should possess spells, items, or skills to travel to the Void and steal the seedling in the first place. Otherwise, the PCs might have a hard time believing, for example, that the local beggars guild was suddenly able to travel into the Void. A few suggestions for the culprits, their motivations and methods of travel are listed below, but the exact identity of the thieves is left for individual GMs to decide.

d4	Antagonists
1	A cabal of wizards wants…
2	A rakshasa clan wants…
3	A cult of a death god wants…
4	A consortium of greedy nobles and merchants wants…

d4	Motivation for Theft
1	To control the newborn mimic moon.
2	To drain the seedling of infinite magical power.
3	To transplant the seedling into the chest of a dead god to resurrect it.
4	To use the seedling as a doomsday device to decimate an enemy nation.

d4	Method of Travel
1	Spells such as gate and plane shift.
2	An ancient gateway connected to ruins on Odlayo’s surface.
3	Voidships capable of sailing into space and between planes.
4	The sacrifice of a minor deity to fuel a portal.

How to Use in a Campaign

When the Mimic Moon enters orbit, it appears as a new moon in the sky. The gravitational disruption of Odlayo’s mass causes tides to increase six-fold, in turn causing massive flooding in coastal cities and communities. At the same time, violent seismic activity triggers earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis across the globe. After a week, this activity settles, but clouds of ash and dust radically alter the season, potentially causing a small ice age. The PCs might spend the week handling one disaster after another, struggling to save as many as possible or (conversely) making use of the chaos to accomplish some nefarious goal of their own. But just as the natural disasters appear to ease, the meteorites begin to fall.

Odlayo spent the week after its arrival spawning servitors to hunt for its stolen offspring. These mimic-like monsters fall from orbit within meteorites flung from the Mimic Moon. The impacts create devastations made all the worse when the mimics inside swarm out. Eventually, the PCs must learn of the seedling’s theft and Odlayo’s purpose. At that point, the goal shifts to tracking the thieves, recovering the stolen offspring, and returning it to the Mimic Moon before the world is overrun by mimics!

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NEXT TIME…

We shall learn of Odlayo’s lesser servitors, a trio of new mimics to plague your players!