The Fog That Rests

Whenever someone mentions encounters, my mind jumps automatically to an elaborate trap or finding a bunch of wolves in the middle of the forest. An example of one of the most memorable quick encounters, which you might find in your classic dungeon crawl, might that your party have stumbled, foolish and willing, into the labyrinthine catacombs that thread their way beneath a great city. The party listens at the door, their shoulders hunched and tight with anticipation. They hear a quiet chattering and the occasional elevated shriek of something humanoid. Your rogue has just failed at picking the lock of the door and, frustrated, your warrior shoulder barges her way into the room, screaming blue murder, brandishing her great axe in anticipation of a fight. They are immediately accosted by a snivelling group of goblins who launch an immediate attack after seeing the warrior barge in whilst they were trying to play a civilised game of Five Finger Fillet.

Another encounter might be that your investigators have discovered a dark secret about one of the victims of strange ritualistic disembowelments, which have plagued a local town; only to enter the victims room and encounter an otherworldly artefact that drives them all to the point of babbling insanity. They then disembowel each other. 

I love random encounters and not-so-random encounters.

The below encounter is a quick encounter to toss into a game if you feel it needs more to bulk it out. I hope you have fun adding them into a table or into your game as a set encounter.

The Fog That Rests

The Fog That Rests is a phenomenon usually left imprinted upon a personal possession; in rare cases, the Fog has been imprinted upon a child or infant. It is a semi-concious effect that causes a "haunting" around that object or person; it imprints itself by being put involuntarily by a spell caster into the object or by finding it on its own. It manifests outside of an object as a dense white patch of fog. Fogs that have no host will usually gather in forests or already foggy atmospheres to hide. Once, The Fog That Rests squatted inside the eye of a newborn baby, another time, it crawled into the necklace of a young noble Lady. 

Its effects are slow at first, as simple chills in the air or objects being knocked from shelves or counters. It emits an eerie fog over a large radius about the object or person. As its power grows, it slowly takes the fears and anxieties of its bearer and forms them into hallucinations that then become physical manifestations. Strange effects, such as a memory playing out in a continual loop within a room begin to take place. In other cases, The Fog That Rests will cause the room itself to turn into the innards of a creature or even the creature it is locked onto. The Fog That Rests will transfer itself from one possession to another or from one infant to another if it feels that its host is threatened or due to be discovered.

The only way to remove The Fog That Rests is to destroy the possession while it is still inside it. If threatened and unable to move from the host, The Fog will attempt to destroy or drive mad anything within its presence, escalating changes in reality and time rapidly as it becomes more panicked.

The Fog cannot mimic a form on its own. If it is dispelled from an object it will take on the appearance of a thick, white fog and cannot be destroyed by anything other than Dispel Magic or a similar spell. It will attempt to leap into another object or child/infant as soon as it is dispelled or escape into the nearest patch of natural fog where it will be safe from magic users. In moments of pure terror at the loss of its own life, it may jump into an adult humanoid. This rarely works however and both The Fog and its host will cease to exist. 

The Fog that Rests is not a creature or a humanoid, it has no empathy or emotions and cannot be bartered or reasoned with. It feeds on the fears, anxieties and confusion of those within its effect and the more terror it instils the bigger and more powerful it becomes. It can grow to the point where its effect can be felt throughout an entire building, leading many to believe in the idea of a "Haunted House."

There has been one case where an entire island has been subjected to the slow burning horror of a fog. This incident was documented as the rarest case when several Fog That Rests formed into a huge anomaly and squatted inside the bones of an entire dead nation buried beneath a mountain range, long forgotten. 

Your players may enter a simple room and fall pray to the weirdness that the fog inflicts on reality, or they may be faced with an entire haunted forest. It is entirely up to you how you manage this encounter!