Nunui and the Bloodsucking Manioc Garden - Jivaro Tribe pt.1

The Jivaro (headhunters of shrunken head infamy) live in the foothills of the Andes in the western Amazon.  I will come back to their head shrinking, magical soul possessing ways in a later post, but today I want to talk about their vampiric manioc gardens.

The Jivaro's land starts where the mountain waterfalls give way to tributary streams and rivers that are unnavigable because of rapids, and ends where the rivers begin to flow more slowly and can be traveled by canoe.  They live in scattered houses, each containing a polygynous nuclear family and occasionally a married daughter and step-son who have no children.  Each house is situated in the middle of a large cleared out garden, on a hillock near a stream.

The garden is the province of the women of the house; the men clear the garden by felling giant trees (which in turn take down many smaller trees as all the trees are connected through their canopies by vines) but the women weed, plant and maintain the garden.  The primary food crop is sweet manioc, grown for its large tubers.  Manioc is not only the primary food, it is also provides the exclusive drink for adults and weaned children - the Jivaro drink manioc beer in prodigious quantities (3-4 gallons a day for adult males, 1-2 gallons a day for adult females, ~ 1/2 gallon for 9-10 year old children).  The beer is typically weak, as it is usually drunk before it has fermented long enough to reach maximum alcoholic content (which takes 4-5 days).

The Jivaro also believe that the manioc plant has the innate desire and ability to suck the blood from any person touching it.  To protect themselves and their families from this ability of the manioc, the women turn to a type of earth spirit called Nunui.  Nunui appear as 3' tall, very fat women wearing black dresses.  Nunui are responsible for pushing plants up out of the ground and plant growth in general.  Nunui like to dance in clearings in the forest, and often many of them will come to dance in a newly cleared garden.  However, there is usually only one nunui associated with each garden once it has been planted.  The nunui stays underground during the day, and at night dances in turn with each manioc plant.  Nunui demand a well-weeded garden to give them the room they need to dance with the manioc.  The women also sing special songs to nunui, to give them respect and warn them when they are coming early in the morning to the garden to avoid frightening nunui away.

The female head of household will also hide three magic stones (unworked pieces of red jasper), known as the stones of nunui or the stones of manioc, in the garden - these magical stones are the babies of the nunui and ensure that the nunui will stay in the garden, the crop will remain plentiful and the women can call upon the nunui to make the manioc drink only the blood of trespassing enemies.  The woman gets the stones of nunui after a nunui reveals their location to the woman in a hallucinogen-induced vision.  Each vision only reveals the location of one such stone, which the woman must then immediately go out to find and place in the garden.

Vampiric Manioc
Anyone moving through a stand of manioc must save vs. spells each round (or make a CON save DC12 for 5th edition types) or take 1d6 damage from blood loss.  The plants are otherwise normal plants and can be easily cut down or uprooted.  Carrying a cut branch of manioc (or sticking it in one's belt) grants a +2 to this save.

Stones of Nunui/Stones of Manioc
Three pieces of magical red jasper.  Detect Magic will reveal the form of a baby inside them.  They are the babies of nunui and serve both to tie nunui to a garden and also as a conduit which allows their possessor to tap into the power of nunui to control the vampiric properties of manioc (and possibly ask other boons of nunui as well).  The women that tend the garden and the husband of the house are rendered immune to the manioc's blood drain if there are stones of nunui in the garden and the women regularly sing this magical song:

Don't suck the blood of my husband

And also don't suck the blood of my daughter.

When you want to suck blood,

Suck the blood of my enemies.

When my husband comes, 

he will look very beautiful and very clear.

But when our enemies come,

They will come very pale

And in the form of demons.

And you will know

Who will die,

Who will die.

And when they enter this garden,

They will have their blood sucked.

All, all I can call,

Even the plantain itself.

I am a woman of Nunui.

Note that children are not excluded; they are instructed not to play in the garden lest their blood be drained!

Guachimines "Guacamole" Left Hand of the Keeper and the Jump to the Future

The players in my 4e game surprised me last session by deciding to track a fleeing vampire into the jungle rather than deal with any number of what I had figured would be seen as more pressing matters.  They had ended the previous session at one of those crossroads moments when they had just wrapped up one little mission and had a wide open decision about what to do next.  I try not to over prepare as a DM in these situations because you never know what the party is going to do, but I figured they were most likely to either cash in on the offer to be introduced to Ruskus and his band of River Dragons that was made by the defeated slaver a few sessions ago (and learn more about another aspect of the fractured river deity), visit their connections in the city of Siss-Anor (to learn more about the activities of the snake men) or investigate the ruined dungeons left behind when Manu Jibleetu blasted off into space in his twisted tower.

So of course they decide to chase after a vampire that they didn't even know about until two sessions ago and who has really never done anything to the party, or even done anything to make himself a logical target.  He just existed, and he was a vampire, and he ran away, and apparently that was enough to make the party chase him.  His name is Guachimines and his title is Left Hand of the Keeper, but the party has been calling him "Guacamole" and I even found myself calling him Guacamole a few times last session when I wasn't being careful.  Guachimines was created by Trumak, the Keeper of the Chamber, who was defeated by the party two sessions ago and his consciousness trapped in a blood gem.

The party knew Guachimines was originally from the head-hunting tribes that lived in the foothills of one of the Zamonas' major tributary rivers, and figured he might be heading back to his old homeland.  At first they were just going to fly the hovercraft over to the hills and find his home village and poke around there before he showed up, but eventually they figured out that they could track him directly through his connection to his master Trumak, even though Trumak was mostly destroyed and what remained was bound inside the gem.

The party eventually caught up to Guachimines and his group (Guachimines had several vampire thralls and 18 abducted river worshipers with him that he had transformed into a flock of bats and flown off with) about 50 miles from the confluence and discovered that they had arrived about a half hour too late to keep Guachimines from jumping into the future.  An uneasy standoff with the vampire thralls ended surprisingly with a decision to parlay with Ibi Shadowhands, the leader of the thralls.  Most of the vampire thralls had one arm that ended in a large metal flamethrower, but both of Ibi's arms ended in shadow appendages intended to make him a more formidable ritual caster.  When Guachimines jumped into the future the vampire thralls suddenly found themselves free willed and masterless for the first time.  Ibi turned out to be a somewhat sympathetic character and the party, after much debating, decided to spare the lives of the thralls and task them with rebuilding the Badi-Badi temple that the party had just destroyed, minus the complex shadow circuitry.  This pleased the thralls, who had been members of the temple in life and then had spent thousands of years of undeath assisting in the rites of the chamber.  I think this also helped appease Tilia a little bit about the decision to spare their lives, because Tilia had been upset that the rest of the party destroyed the temple while she was lucid dreaming on the shadow table trying to figure out more about the temple's past and purposes.

After investigating the bloody ritual sacrifice of the 18 worshipers and the intricate pattern of entrails left behind by the time jumping vampire, Beautiful Bob called on the restless spirits of the recently slaughtered to help the party follow the vampire into the future.  He succeeded wildly and the session ended a little early with me saying that I wanted to make sure I was fully prepared for the awesome encounter that was sure to follow.

You see, even though the party was almost an hour behind Guachimines when they too jumped into the future, they are going to arrive at the exact same instant of time as Guachimines does... and he will have no idea they are coming.  Guachimines will have the advantage of terrain, having jumped into his secret future lair, but the party will have the element of surprise.

This is going to be fun.

There was some amusing back and forth before the jump as the party instructed Curious George (their sentient magical hovercraft) to "meet them in the future" but not tell them about anything their past selves said after they came back from the future.  That way, they told me, Curious George wouldn't influence the events in the future present and they could come back to the proper past.

Ah, I love time travel.