Puffball Hooligan Holidays for Fungi Folk

Deep underground, fungus folk have weekly games of puffball, where they gently kick a giant puffball without exploding it, requiring replacement. Blowing up a ball is -1 point. Two villages compete over an area between them, starting in the middle. But sometimes players wander a bit or go higher or lower than usual, like the underworld or the surface world. As mushroom folk may interact with faerie paths, this can include other planes of faerieland. Each village has a clay pot to put a puffball in to earn a victory point. Each team has 12 balls and needs them ready to replace balls that break. Getting a goal against you or losing all your balls is a loss. An elder acts as a referee and is carried around the field on a giant mushroom cap. So teams fight over the ball but gently and chase it sometimes for days over many miles.

You may play this with teams of identical mushroom men on a tabletop or with geomorphs. Your team of a dozen may have its own flair, style, name and banner. You can roll for random encounters as they fight over a puffball. Play starts between two goals by the referee elder.

This elder is a nuetral religious official both parties agree, is objective. The game is a ceremony.

Some teams have mascots of fungi or animals that live among them (giant toads, newts, bugs). Each team has an entourage of cheerleaders emitting spores, ball bearers, a healer, a coach, a magician to deal with terrain, six substitutes or enemies and a gang of hooligan fans. Terrain and luck will win. Punching and using sticks, bones and stones found on the course are ok but only one-handed weapons. Some teams allow two shroomlings to replace one mushroom person. Both teams attack outsiders who meddle in the game, and the entourage and referee will help too.

You never met such awful mushroom folk as hooligan puffball fans. They are often hopped up on foamining berserker yeast brews that make them dangerous if a fight breaks out. They will rampage over an area, breaking things and vomiting. They scare children and make babies cry with noises. They dont talk much when linked in a spore mind link, but humans may accidentally be affected and have a nightmarish episode of the spore mind.

Mushroom hooligans are surprisingly quiet to humans, but some sensitives or magicians will hear them screaming, taunting and chanting.

Some know the usually stoic shroom people don't normally gamble or get drunk. They often carry potions, and all this makes them good at grifting in games of chance. They are often naive to human fraud.

d12 Puff Ball Holigans Scenarios

1 Mushroom creatures every night and rampage over the fields, waking babies and breaking things for no reason. Please stop them

2  Team members or entrants are really lost and separated, and need help finding the team or the game. Dealing with humans is hard. The rest of the gang rampaging through a district

3 Gnome tourists require guides to protect them while they watch a puffball game

4 Giant pufballs have been growing in the area, rolling to new areas in the breeze and exploding spores in new places. Other giant fungi are spreading too over the years. Some say they have seen sinister shrooms performing some kind of drunken dance at the heart of the problem. Please stop their vile rites

5 Mushroom team elders contact outsiders, asking them to be substitute players in a match, after a purple worm ate the sub players' house

6 Drunken, violent mushroom folk burst into a tavern demanding fermented yeast beverages. They are trying to find their team but now fancy a drink. Beer makes them potential berserks

7 Team stray mascots are roaming the village. Why is this happening?

8 A mushroom folk elder came to the graveyard away and took away all the dead, even the blessed ones protected from necromancy. While vile magic is this, go investigate. They now follow the Deathcap team mob

9 The village well was a goalpost long ago, and sometimes confused fungus folk come here to hurl puffballs in it. Locals have no idea and want it to stop, and the drunken mushroom folk to go away

10 Team on their way to a championship needs escorts to get them through civilisation in secret so they get to their match on time

11 Due to a shortage of puffballs this year, mushroom folk at night are sneaking around fields, kicking melons and pumpkins to test them as substitutes. They might accept substitutes like huge spiders found in a cave. Some evil jerk suggests rotting human heads or skulls. They need 26 for a match

12 A diminutive clan of smaller 2-4 foot high shroomling folk have begun playing with human children. Parents and larger mushroom folk come to watch. Some adults want to start a team and need some tough monster brawlers who are not afraid to punch 7-foot-tall mushroom folk in the face. Someone has even planted a puffball crop. Some humans worry about this and call the inquisition for sensible clarity 

d12 Famous Teams
1 Deathcaps - include zombie entrance among their hooligans but it slows them down. Sometimes use zombies to make bridges or ladders or walls
2 Toad Lickers - have pet giant toads who sometimes eat humanoids or animals, the entrance pass. Toads are also good at dealing with fungus-eating giant bugs that prey on the wounded. They are all hopped up on toad juice and good at jumping and dancing
3 Raming Tortoise Fist - have a giant snapping tortoise with a catapult they use to launch spore bombs. They also favour dense formations. The turtle is also good for digging and water crossings
4 Battling Glow Worms - members are luminous and leave glowing hand and footprints. People often think they are ghosts. They rarely get lost. Some have gone a bit insane from being worm-infested, but they say it makes them braver. Some say the team taint often remains, leaving luminous fungi in caves and dark places 
5 Purple Centipedes - charge single file, ploughing through obstacles. Some up front if injured, fall back and join the back of the line when able. Sometimes they get trapped in loops in circular paths around a rock, and it takes them a while to realise. They often hurl huge centipedes at enemies as a taunt
6 Devils Fingers - creepy thin mushroom folk, unusually have a pact with hell and sometimes open hellgates to help hell's minions enter the world on some mission. Where they have rampaged, creepy red finger-like fungal growths bloom in positions of diabolical hand gestures or sometimes grasp passersby

7 Witch Butter Churners - lewd slimy yellow shroom folk includes human witches and their familiars in their entourage and fans. Quite a few goats join them too. The witches enhance the team with magic and potions

8 Ghost Shrooms - eerie, luminous, fragile fungus are aided by ethereal woodland spirits and their followers include shamans and other followers of their spirit allies

9 Horns of Gomphus - play fungal trumpets and loudest of all the fans. Obnoxios drinkers and users of berserker potions to get excited for a match

10 Elf Caps - allied to faerie folk and often have faerie, elves and goblinoids in followers. Some are quite pretty but usually include a variety of fungal beings. They are a bit fragile, but the team use magic

11 Staghorn Maulers - grow antler-like fungal horns as part of a secret cult. Viscious brawlers who may infest foes. Those who grow horns prefer this team over all others

12 Slime Lords - include slime, oze and gelatinous monsters as followers. Also good to dispose of murder evidence. Leave slimes wherever they go, fouling water and irrigation ditches

d20 Game Troubles
1 Ball moved by freak occurrence 1d10 x 100 yards away by a d4 1=creature 2=gust of wind 3=water 4=rolls down hill
2 Third fungi tribe wants to interfere with the local league ladder and will use magic and traps to get the ball out of the legal zone
3 Enterage hooligans have a violent brawl 
4 Goblins want to eat the puffball like a pudding and chase it to their fort
5 Ball rolls in front of a monster lair like an owlbear

6 Someone replaces the ball with a deadly, floating, explosive fungus sphere

7 Hundreds of rival hooligan shroomians come to the match, they riot and start some fires

8 Local millitary or church ready to face the invasion of chaos fungus demons

9 Corrupt fungus folk want to rig the contest to gamble

10 Trails of giant fungus and bugs grow in the wake of the teams

11 Evil elves kidnap teams of followers for slaves

12 Human cult of bigots harasses mushroomkin, making more problems as hooligans arrive to support teams and spread spores or giant critters

13 Goblins come to see and collect spores and cause mischief
14 Dandy gourmets send cooks to collect dead and wounded fungoids, upsetting them
15 Sinkhole opens, and two more battling fungoid teams break out, fighting over puffballs
16 Dark elf and fungal dryads come to watch and prank humans in the area
17 Two fungoid villages grow overnight and meet in the centre to play puffball
18 Giant inflatable puffballs fly overhead in the hundreds, raining spore clouds
19 Clouds of fungal telepathy spores released, putting all sentient beings in the area into an empathic link for a d4 days. Some locals are profoundly changed by fungal thought, forming a cult
20 Manifestation of a fungal deity appears to watch with its own followers

d12 Random spore clouds
1 Obscuring fog like clouds
2 Caughing and choking clouds
3 Giant fungus spores also promotes giant bug growth
4 Aggression spores
5 Fear spore clouds
6 Hallucinogenic spores
7 Empathic link spores
8 Telepathic link spores
9 Fungal group mind spores

10 Shroom folk spores growing more team supporters
11 Spores create fungal undead in graves, fungi not evil

12 Spores grow mushroom houses attracting animals, gnomes, and wee folk