/\/\U%2D00/\/\: #RPGaDAY2020 6 - Forest

Today's #RPGaDAY2020 prompt is

Forest

I've been doing the Gygax 75 and have been developing a post-apocalyptic post-cyberpunk setting. The challenge guides you to flesh out a dungeon map after making a general local area for your PCs to explore, but I wanted to flesh out another area of the map. Here's the description I wrote before:

Malfunctioning Solar Forest South edge of map. I read somewhere that in the future we'd have fake trees covered in solar panel leaves that rotate to face the sun, atop trunks full of filters that remove CO2 and toxins from the air and produce algae. This forest's broken though. And full of wiresnakes.

This leaves us with a couple of key questions we can use to flesh out this area:

Why is the forest malfunctioning?

In principle, the solar leaves themselves could still function. However, the servos that rotate them toward the sun have rusted through due to lack of maintenance. Also, wires and connectors have come loose to to scavenger, animal and occult activity. And some of the trees are just engulfed, ironically, in real vegetation. The vast majority of the batteries that store charge from the solar trees have been looted or broken. The air filter and algae pool systems have also failed.

What are the consequences?

Clouds of toxic gases hang in the forest like mist, and the algal bloom has gotten so out of control that there are areas of noxious slime. Some of them are corrosive. Some of them, perhaps, sentient.

Many of the wires here became wiresnakes after the occult calamity. They lie dormant, hungry for energy. Other creatures live in this forest, eating the algae and the twisting metallic vines and electric berry shrubs that have reclaimed and integrated with the artificial forest. Things like rats and pigeons and cyberowlbears. Predators too: lazerhawks and wild dogs.

What can people do here?

It's a place to gather resources. The various kinds of algae probably have uses, as do foraged foods(?) like electric berries. It'll be hard to find any charged batteries, but some might not have been looted, especially deeper in the forest. The solar leaves themselves are absolutely still usable. And if you had some unfathomable use for a whole bunch of wiresnakes, this forest has got you covered.

It's also a place of power. As one of the locales where the natural world has fused most completely with occult computing, technocultists and reality-hackers come here to perform rituals and commune with the Web.

Why would the PCs come here?

Here's some hooks and rumours:

1. Technocultists kidnapped an old man and took him to the solar forest.
2. The old control centre in the middle of the forest still has fully charged, giant power cells.
3. Young Fila swears they saw an owlbear climbing a solar tree.
4. Doc needs 20 live wiresnakes for a thing. Don't ask.
5. A reality-hacker calling herself /\/\U%2D00/\/\ is offering a way to jack into the Web without getting a virus, by hooking up to a specific solar tree.
6. On the summer solstice, all the solar trees wake up again and everyone can charge their batteries--but the creatures are all really agitated.

Artifical forests with cyber-occult wildlife are cool.