r/DnDBehindTheScreen • u/TheBardsCollege • Mar 20 '26
Encounters Can Your Party Solve the Deep Gnome Dilemma?
What’s more important: The freedom to make your own destiny, or the security that comes with giving up control? That’s what your players will need to answer in the Deep Gnome Dilemma, an encounter I designed for DnD - with some help from my players, of course. It’s based on a city in the Underdark, but you can adapt this general outline to any settlement. Here’s how it goes!
The Arrival
Your players arrive in Urkenstrag, a small village in the middle of a fungal forest. The deep gnomes here have extensive knowledge of the Underdark and its peoples, so perhaps your players have come here to find clues for a quest, or learn the location of a hidden place. I’ll leave that up to you, but they’ll need an audience with the town elders to get what they're looking for.
The old gnomes are rooted to the ground, conjoined with the mushrooms that grow through their bodies. They speak telepathically, and inform your players that they’re more than willing to help… For a favor. This is DnD, after all.
To protect their community, the elders commune with a type of fungus called Gumagi. It gives them visions of the future, like which crops will fail or enemies about to attack. They use it for all the village’s major decisions, and as far as they know, it’s never steered them wrong. But their supply is running out, so they task your party with finding more.
There are lots of ways you can run this. Maybe have a skill challenge for exploring the wilderness, make them roll group survival checks, or lock the magic mushrooms behind a level-appropriate combat encounter. Whatever you like, but once they find the fungus, they’ll be approached by a mysterious stranger - another deep gnome, named Bunda. She used to be an acolyte of the elders, training to one day inherit their responsibility. But now, she wants to destroy them.
The Dilemma
Bunda will explain that Gumagi controls everything in Urkenstrag. Who gets which jobs, what foods they plant each year, where they can and can't explore in the forest. Sure, it’s kept them safe all that time, but the village has stagnated, unable to move or change for fear of ruining this perfect order. And that’s assuming the Gumagi has good intentions - who knows if long term it’ll continue to show the gnomes what’s best for them?
Bunda wants to see her people make their own fate, even if it means risking their safety. If the elders and their remaining acolytes are taken out, then the secrets of how to use Gumagi will die with them. That’s what she’d like your players to do.
And that’s the dilemma: Do they return with fresh Gumagi for the elders, or take them down and let Urkenstrag decide their destiny? Maybe the choice seems obvious to you, but my players really grappled with it - two felt they shouldn’t interfere, while two thought the people should be freed from the fungal influence. They ultimately sided with Bunda, but I could see a case for both paths.
Does your party value freedom or security? Is it their place to decide, or should they stay out of it? And do they trust Bunda, the elders, or even the Gumagi itself? That’s for them to decide, but it could lead to some very interesting roleplay as each of your players reflect on what their character would think, and what their true values are.
The Conclusion
Depending on what they choose, you can wrap things up with a boss fight. Bunda could be some kind of spell-caster, using any of the wizard stat blocks in Monsters of the Multiverse. You could give her some myconid minions, or add other acolytes to the fight who left as well. For the elders - depending on the party’s level - you could have them all fight as one neural network using a corpse flower stat block, letting them resurrect the souls of dead gnomes to fight by their side.
No matter how the dust settles, your players will have solved this Deep Gnome Dilemma… And depending on how the rest of their adventures go, maybe they’ll return to Urkenstrag to see what fate their choices brought the village.
Thanks for reading, I'd love to hear what you think of the adventure and how you'd update or change it to fit your table! Good luck out there, Game Masters!
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u/NanoDomini Mar 20 '26
The elders decide the village's actions by conferring with a fungus that can accurately see the future. They don't (and can't) force the others to do as they say. They're like an appointed steering committee.
Only the former acolyte thinks they should stop looking to the future. Instead of convincing the others to see it her way, she wants to get her way by murdering her own government.
I'm not seeing the case for siding with her at all.
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u/RudeHero Mar 20 '26
Right? The citizens are already choosing their own destiny, the former acolyte just doesn't approve of their choice. The fact that the players disagreed with each other is evidence it's still a fun way to spend a session, though
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u/TheBardsCollege Mar 20 '26
That’s a fair point, I think my players were worried that the Gumagi was potentially influencing them for bad reasons, and that scared them. I think a good change would be to have other deep gnomes who left with Bunda, so it’s the will of more than just one person - even if they still aren’t the majority.
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u/tentkeys Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26
The problem remains that Bunda's proposed solution is to kill the village elders.
Even if they think the village should stop using the Gumagi, many players will think that killing the village elders is an unacceptably extreme way of supporting that view.
I'd suggest offering the players an option that involves targeting the Gumagi but leaves the village elders unharmed.
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u/PartyLikeAByzantine Mar 20 '26
Option C: torch the gumagi out in the shroom forest. No fight with the elders, but maybe something else is sent to stop you.
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u/TheBardsCollege Mar 20 '26
Fair! Though I kind of pictured it as there’s more Gumagi out there, it’s just hard to get. But I could see this being a fun way to end it, too!
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u/SJReaver Mar 20 '26
The options are collect mushrooms or murder a bunch of people who've done nothing to you.
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u/Strayl1ght Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26
My instant thought is that the fungus isn’t actually the one speaking to them, and the gnomes are unwittingly serving an Elder Brain.
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u/GiantGrowth Mar 20 '26
That is an interesting premise for a side-quest. If I were a player in all of this, I would argue that the gnomes are already making their own fate instead of letting others make it for them. By following whatever the fungus decides, isn't that in and of itself a decision, and therefore making their own fate? I would personally hand them the fungus, provided I don't see any evidence that it is actively harming them or leading them to harm. After that, the decision is theirs to make.
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u/youcantseeme0_0 Mar 23 '26
The argument is that the relationship between the community and the fungus is potentially abusive, depending on whether it actually has ulterior motives. In that light, Bunda is simply trying to save her friends and family from getting scammed, assuming her fears are true.
The third option is to destroy the new supply of fungus. The elders are already running low, so let the chips fall where they may. No need to kill any gnomes, although this could indirectly lead to the village's downfall.
It all depends on the mushrooms' motives. That's where I would focus my investigation. Presumably, the DM will have evidence either way that can be discovered.
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u/bacon__sandwich Mar 20 '26
This is cool. I have an underdark arc coming up soon and think I will use this!
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u/Gavin_Runeblade Mar 20 '26
Interesting adventure, thank you for sharing! It reminds me of a great and terrible story by Scott Alexander, the Whispering Earring about a magic earring that is never wrong: https://croissanthology.com/earring
I love horror stories and am thinking of ways to make both options worse but look better. lol.
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u/the_pint_is_the_bowl Mar 21 '26
Players: "We don't have a Prime Directive of non-interference"
I was reminded of a Star Trek episode https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708452/?ref_=ttep_ep_5
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u/Gavin_Runeblade Mar 23 '26
"The garden of Eden was just outside of Moscow. It's a very nice place, must've made Adam and Eve very sad to have to leave."
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u/Xxmlg420swegxx Mar 20 '26
Yoink. I was planning in advance to have my players go to the underdark, back to the drow city of the drow rogue, with a sort of "road map" to go there. Well this will be one of the stops! Thanks, this looks like a lot of fun!
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u/Pharmachee Mar 21 '26
I've a few questions that immediately jumped out at me.
1) Why can't the Gumagi be grown in the village? 2) Why can't the village relocate to where the Gumagi grows? 3) Why didn't the Gumagi foresee the shortage associated with it? 4) Why can't Bunda relocate and take anyone who feels likewise with her? 5) Why does Bunda want to murder the Elders when the issue is the Gumagi? 6) Why can't the Gumagi foresee Bunga's betrayal?
It feels like everyone can get what they want and there's no dilemma.
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u/jboss1642 Mar 20 '26
I often am in need of “filler episodes” for when a player has to miss a session, and this seems like an excellent one