Body Field

Body Field
The Body Fields are places in The Changed Lands that are both areas and organisms. While rare even in their environment, The Adventure Guild strongly advise anyone who encounters them to either avoid approaching at all costs, or if at all possible completely immolate.

The Body Fields are a type of organism that appears to be modified fungal-based creature. Typically the organism responsible for the Body Fields are rarely seen, and certainly not in their entirety.

To the casual observer the Body Fields appear to resemble a area, typically short-grassed field of pasture, that is littered with body parts. Most of these bits and pieces of bodies are arranged as if they are plants, with hands opened like flowers planted into the ground at the wrist, and toes arranged like button mushrooms in the ground.

The various limbs, body parts, chunks and bits and pieces of bodies that litter the Body Field appear to not rot or decay normally, the meat slowly withering over time, leaving newer additions to the Body Field fresh, meaty and often leaking juices while over parts of the field will seem almost mummified and desiccated.

On a normal day the Body Field will be passive and inert, as if a grotesque garden of meat and flesh. However, if one is to approach the Body Field, it's true scale of horror emerges.

Upon a warm body approaching the various parts of bodies, each piece of meat, flesh and the like will twitch, spasm, jerk and twist it's way to attempt to reach out for the person. if a person approaches too closely, to a piece of a body, it will attempt to grip, touch, scratch or cut the person. If this happens, the person is infected.

The organism that creates the Body Fields is a rapidly growing and aggressive strand-like infection that pushes it's way through a hosts skin and then body, overwhelming the hosts own muscles and controlling them through sheer brute force. Once a person is sufficiently infected, a process that can take between 5 minutes and half an hour depending on how much infectious material contacted them.

Once the hosts body is taken control of, they become a true victim. The infection will ensure their meat and bodies remain living through the next process. With full control over the victims body, the infection will then start to make each of the limbs attempt to move away from each other, splitting the victim apart and as each part of the body pulls itself apart at the joints those parts will position themselves to allow a root structure to emerge unto the ground and thus the victim's shredded body is added to the body fields.

it has been noted that while a person is torn asunder by the processes of the Body Fields, it appears that they remain alive, to an extent, during and after the process. Meat is kept alive via the root networks supplying nutrients, and even the head, in most cases eyes, jaws, ears etc. having pulled themselves off, is still alive, and still able to think. In several cases the nervous system is still somewhat attached between some parts of the bodies, implying the person can still feel the pain of what happened to them throughout their experience.

Body Fields will usually contain remains of all kinds of people, animals and monsters. They do not seem to distinguish between any animal, it's all just more meat for the fields.

Due to the gradual withering of the body parts, leading to far more jerky and unpredictable movements, implying that the Body Fields are susceptible to fire, The Adventure Guild has suggested the strong and continuous use of fire on any Body Field that is able to immolated on to be the best way of dealing with these dangerous areas.