Neo Mushroom Bowl is a multi-fandom scriptfic fanfiction series written by supercomputer276, taking the form of writeups of wacky combat sport matches. It's inspired by Roy's Sports Hall at Lemmy's Land, and is a continuation of my earlier series Mushroom Bowl.

The Setting: Diamond Bluff Casino

There is a world out there, an infinite desert that serves as a multiversal nexus where realities have blended together, where you can meet almost anyone and almost anything can happen. It's known to some as "The World Where the Worlds Cross." And in one of its most prominant cities, Onieplugmitt, is the Diamond Bluff Casino.

As casinos go, the Diamond Bluff Casino is unassuming. Most have a reputation of organized crime behind them, but this one is known to be run by a retired supervillain, a mad genius of a fox that once tried to conquer the multiverse. Eventually, he found fulfillment not in conquest, but in his own found family, and settled down to create his own business in one universe where he didn't have a criminal record. He currently goes by the name "Ambition," and his former lieutenants almost all took new names as well.

Most relevant to this, this casino's connected stadium hosts the "Solid Reality Arena" system. An invention of Ambition's that's totally definitely not cribbed from Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V's ARC system and Chaotic's Battledromes, it is capable of creating any 3D space - complete with terrain, obstacles, and special features - with only "hard light" holograms. It can even form a "skybox" the audience can look into. Originally designed for elaborate stage shows, Ambition always kept its ability to create fields for competition in the back of his mind. When he was trying to concoct some big new attraction to draw more business, he eventually decided to revive a combat tournament he held early in his criminal career, and make full use of his system's capabilities.

He originally designed his own custom tournament format for it, but it didn't stand up to testing.

Tournament Format

Each season of Neo Mushroom Bowl is a triple-elimination knockout tournament, which means contestants must lose three matches before they are eliminated. There are three total brackets: "A-Grade," "B-Grade," and "C-Grade." When a contestant loses the first or second times, they are dropped down to the next lowest bracket at the same round number. Since there's no reasonable way to sort the initial strength of the contestants that I feel like doing, they are seeded in the first round of the first bracket randomly; and all that drop to a lower bracket will be randomly seeded in the bracket round they landed in (with adjustments to try and avoid repeat matchups when possible). The ultimate victor of each bracket level becomes their Bracket Champ and advances to the Grand Championship bracket.

In each match, the contestants must defeat their opponent(s) by knockout, ringout, or forcing them to forfeit. Even if they summon minions, only defeating the original fighter matters. In addition, each fight takes place in a randomly-selected virtual arena that can add any number of complications, and the promoter can call for Random Events to shake things up and keep things interesting. (Killing the opponent is an automatic loss, and in the event it does happen, there's plenty of 1-up Mushrooms in stock.)

The Grand Championship bracket works slightly differently, as each Bracket Champ has lost a different number of matches but must lose three matches to be eliminated. When a contestant loses but hasn't lost enough times to be eliminated, this triggers a "bracket reset;" the contestants are magically healed back up and have another match in a new arena basically immediately. This keeps going until one of them has suffered the requisite amount of losses. The last Bracket Champ standing becomes the Grand Champion and winner of the tournament, receiving the Neo Mushroom Bowl trophy and a pre-selected grand prize of their choosing.

Voting

Visitors - including you at home - can influence the course of a match through good ol' democracy! When a match's page first goes up, a link to a Google poll is provided. For the following 7 days, you can vote for which fighter you want to win the match. You can only vote once per match; this rule and the time limit are enforced by the poll.

Whoever receives the most votes will have the advantage of the audience's karma, making them more likely to win - though it's not a guarantee! As well, if a match results in a tie (e.g. both opponents knock each other out at the same time), the votes are used to determine the winner.

Arenas

A match's arena is randomly selected from a 20-wedge wheel. The spaces on the wheel are distributed thus:

• 2 wedges each of the three generic arenas: the Battle Pit, the Battle Ring, and the Battle Pillar
• 2 wedges each of the "home arenas" (submitted by each contestant when they signed up) of the participants of the current match
• 1 wedge each of a random selection of the "home arenas" of non-participating contestants to fill the rest of the wheel

Random Events

Perhaps the most original aspect of the original Mushroom Bowl, Random Events choose one of several possible events to happen at, well, random. These can range from shifts in the terrain of the arena, dumping in hostile NPCs, wacky slapstick, and sometimes everything just explodes. Each arena also has its own unique Random Effect that can come up sometimes too. Ambition can call for a Random Event up to three times per match, but only one Event is ever active at a time, with the old one ending right before the new one is rolled.

Each tournament has its own numbered list of Random Events (viewable on its status page), and when called for, one is selected by a 3d6 roll + two modifiers. The first is +2 for every round of the tournament past the first (+2 for Round 2, +4 for Round 3, etc.). The second is based on the bracket, with +2 for B-Grade, +4 for C-Grade, and +10 for the Grand Championship (making its two rounds effectively "rounds 6 and 7" of A-Grade). These push the number higher into even crazier Events the further into the tournament it goes.

Analyst Panel and Pool

Diamond Bluff maintains a panel of six analysts whose job it is to scale up the contestants and attempt to predict the outcome of the match based on their analysis. This is humorous, because most of them are horrible at it. Before each match, an analyst is randomly selected from the panel to give their prediction. If they're right, the casino gives them a small reward. If they're wrong, they're removed from the panel via severe electric shock and a replacement is chosen from a waiting pool. The entire panel will be called on to give their predictions during the final match.

You can nominate an analyst to add to the pool any time you vote on a match. As long as they are part of a franchise represented in the tournament, I can Google them, and they haven't been on the panel before, they're able to be nominated. The state of the panel and how it changes over time is tracked on a season's status page.

Under the Hood

In the process of writing Neo Mushroom Bowl, I use a TTRPG system based on Fate Condensed, with some modifications guided by the Fate System Toolkit and retaining some parts of Fate Core. Each fighter is defined as a PC, and the conflict rules are used to determine the outcomes of matches; with arenas being sets of zones and situation aspects, and Random Events generally introducing a new situation aspect to the bout.

The full ruleset I operate under is available to read here. Here are some of highlights of how Neo Mushroom Bowl diverges from Fate, in no particular order:

• In addition to their five character aspects, including a high concept and a trouble, characters also have a "worldline" aspect representing which franchise they're from, allowing the nature of their reality to be used for invokes and compels. A character's worldline is as immutable as their high concept, if not moreso; not even an extreme consequence can stop a Mario character from being a Mario character. Each arena also has a worldline as a situational aspect (characters in an arena with a matching worldline cannot invoke both for the same roll, because you can't invoke the same aspect for a given roll more than once).
• There are 15 skills: Command, Fight, Know, Move, Notice, Operate, Shoot, Sneak, Steal, Sway, Tank, Tap, Tinker, Trick, and Will. Command and Tap are wholly new; the rest are derived from Fate's default skill list. These were selected to focus on the behaviors and actions of video game villains.
• A number of extras have been added that are usually purchased with refresh (and by turning in free stunt slots from character creation) to allow contestants to better emulate video game boss behavior. This includes being able to summon minions to aid in battle, flight, multiple phases, and rules for when your boss fight is you driving a giant robot.
• All consequences are renamed to begin the recovery process after battle (from the Bowl's on-site medical staff) and in most cases consequences weaker than severe will be cured before the character's next match.
• In addition to their refresh, each main fighter gets a bonus number of special fate points called "support points" at the start of an official tournament match. Each match has a pool of support points based on the round number, and they're divided among the fighters proportional to the audience votes. Unspent support points are lost at the end of the match.
• The fighters in a match reach a milestone after every battle they have (even if they lose), and a breakthrough after every 5 battles. Changes and advancements will, in most cases, reset at the end of the season. Only Bracket Champs receive the equivilent of a "power up" breakthrough, called a "crowning." (Note that the A-Grade Bracket Champ will only have had 4 battles before the Grand Championship, so they and they alone will have less breakthroughs during the tournament. This is intentional, treating having 3 "lives" to lose in the final match as the offset to the advancements their opponent will have.)

Note this doesn't mean these are transcriptions of TTRPG sessions. I currently play as every character and GM. All characters were built as if for a campaign taking place in their own home world, rather than around one participating in a combat tournament.

Earlier drafts of Neo Mushroom Bowl were built around Fate's ancestor, Fudge (specfically the free 1995 version). These systems were chosen for their universality, which you need when you're dealing with so many different franchises running on otherwise such different rules.

The Original Mushroom Bowl

The original Mushroom Bowl ran on my personal site (hosted on Webs, since taken down) from mid-2006 to summer 2010. Most of it was scriptfic, but the Grand Championship took the form of a webcomic. It's currently hosted on ComicFury with director's commentary.