Today we've got some ideas for the kind of peculiar background details that can help bring a game world to life, as well as some ideas for bringing them into the foreground if your players take an interest. They'd fit best in a slightly exotic campaign, perhaps featuring picaresque heroes in the vein of Cugel the Clever.
Piper Snails
Description: These harmless creatures are amphibious snails with cream & white shells that, on closer examination, prove to be pierced with patterns of tiny holes. They are more likely to be heard than seen at first, as each snail produces a continuous fluting "music" that most people find relaxing. Most commonly found in temperate forests and wetlands, piper snails are extremely long-lived. The vast majority of them are eaten by fish, fowl, frogs, and other small creatures within their first few years but they grow slowly but steadily throughout their lifespan, and those that reach a decade or more have generally outgrown their former predators. The shell of a century-old piper snail can be well over a foot in diameter. Rumors persist of fey courts with prized millenia snails the size of a horse, although such leviathans are almost unheard of outside fey-touched regions.
There are two reasons a party of adventurers might take an active interest in piper snails. Firstly, the local nobility (perhaps in imitation of their fey counterparts) have adopted the snails as exotic pets, keeping them in terrariums and collecting and selecting differing breeds and generations of them to optimize the sound of their music. Older snails have deeper, stronger tones and the complexity of their tunes increases over the years, and are therefore more desired (and valuable), but collections of younger snails that harmonize well are also popular as natural orchestras. As often happens, the fad is starting to spread to the gentry and demand for expert snail hunters and "composers" adept at selecting just the right mix of the animals continues to grow. Competition for choice specimens is providing a whole new field for family grudges among the noble houses and class tension between the blue-blooded and the merely wealthy.
Secondly, alchemists and mages have recently discovered (or re-discovered) that piper snails can be rendered down into ingredients used in potions of longevity. Eternal youth has an obvious appeal, and the demand for snails is great among the learned and their wealthiest (and oldest) clients. The specimens must be alive at the time of rendering, so some care in harvesting the creatures is needed. Moreover, an aspiring snail hunter can expect competition not only from their fellows but from music aficionados, angry fey and woodland protectors, and wardens on the lookout for snail poachers on their masters' lands.
All in all, being found walking the lands with a suspiciously fluting bag of dampened burlap is no longer as safe as it once was.
Design Commentary: If you'd prefer to keep piper snails as a background oddity, forget the hooks above and have them be much more common, perhaps even to the point of being pests like common garden snails. There might be customs around them as well. A piper snail might be a traditional gift for a child, possibly growing up with them and even outliving their owner to be passed along across generations. Snails with matching music might be shared as lovers' tokens, with ensuing shenanigans when it turns out that many snails share indistinguishable tunes. Local superstition might hold that the music of the snails is praise to the gods, making them holy animals, or that the souls of your ancestors live on within them. .
Or you could combine the two. Maybe that inn in the forest is run by a fan of their music and practically overrun by the things, which is slightly gross (snail-trails everywhere!) but lends a pleasant air to your stay. Perhaps the PCs will be there the night some passing party of nobles notices the piper snails and starts the whole fad. Maybe getting in on the ground floor of a new craze of the powerful will give the party an unexpected windfall?
This was inspired by several things, including the Victorian fad for keeping live beetles as ladies' pets (on little chain leashes, no less) and by this post on animal friends over on Telecanter's Receding Rules:
http://recedingrules.blogspot.com/2020/09/6-animal-friends.html
I think it would be fun if you could collect different ones to make a certain tune, like collecting pokemon. Though that would work even better in a video game. It might also be interesting if one of their predators was particularly nasty, so that when you heard them, players would get scared of the fish, fowl, or frog, that might be lurking.
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