OSR: Myconids, Part 3

Part 1, Part 2

The Fungid Valley is a hostile environment. If the rest of the Veins of the Earth are a wilderness, the Valley is a jungle. Creatures who can adapt to the ever-changing fungal warfare can live in relative safety. Food and water are always abundant, but the Valley can offer far more. There are treasures and miracles hidden in its untended depths.

Christian Benavides

Rare Fungi

1. Hallucinogenic Mushrooms
Small, easily overlooked, and rather plain, these mushrooms transport any vertebrate who eats them into a rapturous and delirious state. The effects last 1d6 hours per dose. A dose sells for 5gp in the Veins and 30gp on the surface. They can be cultivated. Some rare breeds of Myconid also have hallucinogenic flesh.

1d10	Hallucinogenic Mushroom Effect
1	Sensitivity to light. Torches and candles leave contrails.
2	Nausea. Moving quickly is disorienting and difficult.
3	Floating sensation, as if underwater. Skin feels prickly and warm.
4	The giggles.
5	Colours become brighter, more vibrant. Sounds take on a new pleasant tone.
6	Patterns and ripples crawl across walls and objects.
7	To your eyes, faces melt and shift. Fangs emerge. Daggers become claws.
8	Walls begin to move and churn. Navigating is difficult.
9	Bendy fingers. Cannot hold anything without a supreme effort of will.
10	Blindness and madness. A sensory whirl. A very bad trip. Rapture attack (VotE pg. 107)

2. Celestial Hallucinogenic Mushrooms
Rarer and more dangerous. These mushrooms sprout only before a great catastrophe or upheaval. They require concentrated magical residue to grow. Fossil angel bones, raw occultum veins, and dragon hearts are their ideal food. They glow with a faint octarine light. Ghosts and spells are drawn to them. Most fungal patches are guarded by a handful of deranged hallucinating ghosts. Grab the mushrooms and run; if they have sprouted, some enormous magical disaster is sure to follow.

The effects last 1d10 minutes per dose. A dose sells for 100gp in the Veins, or 1,000gp on the surface. The visions are true and accurate but may not be very helpful. Each dose also erases and muddles the last 24hrs of memory.

1d10	Celestial Hallucinogenic Mushroom Effect
1	Visions of the distant past. Volcanoes, bacteria, weird scuttling insects.
2	Visions of the far future. Blasted wastes, a swollen red sun, dust, strange pillars.
3	Visions of the present. Mundane, shocking, or just odd.
4	Visions of the inside of your own brain, heart, and lungs.
5	Incomprehensible whirls and colours. Strong sense of vertigo.
6	Vanish for 1d6 hours, reappear with all gear randomized.
7	Visions of the object, person, or path you most desire.
8	Visions of the next threat, enemy, or obstacle you will face.
9	Mutate 1d6 times.
10	Raving eye-clawing madness. Rapture attack (Vote pg. 107)

3. Screaming Explosive Puffball
Seeks fire to spread its spores. A white bulbous mass on a cave wall with strange fluted vents and channels, gently spilling spores into the air from one central hole. The spores are ridiculously flammable. The flame rushes up to the puffball, turning the entire mushroom, briefly, into a noisy biological jet engine. It scours nearby rock clean, exposing new surfaces for its spores to colonize. Adapted Humanoids use them as traps.

The puffballs can be detached and used as a weapon. Their skin is fireproof. The jet deals 2d6 fire damage in a 30' line and lasts for 2d6 rounds. Anyone holding it must brace themselves against the recoil.  Although the Fungid Valley is carved from coal, water and damp fungi make it difficult to set a large section on fire.

4. Tinder Conks
Most mushrooms are temporary tools. Conks, or tree shelves, or tree brackets, are more permanent. They grow seasonally, adding a new layer of spore-producing fungus to the bottom of their plate- or hoof-like structures. The fungus itself is buried its food source. Some species in the Fungid Forest have adapted to feed on coal. They form permanent shelves, almost invisible under a secondary layer of smaller fungi. They have permanent, slow, and vengeful minds.

When man stole fire from the Gods he carried it in a dried conk, glowing embers concealed by the dead fungus. The tale became legend; the conk was forgotten. Its brothers and sisters in the dark remember the callous foolishness of man and the warmth of the flame.

A tinder conk will sing to you at night. It will call out and ask for fire. It will carry your embers for you more securely than a lamp. Quicker than flint and tinder. Safer than oil. Store it in a pouch or a pack and forget about it. Only one -  a small one, the size of a clenched fist, will be chosen. Hidden in the darkness, the enormous ancient conks wait and mutter parting words of advice to the small conk. The conk dies but lives on in the embers, taking the flame's nature for its own by magic so ancient it's hardly magic at all. It calls softly to other flames. A lit tinder conk can:
     -dim or extinguish fire in a 100' radius.
     -cause fire to inflict double damage against a target.
     -spontaneously turn an ember, spark, or smouldering coal into a blaze.
     -burst into flames (1' radius, 1d6 fire damage).
It can be reasoned with, if you can speak to fungi or to fire. It wants conflagrations, death, destruction of worked objects, misery, and the humiliation of civilizations. Failing that, it just wants you dead.

Lit tinder conks are prized by Meanderthals (VotE pg 84). They have similar grievances. They don't care about Illithids, the Dvergr, Antlings, or the Olm. Everyone else should suffer in cold and lightless misery.

5. Memory Mold
Blacker than black. Drinks light and memories. Harmless unless you touch it or step into it accidentally. The spores twinkle in the air like falling stars. There's an odd sense of pressure and a faint buzzing sound.

Memory Mold spores eat 1 month of memories per round. (Just as a reminder, there are 12 months in a year and most people have very few memories before age 5). Moving out of the area ends the effect. The mold eat your oldest memories first. Childhood. The surface. They flash through your mind as they are devoured.

You won't lose language or skills. Strong emotional reactions and some vital details will remain. But you can purge yourself of guilt or weakness or doubt. You can truly kill your past. For those who seek a new life in the Veins, Memory Mold is a blessed release. At the GM's discretion, prolonged Memory Mold exposure may require a roll on The Effects table (VotE pp. 326-327) or give bonuses to Saves vs Fear (or doubt, or nausea, or committing taboo behaviors).

Emily Eliza Ellis

6. Massacre Mouse
A button-sized grey mushmouse with an skull-shaped cap. Deadly poison, but that's not the main draw. The mushmouse's fungal senses are so highly tuned that it can sense a disaster or massacre before it happens. It can smell fear and blood a mile away. It needs fresh corpses and sudden violence to sporulate. If your captive mushmouse begins to leak spores, prepare for a fight.

Mechanically, anyone carrying a massacre mouse cannot be surprised by any potential massacre-inducing roll on a Random Encounter Table. They have at least 1 round to prepare. A massacre mouse will live for 1d6 weeks. Near the end of its life cycle, it will begin to emit an invisible and nearly odourless gas that smells like a dying Mantis Shrimp (VotE pg. 82). If it can't find a massacre it will make one.

7. Trumpet of Judgement
A fabled medicinal powder on the surface; a rare mushroom in the Fungid Valley. Trumpets of Judgement are blue-white folded mushrooms with bright gold interiors. They grow in patches untroubled by other nearby fungi; similar to the corroded ring around green slime, trumpets of judgement make their own space. They are immensely powerful purgatives. Eat just a small portion and all diseases, fungal infections, spells, curses, and supernatural afflictions flee your body. You will also sweat profusely, vomit, cry, and shit yourself all at once with astonishing force. You also take 1d6 damage. Powdered, the fungus can be thrown in the face of wizards to utterly cripple them. A handful is worth 100gp in the Veins and 1,000gp on the surface.

8. Long Fungus
A simple grey-black spot, perfectly round, shiny like a beetle. Only grows on ranged weapons, usually flint arrowheads or ancient stone throwing axes. Eat it, and for 1d6 hours all ranged weapons, thrown objects, or projectiles will miss you. Causes mild stomach cramps.

9. Preservation Spores
Some fungi wish to feed at leisure. This species spreads cold white spores as big as snowflakes. It tends to fill entire passages. Any non-fungus creature they touch is slowed and chilled. 3 rounds of exposure induces a deep dreamless sleep. Each round after that extends the sleep by 1 hour until 24 hours are reached, and then by 1 week for each subsequent round until 52 weeks are reached. Sleeping creatures will not wake unless rinsed in hot water. While asleep, they are immune to all diseases and poisons, even ones previously afflicting them. If they have slept for more than a week, they permanently lose 1d6 HP upon awakening (to represent the spores growing and feeding on their flesh). The spores can be bottled and made into a potion with similar effects.

10. Gold Plate Fungus
Grows on gold ore veins (or, more commonly, dropped gold pieces, water-lost jewelry, etc.). It glows blue in the presence of royalty. Some petty kingdoms in the Veins have throne rooms lit only by this fungus. Royalty, kingmakers, and blood sorcerers will pay 100gp for a small piece.

Zdzisław Beksiński

Runoff

A thousand underground streams feed the Fungid Valley. Lost and forgotten things are carried by the water and wedged in the coral reef chaos of the Valley. Ancient swords and lost crowns are buried in the mold next to heaps of lost coins.

This great concentration of wealth attracts many treasure-seekers. If you can survive in the Valley you can easily become rich. Myconids care little for gold (unless someone has taught them to hoard it), so most treasure simply lies where it feel, forgotten and ignored. Use standard treasure tables throughout.

In Harbinger Basin, at the very bottom of the Fungid Valley, a Castillan Caddis Larva (VotE p.36) lurks in the slime-coated lake. It has grown huge and is nearly ready to become a Caddis Dragon. Blessedly, Caddis Dragons live only for a few weeks. Unfortunately, their short lives are spent in an  orgy of destruction. The Caddis Dragon will try to eliminate any rivals, redirect rivers, pollute lakes, and overthrow civilizations to ensure more magical items are swept downriver for its offspring to use.

Normally, killing a Castillan Caddis Larva provokes a war. This time, it might prevent one.