mushrooms

The Mushrooms Go to war!

David Skelector Fantasy, mushrooms, poems ,
image: Erol Otus

A Russian nursery rhyme:

Borovik, mushroom white,

Colonel of the mushroom might,

Sitting under a large oak

Looking at his mushroom folk

Summoned them, ordered them

To go to war

We can’t go, said the ink-caps,

Our foot’s too small for the steps.

We don’t have to go to war.

We can’t go, said the belianki,

We are noble white dvorianki.

We don’t have to go to war.

We can’t go, said the toadstools,

We are brigands, we are crooks.

We don’t have to go to war.

I can’t go, said the morel

I am too old and not too well.

I don’t have to go to war.

Said the russet ryzhiki,

We are simple muzhiki.

We don’t have to go to war.

We’ll go, cried the groozd,

We are brave and willing.

We shall go to war

And make a great killing.

A note on Myconids

David Skelector D&D 5e, Dungeons and Dragons, Fantasy, Monsters, mushrooms, musings, Roleplaying Game, RPG, world-building , ,

27. sovereign basidia (2015) - out of the abyss

I don’t think I’ve ever used myconids, but that’s something I want to remediate soon enough. However, if I were to stick to D&D canon lore (which I won’t), myconids are supposed to be found exclusively in the underdark, the subterranean world home to the iconic drow. This was set in stone, so to speak, by Gary Gigax’s D1-2 Descent into the Depths of the Earth (1e), which of course, borrowed heavily on established hollow earth fiction (Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la Terre). More to the point, Gigax also borrowed the myconids, which were created in the earlier module  A4 In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, which was an subteranean adventure (mostly) but in no way deep in the bowels of the earth-subteranean.

shrooms

They belong on the surface!

Leaving the myconids out of most of the more typical (surface) encounters is both sad and needless, in my opinion. Put in any setting, the potential is just mind-blowing…

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Deathbloom Thallid (MtG), perfect for a Chult campaign conversion

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sporecap_spider

The Fun in Fungi (magic: the gathering)

David Skelector Fantasy, Magic: the Gathering, mushrooms , , ,

A few weeks ago I tried MtG for the first time. I’d never played in my youth (it seems like you choose either tabletop gaming or card gaming, rarely both). My good friend, who was nostalgic about his own gaming past, introduced me to this famous money pit (what a friend hey!). He taught me the basics and we had time to play twice The first time, and most interesting from my pov, was with bare-minimum dominaria decks.

I had a black and green deck, with not much going on with the notable exception of FUNGUS!

Here’s some cards I had:

 

That sufficed to make me like the game as I’ve been quite fascinated by anything mycology-related for a while now. In fiction, since I read the Ambergris books from Jeff Vandermeer and before that in gastronomy, when my wife and I became wild mushrooms enthusiasts.

The M:tG Thallids (how the fungus creatures are called) seems to have much more impactful art and concepts than their D&D Myconids counterpart and I will certainly steal a few things for my Ruins of Chult campaign!

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Sadly I don’t own this big guy… Yet!