Dwelling in secluded caverns, dank grottos, murky rainforest undergrowth or other dark and out of the way places, the Mushroom men, aka the Myconid, are peaceful and harmonious fungus people.
THE FOX I had a Dwarf character that didn’t bathe and barely ever took his armor off. Eventually, he got a myconid infestation in the crouch piece of his plate male. Took 3 Druids, a Cleric, and 5 different salves to get rid of the itch. I tried to get the party’s paladin to Lay on Hands but I’m sure you can understand why she was opposed to the idea.
Dude, AJ Pickett it's so passionate at explaining things that for the first three and a half minutes when he was describing the myconids I really thought he was talking about real life fungus
Oh man, when you were mentioning the hive mind aspect of these myconids and mind flayers, I wondered what if you and your party were to find a myconid village under attack by mind flayers and the way you defeat it is by joining the entire myconids collective hallucinations and overcoming the elder brains hive mind through it, that would be epic!
I have been using myconids in a game i am running currently. In my game the myconids are contacting the astral plane when they meld, since the astral is like a realm of dreams. Anyone in rapport with the sovereign can effectively see into the part of the astral from which they have their hallucinations. As a bonus ability, a large tree that they draw nutrients from has a portal to the astral plane between its roots. They have grown down into the shallow cavern inhabited by the myconids and other fungus. A local group of goblins have been capturing myconids and removing their spores, to drug their enemies. They also have corrupted the Rapport spores, turning them into a street drug called "Kack". So when the PCs, eliminate the goblin threat for the myconids, they can also take the spores harvested by the goblins and use them in combat. I would recommend myconids to any DM wanting to stretch their imagination. +
I can just imagine a colony of these guys living in a sewer beneath a large city, living off the wastes of the society above. Farming with human manure as the growing medium.
For some reason I got a huge feeling of Amish monks, haha. Just want to be left alone, very spiritual, don't press or infringe on others. I like these characters a lot. Thanks for bringing them to my attention!
Actually might be an interesting start to one off, or taken further of there is a fix, to have the players start out as reanimated corpses by Myconids. They would not know who they were, would follow orders from Myconids, and with the right tools you maybe could even do something like they fill in pieces of what their character was like before. Sort of like an in story character creation, with them brought back to life at the end.
AJ Pickett I had heard of the prison unknown traits thing, but it kind of sounds hard to understand a story reason to not know who you are or gage other characters. But if you were fungus zombies which did not have self awareness at first, I could see just asking to role just for height when it might come up to random parts of memories, or languages. A reason people to monster races could find themselves together. I had been really busy with work lately, but with Xanathar's guide I had been playing around with ways to randomly roll everything about a character. Past idea I had been trying think of was a real horror story for in Underdark, mostly been thinking of Ilithid, but not think that despite Myconids not being evil, they could open a whole lot of horror potential.
I think the Myconid's would just dose them with Psilocybin and you would have a pod of Ilithids floating around mentally giggling and talking about how their tentacles are melting.
We visited a wizards village with a myconid cavern underneath. That cavern was coming under attack by more zenophobic myconids, my druid (LN) really apriciated the various uses for the huge variety of mushrooms and spores. Used goblin gained gold to tade for a lot of them. Used that druid for so many campaigns and made the supplies bought from that village for a long time. Long may you serve the cycle Sayn Worwalker, who died slaying a Green dragon.
I'm going to be making a coral variant of the myconids, so I'm coming back to this video again. This is going to help a lot for our underwater adventure. :)
One thing to keep in mind is that coral is formed by tiny Cnidaria, the Polyps, little sea anemone clones, millions of them, covering the hard shells of previous generations, so the living part is the skin. They also have a mobile stage where they spread out and drift to new surfaces, settling and feeding by filtering the water. A mobile form could be a connected skin of Polyps that move together like a sheet of muscle, with a solid core, like an endoskeleton, or, they could settle as a skin across an old, actual skeleton of some long dead creature, effectively animating it. So, they could exist in many forms, an immobile "Thinker" colony, a mobile "cloak" or "Web" form that can smother and poison a target, and a "Skin" form that anchors to and animates something else, either a coral core or an old skeleton. They could have a potent toxin they can jrelease into the water or stingers like any of the other jellyfish species.
THAT'S SO COOL! There's an area called the Cnideria Ridges our DM made. Our DM wanted the Cenosarcids to have a wide range of physical appearance, so the polyps take on the growth traits of other mundane corals they settle near. We named this variant the Cenosarcid (from the cenosarc of coral anatomy), a nod the the Myconid naming. I think the new UA Druid Circle of Spores could still be used for corals. Flavor-wise, it would probably not be spores but chemicals like hormones. I'm not a biology buff so I hope I'm not missing something here. I was thinking of taking away the light sensitivity, since corals seem to do well enough in sunlight, and make it viable for a player coming in soon to play as one. Also, if a single "creature" would be made up of hundreds of Cnideria, I'm thinking of taking inspiration from the Geth of the Mass Effect series. My worry is game balance. If they lose the daylight sensitivity, what negative should they have to balance it? Maybe disadvantage against poison saves?
I would make them more sensitive to temperature, the Cenosarcids are vulnerable to heat and cold attacks, plus, if they spend more than an hour in freezing temperatures, or very hot temperatures (say, close to a volcanic vent or in the very cold, deep water) they start taking damage and suffer cumulative states of exhaustion, leading to death.
AJ Pickett Thanks! This really helps us out a lot! :) That feels like a fair trade, daylight sensitivity for temperature sensitivity. Does it make sense to change the spores into hormones or toxins more?
Fun fact, these jolly fellows got their debut in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, marching alongside the hordes of the White Witch. They are originally an evil species, and were probably meant by C.S. Lewis as a dark subterranean counterpart to the tree based Dryads.
I love myconids and other fungi. I know you did an ecology of oozes, how about an ecology of fungus creatures - hit myconids, gas spores, shriekers, brown mold and yellow mold, and all of the other related things that might actually form a full ecology in some damp underdark cavern.
Okay... I'm gonna befriend a myconid sprout. Keep it safe and fed in my sachel and name him Groot... Teach it dance. Use Telepathy for the party as needed. Reanimate party members for battles to be reincarnated later. Throw hallucinate packets at enemies.
I know a lot of these are older videos, but I just got into painting miniatures. I watch your videos to learn about each creature or being that I'm painting as to get a background of who each miniature is, where they came from, what color and why, Is it recovering from some sickness or other. Now I'm doing myconids and fungal beings. Awesome content as always.
So I've got a weird fungi related situation in my game and I need advice. The players have made a pit in the middle of the forest and thrown some russet mold in there. Then they've thrown corpses in, human corpses. Then they threw picks in and helped the vegepygmies widen the space AND gave them a tunnel to the surface. Then they fed 8 goats and a giant corpse to them. A week passes of the pygmies and thornies hunting for food and a chief grows. The players try to explain to the pygmies to NOT kill them or their workers but it's tricky. Now the players have realised there's about 60+ fungi monsters in there and they want them dead. They set a few on fire by burning a barrel of dwarvern booze but they're hard negotiating with me that basically the monsters wouldn't know how to put the fire out and they'd just run around into eachother and tons of them would burn to death because they're plants. (except they're not weak to fire and they're actually fungi) It's a damp cave and they'd have side tunnels now after a week of digging through soft soil. Should I kowtow to them and let tons of them die or should I let this obviously f**king stupid mistake they made have the horrible, potentially game ending consequences you'd expect.
MrCompassionate01 make them role an intelligence check depending on the role tell them that "you remember from your studies that fungi actually don't share many traits with plants, and further more tools considerably speed up the excavation process." Or on a low role "this should defiantly work, fungi are basically plants right? And it's not like we gave them tools or anything."
I would absolutely let this escalate to disaster.. then give the player characters a lead on a magical artifact that could deal with this situation, but they have to go on a fairly difficult quest to attain it.
Good idea! I'll do that if they escape but right now we ended the session with them throwing barrels of burning booze into the hive of 60+ monsters. Luckily Thornys only run 30ft per turn so they might be able to run away if things get rough. Strangely some of them are on the verge of blaming me for this on the grounds of "you let our schemy player have a vial of Russet Mold". This is like sueing a hammer company because you repeatedly hit yourself in the head with a hammer. Players be crazy. PS: The schemy player isn't a traitor or working against them, he's just terrible at scheming.
I agree with PeramFare. My personal tactic is, if the players do something really, really dumb, i'll make sure they are actually doing that, give them a chance to change their mind, and then after they fail to do either, (There is no if.), they suffer the consequences and somehow scheme their way out of it.
3.14 Dragon I agree it's the done thing to warn your players. I always give them a chance to figure out how silly they'e being. I had the Vegepygmies hiss like evil monsters and when a player used comprehend languages to talk to them the creatures simply said 'SUSTINENCCCCEEEEEE' Then there started to be drag marks with blood trails leading into the cave, as if they'd been hunting. I made sure the players were well aware of how many of these things appear from merely a single humanoid corpse, let alone Giants. The townsfolk started to complain about groups of mushroom dog monsters running amok. I even let them know that the soldiers they'd ordered would arrive in a day or two but they rushed out the fire plan immediately anyway. Problem is by this point it's far, far too late for four level 5 heroes to solve this problem. It has grown horribly out of control so it's gonna end up like this: cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/368317981681385472/391542960635772928/PAMTq3W.png
Thanks for bringing these guys to my attention, I was trying to think of an interesting non hostile creature to introduce a group to the under dark before they have to deal with their Mind Flayer problem. I was thinking Flumps but I think I can do so much more with this.
One of my players is actually running a myconid homebrew character. It's pretty interesting when he trys to interact with a person who is unfamiliar with rapport spores
I'll soon be running n updated version of the old AD&D A series slaver modules - which use the myconids. I think I'll have these creatures take a more active role, with the slavers using tactics like Illithids. I also like the idea of making them jungle based rather than forest based. Thanks!
How well do they get along with flail snails? Do they ever meld with them to collect and archive some of their poetic wisdom? Are there any rare cases where a myconid might meld with a non-myconid they are particularly fond of and travel out of the colony with them for a while?
Hey AJ like the channel. Learned so much from your channel. One thing that I like to do with Myconids is that when they drop to 0 hp a cloud of hallucinate spores as a final defense. Have you ever thought about doing Nagas?
This is perfect. I'm working on an encounter with Myconids. The adventurers find a cavern occupied by Myconids. In the distant past an earthquake destroyed a massive natural column. Fearing a cave-in, their aging king climbed the remnants of the column and found he could just reach the ceiling. Bracing himself beneath the rupture, the king cut off contact with his fellows and entered a trance-like state before eventually dying. Since then, any Myconid sensing their end makes the climb and joins the King Column, intertwining as best they can with their petrified kin. The Myconid's have been receiving visions during their meld that make them think the column is in trouble. They ask the adventurers to take a spore-potion that will shrink them down so they can enter the column to investigate. Any suggestions on what they encounter in there?
The thing to note is that Tardigrades aren't extremeophiles. They can survive in their, but not live. So if the players make it a hellish wasteland, THEY DID EVENTUALLY KILL THEM. With luck. I hope.
A whole bunch of that would be ants (using a giant spider/giant wolf spider stat blocks) burrowing and making a nest in the column weakening the structural integrity
Im new to all the d&d lore and actual playing. Im giving it my best shot to learn about whats out there and honestly there is way more then i thought. You videos are a great help with learning about it all but ive still got some questions. Like what is a tortle or i think they are called the tortoise folk? Thanks for the videos keep'm coming
Such a beautiful race!!! So delightful. I was worried at first that they would be evil servants/soldiers of Zuggtmoy. Is that another race of mushroom folk I'm thinking of?
They are easily corrupted and dominated by the Demon Queen of Fungus, some might be warped after hundreds, if not thousands of years of her influence, so, they may have been Myconids, but are not something very foul and deadly.. a name springs to mind.. Death Caps.. but I will need to look into that..
In out of the abyss a similar plot occurs in which zuggtomoy is corrupting a group of myconids. The effects she has on them are actually really fascinating
My friends and I have determined that they CAN in fact be poisoned, but only with vinegar or alkali, or something similar with an extremely high ph content. However, fire seems to be the most effective solution.
Hey brother! I was wondering if you could shed any light on the relationship between Myconids who are Lawful Neutral and the evil Demoness lady of Fungi, Zuggtmoy. THANKS!!!
Thank you for making this very informational video, I loved it! I'm making a myconid character to play through the Out of the Abyss module and having no real prior knowledge of how hive-mind/community based they were, I'm excited to see what interactions will take place with the other myconid NPC at the beginning of the campaign. :D
Myconids have often impressed me; a hove mind that isn't bad. Formians don't have to be, either, but they often seem more driven to skirt the edge of tipping past their resources, meaning every action IA about increasing said things, and even the biggest, most powerful of them hardly seem motivated beyond "get food, make space, increase number." Illithids are just evil, but Myconids can combine higher thinking patterns with their hive mind mentality, and not see everything else as either a resource, or an option for torture. I do wonder, though, why Zuggtomy doesn't have a majority of them under her control? Numerous Prime Material creatures have been dominated by such a Demon Lord, and fungi seems to be her thing. She has Cultists here, and used to visit more often, so why aren't more of them under her sway? Do they have a defense against madness, and corruption?
Myconids can be found in cow pastures underneath what is known as a "cow-pie". This "cow-pie" is actually the excrement of cows, and not as the name suggests a delicious cowfectionery creation. But this inedible shit pie hides a trippy secret...
@1:05 oh well aren't you just living the f-ing dream. I've got a biomedical science degree and would love to work in a genetics lab. Specifically a research lab focusing on CRISPR/CPF1. I'd also like to make informational youtube videos like you. Exploiting all those years of finely developed research skills. Anyway... Talk to you later on Patreon.
Great video as always! I liked expecially the reanimation spores suggestions. Meanwhile watching i was thinking about leafcutter ants (who grow mushrooms for eat feeding them with leaves) and so i've imaginated a community of Formians and Myconid in a sort of symbiosis. There was also a type of mushroom who grow on the head of certain type of insects and manipulate them (made more famous by the videogame Last Of Us), so maybe such thing can change the political status of such colonies...
Our DM played these folks so well in Out of the Abyss. It was kinda hard for us to go back to adventuring because we just wanted to hang out with the myconids and do shrooms.
"Juffo-Wup is the power of life... hot warmth in the cold Void. It flows through all things, binding them together, making them one. You are Non-Juffo-Wup, you cannot understand. Below is the pod of Juffo-Wup -- there for a thousand centuries. When we are cold, the pod opens and warms us. When it is dark, the pod clenches and lo, there is light. You are the Non. The pod is not for you. You must leave."
Special homebrew status: Myconids using animation spores on living beings and that being failing to resist. It's an opportunity to get creative, a special fungal-base pseudo-undead (not undead and never really died, more of a fungal hybrid that tends to favor Myconid relations and mutate).
There's a few hiding out in the Cypress swamps down here in Louisiana. Its rumored that the owner of the club in New Orleans called The Parade is actually a Myconid.
@@ryderma1 Well, I've never been to the swamps of Louisiana so I guess you could be right. Do they make good pets? A mushroom man sounds like a kick-ass pet.
Theirs even a base for that, it's a warlock incantation called something like Steel Mind if I remember? One of my players took that a while back, I don't know.
I do hope you read the comments on these older videos. I have a very specific request (should you have the time and ambition to fulfill). Could you consider making some location specific playlists? (underdark, feywild, alternate planes, etc) The idea is to assist viewers find the information they may be looking for. This is a selfish request, I admit, as your Ecology of the underdark video inspired me to make an adventure in the darkness for my players, but trying to find more videos specifically in that space is less than fluid.
Yes, it is somewhat unrealistic to comb through 700 video thumbnails trying to guess where I mention the Underdark. I am being increasingly prodded by viewers to make a big series of videos where I systematically tour the entire realms.. and of course, the Underdark is part of the realms!
I know these guys are normally peaceful, imagine if somewhere you have a rogue circle that forms a cult to worship Zuggtmoy. I mean she is the demon of fungus. Maybe she corrupts the peaceful mushroom people.
First encountered these guys in icewind dale in a sub terranian cave leading to Dorn's Deep. They were violent but so was everything in that game. Thought it was a cool monster myself. Would probs try playing as a homebrew monk. Will let my firends name the char to reflect the lore
So because I love cheese and like the idea of eating cheese and D&D talk like you do I always have these guys addicted to cheese and good ones will help or trade for cheese while evil one's will steal or lead players into dangerous places to eat the cheese advantage on rolls dealing with good guy's with cheese used or disadvantage if evil and they know players have cheese for skill checks please keep doing more videos love the shows and thanks for pink ooze cheese I thought of the two together making more people addicted to the best cheese in toril that my halflings make and use to get in close or get the players assassinated it is outlawed in 3 towns now to own or possession of cheese with any pink colors and my halflings use this as well slipped into players bags ect. And telling that they were selling to towns folk
The Forgotten Realms has Araumycos as the lord of the Myconids, that would be an excellent adventure arc. I've never heard of a fiendish myconid with a connection to Zuggtmoy, the Demon Queen of Fungi, does anyone out there run that idea in their campaign?
Yeah, basically, though I think they are content with who and what they are, evolution will end up favoring the more intelligent and aggressive myconids. The more passive and contemplative will tend to get killed off more often, so, evolution is basically the end result of many years of brutal attrition and basic statistics.
