Serpentine Squiggles

Fruiting Body, Rotting Soul

Deep within the underdark, centuries of rot consumes ancient forest remnants. Fruiting bodies emerge from glistening oil field and hungry roots crack open coal. Hunger for fuel births a new race.

Princess Tremella is a simple nascent fragment of a fungal collective. She wants to win friends, make her creator shut up about finding a mate, and seize power to subjugate the world under her inhuman will. Why should myconids hide in caves and sip oil when there’s a world out there to devour?

Unfortunately, relationships are hard when you keep scaring shrooms away with your plans to feast on every creature and blanket the world in a tide of mycelia. No one understands. But that’s fine, she’ll just start an empire of unrivaled dominance on her own.

When she encounters a drow child exploring the caverns, she follows in secret to the site of her first conquest, a village full of living flesh ripe for devouring.

Tremella has two friends: Millaria and Ascos.

Millaria is a myconid with several long, corded limbs. She greets everyone with a tangled hug. Though her flesh is hard and spikey, she wears a lot of padding to keep her embrace soft. Visually, she’s a bit of chimera, her worn mycomeres born of many differnt eurhizae. Her first eurhiza lived in an old cavern lost to a monster’s incursion. Orphaned and jobless, she’s searching for a new eurhiza to adopt her before her mycomeres break down entirely.

Ascos is a scout, vis armor and strapped weapons so omnipresent they might as well be mycomeres. Ve spends vis days hunting small game in the caves and tending to farms on the periphery. Ve works hard enough ve’ll easily wear through a set of mycomeres in a month. It’s all worth it, ve says, if it means nobody starves.

Zia is a doll. A princess from another myconid settlement gave it to Tremella as a courting gift. Spirals decorate its fruit, and limbs are stretched to alien proportions. Zia is fragrant, body flowing with leaf​-​like hairs to waft its scents, and its cavities open in several places, joints eager to be pulled apart. Zia follows every order Tremalla gives, but otherwise sings stories and recites poetry. (Tremella rolls her eyes and ignores it.)

Sarcosypha is the eurhiza who provides the noorhiza for every myconid in Stalacap.

These myconids scrape by in Stalacap, a settlement reduced to fifteen eurhiza providing for a few hundred fully sapient myconids. The town is centered on a great, still lake in a vast cavern.

The fifteen eurhiza essentially act as families or companies, each producing a particular style of mycomere. Every body is crafted with some combination of the fifteen’s products, but sapient minds can only be produced by Sarcosypha. Each myconid has a fragment of her mind, a vegetative outgrowth of her noorhiza. Thus, new myconids can only be born with Sacrosypha wills it; without her, the fifteen eurhiza elders can at beast create simple​-​minded mycobeasts.

(Tremella doesn’t understand why Sacrosypha is so stingy with minds, or why she doesn’t give them all direct orders. How is Millaria still trying to figure out what to do with her life, when one word from Sarcosypha would decide everything? When she is queen, she’ll simply create a massive hivemind, an army under her direct control.)

  1. Tremella unhappy in her home cave.
  1. Dead drow