Thursday, July 3, 2014

Ready Reference: What Kind of Mushroom Is It?


There aren't a lot of plants that grow naturally in caves and underground locales. This is generally because plants, as a rule, require light. But where there are moisture and food (which may include fecal matter), it is possible for fungi of various sorts to grow. (Conveniently for hexcrawlers, they grow in forests as well.) Mushrooms are great and interesting things, and can have all kinds of effects when introduced into the human body. This chart is for when PCs find mushrooms, and maybe do something about it.

(For the curious, the mushroom on the left is the death cap, the most toxic mushroom for humans; the one on the right is the fly agaric, which causes hallucinations.)

d100 Description
01-30Harmless but inedible. The mushroom is too tough to eat or indigestible, but trying it will not make a human sick.
31-35Bioluminescent. These mushrooms are neither edible nor poisonous, but they give off light. It only illuminates 2' from the mushroom but they will be visible from as far away as 120' if there is a clear line of sight.
36-55Edible but not incredible. This type of fungus has nutritional value, and eating enough will give some basic semblance of nutrition, but it tastes bland and spongy. They can be gathered and sold for 1 GP per pound.
56-59Delicious. Not only edible, but tastes very good, cooked or not. In town these can be worth up to 10 GP per pound of mushrooms.
60Rare gourmet mushrooms. These are the finest mushrooms, or perhaps truffles. They are extremely rare and nobles or merchants will easily pay 100 GP per pound.
61-75Mildly poisonous. These mushrooms cause retching and vomiting; a character failing a saving throw will be disabled for 2d6 turns while they deal with the effects.
76-80Extremely poisonous. A character who eats these and fails a saving throw versus poison will die. Success entails 2d6 turns of retching and vomiting.
81-90Psychoactive. A saving throw against poison should be made; the result determines how much control the character eating the mushroom has. They will experience hallucinations, visions, perhaps even synesthesia, but if they make a saving throw they can act normally through the experience. Failure means the character is inactive for 2d6 turns. Each mushroom can sell for 10-20 GP in town.
91-00Magic mushroom. The mushroom is literally magical. Suggested effects include growth up to 50%, shrinking up to 50%, healing 1-3 hit points per mushroom eaten, invisibility, bioluminescence, growing mushrooms, polymorphing into a random animal, or reversing any of these effects.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks, Wayne. This may be a dumb question but have you ever collated your tables into pdfs?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's actually a good question, and one I've been thinking about. With the reference charts, I'm going to wait until I've done a few more and then put them up in a single PDF like the OD&D setting.

      Delete
  2. I just did it myself. Quite easily, too. I clicked on your link for Ready Reference (down below on the right-hand side). I then clicked on my Print Friendly & PDF button (which I installed on Google Chrome). All the pages were put into PDF format quite nicely. I can send you the file if you'd like to see it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I like that there's only a 1% chance for gourmet edibles but a 10% chance for magic.

    ReplyDelete

Comments on posts older than two days will not appear until approved.