Drawing Inspiration From The Natural World: Fungi

At A Weekend With Good Friends in March 2024 I took part in a panel discussion on drawing inspiration from the natural world. While I'm no biologist, I am absolutely fascinated by nature in all it's beauty, horror and downright weirdness, and often make use of it in scenarios.

Over the course of this panel I talked quite a lot about fungi, but still had plenty more that I could say. So...

A Few Favourite Fungi

Cordyceps

Photo by Andreas Kunze

This is Cordyceps militaris, the Scarlet Caterpillarclub. A pretty innocuous fungi on the face of it, but the fun stuff is happening underground. The spores of this fungus grow on an underground moth pupa, taking over the body of the caterpillar inside and filling it with mycelium.

Chances are though, if you've heard of cordyceps before, it's Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the zombie-ant fungus. As the name suggests, rather than just attacking an immobile pupa, it goes for the live ants, infecting their brain and changing their behaviour to make them move to an area good for spore distribution. There the ant is forced to bit onto a leaf, where its mandibles lock in place. Only then is the ant allowed to die, as the fungus consumes it and produces its fruiting bodies. And there is a reason I only included a picture of the Scarlet Caterpillarclub in this article. Feel free to google your own nightmares.

Some types of cordyceps are edible, and they also play a part in traditional Chinese medicine. Googling them gets you articles about the many health benefits of cordyceps and how eating them will improve your life.

Nice try, cordyceps.

Stinkhorns

Photo by Jörg Hempel

On to something a bit more lighthearted. Stinkhorns, as their name implies, stink. Many of them also look a bit like penises, hence the Latin name of the pictured common stinkhorn, Phallus impudicus. The stinking serves a purpose. The slime on the top there is gleba, a goo containing spores. Much like a flower offering a sweet perfume to attract bees to spread their pollen, the stinkhorns use the smell of rotting meat to attract carrion eating flies who carry the gleba to new locations on their feet.

But those aren't my favourite stinkhorns. My favourite is Clathrus Archeri, commonly known as Devil's Fingers or the Octopus Stinkhorn.

Photo by Oilys

They first appear as strange white eggs. In time the red fingers start to become visible under the egg surface, until they burst out in strange shapes, covered in black slime. Of course they are stinkhorns, so that black slime is the stinking spore-filled gleba.

Stinkhorns come in all kinds of weird and wonderful shapes and forms! If you need inspiration for alien looking entities for your games, take a look at the incredible variety of stinkhorns.

Photo by Pseudopanax

Amethyst Deceiver

Fungi names are absolutely wonderful. Many of them sound like they came out of some kind of random word generator. Although when you look at a Laccaria amethystina, you can at least see where part of the name came from.

Photo by GaryGMason

Aside from the charming colour scheme though, what makes these mushrooms interesting is that under normal circumstances they are edible, but that changes if they grow in certain locations. Amethyst deceivers are a bioaccumulator of arsenic, meaning that if they grow on soil contaminated with arsenic, they become poisonous.

These mushrooms are a good reminder that conditions that seem hostile to life, often aren't. Fungi, bacteria and other microbes can exist in conditions that seem absolutely hostile to life, whether through heat, cold, pressure, or excessive quantities of arsenic.

Bleeding Tooth Fungus

But sometimes it's just fun to look at something really weird, and stinkhorns aren't the only bizarre looking fungi out there. The tooth fungi are named for the spiny protrusions that grow on the underside of their caps, but if you ever encounter Hydnellum peckii in the wild it probably won't be the teeth that get your attention.

Photo by Bernypisa

The bleeding tooth fungus, also known as strawberries and cream by people who've clearly encountered scarier strawberries than me, exudes a red liquid which contains an anticoagulant. Nobody knows how or why it does this.

It's not just a bloody face though. Like with all fungi, the fruiting body is only half the story. The bleeding tooth fungus is a mycorrhizal fungus, which means it forms a symbiotic relationship with plants. Its hyphae grow sheaths around the roots of trees, allowing it to exchange nutrients with the tree, benefitting both organisms.

Fungi In Media

There's a number of interesting works of fiction out there that make good use of fungi to bring the horror. Here's a few examples.

The Last Of Us

This video game and its TV adaptation show a terrifying future in which a mutated cordyceps fungus has infected humans, resulting in a zombie apocalypse. A BBC nature documentary provided the inspiration - you can't beat a David Attenborough show for inspiration from nature.

What Moves The Dead

In this novella, T. Kingfisher sets out to retell the story of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. The original story focuses heavily on decay, but T. Kingfisher is all too aware than in decay there is life, and fungi have a major part to play.

The X-Files

The X-Files has two episodes heavily based around fungi. Firewalker makes use of the cordyceps fungus in a manner that's far closer to the way it actually operates than the fungal zombies of The Last Of Us. And Field Trip gives us a hallucinogenic fungus that's notable not just for the hallucinations it induces, but also for the sheer size of the thing, as the creators remember that mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of the vast underground network of mycelium.

Fungi In Gaming

There's plenty going on with fungi to make use of in gaming.

First there's just the absolutely weird appearance of some of them. Need inspiration for a monster? An alien? Fungi have you covered.

Then there's the way they can affect your brain, whether that's with hallucinogenics like the liberty cap, or more directly like the zombie-ant fungus. They can change your perception of the world, or force you to act against your own nature. They are parasites that you can pick up through invisibly small spores and not even know you've got.

But let's go back to the stinkhorns. They're mimics. Lures. Imagine a fungus that gave off the scent of something delicious to humans - strawberries, perhaps - and then hid its spores in strawberry-like structures on its surface. How many of us could it infect?

Remember the extremophile nature of some fungi. Just because the PCs are in an inhospitable place like outer space, doesn't mean they aren't going to encounter life. And what might that life look like?

And finally, there's the symbiotic relationships of mycorrhizal fungi. It doesn't have to be a tree. What would it look like if a fungus formed a symbiotic relationship with an animal?

Conclusion

Fungi are fabulous. If you've only thought of them as food, poison or hallucinogens, get ready for a journey into these amazing organisms that are ready and waiting to appear in your games. Happy googling!

Photo by Jean Roulin