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

A Weekend With Good Friends 2023

I've been part of every A Weekend With Good Friends convention, but covid significantly reduced my participation in the previous event. This time I was back in full health and ready to do as much stuff as I could fit in. Which on this occasion included a number of panel discussions. We've not had them at previous AWWGF events, but it's been a popular request. The guests were a mix of industry professionals, authors, podcasters and GMs, including me.

Game 1: Relics of House Dragonfly

I've been seeing Exuviae: Relics of House Dragonfly at various conventions for a while now, but never actually played it. I decided it was time to change that. This was a slightly different variation on the game, using a D6 system instead of the original game's playing cards, which was certainly easier to manage in an online game.

The premise is that it's the 1940s, and you live in a bayside city that's controlled by an insect cult, and you've decided to do something about it. Character creation was a simple matter of figuring out what kind of person you are, how you found out about the cult, and why you want to stop them, plus the significantly more difficult matter of choosing a name. So a nightclub singer, an up and coming actress and a cryptographer set out to investigate the cult, found some horrible things, and very nearly rescued my character's best friend, only for a bad dice roll to ensure that only the cryptographer got out alive.

One unusual feature of this game is that instead of voice chat we played in text. Having played MUSH games for some time before I ever played tabletop, this was a familiar style of RP for me, but also one that I'd not done for over fifteen years. It was a fun reminder of how we did things in the days before ubiquitous internet voice chat. According to the GM it's taking off again in the FKR movement. All the same, while it was fun for a one-off, I don't think I'll be making a habit of it.

This is another game I own but don't remember buying, meaning I almost certainly picked it up in a charity bundle on DTRPG. If you also bought those bundles I strongly recommend checking this one out. It's ideal for low prep intrigue, and could probably be very easily reskinned for something other than an insect cult. I hope to give it a shot myself some time.

Games 2-4 were all me GMing things I've talked about before so let's skip over those and go straight to...

Game 5: Delta Green

An original scenario, "The Violence of Pure Reason", written by one of the GM's home group. This was truly excellent. I like when the mythos gets tied in with real world phenomena, in this case a notorious information hazard which hinted at what we would eventually encounter. We selected from a number of pre-gens, which meant that none of us had the occult skill, which seemed like a hindrance to the characters but ultimately we were able to find other ways to the information we needed.

None of which particularly helped when we did encounter an unnatural entity, while thoroughly unequipped to deal with it. Final death count: 2/4.

Games-wise, I think this was the highlight of the convention. Everything I want from a Delta Green one-shot. Properly creepy, lots of scope for investigation, freedom to follow up different leads while still getting where we needed to be.

Game 6: Quietus

Game 6 should have been a game of Call of Cthulhu, but with the GM too ill to run it I was happy to spot a free space in my second choice of game. Quietus is a game of melancholy horror, inspired by films like The Babadook, so I had a fair idea what I was in for, even without having played it before.

We began with character creation, which starts off with a simple question: what have you lost? There was one other player, and we decided to tie our stories together, so we decided Richard and Violet had been coworkers at a financial business of some kind. He'd been caught embezzling from the business to pay his child's healthcare bills, which caused the company to fold and she'd lost her home because she was living in a company flat. Then we needed an isolated location, for which we went for the traditional cabin in the woods, and a thing that had gone wrong, which was Violet's car breaking down.

We were already having a great time and that was just character creation. We took a short break when that finished so the GM could figure out how things were going to go from there.

Badly. They went badly. It started with spilt oatmeal and ended with us setting the entire cabin on fire. Ultimately we did manage to accumulate enough hope to escape the horror, but in the end we both went for very downbeat endings for our characters. They'd not been doing well prior to the events in the woods. Perhaps embracing the horror was the only thing that they could do?

And that was a wrap. Another great weekend where I got to try new games and spend time with some great people. Plus there were the panels! But that's a subject for a different post.

A Weekend With Good Friends 2

After the success of last July's Jacks-Con, those responsible were persuaded that we should do it again, and by January they'd recovered enough to make it happen.  For reasons possibly involving copyright, it did get a name change, but it was still based around the Discord server for the Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast.  Sign-up was by lottery, assigned by some arcane and possibly eldritch algorithm with the goal of making sure as many people as possible got into a game they were interested in.  There were 18 game slots, but due to the unfortunate necessary of allowing our fleshy meat sacks to sleep, nobody was actually playing that many.

Game 1: Silencers

With my regular weekly game scheduled for Thursday evening I didn't think I'd be able to play in the Thursday slots, but I realised I could fit in a game before that.  Silencers is a two-page RPG I wrote last year about inept assassins, and with randomly generated plots that I didn't expect to take very long to resolve, this seemed like a good time for a bit of playtesting.

I had one player, which meant I was able to confirm that the game does work with one player (although I suspect two is the sweet spot).  He created an assassin with great juggling skills who did children's birthday parties in between hits.  I rolled two random plots, filled in a few details, and off we went.  While Silencers characters are skilled in a variety of combat techniques, it was ultimately prawn toast and knitting needles that finished off the two targets.

While I still want to try it out with two or three players to see how it runs, I'm overall happy with it, and the only improvement I can think of is to add a few more lines to the random plot generator tables.  Which means I need to get it onto DTRPG pretty soon.

Game 2: Alien

Friday afternoon meant another outing for my Alien scenario, The Toxic Jewel.  Unfortunately one of my five players had got the dates mixed up and nobody else was available at zero notice, but the scenario still works with four so off we went.  The captain and the medic were the spare characters this time, and I managed to engineer a situation that meant they weren't with the rest of the group most of the time so I only had to have them make occasional radio calls instead of constant interaction.

Alien remains my favourite space horror game.  While I enjoy Mothership, for me it just doesn't have the finesse of Alien.  The scenarios are harder to write, given that for cinematic mode you need agendas for each character, but the end result is worth it.

Game 3: Call of Cthulhu

The Murder Shack is a contemporary Call of Cthulhu scenario first appearing in The Blasphemous Tome, which as a podcast patron I have a copy of.  I've been carefully avoiding reading it though in the hope of getting the chance to play it, and I was lucky enough to have my number come up for this one.  While it wasn't Scott Dorward himself running it this time, the GM still did an excellent job with it.  I don't think I've ever lost so many sanity points in one game before.

The scenario itself reminded me a little of a creepypasta I read back in 2004 (which I won't name since the title would be kind of a spoiler, especially for anyone else who remembers that bit of internet history) and makes an ideal one-shot, so much so that I might even decide to take a shot at running it myself some time.

Game 4: Hellboy

I'm not sure what possessed me to sign up for a game at 8.30am on a Saturday (a time when I am rarely awake) but the game was the quickstart adventure for the new Hellboy RPG and I was keen to get a look at it.

The game uses D&D 5e for its engine, but with some significant modifications to fit the genre.  I think that they've done a good job of this, with the extra d10 for insight/doom proving to be a fun mechanic.  All the same, I think they could have done an even better job not using D&D 5e and using something a bit better suited to the setting.

I also suspect that despite being set in Britain, the quickstart adventure may have been written by Americans, as our British and Irish group rapidly found ourselves distracted by the implausible number of toilets in a supposedly Georgian house.  All the same, we had some fun with it, and the visual style of the maps was lovely, really emulating the style of the Hellboy comics.

I would happily play a Hellboy game in the future, and even put up with the 5e system to do it.  Although I still think Liminal would be a better system for it.

Game 5: Call of Cthulhu

There were a bunch of games I was interested in in this slot, and the one I got assigned to was The Forbidden Beat, another Call of Cthulhu scenario.  This time it was 2003 and we were a group living in a squat trying to organise an illegal rave.

Normally in Call of Cthulhu it's a failed sanity roll that ends up entirely changing my character's plans.  In this case it was someone getting a critical success on an Art (DJ) roll that changed everything, leading to my character being on ecstacy at the point where everything started going to hell.  I'm not sure if it helped or hindered, but it did make things more interesting.

Game 6: Kult: Divinity Lost

I hadn't planned to play the 10pm slot on Friday, but when I saw Matt Sanderson was running Kult, I had to give it a go.  So I sat out the previous session (so I had time to eat food and stuff) and then dived in.  Night is the proper time to play Kult anyway.

Matt described the game as a 'horror starter', a concept I'm entirely unfamiliar with, but people reading this might know.  Through a series of questions we determined who each of our characters were and why they'd all decided to run down an alleyway that lead them to Metropolis.

I've played three Kult games before, and this was an entirely different experience.  Not only was it fun, but it also gave me an idea of just how much variety this game is capable of.  It remains probably my favourite implementation of the PBTA rules.  Hopefully this and the upcoming kickstarter delivery will be enough inspiration to finish writing my own scenario.

Game 7: Liminal

After being up past 2am playing Kult I wasn't particularly keen to get up on Sunday morning but fortunately my first game was at the rather more reasonable time of 11.30am.  I ran Bad Blood, my newest Liminal scenario, partly because it's set in Milton Keynes - close to home for the podcast team.

It's amazing how different groups get through scenarios in different ways.  I've run Bad Blood three times before.  The first time was part of a campaign and included an NPC that was important to the campaign's crew.  The second time I took her out as I wasn't sure she was needed.  The third time I put her back in when it became clear she really was needed.  But this fourth group solved the whole thing without ever encountering her.  Players, huh?

I re-used the pregen characters from Mother Said I Never Should rather than write a full new set, and overall they worked well.  While I might tweak them slightly for future runs, they're a fun bunch and it's nice to see them reinterpreted yet again.

Game 8: Noir World

I didn't sign up for anything else on Sunday as it would have clashed with my regular Mutant: Year Zero game, but when that got cancelled I signed up for a pick-up game of Noir World.

As the name suggested, this is a PBTA game about creating a Film Noir style movie plot with all the archetypes you'd expect as playbooks.  It's slimmed down a bit from regular PBTA with only three stats, and I'm not sure what the player moves actually were as we barely used them.  I think this would be an easier game to play around a table, as part of the concept was the multiple rather complicated hooks that connected each character and I was struggling to keep them all in my head.  Fortunately the very light rules meant I didn't have actual mechanics to worry about too.

It's also set up as a GMless game where players can take it in turns to be the director and call for a scene.  I pretty much opted out of this, however, as it rapidly became apparent that I know nothing about Film Noir as a genre beyond what it looks like.  I could picture my character perfectly but really struggled with dialogue.

By the end we'd produced a thoroughly convoluted plot, several characters were dead, and a dramatic epilogue had filled in some final details.  My lack of genre knowledge meant it didn't quite land for me, but if you're a fan of Film Noir and PBTA you'll probably have a lot of fun with this game.

Reflections

My only suggestion for improving the previous event was to have a gap between game slots.  This time round there was a half-hour gap between each four hour slot, and that worked well.  While my games did largely wrap up on time, it meant we didn't have to push things towards the finish, and were able to spend a few minutes chatting after each game.  Hanging out in the bar was once again fun, and I'm glad I found a bit of time for that too.

I got to play in a great mix of games, mostly horror themed, and with a great mix of people that included some familiar faces, some welcome reappearances and some completely new people.  A really nice community has built up around this podcast and I'm very happy to be a part of it.  A Weekend With Good Friends really does describe this event.

So, do it all again in July?