"Who are you? What... Are you?" "I am Gaea, the spirit of this world." "But, you're a... Bunch of fungus tendrils?" "Child, I have existed since before the plants and arthropods crawled onto land. My mind spans the surface of this world and connects even the furthest areas of the continents together. Did you ever wonder why your druids and shamans consume mushrooms? To commune with me, the true master of this world. The Great World Spirit. The Planetmind. You are my cultivated creatures, this world is my garden and you shall be the actors of my will beyond my current reach."
@@wandiriswan6116 Nope, just something I made up. I'm big on fantasy and HFY and have always loved the idea that Earth wants the strongest survivors via survival of the fittest yet still loves every creature in some sadistic irony. So I just sorta put that in here as the Planetmind cultivating the creatures of the land into the best tools to spread to other worlds.
Asking for permission to paraphrase this for a game I'm gonna be running? This gave me the perfect reason to turn my players into the reject Planeteers... and yes, they will be playing your friendly neighborhood eco-terrorists.
Yellow slime mold is an amoeba that is a mass of multinucleated undifferentiated cell. Not cells. Cell. It's foamy and disgusting and the weirdest thing I have personally touched.
nobody: mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters
burger: some gods could be fungi, residing within a myzel. my brain: soo malkav and his madnessnetwork is actiually a fungus and clan malkavian isnt really the clan of the broken mirror but the magic mushroom!
Without them we would still live in the oceans. Fungi are our symbiotic progenitors who break down inorganic rocks into soil. To me, the thought of not being eaten by them is abhorrent. Miss me with that formaldehyde/furnace shit, I want to be fed to the internet of the forest.
@@willk7508 I mean who knows how consciousness and matter are related. If you're dissolved by a mushroom that's a pretty efficient redistribution of biomass into the ecosystem which will then travel up the food chain. Maybe your matter will end up in the bodies of a trillion little bacteria and burned up, but well, even if it does nothing in terms of phenomenal awareness at least it's eco friendly.
Natural burial is the best form of being put to rest. No chemicals to preserve you that leech into the ground and pollute the environment. No carbon emissions produced by burning you up. It's just your corpse in the ground and a simple cotton shroud to preserve your dignity. It's you giving back to nature after a lifetime of taking from it to sustain yourself. The circle of life.
Frankly this sounds like an entire setting. You could fill entire books with stories related to just that aspect of that hypothetical world, without ever touching on any of the dynasty drama and the different kingdoms, wars between nations, evil wizard takeovers and overthrows and all the other usual fantasy stuff.
Probably not the first one to say but oozes and fungi being the same category makes lore sense as well. The demon lord of fungi and the demon lord of oozes share a layer of the abyss
As someone who hates the sight of an anime girl having a mushroom growing out of her arm, literally makes my skin crawl & me want to die, I can't tell you how grateful I am you didn't show any examples of the body horror you mentioned, or even some of the more horrific looking fungi.
A someone who spent a semester researching slime mold computation - physarum polycephalum specifically, since it's basically the only species used for experimentation in the field, much to my great sadness - this video brings me great joy! Fungi contain so much potential for interesting humanoid forms, and they're so often done dirty. Time to implement a fungal BBEG in my next campaign...
I'm currently running a game in a subterranean setting and whilst my players have had a few encounters with weird fungi this is giving me some ideas for some uncomfortable awnsers to what happened to the precursor civilisation they may find soon.
I swear, this video is gonna inspire me to make a post-apocalyptic game where fungi are both the thing killing the players and the the thing saving the players.
I just came out with a great character idea. Necromancer wizard, but all necromancy spells are replaced by fungi spells. Like, instead of raising undead, you infect them with a fungi that moves their body
I think it would be really fun the have a cyberpunk themed fantasy world. Where all the futuristic cyberpunk technology has fantasy analogs. For example, The mushroom mycelium is the world internet, The Druids are the netrunners who connect directly to the “mycelium internet”. Magic acts as a wireless medium of the natural internet. “Cybernetic augmentations” can just be fusing of different creatures body parts and nervous systems to your own (probably linked through mycelium). Like the brain of a mind flayer to allow for physic powers, or the tongue of a giant frog to give you a biological grappling hook, or the arm mounted fungus shotgun.
In all fairness, in Plants vs Zombies there's a Terracotta pot which is also a plant. So maybe we shouldn't be expecting too much taxonomic accuracy from them.
They may not be taxonomically aligned, but they are aligned in ideals. Just like the plants they all had lives they lived (according to the almanac), something the zombies threatened and disturbed. So they join the side of "the plants" as an organization, but they're not taxonomically plants themselves. Whatever biological classification one imposes on them is to them irrelevant. A fungus-based political alliance lol
Really appreciated this video, as I've been playing a mushroom-y character for some time now. I've heard that someone came to the realisation that "the meaning of existance is love" after a powerful trip, and ran with that concept for a druid. I've created a fungi with an unnatural affinity for the corpses of people who died while thinking of a loved one. It infects and rebuilds the corpse until it finally ressurrects them, with the sole purpose of reuniting with said loved one, and won't let them die until it is done. To some, it even gives them powers, all the while making them more sensible to the fungus nature. I play a teenager who is infected and one of the "lucky" few with powers, with the side-effect that, for reasons, they have no memories of anything before their resurrection. So they must struggle with a sadness and desire for travel for apparently no reason, having clashes for being "off" compared to other people, and a constant flow of impressionistic knowledge of an ancient, benevolent, but ultimately eldritch being located inside their skull. I'm really looking forward to somehow applying that in the next sessions. Thx
One of the few times that I played RPG, I mastered a campaign that the mushroom people could sintesize a drug based in other people's brain, the gimmick was that if you take it you get some specific knowlege from that person, but if you did too much the "source person" becomes a vegetal, no trouble to the drug-user though. The players used it to get crussial information from a base that they needed to raid in. One of the players tried to extract the habillities of a bear, thinking that it would help in combat, but when he took it he just become severely incapacitated because he aquired a whole set of habillities that his body wasn't even close to be adapted.
I was converting the metals from terraria into 3.5 and went with a neural interface into mycelium for shroomite. Good to know I'm not the only one who thinks cyberpunk when talking fungus
@@castielsisko2120 Depends on which game. 3.5? Nope, find a better system than post 2e dnd to use or you have a change to get into a mental rut that's hard to get away from, speaking from experience. Terraria? Yes, absolutely, it's a fantastic game that's full of insane items, monsters, bosses, and traders with actual changes made by difficulty levels. I got it earlier this year and it blew my expectations out of the water since I was expecting something like minecraft. If you get it, go for melee damage on your first run for the best experience.
I’m suddenly remembering the weirdness of the Mycon from Star Control 2 or the planetmind in Alpha Centauri. Fungi are sorely underutilized in fiction and RPGs, so thanks for this one. I’ve got a lot of planning to do
This is one of those videos that makes me wish for a second "Like Button." I freaking love it when the research for a topic results in the researcher stumbling upon a fascinating, branching, tremendously in-depth (but previously unknown) area of study that excites them -particularly when their excitement of current and future study is so palpable.
I do think fungi being classed as plants in a fantasy setting makes more sense. Up until a century or two ago, people were still calling whales fish. Fungi were only reclassified as a separate kingdom in the 1960s. If your world doesn't even have proper biologists then why wouldn't mushrooms be plants? They grow from roots/mycelium and they don't move about to the casual observer. Their chitinous structures very much resemble the cellulose of plants. They don't know about algae being plant mushrooms, they don't know we are closely related to and arguably part fungus. They haven't even discovered the microbiome or antibiotics because they lack the sophistication and the tools to study them. Of course, that doesn't limit you in terms of world building or mechanics, you could still write them behind the scenes however you'd like. They are really a cosmic horror in that sense, that we still know not that much today. I don't personally get annoyed that an analogue of a pre-enlightenment European kingdom doesn't understand the difference between plants and fungi. I'd be more frustrated if there wasn't an explanation for how they're able to taxonomise them, since we weren't able to, even once we'd invented nukes. Pre-enlightenment we didn't even have microscopes to study spores. It's very much an "apes aren't monkeys" type deal, where it makes sense if you have a theory of evolution and not if you're an uneducated creationist farmer who can't read or write.
If you have magic in the setting, you may feel the difference, or communicate with mycelium. If you have telescopes and optics, then you would have microscopes as well. It also could go in another way where there isn't a Linneus to divide the life by taxa, but the view of the nature is more hollistic, forests and ecosystems viewed as unseparable. Just like buildings are not singular bricks in a pile, but much more than that.
@@bogdanmazur6312 Well, if you have optics then I don't think you can really call a setting medieval anymore. Apparently the first thing approximating a microscope was invented at the tail end of the 16th century and they weren't really in common use until the end of the 17th century/early enlightenment in real life. I feel as if a druid or chloromancer plant magic type of order would probably end up viewing nature as more hollistic. Real life shamanism seems to treat the spirits, the ecosystem and man as one interconnected whole. Some belief systems see rivers and mountains as living things. In a fantasy story, maybe they can be. Would a living being composed of inorganic matter be in its own kingdom or just seen as magic creatures? Idk personally I don't write fantasy stories.
I knew some bits and pieces of this kinda stuff already, but there's plenty in here I *didn't* know, or connections made that I didn't on my own. Excellent video. Love it.
You have just put all my rationale for being absolutely terrified of fungi into actual words. People always look at me weird after seeing my reactions to just the sight of a mushroom or mold. I get cold sweat whenever i see a fungus unexpected and I always hated going to the forest because of those alien beings lurking around every corner. Very odd for a person, whose favourite biome in Terraria is the glowing mushroom one. The cartooney pixel art style of Terraria might play a role here, as the glowing fungi of Skyrim's Blackreach made me uncomfortable to the extent of having to take breaks from playing the game. I love this video and the way you touched upon many concepts that could be used in tabletop and I appreciate, that you didn't actually show any examples of the more grotesque ones.
To be fair to 40k, the Orks have both a huge (and often overdone, I agree) comic relief potential, but also the one to be the absolutely scariest thing alive after Tyranids. For an example, the earlier books of the War of the Beast dodecalogy.
Some scientist proppose to use fungi to decide urban planning. In experiments they build microscopic replicas of Japanese islands put nutrients were whatever resource exist on the real island and fungi were the cities are and in a really short time the fungi recreated the roads and highways humans took years to plan and decades to build, so in a way, mushrooms are nature's algorythms and they have a vast storytelling potential
So druids communicate over a vast redundant network via impressionistic messages that use primarily concepts and feelings over literal ideas? They’re all meme lords! The Druid spy network is filled with memes.
I am in the middle of redesigning myconids from Dnd, making various complex types. Specifically to play as because i want to be a mushroom. This video is very inspirational in my persute of fungal perfection.
This is actually a really pertinent video for me because I've been working on a species of lizard people who rely on fungus in almost every area. It's their primary food source, their buildings are constructed out of the stocks of large, treelike mushrooms, even their clothes are woven from a particularly thick and durable form of mycelium. This video gives me some really interesting ideas on how to weave fungus even deeper into their culture and society.
I know I’m late to this party, but I just wanted to say that possibly the best representation of scary mushrooms is morrigan lugus from warren ellis supergods.
Mushrooms as functional gods that do exactly what humans want gods for is the premise of an excellent scifi book "Raising the Stones" by Sheri S Tepper. It has a lot of the ideas you mentioned in the video so maybe you've already read it but if not, I highly recommend it.
I like to play myconids as semiautonomous limbs of their mycelial godmind, made to try to interact with the other races through feigned anthropomorphism
Oh now this has proper folk horror mileage hauntology fungus, the fungal visions of lost futures, things that never were that may come to pass. A gardener haunted as tends the spore rich soil. Thanks dude 🍻
Thanks for the useful information to relay to my Druid player when they cast “speak with plants” they won’t be able to talk to the mushrooms.. but talk through the mushrooms, using plants to play translator for you
Spore druid that says things like this- "We- ahem.. I perfer to sleep on the earth" every time they sleep in a place, a few days later mushrooms and such start to sprout where they were laying down in the shape of their body "Just remember the flesh that has been mended is not of your own. You now have, in part, become one of U̶̕͝S̸̃͂"
I like the idea of a friendly village of fungi people, but is all just a front to be able to more easily interact with the more "normal" people, they have the usual humanoid mushroom people, but is not just toadstools, and if you look at it close you notice they are a bit creepy and uncanny, like they are all a shared intelligence connected through the mycelium, and even if they are technically friendly they are very disturbing
I'd run the mycenoids as a loci rather than a stat block. Think giant forest spanning subterranean masses. All you meet and stat are the fruiting bodies controlled by the fungi bellow ground if it even shows itself. So much potential for NPC's and campaigns.
I think a reason why Mignola uses shrooms in Hellboy comics in a manner he uses them is because of their connection to entropy and "primal forces" kinda like ogdru'yahad/ogru'hem are(basicall elder gods of Mignolas universe). There are plenty of shroomy creepy crawlies in his works.
Man. Dead man's fingers could be an item in something existential like Dark Souls, like, hollows carry them around and spread the spores because they're so desperate to have any kind of interaction with someone. Maybe they could meld into your flesh like they're grabbing you all over, that's some good body horror imagery you can have for free, dear reader haha
When pandemic started in 2020 me and my partner moved to their parents house for almost 4 months cause both us and my partner's parents live in different cities and they were worried for us. We clean our house before moving but we left soap on the bathroom's sink. After we got back soap had some fungi and mold on it. That soap don't have many natural oils or other more biological stuff that fungi could munch on
Have you read 'A song for Lia'? A short story by G RR Martin. I suspect you have, but on the off chance that you have not, I would highly recommend it. It is what the Weirwood network from GoT is based off. But it is a fungus that people can connect to when they want to die, for their consciousness to live on forever.
Honestly, some of the best mushroom people I've seen are from Stellaris and their mushroom people. A fair number might be anthropomorphised, but are MUCH better than Myconids. And one of the base races is a fungoid race, where the elders of the race get so big they cover entire nations, and the spacefarers are just the young ones travelling across the galaxy, and eventually they too will have to settle down on a planet and reach gigantic sizes too. Also if you want to anthromophise mushrooms, you could use the Tree Fern method, where the body is just a superdense bundle of roots, with the flowering body on top as the "head". Hell, it may be that under that superdense root bundle could be a dead human body it's walking around with
@4:20 ehhhhhh, slimes are their own thing because theyre in essense the severed/budded spawn of a supernatural demon, jubilax (iirc the spelling). all slimes on all planes share lineage to this creature dwelling in the depths of the underdark. theyre supposed to be living liquid. while I agree slime molds are neat, youre better off creating new branches of monster phylum based on your fungi. slime molds are in fact not untyped masses of liquids. 👍
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![[Live] : ONE 169 วันนี้!! "อนาโตลี vs อูมาร์"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/IK3YZVWuFJg/mqdefault.jpg)
Hooks up a mushroom to a speech device
Mushroom: (starts playing the mushroom biome theme from terraria)
Real shit right there
it actually sounds alot like the band "infected mushroom" o.O
I love this video because if you play Baldur's Gate 3 and go through the Underdark, you find EXACTLY what he's talking about here ^^
An old biologist friend of mine used to describe fungi as "what aliens would make if shown some pictures of plants and told to recreate them"
"Who are you? What... Are you?"
"I am Gaea, the spirit of this world."
"But, you're a... Bunch of fungus tendrils?"
"Child, I have existed since before the plants and arthropods crawled onto land. My mind spans the surface of this world and connects even the furthest areas of the continents together. Did you ever wonder why your druids and shamans consume mushrooms? To commune with me, the true master of this world. The Great World Spirit. The Planetmind. You are my cultivated creatures, this world is my garden and you shall be the actors of my will beyond my current reach."
Is this a quote? BC that's actually kinda beautiful in a way
@@wandiriswan6116 Nope, just something I made up. I'm big on fantasy and HFY and have always loved the idea that Earth wants the strongest survivors via survival of the fittest yet still loves every creature in some sadistic irony. So I just sorta put that in here as the Planetmind cultivating the creatures of the land into the best tools to spread to other worlds.
@@noctusdoesthings damn, good on you man!
Asking for permission to paraphrase this for a game I'm gonna be running? This gave me the perfect reason to turn my players into the reject Planeteers... and yes, they will be playing your friendly neighborhood eco-terrorists.
Yellow slime mold is an amoeba that is a mass of multinucleated undifferentiated cell. Not cells. Cell. It's foamy and disgusting and the weirdest thing I have personally touched.
I bet it did not like touching you either
Well, amoeba are by definition single-celled. So...
@@dexxus8078 oh, shut up
You never shook hands with me, clearly
nobody:
mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters
Im not fucking scared of you!
17:50 fun fact, the ant is still aware in there. the brain is still functioning it just can't send any signals out. so uh ya, fungi can be terrifying
At least ants are too basic to feel suffering (I think)
burger: some gods could be fungi, residing within a myzel.
my brain: soo malkav and his madnessnetwork is actiually a fungus and clan malkavian isnt really the clan of the broken mirror but the magic mushroom!
Without them we would still live in the oceans. Fungi are our symbiotic progenitors who break down inorganic rocks into soil. To me, the thought of not being eaten by them is abhorrent. Miss me with that formaldehyde/furnace shit, I want to be fed to the internet of the forest.
When I die I’d like to be buried in a mycelium coffin. Jacked directly into the matrix
@@willk7508 I mean who knows how consciousness and matter are related. If you're dissolved by a mushroom that's a pretty efficient redistribution of biomass into the ecosystem which will then travel up the food chain. Maybe your matter will end up in the bodies of a trillion little bacteria and burned up, but well, even if it does nothing in terms of phenomenal awareness at least it's eco friendly.
Natural burial is the best form of being put to rest.
No chemicals to preserve you that leech into the ground and pollute the environment. No carbon emissions produced by burning you up.
It's just your corpse in the ground and a simple cotton shroud to preserve your dignity. It's you giving back to nature after a lifetime of taking from it to sustain yourself.
The circle of life.
@@willk7508Hell just stuff my corpse full of em
Frankly this sounds like an entire setting. You could fill entire books with stories related to just that aspect of that hypothetical world, without ever touching on any of the dynasty drama and the different kingdoms, wars between nations, evil wizard takeovers and overthrows and all the other usual fantasy stuff.
Probably not the first one to say but oozes and fungi being the same category makes lore sense as well. The demon lord of fungi and the demon lord of oozes share a layer of the abyss
Seconded
As someone who hates the sight of an anime girl having a mushroom growing out of her arm, literally makes my skin crawl & me want to die, I can't tell you how grateful I am you didn't show any examples of the body horror you mentioned, or even some of the more horrific looking fungi.
Circle of spores druids in dnd are a really cool concept
A someone who spent a semester researching slime mold computation - physarum polycephalum specifically, since it's basically the only species used for experimentation in the field, much to my great sadness - this video brings me great joy! Fungi contain so much potential for interesting humanoid forms, and they're so often done dirty. Time to implement a fungal BBEG in my next campaign...
gives me ideas on how the mushroom spirits could connect to the matrix, or how to hack into the mushroom fairy world using a decker! LOL
I'm currently running a game in a subterranean setting and whilst my players have had a few encounters with weird fungi this is giving me some ideas for some uncomfortable awnsers to what happened to the precursor civilisation they may find soon.
I swear, this video is gonna inspire me to make a post-apocalyptic game where fungi are both the thing killing the players and the the thing saving the players.
I just came out with a great character idea.
Necromancer wizard, but all necromancy spells are replaced by fungi spells.
Like, instead of raising undead, you infect them with a fungi that moves their body
Yeah I'm super terrified of the eldritch primordial force of death which adds flavor to supreme pizzas and Dinty Moore beef stew.
As one should
There are pyrophilic mushrooms that sprout from burned ashes of forest fires. They actually benefit from the destruction around them.
I think it would be really fun the have a cyberpunk themed fantasy world. Where all the futuristic cyberpunk technology has fantasy analogs. For example, The mushroom mycelium is the world internet, The Druids are the netrunners who connect directly to the “mycelium internet”. Magic acts as a wireless medium of the natural internet. “Cybernetic augmentations” can just be fusing of different creatures body parts and nervous systems to your own (probably linked through mycelium). Like the brain of a mind flayer to allow for physic powers, or the tongue of a giant frog to give you a biological grappling hook, or the arm mounted fungus shotgun.
Honestly, this has been so fascinating that I want to DM a game of Pathfinder focusing on fungal shenanigans.
I gotta say, I love how you talk about some off the beaten path topic with an enthusiasm rarely found, keep up with the great attitude
Reject monke, become mushroom
Even in Plants vs Zombies, mushrooms are classified as plants, which I've been finding annoying for years now.
In all fairness, in Plants vs Zombies there's a Terracotta pot which is also a plant.
So maybe we shouldn't be expecting too much taxonomic accuracy from them.
They should br the third party
They may not be taxonomically aligned, but they are aligned in ideals. Just like the plants they all had lives they lived (according to the almanac), something the zombies threatened and disturbed.
So they join the side of "the plants" as an organization, but they're not taxonomically plants themselves. Whatever biological classification one imposes on them is to them irrelevant. A fungus-based political alliance lol
As a fungi grower, I really enjoyed this video. Severely underrated. You're spot on about everything about the fungus.
Is it just me or is fungus starting to sound an awful lot like Organic IRL Tiberium?
that's... interesting...
Honestly, I love the idea of an almost eldritch being, that knows all of the secrets of the universe, is very helpful, and is a giant mushroom.
In my game Myconids are hunted to be used as the main ingredient in a potion that grants visions of the future.
Africans smoke vulture brains for the same reason. they're endangered in certain areas now.
Out of the Abyss has some interesting ideas about these fun guys
Really appreciated this video, as I've been playing a mushroom-y character for some time now. I've heard that someone came to the realisation that "the meaning of existance is love" after a powerful trip, and ran with that concept for a druid.
I've created a fungi with an unnatural affinity for the corpses of people who died while thinking of a loved one. It infects and rebuilds the corpse until it finally ressurrects them, with the sole purpose of reuniting with said loved one, and won't let them die until it is done. To some, it even gives them powers, all the while making them more sensible to the fungus nature. I play a teenager who is infected and one of the "lucky" few with powers, with the side-effect that, for reasons, they have no memories of anything before their resurrection. So they must struggle with a sadness and desire for travel for apparently no reason, having clashes for being "off" compared to other people, and a constant flow of impressionistic knowledge of an ancient, benevolent, but ultimately eldritch being located inside their skull.
I'm really looking forward to somehow applying that in the next sessions. Thx
adding a mushroom god of alchemy to my pantheon after watching this
Nice
it would be funny if moses buring bush was just a very brightly colored fungus
One of the few times that I played RPG, I mastered a campaign that the mushroom people could sintesize a drug based in other people's brain, the gimmick was that if you take it you get some specific knowlege from that person, but if you did too much the "source person" becomes a vegetal, no trouble to the drug-user though.
The players used it to get crussial information from a base that they needed to raid in.
One of the players tried to extract the habillities of a bear, thinking that it would help in combat, but when he took it he just become severely incapacitated because he aquired a whole set of habillities that his body wasn't even close to be adapted.
Very swag video. So many cool ideas.
*sipping from my years old Burger-Mug-Mug*
I firsted him before it was cool
Very interesting. Some of those ideas would have never crossed my mind.
I was converting the metals from terraria into 3.5 and went with a neural interface into mycelium for shroomite. Good to know I'm not the only one who thinks cyberpunk when talking fungus
Should I play that game? Never have.
@@castielsisko2120 Depends on which game.
3.5? Nope, find a better system than post 2e dnd to use or you have a change to get into a mental rut that's hard to get away from, speaking from experience.
Terraria? Yes, absolutely, it's a fantastic game that's full of insane items, monsters, bosses, and traders with actual changes made by difficulty levels. I got it earlier this year and it blew my expectations out of the water since I was expecting something like minecraft. If you get it, go for melee damage on your first run for the best experience.
I’m suddenly remembering the weirdness of the Mycon from Star Control 2 or the planetmind in Alpha Centauri. Fungi are sorely underutilized in fiction and RPGs, so thanks for this one. I’ve got a lot of planning to do
Juffo-Wup fills me and I grow turgid. Violent action ensues.
This is one of those videos that makes me wish for a second "Like Button."
I freaking love it when the research for a topic results in the researcher stumbling upon a fascinating, branching, tremendously in-depth (but previously unknown) area of study that excites them -particularly when their excitement of current and future study is so palpable.
If someone figures out that Fungi really are trying talking to us, thats gonna fck up a lot of vegetarians lol.
ah yes the big 3 - bear cheese and bread
I FOUND IT! I was talking about mushrooms with an online friend and I looked for this video for like...30 minutes.
I do think fungi being classed as plants in a fantasy setting makes more sense. Up until a century or two ago, people were still calling whales fish. Fungi were only reclassified as a separate kingdom in the 1960s. If your world doesn't even have proper biologists then why wouldn't mushrooms be plants? They grow from roots/mycelium and they don't move about to the casual observer. Their chitinous structures very much resemble the cellulose of plants.
They don't know about algae being plant mushrooms, they don't know we are closely related to and arguably part fungus. They haven't even discovered the microbiome or antibiotics because they lack the sophistication and the tools to study them. Of course, that doesn't limit you in terms of world building or mechanics, you could still write them behind the scenes however you'd like. They are really a cosmic horror in that sense, that we still know not that much today.
I don't personally get annoyed that an analogue of a pre-enlightenment European kingdom doesn't understand the difference between plants and fungi. I'd be more frustrated if there wasn't an explanation for how they're able to taxonomise them, since we weren't able to, even once we'd invented nukes. Pre-enlightenment we didn't even have microscopes to study spores. It's very much an "apes aren't monkeys" type deal, where it makes sense if you have a theory of evolution and not if you're an uneducated creationist farmer who can't read or write.
If you have magic in the setting, you may feel the difference, or communicate with mycelium. If you have telescopes and optics, then you would have microscopes as well. It also could go in another way where there isn't a Linneus to divide the life by taxa, but the view of the nature is more hollistic, forests and ecosystems viewed as unseparable. Just like buildings are not singular bricks in a pile, but much more than that.
@@bogdanmazur6312 Well, if you have optics then I don't think you can really call a setting medieval anymore. Apparently the first thing approximating a microscope was invented at the tail end of the 16th century and they weren't really in common use until the end of the 17th century/early enlightenment in real life.
I feel as if a druid or chloromancer plant magic type of order would probably end up viewing nature as more hollistic. Real life shamanism seems to treat the spirits, the ecosystem and man as one interconnected whole.
Some belief systems see rivers and mountains as living things. In a fantasy story, maybe they can be. Would a living being composed of inorganic matter be in its own kingdom or just seen as magic creatures? Idk personally I don't write fantasy stories.
I knew some bits and pieces of this kinda stuff already, but there's plenty in here I *didn't* know, or connections made that I didn't on my own. Excellent video. Love it.
I have literally been playing with heaps of this in D&D for a while now! so awesome to seen shared!
You have just put all my rationale for being absolutely terrified of fungi into actual words. People always look at me weird after seeing my reactions to just the sight of a mushroom or mold. I get cold sweat whenever i see a fungus unexpected and I always hated going to the forest because of those alien beings lurking around every corner. Very odd for a person, whose favourite biome in Terraria is the glowing mushroom one. The cartooney pixel art style of Terraria might play a role here, as the glowing fungi of Skyrim's Blackreach made me uncomfortable to the extent of having to take breaks from playing the game.
I love this video and the way you touched upon many concepts that could be used in tabletop and I appreciate, that you didn't actually show any examples of the more grotesque ones.
The algorithm brought me this man yesterday. The algorithm brought this man a new subscriber today. Praise Algo, rama rama
Generally supportive comment for the algorithm. That was really interesting and something im definitely going to come back to.
To be fair to 40k, the Orks have both a huge (and often overdone, I agree) comic relief potential, but also the one to be the absolutely scariest thing alive after Tyranids.
For an example, the earlier books of the War of the Beast dodecalogy.
Some scientist proppose to use fungi to decide urban planning. In experiments they build microscopic replicas of Japanese islands put nutrients were whatever resource exist on the real island and fungi were the cities are and in a really short time the fungi recreated the roads and highways humans took years to plan and decades to build, so in a way, mushrooms are nature's algorythms and they have a vast storytelling potential
or maybe those emergent patterns speak to the idea of deeper patterns in reality, proving it's recursive fractal-like nature...
So druids communicate over a vast redundant network via impressionistic messages that use primarily concepts and feelings over literal ideas? They’re all meme lords! The Druid spy network is filled with memes.
HA iirc the term "meme" originated in genetics, so i could totally see that
I am in the middle of redesigning myconids from Dnd, making various complex types. Specifically to play as because i want to be a mushroom. This video is very inspirational in my persute of fungal perfection.
It mind boggles me why we aren't sending fungi to other planets
This video has given me so much existential dread
A few minutes in and I gotta say, you've sold me on the concept of Nurgle.
Praise the grandfather!
Rot for the Rot God!
You where right on the first one for morel mushrooms
This is actually a really pertinent video for me because I've been working on a species of lizard people who rely on fungus in almost every area. It's their primary food source, their buildings are constructed out of the stocks of large, treelike mushrooms, even their clothes are woven from a particularly thick and durable form of mycelium. This video gives me some really interesting ideas on how to weave fungus even deeper into their culture and society.
This topic is very dear to me and I'm so happy to see you covering it!!!!
I know I’m late to this party, but I just wanted to say that possibly the best representation of scary mushrooms is morrigan lugus from warren ellis supergods.
Cheers, ill add this to my bouts of existential dread.
9:55 oh wow its the terraria mushroom biom ost
Mushrooms as functional gods that do exactly what humans want gods for is the premise of an excellent scifi book "Raising the Stones" by Sheri S Tepper. It has a lot of the ideas you mentioned in the video so maybe you've already read it but if not, I highly recommend it.
Only Burger can make me listen with fascination to a 30 minute video about mushrooms
This video is, in my opinion, maybe your best ever. Very cool!
Always remember: while fungi obvious aren’t animals they’re closer related to animals than plants
fungi people, should obviously be classified as fungoids, at least thats something right in stellaris.
I like to play myconids as semiautonomous limbs of their mycelial godmind, made to try to interact with the other races through feigned anthropomorphism
Oh now this has proper folk horror mileage hauntology fungus, the fungal visions of lost futures, things that never were that may come to pass. A gardener haunted as tends the spore rich soil. Thanks dude 🍻
Thanks for the useful information to relay to my Druid player when they cast “speak with plants” they won’t be able to talk to the mushrooms.. but talk through the mushrooms, using plants to play translator for you
I've now got an interesting idea for fungal vampires and that's fantastic
Okay, I kinda wanna hear what this idea is now.
Mushrooms communicating sound very much like the band infected mushroom
Man, I slept on a good essay from you.
Also yes, MycoLyco’s channel is *so cool*
Spore druid that says things like this-
"We- ahem.. I perfer to sleep on the earth"
every time they sleep in a place, a few days later mushrooms and such start to sprout where they were laying down in the shape of their body
"Just remember the flesh that has been mended is not of your own. You now have, in part, become one of U̶̕͝S̸̃͂"
I like the idea of a friendly village of fungi people, but is all just a front to be able to more easily interact with the more "normal" people, they have the usual humanoid mushroom people, but is not just toadstools, and if you look at it close you notice they are a bit creepy and uncanny, like they are all a shared intelligence connected through the mycelium, and even if they are technically friendly they are very disturbing
Oh. Oh I have so many worldbuilding ideas
When the sounds at 9:57 came on, I almost had a heart attack. These were the same sounds I heard on my magic mushroom trip
I'd run the mycenoids as a loci rather than a stat block. Think giant forest spanning subterranean masses. All you meet and stat are the fruiting bodies controlled by the fungi bellow ground if it even shows itself. So much potential for NPC's and campaigns.
I think a reason why Mignola uses shrooms in Hellboy comics in a manner he uses them is because of their connection to entropy and "primal forces" kinda like ogdru'yahad/ogru'hem are(basicall elder gods of Mignolas universe). There are plenty of shroomy creepy crawlies in his works.
Time for a circle of the crone mushroom nosferatu
Mic sock looks like the Sorting Hat's emo little cousin
so while watching this i had a idea for a gane that has already grown in to a thirty page story
Dude. Awesome video.
Man. Dead man's fingers could be an item in something existential like Dark Souls, like, hollows carry them around and spread the spores because they're so desperate to have any kind of interaction with someone. Maybe they could meld into your flesh like they're grabbing you all over, that's some good body horror imagery you can have for free, dear reader haha
When pandemic started in 2020 me and my partner moved to their parents house for almost 4 months cause both us and my partner's parents live in different cities and they were worried for us. We clean our house before moving but we left soap on the bathroom's sink. After we got back soap had some fungi and mold on it. That soap don't have many natural oils or other more biological stuff that fungi could munch on
Honestly inspiring me to make a Progenitor (MtA) focusing on the mycelial.
@30:00 reminds me of the newer nether vegetation added in the Nether Update for Minecraft.
One important thing i learned from this video is that you seem to be quite a fun guy.
Have you read 'A song for Lia'? A short story by G RR Martin.
I suspect you have, but on the off chance that you have not, I would highly recommend it.
It is what the Weirwood network from GoT is based off. But it is a fungus that people can connect to when they want to die, for their consciousness to live on forever.
Did you know people eat cordecepts.. it’s like. Actually an edible mushroom that people EAT
Honestly, some of the best mushroom people I've seen are from Stellaris and their mushroom people. A fair number might be anthropomorphised, but are MUCH better than Myconids. And one of the base races is a fungoid race, where the elders of the race get so big they cover entire nations, and the spacefarers are just the young ones travelling across the galaxy, and eventually they too will have to settle down on a planet and reach gigantic sizes too.
Also if you want to anthromophise mushrooms, you could use the Tree Fern method, where the body is just a superdense bundle of roots, with the flowering body on top as the "head". Hell, it may be that under that superdense root bundle could be a dead human body it's walking around with
im waiting to play my blood mushroom myconid that grew into a discarded zombie thrall, im so excited my DM ok'd it :D
motherland fort Salem deals with the mycelium network.
I like you burguer. After this video i love you almost as much as i already loved mushroom.
29:30 I think you've just described Star Trek: Discovery
Tfw I ate the grim reaper on multiple occassions and with some parts of it bllessing me with a good time
I've died and come back with even more life in me before doing the brain dance with the grim reaper
@4:20
ehhhhhh, slimes are their own thing because theyre in essense the severed/budded spawn of a supernatural demon, jubilax (iirc the spelling). all slimes on all planes share lineage to this creature dwelling in the depths of the underdark. theyre supposed to be living liquid. while I agree slime molds are neat, youre better off creating new branches of monster phylum based on your fungi. slime molds are in fact not untyped masses of liquids. 👍
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Degenesis has an interesting take on this
somebody probably mentioned this already but "slime molds" arent actually fungi. they are their own thing