No Need for a Core?

Copying their original shape and color for now, Mordecai started his forest with the mushrooms that had a single stalk and cap. Or rather, that showed above ground that way, all mushrooms were merely the ‘fruit’ of the actual fungus. They wouldn’t entirely behave that way when he was done, but the main body would always be below the ground.

The very tallest ones were thin with narrow, pointy caps, while each successive tier of shorter mushroom had wider caps and thicker stalks. The very shortest, broadest of these had a clearance of about 10 feet between the ground and the bottom of the cap. Once he had enough for a thick canopy, Mordecai switched to the mushrooms with more interesting designs.

Some grew in small, tightly packed clumps, others spread out in branching layers. Over here was a cluster that looked like horns, while another one looked almost like a piece of coral or a brain. And there were so many colors to go with the endless variety of shapes; bright oranges, vivid reds, and even the occasional delicate blue. It was rather beautiful he had to admit. But he wasn’t done.

Now that he had a common layer done, he started adding rarer ones. In one area he added some mushrooms that ‘bled’ a crimson fluid out of its cap as well as a beautiful pink-capped mushroom that ‘bled’ a pale yellow fluid from its white stalk. While the first was completely inedible as the fluid was an anti-coagulant, the second one was merely bitter, and someone with the right knowledge could tell the difference, and possibly make a weapon coating to increase the bleeding of cut and pierced foes. Keeping in theme with the forest, they were 1 to 2 feet tall, much larger than their normal variations.

And that was one thing Mordecai was being very careful of, any mushroom that was an upscaled version of a normal mushroom would have the same properties. So he continued creating clusters of various normal mushroom varieties until there were only a few types he hadn’t placed. Those were going to be the base for some of his more creative work, and he wanted them to be a bit more obvious that they weren’t the same as the normal mushrooms. At least, if you knew what a normal one was supposed to look like.

But before that, it was time to work in a bit of precaution. While most druids were better with plants and animals than they were with fungi, some specialized in fungi, and he’d already been served up his reminder about druids. So he drew on the living crystal that they had created for flowers and incorporated it into this level as well. As the theme here was mushrooms, he used the living crystal concept to create new mushrooms. These were tiny buds that liked to nestle amongst other mushrooms, and their mycelium wove between and intertwined with the mycelium of the other mushrooms. Their crystalline nature would resist most attempts at controlling them through normal nature magic, while their living aspect resisted elemental control.

The top layer of soil was almost a veneer, more than a foot down and one would find a thick matting of mycelium, and this structure wove its way even deeper, to the crystalline sheathing he and Kazue had started integrating into all of the dungeon’s outer structure.

Now it was time to have fun. He’d need to give everything a less lethal mode, but he was going to start with the deadly version to make the design feel right. Puff balls were a good start, these he enhanced to make their spores more aggressive and faster to grow, making exposure dangerous and inhalation worse. Then he added variety, imbuing some with a stronger version of a stink horn's odor. While not particularly dangerous, direct exposure could be overwhelming and leave one sickened and retching as they try to recover. It left people vulnerable while making noise that might draw unwanted attention. He also made sure that these spores, but not the puffball itself, were sticky and luminescent to visibly mark the victim as well.

Now, the stinkhorns brought up another idea. Many varieties had netting which was used to spread their scent. They didn’t act like traps, but they looked like they could be actual nets. So he was going to make some that were. The first step was to alter the secretion to be a subtle, attractive scent that would lure people closer even if they didn’t realize they were smelling it. And instead of having the netting just grow, it stayed rolled up until something was close enough to trigger it, not unlike a puffball’s explosive action. The netting was coated in the sweet-scented secretion, which was also sticky, acidic, and contained a digestive enzyme. The combination was designed to entangle prey and keep it trapped while it was dissolved, and in such concentration the sweet scent proved to also be a soporific, dulling the mind and potentially sending the prey to sleep.

His next trap mushrooms were more direct in their attack, but didn’t come with a lure. Instead, they grew in spread-out groupings, tightly packed clusters at the tip of foot-long stalks that could hide among other mushrooms. They had a basic motion sensor trigger, and the groups were always all the same organism. When movement happened close enough to trigger three or more stalks at the same time, every triggered stalk’s tip exploded with tethered, razor-sharp darts, whose edges were hardened by living crystal. The darts were coated with a paralytic neurotoxin, and when they hit home would inject even more. The outer coating ensured that even a glancing blow to the flesh would at least deliver some of the toxins and hopefully slow the prey down enough to get caught.

The tethers were simple strands, designed to act like harpoon lines and give the toxin time to take effect. There were no digestive enzymes here, the goal was simply to down the prey and let it decompose in place, enriching the soil. The tethers dropped off the stalks about 10 minutes after the darts were fired, the prey was either disabled or free by then, and the stalks could start regenerating a new set of darts.

Mordecai moved on to creating his final active hazard. He created a new type of mushroom tree to populate the forest, about 12 feet tall and with a wide, thin cap whose underside glowed with a soft violet light. Most of them were perfectly safe, and the light promoted quicker healing for most creatures, but a small percentage of them were a look-alike species, differentiated from a distance only by a subtle change in the color of its light.

This light created a soothing effect, but it was designed to slow and distract creatures rather than promote healing. This left them more vulnerable when tendrils unfurled from the cap to lash about, wrapping around anything unfortunate enough to be hit by them. The tendrils didn’t stop whipping about when they caught something, the violent motion shaking its prey hard enough to potentially snap necks, limbs, or spines, depending on what portion of a creature had been grabbed. The violent motion lasted for about a minute before the tendrils came to a stop. It took about 20 more minutes for them to retract into the gills of the cap, carrying any prey into the mushroom’s flesh where it could be properly digested.

With the hazards finished, and one of them giving off light, it seemed like a good time to work on more lighting. There was a type of mushroom that grew out from vertical surfaces, dipping down and curving up before forming its cap. This made it look a bit like a wall-mounted lantern, and Mordecai ran with that idea. The first variants he spawned near the waterfalls and the springs near surfaces that let them hang out over the water. After making sure they were adjusted to only want very wet or humid environments, he gave them luminescence in a variety of orange, red, and goldish yellow colors, then made them prolific spore producers, with the spores glowing in the same colors. The spores were about neutrally buoyant to water, with a bit of variation to ensure the glowing spores spread out to different levels in the streams. The visual effect was somewhere between that of water reflecting fire and the molten glow of lava. It did not compliment the violet glow coming from some of the mushroom trees at all.

The spores would also get brought to the edge of the water, deposited by various ripples and splashes, making it hard to see exactly where the edge of the water was. This wasn’t helped by the spores finding niches to grow more of the little lantern mushrooms, leaving all the waterways a confusing haze. The spores and mushrooms were all perfectly harmless and reasonably nutritious, so the streams could be used as a water source without worrying about poison at least.

And for a third light source, Mordecai used the same style of lantern mushrooms but made these ones not like humidity as much, and also adverse to direct violet illumination from the mushroom trees that glowed. These glowed a sickly greenish color, and could grow on almost any vertical surface but did not like growing in high concentration. This left their glow diffuse and unreliable as a light source.

None of these three colors worked well together, and were never in enough concentration to combine evenly into a roughly white illumination. The waterways were the only consistent illumination available naturally, but that would also leave one’s outline visible against the glowing water. The other choice was to make one’s way through the patchy light and shadow of the forest.

Of course, one could produce one’s own light source of a proper white and easily wash out the effects of these other colors, but such glow would also be quite noticeable to anyone close enough. Most of the time there would at least not be a direct line of sight to make a light source visible to anyone too far away.

Overall it was rather disorienting for most types of vision and forced adventurers into making trade-off decisions about light and visibility as they prepared to contest the dangers of the level.

Once he was satisfied that the environment was well set, it was time to start modifying some inhabitants, and he had quite a few ideas he was eager to try out. There were some serpentine variants of draconic body shapes he had plans for.