Like Lewis Carroll on acid with Lovecraft thrown in

The Fungus Forest was featured on the Roll For Initiative podcast.  I think they gave us a new tagline:

This is like Lewis Carroll on acid with Lovecraft thrown in.

Check it out!

White Water Wyrm and Wyrmlings

[creatures and text by Lee Reynoldson from Fungus Forest, art by moi]

White Water Wyrm A thirty-foot long beast with huge bulging eyes that are perfectly adapted to the darkness of its cave and its waters. It has rubbery white flesh, proto-gills and lungs, diminutive fins and semi-functional limbs. It secretes an oily substance that paralyses those that come into contact with its skin (Saving Throw at -1 penalty to avoid paralysis for 3d6 turns) or are exposed to the water around it (Saving Throw each round at +1 bonus to avoid paralysis for 2d6 rounds). It is also asexual and without another of its species gives birth to batches of White Wyrmlings.  It feeds on its own young, forcing the Wyrmlings to flee the lake and inhabit the underground river system. It is a dangerous predator in the water, but it can, and does, waddle onto land from time to time. White Wyrmlings Offspring of the White Water Wyrm. These vile looking things resemble aquatic tapeworms with teeth. They thrash about a single victim in a swarm. Anyone who succumbs to the paralyzing poison that seeps from the Wyrmlings' skin or from their bites will be eaten. If they are successful in paralyzing a victim, they will devour him in just four combat rounds. If left to feed they will not attack anyone else. If the party tries to rescue their paralyzed comrade the swarm will retaliate. If a swarm is reduced to four or less HP it will swim away.

White Water Wyrm AC: 3 [16] HD: 5 (24 HP) Move: 4; 16 Swim Attacks: 1 Bite (2d6) Save: 16 Special: Immune to poison; Secretes poison (on contact: -1 to Save, paralyzed 3d6 turns; in water: +1 to Save, paralyzed 2d6 rounds) XP: 600

White Wyrmling Swarm AC: 9 [10] HD: 2 (9 HP) Move: 12 Swim Attacks: 1 Swarm Frenzy (Poison) Save: 18 Special: Poison (Save or paralyzed for 2d6 rounds); Devour paralyzed victim in 4 rounds; Immune to poison XP: 50

The Fungus Forest is an old-school adventure location suitable for low level play, available at DriveThruRPG as a pay-what-you-want .PDF (please download it for free if you can't afford to contribute anything, we want this in the hands of gamers!).  

Fungus Forest (C)2016 by Lee Reynoldson and Carl Nash

The Most Interesting Treasure Trove In The World

[Fungus Forest text by Lee Reynoldson]

Dark Fey are evil fairies. Like fairies, they are small (six inches) magical creatures with wings. They have small horns, protruding fangs, claws, scaly grey skin, and bat-like wings.

The Dark Fey and their foul creations the Wassermen are evil through and through. Their only
interest is in slaying anyone they come across... especially their neighbors the Draklings. They
cannot be reasoned with and the only communication a party will have with them is being taunted
and threatened.  The Wassermen spend most of their time in the large underground lake and the rest patrolling the underground river system.

High above the ground, carved twenty feet up the wall above the south shore, there are hundreds of tiny cave
mouths. These are the homes of the Dark Fey.

If things go bad they retreat into their tunnels, which are 7-10 inches high and 5 inches wide. The tunnel complex stretches far into the walls, making the Dark Fey relatively safe once they retreat into them.

Clever adventurers may shrink themselves, using magic or the Grow-Shrink Shrooms, to infiltrate the Dark Fey cave system.

The Dark Fey raise tarantula-sized wolf spiders in their cave system. They will attempt to lure intruders deep into the complex to their temple, the large chamber shaped like a spider. The Dark Fey will flee out the far exit of the temple while dozens of wolf spiders attack from their nests in the “arms” of the spider cave.  The Dark Fey keep no treasure in their complex.


Straight from the water near the middle of the north shore of the lake there is a ten-foot cliff leading up into a cave. The Wassermen have covered the surface of the rock in slimy moss to make it treacherously slippery and very difficult to scale. For years the Dark Fey have been hoarding treasure in this cave that they or their Wassermen have salvaged from the Shroomenkin’s dump, stolen from other creatures within the forest, taken from adventurers and pilfered from the surrounding countryside. They spread rumors of their hoard as bait to lure new victims to slay.

Get the Fungus Forest yourself as a pay-what-you-want .PDF with full color illustrations and interior layout at DriveThruRPG.com and find out what other strange delights lurk within!

Fungus Forest Reviews

The first few reviews for the Fungus Forest pay-what-you-want adventure location are starting to roll in.

Needles at "Swords & Stitchery" gave a very detailed and enthusiastic review.  I loved all the ideas presented in the review about how to integrate the Fungus Forest into different genres - great stuff!  You should read the whole review but the last paragraph has a nice summation:

"So why all of the serious fungal talk about the Fungus Forest adventure? Well because it happens to include a full OSR monster tool kit for creating your own fungus monsters and encounters;"Ready Reference Appendices: Formatted in black and white with printable margins to enable home printing for easy in-game reference; Appendix I - Random Fungus Generator; Appendix II - Magic Mushrooms of the Fungus Forest; Appendix III - Fungus Forest Bestiary (30+ unique entries); Appendix IV - Printable Fungus Forest Map." This makes inserting the Forest and its monsters into your old school campaigns a snap! Do I think you should grab this adventure? Yes! Today,now, and start using one of the most underappreciated types of horrors for your game today. A hearty five out of five. "

A second (much shorter) review was posted on DriveThruRPG by user "Zero C":

"I am vey impressed! I picked this up for a look, even though I haven't played OSR rules since the 1990's. I discovered this 71 page adventure site is well-written, well-formatted, and nicely illustrated."

But don't take Zero C and Needle's words on it - download the Fungus Forest and see for yourself!  "Pay what you want" means you are welcome to download for free if you can't contribute anything.  I guarantee it is a great value for the money :)  Full color cartography, art and layout including "The Ring of the Restless Dead" from cave C13 (pen & ink drawing by yours truly colored in Photoshop):

Fungus Forest - Pay What You Want

The Fungus Forest is available now as a Pay What You Want .PDF on DriveThruRPG.com.  Check it out and download now!

The Fungus Forest is an OSR Compatible adventure location designed for use with Original, Basic and Advanced Editions of the world’s most popular fantasy role-playing game (and their modern simulacra).

Pay what you want for this sprawling 100+ cave complex suitable for low level play.  Please download for free if you cannot pay anything; we want this thing in the hands of gamers, not mouldering away on a DriveThru bookshelf.

Features:

• Unique creatures and magical items, including six feuding Fey factions that will try to pit the party against their rival factions.
• Compatible with most editions of the game; stats are provided in a simple, system-agnostic format with both ascending and descending armor class listed. 
• Maps: 2-Page overview map spread of the caverns; four quadrant maps of sections of the caverns; inset map of the Tiny Tunnels of the Dark Fey; printable black & white single page version of the overview map.
• Full Color art and layout.  
• Ready Reference Appendices: Formatted in black and white with printable margins to enable home printing for easy in-game reference; Appendix I - Random Fungus Generator; Appendix II - Magic Mushrooms of the Fungus Forest; Appendix III - Fungus Forest Bestiary (30+ unique entries); Appendix IV - Printable Fungus Forest Map.
• Bookmarked & Hyperlinked: Fully bookmarked .PDF with a clickable Table of Contents
• Two Formats Available: 2-Page Spread or Single Page .PDF formats available for download.
• Print Edition Coming Soon: The Fungus Forest is currently .PDF only but a print edition is in the works, loaded with more art!

Thanks to osrcompatible.org for the "OSR Compatible" declaration, used under a Creative Commons CC-BY license.

OSR Logo by Stuart Robertson used under a Creative Commons CC-BY License

Fungus Forest (upcoming release)

I am getting close to releasing a product that started kicking and clawing its way to freedom way back in 2009.  I drew a map for the now defunct megadungeon.net project and Lee Reynoldson made an awesome key for the map.  We have kicked around the idea of publishing it in a few different forms over the years but in 2016 the stars aligned and I finally got off my butt and started tackling the editing, art and layout.  Several intensive weeks of work later, we are so close I can taste it!

This is a big project; there are over 100 keyed locations on the map, with 101 unique key entries (some entries covering multiple caves).  Lee wrote a really terrific text for low-level play; each of the Fey factions that live in the magical Fungus Forest will try to pit the party against their rival Fey factions.  Every creature in the Fungus Forest is a unique creation of Lee's (which is a big selling point in my opinion); the Bestiary in the appendices contains nearly 40 new creatures.  And of course, there are tons and tons of magical mushrooms.  You can never have too many magic mushrooms.  It took a LOT of editing work to get the sprawling original 60 page Google Document print-ready, from making sure all stat blocks and abbreviations were standardized to compiling the appendices and of course going over the text with a fine-toothed grammar comb.

I also wanted to make individual quadrant maps in addition to the main overview map, and of course I wanted more art than the couple few monster pictures I drew... so I talked my wife into doodling some awesome mushroom sketches in pen and ink, which I am coloring in PhotoShop.

On top of that, it turns out that doing interior layout is WAY more time consuming than I ever imagined.  I have learned a ton about Adobe InDesign throughout this process and I am very pleased with the way things are shaping up.  A few sample spreads (not necessarily final layout but probably pretty close on these particular pages):