Episode 1 - Myconids and Mushroom Coffee

Two Dungeon Masters discuss their D&D adventures and the coffee they drink. They talk about an adventure in a Myconid Cave where one player eats fungus off the walls. The group encounters violet mushrooms and a baby Myconid. The player tries to take the baby, but the party is bombarded with telepathic messages from the Myconids. The fairy character successfully takes the baby from the barbarian. The group narrowly avoids a dangerous situation. The Dungeon Masters reflect on the player's commitment to playing their character and the storytelling aspect of D&D. Welcome to episode one of Dungeons and Dark Roasts. Stick around as we talk about Myconids and Mushroom Coffee. Hello, and welcome to Dungeons and Dark Roasts. I am Axis. And I'm Alex. We are two Dungeon Masters for D&D 5e, here to talk to you today about the chaos of our adventures and the coffee that gets us through it. Be sure to check us out on our Instagram page, dungeons.n.darkroast. And of course, our Facebook page, where we can update you all the time on our next episode and the coffees we make. Hell yeah. Hey, Axis. So today, I really want to talk about when we were playing the Dragons of Zorbrick Isles. Yes, yes, and all of the chaos of the Myconid Cave. Oh, jeez, yeah. Must you remind me of all of this? Yes, yes, because it's too good to forget. All right, all right. I feel like everybody else needs to hear about it, too. Well, you know, if we're gonna suffer, everybody else should probably suffer, too. I'm cool with that. So for those of you who have never played 5e or have never played Dragons of Stormwreck Isle, a little spoiler alert, there will be things we're talking about in this episode that are absolutely spoilers. So if you don't want to hear those, just skip to the end where we're talking about coffee. And then you can just have the fun part, too. But in this, there are four parts. And one of those parts, or the specific areas, is a Myconid Cave. I never in all of my years had heard of Myconids. And I have been playing since Pathfinder. So I have quite a bit of experience under my belt, even DMing. It's nice to see a difference than goblins or, you know, undead. It was nice to deal with, you know, mushroom people in a cave. It's a fantastic new twist, I think. And I was grateful for it. And our group just completely went off the rails with this. I would love to hear about, remind me, please, about licking the walls. Yeah, okay. So you gotta understand, our group is full of unique people. And I, whenever I started this group, I was like, okay, you know what? I've never done 5e. I'm from the 3 and 4 generation. Let's just get some new players, or people who haven't played that much, and we'll go after it that way. Well. On the internet, mind you, right? Yeah, off of the internet. So skip to this Myconid Cave. And the group gets through the octopus. And I'm like, okay, cool. And they've gotten through the first challenge. And one of our players, Gru, decides to ask, okay, can you tell me what's on this wall? And it's like, yeah, yeah. It's, give me a nature check. It's purple fungus. He, before I can even really say anything, he just says, okay, I wanna eat the fungus. And he ripped it off the wall, right? He like grabbed it, and it was gooey, and it was gross. And he had this purple fungus that he's just munching on. And the rest of us are like, wait, what are you doing? My character in particular was very grossed out. Why, though? You failed your nature check. Why? It seemed like a good idea at the time. Apparently it did. He was hungry. He was hungry. Yeah, and then he ate the fungus. And I don't know how, I don't know where to go from there. You know? Well, didn't you make him, like, he did a Constitution saving throw, didn't he? Yeah, and he passed it. Which is something- And he passed it. Yeah, it's a recurring theme with Gru. He makes checks that should result in absolute horror and likely a wipe for the entire party. And nothing happens. Story for another time, he actually spared the group's tavern from burning down with a successful deception roll. He got a net 20 lying to a very, very powerful individual. But he passed his Constitution save, so I can't really punish him. Failed the nature save, passed the Constitution save. Can't really punish him for licking fungus off the walls, even though I personally don't understand why we had to lick the fungus off the walls. But little did I know that it was going to be pretty much par for the course. And it's only gotten worse as time has gone by. Oh my goodness. So as they go into this cave, because I don't remember, it's been so long since we played this, did we, like, there wasn't anything else that got eaten inside the cave, right? Not at that point. Not at that point. There were several other things that got eaten throughout the cave. Gru has a tendency to just snatch and eat. He is a barbarian. He is a barbarian. But that particular room, yeah, no, nothing else really happened there. He went charging in whenever he saw a small myconid. It was a baby myconid, the beginning of life. And he kind of befriended it. And there were a couple other people there. But in doing so, he also ran into the room and triggered some violet mushrooms to attack. So he just got done eating purple mushrooms off the wall. He's now being attacked by purple mushrooms. I'm seeing a purple theme here. Yeah, we have a purple character in the party. There's a lot of purple in this campaign. That is a lot of purple. Yeah, not sure how it happened, but it seems to be happening. Jump ahead a couple of sessions, and they are successfully trying to make it out of the cavern after licking more fungus off of a wall. No punishment, by the way. Yeah, because just- Never at any point is he punished for any of his fungus licking. No, ever. No, it's not until he's almost out of the cave that he picks up this baby myconid and tries to take the baby myconid. And he doesn't know this. His character doesn't know this. The player doesn't know this. But if you take a myconid out into the sunlight, they die. Right, because it's a creature that is, it's sensitive to sunlight, just like your drow and your duergar, or any of the other, but it's also a fungus, so it's even more so, I would imagine. Yeah, it was really more of the fact that, oh, hey, look, a baby mushroom person. Let's take this. Right, because, you know, you wanna take things out of their natural habitat. Absolutely. But Gru seems to have this obsession with small creatures. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's expanding into, I think, behind the scenes, he may be recruiting an animal army. I'm not quite sure yet. We'll find out. Adventures to come. Yeah, if the Forgotten Realms get overrun by mushroom-animal hybrids, we will know exactly where to go. Gotcha. So, yeah, as he picks up this baby mushroom person that he's going to kidnap, because, you know, let's just call it what it is. He's trying to steal a person. He is, the entire party, actually, gets bombarded with this hive mind telepathy that connects the Myconids, and they're all given these massive senses of alarm at first, as he picks it up, and then he starts moving towards the door. Right, and that spore communication that they have created this fear response, and myself and Aria, and I think even Ogis. I think Ogis is the one that really, truly started to stop him, and then by all miracles of the dice, and I do mean miracles of the dice, our one tiniest character, a fairy, wins a strength roll and takes this Myconid baby away from a full-grown barbarian. How that happened, I will never understand, but she was successful. It was the most bizarre thing I have ever seen. A fairy with no leverage just grabs this Myconid child out of a full-grown half-orc barbarian's grasp, and we're just gonna put this back. We're not gonna take this. Ogis was in the sidelines doing his whole swaying thing, because he's been vibing the entire cave. He was dancing with some of the mushroom people, swaying, because that's how they communicate. Aria's kind of sitting in the background just kind of recording all of the dirt so that nobody ever forgets anything. Rularc is recovering from his own shame. Check us out next week to talk about that particular situation, and yeah, Ginger, you had already tried to politely convince them to, you know, be clever. Well, my character was so new to the group, and my character is very stoic, and she is just taking everything in, and at this point, she has got her hand on her face, shaking her head, not knowing if she even wants to continue partying with these people, because they are stealing mushroom babies and acting like they're on drugs. Like, they are swaying like they're high, and I just don't know if that character would have been okay with that. You know, in later adventures, she does kind of go off on her own, and no, I did eventually help our little pixie friend as she was trying to talk Gru down. She was doing her utmost to prevent you guys from dying, because that's exactly what would have happened. If you guys had continued any further, that spore octopus had recovered, that you all had fought on the way in. Gru was walking out the door with one of the Myconid babies. The entire colony was aware of this, and they were all, including the Sovereign, which none of you could have defeated at that level. Even the Sovereign had started moving towards the entrance to recover what they deemed a kidnapping. Well, I mean, there is no way to deem it otherwise. It was definitely a kidnapping. See, that's the danger when you're dealing with things like Myconids and other monsters in D&D that operate with hive minds. Whenever you're operating with a bad guy that has a hive mind, you never know what's out in the map that might be coming for you. Very true, and I think this really speaks to this player's ability to take ownership of his character and really play it. It doesn't matter, he's preventing the metagaming. It doesn't matter what his personal knowledge is. He's playing his character very true, and his character is saying, I want this baby, and I don't understand that it's a baby mushroom. I think it's super cute, and it's walking around doing the little dance from that movie in the 1940s, and he just thinks it's adorable and wants a little pocket friend, and I think that it really shows how wonderful D&D can be and get into that storytelling and how escapist it can be for your mind, and you end up with these wonderful stories, and this is a story that this group tells often, and it really has built his character up, and I'm sure we'll tell more stories about it, but I love how something so simple can really transform the entire game. Well, it's that, and it's also, we have players in D&D that come in with a fully realized backstory, and none of the players at this table have extensive backstories. They have ideas of what they want to explore in their characters. They play to the truisms of their characters. Gru just likes small animals, and he has surrounded, he is, through the miracle of the D20 role, has surrounded himself with a menagerie of small animals, but he's playing that to his character, and in the process of doing that, he's adding new background to his character, and I think that's what really sets these players apart. They're all new. They don't have a lot of backstory, but as all of these random encounters occur, they're basically homebrewing their own character within the game itself, and that's not something that is easily done. No, and I think it can create a challenge. Correct me if I'm wrong. I know from my perspective as a DM, it can really, it can create both the joy of the homebrew game, or even the game that is pre-structured. It can create a joy, because then you have new opportunities to let that character be explored, but it can create a challenge, because in particular, if you're in a structured game, you may have to homebrew something into that structured game, and if you're a new DM and you don't know how to do that, it could be a challenge, and I think it makes joy for both the player and the DM in something that they really love, and it's... Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, and it's just got that... It's intimidating, but as you get to know your players, it gets easier. I've had to change the campaign course like three or four times, because we take a few steps into that particular idea, and the players just aren't enjoying it, so I gotta change things. I don't care if my players lick fungus off of a wall, as long as they're having fun, and it makes great stories that we end up talking about and shaming them in front of the entire internet on a podcast. It's so great. It is. It's funny, and we love you, Gru, but... Some of us. I'm getting sick of his antics, honestly. They make my job hard. But we will... Gru, don't change a thing. Don't change a thing. Don't change a thing. I lost my train of thought. Because of all of this talk of homebrewing, I think that's gonna be a great way to introduce our listeners to our very first Homebrew of the Week segment, where we talk about what kind of coffee got us through the insanity of the past week. We did something kind of fun, especially since this is our first episode. Don't make that sound. You didn't hate it. So we did a coffee called the Purple Miconid, or if you choose to drink responsibly and add some alcohol to this and make an adult beverage, it's called the Stealing Mike. So what this is, you can always go on our Instagram or our Facebook and find the recipe. It is a mushroom coffee that has got lion's mane in it and a couple of other mushrooms. This particular one has also got coffee beans in it. But whatever your favorite brand of mushroom coffee is, I know there's a lot of really popular ones out there right now, you brew it at espresso strength and reserve that. And then in your cup, you're going to combine coconut milk. And for this drink, we used full fat coconut milk. For any of you that are conscious of it and want to reduce that fat, I think a fat-free coconut milk would be wonderful. In fact, I think it would be even better because it did add a film. There was a film on our glasses, just from the fat content. So you do that, you add a few drops of purple ube extract. It's a yam, it's a purple yam. It is a purple yam. For those of you who don't know what an ube is, it is a yam. Now it does not give it a yam flavor. And then we initially added one Trevia and then poured all of that over ice and then added the reserved coffee to the top. Let's be completely honest here. It was not good. The original recipe of this, which was just one sweetener of your choice, the milk, the ube, and the cold coffee espresso was not good. However, I will say that I was determined, and Axis and I are not cold coffee drinkers. We're just not. So this was really a jump in to the podcast and really trying to do something we thought you guys might be interested in. I think they're gonna be more interested in us, our suffering involved in making this madness. So after we tried it and we gave it a good old college effort, and realized we didn't like it, I doctored it up. And to make it truly drinkable, I added about three tablespoons of sugar, white sugar, and a splash of vanilla extract. And that stirred together actually was very, very good. And I will put in the better tasting recipe on the internet when we launch this. I will. And it was good. Once it was all stirred together, it's a beautiful lavender color. And it was eventually drinkable. But at that point, was it coffee though? I mean, it was as much coffee as that mermaid coffee store down the street. Ooh, shady. I love them so strong. You know, I think it would have been really, really good with some coconut rum. I, yeah, I agree with you. You brought that up and I was like, well, you know, I can't do that because I kind of drive, you know, drink responsibly with alcohol. That's just common sense. But I really, really wanted to try it with a little bit of Malibu rum because you know, the rum is the sweeter alcohol. So I was curious how that would help. Yes, and so I do. If you want to make it a stealing mic, you would go ahead and replace a little bit of the coconut milk with coconut rum. I would just do one ounce and I think that would be perfect. And I think that would be great. Well, if that's how you choose to drink responsibly, then you do you. That is exactly how I choose to drink responsibly. As long as you're staying home. Oh yeah, oh no, no, no. I'm not getting out on the road. It's bad enough out here. I don't need to be out there. No, absolutely not. Even with a stealing mic. So you have your purple mic in it and your stealing mic. We would love for you guys, when I post this, to tell us in the comments, if you make the coffee, we would definitely love to know. And suggest the coffees that you might have, that you might like us to try. So, because I think we're open to trying quite a few things. So I think we have talked about all of the purple fungus and myconids that we can talk about. I think next time he tries to pull some fungus off the wall, I'm going to make it elastic. And he's going to have to do a dexterity saving throw to not get smacked in the face with it. Well, we'll have to see what happens with Gru on another day and the rest of the swayers party. You know, we're actually going to be talking about something else that happened in that same myconid cave next week for our second episode, Splash Damage and Spice Roast. Where we're talking about the de facto leader of the swayers, the Wave Bearing Swayers Company, as they are now known, Roolark. We'll tell you more about that next. It's been a pleasure to have everybody here. We hope to see you. Well, I don't see you. You see us because we're on your screen. You hear us. Alex, what was I saying? Yeah, that part. Thank you for joining us this week for myconids and mushroom coffee. Dungeons and Dark Roasts, can't wait to have you back. And if you ever want to meet us, our first appearance is going to be at Dallas Fan Expo, June 7th through the 9th. We would love to have you come out and say hi. Thanks guys. Cut.