> [!infobox|wikipedia] > # Fungrals > [![[Fungrals_small.webp|cover hsmall]]](Fungrals.webp) > ###### Lore Information > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Type | Lore | > Category | Culture | > People | Fungrals | > Region | [[Faewild]] | > ###### Status > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Status | Active | The **Fungrals** are a small, mushroom-bodied folk of the [[Faewild]] — gentle humanoids whose mycelium flesh and cap-shaped heads make them seem grown rather than born, more a part of the fungal world than apart from it. Cheerful, industrious, and disarmingly talkative when they trust you, they live in close communities wherever the right kind of dark and damp will let their gardens flourish, and they have a knack for taking root in places no other people would call home. ## Overview Fungrals stand no taller than a halfling, their bodies a soft, fibrous mycelium and their heads crowned with mushroom caps that vary from one individual to the next in shape, size, and colour — pale cream, deep purple, dappled red, mottled brown. To outsiders they look like the fungi around them stood up and learned to walk, and the resemblance is no accident: theirs is a culture built entirely around the cultivation, tending, and understanding of mushrooms, in which a garden is at once larder, pharmacy, and home. They are native to the [[Faewild]], and like much of that realm's life they are bound up with growth, decay, and the quiet cycles between the two. Where they settle, they settle for good — patient, communal, and slow to leave a place once its soil has been made to bloom. Two populations are known in the world today: a shy, isolated colony hidden deep beneath the earth of the Material Plane, and a thriving, gregarious community woven into the life of the elven city of [[Sumara, The Shining City|Sumara]]. The gulf in temperament between the two — one wary and wordless with strangers, the other unable to stop talking to them — says less about the Fungrals than about the lives circumstance has handed each. ## The Garden as a Way of Life To a Fungral, a garden is not a luxury but the centre of everything. Their settlements are organised around cultivated beds of fungi, and the labour of tending them — watering, pruning, harvesting, and clearing — is the shared rhythm that structures a community's days. Hospitality, too, runs through the garden: a Fungral's surest expression of trust is to share food from it, and the surest way to earn their welcome is to help it grow. ### Fungal Lore Fungrals possess a deep, practical understanding of the many varieties of fungus they live among, and of the alchemical properties each one carries. In the colony beneath the [[Bioluminescent Forest]], the folk tend beds in which the differences between species are matters of life and death: red specimens that turn violently explosive when processed, green that yield a potent contact poison, purple that neutralise toxins, and blue that are simply good to eat. They know which spore-clouds will sicken or madden a creature that disturbs them, and which mushrooms will heal — a body of knowledge passed down by tending rather than by writing, learned by every Fungral from the time they are small. ### Stewardship and Labour Where Fungrals live alongside other peoples, that same patient diligence makes them prized hands. In [[Sumara, The Shining City|Sumara]] they do much of the physical labour of the lower cantons — rolling barrels, carrying baskets, hauling stone and soil — and have become an inseparable part of the city's working life. The [[Circle of the Loom]] counts Fungral hands as one third of the great partnership of elven enchanters, Korred stoneworkers, and Fungral labour that raised and maintains every Nexus, aqueduct, and bridge in the city; the [[Circle of the Root]] keeps them among the terraces of the Greensward, where their feel for growing things makes them natural to the rhythm of planting and harvest. ## Temperament & Voice Fungrals are, by nature, cheerful and curious to a fault. Among their own and among those they trust, they are relentless talkers — full of questions, delighted by novelty, and inclined to keep a passer-by in conversation long after the passer-by has tried to leave. A Fungral who has never seen a dwarf, or a human, or the sky, will want to know everything about it at once. That openness curdles into shyness when a Fungral has reason to fear. The colony beneath the [[Bioluminescent Forest]], cut off underground and unused to visitors, meets strangers not with chatter but with wary silence, communicating through gesture and mime rather than words until trust is established. The contrast with their Sumaran cousins is stark, and entirely a matter of circumstance: the same people, made cautious by isolation in one place and emboldened by belonging in the other. ### Names Fungrals go by a single name, with no family surname — short, soft, and whimsical to other ears: Bopkin, Drimble, Mossy, Nubbin, Puffin, Sporvi, Trumple, Wibbet. The names suit the folk who carry them, and a Fungral introduced by their full name has given a stranger everything there is to give. ## Two Homes ### The Bioluminescent Forest Colony A colony of Fungrals lives deep beneath the Material Plane, in the vast glowing mushroom cavern called the [[Bioluminescent Forest]], within the tunnel network beneath the [[Ruby Falls Goldmine]]. They are believed to have arrived from the [[Faewild]], drawn or displaced through a [[Riftshard]] or fae circle that once opened into these tunnels, and to have made the cavern their permanent home ever since — far from where they began, in a world of perpetual soft colour and no sun. Shy and isolated, they tend their fungal gardens in the quiet and meet the rare intruder with cautious gesture rather than speech. ### The Fungrals of Sumara In the elven refuge of [[Sumara, The Shining City|Sumara]], hidden in the [[Faewild]], a far larger and more confident Fungral community lives woven into the life of the city. They labour through the Fundament and Greensward cantons, talk the ears off anyone who slows down long enough to listen, and keep shops of their own — Sporryn, an enthusiastic fungral with a pale-cream cap who runs the herbalist's stall Petal & Provision in the Heartstone Commons, asks a hundred questions in sequence and has never in his life seen a dwarf. Among Sumara's diverse Faewild population — pixies, sprites, dryads, fauns, korreds, and more — the Fungrals are the cheerful, ever-present workforce that keeps the lower city running. ## In Memory & Belief To those who have met them, Fungrals leave an impression of harmlessness and warmth — small, busy, curious folk who would rather feed a stranger than fight one. In Sumara they are taken so thoroughly for granted that the city scarcely notices how much of itself rests on their labour; they are simply part of the place, as much as its stone and its light. Among the few surface-dwellers who have stumbled into the Bioluminescent Forest, the memory is stranger and rarer — of timid mushroom-shaped people glimpsed among the glowing stalks, more rumour than report, the kind of thing a miner might mention once and never be believed about. What almost no one understands is what the Fungrals quietly prove: that the boundary between the [[Faewild]] and the Material Plane is not absolute, and that a whole people can cross it and endure. The cavern colony is the living evidence of a crossing made long ago and never undone — a fact whose deeper implications are followed, for now, by very few. ## [[The Bloody Nails|Campaign: The Bloody Nails]] #### [[Session 24 - Nelfandriss The Banished]] [[The Bloody Nails]] passed through the [[Bioluminescent Forest]] on their way to the caves of [[Nelfandriss the Banished]] and met its Fungral colony. Through patient mime and a set of harvested spider fangs, [[Kai]] managed to make himself understood to the shy folk — and after he watered their mushroom garden, they shared their food with him and pointed the party deeper into the tunnels. It was the party's first encounter with the mushroom-folk, and a clear demonstration of how trust is earned among them: not with words, but with help given to the garden. #### [[Session 46 - The Shining City]] Entering [[Sumara, The Shining City|Sumara]], the party found Fungrals woven throughout the working life of the city — a marked contrast to the timid colony Kai had once mimed his way into, here cheerful, chattering, and entirely at home among the elves and other fae of the lower cantons. ## Trivia - The same people meet strangers in two opposite ways depending on where they live: the isolated cavern colony falls silent and communicates by gesture, while their Sumaran cousins cannot be persuaded to stop talking. - A Fungral's mushroom cap is as individual as a face — Sumara's Sporryn is known by his pale-cream cap as readily as by his name. - The surest way to a Fungral's trust is to tend their garden; the surest sign you have earned it is to be offered food from it.