Driftbloom - The Gas Spore

Role in Its Society:

Driftbloom is a weaponized rumor—a drifting fungal horror that looks enough like a beholder to turn any tunnel into a panic test.

To Underdark denizens, its cavern is called the False Eye Grotto. Drow, duergar, and derro all know the stories:

• Patrols who saw “a beholder” ahead and turned back, only to be mocked later when no such tyrant appeared.
• Raiders who loosed a single crossbow bolt and vanished in a choking cloud of spores.
• Fungus-haunted husks, bloated with spores, dragged away to seed new driftblooms.

Some factions deliberately herd or plant gas spores in chokepoints, letting Driftbloom hover just above the floor like a living mine. Others avoid the grotto altogether, unwilling to risk discovering whether this time, it’s a fungus… or the real thing.

Driftbloom itself has no alliances, but its existence shapes tactics. Veterans in the area carry long poles, throw rocks at anything that looks like a floating eye, and never trust an unmoving “beholder” that doesn’t react right away.

Appearance Description:

Driftbloom is a huge, roughly spherical mass of pale, spongy fungus that floats a few feet above the cavern floor, bobbing slightly on unseen currents.

Its surface is mottled purple, gray, and sickly white, with veinlike mycelial threads and swollen blisters scattered across it. From the crown sprout a tangle of long, stalk-like growths resembling eyestalks—thin, tubular mushrooms capped with small, hardened fungal nodules. Many of these caps have dark, glossy spots that look disturbingly like pupils, but up close they are just pits of spore-rich tissue.

On the front of the sphere, a large, discolored patch of fungus creates the illusion of a central eye—a ring of darker tissue surrounding a lighter center. When torchlight hits it, the texture glistens like a wet cornea. Tiny, hairlike filaments around this “eye” continually twitch and release faint puffs of spores.

Rootlike strands hang beneath the sphere, trailing inches above the ground, occasionally brushing stone and leaving powdery spore smears. The air around Driftbloom is faintly hazy, speckled with drifting motes that glow softly when caught in magical light.

From a distance, especially in low light, it is easy—dangerously easy—to mistake Driftbloom for a beholder hovering in silence.

Backstory:

Driftbloom’s existence began with a corpse.

A beholder once ruled a portion of this Underdark, its lair a maze of carved shafts and anti-gravity chambers. When it was finally slain—by heroes, rival aberrations, or betrayal—its vast body lay where it fell, eye and stalks rotting in the damp.

Spores from nearby myconid colonies and other rot-fungi settled into the carcass. Aberrant residue from the beholder’s flesh twisted their growth. Where most gas spores become mindless mimicries, this particular bloom grew slowly, fattened on lingering magic, psychic residue, and decades of corpses dragged into the lair’s shadow.

As the original lair crumbled, Driftbloom floated free, following the faint currents and tremors of the Underdark until it found a new cavern rich in still air, corpses, and fear. The stories of a beholder never truly died. Whenever someone saw Driftbloom’s silhouette and fled, the myth was reinforced. Whenever someone struck it, the explosion seeded new colonies.

Over time, the gas spores in this region developed a shared “echo”: they are still mindless fungus, but they all originate from that same corpse and carry faint, instinctive patterns—hovering motionless, turning slowly as if tracking prey, and drifting toward voices that sound like fear. Driftbloom is the oldest and largest of them, swollen with spores and half-remembered horrors.