Vyrnash - The Myconid Sovereign

Role in Its Society:

Vyrnash is the undisputed mind of a sprawling fungal commune deep in the Underdark—a place where refuse, corpses, and runoff from a dozen warring factions are quietly digested into something new.

To duergar, drow, and derro, the cavern is a convenient dumping ground: a sinkhole of filth and the “mushroom king” who makes it all disappear. To nearby svirfneblin and druids, Vyrnash is a neutral recycler and memory-keeper, turning battlefields and plague pits into phosphorescent gardens.

He stands at the center of a ring of lesser myconids, spore servants, and animate fungal growths, all linked through rapport spores. Vyrnash will bargain with almost anyone who respects the cycle of decay. Those who bring fresh corpses, compost, and nonpoisonous waste are granted safe paths and strange, dreamlike visions in return. Those who bring fire, poison, or defile his grove are quietly surrounded by shambling, spore-choked husks.

He is not a villain by nature—but his definition of “acceptable sacrifice” is measured in compost, not comfort.

Appearance Description:

Vyrnash rises nearly twice the height of a human, a towering fungal figure whose “flesh” is a tapestry of layered mycelium and soft, fibrous tissue.

His central stalk-body is pale grey shot through with faint violet and sickly green veins, as if veins of mold snake through him. Thick, rootlike legs plunge into the damp earth, disappearing into the mat of moss, rot, and tangled mycelium that carpets his grove.

His cap is a broad, flaring crown of overlapping fungal shelves—each tier edged in bioluminescent blue and sickly amber, like a stacked halo of glowing fungus. Tiny puffball nodules and cup fungi stud the underside, releasing lazy motes of spores whenever he moves.

Several of his long, flexible arms end not in hands, but in frilled, spore-shedding fronds, while others terminate in more defined, three-fingered “hands” made of braided mycelium. Embedded in his torso and shoulders are half-absorbed relics of the dead: a rusted badge, a cracked holy symbol, a fragment of carved stone tablet, and the hint of a skull swallowed by fungus, its eye sockets now glowing with dim blue spores.

Where a face might be on a humanoid, Vyrnash has a slightly raised ridge with bioluminescent “eyespots”—no mouth, just a faintly pulsing ring of pores that release a soft sigh of spores when he “speaks.”

Backstory:

Vyrnash began as a simple cap in a small myconid circle near a trickle of mineral-rich water. The circle was peaceful, content to digest fallen beasts and scraps of fungus. Then the wars came.

A duergar mine broke through above, followed by a drow raiding route and, later, a troglodyte midden. Poisoned runoff, spoiled rations, piles of corpses, and broken weapons began to rain into the cavern. Where other myconid circles withered under the onslaught of strange alchemical toxins and necrotic residue, Vyrnash adapted.

His spores began to feed not just on flesh and plant, but on echoes—residual magic, lingering psychic impressions, the emotional flavor of the dead. As each corpse rotted, Vyrnash absorbed fragmentary memories: a duergar’s fear of abandonment, a drow captain’s cruel satisfaction, a troglodyte’s territorial rage. These impressions did not twist him; they deepened him. The circle chose him as sovereign, his cap blooming into a radiating crown of filament and light.

Over cycles, Vyrnash established himself as a quiet broker:

• He extended safe fungal pathways to merchants who paid in bodies and organic waste.
• He allowed necromancers to harvest mushrooms in exchange for “clean” bones and discarded failed experiments.
• He grew spore servants from fallen enemies to clear filth and tend the grove.

He has watched whole factions rise and fall, their banners now nothing more than mold-thread in his soil. He remembers them all in his hallucination spores and believes that, one day, everything—stone, flesh, and thought—will join the Great Compost of the Underdark.