D&D General Plants (and Fungi) that should be in your D&D Campaign!

Does this prove the theory that everything in nature is trying to kill you. I do like the idea of a crawling claw tree. Wasn't there a hangman's tree someplace.
 

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I saw a crawling cactus at the Cal State Botanical Gardens in Berkeley. Also known as a creeping devil, this columnar cactus "crawls" across the desert floor by growing at one end while dying at the other end. In real life this happens at the pace of plant growth but I see no reason we couldn't make it faster and more vampiric.
I loooooove the idea of a cactus snake!
 

This is a very appropriate post for a thread necromancy!

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(photo credit: M.Y. SITI-MUNIRAH, science news.com)

Fairy Lantern Flowers are parasitic plants that spend decades underground, feeding off of the roots of other plants. They lack the ability to photosynthesize, but still require pollination, so they emerge every once in a while to attract insects. They have strange, tentacle-like pedals and brightly colored insides.

In a D&D campaign, Fairy Lantern Flowers could require pollinators from the Faerie Realms. They spend decades beneath the ground, feeding from the roots of trees (which will then grow sickly or warped into strange, almost humanoid shapes), then rise on long stalks, almost floating into the air and glowing. Their long tendrils open portals into Faerie Realms and summon strange creatures to collect their pollen. Patient faeries keep track of the life cycles of Fairy Lantern Flowers and use these opportunities to make quick jaunts into Mortal Realms, gathering treasure or servants and leaping back to their home worlds before the flowers retreat to beneath the soil. Mages and druids seek out trees with the signature warp of the parasitic flowers and await their blooming, planning out ways to worship, trick, or even trap the faeries that pass through!
 

A while back, I saw one of these growing near my classroom:

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(Photo Credit: wikimedia)

It's called a Latticed Stinkhorn or Red Cage. It's a very cool fungus. It starts as a white egg-like thing, then erupts into this cage structure.
Here's a zygomind from one of the Pathfinder Bestiaries:

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It pretty much looks like a much larger version of the terrestrial fungus depicted above.

Johnathan
 

Wasn't there a hangman's tree someplace.
Yeah, I think it was in one of the Monstrous Compendium Annuals towards the tail end of AD&D 2E

EDIT I was wrong apparently its been in 1E, 2E and 4E
 

My friend (and former DM) introduced Fungar, God of Fungus, to our first D&D 5e campaign. He was worshipped by cultists who infected live victims with spores ostensibly cultivated from the God of Fungus himself, where they would eventually turn the victims into fungal zombies whom the cultists could use to spread Fungar's influence.
 

When it comes to weird fungi-related religious rituals, I really liked the ideas presented in “The Demonomicon of Iggwilv: Zuggtmoy: Queen of Fungi” by James Jacobs in Dragon #337. The picture presented was perfect: Zuggtmoy (or Tsuggtmoy, as she sometimes shows up in Gary's notes) as the patron of degerate, crazed swamp-people is absolutely perfect to inject a bit of Slasher Movie horror into your D&D.
 

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