The term ‘Sporekin’ refers to any of the number of humanoids who can symbiotically link with and connect to the forest known as the River of Madness from the nation of Mosetto. Officially, the efforts to contain this forest are absolutely successful and there’s no growth from the forest outside of the ravine, and there are no people living in there – only dangerous plant life and symbiotic living-seeming things from inside the forest.
There’s nothing in the River to worry about and the whole affair is contained.
What do you mean you’ve seen people coming out of it? You must be mistaken. The spores cause madness, after all. Do you need to sit down? We can take you in for medical examination. Anything in the name of containing the River, you know. No? Then you best stop with these rumours.
Glossary Note: Conventionally, the term used in D&D for this mechanical package is race. This is the typical term, and in most conversations about this game system, the term you’re going to wind up using is race. For backwards compatibility and searchability, I am including this passage here. The term I use for this player option is heritage.
Of course, that’s what the people of Mosetto call them. Just like how the people of Mosetto call their home the River of Madness. What they call themselves is
Mykin
People bound together by the spores of the Dancing Stars.
Mykin are humanoids made out of other humanoids. Each Mykin was a humanoid of another heritage, then they became part of the Mykin. Because of this, some rules like height and weight and languages are all based on the heritage they were. This will be listed on the table as see base heritage.
This can mean that Mykin can be small or medium sized, and this is intentional.
Mykin Heritage Traits
Average Height: See base heritage
Average Weight: See base heritage
Ability Scores: +2 Constitution, +2 Charisma or Wisdom
Size: See base heritage
Speed: 6 squares
Vision: Normal
Languages: See base heritage
Skill Bonuses: See base heritage
Star Voiced: Anyone who inhales the spores around you can communicate with you. Treat this as Telepathy 5, with some limitations. You can communicate with any other creature that has a language and is within line of sight and within 5 squares of you; this allows for two-way communication. It doesn’t let you communicate with undead or entities that don’t (or choose not to) breathe.
Spore Health: You have resist 1 poison.
Aberrant Origin: You’re not an entirely natural organism any more, symbiotically linking together the Dancing Stars with your own body. You are considered an aberrant creature for the purposes of effects that relate to creature origin. Despite being an aberration of sorts, don’t worry, animals aren’t bothered by your presence, and you still seem like a fun guy to be around.
Shared Blood: Select a heritage other than Mykin or Revenant. You are also considered a member of that heritage for the purpose of meeting prerequisites, such as feat or paragon path prerequisites.
Power Name: You have the Shared Potential heritage power.
| Shared Potential | Mykin Heritage Power |
|---|---|
| After the dice is thrown but before it lands, there’s a chance the right breath could steer its fate. So don’t hold your breath. | |
| Encounter | |
| Free Action Personal | |
| Trigger: An ally makes a d20 roll and dislikes the result. | |
| Effect: The ally rerolls the d20 and uses the second roll, even if it’s lower. | |
Any given Mykin’s appearance varies wildly from whatever their base heritage is. Orc Mykin and Halfling Mykin are all Mykin, even if they’re wildly different in terms of their physical size and mass. Mykin tend to be about the same weight as their base heritage, even if they are broader and more massive – seems the mushrooms they’re symbiotically linked to may have a lot of volume but not necessarily a lot of mass.
What Mykin do tend to have is wildly out of type colours. Bright pale whites, neon pinks and cyans show up in unexpected places. Also Mykin tend to prove a little odd on physical inspection – many people binding a Mykin has been surprised to find a limb that normally has a bone in it is somehow a lot more flexible than they were assuming.
Some Mykin are extremely different to their base heritage, with things like multitudinous eyes, gills, and skin replaced with textural fungus mass. Any given Mykin can be extremely like or extremely unlike their base heritage, but that difference tends to represent a depth of connection to the symbiosis of the Gleaming Stars.
The Mykin are from the small communities living inside the River of Madness, or as they know it, the Dancing Stars. Where the vision from the outside of the River of Madness is a space where even the air itself is hostile and induces madness, the Mykin are very familiar with a different life. They call their home the Dancing Stars, pointing to the bioluminous pollen and spores of their complex, a constellation that they can somehow understand in its place and position all around them.
This is one of the big mindset things for Mykin and non-Mykin to understand one another. For a non-Mykin the idea that every single spore can be meaningfully categorised in its location is impossible. For Mykin, it’s easy. Every single spore tells you where the nearest spores are, and then to understand that, you just have to ask all of them.
To the Mykin the life inside the Forest is full of perhaps-unsettling communalist living. When you partake of the spores, when they take root in you, you learn a way to communicate in a truest possible way. A Mykin who breathes deep and feels an emotion can exhale spores and those spores share that feeling with any other who breathes them in, in turn. This kind of communication network, across respiring stalks all across the River, mean that the Mykin are very aware of all those who enter their space and are willing to do it harm. The Mykin are very careful about who and how they share this information — and can even hide their whole towns.
Mykin are fully aware of their reputation, and that means adventuring Mykin who are outside of the Dancing Stars are often cagey or dishonest about themselves, about their bodies, about the strange and mysterious things they can or can’t know.
The next step for Mykin, by the way? Feats! But I don’t have those yet. The important thing is to make sure that the heritage works reasonably well on its own, first.