Overview

Sprawling out over the plains, the Grandfarmers are a mycel of industrious folk who pride themselves on their ingenuity and capitalistic spirit.

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Culture

Ask any Grandfarmer who the largest mycel is and they’ll be quick to claim that credit themselves, even if the evidence is perhaps somewhat suspect. It can’t be denied, though, that the Grandfarmers are the most industrious builders and inventors in the world, and it shows in the grandeur of the vast colonies they erect across their native plains.

Voracious producers and consumers, the Grandfarmers are a popular source of trade goods among the mycels as well as one of the largest buyers of goods from other cultures. But voracious though they may be, they remember the lessons of the past and temper their urge to expand with a strong dose of common sense and respect for the world and ecosystems around them.

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Religion

Grandfarmers revere technology in a way that most other mushroom folk don’t, holding it in reverence and awe. Given that their entire way of life was made possible by that technology, it’s understandable. They wield the power to not only grow and cultivate a dizzying array of foods and materials used by mushroom folk world wide, but also the power to sculpt and shape the building blocks of those foods and materials, to make them new, adaptable. In their minds, they wield divine power itself.

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That sort of power comes with the need for great responsibility, and it’s a responsibility they take seriously. The leaders of their faith are those who have earned the greatest trust in its use.

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Daily life

Your average Grandfarmer goes to work as a builder, planner, merchant, trader, farmer, or any of hundreds of other traditional vocations. They go to these jobs safe in the knowledge that their cities are well constructed marvels of fungal design and engineering, even if every once in a while something doesn’t work quite right because the materials, or perhaps the labor, put into building it was on the cheaper side.

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Governance

The Grandfarmers are ruled by councils composed of the greatest or most popular technical experts of their communities.

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Character

Cocopell was a wandering mycanoid who, when they brought goods to trade, was wildly celebrated. Not only did Cocopell bring treasures and novel delights but also had an impossible ability to dramatically improve crop growth, harvest yields, and mold development through the use of nanotechnologically-enhanced pheromones.

 

Cocopell established the template for the vast fields and farms of the Grandfarmers in generations to come, and in so doing, spread the technology that made them possible across many lands. With this example Cocopell inspired the Grandfarmer religion and the template for secular rule all at once.

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Biology

Grandfarmers as a mycel are primarily made up of Shaggy Mane, Witch’s Hat, and Maitake mushroom folk.

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Native Lands

The plains on the Grandfarmers live and work are fields of vast, varicolored varieties of mycelium that have been domesticated for every imaginable use. Land is typically worked in small-to-medium sized plots overseen by an individual farmer or a couple, with larger plots going to bigger groups or to older Grandfarmers. Some elder family units control truly impressive tracts of land.

 

Where the Grandfarmers aren’t actively practicing agriculture or expanding their cities and homesteads, the plains are wilder but still impressive, featuring mixtures of fungus among other plantlife. Sometimes an isolated farm can be found out in the wilderness between mycels. And, on occasion, the ruins of abandoned farms reveal themselves, having been reclaimed by wilderness. Stories tell of wonders and terrors that dwell on such reclaimed lands, the unmanaged power of nanotechnology having been left free to devise new and novel creations.

Most dismiss such stories as myth, but the tales persist regardless.

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Relations

The Grandfarmers have an excellent relationship with the Merchants, who facilitate the trade of their goods at volumes so immense their own native merchants could never match.

They tend toward a bit of suspicion of the Undergrounders; they typically resent the secrecy with which they conduct their business and lives, especially as it pertains to technical innovations.

 

Most other mycels wax and wane in their estimation, but they try not to antagonize anyone who might be a potential market for their wares or who might have exotic goods to be sampled. Anyone who comes up with new and novel technologies is eyed with great interest and approval, touched with just a hint of jealousy, as such innovativeness is seen as a touch of the divine by the Grandfarmers.