Cavern Terrain Part II - Mushroom Forest

In the last post here, I described and showed a bit of the cavern project I'd put together for a D&D 5E campaign. I have to admit that I went a bit nuts at the local Hobby Lobby picking up things to re-purpose into terrain or creatures. In a time when so many different things are commercially available I was inspired to return to the old days of conversions, kit-bashing, and just plain old DIY.

Which brings us to the Mushroom Forest. I'm not sure what got me motivated to work on this, but it was a slippery slope thing. Once I started, I just kept making them.

Here's the initial work on the first batch. All materials came from Hobby Lobby in this case. There were small and large furniture upholstery tacks, an assortment of wood pegs and dowels, and roound wood circles for basing. The shells used in my previous post to make Piercers starred again as another way of making stalagmites, and some other shells ended up in the mushroom role as well.

Some use of hot glue was added for texture in spots or to bulk out the smaller mushroom stems. Bases received some textured acrylic gel medium...which promptly dried out before my follow up batch...grumble...

Then these were sprayed with black paint/primer. I'm certainly not a perfectionist when it comes to painting models that may only see a handful of games, so some basic acrylic paint work was done.

I liked the results of the scratch built mushrooms, and decided to make up another batch, and also decided on making up some homemade Purple Shriekers, Violet Fungus, and Myconids...because I'm a fun guy. (sorry)

Those Myconids were made with fabric wrapped floral wire hot glued onto the ends of some leftover upholstery tacks.  That's what happens with leftover materials, they spawn new projects.These were coated with acrylic gel medium and below you can see them with a little paint, the bases they will be on, and the next set of mushrooms.

I did mention the Purple Shriekers and Violet Fungus plants (the ones with tendrils). I used wood drawer pulls for these and a liberal amount of hot glue for the detailing. The Violet Fungus plants I used some leftover back halves from the small  2 piece round head rivets that were used for the smallest mushrooms (in black below). Coming out of the rivet back centers were bent wire with hot glue to make the tendrils.

 And finally here's everything thrown together for a staged photo. The adventurers shown in lower right to show the scale. They certainly will have to deal with a lot to get to the far side of the cavern...

When I have time, I'd like to make up some 3D irregular cavern rooms and them incorporate these pieces into the scene. Now, if anyone is wondering why the mushroom bases are green, I intend to use them for surface world forests and can hand wave the base color as moss or other fungus growth around the larger 'Shrooms.