By Rasher
a small, blue glowing mushroom which can be seen to pulse with light very slowly, the spores it releases glow far brighter than the mushroom itself. They usually grow in patches of varying sizes, that glows to attract animals and explodes to spread its spores when disturbed.
Trigger: Anything larger than a frog (SM -7 or so) disturbing the ground within 1 a hex radius of a mushroom causes it to explode, this will also cause a chain reaction, making adjacent mushrooms explode.
Detect: Naturalist -2, Herb Lore -1, or Area knowledge (wherever this mushroom grows) to identify this specific type of mushroom and know how it works
Disarm: Use a fungicide (bought before hand for or created by either alchemy or chemistry skills. Alternatively a natural fungicide can be located and extracted from plants such as tea tree oil with herbalist skill) or something like a successful “wither plants” spell would also work.
Circumvent: Jumping, Climbing, or Acrobatics (to go over the mushrooms without touching the ground, assign penalties on terrain difficulty and how much ground the patch of mushrooms covers, no penalty to get over just one mushroom, although there are rarely just one)
Evade: You cannot evade the spores, but you can make a HT roll at -3 to hold your breath to avoid the secondary effect as you run out of the spore cloud.
Effects: The mushroom explodes, triggering any adjacent mushrooms and covering everything within a 2 hexes radius in a cloud of very bright bio-luminescent spores in a cloud lasting for 3 seconds. The spores covering your body, trailing off you and sticking to things you touch which will put you at a -8 disadvantage to Stealth, Shadowing or Disguise until washed off or after 1d+1 hours
If you fail the HT roll you inhale some of the spores, causing a -2 DX penalty for as long as you are in the cloud of spores and for 3d turns thereafter due to irritated eyes, sneezing and disorientation. (basically it’s “Pollen cloud” in GURPS magic)
Shots: 1 per mushroom
Rearm: no (the mushroom is destroyed, but spores on the ground could grow into new mushrooms over the next few weeks)
Steal: Yes (if you can pick the mushroom without touching the ground in it’s range, the mushroom is now an improvised spore grenade of sorts that is resisted by HT with no penalty and has the same glow effect; and while non-toxic if cooked tastes terrible and has no real nutritional value to those without the “universal digestion” advantage)
Variants
More Hazardous Spores
You can replace the glowing effect of the spores with literally any of the spore cloud effects found on page 17-18 of "GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 2: Icky Goo" with the same rules for touching and breathing the spores listed there you could also use a large patch of these mushrooms to spawn one of those spore clouds! You could also just add any of the afflictions listed on B 428-429 with HT-2 to avoid.
Adventure Ideas
Perfect for a fantasy cave, an alien biosphere, a biological engineering companies greenhouse these mushrooms are ideal for making victims very easy to detect. Perhaps an alien or a monster uses the glowing spores to track it's prey, maybe the security guards have tech that can use the spores to track intruders or maybe they were the only light source in the area in the first place; meaning the victim has a very low amount of visibility around them, but that they stick out like a candle to any adversaries in the darkness.