You play the beasts of the world... I'll play the fungus.
Race: Yrb
Singular: Yrble
Genitive: Yrben
Description and Traits: The Yrb is the result of a melting pot of micro-organisms brought together in the midst of a world undergoing a surge in psychic evolution. It can best be described scientifically as colonies of fungi infected with various specialist bacteria and other microbes living in symbiosis. To the layman, it looks like large mats of mould. Large mats of strangely unappealing mould.
Individual colonies of Yrb can be described as Yrbles, but the distinction is a loose one because overlapping colonies can mesh. For the sake of population counts, a single Yrble can be defined as a quantity of Yrb containing enough supplementary microbes to function as an Yrble in the event of being cut off from the larger colony mesh.
Yrb can be loosely classed as omnivorous, but is technically detritivorous; it will eat anything dead. Whilst it eats already decomposing or dead organisms (plant or animal) in preference, it will deliberately kill organisms if there is not enough detritus for its energy requirements. Right now, it can only kill plants (by infecting them and leeching nutrients until the plant dies, but this exposes it to plant immune resistance).
Partly as a result of the increasing psychic development of a number of other species in the world, intelligence of a sort has arisen within Yrble colonies. Yrb has developed a number of basic psychic abilities, despite its non-standard mental structure. Yrb's "brain" is evolved from the interactions of large colonies of supplementary organisms that form the equivalent of a neural net. As such, destroying Yrb will actually cause it to grow less intelligent (although what few memories are recorded tend to be done so redundantly across the organism, so splinter colonies may survive to carry memories).
Diet: Omnivore/Detritivore
Evolutionary Expenditures
Breeding [20?]: Difficult to categorise, so I've left the EPs open until I know what to spend on this. If a colony is cut off from the whole and has to survive on its own, it will reproduce and die out at a rate equivalent to an individual lifespan of half a year, spending 15 days generating enough new mass to act as a new colony. So, lifespan 6 months, childhood 15 days (1/12th of life), litter of 1.
Asexual [5]: Sex is the domain of higher organisms. Yrb reproduces with only the need for a single colony. This cuts the hassle out of finding and attracting a mate, allowing for much more reproduction. The price of this is reduced genetic diversity.
Sedentary [-]: Yrb does not move as such, yet. When it needs to get to a new location, it grows new strands that way and spawns another colony. Migration is currently accomplished by extending long stretches of hyphae and transferring seeding patches of supplementary organisms to the ends, forming new colonies.
Detritivorous [1]: Yrb can digest all manner of dead creatures or plants, but not so efficiently that they are unaffected by poisons.
Almost homogenous [5]: Cut off a large enough piece of Yrb and it will still function as an independent Yrble. Stab it, and it will just re-route its connections. Burning works, mind, but generally Yrb is difficult to kill simply because of how time-consuming the necessary large-scale destruction is. Excising or poisoning specifically the specialist microbes that serve as its 'brain' will just render it harmless fungus, however, and killing off the fungus that serves as its body will starve the neural colonies in turn.
Psychic Powers
This is the meat of the Yrben evolutionary base, and much easier for it to alter.
Ranged Perception [5]: Yrb has sensory 'organs' of neural colonies that can sense stationary environment in an approximate sense up to sixty feet away and moving objects up to two hundred feet away. It can sense basic animal minds or Yrbles within five hundred feet and fully intelligent sapient minds within a mile. This perception is light, sound, smell and touch independent, but requires the presence of a fully-functioning sensory colony. Such a colony can adjust itself to focus on a specific region (of about twenty feet) within two hundred feet with much greater detail, but loses its wide-range perception. Adjustment to and from this state can take up to five minutes. Generally, multiple sensory organs exist within an Yrble. They can be destroyed with blunt trauma to disperse the neural connections (slicing and stabbing work less well) but can reform if enough organisms survive within about twenty minutes.
Information Exchange [4]: Memory patterns can be freely exchanged between Yrbles by direct physical contact, a process that takes about half as long as the memory itself took to experience. Unfortunately, this ability is limited by the ability of Yrb to actually grasp concepts and sense the world at large.
Alien Mindset [10]: Yrb mental structure only vaguely resembles the brains of higher organisms and as it grows more complex departs further and further from the animal brain. Whilst it can still manipulate the minds of other species without penalty, this gap is difficult for other psychic species to overcome, conferring it a certain level of resistance to other psychic forces.
Empathy [5]: Yrb has a basic ability to plant emotive thought. Right now this is generally used for the purpose of fending off other creatures by putting out a sense of aversion: "I do not want to eat this, I should leave this alone." Ability to plant thoughts is limited to basic emotions only. This ability does not confer the ability to perceive emotive thought.
Civil Traits
Language [5]: The Yrb mindset encompasses certain basic concepts and events, which it can communicate via the physical information exchange process. It lacks distance communication at this stage, but concepts spread from a single Yrble via information exchange can reach the entire network of colonies. The limitation upon Yrbs is not the ability to express concepts, which can be copied from 'mind' to 'mind' exactly, but the ability to grasp them in the first place.
Aquizzar, could you work out what sort of BP expenditure I'm looking at for my breeding requirements please? Right now I've just left a placeholder figure. Values are generally all wrong as well, so I'll need to adjust quite a bit before I'm done.
Start squares: J20, K19 L20, L22 [One river and three forests surrounding a fungal forest.]
NB: For reference (because this is an obvious point for confusion), Yrb does not form fruiting bodies. Think less mushrooms, more big mats of mould.