=== A Short Cut to Mushrooms ===

To whom it may concern,

   Farmer Maggot, or as he styles himself, Mr Maggot Esq, is
a pompous and boring old fool who needs to be put out of his
misery.  His misinformation campaign about the safe and deadly
properties of mushrooms hereabouts has cost more than one
adventurer their life, so don't have any regrets about re-
turning the favour to Mr Maggot in kind.

So here's the skinny: as you've no doubt discovered, many
mushrooms appear in patches which need to be subdued first
before you are able to harvest the mushrooms in turn.  These
newer breeds appear to be able to launch the spores at a
distance - I'm not sure that this was the best idea to breed
them that way, but it seems to have increased the virility of
the patches themselves, so that you can almost always harvest
a mushroom or two, and usually a good collection of spores
as well.

The spores, you can throw in turn, and they explode just
like potions, but with an effect similar to the original
mushroom patch.  You can keep these spores in your quiver,
which hopefully you've learnt how to use elsewhere, and its
a great idea to keep a few of these around, particularly for
those pesky faeries which are otherwise so hard to kill.

The mushrooms themselves can be used in a variety of ways:
you can eat them, but they're usually poisonous, or at least
the ones dropped by most mushroom patches are.  This means
the best bet with harmful mushrooms is to apply them to
an edged weapon, arrow or bolt, and use them against the
enemy.  Mushroom coatings are 'nerve agents' which mean that
they only affect living monsters, but otherwise they are
similar to potions in how they work.  

You can throw mushrooms, but only an enemy stupid enough
to pick them up and eat them will be affected, and many
insects have built up a resistance to ingesting them.

As for the 'changing colour every season' nonsense, this
only appears to happen for mushrooms that don't grow big
enough to be threatening in patches.  If you find a mushroom
patch, and you can harvest mushrooms from it, you'll see
these are the same colour every season from now until we
all travel to the West.  You can use this as a good guide to
what not to eat, at least when you start out.

There are useful mushrooms around, and most of the harmful
ones are dropped from patches, so once you've learnt about
mushroom patches, you can experiment with a little more
confidence.

                                       - M.B.

