Plants

## Overview

***Plants*** in this context are vegetable creatures, not ordinary flora. Most of them are ambulatory, and some are carnivorous. The quintessential plants are the shambling mound and the treant. Fungal creatures such as the gas spore and the myconid also fall into this category.

## Sub Types

### Blights

Awakened plants gifted with the powers of intelligence and mobility, blights plague lands contaminated by darkness. Drinking that darkness from the soil, a blight carries out the will of ancient evil and attempts to spread that evil wherever it can.

***Roots of the Gulthias Tree.*** Legends tell of a vampire named Gulthias who worked terrible magic and raised up an abominable tower called Nightfang Spire. Gulthias was undone when a hero plunged a wooden stake through his heart, but as the vampire was destroyed, his blood infused the stake with a dreadful power. In time, tendrils of new growth sprouted from the wood, growing into a sapling infused with the vampire’s evil essence. It is said that a mad druid discovered the sapling, transplanting it to an underground grotto where it could grow. From this Gulthias tree came the seeds from which the first blights were sown.

***Dark Conquest.*** Wherever a tree or plant is contaminated by a fragment of an evil mind or power, a Gulthias tree can rise to infest and corrupt the surrounding forest. Its evil spreads through root and soil to other plants, which perish or transform into blights. As those blights spread, they poison and uproot healthy plants, replacing them with brambles, toxic weeds, and others of their kind. In time, an infestation of blights can turn any land or forest into a place of corruption.

In forests infested with blights, trees and plants grow with supernatural speed. Vines and undergrowth rapidly spread through buildings and overrun trails and roads. After blights have killed or driven off their inhabitants, whole villages can disappear in the space of days.

***Controlled by Evil.*** Blights are independent creatures, but most act under a Gulthias tree’s control, often displaying the habits and traits of the life force or spirit that spawned them. By attacking their progenitor’s old foes or seeking out treasures valuable to it, they carry on the legacy of long-lost evil.

### Fungi

With its sky of jagged stone and perpetual night, the Underdark is home to all manner of fungi. Taking the place of plants in the subterranean realm, fungi are vital to the survival of many underground species, providing nourishment and shelter in the unforgiving darkness.

Fungi spawn in organic matter, then break that matter down to consume it, feeding on filth and corpses. As they mature, fungi eject spores that drift on the lightest breeze to spawn new fungi.

Not needing sunlight or warmth to grow, fungi thrive in every corner and crevice of the Underdark. Transformed by the magic that permeates that underground realm, Underdark fungi often develop potent defensive mechanisms or abilities of mimicry and attack. The largest specimens can spread to create vast subterranean forests in which countless creatures live and feed.

## Monsters

Awakened Plants

Gas Spore

Myconid Adult

Myconid Sovereign

Myconid Sprout

Needle Blight

Shambling Mound

Shrieker

Spore Servant (template)

Thorny

Treant

Twig Blight

Vegepygmy

Vegepygmy Chief

Vine Blight

Violet Fungus

Wood Woad