#cr 16-20

[justavulcan]

Airmark's Guide to Planar Vegetables: Gehennan Grafting Tree

If no other plant in this flora encourages the reader to stay far from it, let it be the Gehennan grafting tree that does. Resembling a dark-barked oak tree from a distance, only the smell of cloying rot serves as many travelers' warning against the danger this predatory mimic poses. By the time a better view can be had through the choking ash and smoke of the Gehennan sky, the danger is upon them.

Once battle is joined, this tree's common name becomes clear: under normal circumstances, grafting is a practice of joining two plants or parts of plants together so they may grow as one. The gehennan grafting tree, born from a plane infused with selfishness, perverts this tendency to its own ends by rending flesh from bone and grafting it to its own trunk and branches.

Typically content to lie in wait before snatching prey out of the air or off the volcanic slopes of Gehenna's mountains, grafting trees are indiscriminate in their attacks, snatching fiery elementals, yugoloths, and mortals alike in their ever-ongoing effort to grow their own bulk by including animal flesh in their form. Capable of tapping into internal reservoirs of toxic volcanic gases, these trees remain difficult to locate and attack in their self-generated smoke screens.

Grafting trees are both mobile and intelligent, and are thus capable of setting their ambush anyplace they choose and offering to work with others for short-term gain. They also seem to have some culture of their own, and will periodically meet to compare their newest acquisitions in a ghoulish spectacle not unlike a county fair in reverse.

[bestiarybreakdown]

Ice Linnorm

Looking to mix up your dragon fights? Why not throw in a linnorm, a species of dragon based on Scandinavian lindworms.

An ice linnorm is a CR 17 dragon. Like all linnorms, it has constant freedom of movement and true seeing, as well as a death curse that activates on whoever kills it. In this case it’s a Curse of Frost (Su), inflicting a weakness to ice damage on the target. For offense it has a breath weapon of freezing slime that entangles and chills targets, congealing into ice if they don’t manage to escape one round later.

When looking at linnorms there’s two main things to take into account: 1) they’re older than dragons, and 2) they’re largely forgotten by the world at large. No dragon likes being ignored, and when that dragon is older that those upstart chromatics and metallics who go around like they own the place? Things will get messy.

Linnorms have existed for ages past, living to see the rise and fall of entire eras. The oldest have seen not only the nations of men and elves but what came before, empires built by beings from the stars and collapsed by their own disobedient servants. Such linnorms are all too happy to tell adventurers of the shapeless things lurking in those ancient ruins, hoping to lay claim to the few structures older than themselves once their current occupants are slain.

In a land of extreme temperature changes, it can be difficult to lay claim to a particular region. Ice linnorms rule the freezing nights and polar caps, but with the planet constantly rolling on multiple axes, they must frequently hibernate and cede their territories to the heat-craving salamanders, only to reclaim them in bloody attacks when the temperature falls once more. 

Political maneuvering has seen the heir apparent faced with a daunting challenge: slay the ice linnorm that preys on the northern reaches of the kingdom. Should they fail, their political adversaries will leverage that to tear down their standing, while success will subject them to the death curse and make assassination attempts much easier.

[justavulcan]

Airmark's Guide to Planar Vegetables: Gray Lily of the Waste

Legend has it that the first gray lily of the waste was a dryad whose lover died. She pursued him into Hades, but there the emotional climate of the environment tainted and twisted her love and longing into its worst form: obsession, possessiveness, and even abuse. When she eventually died in Hades, her body took the form of the first gray lily.

Gray lilies of the waste are monochromatic beauties; huge white flowers with soft gray innards protrude from their black stems and leaves. Their immense size does little to dissuade the most ardent of florists from obsessing over their beauty, but these flowers are deadly to cultivate and keep.

Sentient and filled with a longing and loneliness little can assuage, gray lilies obsess over acquiring 'paramours' to keep by their side to provide the briefest flicker of contentment in an existence otherwise miserable with solitude. That their grasp proves fatal to all but the most psychically resilient or that they quickly turn to using their lovers as shields do not matter; only the longing does.

Gray lilies prove highly conversational with Speak With Plants, able to converse about a variety of subjects including the local area and its denizens. Their preferred topic of conversation, of course, is themselves, and they are very persistent about trying to convince visitors to remain with them 'just for a season or two...'

[justavulcan]

Airmark's Guide to Planar Vegetables: War-Drum Tree

Twisted and vast, war-drum trees are among the only true trees that grow in the Infinite Battlefield, as the availability and quality of true soil are often somewhat limited. Native to Thuldanin, the second layer, war-drum trees resemble treants from other planes, with a roughly humanoid body plan comprised of a steely-grey trunk, roots, and branches tipped with dark red leaves.

War-drum trees are so called because they are natural resonators; while growing, they develop hollow chambers within their trunks for magically amplifying the sound of impact, a development they use to communicate over large distances and, naturally, on the field of battle as a defensive mechanism. Combined with their abilities to draw upon Acheron's natural magics and their immense size and strength, war-drum trees are extremely dangerous combatants.

And combatants they are. As with most other forms of life on Acheron, war-drum trees engage in a lifelong pursuit of battle, warfare, and bloodshed. They are typically closemouthed about their ambitions, but it is observed that they fight over places with good soil and the correct mineral balance, so it seems clear that they seek optimal conditions for reproduction, which they accomplish by self-fertilizing and seeding.

Often found accompanied by petitioners, devils on away missions from hell, mercenaries, or other local forces, war-drum trees prove as dangerous leading troops as fighting themselves, as they seem to have an instinctive grasp of strategy above and beyond their already noteworthy intellect. They are willing to speak if spoken to, but rarely have much to say unless the conversation serves their current objective.

[justavulcan]

Airmark's Guide to Planar Vegetables: Lotus Anchorite

These curious plants are found spotted throughout the Astral Plane, drifting in a meditative trance with their humanoid-shaped root systems trailing beneath their flower, which takes the place of the 'head'. The flower typically has a midnight-blue hue that fades into a rich maroon near the tips of the petals, with rich orange innards.

Due to the timeless nature of their home plane, lotus anchorites remain healthy without any need for sun, water, or nutrients of any kind; if transported to other planes, they demonstrate typical needs for a flowering plant of their size, favoring warm, wet environments. Lotus anchorites are exceedingly rare, potentially due to the divinatory use of their petals.

Lotus anchorite petals can be eaten, and if consumed provide revelatory visions that many attest to be the gods themselves contacting the consumer. Anchorites do not often consent to others consuming their petals, as they only grow a single flower in their lifetimes, and petals do not grow back.

If pressed to defend themselves, lotus anchorites bring both formidable psychic power and physical prowess to bear, equally adept at nonlethally escaping or ending combats as bringing would-be assailants to an untimely end. However, they are conversational if approached peacefully, and prove knowledgeable on a variety of topics. Consulting with them has proven invaluable to my research.

[justavulcan]

Airmark's Guide to Planar Vegetables: Tombstone Lily

Large plants with a greyish, woody trunk topped by a milky white flower, the tombstone lily's most stunning feature other than its size is the translucent, faintly luminescent pods that grow beneath the flower. These pods are not fruit- in fact, they are the equivalent of stomachs, as the tombstone lily does not feed on water and sun.

Tombstone lilies are unique among the Ethereal Plane's fauna in that they are actively dangerous to the plane's other main inhabitants, souls in transit to their final destinations. They lure, trap, and consume these ethereal remains of the living, and slowly digest them over time for their energy.

Once a tombstone lily has consumed seven souls of suitable nutritional energy, they go to seed- forming a seed crown similar to a dandelion, with seeds that disperse on the misty currents of the Ethereal mist. Cultivating these flowers on other planes than their natural environment proves difficult for most gardeners, given their nutritional requirements; however, they can survive tolerably on the soul-infused water of the rivers Styx or Oceanus, and a constant access to either is sufficient for cultivation elsewhere.

Tombstone lilies are intelligent, and use telepathy to converse with passers-by as they digest their pods' contents. They are very aware of the ethereal conditions nearby, and can direct travelers to areas of interest if prompted. They can, however, subsist on the living, and it is dangerous to approach them if their pods are not full.

[bestiarybreakdown]

Dhalochar

This week’s Creature Feature monster with OGN is the dhalochar, a CR 19 devil that can transform into a spaceship. You can read all about it here or skip the analysis and find the stats here.

[bestiarybreakdown]

Bythos

Travelling internationally is enough of a pain with all the security checks and paperwork needed. Now imagine the type of security you’d have to get through to time travel. That’s the bythos’ job, serving as the border patrol of planes and time.

A bythos is a nasty foe in melee, with Aging Strike (su) allowing it to turn the hardiest of fighters into a frail octogenarian and Temporal Strike (Su) to toss enemies forward several seconds into the future, taking them completely out of combat for several rounds. On top of that, Confusion Gaze lets it disorient targets, while its spells allow it to shut down attempts to escape, pursue those who still manage to slip the noose, and see briefly into the future to better plan its attacks.

A bythos is an interesting foe, an aeon assigned to guard some of the fundamental aspects of reality. Whether your players are looking to hop between dimensions or muck about with history, it’s pretty likely that a bythos will catch wind of their shenanigans soon enough.

History’s most evil ruler leaves a land soaked in blood and tears. Unbeknownst to him and his enemies alike, he has an secret ally: a bythos that routinely foils time travelers seeking to kill him before his rise to power. The being has no particular desire to see his rule come to be, but it also cannot allow the natural flow of time to be besmirched.

Daemons are creating a superweapon, a device capable of ripping chunks from other planes and hurtling them into Abbadon. With every planar fragment stolen, the multiverse outside of Abaddon grows just a bit smaller, that piece never to give rise to life again. This invention has drawn the attention of a bythos tribunal, who seek alliances with angels and devils alike to ensure it is never used.

A bythos has been drawn to the creation of an elderly wizard, a spell  called time stop. The wizard has managed to avoid the aeon’s wrath by engaging in debate with it, arguing that the spell follow the rules of magic and thus the rules of the universe. Though this has successfully kept it from completing its mission thus far, he fears that he cannot stall an unaging, needless being forever and seeks outside aid to help him win the argument before he dies and the bythos destroys his work anyways.

Image and stats are from Paizo’s Bestiary 2.