Monster Monday: Holly King, Protector of the Winter Wood

Today's Monster Monday is the holly king, winter's answer to the verdant green man of spring. The holly king is a man of twisted holly wood with a cloak and crown of spiny leaves and red berries. Squirrels and small birds flit about him, taking shelter among his branches. Travelers finding themselves lost in the wilderness may receive aid from a holly king, but those who despoil the wilderness or abuse the forest's hospitality will find themselves on the receiving end of a holly king's druidic wrath.

photo by Erich Ferdinand, via Wikimedia

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2018 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Redwood Treant, Titan of the Forest

Today's Monster Monday is the redwood treant, a mighty tree creature so large that it tears up the earth with its footprints, so thick that fire struggles to penetrate to its wooden core, and so ancient that it considers elves to be young upstarts.  Just as redwoods are to regular evergreens, so redwood treants are to normal treants: more extreme in every dimension.

The mighty redwood

The redwood treant has been on my backburner for a while now (I mentioned them in my introduction to Guns of the Western Kings back in 2014), but I was inspired to bring them to life during a recent trip to the California redwoods.  All photos in this article are from this trip which I took earlier in May; in some of them, such as the one above, my wife provides a helpful reminder of the scale of these immense giants.

One of the abilities of the redwood treant is that its footprints create an area of difficult terrain, meaning its very movement can change the nature of the battlefield.  This ability was inspired from in-the-field observations of fallen redwoods and the huge pits their root structure left when they toppled over.  You can see the size of a redwood treant's 'foot' in the image below - try to imagine a battle where every blow the enemy dealt was made with gnarled feet of that size!

Speaking of gnarled, a redwood's incredible longevity and resistance to stress manifests itself physically in odd deformations.  These scars occur when a redwood survives a particularly stressful event like a forest fire, infection, or intense storm.  Sometimes it can look like the bark of the tree boiled and began to flow off, other times a scar can take the form of a huge burl the size of a small car.  They can even result in beautiful, almost sculptural figures emerging from the trunk.  An ancient redwood treant, the veteran of many battles for the survival of its wood, would likely have several such scars, making each one distinctive and characterful.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2017 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Planticore, a Leafy Beast

The goat was a problem, so he let it go.  It must have sensed its fate.  Broussilos would just have to hope that the wine would be enough of an offering.  He adjusted the thick straps that held the amphora on his back and continued his arduous trek up the mountain.  The Spring of Laersippos was hidden near the peak, guarded by a fierce manticore.  Local legend said the beast could be placated with the right gift, but no one was quite sure what that gift was.  A short bronze blade beat against Broussilos' thigh with every step: purely a measure of last resort.  The wine sloshed rhythmically in its container, like waves against the side of a ship at anchor.  If it wouldn't buy him passage to the spring, it might at least be enough to buy his safe retreat from the mountain.  

The brush grew thicker, wild vines choking out all else.  They pulled at his sandals, slashed at his linen greaves, and even caught on the amphora as if they, too, thirsted for wine.  Broussilos pushed through a plait of hanging tree branches and came face to face with the manticore.  It was upside-down, its huge man-like face purple and bloated, spiky beard matted with week-old blood.  Its wings were splayed out on the ground, pinned in place with serrated thorns as long as a man's arm.  Probing creepers grew into every nook and gash in its hide, twining about its bare ribs, hungry for decaying flesh.  

All in all, it was a very dead manticore.  

Broussilos could hear the burbling of the spring muffled by a mat of dense vegetation.  He took two steps toward it.  A great rustling of leaves marked the emergence of another great beast.  It was a cruel mockery of a manticore, its face all of knotted wood, its wings of veiny leaves.  Its leonine torso was woven of twisting brambles, and its swishing tail bristled with javelin-like thorns very much resembling those which peppered the corpse of the real manticore.  It growled, its voice like a thick cedar straining against a gale, and its amber eyes fixed on the intruder.

"I don't suppose you'll be wanting this wine," Broussilos began, unslinging the heavy amphora.  The beast's reply was an angry rattle of branches.  Then the vines all around snaked toward him, rearing up to grab at his limbs.  Bursts of nettles spattered his skin with burning poison.  "Very well then."  Broussilos cracked open the amphora's beeswax seal with the pommel of his sword and dumped the wine into his face, swallowing as much as possible and letting the rest spill over his body.  He tossed the half-empty container to the side, gripped his sword, thews tensing, and threw himself at the leafy monster.

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Today's Monster Monday is the planticore, which - as you might imagine - is a manticore made out of plants.  My wife threw the name out as a joke, and I took it and ran with it.  Planticores bristle with thorns, and they can even swallow people whole and crush them in the wicker cage of brambles that is their belly.  They can bend nearby plants to their will, unleashing plant-based magic against their foes while hovering safely above the action, bombarding the area with a barrage of thorns.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2016 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Vampiric Treant, a Sap-Sucking Fiend

Today's Monster Monday is the vampiric treant, a ghostly white walking tree that sucks the life out of its enemies with its long, probing roots.  Vampiric treants can lay waste to large stretches of forest, and drain the blood of any who would stand in their way.

It may surprise you to know that this monster is based (loosely) on a real type of tree.  A rare mutation in Sequoia sempervirens (the coast redwood) renders the tree unable to produce chlorophyll, resulting in an albino redwood.  Albino redwoods have white or pale yellow needles, giving them a ghostly appearance in the forest.  Unable to sustain themselves through photosynthesis, they become parasites, their root systems tapping into the xylem and phloem of other trees and leeching off their sweet, sweet sugars.

via Wikimedia

Albino redwood needles

It didn't take much of a leap to turn this fascinating natural aberration into a monster idea.  A treant that sucks the life out of other trees could make an interesting dilemma for a nature-loving druid or ranger: does this creature represent a threat to nature, or is its existence a part of the natural order?  This monster is also a good one to throw in when the GM wants to show that something is 'off' or threatening about a forest.

via Wikimedia

An albino redwood in the wild

Before you grab your torches and axes and go running off into Humboldt Redwoods State Park to kill some vampire trees, you should know that real life albino redwoods are not nearly as dangerous as the vampiric treants presented below.  Aside from the obvious (they can't walk, they don't suck human blood), these parasitic trees don't actually seem to harm their hosts all that much.  In fact, it has been suggested that albino redwoods actually filter toxic heavy metals out of the soil, making it safer for the other redwoods in the grove.  Only about 400 albino redwoods are known, and their locations are generally not made known to the public so that they are not accidentally damaged or killed by overzealous visitors.  If you encounter one in the wild, be careful not to trample its delicate root system or do anything that might harm it or its connection to the other trees in the area.

Of course, if you encounter one on the tabletop, you know what to do: axes, torches, etc.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2016 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Manchineel Treant, A Cruel and Poisonous Plant

Today's Monster Monday is the manchineel treant, a poisonous plant creature that delights in causing pain.  The manchineel is the deadliest tree known to man, with poisonous sap that can cause blisters and excruciating pain on contact and poisonous fruits that can cause your throat to swell up and close over.  If you take shelter from the rain under a manchineel tree, the raindrops will pick up sap from the leaves and burn you.  If you burn it, the smoke will blind you.

A manchineel tree, via Wikimedia

That's a tree that's just begging to be turned into a monster.  Even fire, an adventuring party's first recourse against plant monsters, just makes it more dangerous.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2016 Jonah Bomgaars.

GotWK Campaign Part 5: Desert Dungeon and Cattle Drive

This is an account of part 5 of my ongoing campaign set in my homebrewed wild west setting, Guns of the Western Kings.  Get caught up with the previous parts here.

When last we left our heroes, they had just crashed their bedraggled steamboat in a desert canyon, far to the south of anywhere they wanted to be.  Narrowly escaping a swarm of flesh-eating giant freshwater crabs, they found themselves facing the steep wall of the canyon they were trapped in.  Following a crumbling staircase carved into the rock, they came upon a cave, littered with shards of pottery, but large enough to rest in.  Before them looms a circular stone door ringed with strange glyphs.  In its center, a carved skeletal figure hanging upside down over a river, its dark maw open wide, as if waiting to swallow something.

We now return you to the adventure already in progress...

Photo: Tigerhawkvok via Wikimedia

Intrepid Theodore leads Big Bjorn, Falco the Flexible, Rusty the prospector, and the half-elf rogue Gudguniis in scaling the face of the cliff.  Ash the sharpshooter, Heather the hedge witch, Face the pigtailed paladin, and the newly-adult sorceress Dawne, meanwhile, attempt to figure out how to open the circular door.  They figure something needs to go in its gaping maw, but what?  Dawne shines a light in its mouth, revealing only a fist-sized smooth stone concavity.  Ash tries sticking his hand in, and when that doesn't work, he cuts his finger and rubs the blood inside.  Finally, he pours some whisky in there, and the door slowly rolls open.