Brack-anchored predatory trees, the elegant arched spindles of their roots gathering scabrous silt. Their bark is alabaster, their leaves a delicate, sensual pink - but they are consummate vegetable shapeshifters, able to match their appearance to surrounding plant-life. The wary can still spot them by their accompaniment: carrion-beetles, corpse-nibbling fish, and suchlike - and of course they become obvious when their sucker-tipped roots rear up from the water.
They hunt by detecting animal heartbeats. In turn, they are hunted by the people who share their coastal environments for their rich crimson sap, which can be worked into the finest rubber and plastic, or made into gum that is chewed to promote vitality. These tree-hunters take drugs to depress their heartbeat, using pumps in their palms and heels to quicken their blood-flow and prevent themselves from passing out*. Paddling out in canoes like drunken crocodiles they may sneak up on the trees and tap their sap. It is still an enormously dangerous profession, due to the flailing of tapped trees' roots, complications from the pumps and the drugs, and the other dangers of the coast which those precautions render them vulnerable to.
The enormously wealthy sometimes keep these trees in their gardens, "taming" the things by feeding them so much blood they don't bother to attack or disguise themselves.
They are
Mangraves
HD: 6 AC: 14 ATK: 4 Sucker-Roots SAV: 10 MOV: N/A INT: Dumb animal ML: 12
No. Appearing: 1d3
Sucker-Roots: 2 of a mangrave's roots can reach 30', and the other 2 can reach 15'. A successful attack from a sucker-root represents it sticking to you - for every round thereafter you will take 1d6 damage automatically until it is severed or otherwise detached. Against anyone with a sucker-root stuck to them, a mangrave may also make a grapple action in addition to draining their blood - trip them, hold them underwater, drag them closer, etc. A sucker-root takes 6 damage to sever - only half this is taken by the mangrave itself.
Mangraves surprise on a 3-in-6 unless one is moving at half-speed. Conversely, a mangrave can never be surprised unless one has altered their heart-rate by drugs or some other means.
* When they're not on the drugs they can do this:
I was listening to a podcast recently where they were talking about plant intelligence and I thought it was interesting when they refuted the idea that plants might feel pain. There's that study people often refer to where some plants release a signal, sometimes described as a "scream", to other plants trees when they're cut or damaged. The person refuting it wasn't doing so on the basis that plants don't have a CNS or intelligence of another kind, but instead that it evolutionarily probably doesn't make sense for a creature that can't run away and that often invites agitation e.g. fruiting trees to feel pain in the conventional sense.
ReplyDeleteAnyway I like the idea that even a monstrous predatory tree, by virtue of still being a tree, would naturally still likely have its own predators if it had anything of value, because unless you're like a god tree, at a certain point being unable to move is just too much of an intrinsic disadvantage.
Also I don't know the manga reference :(.
"Hui Tzu said to Chuang: I have a big tree, the kind they call a “stinktree". The trunk is so distorted, so full of knots, that no one can get a straight plank out of it. The branches are so crooked you cannot cut them up in any way that makes sense.
DeleteThere it stands beside the road. No carpenter will even look at it.
Such is your teaching – big and useless.
Chuang Tzu replied: Have you ever watched the wildcat crouching, watching his prey – this way it leaps, and that way, high and low, and at last lands in the trap.
But have you seen the yak? Great as a thundercloud he stands in his might. Big? Sure. He can’t catch mice!
So for your big tree. No use? Then plant it in the wasteland, in emptiness. Walk idly around, rest under the shadow; no axe or bill prepares its end. No one will ever cut it down.
Useless? You should worry!"
The manga is Kengan Ashura - it is a technique loosely based on the real practice of "boosting" - gets your heart rate up a lot and somehow this makes you fast but also kills you eventually.
I have not read Chuang Zhu in >15 years and I actually have been meaning to reread for some time now >.<...
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