Blacktree Chronicles: Monsters, Part One

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So I have some time off from the next session of the blacktree game.  Even better, I have time off from the Blacktree portion of the game altogether — the introductory arc is all about a kobold incursion.  The kobold incursion is much less demanding prep-work wise, so I’ve had some time to build up the mythology and mechanics involving the mysterious blacktrees and the mayhem they bring wherever they choose to sprout from the earth.

First a little more about the blacktree. These harbingers of doom and destruction don’t literally grow.  They are summoned forth by a ritual known only at this moment by our archvillain, a  dragonborn lich known to his followers as The Golden, and the subject of another post.  Blacktrees act as gates for evil in various forms, but their most important function is to leech enough energy and to conjure enough pain and despair to create a Deathgate, which the Golden will then enter to seek his ultimate prize –godhood.

Blacktrees bring with them all manners of demon and undead, but I want a foot soldier that represents this menace, that will be iconic — a monster that, when players see it, will evoke the looming menace of the eldritch fauna.  The grunt should evoke death but also nature, a grim paradox of plants and undeath.

At the basic level, I’m looking at a zombie.  And now you’re thinking I did all this build up for zombies.  You’re dissapointed. Sad.  A little bit hurt.  I understand, but please, follow me a little further down this road.

The foot soldiers will be reanimated, but the power source won’t be necromancy.   A blacktree will be able to scatter seeds that embed themselves in and grow inside a victim.   The seed will feed off the it’s victim’s lifesource, the branches vining around the skeleton.  In the final stages, the branches will cover all of the hosts bones.  The host will become rigid, and the branches will constrict and break the skeleton.  The seed’s branches will be the victim’s new skeletons, and the seed will become the new brain and heart.  Most of the host’s innard will be pulped and replaced as well, forming a new wooden ribcage to protect the seed.

A rootwalker will rise, ready to serve the blacktree.  Black branches extrude through the skin at various points, and its dead, onyx eyes peer right through the foes of its master.  Its torso is a tangle of flesh and wood, and a pulsating red orb of light illuminates it from the inside.

The next question to answer — how do they fight?

Rootwalkers are mindless and relentless like zombies.  They need something to differentiate them from zombies so that players don’t think “tree zombies”.  I want them to think “rootwalkers”.  I can’t make them too complex though, as it will make them too hard to fight or run.  I figure that I’ve got one at-will power and one encounter power at my disposal to make them distinct.  What will make the rootwalkers different from an everyday zombie is their ability to root themselves and their ability to entangle enemies by summoning roots from the ground to trap them.

The basic stats are made pretty easy with the guidelines in the DMG.  So now I present to you, the rootwalker.

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