List of Plant Creatures

Awakened Flora

MM p 317

Awakened Shrub

Challenge 0

An awakened shrub is an ordinary shrub given sentience and mobility by the Awaken spell or similar magic.

Awakened Tree

Challenge 2

An awakened tree is an ordinary tree given sentience and mobility by the Awaken spell or similar magic.

Blights

MM p 31-32

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.

Needle Blight

Challenge 1/4

In the shadows of a forest, needle blights might be taken at a distance for shuffling, hunched humanoids. Up close, these creatures reveal themselves as horrid plants whose conifer-like needles grow across their bodies in quivering clumps. A needle blight lashes out with these needles or launches them as an aerial assault that can punch through armor and flesh.

When needle blights detect a threat, they loose a pollen that the wind carries to other needle blights throughout the forest. Alerted to their foes' location, needle blights converge from all sides to drench their roots in blood.

Tree Blight

CoS p 230

Challenge 7

Blights are evil, ambulatory plant creatures, and a tree blight is a particularly enormous variety. It looks like a dead tree or treant, 30 feet tall, with spongy wooden flesh, thorny branches, and rubbery roots that trail behind it. It has blood for sap and is so saturated with blood that it doesn't catch fire easily.

Vicious Carnivore. A tree blight feeds on warm-blooded prey and takes perverse delight in causing carnage. It strikes with its heavy branches and crushes prey to death with its roots. It can open its gaping, tooth-filled mouth and bite a creature caught in its roots. The roots of a tree blight can be severed, though cutting them causes the blight no harm.

Blight Animosity. A tree blight will often fight alongside other kinds of blights, but it hates other tree blights and will attack them given the chance. Tree blights also hate treants, and the feeling is mutual.

Twig Blight

Challenge 1/8

Twig blights can root in soil, which they do when living prey are scarce. While rooted, they resemble woody shrubs. When it pulls its roots free of the ground to move, a twig blight's branches twist together to form a humanoid-looking body with a head and limbs.

Twig blights seek out campsites and watering holes, rooting there to set up ambushes for potential victims coming to drink or rest. Huddled together in groups, twig blights blend in with an area's natural vegetation or with piles of debris or firewood. Given how dry they are, twig blights are particularly susceptible to fire.

Vine Blight

Challenge 1/2

Appearing as masses of slithering creepers, vine blights hide in undergrowth and wait for prey to draw near. By animating the plants around them, vine blights entangle and hinder their foes before attacking. Vine blights are the only blights capable of speech. Through its connection to the evil spirit of the Gulthias tree it serves, a vine blight speaks in a fractured version of its dead master's voice, taunting victims or bargaining with powerful foes.

Bodytaker Plant

VRGtR p 226-227

Challenge 7

Whether hailing from the stars or sprouting from hidden depths, the malicious vegetation known as bodytaker plants seek to become the dominant form of life wherever they appear. These invasive organisms subvert whole societies by consuming individuals and replacing them with duplicates called podlings. Bodytaker plants view themselves as perfect organisms and seek to dominate the lands where they grow. To their minds, a world would be healthier and more efficient were they in control. Anyome who disagrees either lacks perspective or is fit to serve only as fertilizer.

A bodytaker plant roots deep, spreading near-invisible filaments through the soil. Should any of these fibers survive the plant's destruction, the bodytaker plant regrows after a matter of months. Salting or poisoning the soil were it grew destroys these filament and prevents the plant from reappearing.

Podling

Challenge 1/2

Bodytaker plants either capture unsuspecting victims with their vines or accept captives brought to them by their podling servants. In either case, they drag creatures into their central pod, where potent chemicals render the captive comatose. Over the course of hours, the creature is dissolved and its body repurposed into a podling duplicate.

Podlings are near-perfect mimics of the creatures they replace. Despite having the knowledge of those they mimic, podlings frequently miss the nuances of interactions between sapient beings. These duplicates make excuses about their odd behavior, but those familiar with an individual replaced by a podling can often tell something's amiss. Roll on the Podling Behavior table to see what unusual habits a podling might demonstrate.

Podling Behavior (1d6)

1. The podling abandons the habits and hobbies of the creature it's mimicking.

2. The podling lavishes affection on plants and views houseplants with excessive sympathy.

3. The podling relishes exposing its skin to the sun. It resents clothing and hair.

4. The podling often reacts as if some unseen force is speaking to it, staring into the distance or nodding.

5. The podling often communicates to other podlings using Deep Speech.

6. The podling no longer understands the nuances of a relationship, system, or instrument.

Corpse Flower

MToF p 127

Challenge 8

"Corpse-flower seedlings are quite useful for various purposes. Simply kill and bury a necromancer, and you should have a good crop in about a week."

— Mordenkainen

A corpse flower can sprout atop the grave of an evil necromancer or the remains of powerful undead. Unless it is uprooted and burned while it is still a seedling, the corpse flower grows to enormous size over several weeks, then tears itself free of the earth and begins scavenging humanoid corpses from battlefields and graveyards. Using its fibrous tentacles, it stuffs the remains into its body and feeds on carrion to repair itself. The plant has a malevolent bent and despises the living.

Horrible Odor. With or without humanoid corpses nested in its body, a corpse flower exudes a stench of decay that can overwhelm the senses of nearby creatures, causing them to become nauseated. The stench, which serves as a defense mechanism, fades 2d4 days after the corpse flower dies.

Fungal Hazards

MM p 137-138

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.

Brown Mold

Large Plant, Unaligned (DMG p 105 & Homebrew)

Challenge 1/2 (100 XP)

Brown mold feeds on warmth, drawing heat from anything around it. A patch of brown mold typically covers a 10' square, and the temperature within 30' of it is always frigid.

• Armor Class 5

• Hit Points 5

• Speed 0

STR 1 (-5) / DEX 1 (-5) / CON 10 / INT 1 (-5) / WIS 1 (-5) / CHA 1 (-5)

• Damage Immunities Fire

• Damage Vulnerablities Cold

• Condition Immunities Blinded, Deafened, & Frightened

• Senses Blindsight 30' (blind beyond this radius) & Passive Perception 5

Cold Aura. When a creature moves to within 5' of the mold for the first time on a turn or starts its turn there, it must make a DC 12 Constitution saving throw, taking 22 (4d10) cold damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.

Ground Cover. The mold can occupy another creature's space and vice versa. The mold can't regain hit points or gain temporary hit points other than described below.

Heat Absorption. Any source of fire brought within 5' of the mold causes it to instantly expand outward in the direction of the fire, creating another brown mold (with the source of the fire as the center of that area). If an attack is made on the mold that causes fire damage, the mold gains temporary hit points equal to half the fire damage.

Gas Spore

Challenge 1/2

The first gas spores are thought to have been spawned from dead beholders, whose moldering corpses fed a parasitic fungus with aberrant magic. Having long since adapted into a unique plant creature, a gas spore grows quickly and purposefully out of any corpse, creating a malevolent-looking mockery of the most feared denizen of the Underdark.

Eye Tyrant's Form. A gas spore is a spherical, balloon-like fungus that resembles a beholder from a distance, though its true nature becomes increasingly obvious as one approaches it. The monster possesses a blind central "eye" and rhizome growths sprouting from its upper surface, superficially resembling a beholder's eyestalks.

Death Burst. A gas spore is a hollow shell filled with a lighter-than-air gas that enables it to float as a beholder does. Piercing the shell with even the weakest attack causes the creature to burst apart, releasing a cloud of deadly spores. A creature that inhales the spores becomes host to them, and is often dead within a day. Its corpse then becomes the spawning ground from which new gas spores arise.

Beholder Memories. A gas spore that sprouts from a beholder's corpse sometimes carries within it memories of its deceased parent. When the gas spore explodes, its deadly spores cast those memories adrift. Any creature that inhales the spores and survives inherits one or more of the beholder's fragmented memories, and might gain useful information about the beholder's former lair and other nearby places and creatures of interest.

Russet Mold

VGtM p 196

Challenge 0

The fungus known as russet mold is reddish-brown in color and found only in places that are dark, warm, and wet. Russet mold that spreads out across a metal object can be mistaken for natural rust, and a successful DC 15 Intelligence (Nature) or Wisdom (Survival) check is required to identify it accurately by sight in such a case.

Any creature that comes within 5' of russet mold must make a DC 13 Constitution saving throw as the mold emits a puff of spores. On a failed save, the creature becomes poisoned. While poisoned in this way, the creature takes 7 (2d6) poison damage at the start of each of its turns, sprouting mold as it takes damage. The creature can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of its turns, ending the effect on itself on a success. Any magic that neutralizes poison or cures disease kills the infestation. A creature reduced to 0 hit points by the mold's poison damage dies. If the dead creature is a beast, a giant, or a humanoid, one or more newborn vegepygmies emerge from its body 24 hours later: one newborn from a Small corpse, two from a Medium corpse, four from a Large corpse, eight from a Huge corpse, or sixteen from a Gargantuan corpse.

Russet mold can be hard to kill, since weapons and most types of damage do it no harm. Effects that deal acid, necrotic, or radiant damage kill 1 square foot of russet mold per 1 damage dealt. A pound of salt, a gallon of alcohol, or a magical effect that cures disease kills russet mold in a square area that is 10 feet on a side. Sunlight kills any russet mold in the light's area.

Shrieker

Challenge 0

A shrieker is a human-sized mushroom that emits a piercing screech to drive off creatures that disturb it. Other creatures use the fungi as an alarm to signal the approach of prey, and various intelligent races of the Underdark cultivate shriekers on the outskirts of their communities to discourage trespassers.

Violet Fungus

Challenge 1/4

This purplish mushroom uses root-like feelers growing from its base to creep across cavern floors. The four stalks protruding from a violet fungi's central mass are used to lash out at prey, rotting flesh with the slightest touch. Any creature killed by a violet fungus decomposes rapidly. A new violet fungus sprouts from the moldering corpse, growing to full size in 2d6 days.

Yellow Mold

Medium Plant, Unaligned (DMG p 105 & Homebrew)

Challenge 1/2 (100 XP)

Brown mold feeds on warmth, drawing heat from anything around it. A patch of brown mold typically covers a 10' square, and the temperature within 30' of it is always frigid.

• Armor Class 5

• Hit Points 4

• Speed 0

STR 1 (-5) / DEX 1 (-5) / CON 10 / INT 1 (-5) / WIS 1 (-5) / CHA 1 (-5)

• Damage Resistances Poison

• Damage Vulnerablities Fire & Radiant

• Condition Immunities Blinded, Deafened, & Frightened

• SensesBlindsight 30' (blind beyond this radius) & Passive Perception 5

Ground Cover. The mold can occupy another creature's space and vice versa. The mold can't regain hit points or gain temporary hit points.

Poison Spore Cloud. If touched, the mold ejects a cloud of spores that fills a 10' cube originating from the mold. Any creature in the area must succeed on a DC 15 Consitution saving throw or take 11 (2d10) poison damage and become poisoned for 1 minute. While poisoned in this way, the creature takes 5 (1d10) poison damage at the start of each of its turns. The creature can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of its turns, ending the effect on itself on a successful save.

Light Hypersensitivity. The mold is instantly destroyed by exposure to direct sunlight or open flame.

Myconids

MM p 230

Myconids are intelligent, ambulatory fungi that live in the Underdark, seek enlightenment, and deplore violence. If approached peacefully, myconids gladly provide shelter or allow safe passage through their colonies.

Circles and Melds. The largest myconid in a colony is its sovereign, which presides over one or more social groups called circles. A circle consists of twenty or more myconids that work, live, and meld together.

A meld is a form of communal meditation that allows myconids to transcend their dull subterranean existence. The myconids' rapport spores bind the participants into a group consciousness. Hallucination spores then induce a shared dream that provides entertainment and social interaction. Myconids consider melding to be the purpose of their existence. They use it in the pursuit of higher consciousness, collective union, and spiritual apotheosis. Myconids also use their rapport spores to communicate telepathically with other sentient creatures.

Myconid Reproduction. Like other fungi, myconids reproduce by mundane sporing. They carefully control their spores' release to avoid overpopulation.

Myconid Adult

Challenge 1/2

Myconid Sovereign

Challenge 2

Myconid Sprout

Challenge 0

Shambling Mound

MM

Challenge 5

A shambling mound, sometimes called a shambler, trudges ponderously through bleak swamps, dismal marshes, and rain forests, consuming any organic matter in its path. This rotting heap of animated vegetation looms up half again as tall as a human, tapering into a faceless "head" at its top.

All-Consuming Devourers. A shambling mound feeds on any organic material, tirelessly consuming plants as it moves and devouring animals that can't escape it. Only the shambling mounds' rarity and plodding speed prevent them from overwhelming entire ecosystems. Even so, their presence leeches natural environments of plant and animal life, and an unsettling quiet pervades the swamps and woods haunted by these ever-hungry horrors.

Unseen Hunters. Composed of decaying leaves, vines, roots, and other natural swamp and forest compost, shamblers can blend into their environs. Because they move slowly, they rarely attempt to pursue and catch creatures. Rather, they remain in place, sustaining themselves by absorbing nutrients from their surroundings as they wait for prey to come to them. When a creature passes near or alights upon a shambling mound, the monster comes to life, seizing and absorbing the unwary prey.

Spawned by Lightning. A shambling mound results from a phenomenon in which lightning or fey magic invigorates an otherwise ordinary swamp plant. As the plant is reborn into its second life, it chokes the life from plants and animals around it, mulching their corpses in a heap around its roots. Those roots eventually give up their reliance on the soil, directing the shambling mound to seek out new sources of food.

The Weed that Walks. The instinct that drives a shambling mound is its central root-stem, buried somewhere inside its ponderous form. The rest of a shambler consists of the rotting heap that it simultaneously accumulates and feeds on, which protects the root-stem and animates to smash and smother the life from any creature.

The dense mass of a shambling mound's body shrugs off the effects of cold and fire. Lightning reinvigorates the root-stem, strengthening the shambling mound and bolstering its consumptive drive.

Despite its monstrous form, the shambling mound is a living plant that requires air and nourishment. Although it doesn't sleep the way an animal does, it can lie dormant for days on end before rising to hunt for food.

A Resurgent Menace. If a shambling mound faces defeat before an overwhelming foe, the root-stem can feign death, collapsing the remains of its mound. If not subsequently killed, the root-stem beds down in the shambler's remains to slowly regrow its full body, then once again sets out to consume all it can. In this way, shambling mound infestations long thought destroyed can recur time and again.

Spore Servants

MM p 230

A spore servant is any Large or smaller creature brought back to life by the animating spores of a myconid sovereign. A creature that was never flesh and blood to begin with (such as a construct, elemental, ooze, plant, or undead) can't be turned into a spore servant.

• Retained Characteristics. The servant retains its Armor Class, hit points, Hit Dice, Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, vulnerabilities, resistances, and immunities.

• Lost Characteristics. The servant loses its original saving throw and skill bonuses, special senses, and special traits. It loses any action that isn't Multiattack or a melee weapon attack that deals bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage. If it has an action or a melee weapon attack that deals some other type of damage, it loses the ability to deal damage of that type, unless the damage comes from a piece of equipment, such as a magic item.

• Type. The servant's type is plant, and it loses any tags.

• Alignment. The servant is unaligned.

• Speed. Reduce all the servant's speeds by 10', to a minimum of 5'.

• Ability Scores. The servant's ability scores change as follows: Int 2 (-4), Wis 6 (-2), Cha 1 (-5).

• Senses. The servant has blindsight with a radius of 30', and it is blind beyond this radius.

• Condition Immunities. The servant can't be blinded, charmed, frightened, or paralyzed.

• Languages. The servant loses all known languages, but it responds to orders given to it by myconids using rapport spores. The servant gives highest priority to orders received from the most powerful myconid.

• Attacks. If the servant has no other means of dealing damage, it can use its fists or limbs to make unarmed strikes. On a hit, an unarmed strike deals bludgeoning damage equal to 1d4 + the servant's Strength modifier, or, if the servant is Large, 2d4 + its Strength modifier.

Chuul Spore Servant

OotA

Challenge 4

Drow Spore Servant

OotA

Challenge 1/8

Duergar Spore Servant

OotA

Challenge 1/2

Hook Horror Spore Servant

OotA

Challenge 3

Quaggoth Spore Servant

MM p 230

Challenge 1

Treant

MM p 289

Challenge 9

Treants are awakened trees that dwell in ancient forests. Although treants prefer to while away the days, months, and years in quiet contemplation, they fiercely protect their woodland demesnes from outside threats.

The Sleeping Tree Awakens. A tree destined to become a treant meditates through a long cycle of seasons, living normally for decades or centuries before realizing its potential. Trees that awaken do so only under special circumstances and in places steeped with nature's magic. Treants and powerful druids can sense when a tree has the spark of potential, and they protect such trees in secret groves as they draw near the moment of their awakening. During the long process of awakening, a tree acquires face-like features in its bark, a division of the lower trunk into legs, and long branches bending downward to serve as its arms. When it is ready, the tree pulls its legs free from the clutching earth and joins its fellows in protecting its woodland home.

Legendary Guardians. After a treant awakens, it continues to grow exactly as it did when it was a tree. Treants created from the mightiest trees can reach great sizes while developing an innate magical power over plants and animals. Such treants can animate plants, using them to ensnare and trap intruders. They can call wild creatures to aid them or carry messages across great distances.

Protectors of the Wild. Even after awakening, a treant spends much of its time living as a tree. While rooted in place, a treant remains aware of its surroundings, and can perceive the effects of events taking place miles away based on subtle changes nearby.

Woodcutters who avoid culling healthy living trees and hunters who take only what they need of the forest's bounty are unlikely to arouse a treant's ire. Creatures careless with fire, those who poison the forest, and those who destroy great trees, especially a tree close to awakening, face the treant's wrath.

Vegepygmies

VGtM p 196-197

Vegepygmies are fungus creatures that live in simple tribal units, hunting for sustenance and spreading the spores from which they reproduce.

Primitive Plants. Vegepygmies, also called mold folk or moldies, inhabit dark areas that are warm and wet, so they are most commonly found underground or in dense forests where little sunlight penetrates. A vegepygmy instinctively feels kinship with other plant and fungus creatures, and thus vegepygmy tribes coexist well with creatures such as myconids, shriekers, and violet fungi.

Although they prefer to eat fresh meat, bone, and blood, vegepygmies can absorb nutrients from soil and many sorts of organic matter, meaning that they rarely go hungry. A vegepygmy can hiss and make other noises by forcing air through its mouth, but it can't speak in a conventional sense. Among themselves, vegepygmies communicate by hissing, gestures, and rhythmic tapping on the body. Vegepygmies build and craft little; any gear they have is acquired from other creatures or built by copying simple construction they have witnessed.

As a vegepygmy ages, it grows tougher and develops spore clusters on its body. Spore-bearing vegepygmies are deferred to by other vegepygmies, so outsiders refer to such vegepygmies as chiefs. A chief can expel its spores in a burst, infecting nearby creatures. If a creature dies while infected, its corpse produces vegepygmies the same way russet mold does.

No one knows for sure where russet mold came from. One historical account tells of adventurers in a forbidding mountain range discovering russet mold and vegepygmies in a peculiar metal dungeon full of strange life. Another story says that explorers found russet mold in a crater left by a falling star, with vegepygmies infesting the dense jungle nearby.

Mold Begets Mold. Vegepygmies originate from the remains left behind when a humanoid or a giant is killed by russet mold. One or more vegepygmies emerge from the corpse a day later. If a beast such as a dog or a bear dies from russet mold, the result is a bestial moldie called a thorny result instead of a humanoid-shaped vegepygmy. Thornies are less intelligent than vegepygmies, but have greater size and ferocity, as well as a thorn-covered body.

Thorny

Challenge 1

Vegepygmy

Challenge 1/4

Vegepygmy Chief

Challenge 2

Wood Woad

VGtM p 198

Challenge 5

A wood woad is a powerful plant in humanoid form invested with the soul of someone who gave up life to become an eternal guardian.

Born of Sacrifice. The ritual to create a wood woad is a primeval secret passed down through generations of savage societies and dark druid circles. Performing the ritual isn't necessarily an act of evil, if the victim-to-be has entered into a bargain that requires it to be a willing sacrifice.

In the ritual a living person's chest is pierced and the heart removed. A seed is then pushed into the heart, and it is placed in a tree. Any hollow or crook will do, but often a special cavity is carved out of the trunk. The tree is then bathed and watered with the blood of the sacrificed victim, and the body is buried among the tree's roots. After three days, a sprout emerges from the ground at the base of the tree and swiftly grows into a humanoid form.

This new body, armored in tough bark and bearing a gnarled club and shield, is at once ready to perform its duty. The one who performed the ritual sets the wood woad to its task, and the creature follows those orders unceasingly.

Wood woads are drawn to creatures that have close ties to nature, and that protect and respect the land, such as druids and treants. Some treants have wood woad servants by virtue of age-old pacts with druids or fey that performed the rituals, while others acquire the services of freed wood woads that find renewed purpose in the domain of a kindred guardian.

Pitiless Protectors. A wood woad has a hole where its heart would be, just as does the body of its former self, buried in the earth. Those who become wood woads trade their free will and all sense of sentiment for supernatural strength and a deathless duty. They exist only to protect woodlands and the people who tend them. A wood woad's face is void and expressionless, except for the motes of light that swim about in its eye sockets. Wood woads speak little, and when not being called upon to take action, they root themselves in the earth and silently take sustenance from it.

Uprooted by Immortality. Like a tree, a wood woad needs only sunlight, air, and nutrients from the earth to go on living. Because they are undying, some wood woads outlive their original purpose. The site a wood woad guards might lose its power or significance over time, or those whom it was assigned to guard might themselves die. If it is freed from its specific duties, a wood woad might roam to find another place of natural beauty or fey influence to watch over.