The garden

Before the creatures, the ground they came out of. This chapter covers how a plant wakes and advances, the five kinds of ground that produce something other than the usual, what a party can read off a field before they step into it, and what they can take home afterward.

The growth cycle

Which stage a party encounters is a fact about the place, not about the fight.

What drives advancement

Left in ordinary loam, a Stage 1 plant stays Stage 1 indefinitely. Advancement requires one of:

• Season and surplus. Roughly one growing season per stage in genuinely rich soil. This is how a neglected estate garden ends up dangerous.
• Interment. Something was buried there. A battlefield, a plague pit, a single powerful corpse. The most common cause, and the most useful, because it comes with a reason the party is already investigating.
• Ambient magic. A ley line, a wild magic scar, a druid’s failed working, a wizard’s leaking laboratory drain.
• Deliberate cultivation. Somebody is farming these — the version that comes with an antagonist (see chapter 6).

What arrests it

• Harvesting removes a plant permanently.
• Salting the bed prevents any further advancement in that soil for a year.
• Hard frost knocks a plant back a stage if it’s caught rooted.
• Crowding. A patch that grows too dense starves itself. Stage 3 specimens are almost always solitary, surrounded by a dead zone of stunted plants that never got their share.

Bedding down

A Stage 2 creature that wants to advance must root itself again and hold still for a season — the most vulnerable thing it will ever do. A bedded-down Stage 2 uses the Rooted trait but keeps its Stage 2 statistics otherwise. This is the best opportunity a party will ever get to kill something before it becomes a problem.

The soil

Soil determines more than size. Two gourds from the same seed, grown forty feet apart, can be entirely different problems, and the ground says which one is coming before anything moves.

There are no modifiers here and nothing to recalculate. Bad ground produces a different creature, and those creatures have their own stat blocks.

Ash ground. Burned-over fields, charcoal pits, the site of an old fire. Rinds come out dry, brittle, and full of gas. Ash ground produces things that move when they shouldn’t and come apart on purpose — the Rollrind and the Tumblewrack.

Grave ground. A battlefield, a plague pit, one powerful corpse. What grows here knows the names of what’s under it and is not shy about using them. See the Gravegourd.

Ley ground. A ley line, a wild magic scar, a druid’s failed working, a wizard’s leaking drain. Growth here comes out wrong in ways that have nothing to do with strength: the Chimeweed silences, the Fondvine makes people love it.

Bog ground. Waterlogged bottom fields and drainage ditches. Slow, heavy, foul, and much harder to kill than it looks. See the Drownbulb.

Starved ground. The dead ring around anything crowned. Too many plants, not enough soil, nothing gets its share. What survives is small, numerous, and desperate — the Runt Patch.

To add a variety that isn’t in this library, write it as a new creature with its own name. Don’t adjust an existing creature’s numbers. Give it different traits instead — that is what makes a variety worth running.

Reading the bed

A party that looks before it walks can tell which stage is in the field, and often what kind of ground grew it. Each sign below is a single Intelligence (Nature) or Wisdom (Survival) check made from the edge of the bed — on a success, tell them what it means. Signs grow easier to read as stages advance.

Increase the DC by 4 to detect Ash and Grave ground, by 3 to detect Ley ground, and by 2 to detect Starved ground.

Signs vary from bed to bed and from ground to ground. Some examples:

Harvesting

A creature within 5 feet of any Stage 1 or Stage 2 plant at 0 Hit Points can take an action, with an Herbalism Kit or sickle, to make a DC 13 Wisdom (Medicine) or Intelligence (Nature) check — DC 16 for Stage 2 — to sever the taproot cleanly. Stage 3 plants cannot be harvested.

• Success: permanently harvested, yields 1 usable component.
• Failure by 4 or less: dead, but the component is ruined.
• Failure by 5 or more: the taproot retracts into the soil and regrows at half its Hit Point maximum within 30 feet, after 1 minute at Stage 1 or 1 hour at Stage 2.

An ash-grown plant’s component always detonates for 2d6 Fire if the harvester fails the check by any margin.