The Adam Vines

The fishing village of Aizendorf had been a peaceful place to grow up. A fishing village built on the ruins of the Ancients, its people were not rich and knew better than to go out at night, when the Shadow moved across the land, but they were mostly happy and rarely squabbled.

It was a peaceful town during the day, but bad things happened to people at night in Aizendorf. Giddie, a lamp-lighter, was usually one of the last people out on the streets at night, making sure the roads were lit so people could get home and avoid the dark, and wistfully hoping to repel the Shadow. He put oil in the streetlamps and made sure they were clean and working. It was dangerous, but it was a living and Giddie was a tough, streetwise teenaged boy. Good people kept their doors locked and their rooms lit at night. Just last night he had seen old Kibner, a member of the Sky Watch, get knocked off the steel watchtower where he was a guard by a gigantic flying beast with a body like a two-headed worm with an absent flick of its tail. A beast of nightmares it was, spawn of the Shadow. Poor Kibner's wake was supposed to start tomorrow morning. It was a dangerous world they lived in.

Occasionally, Giddie would see something he was not supposed to because no one thought anyone was out at night. Tonight was one of those nights. Now, Giddie knew something was different, but he could not tell what was causing it. One by one, people were somehow becoming different. The compassion and warmth was leaving them. Jokes were not being told, songs were not being sung, hobbies were abandoned. There was no spontaneous passion or joy or rage or sorrow, just performative expressions he could tell were fake. Just people working, having the same boring conversations, acting like drones. It was like they no longer had souls. On the edge of town, he saw the door of a private garden ajar. Inside he saw the Belicec family. They were usually a rowdy, loud family that loved drinking and gambling. But for weeks they had been homebodies; calm, emotionless, and never leaving home but to work and shop. Soulless drones.

Giddie peered between the hinges. He saw the family gathered around a strange plant with long vines and wide leaves like a palm but over two meters long. A long pod was growing from the plant, like a big roll of tangled leaves and vines. It looked over two meters long and the leaves looked over ripe, strangely thick, and had deep red veins. Giddie could see roots sinking into the soil and realised they were throbbing as if pumping blood.

The pod shook and heaved as if alive. Then it began to rip from the inside, like a cocoon hatching open, and hands coated in dark green slime burst forth from it. A groan came from within the husk. An odour like blood and rotting vegetables filled the garden and flowed into the street. Then legs emerged, naked but for their coating of slime. A head emerged, gasping for breath, then finally the whole body sat up. It was old Kibner! His naked form crawled out of the husk, dripping with frothing ooze like a baby covered in afterbirth, his limbs wobbly and weak as if they had never been used before. But his bones had all been snapped and his skull cracked wide open on the cobblestone road he landed on. Everyone knew he had died, this was impossible!

An involuntary squeal came out of Giddie's mouth as he stood staring in shock at what looked like the dead rising. The trembling form of Kibner looked up and groaned. The Belicec family turned around and saw Giddie peeking through the garden gate...

This mutant plant creature looks like a mass of creeping vines with huge leaves that spread out across the ground, and flowers with thick, blood-red petals. It moves slowly but quietly across the floor of dense forests and jungles in search of victims. Adam Vines seek to replace human communities with their spawn through infiltration, slowly replacing one person at a time until an entire town or village is populated by their spawn.

AC 7, HP 19, ATK 2 vines (near) +1 (1d4+poison), MV close, S +1, D +2, C +1, I +2, W +1, Ch +2, AL C, LV 4

Telepathy. Can secretly hear the surface thoughts of all humanoids within near.

Poison. DC 12 CON or paralyzed 1d4 hours.

Engulf. DC 12 STR or trapped inside a pod. Touch attack auto-hits engulfed targets each round. DC 12 STR on turn to escape. Fail checks if paralyzed.

Spawn Duplicate. If a creature is successfully engulfed and dies wrapped in the leaves of the vine, or the plant finds a dead body and wraps its leaves around it, it can choose to absorb the dead body then create a duplicate of the creature in 2d6 hours. This duplicate has all of the knowledge and abilities of the creature but is controlled by the parent vine which can see, hear, and use its telepathy through the spawn. Spawns have green blood that smells of chlorophyll.