Alchemy Plant

It looks like a plain bush with saw-edged green leaves and juicy brown stalks. It can grow almost anywhere, using its transmutation to survive strange environments. The only giveaway is a bare 1-foot ring around it where nothing else grows.

The plant is defenseless against a careless blade or a grazing animal, but it senses living plants within 20 feet, and when they are hurt it instinctively changes into a nearby substance. The survivors therefore tend to grow beside rocks, turning into a plant-shaped stone just as jaws close. It can even shift between a weapon's touch and its cut, becoming solid steel. The plant then saves vs. crushing blow on the column for its new material, and the striking weapon must save as well. The change persists while danger remains.

The plant eats by transmuting minerals in the earth around it rather than photosynthesizing, so they need no light. They take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, which makes them valuable aboard starships.

It can take on the substance of any nonliving material in contact with it, and once-living matter like wood, cloth or a corpse counts too. When two objects touch it, one becomes the other's substance, with equal odds for which. To make gold, touch it with a rock, then gold, and hope. It converts one pound per foot of plant height, three pounds at most, once per day. Uprooting a plant that has turned itself to gold just yields a dead green bush, since it must live to hold its own change; other transmuted objects stay changed.

A potion of plant control or a charm plant spell guarantees the desired result. Speak with plants rarely helps and threats are useless, since it has no idea of pain or death; only a druid can persuade it, with an Intelligence check. It cannot copy magic, so a candle of invocation becomes a lump of plain wax.

Each month it has a 5% chance of a seed, flung explosively 10d6 yards; anyone in its path takes 1 hp damage. A seedling matures in two weeks.

Grazing animals eat it, and little else depends on it. Its unreliability limits interest to sages, mages and alchemists, but it is grown aboard human, elven and mind reaver ships to freshen the air and maybe supply useful materials.