Bloodsipper [Farther Dark]

Long before you see one, you smell it: a copper tang that carries up to 100 feet in still air. A bloodsipper is a broad snarl of slender yellow vines, much like arteries, that throb slowly with a thick red fluid. Leathery scarlet pods hang from them like diseased fruit. Most are fist-sized, but some swell to four feet or more across.

The little pods along the edges are immature. Slicing one open releases a choking reek; anyone nearby must save vs. paralyzation, and failure brings one turn of nausea with -4 on every action, check and save. Inside sits what looks like a shriveled organ tied to the base by a coiled cord. Few would guess it is a young pod creature, though prodding the goo with a knife point reveals a tiny mouth of needle teeth.

Walking normally through the tangle means stepping on a vine sooner or later, and that wakes the 2-12 mature pods at the heart of the growth. Each splits with a wet pop and launches its occupant: a huge, eyeless tadpole whose mouth bristles with hundreds of fine teeth and is ringed by four clawed arms. Its body tapers into a long, muscular tether fixed to the pod, letting it strike anywhere within 20 feet.

A hit means the head has hooked its claws into soft flesh and begun drinking, taking 4 hit points each round as the blood visibly flows back along the tether. Dealing 10 points to a tether cuts it, but that only frees the head, which keeps fighting and pulls itself around on its arms. Each head must be slain separately. Once all are dead, the remaining vines and young pods are harmless. Vines and heads both convulse and pull back from heaped salt, and a handful thrown on one burns for 2d4, the way holy water burns undead.

The vines always root into stone floors and walls with stubborn rootlets that resist removal. The wizard who first found one coined the name. Strong evidence suggests the bloodsipper did not evolve but began as normal plant life that grew too long near gateways to the Farther Dark, a distant dimension of subjective reality and ruling madness known only to a handful of scholars. Whatever its source, it is utterly foreign to the Prime Material Plane.

The bloodsipper is part plant, part animal. It sprouts from a seed and sends vines outward to claim as much ground as it can, but it needs no sunlight; its pods have become specialized blood-harvesters, and blood alone sustains it indefinitely. To spread, the growth deliberately cuts the tether of a mature pod, which crawls away as far as it can manage, usually a few hundred yards, then buries itself to sprout a new bloodsipper.