Evil Treant

In the misty dread realm, the gentle treant race has been poisoned by the land's dark waters and creeping evil into cruel, hateful beings. Standing among other trees, one has a 90% chance to pass for ordinary vegetation. Its gnarled bark is thick and tough. When it talks, a disturbingly human face appears, then melts back into knots and grooves when it wants to stay hidden. They come in three sizes: young (13-14 feet), mature (15-16 feet) and elder (17-18 feet). Besides their own tongue they usually can talk with forest animals and often know 1-4 other languages.

Each treant strikes twice with its branches. Young ones deal 2d8 per hit, mature ones 3d6, and elders a punishing 4d6, so few creatures can stand against them.

For all their armor-like bark, fire is a deadly weakness. Any fire-based weapon or attack, magical or mundane, gains +4 to hit and +1 damage per die, and they save at -4 against fire attacks and spells. Strangely, their one surviving link to their good kin is a hatred of reckless, uncontrolled burning.

Like true treants, each can awaken and command two living trees within 60 yards. A tree spends a round uprooting, then moves and fights as a mature treant, but reverts to an ordinary tree the instant it strays past that range. Their bulk and strength make them very effective against fortifications, especially wooden ones, and they are treated exactly like good treants under siege and mass-combat rules.

Where normal treants hate evil, these hate goodness and innocence, and they go out of their way to frighten and torment travelers. They dwell in remote forests such as the mountain woods of the realm's southwest, warping what could be lovely countryside into sinister, haunted forests.

They care nothing for treasure, though coins and magic may lie where their victims fell. They almost never use such objects, preferring to leave them in place as bait for curious explorers.

Instead of living on sunlight, evil treants eat meat, above all the flesh of intelligent beings, usually humans and demihumans. Their greatest delicacy is an innocent, terrified and tortured before being eaten. They think a dead victim is unfit to digest, so they eat their prey alive and toss aside anyone who dies by accident during the torment for the forest scavengers. Smearing an evil treant's sap over the whole body is said to give a human or demihuman protection equal to a barkskin spell.