Fearweed [Plant]

Fearweed is identical to milkweed to everyone except druids and rangers: a short, sturdy stem topped by white blossoms and wide green leaves. The only real difference is underground, where it spreads a far wider web of spongy roots made to soak up the blood and rotting remains of anything it destroys. Like most plants, it cannot communicate.

Its roots sense living creatures. When any animal, human or otherwise, comes within 20 feet, the plant exhales an invisible, odorless gas that quickly spreads into a cloud reaching roughly 20 feet out from the plant. Everyone inside saves vs. poison at -2. On a failure, paranoid terror takes hold: companions look like wicked doppelgangers, trees become twisted monsters and every shadow hides something ready to kill. The world stops making sense, except that anything moving is plainly an enemy.

Dispel magic cannot lift the effect, though remove curse or neutralize poison will. Whenever someone in the group falls unconscious or dies, the others may save again to realize what is happening; success leaves them shaken and confused as by the confusion spell.

Fearweed first grew in harsh, poor soil. Rather than learning to move or hunt, it evolved to make creatures die and rot beside it, letting their nutrients seep down to its roots. Over time it spread across the misty dread realm without losing that grim habit. Liches, powerful undead and other beings untouched by biological effects often grow patches around their lairs to repel intruders.

Fearweed spreads by pollen from its flowers. Oddly, ordinary milkweed has sometimes changed into fearweed, perhaps after insects carrying its pollen fertilized it. Because milkweed grows almost everywhere in the realm, any overgrown area has a 5% chance of sprouting fearweed too, most often in neglected places like fallow fields, cemeteries and forgotten corners of castle grounds.