Manikin

This little humanoid has rubbery skin of brown or gray and smells of fresh-dug soil. It never speaks or writes. It begins as the 10-inch root of a rare plant, the mandragora, which grows in a knobbly human shape topped by a few leaves.

Too feeble to fight, a manikin avoids battle, relying on surprising speed for its size. It can merge into wood and travel through it at 10 feet per round, or through stone at 5 feet per round, and it hides in shadows at 65%.

Killing one is dangerous. As it dies it lets loose a dreadful shriek, and its killer must save vs. death or drop dead as though poisoned. Its creator also permanently loses hit points equal to the manikin's own, and a manikin perishes the moment its creator does.

A wizard can make as many manikins as he has roots. He reads each one's mind like an open book and directs it mentally, typically as a lab assistant. During complex work it senses his needs and acts unbidden, handing over tools or handling poisons. Each manikin assisting in potion or magic item creation adds 3% to the chance of success, up to 12%.

The creator must pick a fixed spot in the lab, any immovable object, as the manikin's spiritual anchor, often a big pot of soil. The anchor can never move, and the manikin must stay within 100 feet of it until it or its master dies. It also needs an hour a day in soil to absorb water and nutrients. Deprived, it loses 1 hit point daily until it dies, and its death shriek then targets whoever starved it.

Beyond serving its master, a manikin affects nothing around it, and its body can be used just like a mandragora root.

Mandragora grows only in temperate forests, and two plants almost never sprout within 20 miles of each other. A successful herbalism check reveals whether a forest or section of one holds a root. Finding it then takes hours: each hour, an herbalist succeeds on a 1 in 10 roll, anyone else on 1 in 20. The root feels warm and sometimes twitches, but cannot move or fight.

Uprooting it, however, makes it bleed a bloodlike sap and scream, and whoever pulls it must save vs. death or perish in torment. Pulling with a rope does not help, nor does deafness; the plant's vengeance cannot be dodged. Evil wizards leash a dog or similar small beast to it, which dies in the uprooting, leaving the root safe to collect. Many prefer an unseen servant for the job.

Eating raw root calls for a save vs. poison: success means 1d6 hours of helpless stomach cramps, failure means death. Skilled alchemists can make one product per root, such as poisons, sleeping draughts, anesthetics, aphrodisiacs or fertility medicines, and it is a key ingredient in potions of heroism, invulnerability, plant control and treasure finding and in philters of love. Making a manikin requires casting monster summoning I on the root, then permanency.