Needle Blight

D&D 2024 monster: Needle Blight. Source: Monster Manual (2014). challenge rating 1/4, creature type Plant, Medium size, speed 30 ft. In the shadows of a forest, needle blights might be taken at a distance for shuffling, hunched humanoids. Up close, these creatures reveal themselves as horrid plants whose conifer-like needles grow across their bodies in quivering clumps. A needle blight lashes out with these needles or launches them as an aerial assault that can punch through armor and flesh. When needle blights detect a threat, they loose a pollen that the wind carries to other needle blights throughout the forest. Alerted to their foes' location, needle blights converge from all sides to drench their roots in blood. Blights Awakened plants gifted with the powers of intelligence and mobility, blights plague lands contaminated by darkness. Drinking that darkness from the soil, a blight carries out the will of ancient evil and attempts to spread that evil wherever it can. Roots of the Gulthias Tree Legends tell of a vampire named Gulthias who worked terrible magic and raised up an abominable tower called Nightfang Spire. Gulthias was undone when a hero plunged a wooden stake through his heart, but as the vampire was destroyed, his blood infused the stake with a dreadful power. In time, tendrils of new growth sprouted from the wood, growing into a sapling infused with the vampire's evil essence. It is said that a mad druid discovered the sapling, transplanting it to an underground grotto where it could grow. From this Gulthias tree came the seeds from which the first blights were sown. Dark Conquest Wherever a tree or plant is contaminated by a fragment of an evil mind or power, a Gulthias tree can rise to infest and corrupt the surrounding forest. Its evil spreads through root and soil to other plants, which perish or transform into blights. As those blights spread, they poison and uproot healthy plants, replacing them with brambles, toxic weeds, and others of thei...