Twig Blight

D&D 2024 monster: Twig Blight. Source: Monster Manual (2014). challenge rating 1/8, creature type Plant, Small size, speed 20 ft. Twig blights can root in soil, which they do when living prey are scarce. While rooted, they resemble woody shrubs. When it pulls its roots free of the ground to move, a twig blight's branches twist together to form a humanoid-looking body with a head and limbs. Twig blights seek out campsites and watering holes, rooting there to set up ambushes for potential victims coming to drink or rest. Huddled together in groups, twig blights blend in with an area's natural vegetation or with piles of debris or firewood. Given how dry they are, twig blights are particularly susceptible to fire. 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 their kind...