Shambling Mounds

Plant: Plants are vegetable creatures. Note that regular plants, such as one finds growing in gardens and fields, are not creatures, but objects, even though they are alive.

They have low-light vision.

Plants have immunity to all mind-affecting effects (charms, compulsions, morale effects, patterns, and phantasms).

They have immunity to paralysis, poison, polymorph, sleep effects, and stunning.

Plants breathe and eat, but do not sleep.

Shambling mounds, also called shamblers, appear to be heaps of rotting vegetation. They are actually intelligent, carnivorous plants with a fondness for elf flesh in particular. What serve as a shambler’s brain and sensory organs are located in its upper body. Shambling mounds typically have an 8-foot girth and stand between 6 and 9 feet tall. They weigh about 3,800 pounds.

They are immune to electricity.

Shambling mounds are strange creatures, more akin to animate tangles of creeping parasitic vines than single rooted plants. They are omnivorous, able to draw their sustenance from nearly anything, wrapping their creepers around living trees to draw forth the sap, sending rootlets into the soil to absorb raw nutrients, or consuming flesh and bone from crushed prey.

A shambling mound can crush an opponent, dealing bludgeoning damage, when it makes a successful grapple check (in addition to any other effects caused by a successful check, including additional damage).

If a shambling mound hits with its slam, it deals normal damage and attempts to start a grapple. Grab can only be used against targets of a size equal to or smaller than the shambling mound. The shambling mound has the option to conduct the grapple normally, or simply use the part of its body it used in the grab to hold the opponent. If it chooses to do the latter, it takes a penalty to make and maintain the grapple, but does not gain the grappled condition itself. A successful hold deals constriction damage as well.

Shamblers are frighteningly stealthy in their native environments. Blending in with the surrounding terrain, they can lie in wait for days on end without moving, waiting patiently for a potential meal. A shambler could be almost anywhere at any time, attacking without warning and not caring whether it leaves any survivors, so long as it acquires its next meal.

Shambling mounds take no damage from electricity. Instead, any electricity attack used against a shambling mound temporarily increases its health and stamina.

They are resistant to fire.

Shambling mounds normally lead solitary, nomadic existences in deep forests and fetid swamps, although they can also be found underground living among damp fungal thickets. Disturbing rumors persist, however, of shamblers gathering in strange congregations around great earthen mounds in the depths of marshes and jungles, often during the height of violent electrical storms. Their reasons for doing so are unknown, and many sages have wondered whether there is some obscure and alien purpose at work.

They have darkvision.