Friendlies «Harmony Tree»

Description (Initial Observations): There is a 20% chance that players have not encountered 1 tree, but 1d20 trees. The harmony tree is extremely handsome graceful and straight, with large yellow flowers, red plumlike fruit, and lush, glossy green leaves the year around. Any creature with intelligence between 2 and 16 (not including robots or androids, but includ- ing cyborgs) that comes within 20 m of a harmony tree must defend vs. a mental attack or become psychologically depen- dent on the tree. Victims are overcome with a feeling of great peace and har- mony, and will be totally unwilling to leave the euphoric atmosphere of the tree or see it harmed in any way. Vic-ims must be killed, stunned, or other- wise subdued if they are to be removed from the trees influence. Once out of range, the victim will recover his or her normal senses. However, victims of a harmony tree are immune to fear gener- ation, mental control, and empathy while under the trees control.Creatures under a harmony trees control feel no need to eat, and they would shudder at the mere idea of hurt- ing any living thing, especially the tree itself. They will not even fight to defend themselves if attacked (but see below). However, if a victim is attacked and hurt, the tree must try to regain control (a mental attack at + 2); if the victim is brought to 10% of his or her hit points, the tree may attack again at no bonus. If this attempt to control the victim fails, the victim is free to escape.If anyone tries to harm the tree, all its victims will attack the offender in a frenzy of blind hatred, using the most effective available attack form at + 4 to hit. In this frenzy, victims will ignore damage to themselves, and can be injured and killed without the tree have- ing to renew its control over them at all. Victims of a harmony tree that are not attacked and killed will slowly, happily starve to death.A harmony tree will keep an entou- rage of as many creatures as possible, since this is its only means of defense. These creatures are often quite varied and even naturally hostile to each other, but they will lie down lovingly together at the base of the harmony tree (this being one way to identify the latter). If a victim is killed or starves to death, the tree will cause the survivors to hide the corpse by burying it or throwing it as far as possible, according to their abili- ties. However, it will have them keep any weapons on the body, as well as any weapons they have themselves, as the guardians may be called upon to use these in defense of the tree. Victims will hide weapons among the branches of the tree or play with them peacefully until someone attacks the tree. In gen- eral, the tree uses the senses of its vic- tims, but they are guided entirely by its intelligence, which may be higher or lower than their own.In any harmony tree encounter, the GM should decide what sort of entou- rage the tree should have, based on the size, status, and overall power of the player character party. There may be nothing but a few dead bodies under the tree, or up to a dozen assorted creatures including a few humans or humanoids with artifacts. Something should almost always be under a harmony tree, since no one can bury the last victims if they all die.The fruit of the harmony tree is inten- sity 7 slow poison. If the tree captures a victim too small to use in its defense (5 HD or less), it may force the victim to eat a fruit and then walk or fly away at normal speed to die within 1-3 hours, starting a new tree. Even after it leaves the 20 m range of the tree, the victim will not regain its senses unless it sur- vives the poisoning, being overcome with misery at having been cast out. This is the way in which the harmony tree propogates itself. A free-willed character that eats a ripe harmony fruit (indistinguishable from an unripe one) will gain four points of mental strength for one hour. Eating unripe harmony fruit will not increase a characters men- tal strength. At any given time, 10% of the fruit on a harmony tree will be ripe. All of it will be poisonous, and of course a character must survive the poison to gain the mental strength. The poisonous effects of all harmony fruit eaten in one day are cumulative, so two harmony fruit will act as intensity 14 poison.