Thoughts on plant trap/enemies

By MrTInce, in Game Masters

Hello,

For my next campaign I created some plant trap/enemies to make the wilderness more fun. Names aren't locked in but what are people's thoughts?

Name : Poison Spore
Notes : Puffball Mushroom, will release spore if disturbed. Hard resilience to resist or blinded until cured.

Name : Large snapper plant
Notes : Giant Venus Fly trap, looks innocent and hides among safe planets. Average coordination to avoid. 6 damage on failure, will ensnare and cause burn damage of threat/despair.

Name : Hallucinating Plant
Notes : Hard Resilience to resist effects, failure will cause players to feel tired and want to sit down. Players can attempt to fight this with hard discipline.
Failure will cause 6 damage each round of failure.

Name : Web plants
Notes : Lives among hanging willow branches. Snags on players and requires 1 red 1 purple athletics to remove. Threat and Despair causes player to be ensnared and difficulty goes to 1 red two purple. Continued failure and begins to cause suffocation.

Name : Pit Plant
Notes : Looks like a ground of moss. Hard Vigilance to spot. Failure causes moss to fall away and player falls into pit. Short range. Sides of pits covered in oil so hard athletics to get out. Each round 6 damage is taken as the acidic pool eats away. GM to spend Destiny to cause equipment damage.

I like these. It also adds to good options for Threats

Poison Spore - 1 Setback dice to Perception/Vigilance per 2 Threats due to blurred vision

I would think the Hallucinating Plant would go more against Strain Threshold than Wound Threshold

How about a plant that acts as a hive for some particularly painful insects?

Also these look neat. Well done.

7 minutes ago, kaosoe said:

How about a plant that acts as a hive for some particularly painful insects?

Also these look neat. Well done.

Good idea with the hive thing. Insect swarms that are ridiculously hard to hit...

19 minutes ago, MrTInce said:

Good idea with the hive thing. Insect swarms that are ridiculously hard to hit...

Beyond the Rim has good rules for swarms: half damage before applying Soak unless the weapon has the Blast or Burn quality. The wasps in BtR had Soak 1, WT: 20.

2 hours ago, MrTInce said:

Name : Hallucinating Plant
Notes : Hard Resilience to resist effects, failure will cause players to feel tired and want to sit down. Players can attempt to fight this with hard discipline.
Failure will cause 6 damage each round of failure.

Sitting down isn't fun :) it should affect their decision-making abilities. With Threat or Despair they might not even know they are hallucin ating. Survival, Perception, Vigilance and Cool are all compromised. Athletics, Coordination, Piloting could be altered (+ or - or random). They could end up going completely in a wrong direction (now you can bust out that encounter they bypassed), or see things that aren't there ("It's that bounty hunter, he's in the woods!").

I like the variety of your plant traps, @MrTInce ! Things like those are great for spending threats in combat or on Survival/Resilience rolls to traverse the wilderness. I am working on a Tatooine module, and I've been trying to come up with similar types of things for the desert environment. I do agree with @whafrog , though, that a hallucinogenic plant creates so many more opportunities! You could also have a plant with the effects of avabush, making the PCs lethargic, more prone to telling the truth, and capping out their skill upgrades to just a single yellow die. Come to think of it, the narrative descriptions of many Star Wars drugs would be a good thing to look at for effects of plants encountered in the wild.

Lords of Nal Hutta has a nice swamp disease called Fester Lung in the Toydaria mini-module. I've used that a few times in wilderness settings. I like having some possibilities for dishing out setting-specific crits. (My group tends to get much more interesting narrative mileage out of critical injuries than out of simple wounds.)

Edited by jendefer
fix username reference