Bestiary: Phytes

Phytes are vegetation that have gained intelligence and mobility similar to fauna - other animals or monsters. In the Baest Notera, Sylvfar debates if they should be in a ‘bestiary’, or are more appropriately categorized in a work about plants, but since he included fera he decided that phytes are similar and includes them.

Phytes include: blights, fungi, myconids, oozes, shambling mounds, and treants.

Hag Corruption

In the land of Taluma, the very nature of hags can sleep into and corrupt the environment around them. Even if not actively manipulating plants and animals around them, they can absorb the weird magic that emanates from a hag lair. Phytes can spontaneously arise from the land around a hag lair. But, hags are also known to use their magic to warp the plants and animals near them. This may be to create guardians for their lair, or simply to release havoc and chaos of these foul creatures into the land around them.

Shamblers are one of the foulest works of hags, weaving their weird magic into the land around them—especially in swamps—to create these menaces of wetlands. Feeding off of the dark emotions like fear and anger, they grow into tree-sized masses of grasses, ferns, vines, mosses, and other marshland vegetation and become carnivorous—consuming animals and even people to sustain themselves. Shamblers usually start out as a mound of vegetation, but the longer they live, the more they adopt an anthropomorphic image.