There’s a wealth of folklore about the mandrake root—the
most common being of its fatal shriek and the typical harvesting method (dog
tied to the stalk, that when called pulls out the root and bears the brunt of
the scream). (But seriously, check
out some of the others—in the Bible, it’s an aphrodisiac; in Germany, the
product of hanged man’s seed (and yes, that means exactly what you think it
means). Pathfinder’s mandragoras only nauseate, but they’re still
nasty little blighters, with poisonous slamming strikes. And since mandragoras are good for
spell components and have ties to demons, killing one might be just the start
of the adventure.
Wizard Calev Messert
has no time for folk superstitions about harvesting mandragoras with
dogs—novice adventurers will do just fine. Nor is he troubled if the mandragoras kill some of them in
the process—he has no plans to pay them for their troubles, and is already
planning instead to poison them and reanimate their corpses as undead.
Execution in Whitemarch
comes in three varieties. A
simple hanging serves for horse thieves and the like. Knights, gentry, and other important personages languish in
jail until the king’s headsman makes his rounds. But truly heinous offenders are left to hang in the gibbet
at Carter’s Crossroads. The last
man to die there was no man at all, but the tiefling serial killer Barnaby
Quicksaw. Now mandragoras fed by
his decaying viscera grow in the brambles beneath the gibbet. Due to the rocky soil at Carter’s
Crossroads the mandragoras have to struggle to uproot themselves, so the next
public display will likely be in full swing when the shrieking plants attack.
King Willowfayeth
of the elven nation of Intseneer has been driven nearly mad by the revelation
of drow in his sacred woods.
Determined to drive them out, he has commanded his alchemists, wizards,
and druids (coaxed by a few strategic “disappearances”) to summon demons to
harvest for ichor, which in turn yields crop after crop of mandragoras. For a while the mandragoras served as
almost living mine fields, but the affair has since turned into a fiasco—the
mandragoras are now germinating in the wild, the drow have grown adept at
casting deeper darkness to slow the
plants, and their raid have freed the summoned dretches to escape into the
woods and wreak havoc.
—Pathfinder Bestiary 2
185
As a further note, I’d fully recommend taking that last line
of the Bestiary 2 entry—“The newly
created mandragora is hostile, even to its creator”—as a suggestion, not
Gospel. If it’s better
role-playing to have a mandragora hate even its creator, go for it. (For comic relief is one option, or
that might be a good way to save a low-level party’s bacon if you need a
convincing way to help captured PCs avoid a TPK, for instance). But if you need guards for a mage’s
tower and are tired of homunculi, you can do a lot worse than mandragoras.
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