The hangman tree is not subtle. According to the flavor text, it “looms above a field strewn
with bones.” Its vines are “looped
into nooses.” Corpses hang from it
like fruit. Its Stealth is –2—about as bad as an untrained human
with a Dex of 6. If the hangman tree were the murder
house in your neighborhood, it wouldn’t be the quiet ranch that smelled subtly
of ammonia…it would be the gothic edifice with a clown-driven, blood-spattered
ice cream truck out front and a neon sign reading “MURDER HOUSE THIS WAY.”
And that’s what’s so fantastic about it.
Other monstrous plants rely on subterfuge. Let them. The hangman is a CR 7 death tree, and all the Perception in
the world won’t save the PCs if they get caught in a cloud of its
hallucinatory spores. I haven’t
faced one of these in game, but there’s probably a lot of fun in role-playing
the poor stoned character stumbling over the bones of past adventurer fertilizer
while his friends protest in horror.
Let assassin vines be sneaky—the hangman tree is too busy hangin’.
A murder of talking
crows is said to have the gift of prophecy…or at least a lot of good local
gossip. The crows nest in a
hangman tree that slowly trundles through the downs, moving slightly in the dark
hours of each night.
A town in the path of
an army of fey is spared when it promises to plant a tree in the center of
the village green. The gifted tree
turns out to be a hangman tree.
Already folk are losing livestock to the tree’s vines. But if they remove it, they will have
an army of spriggans, quicklings, redcaps, and fey ettins at their doorstep.
Various monsters
sometimes lair in the vicinity of hangman trees. Angry or vengeful victims may rise as wights, still trailing
the vine noose that killed them.
Sprites find hangman trees a safe place to rest after their revels. Shocker lizards tend to drive the trees
away, though—hangman trees instinctively fear their electric shocks, and the
territorial reptiles scare off potential food for the tree.
—Pathfinder Bestiary 2
152
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