The Strange Bestiary
These insidious mutant flowers draw the unwary closer with alluring blooms, calming perfume, and a low-level magic aura that promotes well-being. Once a bed of prances has put its prey to sleep, individuals emerge for a bloody feeding frenzy. Victims who survive a prance attack have nightmares for years afterward, recalling how the creatures' influence was so strong that being devoured alive was a somehow pleasant, euphoric experience.
Prance pollen is a valuable commodity in the town of Newk, but gathering it is obviously dangerous. Although any individual prance is fairly weak, prances generally live in patches. Few creatures can overcome an entire patch of prances focusing on putting prey into a state so accepting that having one's spine ripped out and eaten seems like a spiritual experience.
These carnivorous flowers are also known as skittering irises and death blooms. The gathered pollen is a drug that can promote relaxation, bliss, and wonder, while at the same time utterly disengaging a user's sense of self-preservation.
Motive: Hungers for flesh
Environment (Cataclyst | Weird Science and Magic): Growing in patches of six or more in irradiated areas
Health: 6
Damage Inflicted: Minor wound (3 points)
Movement: Short; immediate when burrowing or climbing
Modifications: Disguise as level 6 when not moving.
Combat: A disguised prance patch appears to be an enticing area of purple flowers. When four or more prances grow together in a patch, they can spend an action to produce a pulse of pollen (which mingles odor and magic influence) that has a soporific effect on every living target in immediate range who fails a difficulty 4 Intellect defense roll. Affected targets take 3 points of Intellect damage (ignores Armor), but oddly enough, the experience seems pleasant, not painful. If a victim becomes impaired or debilitated, he falls into a trance. After that, pain and rough treatment isn't sufficient to rouse him to care about his condition, not even the pain of being eaten by a suddenly revealed prance. This lasts until the victim is hale again.
Prances can also make melee attacks, preferentially on subdued prey. Instead of being wiped out, a patch retreats from prey that proves resistant to the pollen. In direct sunlight, a prance regenerates 1 point of health per round while its health is above 0.
Interaction: Prances are predators that use mimicry and ambush to bring down prey. Use: Prance seeds are sometimes traded in Crow Hollow. A few days ago, several seeds accidentally and secretly germinated, taking over an entire covered stall in the Glittering Market. Shopping PCs come upon a sleeping merchant and smell something wonderful coming from the tented area behind her.
Loot: Prance pollen is valuable to certain traders, who might trade a cypher for the pollen collected from a patch of six or more prances.
GM Intrusion: Four more prance flowers pop out of the ground and attack the character.