The Strange Bestiary
The radioactive craters dimpling Cataclyst's landscape produce an endless variety of bizarre and monstrous creatures. In some places, even the plant life has undergone a radical change. The voot, for example, looks like an enormous shrub with cobalt blue leaves on long branches that drag on the ground, weighted by the pulsing white fruit clinging to their stems.
The voot may look like an ordinary (albeit colorful) plant, but it's sentient, mobile, and aggressive. It feeds on fresh blood. It moves on top of a fallen creature and sinks barbed roots into the flesh to draw out the sweet nutrients.
Radiation saturates the voot and causes the plant to shed faint light in darkness. Its seeds are highly radioactive, and ingesting or having one of the barbed seeds lodged in the skin causes rapid, harmful mutations in a creature.
Motive: Feed
Environment (Cataclyst | Magic or Weird Science): Any wilderness environments in groups of two to four
Health: 24
Damage Inflicted: Moderate wound (4 points)
Armor: 1
Movement: Immediate
Modifications: Speed defense as level 4 due to size and nature.
Combat: With a movement not unlike a trebuchet, the voot flings its pulsing fruit at a character within long range, and the projectile explodes in an immediate range on impact. In addition to dealing damage, the bursting fruit releases seeds that may become embedded in the target's skin, requiring a Might defense roll. On a failure, the victim gains a randomly determined harmful mutation. A PC can gain only one such mutation per day regardless of how many times she is struck by a voot's fruit. The mutation stays with the character for as long as she remains in Cataclyst.
In close combat, a voot lashes out with its branches.
As plants, voots are combustible and take double damage from fire or forms of energy (such as electricity) that can start fires.
Interaction: Although sentient, voots are not very clever, and the extent of their cunning is to hold still so they look like ordinary plants. Voots regard other creatures as food and lack the means to communicate even if they were so inclined.
Use: A group of mutants regards an infestation of voots as divine emissaries that have come to bestow the blessings of mutation. The mutants sacrifice living creatures to the voots so they can safely harvest their fruit. PCs who run afoul of the mutants might find themselves offered up to the monstrous plants.
GM Intrusion: A PC damaged by the voot's branches becomes tangled in them and cannot move away on her next turn.
GM Intrusion: A PC that gains a harmful mutation also gains a second harmful mutation. The second mutation lasts for only one hour.