This is the second creature from Robert E. Howard’s The Scarlet Citadel. For the summary of the story as well as the creature from the pit, click here.
Spoiler Alert! All of these Hyborian age posts are going to be filled with spoilers. From the summary, to the monster stats they are going to ruin any surprises as to what the monster is, when they pop up in the story and how and why they are killed. You’ve been warned.
Yothga the Devil Flower
In the cold, black depths of the cosmos hangs the star known to warlocks as Yag the accursed. From here, yothga the devil flower spreads its seeds into the world to nourish itself on the thoughts and memories of intelligent creatures. It is said the seeds will only germinate in the lowest, most vile reaches of the underworld, and that as the plant grows, horrible monsters take refuge in its roots. The devil flower feeds by immobilizing its prey in its tendrils and showering them with potent sleeping spores. Once asleep yothga uses its alien flowers to siphon a victim’s thoughts and memories until only an empty soulless shell remains – a slow and ghastly process that can take a decade or longer.
Only those powerful and mad enough to make a pact with the powers of the outer dark know the secrets of cultivating one of yothga’s stalks. For these individuals the devil flower is a powerful tool of unending torture and imprisonment.
Notes
The devil flower is one of the cr
eepier creatures of Tsotha-lanti’s dungeon and plays a much more pivotal role in the plot than the thing from the pit, so that alone demanded that I should create statistics for it. But as a stationary plant that didn’t eat enemies so much as imprison them, it seemed much more like a hazard than a monster. The monster summoning comes from Pelias’ comment that pulling the plant up by the roots is dangerous because Conan “…might have found things clinging to the roots against which not even your sword would prevail.” I used the ghoul and wretch of Kyuss simply because they were minions of the right level (I also felt they fit the whole ‘roots in the underworld’ thing), but any level 13 minion would do (a minion balances out the XP of the devil flower being killed with a single action, I think a full fledged creature would be too powerful). Even though the story has yothga putting people to sleep forever (until the plant is removed by an outside force), I thought that in the context of a D&D adventure it was just too deadly, so I added the option of using a healing surge to wake up. If you were running a very gritty and deadly game you could remove that option to reflect the source material more faithfully.
Tags: 4e, Conan, D&D, Original Art
