Hello and welcome, grab yourself a tasty beverage, its time to get deeply nerdy, in todays video we are going deep into Dungeons and Dragons past, to the classic fiend folio and a rarely mentioned plant humanoid monster known as the Needleman, not an individual, but a whole species of wood-dwelling, intelligent, zombie lookin plant folks. From a distance they could easily be mistaken for well camoflaged wood elves, and as you get closer, they look and move kind of wrong, so you start to think they are undead zombie elves of some sort, but no, closer still, you realize they look like a cactus shaped like a person, covered in clusters of fine needles, about the length and shape of pine needles, but they are really quite vicious spines.
So what sort of ecology do these creatures have, why have you never heard of them and how have the changed and adapted over the long history of the Dungeons and Dragons, and Magic the Gathering?
The monsters found in the pages of the 1981 Fiend folio were collected up from fan creations sent into White Dwarf Magazine, back in the mid to late 1970's it was very much a United Kindom version of Dragon Magazine and covered a wide range of roleplaying games that were just as popular in Britain as they were in America, This was the era where D&D was spreading rapidly and found very rich ground in the UK, before Games Workshop split away from the original publishers of D&D, the company TSR, thanks to Gary Gygax basically shafting them, but that is ancient history.
Without those events, we would never have gotten Warhammer fantasy and later Warhammer 40,000, no space marines, and so on. It is what it is. Since the fan who sent in the Needleman to White Dwarf magazine never actually signed anything other than a limited First Dibs license on the concept, and even that is a big maybe, because there are no records left either way, its quite true that TSR, and later Wizards of the Coast don't have any legal ownership of it, along with just about every single monster found in the fiend folio, including Githyanki, Norker goblins, Grell and so many other so called Iconic intellectual properties they claim to own.
Fun fact. They don't, their claim hasn't got a leg to stand on, legally speaking.
Trevor Graver, who sent in the Needleman which appeared originally in White Dwarf issue 6 in 1978, and the Galltrit monster concept, plus an article on Criminals as a character class for Traveller RPG in issue 19, optional traveller skill rules in issue 25, plus some RPG reviews in issue 34, along with more obscure fanzines at the time, such as Trollcrusher issue 27. Oh yeah Wizards of the Coast, some of us do the research and check the receipts.
Heh, I bet their lawyers throw darts at my picture on the wall in their office.
The needleman was later included in the Monstrous compendium for Greyhawk Adventures appendix in Second edition Dungeons and Dragons and the Monstrous Compendium annual volume three, and had a name and design change, appearing as the Needlefolk in Dragon Magazine issue 292 in February of 2002 and later on page 158 of the second Monster Manual for 3rd edition D&D, In fifth edition, the Needleman reappear as the needle blight and are amongst a class of similar plant creatures which include Tree, Twig, and Vine blights.
Although there is no direct connection between needle blights and Cactus Folk from Magic the Gathering, I think they convert over particularly well, and there is a lot to draw from in the long history of these creatures in the game.
Alright, enough Sage flexing, what's the ecology of the Needlefolk?
While they do appear and move around as humanoids, including a total lack of roots, which means they have to drink water through their mouth, just like most humanoids do, they are still plants, their skin is a layer of tiny leaves which change over the seasons just like many trees do, a ruddy green in the summer months, and turning mottled brown and reds in the fall, while those in deserts where its always hot and sunny will stay green all year round, usually you find needlefolk in woodlands, where they wander around, looking as guant as a corpse, with a zombie-like shuffling walk, they don't really have any mammal sexual characteristics, hence why they get called Needle men. They really have no idea what the hell gender even is, that's just mammal stuff. To reproduce, the needlefolk just grow seedling pods which detach from them and grow in the ground until they can grow their own limbs and start to move around by themselves, so its typical to find a grove of related needlefolk, all basically identical to each other, with no real society, culture or leadership, their intelligence is not much higher than that of a turtle. However, and this is a bit of a mystery to the sages, many Needlefolk can be seen wearing tight-fitting yellow breechcloth underwear or occasionally what looks like the remains of ceremonial white robes. I do wonder if the material is made by them. I suspect the white robes are nothing more than the needle folk molting their old skin leaves, and the leaf structures also have little barbs that can be used, a kernel of an idea that the Needlefolk can grow their own gear which will blossom into a complete technology later on, as we shall see. The typical habitat of Needlefolk are woodlands usually, though there is no reason they can't exist in the desert they don't look nearly as cactus-like as they probably should, because they can hide so much more effectively in thick conifer forest, they will seek out such places to dwell if they can. They can survive winter conditions, even quite harsh winters, by dropping their leafy coating and going into a dormant state for as long as required, and normally they don't move around very quickly anyway, their movement described as Stately and graceful, but, when threatened or otherwise provoked, or they see an Elf, they become much faster, moving with the same agility and speed as a human. Needlefolk are communal and tend to gather in areas they find most suitable for their needs, so its rare to find one alone, and common to encounter anywhere from five to fifty of the things, which is a good reason they are so dangerous.
The Elves and Needlefolk have always hated each other and needlefolk will attack elven people on sight, luckily they can't see very far, the maximum effective range of their flung thorny needles is around 200 feet and outside that range, unless you happen to be making really loud noise of thumping the ground very hard or you are an elf, they won't see you as anything more than a blur, they can see quite well in the dark out to that range as well though. Elves can somehow be sensed up to 1200 feet away, nobody is quite sure how they do this, but its not supernatural, not a magical ability. Close up, their sensitivity grants them blindsight, making them difficult to sneak up on, and those finger-looking things on the ends of their arms are hooked and very sharp thorns that they can shred enemies with like a paw full of claws. If they can though, they will always rather retreat and use their ranged needle attack, as its more effective and less risky for them. Though they do attack in groups, they are not organised, have no leadership and they don't care what the rest of their group is doing or how many are being chopped down around them, they don't get scared and they don't negotiate. The one exception is elves, again, they know when they are outmatched and they will wait until a sufficient number of them are within range before they start an attack on elven people, but only if they think they are badly outnumbered. While its rare to see, they can actually speak the Sylvan language, with reedy and whistling voices that sound more like hisses and squeeks, a little bit like a dolphin who is very drunk. They speak slowly and haltingly, with a limited vocabulary, but they tend to understand sylvan well enough.
Needlefolk reproduce by seeds, which each needlefolk produces in the autumn. The seed pods are brown and covered with spiny thorns. Because they fall close to the parent plant, groves of needlefolk tend to spring up wherever one has chosen to spend a season.
Moving on to 5th edition D&D how have the needlefolk evolved and where can you find them?
The Needlefolk have now joined the class of malevolent plant creatures called the Blights, a far more evil class of monsters, now at least the elves have got a very good reason to hate them as much as the needlefolk hate the elves.
They appear in both the 2014 Monster Manual as standard one quarter challenge rating Needle Blights, then in Mordenkainen's Fiendish Folio Volume 1, on page 16 we have the challenge rating 3 Needle Lord and the challenge rating half Needle Spawn, the text tells us that Needle Spawn always mean a Needle Lord, a more powerful Fey Native version of the creatures, is somewhere in the vicinity and they are created by the Needle Lords from the seed pods it scatters around any worldly forest it enters and wanders around in, and here is the interesting new twist they provide for the spawn and a good reason for the elves to hate them, any seed pods will remain dormant, until a humanoid corpse appears close enough to them for the pod to become active and mobile, burrowing into the corpse and feeding on the decaying meat, then wrapping its rapidly sprouting tendrils tightly around the corpses skeletal remains, animating itself and lurching around looking a lot like a zombie.
One of the major changes to the creatures is that Needle blights don't have eyes anymore, they are restricted to a 60 foot Blind Sight, so, they are restricted to hearing, smelling and feeling the vibrations of movement of things fairly close to them and won't react to anything further away unless some other means exists to inform them. They also, in Forgotten Realms lore, gained a specific origin, which is a form of mutant, corrupted tree. The legend has its origin in 3.5 edition in the Libris Mortis undead sourcebook actually, where the first Gulthias tree sprouted from the stake used to slay the vampire Gulthias of Nightfang Spire, head of the cult of the red dragon Ashardalon. The stake destroyed Gulthias, but the vampire's latent magic caused the stake to sprout, growing into a sapling infused with vampiric power. A druid was said to have later discovered the sapling and transplanted it inside an underground grotto, where the druid nurtured the tree until it produced the first seeds from which blights were generated. Since then the blights can propagate themselves, but evil druids and clerics and cultists have been transporting the seeds to all sorts of places. In the Forgotten Realms Dale Recking year 1490, so, nine years before the current official date of 1499 in Faerun, the half orc anchorite of Talos named Grannoc cultivated a Gulthias tree within a ruined manor in Neverwinter Wood, northwest of Conyberry. This is from the lore in The Dragon of Icespire Peak published in September 2019, you can find it on page 44, and in Greyhawk, around 1492 DR a Gulthias tree appeared along the banks of the Stojanow River outside of Valjevo Castle in Phlan, causing the magical thicket around the castle to spill into the streets of Old Phlan and generating malevolent blights. This lore source is from February 2016 with the publication of the Reclamation of Phlan PDF for the D&D Adventurer's league, on pages 20 through to 22.
Those of you familiar with the Moonsea region of Northern Faerun and the activities of Zhentarim faction in the area will know that the Quivering forest near Phlan has a population of Dark Fey and Treants and a zone bordoring Mount Baratok that is also a misty border to one of the Domains of Dread.. the whole place is best avoided and still infested with blights to this day. Why avoid it? Well, wander too far into the mist and you may find yourself trapped within Barovia and the domain of the infamous vampire Strahd von Zarovich!
Gulthias trees are potent sources of corruption and can turn a whole forest into toxic, bramble filled deathtrap which spreads beyond its borders with supernatural speed, swallowing up areas previously the site of roads, farmsteads or even whole townships.
While the Needle Blights are now technically blind, they now have a form of alert signal in the form of a kind of pollen they release in the air that carries to any other blights who sense it in the air and immediately move toward the source of the pollen, swarming the area from all sides, a tactic we see perfectly represented in the Baldur's Gate Three video game.
In act two in the Ruined Battlefield - not too far from the Last Light Inn across the bridge and down the left-hand path- You can encounter a variant called the Shadow-cursed Needle Blight, expertly concealing themselves in the creepy vegetation, waiting to ambush your character, springing out in a sudden surprise attack unless the player passes a DC 30 perception check. Obviously, the numbers for the checks are a bit different from the tabletop version of Dungeons and Dragons, and the Shadow-Cursed Needle Blights are smaller, more fragile, and more numerous than the standard Needle Blights, though they still weigh 100 pounds or 50 kilograms, so not easy to toss around. They do have a great feature that makes them very effective when part of an encounter with a notably larger individual showing up, and charging into the midst of the player character group to release a burst of vines. These vines hamper movement while also inflicting a mild necrotic damage, but they are easy to destroy and fairly feeble, though I should warn you, the vines can't be destroyed just by using fire, which is a rare damage immunity for a plant. They don't have the standard Needle Blight claw attack instead the release bursts of needles, staying close and surrounding the player group, releasing a lot of volleys of spines that are quite strong, Larian studios does a great job representing the creatures lore accurate tactics and the fact their needle attack is a much stronger attack than their claw attacks. When killed, the blights drop wood bark and can also drop Shadowroot Sacs, which are vile smelling but alchemically valuable as an ingredient in making an elixer of viciousness, which reduces the target number for a critical hit by one point. In the game the shadow cursed needle blights will explode when killed, releasing a burse of needle, which, when chained together all at once, can be fairly devastating to a party of players all caught within a flanking circle of the monsters.
So lets take a look at the fey Needle Lord and its Spawn, then I'll introduce you to some recent lore from the Magic the Gathering multiverse and the Cactus Folk of Thunder Junction.
Needle blights, Needle Lords and Needle spawn has lost the ability to speak Sylvan and now understand the common tongue, but can't speak at all, Needle blights are still medium sized and appear humanoid, the Needle lord is larger, say, ogre sized and they have that special Raking Vine attack, though in the roleplaying game this is not an area attack but targeted at one foe within 10 feet and the needle lord can grapple up to two targets at a time, so, its like they lash out with up to two vines they can sprout, which also inflict ongoing piercing damage. Their needle volley attacks are rapid and while doing much less damage now, they have a 60 foot range and they can make up to six needle attacks per round, though no more than two of those can be against the same target in that turn, also each time a creature makes a melee attack against a needle lord, it takes 2 piercing damage. A creature can choose to make an attack with disadvantage to avoid this damage. Needle lords are known to sometimes form alliances with other malevolent species in the area, such as hobgoblins and kobolds, Black dragons, Hags and other dark fey.
The needle spawn don't get disadvantage on ranged attacks while within 5 feet of a hostile creature and they have the same sort of needle volley attacks and claw strikes that the Needle Lords do, but not as powerful. They can be devastating against player character parties in 5th edition D&D because its a lot easier for them to get successful damaging hits in with the number of attacks they can combine as a group to shred their victims with, and it adds up very fast, so, players have to be careful to avoid being surrounded by the blights, making the combat a lot more intense and tactical.
If your players don't get into the habit of diving for cover and trying to keep attacking the blights at a range further out than the blights can sense, they will most likely all get thoroughly murdered, and then end up just another skeleton wrapped in very naughty foliage.
In the Magic the Gathering Multiverse, a recent development after the Invasion by the forces of New Phyrexia saw a corruption and conversion of a type of Fae dimensional path network, you see this in the Feywild of the D&D Universe and in mythic outer planes entities like Ygdrassil the World Tree of Ysgard and the Norse pantheon, where the tree or sometimes a mycelial fungus network forms living connections between the different planes, demiplanes and worlds, in the Magic the Gathering multiverse, the conversion and forcing open of these portals resulted in what are now known as the Omenpaths, which, after the War of the Spark and essentially the Nerfing of all the Planeswalkers, is pretty much the only way any of them can get to different locations through the blind eternities, the vast void which is kind of like that multiverses Ethereal plane. When this event occured, on a remote, wild west style frontier world, home to a lot of folks who don't want to be found, these cactus creatures suddenly started to become sentient, essentially waking up as a new species called the Cactus Folk, they are a lot more robust than the Needlefolk, and have four arms on a humanoid shaped body, a largely featureless head, but a remarkable gift for biotechnology, growing living sidearms made from highly mutated and supercharged plant pods, growing their own protective garments and developing who knows what else in their well protected desert homelands. As I say, they are a recent arrival, not well understood, the live in a harsh environment and are quite aggressive when fully grown, a bit prickly, you could say... so I hope we shall see more about them and the residents of Thunder Junction and the outlaw town of Omenport. So, circling back to the 5th edition D&D multiverse and the Needle blights, all we really need to adjust is give the Needle Spawn four claw attacks and alter the text and range on the needle ranged attack to represent the creature firing a plant pod sidearm.
Easily done.
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