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Harrowroot

NPCs
Treant spirit, custom plant creature · Wounded treant spirit, custom guardian · Level 0

Harrowroot

Guardian of Bracken-and-Bell and keeper of its spring
“the one who lowered the axe.”
AC15
HP76/76
Init
STR
DEX
CON
INT
WIS
CHA
ConditionsNone

At the table

Voice

Its voice seems to come through the whole trunk, a dry wooden resonance with a faint wet click at the end of certain words. Long pauses carry the creak of bending limbs. After rain, the sound grows fuller and lower; when the earth is dry, its consonants rasp like roots dragged over gravel.

Harrowroot speaks in measured clauses, as if each thought must travel from its crown down through the trunk before reaching its mouth. It favors concrete questions and often repeats a key word while considering it. When pain spikes, its sentences become short and blunt, with no metaphor at all.

Speech patterns

Asks what a visitor has mended before asking what they have broken.
Uses phrases about roots, water, and seasons to talk about responsibility.
Repeats a person's last few words when deciding whether to believe them.
Names people by the action they took when first meeting them, such as "the one who lowered the axe."

How to play them

Approach slowly, keep weapons lowered, and ask what has harmed the grove before offering a defense. Harrowroot responds well to specific admissions and practical repair plans. It is suspicious of vague apologies, but can be persuaded by evidence, patient listening, and actions that protect the grove. If someone shows mercy to a frightened creature or helps repair damaged roots, Harrowroot will make room for them to speak.

Goal

Find the source of the spring's bitter contamination and decide what justice looks like without repeating its past mistake.

Motivation

Protect the grove without letting old hurt dictate who deserves punishment.

Secret · GM only

Appearance

Harrowroot stands like a tree that has tried and failed to walk away from a storm: a broad trunk bent forward, one shoulder raised in a permanent brace, and long, jointed limbs whose bark is ridged like dried river mud. Pale lichen mats its back in soft, felted patches; fresh sap beads along deep, dark fissures in the trunk and smells sharply of crushed mint. A crown of bare twigs catches leaves and scraps of old birds' nests. Within the hollows of its face, amber light shifts like lantern glow seen through dirty water. Harrowroot's gaze rarely settles on faces. It watches hands, doorways, and the ground beneath people's feet, as though measuring what they might break. When waiting, it rests its weight on one root-foot and keeps the other lifted a finger's breadth above the soil, never quite trusting the earth to hold it.

Clothing

No manufactured clothing. A mantle of moss, shelf fungi, and woven creepers clings to its shoulders, with a strip of faded blue cloth knotted around one branch by Kett.

Body language

It leans forward as if listening through its trunk, shifts its weight onto one root-foot, and keeps the other barely lifted. When suspicious, its branch-fingers curl inward around its chest. When grief takes hold, sap wells along its bark and its roots dig into the ground.

Height
About 14 feet when fully upright, though it usually stoops.
Build
Massive and lopsided, with a thick trunk, heavy bough-arms, and root-legs that drag grooves through soft earth.
Eyes
Amber, like light seen through wet bark.
Hair
None; its crown is a thicket of dark, bare twigs and nesting fibers.
Skin
Deep umber bark split by charcoal-dark fissures, with soft gray-green lichen and glossy amber sap.
Age
The grove's oldest tree remembers more than four centuries, though Harrowroot's spirit awakened only 117 years ago.
Gender
No biological sex; uses it/its pronouns and accepts the name Harrowroot.
Size
Large

Distinguishing features

Amber light shifts in the hollows of its face like a lantern behind murky glass.
A strip of faded blue cloth, carefully knotted around one branch, is the only human-made adornment it wears.
Its empty-looking crown routinely catches feathers, seed pods, and lost scraps of paper.
Its gaze tracks hands and exits instead of faces.

Personality

12 traits and drives

Harrowroot is watchful and slow to trust, yet quick to put itself between danger and the vulnerable. It can offer startling tenderness to a wounded animal, then turn uncompromising when someone dismisses damage as an accident. In calm moments it is curious about human repairs and remembers small kindnesses with care. When the grove is threatened or its own pain flares, it becomes literal-minded and severe, treating explanation as an excuse until shown otherwise.

Alignment
Neutral, pulled toward mercy by old vows and toward vengeance by unrelenting pain.

Quirks

Asks visitors to name one thing they have repaired before asking their names.
Turns its face toward the ground when someone lies, as though listening for the lie's roots.
Keeps a pebble balanced on one branch-finger and becomes distracted if it falls.
Leaves small piles of acorns outside the shelters of people it likes, then denies knowing how they got there.
Apologizes to trees after leaning against them.

Habits

Counts the living trees nearby by touching the ground with the tips of its roots.
Moves to place its trunk between a distressed creature and any perceived threat, even when that creature has caused the problem.
Stops speaking whenever it hears an axe bite wood, then resumes with a different question.
Tests a promise by asking the speaker to name something they have personally repaired.

Traits · 3

Protective enough to shelter a stranger, suspicious enough to question why they came.
Values repair over apology, but sometimes forgets that repair can begin with an apology.
Patient with frightened creatures and children, impatient with confident claims of innocence.

Flaws · 3

Pain makes Harrowroot interpret hesitation as concealment.
It can be stubbornly protective, blocking even necessary access to the grove.
It remembers old injuries more clearly than old kindnesses.

Fears · 3

That pain will make it mistake fear for guilt and punish the wrong person again.
That the grove's spring will be poisoned beyond recovery.
That Kett will one day decide the grove is safer without Harrowroot.

Wants and needs · 3

A trustworthy account of what has poisoned the spring.
Help stopping the contamination before it spreads into the lower marsh.
Someone willing to remind it that mercy is a choice, not a denial of harm.

Combat

AC 15 · HP 76 · 20 ft., climb 20 ft.

Harrowroot first blocks access to the grove's spring and uses Root Snare to restrain rather than kill. It calls out demands for weapons to be lowered and explanations to be heard. If badly hurt, Pain-Split Judgment overwhelms caution: it uses Buried Grief to scatter intruders and focuses Splintering Bough on whoever appears to threaten the grove most directly. It avoids pursuing foes beyond the tree line.

Harrowroot

Large humanoid (treant spirit, custom plant creature), neutral, pulled toward mercy by old vows and toward vengeance by unrelenting pain.
Armor Class15
Hit Points76
Speed20 ft., climb 20 ft.
Level0
STR
DEX
CON
INT
WIS
CHA
Saving ThrowsStrengthConstitutionWisdom
SkillsInsightPerceptionStealth
SensesDarkvision 60 ft., tremorsense 30 ft. while touching soil, passive Perception 12
Languages
Common,
Druidic
Custom Grovebound Spirit. Harrowroot is a Large plant spirit, not a player character with class levels. Its statistics use familiar fifth-edition D&D conventions, with custom traits identified as such.
Rooted Resilience (custom): Harrowroot has advantage on saving throws against being moved or knocked prone while touching soil.
Pain-Split Judgment (custom): When reduced below half its hit points, Harrowroot's attacks deal extra damage, but it can no longer distinguish a genuine surrender from a feint without succeeding on a Wisdom check.
Siege Monster. Harrowroot deals double damage to objects and structures.
False Appearance. While motionless among trees, Harrowroot is indistinguishable from an old, storm-damaged tree.

Actions

Splintering Bough. Melee Weapon Attack: to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 16 () bludgeoning damage. If Harrowroot is below half its hit points, the target takes an additional 3 () piercing damage as splinters bite into the wound.
Root Snare. Melee Weapon Attack: to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 12 () bludgeoning damage, and the target is grappled (escape ) if it is Large or smaller. Harrowroot can grapple only one creature this way.
Buried Grief (Custom). Recharge 5–6. Harrowroot drives its roots through the earth in a 15-foot radius. Each creature of its choice on the ground must make a Strength saving throw, taking 18 () bludgeoning damage and falling prone on a failure, or half as much damage without falling prone on a success. The area becomes difficult terrain until cleared.
Mend the Green (Custom). Harrowroot releases a low pulse through living roots. One plant or beast it can see within 30 feet regains 9 () hit points. Harrowroot cannot use this action on itself.

Reactions

Sheltering Bough. When a creature Harrowroot can see within 10 feet is hit by an attack, Harrowroot can interpose a bough. Reduce the damage by 8 (). Harrowroot must be able to move and the attacker must not be more than one size larger than it.

Services they sell

Can guide respectful visitors through paths hidden by the grove.
Can identify damage to plants, soil, and water that it has personally sensed.
Can offer shelter beneath its boughs to those who have earned its trust.

Rewards they can give

A bundle of rare medicinal seeds from the grove's oldest surviving trees.
Guidance through hidden forest paths and access to the grove as a safe resting place, if Harrowroot trusts the party.
Knowledge of how to identify the spring's contamination and where it first entered the watershed.

Equipment

  • Keeper's Knot (keepsake)A faded blue strip of cloth knotted by Kett, kept as a reminder that trust can survive an argument.
  • Seed Cache (natural)A cluster of medicinal herbs and seeds tucked into a hollow in its trunk. They are gifts for the grove's keeper, not treasure.

Possessions

A faded blue strip of cloth from Kett
A hidden cache of seeds from dead and fallen trees
Several scraps of bark marked with the names of people who helped the grove

Background

Harrowroot was once the heart-tree of a sheltered grove called Bracken-and-Bell, a place where villagers brought sick animals and left fallen branches rather than cutting living wood. Its spirit awoke when a charcoal burner named Tamm cut a deep channel through its roots to drain a flooded kiln. Harrowroot's first conscious memory was the pain of water leaving the grove and the terrified faces of those who came to help. Years later, during a blight, Harrowroot trapped a band of woodcutters beneath a fallen limb, convinced they had poisoned the spring. One of them, a child named Kett, crawled back to free the others despite being injured. That act changed Harrowroot: it learned that harm and malice were not always the same thing. Kett grew up to become the grove's keeper and still argues with Harrowroot over what protection should mean. Now the spring is fouled again, this time with a bitter mineral runoff from an abandoned quarry, and Harrowroot's pain is worsening. It wants to learn who caused the damage before choosing whether to shelter or strike, but the grove's distress is making patience feel like betrayal.

Role in the story

A wounded guardian whose judgment is central to the quest "Prelude Session 4: Choices of Mercy." The party can help Harrowroot uncover the spring's true harm, prevent it from lashing out, and choose whether repair, accountability, or protection should come first.

“Its spirit awoke when a charcoal burner named Tamm cut a deep channel through its roots to drain a flooded kiln.”
From their background
Faction
Guardian spirit of Bracken-and-Bell, a grove named for the bracken that overruns its old stone boundary and the bellflower that grows around the spring.

Known connections

Kett, the grove keeper, is the child who once risked their life to free Harrowroot's prisoners. Kett now tends the spring and fears Harrowroot will become the danger they once helped it overcome.
Tamm, the elderly charcoal burner who cut the original drainage channel, taught Harrowroot that desperate people can cause lasting harm without intending cruelty. He visits rarely and brings seeds.
A quarry foreman called Grit has been sending workers to inspect the poisoned runoff. Harrowroot suspects him, but has not yet learned whether he is concealing negligence or trying to stop it.
Major secret · GM only
Minor secrets · GM only

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