Characteristics
CLIMATE/TERRAIN: Any climate except Arctic Deserts
FREQUENCY: Very Rare
ORGANIZATION: Copse
ACTIVITY CYCLE: Day
DIET: Nil
INTELLIGENCE: 5-7 Low intelligence
TREASURE:
ALIGNMENT: Lawful Evil
Encounter Information
NO. APPEARING: 10-100
ARMOR CLASS: 0
MOVEMENT: 0
HIT DICE: 8
THAC0: 13
NO. OF ATTACKS: 1/person/round
DAMAGE/ATTACK: 10-1000
SPECIAL ATTACKS: Heat Beam
SPECIAL DEFENSES: Destroy missile weapons in flight
MAGIC RESISTANCE: Nil
SIZE: Large
MORALE: Fearless (20)
XP VALUE: 9000
Description
Sun flowers are cones with a dish reflector set atop a turnable axle. They are found only in the midst of deserts that are very arid, having no cloud-cover to hinder the plants sunlight-focusing weapon. Athas is a particarly well-suited world for sun flowers, but any arid desert can host these evil plants
Combat
Sun flowers are exceptionally dangerous for three reasons. First, the range of their heat beam is 6,000 feet (over 1 mile)! Second, they grow in large copses of up to a hundred plants. During the daytime NOTHING can approach a sun flower copse and survive. Third, the plant can sweep the heat beam very rapidly, in effect hitting every target within a 30 degree arc. The termperature of the beam is 18,000 degrees centigrade, quite hot enough to totally vaporize a human. In this case, 1 structure point = 1 hit point. An overcast day or a clear moonlight night reduces damage to 1-20 without reducing the beam's range. However, even with only starlight (or the party's own light sources!) the plant can still fire the beam for 1-6 damage, although range is reduced to a mere 100 feet and missile weapons can't be burned out of the air. Assuming a Darkness or Continual Darkness can be cast on the plant (the plant gains a saving throw) the beam will be totally negated. However, casting darkness (even continual darkness) on one's self is little protection against a full strength beam. It gives 90% protection but that still leaves 1-100 points of damage per round! A slow spell cast successfully on the plant is quite effective, the plant loses the ability to burn missile weapons out of the air, and can only attack a single target per round. (Assuming it misses its saving throw). When the beam is at full strength armour is ignored as is defensive adjustment when calculating a victim's AC. Fire resistance is useless agains a full power beam, although it will protect against the reduced beams. The plant is totally immune to heat, fire, and electricity due to a glass like outer coating. Cold affects it normally. A shatter spell or sonic weapons will leave it vulnerable to all the above effects, and in addition, lowers the armour class to 9. Petrification will reverse this effect. If the plant(s) have a full strength beam missile weapons will be burned out of the air before they strike, thus are totally useless. A moonlight/overcast beam can destroy wooden arrows fired from further than 100 yards away before they hit the plant.
Habitat/Society
Sun flowers have massively deep root systems that connect them to others in their copse. As the copses conquer the land they come closer together until their root systems encounter one another and merge. They communicate through their roots, becoming a massive community. What one plant says will eventually spread throughout the network. Sun flowers are very social plants and find the "speech" of their fellows a psychological necessity. Cutting them off from the community is equivalent to sensory deprivation in a human. It's difficult to believe plants can be xenophobic, but sun flowers tolerate NO other forms of life. They destroy anything and everything living within range. Not even flame scarabs can handle a copse of sun flowers in full sunlight. Needless to say this doesn't endear them to other creatures, especially sentient races. Sun flowers are a threat to evey living creature in their reach. And sun flowers are incredibly determined to extend their reach as far as they can as quickly as they can. The only advantages the other races have is the length of time a sun flower requires to reach reproductive maturity, and the fact they are reasonably weak at night. That, and the fact that flame scarabs consider sun flowers an irresistable delicacy. Flame scarabs can shrug off the moonlight strength heat beams of a small copse of mature plants or a larger copse of younger plants, although a massive copse (more than 100 plants) is too much for even flame scarabs to handle. Their lasers are capable of cutting through the axles that support the reflector, or slicing through the reflector itself. (The laser is too much light for the sun flower to handle, it causes the reflector to shatter). Once the plants are defenseless the scarab simply bulls through the copse, gorging itself. A scarab will smash every single plant, even though the scarab can't eat more than one or two a night. Often a pair or trio of scarabs will come upon a single copse and (accidentally) cooperate in the copse's destruction, spending up to two weeks eating their windfall. Sunflowers do have one class of enemy they're completely helpless against--anything that attacks from underground, and doesn't come to the surface. Sun flowers can't use full strength heat beams to penetrate the ground near them because this would destroy their roots, leaving them unable to communicate to their fellows and (if the damage were severe enough) certainly kill the plant itself.
Ecology
Sun flowers are the plantlife equivalent of army ants. Sun flowers will completely destroy any animal life within their range, and all non-sun flower plant life as well. Their purpose in life is to spread over every square inch of land they can, spreading desert conditions where ever they grow in order to spread themselves. The plants reproduce by spewing a fine mist of seed material and heating it with gentle (non-damaging) touches of their heat beams. This causes the mist to rise high in the air (thousands of feet), thus spreading the seeds where ever the prevailing winds blow. The mist gradually coalleses into viable seeds and fall to earth. Such a mist can travel hundreds of miles, falling to contaminate huge areas of land downwind. Random effects of atmosphere and the parents instinctive slight changes in heat output cause the mist to travel at different altitudes, which means it can catch winds travelling in different directions. Sometimes even a single spawning mist can travel in 3 or more directions simultaneously! Sun flowers are hermaphoditic, the mist contains both male and female components, which cross pollinate during the flight, allowing the exchange of genetic material between widely seperated parent plants A plant takes one year to mature, gaining a heat beam after two months. The plant grows steadily throughout the year, so it's easy to calculate the plant's hit points and damage as 10% per month of age over two months. Thus a 3 month old plant has 10% of its mature hit points and 10% of the beam damage (1-100). It's also 3' tall, gaining one foot in height per month. The axle and reflector add up to 10% to a plant's height. Plants do not gain their full protective covering until a year old. They start as AC 9, subtracting 1 AC for each month of growth after the second (a 3 month old plant is AC 8). Plants can't reproduce for at least 10 years, this is one of the few weaknesses that sentient races can exploit to hinder the horror's spread. It is well documented that sun flowers have acute senses of some kind, they can spot motion of large creatures well outside the range of their heat beams, and small creatures within a couple of hundred yards. They can even spot incoming arrows and slingstones far enough away to burn them out of the air within a second of being launched. However their senses extend beyond mere motion sensing, since they can burn out other plantlife from around their bases with surgical precision, or blast trees at the limit of their heat beam's range.

Generated by the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Core Rules 2.0 Expansion on 04/09/2000 03:17 PM