Weird, Lesser — Wood

[ Bestiary | Elemental-Kin | Weirds ]
[ Lesser Weird ] [ Air | Earth | Fire | Metal | Water | Wood ] [ True Weird ]

Weird, Lesser — Wood

Lesser elemental weirds appear as strange, snake-like beings. Their bodies are composed entirely of a single element, and while their forms are somewhat malleable, they’re usually around five feet long. They lack the humanoid grace of the mysterious humanoid true weirds though, instead resembling restless spirits that have been perpetually caught between states of being.

DESCRIPTION: A lesser wood weird is a rolling briarpatch of animated vine and tumbleweed. It knits itself into a limber whip-like woody snake which creaks like wicker and shimmers with fresh leaves that unfurl and furl as it thinks. It carries the scents of green sap, sun-warmed hay, damp loam, and just a hint of crushed mint. When startled or excited, it sprouts thorns and catkin tassels. To attack, it extrudes poison ivy tendrils, and when it moves it sloughs back into a bramble-wheel that can roll with surprising speed, scattering chaff and seed as it goes. Bees often buzz around wood weirds, feeding from the nectar they extrude.

HABITAT: Wood weirds favour life in the sun and wind: scrub plains, dune-grass, rolling prairies, orchard fringes, and wildfire-scarred woods where pioneer plants race to reclaim the ash. In deep country they haunt hedgerows, sleeping as innocuous brush piles by day and ranging at dusk. Underground, they move with the roots between cisterns and cellar-stores in ruined settlements swallowed by greenery. In the Plane of Wood, they gravitate to living thickets and vine-mazes. Wood weirds travel by growing as much as moving, using trellises of roots to cross gaps or climb. They vanish into bushes and trees the way a fish slips through reeds.

PHILOSOPHY / SOCIETY: Philosophically, wood weirds are pragmatists of give-and-grow: they gladly bend, reroot, and try again. They think quickly, but they measure time in seasons, not seconds. Their flexible natures are both physical and moral—wood weirds prefer graft and compromise over breakage. The elders are those that remember old fires and old rains and can tell which way the wind will carry seed. They respect resilience, reciprocity, and the wisdom of pruning; they mistrust salt, over-harvest, and anything that consumes too much water.

Weirds can be a xenophobic bunch, and don’t really like any cutters who aren’t wood elementals—and this has led many planewalkers to believe all weirds are wicked. Wood weirds love life on the Prime, but are very defensive of plants and especially trees. They frequently come into conflict with lumberjacks and even druids, if they feel the spellcaster is misusing their plant companions. The most benevolent wood weirds sometimes even align themselves with the Princes of Elemental Good.

ECOLOGY: Wood weirds photosynthesise and drink from dew and soil, but they also “eat” stress: they thrive after wind, drought, and grazing, healing quickly by rerouting growth and knitting splints of woody fibre. Their bodies host epiphytes, moss, fungi, and insect-denizens who repay the favour by cleaning pests, or warning of danger—each wood weird is a traveling microhabitat.

Wood weirds tend to be solitary, but when their paths cross they might braid themselves together to share water, strength, and news through phloem-whispering. When the seasons change, then it’s time to loosen and part company forming more weirds than originally came together to create the thicket. However, they each retain a share of the combined memories of the weirds who sired them, so while the original weirds effectively cease to exist, part of them lives on in the new weirds too.

Graybeards believe that elemental weirds are the immature form of the true weird, although how long these creatures remains in this larval stage isn’t known. It is also strange how they reproduce as lesser weirds, only occasionally becoming true weirds, who do not themselves seem to spawn lesser weirds—which is partly the reason the question of how the two types of creatures are linked is not settled. As they age, lesser weirds seem to become less ethically fickle, and the current theory is that after many cycles of reproduction they eventually mature and settle down as true weirds.

Lesser wood weirds tend to be solitary, unless in the company of a true weird. A cluster of lesser wood weirds (called a ‘thicket’) can often be found nearby true weird pools, where they gather to commune with the elder true weird, perhaps to learn from them, perhaps to defend them. They converse with each other through leaf movements and nutrient exchange through their roots rather than speech, so solidfolk can only communicate with a lesser wood weird using magic.

COMBAT: A wood weird fights like a living snare line. It is able to grab opponents from a distance with thrashing vines, then strangle them. It can spray acidic spores at short ranges, or use primal magic to raise plant barriers, or fire volleys of barbs. It shapes the field on the fly, putting out roots to make the surroundings difficult terrain for its opponents, while it glides through plantlife and strikes from behind. Wood weirds are revitalised by earth, air, water, plant, wood or electricity magic. They are less vulnerable than you might expect to fire, perhaps because forest fires are a part of their natural life cycle. Their weaknesses are metallic and slashing weapons, especially axes, which they greatly fear.

Sources

Full Statistics For: [ PF2e ]

Canonical Sources: Monstrous Compendium Volume II (as elemental, water weird); Dragon Magazine #347 p66-69;70-71 ‘the ecology of the elemental weird’ (air, earth, fire, water); Monster Manual II [3e] p91-92 (lore on true weirds)

Source: Margarita and Jon Winter-Holt. Canonwatch: These creatures are based on the elemental weirds from AD&D 2e. Wood was introduced as an elemental plane by AD&D Oriental Adventures, and more recently in Pathfinder’s Rage of Elements. I’ve extrapolated the elemental weird to these new environmental niches.