You better hope it's not the great pumpkin, Charlie Brown!
Wow, it's been a while since I've done one of these! In the spirit of Halloween, I bring you a monster I picked right from the pumpkin patch, with art from Daniel Larios again - the great pumpkin!
Trying to get into the spirit of the holiday, I went through a couple of different ideas before settling on doing some sort of pumpkin monsters, giving me the chance to make another plant - but one that I wanted to mix with some undead traits. Basing it off of a jack-o'-lantern, I decided to give it fire immunity as well as negative energy since I wanted to have it be a symbiosis of plants and spirits. Lacking mobility, it mainly uses its long vines to attack victims before reeling in its prey to bite and then swallow whole, trapping prey in its cavernous interior where flames stoked by the souls possessing it persist. The great pumpkin can also unleash this fire in a blast in an attempt to incinerate foes. However, when reduced to less than 0 hp, the great pumpkin's ferocity activates and the fire within becomes cold, a manifestation of the spirits' deathly energies expressed through the negative energy it now deals. I also added in pumpkin patch so that it can create servant jack-o'-lanterns to venture from the patch to wreak havoc. Finally, on a suggestion from Blue, I included carved face to really capture the different faces that can be carved onto a jack-o'-lantern.
Pathfinder 1e:
I didn't do anything too crazy with the second edition version aside from give it the much better-named One Foot in the Grave to represent its power when it is near death. I did add some extra effects, allowing it to recharge its abilities when it is near death. However, something that I did add was a whole statblock for the jack-o'-lanterns it summons since they aren't a thing in PF2e yet. They're pretty straight copies of their 1e versions that were fun to make. Formatting wise, I'm not sure what's going on with their Pumpkin ability - it shows up fine in my document, but it moves the line when I save it as an image.
Pathfinder 2e:
Blue went above and beyond when it came to his version of this creature - not only did he make a statblock, he made a whole event to go with it! It's amazing and is something I'd love to run if D&D 5e was more fun.
Blue's D&D 5e Version:
With that whole event, which can be adapted to other systems easily enough, I'm not going to include any encounter hooks. I hope you guys like the work we've done and check out the rest of the blog for more.
If you want to join in on the discussion of what we're working on, have some of your own ideas you want to share, or just chat about TTRPG stuff, join our Discord! I also started a Twitch where I stream testing and occasionally making monsters, so stop on in.
Happy Halloween!
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