Once a month or so, we’ll do a Random Monster Mashup! This could take many forms – maybe see what happens when the monsters fight or team up, think about what kinds of circumstances might result in this situation, and even, if we’re feeling really creative, think about what happens if we stick these two monsters in a teleporter together and hit “SEND.”

For this entry, you couldn’t ask for two more different creatures. The Dryad is a creature of abundant life, of protection. She guards her grove like a precious jewel, keeping flowers and trees in bloom wherever she goes.

A Wight, on the other hand, is an Undead agent of death. It seeks out the living and cuts them down, venting its rage on those who have wronged it

Put them together, and you have an adventure that touches on some really fundamental human questions.

What are we protecting, and how far will we go to protect it?

What do we fight for, such that even death will not stay our hand?

Pitting them against each other would be interesting, but what might be even more interesting would be seeing how these two concepts could combine. What if Life and Death reside in one being – how truly terrible would she be?

We begin with what was once a forest. There is evidence here that life once flourished: fallen logs, ashy grey leaves on the ground, the skeletons of wild creatures that could not escape fast enough.

Somewhere in the center of this desolation is a withered tree, once tall and strong, now pale and dead, its branches long bare. The guardian of that tree, however, refuses to leave, determined to exact justice for what was done to her woods. And so, the Dark Dryad begins to spread her rage and hate across the land.

This Dryad is bound to a dead or corrupted tree. How it happened is up to you, and whether the corruption was slow or sudden will be vital to how she behaves. But the important thing to remember is that her bond to her tree is powerful, and it’s been twisted into something terrible. Warped into a hungry reflection of the love she once had for the woods and all that called it home.

She still keeps watch. She still guides travelers through her woods.

But now, she guides them to graves, not groves.

Mechanically, she should combine the most terrible of their powers. For example:

• Speak With Beasts and Plants could be replaced with Speak With Dead with the corpses in her grove. You could put a recharge condition on it, or give her a per-day use limit, but this is someone who knows death intimately, and should be able to call them forth at will.
• Physical Attacks such as Vine Lash and Thorn Burst could be enhanced with the Wight’s Life Drain ability, slowly chipping away at your Players’ ability to heal.
• Spellcasting can change entirely. Give her spells such as Blight or Wither and Bloom or Chill Touch and watch her leach the life away from her target.
• An Aura of Decay around her Tree that saps your Players of their Strength or Constitution. Magical or environmental – take your pick, but keep in mind how it will change encounters.
• Protective Frenzy – a condition where, if your Players damage her Tree, she attacks recklessly.

Focus on the environment around her as well. Floating embers or motes of dust, black rotting trees against a hazy, sunless sky. Corpses littering the ground around the Tree, their skin half-converted to bark and wood.

When you play her, lean into the Tragic rather than the malicious. She was a once-beautiful creature who has been brought town by an uncaring world.

Think Tennessee Williams’ Blanche DuBois. “The White Wood” indeed – the beauty who was too precious for this world, corrupted and turned into a dark mockery of what a protective spirit should be.

When she speaks, she speaks in two tones – one soft, one hollow, sometimes the sentence begins in one and ends in the other. Her sentences start and end predatory and cruel. She remembers names, but never correctly. She’s pleasant to those who come to her grove, but only in the same way a spider is polite, waiting for a victim with pleasant words and cruel promises so that she can add to the garden of bones that she plants around her Tree.

With this Dark Dryad, you can explore all kinds of important ideas. For example, you could explore ideas of corruption, either natural, arcane, or industrial. Someone is being cruel to these woods, and that cruelty has consequences in the creation of a creature that should never be.

She could also be a great creature to put into a quest involving mission people or haunted ruins. She’s the last living thing at the center of a natural oblivion. Perhaps she saw the people you’re looking for, or remembers the village that was built here, but her memory comes with a cost. She is the only source of truth about what destroyed the forest — but telling that truth hurts her.

And in the end? Does your Party manage to cleanse her Tree, freeing her from undeath and bringing life back to the world? Or do they destroy it, taking the Dark Dryad with it in a sigh of gratitude and a shower of dust?

However they deal with her, this creature will force your Party to deal with questions of life and death, of protection and vulnerability.

A guardian doesn’t stop guarding just because she dies.

She just can’t tell the difference between saving something and keeping it.