It is possible that this is the most horrifying entry in the entire Monster Manual

Not the most terrifying – there are dozens of monsters that should make your Players’ hearts race as they wonder if they’ve gotten themselves into something they can’t handle.

But if you let them think about Awakened Plants for too long, your Players should feel a creeping sense that something terrible is happening that will linger with them for far longer than a fight with a Dragon or a Beholder.

At the heart of this creature is the Awaken spell – magic that can imbue a beast or a plant with sentience. It gains an Intelligence score of 10, which is the same as a Commoner, the ability to speak up to two languages and, if it’s a plant, the ability to move about.

Think about that. One minute, you have a lovely spreading oak tree, doing nothing more than photosynthesizing and hosting squirrel parties. And then it is aware. It has language and reason and understanding of the world around it. Awareness which, I’ll remind you, it never asked for.

What does that do to a person? At least when we’re born, we have no real self-awareness. That comes with time, and we have people to guide us into what we are becoming. With an Awakened Plant, there is no transition from planthood to sapience. Where once there was a rose bush, now there’s a person.

And that’s another thing: what rights does an Awakened Plant have? How should it be treated in a world of Humans and Orcs and Elves? Should they be given the same autonomy? Does a forest suddenly become a sovereign kingdom once the King of Trees opens its eyes and screams into the ancient woods, “I LIVE!“

That’s only the start of the web of horrifying questions that Awaken Plants raise. Their creation is an act of intention, remember: a Druid or a Bard or a god or some other powerful entity chooses to make this creature. But why? If the answer begins with any variation of “I need…” (i.e. I need a guard or I need a servant or I need an army), then you’re creating a person specifically to fulfill a purpose – a purpose decided by you, and last time I checked, that’s slavery.

What this all boils down to is a fundamental question of philosophy: Who counts as a person?

Is it the Sage Tree, an awakened, oracular tree at the center of a great forest who remembers everyone who has ever rested under its branches? What would it need from your Party in order to divulge what it knows? It has soil and sunlight – what more can your Party offer it?

Is it Underbrush Refugees, Awakened Plants that are running from a destructive planar rift in their forest, seeking a place to put down new roots? What happens when they try to take the space that local farmers need for their own crops?

Is it the Vengeful Canopy, furious at the destruction of their non-sapient siblings by an evil Wizard who is clear-cutting the forest to enable to creation of his foul Orc Army? If your Party rides with them, are they doing so because the Trees deserve vengeance, or are those Trees simply the tools your Party is using in their own quest?

Is it the Traumatized Tree, which lumbers into your Party’s campsite to put out their fire because it saw an entire forest burn once and will be damned if it lets that happen again?

These may be Plants, but they are thinking creatures, with just as much right to want things – peace, safety, revenge – as us meat-people.

Once your Party has decided what to do with the Awakened Plants, what might they do to the person who has Awakened them? The spell itself is expensive and difficult – requiring eight hours to cast and a 1,000 GP agate – but you’re the DM. If you want an angry Druid who has figured out how to do it faster and cheaper, you certainly can. If this Druid is churning out dozens of Awakened Plants to send out into the civilized world, of course your Party will want to deal with them.

Or perhaps an agent of the Feywild is Awakening plants just for fun – because the plants in their realm can talk and move and dance, so why shouldn’t the ones here? Now you have hundreds of plants out there causing chaos because some Archfey thought it would be fun.

Since this is also a Bardic spell, you could have a powerful Bard who Awakens plants to act as an audience for their work (work which more traditional audiences have resoundingly rejected). Or, even worse, as unpaid employees. Imagine a play put on by dogwoods and aspens, or a bunch of roadie rhododendrons?

But once you’ve dealt with the maniac who’s waking plants up, we’re left with our original question: what do you do with the Plants? The Plants who never asked to be called into this world and now have no purpose of their own? What are the consequences of creating something like this and leaving it to its own devices?

An Awakened Tree didn’t ask to exist. It can’t un-know what it knows, can’t return to peaceful photosynthesis. Someone decided this tree should be a person, and now the tree has to live with that choice forever. That’s not a monster problem. That’s a creation problem. And every time we create something – children, AI, art, ideas – we’re asking the same question: what do we owe the things we bring into being?

You might not answer that question in your D&D game, but you certainly should be able to sit with it.