Help develop this idea: A pyromanic treeant

[Le Noir Faineant]

Yeah,

Let's say some Ent decides he likes to play with fire.

How would this end?

No kidding, I am thinking of this principle as a campaign outline.

Important: I think there are enough darklords around not to create a new domain. But just as a principle, how would this play out? Any (perferrably silly) ideas are very welcome!

Yours,

Rafe

[ewancummins]

Yeah,

Let's say some Ent decides he likes to play with fire.

How would this end?

No kidding, I am thinking of this principle as a campaign outline.

Important: I think there are enough darklords around not to create a new domain. But just as a principle, how would this play out? Any (perferrably silly) ideas are very welcome!

Yours,

Rafe

A young and small ent shunned by his own kind for his interest in the ways of Man, 'Tindertwig', thought that the older ents had grown too stodgy and conservative, unable to adapt to the changing conditions of the world. He wanted to teach the other ents that they could live in peace with humanoids. He tried to demonstrate how controlled fires actually benefitted the woodlands, but the older ents expelled him for wrong-thinking.

Now an exile, Tindertwig entered the lands of Men. Although some druids and rangers treated him well enough, other humans fled screaming from the lumbering tree-man or simply treated him as a curiosity, a freak of nature. He was saddened and confused. Why were the majority of humans, such adaptable creatures, no more understanding than his fellow ents had been?

Bitterness grew in his wooden heart. He would make the humans understand. He saw the dry-rot of their filthy city, the contempt and fear they felt for him. Still, he hoped to teach them. Fire, a tool the humans used so well, could turn on then. He saw their fear of fire. If he were to set a fire, and then save the humans by stopping the blaze before it raged out of control, might they not accept him at last as their teacher and protector?

The night of the Great Blaze was unusually hot and dry for late autumn. That would not have mattered so much, but for the freak windstorm that blew in after Tindertwig set a small fire in the slums of the city. The wild winds spread the fire across a far wider area than the ent had intended. Unable to control the raging monster he had created, the young ent was burned badly and had to take refuge in the river. Hundreds of humans died in the flames and smoke, and many more lost their homes. The word was out that a moving tree had been spotted setting fire to a hut, and soon Tinderwtig went from a freakish curiousity to a hated and hunted public enemy.

The first men that came for him were found crushed. He fled into the woods of the city's remaining park, but the humans smoked him out. He escaped by floating down the river and hiding in the forested hills south of town. There he plotted a return to the city, to explain his error and regain the chance to teach. But the humans would not listen. They began to cut down many trees to rebuild what Tindertwig's blaze had destroyed. This was not acceptable. These humans were so stupid....

Better to burn them out and grow new humans. -new humans whom he could teach and guide. The mad idea grew and grew within the burned ent, and soon fires began to break out on farms and in the outskirts of town, always at night. A charred, twisted giant of living wood was seen stalking the lonely hills and creeping along the riverbanks to hole and sink boats with his mighty fists. Dozens of men and women were killed or driven from their homes in terror.

....

You add the rest, dude.

[Pale]

ewancummins has a good tale - but for me, I lean more toward the mania element, but not necessarily manic.

Fires in trees are orange, yellow, red, they flicker and flash like the leaves of autumn, but with a fury that the season cannot hope to match. What then of an Ent that cultivates an orchard, or even, unknown, a system of parks within a city, building these "gardens" in such a way that they are intense firetraps. The Ent uses its powers of cultivation and growth, and the puts the final animation to its canvases - fire.

The trees selected, their layout, density, chemistry - they are arrayed in such a manner so that when they do light, it is ...artistic.

At least to the Ent's eyes.

On the flipside, the caretaker, taken for granted, has just done something unthinkable to those who had previously benefited from his arrangements.

[Manofevil]

Now don't be hasty.

[Le Noir Faineant]

NICE!

Keep them coming. FWIW, I think of using the Runequest Adventure, Broken Tree Inn, as a base of the action. (Mainly the inn, not any of the other pieces.)

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Note that some trees ("fire climax pines") NEED fire to reproduce. Their seeds are sealed in a cone that only opens when a forest fire happens. Maybe that could be worked in somehow.

[Joël of the FoS]

Similar idea in the last Pathfinder: a treant struck by lightning, now with electric powers it can cast.

Joël