Verdant Basilisk, A Sylvan Monster

Verdant Basilisk

Description:  An eight foot long hybrid of serpent and lizard, sporting ten short legs and a head like a short-snouted crocodile with saw-like teeth.  The creature is covered with leaf-shaped scales, and sports a frill of grass-like hair running down its spine and forming a tuft at the tip of its tail.  Its scales change color seasonally, ranging from brilliant green in the spring and summer to a motley of red, orange, yellow and brown in autumn to faded grayish-white during the winter.  

Abilities:  A verdant basilisk has the same physical attacks as "normal" basilisks do in your preferred game system, or if your game lacks basilisks of any kind it bites for about as much damage as a longsword swing.  They can swim adequately and are very good at climbing, often ambushing victims from the trees overhead.

The creature's petrification effect functions according the normal rules (ie try to avoid its gaze, or being bitten, or in some systems being breathed upon, and if you can't do so then you must try to resist using your sheer fortitude or magical defenses), but rather than turning its victims to stone a verdant basilisk's gaze (or bite, or breath) transforms creatures into young trees.  

A roughly human-sized creature twists and contorts into a tree roughly ten feet tall and six to eight inches in diameter, while smaller creatures become saplings.  These trees radiate an aura of transformative magic, and will grow swiftly over time if rooted in a suitable environment, reaching heights of about fifty feet within five years.   The lair of a verdant basilisk will usually be surrounded by dense thickets of these tress, which even mundane examiners may identify via their distinctive hastate leaves and scars from basilisk claws and bites.

A basilisk tree that perishes for any reason reverts to its original form in death, as does any equipment or treasure it was carrying when transformed.  Considerable amounts of random loot can be found amongst the leaf litter and mold of a verdant basilisk's territory, and ruthless adventurers might find more by resorting to axes or fire to "harvest" helpless victims.

Magic that reverses petrification has no effect on a basilisk tree, although most druids and some priests of nature deities have access to mechanically identical spells or rituals that can do the same job.  Even with such magic there's another danger not seen with "normal" petrification.  A verdant basilisk's victims remain dimly aware of their situation while a tree, and the longer one spends in that state the greater the chance that they'll go quite mad from the experience.  There's no danger within the first three months, but after that they have a cumulative 5% chance each season of being hopelessly insane if revived.  Bonuses to resisting madness or mind-affecting magic will decrease this chance.       

Behavior:  These creatures are technically herbivores, as they subsist entirely upon the foliage of their transformed victims.  Despite this, they display a keen hunting instinct and actively seek out those who enter its territory in order to add to the groves they feed in.  While only of animal intelligence their behavior is actively malicious, and they'll frequently "torture" transformed victims by clawing trunks and gnawing off smaller branches.  Verdant basilisks are most aggressive during the spring and summer, concentrating on gorging itself during the fall in preparation for winter hibernation.  They generally dig three or four separate dens deep among the roots of the largest of their trees, moving between them randomly from day to day.

Possible Origins:  Unclear, but some sages speculate that they may be a magical mutation of the more traditional basilisk species.  There are obscure myths claiming that all basilisks originated from a divine curse targeted at specific folk, with the verdant basilisk being aimed at elves and other sylvan races while the "normal" turn-you-to-stone basilisks are the bane of the Dwarves and mountain trolls.

Treasure:  None, beyond what you can find on the forest floor where victims have died and transformed back into their original forms.  Most mundane gear will be much the worse for wear thanks to exposure to the elements and loose coins will be time-consuming to find and collect, but magical gear is more likely to survive intact and easier to locate if one can detect arcane emanations.  

Chopping down the creature's victims will make collecting treasure much easier and it will be in better shape, but the majority of a basilisk's prey won't be carrying powerful magic or expensive gear or they wouldn't have become victims in the first place.  This approach may excite comment from anyone presented with evidence of what was done, such as accidentally attempting to sell a looted family heirloom to a relative of the now-deceased victim.