D&D 5E How Would You Do This Concept?

[Zardnaar]

The PCs have found an ancient weapon known as a prism flower.

It's essentially a sentient living construct crystal flower that was designed to be an AA gun for dragons. They are semi mobile set up a few of them and they can fire at will sunbeams or something.

As far as they know it's the last one near the end if it's life cycle. They want to use it as shore defence vs ships.

Once it runs out of juice it expires and fires out seeds to germinate "where ever the light shines".

However letting a sentient 88mm or 128mm magical self replicating AA gun exist might not be the best idea.

So would you stat it out as a creature, weapon or something like a trap. Individually not that great point 20 of them at a Dragon......

 

[ccs]

Probably a trap/hazard. Kinda like encountering green slime & such.

Probably need to come up with a reason/mechanism how its targets (prey?) Are selected. And how to reprogram it.
I'm envisioning something like a venus flytrap who's prey is "flyers larger than x". So dragon flies near, flowers track & fire vampiric rays at it....

As for it reproducing? Its final beam fires & scatters seeds/spores along the beams arc.

 

[Richards]

My first thought was that if this was designed as an anti-aircraft gun for dragons, it's probably going to be difficult to redeploy against ships (unless the ships happen to be flying overhead...).

My next thought was that if is indeed the last one of its type, there must already exist a means by which these things can be prevented from self-replicating into unwieldable numbers.

I'd probably stat them up as creatures - it sounds like these might be something you'd need to fight if you wanted to cut down their numbers or prevent them from taking down your allied flying vessel/allied flying creature/whatever. The fact that they're mobile leads me to veer away from using them as mere traps or hazards. I'm also admittedly coming at this from a 3.5 perspective, where "living construct" is a creature type (from the Eberron setting).

Johnathan

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

This can move, attack and be killed. I'd definitely treat it as a creature.
It was artificially created, but as a self-replicating organism, so there would be some measure in place to prevent overpopulation. Maybe the seeds need to be artificially treated to be viable. Maybe without this the flower will produce a bunch of seeds which produce beautiful, but normal flowers. Maybe the soil needs to be treated to grow specific plots of the flowers.

In terms of their attack, I'd suggest a beam of radiant energy requiring a Dex save to avoid. Dragons tend to have too good an AC for a relatively low-level creature to hit them.

 

[Scott Christian]

I agree with Cap'n. It can do all those things, so I say creature.

As far as germination, maybe it is powerful because it is near the end of its life. Maybe the seedlings are a lot less powerful, like d4 cantrip damage once an hour.

 

[Umbran]

"You are a sentient being. I want to use your power for my own benefit, but deny you the right of having children that all us other sentient beings have."

Why should this flower agree to this?

 

[Zardnaar]

"You are a sentient being. I want to use your power for my own benefit, but deny you the right of having children that all us other sentient beings have."

Why should this flower agree to this?

They made a DC 27 or so persuasion check.

Might not be a living construct could be a crystalline plant.

I haven't put much thought into it's reproduction rate.

It's a fetch quest from the Seekers.

Seekers like finding things from the past and using them. This includes WMD.

They're opposed by the Guardians. They like hoarding things.

In previous campaigns they have found weapons from the past.

Some if the longer lived races still have individuals who were there in the ancient wars or not to many generations removed.

3000 years ago desecration wars, the day of 1000 Suns, temples to dead gods,. Ancient secrets buried in multiple world's things like that.

They know at least one ancient survived the wars as well.

 

[Charlaquin]

"You are a sentient being. I want to use your power for my own benefit, but deny you the right of having children that all us other sentient beings have."

Why should this flower agree to this?

It wouldn’t, unless you use the secret command phrase: “if every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn’t have hot dogs.”

 

[Umbran]

They made a DC 27 or so persuasion check.

Or, did they not tell the critter that they don't intend to allow it to reproduce?

If it finds out about that, should not the thing turn upon them? How about we let those ships through... and bombard whatever you're trying to protect!

 

[Tonguez]

I’d stat it as a creature, its an unusual construct or a plant. You’d also need to given it some way of sensing both aerial and marine targets - could be some kind of light sensitive trigger thats not quite vision

For its reproduction, maybe they only throw seeds once a century and the seeds need very specific factors to germinate - perhaps the ground needs to be deep in highly sulphuric ash?