once a treant, still guarding
It lost that fight a long time ago and just kept standing.
The Waste wasn't always a waste. Something in the ground turned against the trees that used to mark its border, and the treant that kept them alive fought it for longer than anything rooted in place should have been able to. It lost. It's still standing anyway, bark gone grey and split, roots trailing rot into ground it still, out of habit, won't let anyone past.
Everything the Bole does either builds up on whoever it's touched or changes the ground they're standing on - no repeating damage pulse anywhere in its kit. It's the tankiest melee threat in the batch and the only one whose damage output climbs the longer a fight against it drags on, which is exactly the trap a rooted guardian should be able to set.
Feats
Skills
Every 2nd round it reaches for whoever's in melee range and leaves a stacking Blightrot affliction behind rather than a flat hit.
Each stack (up to 4 on the same target) drains 1 Strength that doesn't recover until the fight is over - a slow accumulation, not a burst. A target that stands in melee with it too long starts swinging noticeably weaker.
The stacking-on-contact pattern here is deliberately different from the timed-pulse curses the module's earlier bosses use - there's no save to shrug this one off entirely, only positioning to avoid taking more stacks.
Roots itself in place for good the moment it crosses 66% - trading away its own mobility for a damage zone.
Every round from here: anyone within 4m is entangled and takes 2d4 negative energy, and it heals back half of what it deals. A genuine zone-control phase, not another single-target pick.
Combined with Rotting Grasp's Strength drain, standing in melee with it for the middle third of the fight gets progressively worse rather than staying flat.
A ring of rotten seed-pods swells around it and detonates on a 2.5-second delay - the only telegraphed hazard in this batch, giving anyone paying attention a real chance to step clear.
4d6 negative energy to anything still within 6m when the pods go off, and a flat 20 HP heal for the Bole regardless of whether they land.
The delay is the point: every other "once, below 33%" trigger in this batch of five fires immediately. This is the one fight that rewards noticing the tell and moving.
The base game's stock treant blueprint here originally ran 8 levels of an inflated Giant-class stat stick with only 39 HP - badly under-tuned for its own labeled CR 9. A real SRD Treant is a clean CR 7 at 7 Hit Dice, which is where the first rebuild landed it; the revision to CR 25 scales the same real-treant proportions up to 20 Hit Dice rather than inventing new class fiction - Str, Con, and HP all grow together, the same way every other boss in this pass was scaled.
Every mechanic here was chosen to avoid the flat damage-over-time pulse this module's undead casters lean on, and that's untouched by the revision. Rotting Grasp stacks rather than pulses, Bramble Roots is a standing zone rather than a repeating single-target snare, and Bloomrot Burst is the only telegraphed, dodgeable hazard in the whole set of five - a guardian that lost a slow war should feel like slow, mounting pressure rather than a countdown timer.
| Var | Meaning | Value |
|---|---|---|
| BOSS | bypasses the drop-rate roll entirely | 1 |
| LOOPS | loot generation passes | 2 |
| CLEAR | inventory cleared before filling | 1 |
| TYPE | item category rolled | 26 (Boss Drop) |