Plants from Space!

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

As you've probably noticed from all the recent talk about falling stars and strange new worlds, Pathfinder #14 looks to the stars. With spacemen and moon monsters featuring so heavily in "Children of the Void" and the volume's other articles, it seemed appropriate to take this rare chance and dedicate a portion of the month's bestiary to the truly alien. Full-fledged, undisguised, world-traveling extraterrestrials, that is. Taking cues from our favorite otherworldly menaces, Pathfinder #14 unleashes three new alien enemies. But don't expect flying saucers and chest bursting from all of these terrifying travelers. Some, like the star-spawned moonflower, take more subtle approaches drawn directly from similar inspirational invaders from fiction and film.

"All plants move. They don't usually pull themselves out of the ground and chase you! If we could find out how this thing functions we might figure out an easier way of killing it."
—John Wyndham, Day of the Triffids

Alien plants have long found their way into entertainment: from the triffids of John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids; to the alien pod people of Jack Finney's novel The Body Snatchers and its superlative big-screen spawn, 1956's and 1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers and 1993's Body Snatchers; to the infamous "Feed Me!" of Seymore's Audrey II in Charles B. Griffith's Little Shop of Horrors. Roleplaying games are also no stranger to hungry plants from space, like those that appeared in 1980's Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. The moonflower owes its inspiration to these predecessors and dozens of other muses not of this world.

F. Wesley Schneider
Pathfinder Managing Editor