The Rogue Trader rulebook contains many entries concerning dangerous plants and alien wildlife. A far better blog than mine has many examples of them. Now, hopefully you've clicking on the link, been enthralled then felt a bit guilty about being so fickle and returned here. Anyway since my earliest encounter with Rogue Trader, I dearly wanted to create some of the wondrous things to adorn my gaming table. Nearly thirty years later and my ability is approaching my ambition. I was looking around in my loft for some new endeavor when I found a White Dwarf with lots of Catachan Jungle Fighters on the cover looking like they've just walked of the set of 300; More Muscled Men With Oiled Torsos. I opened it up and found this page........





Back in the good old days when Paul Sawyer was editor.













The Strangleplant is pretty cool, it stays in the same place waiting for a foolish mobile critter to get within the range of it's stamen, think ovipositor, but way dirtier. Once it's done it's filthy business on the unfortunate creature then it's lights out.





Making the Strangleplants was pretty easy, just grab some hobby wire, tightly coil it round itself leaving the multitudinous stamen to coil around themselves erotically and then wrap some bandages around the trunk. The bandages I used were a sort of rubberized type that I were used for the treatment of ulcers, not a particularly nice image but it could be pertinent to someone looking in the pound shop/ eurosaver outlets in their local high street. The actual roots were made of greenstuff to help secure them to their bases.





The Catachans in this picture are not falling for the Strangleplant's come hither ploy.





The article about the plants is in White Dwarf 242, so some Internet-Fu is necessary to track it down. The rules for said plant are pretty straight forward, any model moving within 6" of the Strangleplant must roll equal to or under their strength characteristic on a d6 or be removed as a casualty. In 8th edition I'd say the unit takes a mortal wound instead. In my skirmish games Necromunda or Inquisimunda the rules will suffice. Needless to say these things will need some sort of secret deployment rules that I can work on later.





Sadly for YTS trooper Terry from Necromunda, basic training did not cover hostile alien plants. Sadly, he won't get to kill any more xenos for the Emperor.





So the plan is to add to my current jungle terrain the following, some innocuous trees (that may or may not have dangerous characteristics), a Spore Tree, Brainleaf (Catachan or otherwise), Canak Floater, Miral Catcher, Venus Mantrap, Sucker Tree, Catachan Mantrap, and possibly a Spitting Cactus. I have plenty of other creatures from my Fantasy Battle collection to add to my jungle games. That won't be the end of it though, I will work out how to create Triffids and some of the other deadly plants found in the Rogue Trader rulebook. So with all that Oldhammer goodness just over the horizon, I will bid you farewell and happy gaming.



