ECOLOGY

Environment any swamp or underground
Organization solitary
Treasure standard (alchemical items, other treasure)

The secretive and suspicious poleviks cultivate gardens of fungi in deep bogs and caves far from civilization, jealously guarding the secrets of their fungal alchemy from the rest of the world. Once natives of the land of the fey, they retain some of that place's potent life energy, which specifically encourages the growth of fungi and molds. This enables them to turn their own spry and twisted bodies into fertile ground in which to cultivate their signature puffball weapons.

Averaging a few inches shy of 4 feet tall and weighing approximately 115 pounds, individuals can vary in size depending on the number and size of fungal growths that they nurture upon their bodies. They rarely live beyond 300 years.

Ecology

Poleviks are omnivorous but prefer decomposing meat that is already furred with fungus or ripe with mold. They rarely go to the trouble of actively hunting food; instead, they scavenge the remains of small creatures that find their way into their lairs and fall victim to the dangerous plants and molds they cultivate. Although poleviks could subsist on the mushrooms that they grow, they consider it a terrible waste to use these mushrooms for something as prosaic as food.

As with many creatures of the land of the fey, their cycle of reproduction is somewhat bizarre; poleviks reproduce only after their death. As a polevik's body begins to rot, one of his unique fungal infestations begins to consume his flesh and eventually grows into a colony of large toadstools. After a period of 1 year, the stalk of the largest toadstool bursts open and gives birth to a new, fully grown polevik. While already possessing all the skills and abilities of his race, the newborn carries none of the memories of his progenitor. As a result, a newborn polevik knows nothing about the world beyond his immediate surroundings, and his paranoid nature gives him little desire to learn more. Instead, he begins to enthusiastically cultivate the corpse-grown fungal colony that gave birth to him, adding it to the fungal garden of his long-decomposed predecessor.

Habitat & Society

Poleviks are solitary and reclusive creatures who consider fungi and molds to be both their closest friends and their most treasured possessions. Though they are able to communicate with all types of molds and mushrooms, poleviks occasionally find fungi's limited frame of reference frustrating. This sometimes leads poleviks to associate with intelligent fungoid creatures such as leshies and myceloids, although they treat the former as servants and the latter as rivals.

Most scholars agree that the poleviks were cast out of the land of the fey, exiled for some ancient insult. Though scholars disagree on which of those unique beings the poleviks offended, evidence of polevik gardens has been discovered by travelers, leading to speculation that poleviks may have once been her servants. Exile may have stripped them of an unending existence in the land of the fey, but the stability of the material world gives them ample opportunity to cultivate and experiment with their beloved fungal companions. It is for these experiments that they are widely hunted by wizards seeking obscure spell components, and by alchemists who wish to learn the secrets of the polevik's miraculous ability to mix fungi into concoctions that seem impossible to create outside of a laboratory.

Fearful of the outside world, poleviks rarely leave their lairs, but creatures that find their way into a polevik's gardens face vicious opponents. While poleviks are dangerous on their own, their usual tactic is to lead interlopers within reach of the deadly molds and fungi with which they share their lairs. Most who seek poleviks fall prey to ascomoids, brown molds, phantom fungi, phycomids, violet fungi, yellow molds, and others long before they face the direct attacks of these obsessive fey.