Help making a "forest druid"

[fishjam]

Hi, This is my first actual post after much much lurking and i need some help with a pathfinder game

I had a crazy/silly/kinda cool idea for my players that an entire forest was a single high level druid, but i need to work out how i can do the stats for it incase When they try to burn it down or chop down some wood etc.

I'm kinda stuck on what sort of level or stats i should give it.

Also keeping it mainly core would be most beneficial as the party are very new to the whole roleplay thing ( about 8th game, but theres 10 of em so me and a mate are splitting them into 2 smaller groups working together, each running 1 part)

I'm quite experienced at DnD and DMing but this is proving a challenge even for me.

Thanks in advance for any help.

PS: It is ment to be a "good guy"

[Kalirren]

Being a plant ecologist, the first kind of thing I would think about for this is a clone of poplar trees. A single poplar plant propagating vegetatively can easily end up covering a substantial area with ramets that are all genetically identical and connected underground.

You could stat it essentially as a swarmlike entity, and use the rules for awakened swarms given in the Fiend Folio I for Dark Speech, which state that its caster level is about equal to the square root of the number of organisms in the swarm.

Considering that Pando, the biggest known actual connected clone of trees in the world, is about 48 hectares big and has about 47,000 ramets, that's a bit strong. That thing should be epic, but not super-epic. Treating each ramet as a distinct "organism", RAW gives a caster level of sqrt(47,000) = 216. I'd accept 21. Call that factor of 10 the penalty for doing this with plants instead of vermin, which actually are conscious.

So if we backtrack from this, suppose you want a forest-druid of caster level N. You then want a single clone about N^2/8 hectares big.

If you wanted to make it stronger you could just increase the number of spell slots it has got without amping its caster level.

[fishjam]

Poplar trees were the inspiration actually.

How would you do things like constitution and all the normal stats. roll it normally and add some sort of racial mod.. which is quite important. I seriously expect the players to just try and kill this peaceful druid-forest.

Unfortunatly i do not own fiend folio so i cant use that, but i can just semi homebrew/wave over some of it so it stays thematically the same. the caster level thing though seems right i was thinking like a level 20 caster easily as it was going to cover an entire island and be another "intresting island encounter"

Any further ideas would be useful.

[Eldariel]

How about a Genius Loci (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/geniusLoci.htm) using a Druid as its "emulation target"? Fluff it the other way around; Druid used ritual to become the Genius Loci. It could serve as a good starting point anyways; being epic monster, the numbers might be a bit high.

[Kalirren]

Well - it doesn't have Strength. Neither does it have Dex. Con is interesting, and Int, Wis, and Cha might just be 3d6, or whatever is appropriate for the character you're trying to get - you seem to have one in mind.

As for attacking this thing - well, on an individual level, trees have hardness and hp defined by their diameter, that's within SRD. A clone that big with a single awareness probably wouldn't think of a tree or two being chopped as more annoying than we'd think of a biting fly. (Which is pretty annoying, admittedly.)

The sort of retribution I can imagine for chopping down a tree instead of using warp wood to get what you want out of the forest would be something like getting faerie-fired and then having a slightly large swarm of crows show up and all poop on your head.

Remember that Quench is a 3rd level spell. For flavor reasons I'd treat this thing as a 21st-level druid which can cast say, 3 spells at the party per round, spontaneously out of the druid spell list and refreshes spell energy continuously. Just keep track of total spell levels used per year.

Also, this is a forest with things living in and among it - large animals which can be spoken to, fae, multiple competing harems of dryads,...its defenses are deep and many.