Plant the Seeds of Adventure with More Treants for your 5E D&D Games

Whether you are talking about Dungeons & Dragons or Lord of the Rings, treants have the ability to make a big impact. Not only are treants very large creatures — Huge in fact — but they are quite long lived and quite powerful.

Why aren’t there more treants in D&D?

Despite fifth edition D&D being around for about eight years now we have a staggeringly low two treant stat blocks — a basic treant and a treant sapling. If you expand the search to include tree you get three more. There is an animated tree, an awakened tree and a tree blight for a total of five stat blocks for which you can use trees or tree minis in your game.

I know you might say treants are more rare creatures and there are plenty of other plant monsters to use but this is not good enough for me. If you look at orcs or gnolls or plenty of other monster types there are lots of options. Fighters, rogues and spellcasters are easily accessed or converted from other humanoid stat blocks but when you look at other monster types it is not so easy to take an archmage and make it a treant. With all the books 5E D&D books we’ve got at this point I ask again — why do we not have more treats?

Normally treants are chaotic good, which places treants more on the side of the players and not as adversaries. [NERDITOR’S NOTE: Walk in the Woods from Out of the Box leans into this aspect for an engaging encounter!] But as crazy as players of this game can be I feel there should absolutely be more treants for when a spellcaster lets loose with a fireball way too many times in a forest encounter. When the goblin drug addicts in the party wander off to get high and force their drugs on the animals of the forest (as happened in one of our home games) we need some serious forest defenders to rise up out of the ground and put a whooping on those responsible.

Where are our spellcaster treants? Where are roguish treants literally blending in with other trees to sneak up on their foes? Options for monster types need to be a norm. We have different archetypes for humanoids and even for giants but not for treants. Apparently others agree with me as there are loads of plants in the D&D Beyond homebrew section if you search for trees. I will take a closer look at them and see what else I might notice missing for a follow up to this. I’ll create some variant treants to add to my own games and share them so you can add them to yours.

If you are looking to place some amazing tree minis on your battle grid you can look no further than our friends over at WizKids. With the latest release from their Pathfinder Battles there is the Mwangi Expanse. This is an adventure published by Paizo. I hope this one gets added to their 5E D&D conversion as they have a mighty treefolk creature called the Dimari-Daji. I do not have a copy of the adventure yet but I love the sculpt on this gargantuan tree with its mighty green beard. The mini is on a four inch base and stands just over eight inches tall. It is a lot of plastic that is not yet another dragon. Not that I have issues with dragons but I do love variety in the monsters I collect.

There are plenty of other great minis in this collection. Spiders, dragons and so many more are included in this very thematic set but the cool thing is there is another tree mini. Arboreal Warden comes ready for battle with a blade that seems to be made from plant matter.

Add these wonderful new minis to your collection. Grab them online and help support Nerdarchy or from your local game store.

Thanks for reading. Until next time, stay nerdy!

*Featured image — In Walk in the Woods an awakened tree asks for company on a long walk, telling tales and revealing much along the way. Discover this and 54 other dynamic encounters ready to drop right into your games with Out of the Box!

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