Shambling Mound
The Shambling Mound, or Shambler, is a plant monster from Dungeons & Dragons (and little relation to the Lovecraftian entity of the same name). First debuting in The Strategic Review #3, August 1975, it has become a quite a prolific creature, appearing in the baseline Monster Manual for every single edition of D&D from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition to Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. Despite this, they were not considered product identity so they were included in the OGL and they are included in Pathfinder as a result.
Shambling Mounds are hulking, roughly humanoid masses of vegetation and swampy muck, described as either partially decaying or as a verdant mass of living greenery, depending on the edition. Mindless predators, they roam swamps and jungles, moving with surprising stealth for such large creatures, attacking living beings and killing them with either brutal bludgeoning blows or by smothering them under its bulk; it then consumes the decomposing flesh for nutrition. They have a strange affinity for lightning; they are usually immune to it, and sometimes are actually empowered by it, similarly to a Flesh Golem.
Depending on who you ask, Shambling Mounds were inspired by either Marvel Comics' Man-Thing, DC Comics' Swamp Thing, or even just The Heap, a Golden Age monster-hero character from Hillman Comics who basically inspired both of the latter.
The D&D Cartoon episode "The Prison Without Walls" revolves around the child adventurers having to rescue a gnome wizard who has been polymorphed into what is clearly a Shambling Mound by the evil mage Venger.
An "Ecology of the Shambling Mound" run by the Monster Hunters Association appeared in Dragon Magazine Annual #2, their third chronological appearance.
According to the 2nd Ravenloft Gazetteer for 3rd edition, the Misty Domain of Darkon is home to a variant Shambling Mound called a "Mandragora", which is characterized by being unusually intelligent. They are created when animals consume water tainted with spuma vitae, a mutant algae oversaturated with positive energy, which will hijack their bodies and grow into a vegetative mockery of their former identity. Mechanically, drinking spuma vitae-tainted water gives you Fast Healing 1 for 24 hours, but if you die during this time period, the algae will consume your body and transform into a shambling mound with Intelligence equal to (the Host's Intelligence - 2d4), and retaining the memories of their host body, minus (10*Int lost)%.
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Dragon Annual #2
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