Triffids

Powers and Abilities

Triffids are plants with a limited intelligence and survival instincts. In temperate latitudes they average seven feet in height when fully grown, while in the tropics they can reach 10 feet.

Triffids have a tall straight stem springing from a woody bole which is shaggy with little rootlet hairs. This bole is roughly spherical with three bluntly-tapered roots extending from the lower part.

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Lash

At the top of the stem is a funnel-like cup formation which has a tightly-coiled green whorl within, resembling a rolled fern frond. This whorl can uncoil to form a ten foot-long, prehensile stinging lash.

It can strike out at passing animals or humans with considerable speed and force, drawing blood if it strikes unprotected skin. It is noticeable that triffids tend to aim at the most vulnerable areas, usually the head.

The end section of the lash is studded with small sacs filled with a deadly poison which burst on impact. These release their contents into the bloodstream of the victim through the wound inflicted by the sting and causing death almost instantly.

The sting leaves behind a distinctive rectangular welt with linear cuts running along it, with traces of the dark green poison often visible in the wound.

Stem

The triffid can bend its stem somewhat, extending the reach of the sting by several feet. The stem does not snap under pressure but is weak enough to be crushed.

Three small, bare sticks grow straight up beside it, along with short sprays of leathery green leaves. The sticks can be moved enough for the triffid to tap them against the stem in order to create a rattling noise which in some way enables it to communicate with other triffids.

It is clear from experiments that triffids can hear, or at least sense vibrations in the air. Triffids are very sensitive to nearby movement and can be very dangerous to unwary passers-by.

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Carnivorous

Triffids are primarily carnivorous. They can digest insects which become caught in a sticky liquid secreted within the cup formation at the top of the stem which contains the coiled-up sting.

But a triffid is also capable of assimilating an animal or human it has killed with its sting. It uses the prehensile lash to pull chunks of rotting flesh from the decomposing corpse. Then it places them in the cup to be digested by the liquid there.

It is necessary for the triffid to wait until decay sets in before it can begin to feed upon its kill. The flesh on a freshly killed body is too tough for the sting to pull apart.

Locomotion

Triffids are the only known plant capable of locomotory movement. They can lift themselves about one foot off of the ground on their three thick roots.

They walk rather like a man on crutches, sliding two roots forward and then lurching so that the third draws level with them. At each step, the stem whips violently back and forth. Their maximum speed is about average human walking pace.

In the wild, triffids move slowly and apparently at random. They’ll emit their distinctive rattling sound all the while. Their calls can carry for a considerable distance.

Hunting

When a triffid senses the presence of potential prey its call will become faster and louder. It will home in on its prey along the path of least resistance until it becomes close enough to attack with its sting. Wild triffids may also conceal themselves in thick foliage, lie in wait for prey and ambush them.

Once its prey has been stung and killed, a triffid will approach. Then it waits to one side with its roots sunk into the earth until the body becomes decayed enough to eat.

A triffid hearing the rapid call of another triffid will become more active, and will follow the sound. This can result in a lone triffid, or a small group, quickly becoming a large threatening herd.

Typically, triffids will push against any barrier separating them from their prey. A lone triffid will have little impact on most barriers, but a large herd can bring down even a strong fence.

They possess sufficient inherent survival instinct to be repelled from an electric fence. They are intelligent enough to learn that, if they cannot hear the sound of a generator powering the fence, it means that the fence is inactive.

Durability

Triffids are plants and as such their vital functions rely on distributed systems instead of distinct internal organs. This makes them difficult to kill using firearms. It also allows them to absorb considerable blunt force damage to their trunk without being impaired.

Triffids are also capable of limited bodily regeneration, and can regrow their sting if it is damaged or destroyed. This takes about two years. The most effective way to stop or disable a triffid is to sever its stem. Or otherwise destroy the cup formation containing the sting.

Triffids are vulnerable to fire. Once a triffid is set ablaze, it is unable to put the fire out itself. However, it may take several minutes for a triffid to succumb. During this time the triffid still presents a threat to those around it.

Triffids propagate by expanding a dark green seed pod just below the cup until it bursts. It then broadcasts extremely lightweight white seeds into the air. The usual season for this in Europe is late August. Fortunately, 95% of these seeds are infertile.

History

Trofim Denisovitch Lysenko (1898-1976) was a biologist and agronomist in the Soviet Union. He rejected orthodox genetics in favor of an alternative system centering on the creation of hybrid plant species.

His theories claimed that acquired characteristics could be inherited, an idea rejected by scientists in the rest of the world. But his ideas were supported by the Soviet authorities. They meshed well with their ideology of reshaping human nature itself in order to build a truly collectivist society.

Between 1940 and 1965 he was the dominant figure in Soviet biology. During the period 1948-53 he was its total autocrat. In the real world, all Lysenko accomplished was to retard any real progress in the field for decades.

In one extremely unfortunate alternate universe, however, his bizarre experiments are believed to have somehow produced a definite result: the creation of the triffids.

Botany gone wild

It has never been revealed exactly how the triffids were created. Material from several existing plant species is believed to have been combined in a series of unsystematic experiments with little in the way of a clear purpose to them. Somehow this process eventually resulted in a viable new species.

The creation of the triffids was considered a successful outcome to the experiments because they were a potentially valuable source of protein and natural oils.

The history of this alternate universe differed in another important respect. Rocketry experiments progressed more slowly after the Second World War. Manned spaceflight appears never to have been developed at all.

(One possible explanation for this occurs to me: perhaps the Royal Air Force were more successful in their attempts to bomb Peenemünde, killing Wernher von Braun and the other leading German rocket scientists and forcing the Americans and Soviets to develop their own research programs from scratch after the War.)

When satellites were eventually placed in orbit, they included weapons systems. These would remain dormant in a parking orbit until they received a signal ordering them to descend onto a target on the surface and detonate. These were believed to have included nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Cold War gone long

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the existence of a climate of suspicion and fear intense enough to produce such developments as these, there was never a détente between the Communist East and the Capitalist West.

In the real world and the mainstream DC Universe, the Cold War thawed for a time in the mid-1950s after the death of the Soviet dictator Iosif Stalin. This situation did not last, but it set a precedent for another easing of tensions during the 1970s.

In the alternate world it appears that none of these developments occurred. The Soviet Union remained closed to the outside world even after the death of Stalin.

Palanguez’s gone missing

In the early 1950s an entrepreneurial international criminal named Umberto Cristoforo Palanguez was hired by a Western European multinational corporation. The job was to smuggle triffid seeds out of the Soviet Union.

He succeeded in obtaining a box of sorted fertile seeds by bribing workers at a plantation in the Kamchatka region to steal it for him. But as he tried to make his getaway after collecting it his aircraft was intercepted and destroyed at high altitude by the Soviet Air Force.

The box of seeds was blown apart in the process and the seeds were scattered into the stratosphere. They were blown all around the world before eventually falling to earth and taking root across the globe.

Within a couple of years, the first triffids to grow outside the Soviet Union were reaching maturity. They began to make their presence felt by attacking humans and their livestock.

Wonder crop

In the developed world they posed little threat. Modern organization and communications could easily co-ordinate the hunting down and destruction of isolated triffids.

In the developing world they were considerably more of a threat. But humans are adaptable and even primitive peoples were eventually able to learn how to keep them in check.

Before long, the usefulness of the triffids as a source of protein and natural oils became common knowledge. The focus of the human response shifted from trying to exterminate them to finding ways to safely cultivate them as a commercial crop. The benefits of doing so were generally agreed to outweigh the risks.

Within 20 years triffids were a common crop in numerous countries. Though triffids kept by private breeders and collectors had their stings docked for safety reasons, most commercially grown triffids were left with their stings attached. Docking had been found to reduce the quality of the oil.

Consequently the triffid keepers had to wear protective clothing. This situation continued until May 1974, when the world went blind.

(The year is never specified in the book, but someone has worked it out from internal evidence.)

Day of blindness

During the night of Tuesday 7^th and into the morning of Wednesday 8^th, the sky was filled with brilliant green flashes. These resembled shooting stars. These were assumed to be the result of the Earth passing through a cloud of comet debris, as with a conventional meteor shower.

Naturally everybody who could avidly watched this spectacular display. Within a few hours, they all lost their sight permanently. Civilization came to a halt overnight.

Only a handful of individuals who did not watch the green flashes retained their sight as the new day began. They found themselves torn between:

1. The humanitarian impulse to try to keep the masses of blind people around them alive, by finding food for them, while waiting for help to arrive.
2. The pragmatic realization that the global nature of the catastrophe meant that it was almost certain that help would never arrive. Thus, the only thing they were likely to have even a chance of accomplishing in the long term was to save themselves.

Without sighted keepers to maintain their fences and to check the tethers that kept them in place, small groups of undocked triffids began escaping from their farms. They established wild populations. Docked urban triffids, with nobody to prevent their stings from regrowing, soon joined them.

Plants at large

Although slow-moving and limited in intelligence, the newly-freed triffids found blind humans to be easy targets. They began to attack and kill them in droves. Starvation, disease, accidents and infighting between gangs of sighted people competing for preserved foodstuffs further reduced human numbers.

The increasingly bold and numerous triffids began to take over as the dominant life form. They forced those humans who could still move about freely out of the dying cities and into isolated hamlets and fortified farms. Later on, settlements were established on small islands off the continental mainlands.

Some of them still sought to live in accordance with traditional values. Others aimed to build model communities according to the principles of some favoured ideological system. Some degree of conflict was inevitable, but it generally did not involve shooting wars.

Sleeping satellites

It would eventually be speculated that the source of the blinding green flashes was in fact an orbiting weapons system. It emitted radiation at wavelengths specifically selected to burn out the human optic nerve.

Although it would presumably have been designed to descend to low altitude before detonating, in order to target its effects at only a limited area of the surface, it had evidently malfunctioned and detonated while still in orbit. This allowed the entire world to be stricken by its effects as the Earth rotated beneath it.

Notes

The Day of the Triffids as written is a fine book, albeit a little talky at times. However, it contains one major oversight that author John Wyndham himself later freely admitted to.

The largest groups of people in Great Britain who escape being blinded in the book are coal-miners in places like the south of Wales. These were on the night shift below ground when the blinding flashes occurred.

They somehow managed to get back to the surface and became the leaders of their communities, holding their own against the triffids and refusing to have anything to do with the other groups of survivors. This pattern would probably have held true in the rest of the world wherever there were mining communities.

Submariners without winged ankles

However, there is another group of people who should logically have escaped being blinded in the same way – submarine crews who were out at sea and submerged when the blinding flashes occurred.

They would have come ashore and sought to take charge, in Britain imposing martial law in the vicinity of major Naval bases such as Portsmouth in the south of England and Rosyth in the east of Scotland.

Before long they would have found themselves unable to care for all the blind people in these places and realized they were too large to maintain against triffid incursions. At which point they would surely have thought of taking over small islands before anyone else did.

But since John Wyndham never thought of this, there’s naturally no mention of it.

It was belatedly thought up by the makers of the 1962 movie adaptation starring Howard Kiel. It’s about the only interesting idea they had IMHO.

If you’ve ever seen said movie, you may remember that the triffids depicted therein had what in game terms would be a Fatal Vulnerability to being sprayed with salt water. These dissolved into gloop in less than a minute. This has no basis in the book !

Personality

I don’t think plants, even ones as dangerous as these, can really be said to possess any personality.

In super-hero universes

The triffids are probably best used as written, by having PCs struggling to survive and protect others in the world outlined above.

The likes of Superman or Captain Atom would be unaffected by the blinding flashes and the likes of Wolverine would rapidly recover from their blindness, but how would the likes of Captain America, Barry Allen, Hal Jordan, Tony Stark or Spider-Man cope?

There could be an interesting contrast between a blinded Billy Batson, Don Blake or Bruce Banner and a still-sighted Captain Marvel, Thor or Hulk. Matt Murdock, of course, would be unaffected.

Someone like Doctor Doom could surely design something like a radar sight helmet. He would then have his Doombots construct it to his directions. Once his own blindness had been alleviated he could probably mass-produce it in time to save most of the population of Latveria.

Double threat

The triffids alone probably aren’t enough of a menace to hold the interest of most players. I suggest running a standard post-holocaust scenario with superhuman villains immune to the blinding flashes in the role of neo-feudal warlords. Someone like Apocalypse would be ideal for this.

They establish human reservations protected by electric fences and enlist (or conscript) normal humans who escaped blinding by chance as overseers to enforce their rule over blinded serfs.

Anyone who disobeys will be punished by being thrown to the triffids waiting for them outside the fence. When your PCs liberate them they’ll find themselves responsible for ensuring their continued survival.

They’ll have to try to make them realize that freedom is the choice between working or starving, without being seen as no different to the oppressors they’ve just overthrown. Not an easy task…

I imagine alien infiltrators like the Dire Wraiths and Manhunter Androids will react to the collapse of the established power structures they’re used to working through and the mass blinding of most of their potential slaves by simply deciding Earth is no longer worth conquering and leaving.

But if you’re using the triffids in a game world which also incorporates elements from other classic stories, then not only the likes of the Deviants but also the likes of Orcs and Deep Ones are likely to try to profit from the downfall of humanity as well.

DC Universe History

If the above doesn’t appeal, Jason Woodrue is one obvious choice for their creator.

Or alternatively, they could have been created by worshippers of the Great Old Ones. I recall from somewhere that Yog-Sothoth is sometimes called “Father of Trees”, which might suggest he has an affinity for plants in general.

By Hominid71.

Source of Character: The novel The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (1951). There was also a comics adaptation in Issue #1 of a Marvel magazine called Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction (Jan. 1975), but I’ve never read it. The Night of the Triffids by Simon Clark (2001) was the authorized sequel to the book, but I wasn’t very impressed by it and I’ve ignored it for the purposes of this writeup.

Helper(s):First and foremost, Wikipedia entry for Triffid, and a page describing triffids  (including original sketches of them by John Wyndham) (most of the text in the Description/Powers and Abilities section is pasted from these sources). Also, Encyclopedia Britannica CD-ROM (2005 Edition) entry for Trofim Lysenko, Mike Surbrook, Morgan Champion, Kal-El el Vigilante, Darci, Sébastien Andrivet.