There were two Awakened Plants in Year of the Comet, actually. The Sangre Del Diablo (WHich means Blood of the Devil) and Glomoss. Glomoss was a fun little thing I came up with as a nasty Anti-Magic security measure that didn't require a mage or even anything that would be magically visible. Much the fun.
The Sangre Del Diable was a bit more involved though. When Mike Mulvihill accepted my original proposal, he asked for a couple awakened plants. I had originally done a cobnversion of an ED critter... Some sort of thorn bush treeman thingy, but Mike wanted something different. IIRC, he specifically asked me for a "evil, sentient, carniverous tree". Tall order.
I knew that we were messing with the Yucatan in YotC, and knew that there was lots of jungle down that way, so I actually did some research (go figure) to find a tree that I could "Awaken". I ended up finding the Sangre Del Drago, or Blood of the Dragon (Alternatively Dragon's Blood, and the new evil tree would be is Demon's or Devil's Blood). The Dragon's Blood tree sap supposedly has healing properties, according to tribal lore, and at least one pharmaceutical company was harvesting it's sap and extracting some sort of chemical from it, so there was apparently some truth to this.
So my idea was that the when the tree awakened, it basically went totally 180 and inestad of healing, it's sap could paralyze you, and then it would slowly digest you. One of my goals for the YotC critters was to make them tough, and since the Sangre Del Diablo was rooted in place, I was able to go a bit more nuts with it than I could normally, giving it some insanely high stats
The Compulsion power would lure vctims in, the sap would paralyze, then it would engulf you in an d digest you.
There were a few tweaks to all the critters, but I'm pretty happy with the way they came out, and I'm always tickled pink when people mention the SDD, since I think I'm most proud of the way it came out. I also didn;t have enough room to really put in any backstory for it., which sucks, since I thought that there was a very cool connection between the Source Tree and the Awakened Tree.
Bull