As a free action, a frouryad can cause sharpened wooden spines to protrude from her body. Any creature in contact with the frouryad or grappling with her takes 1d6 points of piercing damage each round it remains in contact with the frouryad. In addition, any creature attacking a frouryad with natural weapons or unarmed attacks takes the same 1d6 points of damage.
As a free action, a frouryad can grow an elongated spine and break it off to use as an arrow. This arrow isn't as good as a normal arrow, giving a -1 penalty to the attack roll.
A frouryad is unaffected by wooden weapons (such as clubs or quarterstaffs) and spells or effects that generate or use wood-type effects (such as a wall of thorns for example). Weapons with damaging parts that are primarily metal (or some other material) such as arrows, spears, and so on, damage a frouryad normally.
A frouryad can meld with any tree, similar to how the spell meld into stone functions. She can remain melded with a tree as long as she wishes.
This works like the druid's wild empathy class feature, except the frouryad has a +10 racial bonus on the check. Frouryads with druid levels add this racial modifier to their wild empathy checks.
A frouryad has a +6 racial bonus to Craft checks involving wood, and is always treated as if she had masterwork artisan's woodworking tools when making such checks.
While dryads are the relatively benign guardians of trees, a frouryad (FROW-rye-add; IPA: ˈfɹaʊ̆ɹaɪ̆æd) is more militant in her guardianship. Sometimes called "warrior dryads", they are in fact dryads that have chosen to transform themselves in order to combat terrible evil.