Not Another Zombie Apocalypse

Spicing Up Your Undead Choices

October is here and that means we are hitting my favorite holiday, Halloween. For this month, we will be taking a look at a number of Halloween related topics. Zombies, Ghouls, and Skeletons are hallmarks of the holiday, and of any Pathfinder game you play too. But are they too common?

Skeletons and zombies are probably the most common forms of undead one meets at lower levels. As much as we all love shambling corpses, sometimes as both a player and a GM, I like to see things shaken up. There are about a dozen or so other low-level – between CR ¼ and CR 1 – undead to choose from, so why not consider throwing some of those at your players?

Whereas an ambulatory carcass is ghastly, seeing just individual parts of a body come after you can be downright terrifying. The floating skulls that are the Beheaded come in a number of shapes and sizes, with new and interesting powers like the fire wreathed Flaming Skull, or the decaying snake-haired Medusa’s Head and its petrifying bite. If you imagine a flying eyeball that uses its bloody nerves as wings you would have the CR ½ Isitoq. Or you can sic the bloodhound-like Crawling Hands, which grab and claw at their prey until either it or their quarry are killed.

Midgame undead, between CR 7 and 10, tends to be things like Specters, Ghosts, and Vampires. While classic, there are a lot of other undead creatures for you to have fun with, many of them based on other myths and legends. The Manananggal is a monster from the Philippines that can disguise itself as a living woman, but at night it separates its torso and flies around on bat-like wing. If you really want to play up the terror of this creature, in the real world myth its favored prey is sleeping pregnant women.

The Baykok is a dread skeletal being from Ojibwe or Chippewa legend. Much like the real myth, the Pathfinder version carries a bow and can paralyze its foes. However, they changed its devouring of a victim’s innards to a devouring of its soul. Confound your players with this creature, who they may believe is just a regular skeleton until they hear its fearsome howl.

If you want to use a legend from the good old US of A, the headless horsemen would serve you well. Paizo has converted the sleepy hollow phantom into a creature called the Dullahan. The dark rider heads out across the countryside on his equally fiendish horse to take the souls of the living. These creatures are formed from cruel military commanders, watch-captains, and other martial notables. Having a slain enemy general come back as a Dullahan to hunt down those who defeated him could make for an interesting encounter.

There are tons of out of the box undead from all levels that aren’t Liches, Mummies, Ghasts, or any of the other standard fare. If you’re looking to spice up your game, throw some creatures at them that they haven’t seen before. Paizo extensively uses creatures in its own modules and adventure paths from Frog God Games, Tome of Horrors -- a resource many of your players may not have memorized. A dip into any of the for Tomes could bring new life – or unlife – to an old game

Lastly, if you really want to spice up your game and make even weaker undead a little more of a challenge for your party try adding a Hungry Fog or two to the encounter. When creatures pass through the vaporous ooze they emit a wave of negative energy. This will heal your undead making them quite a bit harder to kill. A powerful intelligent undead or necromancer might consider keeping a few of these mindless green miasmas around to bolster their other minions.

What are some of your favorite oft unused undead? What real-world legends have you converted yourself, or wish were converted into undead creatures? Has your party ever truly been surprised by one of these evil creatures in your game?

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Not Just Another Pretty Skeleton - Ruzel the laughing skull

It’s Saturday and thus time to talk about a god. For those of you who haven’t been a part of my explorations into the religions of Golarion, here’s how it works:

Imagine, if you will, you're making a character for a group. Your only instruction is that you must be a worshiper of a specific god. You do not need to be a divine casting class, although you can be, but the party’s purpose is working toward the goals of this specific divine being. I'd like not just a race/class combo, but a little bit about why the character would choose to dedicate themselves to this particular deity. Feel free to make up secret or not-so-secret orders within the church, or even sects outside of the church that you think might be interesting. With only this one piece of information that must be true, let your imagination go wild with the rest.

Today's god

Ruzel, Lawful Evil Infernal Duke of blasphemy, humor and undeath

Ruzel’s Pathfinder Wiki page

Ruzel’s Archives of Nethys Entry 

Comedy and undeath, not two things you often see together. But is becoming undead the ultimate trick on life itself. It does fly in the face of the natural order; a cosmic joke of sorts. So are Ruzel’s chosen, the cults of the Sabletongue.

The Cackling Assassins

When the people of Golarion speak of the hyena-men known as gnolls, they most often tell tales of the savage beast-men that roam the wastes of Casmaron. Tribal and violent, these gnolls are known for attacking caravans and dragging merchants into the desert to consume their flesh. What few know is that perched on a mountain top somewhere in the deepest heart of the Zho Mountains of Qadira lies the sanctuary of The Cackling Assassins.

The Cackling Assassins are a pack of gnoll assassins renowned as some of the most deadly killers in Casmaron. No contract they have ever undertaken has remained unsatisfied. Their weapon of choice is a deadly poison that causes the victim's muscles to jerk and contract violently, cracking bones and pushing forth spastic grunts of pain that sound remarkably like maniacal laughter.  And, perhaps most disturbingly, every corpse is left with a  grin on their face. Part of the price they require for their perfect murders is another living being to be offered up as a sacrifice to their devil patron. The person given as payment must mean as much to you as the person being killed, love for hate.

The sacrifice is delivered to a labyrinth beneath the fortress, where they are harried into a wild hunt. The hyena-men’s mirth echoes off the blind corridors and long hallways as they pursue their prey to a horrific end. Those who hire them are often plagued with dreams of their sacrifice's fate, experiencing night after night in every detail, the horrible death they suffered. The gnolls get what they want, and both the client and the victim end up with nothing. The Cackling Assassins are the only ones that get the joke, and in this dark humor the goals of Ruzel are served.

The Immortal Brotherhood

Many people seek immortality but very few can find it. The sun orchid elixir is one path but with only one dose a year, those who seek to fight off the ravages of age grasp at any straw available. The organization known as the Immortal Brotherhood have cultivated a reputation of being able to grant men the ability to stave off aging. Little do people know that they are a front for a cult of Ruzel worshipers.

These ascetics reside in a monastery in Thuvia, perfect for scooping up those who fail in their quest for the sun orchid elixir. The monks are tended to by odd, almost human-like automatons. Supplicants spend months and even years following the whims of the masters in an attempt to cleanse their body for an immortal life.

What the supplicants don’t know is that this is a great trick by Ruzel’s chosen. Each monk takes their own supplicant and determines what they value most in life, then forces them to give it up as part of the path to “eternal life”. They also force them to subsist on a diet of various foul herbs and extracts telling them that it will “purify the body”. In reality, these treatments are intended to slowly twist and dement the supplicants in body and mind until they finally die and rise again as an undead servant, totally loyal to their mentor monk. The monks use these undead servitors to play out a complicated game of murder, espionage, and even outright warfare in the Undercroft; a massive cavern complex that spreads for miles through the earth beneath the monastery.  At the heart of this game is one simple fact: the quicker a brother can convert a supplicant the more pieces they can have in play, but the more thoroughly they corrupt him the more powerful the piece will be in the end.

The grand purpose behind these secret battles is the brother’s own shot at a sort of immortality. The automatons that move about the monastery are the true masters of the Immortal Brotherhood. Each of these clockwork bodies takes one hundred years to craft including dozens of complicated rituals designed to fortify them against damage both arcane and physical, as well as any sort of magical scrying. At the end of this time, the monk that has earned the highest rank in the games is ritually killed and, through the power of Ruzel, anchored to this world as a ghost. Incredibly cunning and wicked, these ghosts inhabit the golem bodies, thus granting the incorporeal brother a means to affect the corporeal world. This also allows them to progress the work of Ruzel both within the brotherhood, and via proxy servants, among the unsuspecting people of the world outside the walls.

The Cuckoos

Like their namesake, the Ruzel cult called the Cuckoos live and work among other groups. More explicitly, they worm their way into the churches of other gods in an attempt to corrupt their faithful. Although lay people are the easiest to lead from the path of their patron gods, the true prize is those granted divine power. The ultimate coup is to cause a paladin or cleric of one of the goodly gods to fall by their own free will. Such dangerous games can be difficult to pursue so more often the Cuckoos make up for quality with quantity, corrupting large groups of lay people and causing them to work towards goals at odds with the god they think they are serving.

The tools of their trade are twisted schemes and confusing propaganda. A Cuckoo might set up an orphanage in the name of Sarenrae only to subject the children to brutal discipline and near slave labor conditions. Some might even be sold into slavery, something that Sarenrae would truly abhor. Iomedae’s hospitallers might be used to sterilize entire groups of people because “the children would only be born into poverty and pain anyway.” Cuckoos might also convince money movers in the church of Abadar to embezzle funds while building a new holy site. Any time they can twist the followers of another god from the inside the Cuckoos smile at their grand joke.

So if you had to make a follower of Ruzel, who would they be? What would their goals be? What is his grand joke?

An (Un)Death in the Family

So this week the second publication I have contributed to has been published. TPK games has released the next installment in their line of “Feats of Legends” books: 20 Undead Feats. The TPK staff were a joy to work with and I got to contribute with my friend Neal Litherland, who of course runs the Improved Initiative  blog. You should take a look at it, if you haven’t already.

With the undead being the theme of the new book, I thought we could talk undead and specifically undead that are not evil. Can there be non-evil undead you ask yourself? And the answer is that intelligent undead fall into the same category of most other creatures in the bestiary, they can actually be of any alignment you choose as a GM.

Page five of bestiary one clearly states:

“While a monster's size and type remain constant (unless changed by the application of templates or other unusual modifiers), alignment is far more fluid. The alignments listed for each monster represent the norm for those monsters—they can vary as you require them to in order to serve the needs of your campaign. Only in special cases is this more fixed, such as creatures with an Intelligence of 2 or lower (which are almost always neutral) and planar monsters (outsiders with alignments other than those listed are unusual and typically outcasts from their kind).”

Since intelligent undead have an INT score higher than 2 and they are not planar creatures from an alignment based plane (thus giving them an alignment subtype), they can officially be of any alignment. But there is further evidence that they aren’t forced to be evil. Although channeling negative energy can be done mostly by evil-aligned, or naughty-leaning neutral-aligned characters, negative energy itself is not evil. The negative energy plane is not an aligned plane and negative energy is neither good nor evil.

Lastly there is precedence. I can think of one Paizo’s modules where there is an undead alchemical zombie (yes zombies aren’t usually intelligent but she is) who is neutral off the top of my head, and I am sure there are others. So, even beyond some boxes of text in a bestiary that you could argue intent with, Paizo has explicitly shown us through their content that yes, undead can be non-evil.

I believe we’ve thoroughly established that we can do it, but just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. So why should we add non-evil aligned undead? And maybe a better question how do these undead become non-evil even when 99% of their kind are evil? Both very valid questions.

The answer to why is pretty simple to me, to switch things up. Players have seen the flesh eating Ghoul, what about the Ghoul scholar? Tired of seeing the faux Dracula blood sucking vampire, why not the vampire who worries about the welfare of his people? The juxtaposition of overwhelmingly evil beings not being evil throws everything in the face of convention. Add in the fact you could have a Lawful Good lich that still detects as evil because he’s undead, and watch as the Paladin tries to smite him to no effect causing him to believe he is losing his powers.

How is a bit tougher I think, but there are still many answers to the question. A vampire or even a mummy may have sought undeath as a means to protect their people forever. Other randomly created undead like ghouls might somehow maintain many of their past memories and desperately cling to their humanity. Ghosts are probably the easiest, just give them a piece of unsettled business that extends beyond killing some bloodline that wronged them.

So there you have it, the case for non-evil undead. Would you use a non-evil undead in your game? Would you go so far as to let an undead creature be actually good? Tell us your stories of undead gone not-bad.