DH5 Undead

It's no surprise.  I love undead.  However, I also think that in games like D&D, they're oversplit and over-statted.  While adding some unique abilities or quirks to unique undead appearing in a module or adventure is always a good idea, having a gazillion types of undead in your monster books, most of whom are variations on—at most—half a dozen identical concepts, is a bad idea.  Dark•Heritage 2.0 (technically 2.2 right now) has the following statted undead in its monster list:

• Fell Ghast—an undead dragon, essentially.
• Ghost—with an a la carte suite of abilities to choose from that create wraiths, banshees, spectres, etc. which are all unique incorporeal undead in D&D.
• Ghoul—cannibalistic undead, much as they are in D&D or Warhammer.
• Ghoul Hound—is to wolves or hyenas or something what ghouls are to people.
• Golem, Flesh—I don't make the distinction between constructs and undead that D&D does.  Especially one made out of cadavers.  If it looks like the undead (and smells like the undead) might as well call it undead.
• Headless Horseman—granted; I could simply have made this a ghost.  But I like the concept too much to have not made it a unique stat-line.
• Lich—pretty much exactly what you'd expect; evil sorcerers who've made themselves into undead immortals.
• Mummy—also, pretty much exactly as you'd expect.  Another potential end-game for an evil sorcerer, although most mummies are created by curses bestowed on the unwilling.
• Nizrekh Royal Heresiarch—maybe too unique to have merited inclusion in the main monster list; kind of combines the worst aspects of liches and vampires into one super-powerful foe.
• Skeleton—yeah, pretty basic stuff.  Slower and less graceful than the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts, but basically the same idea.
• Vampire—pretty much the Bram Stoker version of Dracula turned into a fantasy monster.
• Wight—the barrow-wight of Tolkien fame, which is the land-draugr of Norse mythology.

I don't think I'm missing anything really crucial from the list of "standard" undead except for zombie, but that's why I have flesh golem (I prefer the more Haitian voodoo Serpent and the Rainbow type zombie—but a "regular" zombie is just a skeleton that's not as rotted.  Maybe skeleton would have been better as something more generic like "walking corpse"), and I do, in fact, have a handful of unique guys, or at least unusual ones.  Most of what else I might need can be created pretty simply by taking the stat above that is closest to the same concept and making slight modifications to it.  Need a Ringwraith?  Take a royal heresiarch and give it a ghost ability or two.  Or simply take a ghost and give it all of the abilities you need to feel like a ringwraith.  Anyway, I also don't think that there needs to be too much standardization to this stuff.  Much of the various illustrations of undead that you see out there can be adopted to these stats.  There doesn't need to be the "iconic" image of a wight, for instance, and something else that looks different can't be a wight.  A lot of the diversity in undead stats comes from merely assuming that different visual cues require different stats.

But to demonstrate, let me pull up some of my favorite WAR artwork featuring undead and show how they can be used with my stats, starting with the image I used yesterday.

These poor dwarves getting overrun by the undead are really facing maybe four different types.  The one most to the left, with the black cloak and an ax simply looks a little too imposing to me to be merely a skeleton (as the guy immediately to his southeast obviously is, with the sword above his head.)  I'd probably call him a wight.  Just to the right of the skeleton is a ghoul (lower) and a ghost (upper) while above the ghost are probably two skeletons, although maybe the cloaked one is another wight.

Wights, skeletons, ghouls and ghosts.

These are fairly run of the mill undead as far as undead go.  Basic and common, as it were.  Now granted; I don't think undead ever should feel basic, common, or run of the mill.  If they do, the fault is you (or your GM) who's not running them right.  The only possible exception to that might be skeletons and zombies, which have developed over time a trope of being hordes of run of the mill savage, mindless creatures that merely need to be slaughtered en masse.  But I don't really love that trope either, to be honest with you, and prefer undead to always be scary, freaky, unique, and monstrous.  While in D&D, a wight might not be a terribly intimidating or unique foe, remember how they felt in Fellowship of the Ring?  That's what you should be doing with your undead.  Otherwise, just use mean people as your villains, fer cryin' out loud.

Which shouldn't be overlooked as a thing, by the way.  I think a lot of people underestimate just making villains be nothing more than mean people who act villainously, instead of having to make them literally be monsters.  Especially if we're talking about using them as tactical gamist pieces. 

Well, on the other hand, if that's all you want from them, making them monsters is just fine.  My approach to gaming is driven strongly by the fact that my entrance into the hobby was through the vector of being a fan of fantasy fiction.  So, to me, the game output had better come closest to resembling fiction as it can, and the more it does so, the better I like it.  Contrary to popular (and thoughtless) belief, that doesn't make me a "story-gamer;" rather, it merely makes me not a rabid sandboxer.  The Chris Perkins school of DMing, as described in his long-running Dragon Magazine column "The DM Experience" describes my style better that just about anything else I've read, even though it's a specifically 4e column.  Ray Winninger's DungeonCraft series does a pretty good job too.

See, now the undead dragon, on the other hand, is always weird and scary.  Granted, in D&D, that usually means that they are merely a tactically interesting high level opponent.  But this is a problem with the paradigm of D&D.  One of the main themes of my blog, not that I always talk about it, but it's lingering there in the background, is that when you borrow something from the horror genre into your fantasy, you should maintain its ambiance of horror along with it.  That's why I have the tagline under the blog title of "d20 rules, Call of Cthulhu play paradigm" (Although m20 is certainly a highly derived variety of d20, and that's the only kind of d20 that I still use anymore.)  The tagline under the rules for Dark•Heritage is + fantasy + horror + madness + which of course is the same theme.

But pulling off dark fantasy can often be much easier said than done.  How do you make a big scary monster actually a big scary monster with overtones of horror instead of an exciting challenge that makes your players shout "huzzah!" and charge recklessly into combat?  Anyway, I don't want to get diverted into talking about that right now, and I've done so in the past to my satisfaction already anyway.

I'll point out that I created the fell ghast not to imitate the dracolich from D&D specifically, but actually the terrorgheist from Warhammer.  Of course, the two already look very similar to each other, and are two iterations of the same concept, so maybe my fell ghast straddles the line somewhat.  I'll also point out that my dragons are more like terrible magical beasts; cunning, but not Machiavellian geniuses with all kinds of magical powers other than their terrible fiery (or other, on occasion) breath.  It seems like maybe post 3e, D&D pulled back from making creatures like dragons (and demons, and other traditionally high level foes) so complicated to run and even to imagine, and boiled them down to their core conceit a little better.  I'd like to think that I independently arrived at the same place after taking a serious look at the stats for such beasties and deciding that I'd never want to run such a thing, no matter how cool the concept of the creature was, but really, I can hardly take credit for having thought of something so obvious, I don't think.

Not that I wouldn't wish to.  But in honesty, I can't.

Now, I just kind of dismissed the notion of zombies as being scary, but of course, they can be, even if the theme of a zombie apocalypse is so overdone that it's become a literal joke that people talk about all the time.  Here's a WAR piece from Paizo illustrating a zombie horde that illustrates how best to make it work: 1) it's never-ending, and while individual zombies are not hard to kill (again) the overall experience is desperate, bleak and hopeless, 2) set it in a suitably spooky setting, even if such a setting is cliche.  Cliche often exists precisely because it works so well.  Cliche with a twist is often more interesting than avoiding cliche altogether.

Curiously, in this next picture, WAR doesn't do the best job of evoking the setting (why is there daylight all around, for one thing?) and it has more of a D&D kind of vibe—huzzah, the boss monsters! than I would like.  But it's still a nice image of some of our upper level undead; a lich and his vampire lieutenant, with a zombie/skeleton bodyguard and maybe a ghoul or two thrown in for some variety.

And this last one is definitely too pulpy and huzzah to be proper dark fantasy, but that doesn't make it any less awesome.  Karrnath, from Eberron, is the quintessential vampire kingdom, and it had some no small part in inspiring me as I was creating Tarush Noptii, which later evolved into Timischburg.  My first incarnation was that it was ruled openly by vampires (borrowed more from a blurb from the 4e book, Open Grave, which I've actually never read), but gradually started to borrow more from Karrnath as it went on, because I liked it better.  Then it went on to more openly imitate Ustalov rather than either, but it's probably fair to say that all of them rolled up into one makes a pretty close analog to Timischburg.