Creature Corner: Undead part 3
(art by reaper79 on DeviantArt)
Yesterday we looked at allies. Today we will look at undead in their more traditional role as antagonists.
While undead within the core setting are seen as inimical to life, and also the victims of either their own dark desires or those of the necromancer that animated them, on a more general folklore level, the undead represent a classic part of horror stories, symbols of wrath or other negative emotions persisting in the dark places of the world beyond the lamplights and campfires of civilization.
Of course, that unnatural state and general malevolence makes the easy picks for foes that you don’t have to worry about feeling bad about slaying, since you’re “putting them to rest”, but as we’ve previously discussed, undead can be much more complex than an army of mooks, though such armies also have their place.
Perhaps the undead foe most commonly seen at low levels, and later in large groups, are the mindless undead. Zombies, skeletons, beheaded, and more. Most may be animated by necromancers or supernatural plagues, while others may arise spontaneously, though usually such soulless undead arise in such a manner due to the presence more powerful undead or malevolent forces, the psychic impressions animating bodies with no clear connection to any trauma the body’s owner may have once experienced. However, there are always exceptions, such as the intelligent variants of zombies and skeletons, the zombie lords and skeletal champions, for example, and others that may exist spontaneously rather than being the creations of certain blasphemous rituals.
Another classic are ghouls and those like them. Certainly ghouls have their own family of relatives such as ghasts, lacedons, and Leng ghouls, but then there are distant cousins like festrogs and gaki. Such creatures are corpse-eaters, eager to devour the flesh of the dead as an act of sapio-cannibalism and grave defilement all in one package. Such ghouls will either fight to protect their “larder”, or seek to fill it with less rotten and more recently-dead corpses from nearby villages and adventuring parties. Many may be driven mad with hunger and be utterly incapable of negotiation. However, whether due to ample food, strong discipline, or otherworldly energies, some ghouls are capable of retaining their sapience and forming civilizations, albeit bloody ones.
Many undead truly are innocent (or not-so innocent) victims, but that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. Attic Whisperers come from children that died of neglect, and their desperate bids for attention and love spell doom for most. Meanwhile, revenants and pale strangers hunt down their killers with implacable fervor, and they don’t care who or what they have to destroy between them and their prey. Others, like the bakekujira and the gashadokuro, are the shadows cast by the callousness of the powerful, butchering great whales or allowing hundreds to starve. While not all bone ship crews were good or righteous in life, such amalgamations certainly don’t deserve the horror of what they have become either. Another nasty one is the lovelorn, born when a heartsick deceased heart literally rips itself out of their chest after death to skitter away on ribcage spider legs.
Some undead were created specifically to guard the tombs of powerful dead or undead figures. The most notable of which are mummies, mummified creatures, and their often masters, the mummy lords. However, don’t discount other undead guardians, such as the space-warping crypt thing, the cursed and bound cursed kings, cyclopean gholdakos, the hanging gallowdead, blasphemous herecites, hordes of possessed phantom armor, and more.
Other undead are driven by the dark hungers of predation, making coexistence with mortals nearly impossible. The souls of murderers returning as mohrgs, obsessed hunters bounding on the air as baykoks, disgraced monks offering paths away from enlightenment as kurobozu, and so on. Dullahans and death coaches race after prey, often with an obsession for the race or chase. Draugr rise from cursed voyages and make their way home to the horror of their loved ones, while wights possess so much malevolence that they possess their own corpses and refuse to let go.
Some undead show the horror that necromancers and fell alchemists can wrought. Some are made from body parts, such as crawling claws and isitoqs, while others are surgically put together to create custom horrors, such as necrocrafts. The preservation of unviable births and flesh leads to the creation of “pickled punks”, while fleshless horrors like ecorche were almost certainly originally born in a necromancer’s lab. Others might be the remains of attempts at life, like the unrisen.
Perhaps most insidious among the undead are vampires. Most spreading via a cursed death, there are several types of vampires, ranging from the classic moroi to the ancient nosferatu, the soul-draining jiang shi, ki-draining vetalas, psychic vampires, and more. The foolish might think that the immortal beauty and power of most forms of this type of undeath make it more appealing, but most vampires are twisted by their need to prey on mortals into creatures utterly lacking in empathy. In addition to these, several vampire-like creatures, such as manananggals, penanggalens, baetriovs, sayonas, and the like also have such a predatory nature and even animalistic powers in some cases.
And then of course there are those dead that lack a body entirely, being nothing but disembodied souls. Things like ghosts, wraiths, shadows, and spectres are fairly well-known, while things like the insane allips, shrieking banshees, and the like add their on flavor to spectral death. Some even have unique gimmicks connected to other hazards, like gearghosts being attached to mechanisms and traps, while geists latch onto nearby haunts to control and be bolstered by them. In a way, these undead are even more malleable than corpses due to the way that the soul becomes twisted by darkness.
Of course, no discussion of the undead would be complete without those that can only be created by deliberate transformation. Liches and graveknights come to mind, both of which bind their souls to an object to continuously come back again and again. However, they are not the only ones, the siabrae being druidic counterparts to lichhood. However, one must be careful, for even this eternal life needs to be nurtured, lest one break down into a lesser horror like a demilich.
Finally, some undead defy the ideas of what undead must be. Some of them are the divinely punished like huecuvas, or those whose souls have been blasted by ultimate evil such as bodaks. However, some creatures that are definitely undead were already supposedly immortal beings when they turned, such as the entirety of the shadowy monsters known as nightmares: fiends that sought power from the negative energy plane and were consumed by it, or devourers, who sought beyond the edges of known reality and returned as soul-eating horrors. Perhaps most terrifying of all are the grim reapers (or possibly one single immortal grim reaper), a spectre of death that never seems to have been alive, and unlike the psychopomps, seeks only finality in death, reaping souls and providing no guidance.
Indeed, it would seem that the horrors of the undead are countless, and there are plenty that I did not mention here. With so many varieties of such horrors, one might fear undead apocalypses being disturbingly common on countless worlds, but by the efforts of goodly divine beings, psychopomps, heroic mortals, and even the undead’s own nature, keep most worlds safe from such dooms.
However, beyond immortal foes or undying allies, there are plenty of ways for a character to be inspired by the undead, as we shall see tomorrow. Tune in then!
