Half-Lung Fighter

No. Enc.: 1d6
Alignment: Chaotic
Movement: 90
Armor Class: 5
Hit Dice: 3
Attacks: 1 weapon + special
Damage: by weapon type (1d6)
Save: F4
Morale: 9
Hoard Class: XXI
XP: 95
The unusual name of this undead comes from the story of a lord who went mad when his wife drowned while at sea. He convinced himself that if he had enough potions that would allow him to breath water, he could go beneath the sea to be where his wife had gone to live. According to this self-delusion, each potion needed the lower half of a fighter’s lung. He would lure his own soldiers into the make-shift lab he constructed in the bowels of his tower. He would then extract the lungs while his victims were still alive. He would then dispose of the bodies by throwing them into the sea. Eventually, the soldiers returned as undead to exact their revenge.

A Half-Lung Fighter appears as a bloated soldier that can barely squeeze into what little armor they wear. They are armed with the weapons they used in life, usually a spear. They are immune to blunt damage and take half-damage from piercing weapons. The first time they take damage from a slashing weapon, the noxious liquid that fills what is left of their desiccated body cavity bursts out. Everyone within 10 feet takes 3d6 damage unless they make a Save vs. Breath Attacks. Those who make their save only take half-damage. This attack may happen once per encounter. Damage taken from this attack cannot be magically healed until a Remove Curse or Cure Disease spell is cast on the victim.

I told you it needed to be a thing...

Gamer ADD: A Ghast at the Possibilities

As far as I am concerned, the mark of a really good monster folio are those little phrases that allow you to completely rethink another type of monster. As an example, the idea that hobgoblins hang out with carnivorous apes according to the MMI gives me permission to do this.

I took advantage of the Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day sale by Frog God Games and picked up Tome of Horrors 4 because, as I said yesterday, Tome of Horrors Complete is one of my all time favorite collections of monsters. The fourth installment of the series is less immediately useful because it errs towards the high to really high level spectrum of adventuring (there are more creatures with a CL18 than either CL A to 1 or CL 2 and there are over 30 creatures with a CL of 20+) and I do not care for the fact that all the illustrations are in color, but it does qualify as a really good creature catalogue because of a little blurb under the listing of the Banshee Queen:

Any male slain by a banshee queen’s magic rises to become a ghast in 1d4 rounds.

I have to be honest, I have never really used ghasts in my adventures. Once you get beyond the point where ghouls get used as the go-to-undead, there are so many more evocative creatures in the catalogue of undead than a beefed up ghoul. Why dip into that well again?

Given the fact that fey are playing a large role in my most recent case of Gamer ADD, I was attracted to the idea of a queen banshee, given that it is an undead fey. When confronted with the idea that the source of ghasts may very well be a queen banshee, I had to take another hard look at the ghast:

Ghasts are highly intelligent ghouls. Their charnel stench is so powerful that anyone nearby (about 10ft) must make a saving throw or suffer a –2 penalty on attack rolls.

Note that phrase “highly intelligent.” This is no mindless zombie hanging out in grave yards digging around for scraps. A ghast has the potential to be a master-mind, a main villain, the mover and shaker behind the scenes that pulls the strings of an entire campaign. Given the fact that ghasts reek to the point that anyone in the immediate vicinity is going to be sick, they would have to use subordinates and agents to do their bidding.

This begs the question: what would a highly intelligent undead that couldn’t walk around civilized society want out of undeath? I could easily imagine an undead version of Hannibal Lecter waxing poetic about the various gastronomical possibilities of elves versus humans, but what if a paladin or a cleric found themselves trapped in their own stinking corpse plagued by an insatiable hunger for human flesh? That phrase “highly intelligent” does not translate immediately into “slave of the banshee queen” or even “willing servant of the banshee queen.”

Imagine, for a moment, a former paladin who seeks to use his new lot in un-life to do what good he can, given the fact that he is a rotting corpse who needs to eat people. The idea of a cloaked and masked avenger wandering the streets at night putting fear in hearts of the criminal element has never so haunting, because he would be literally eating them.

Or imagine a someone unwillingly turned into a ghast who then spends his entire un-death trying to take revenge on those he thinks responsible: elves.

Or imagine a ghast pouring over necromantic tomes in a desperate quest to move up the ranks of undeath, so to speak.

I think I am going to have to include ghasts far more often in my campaigns, because the possibilities are endless…

Gamer ADD: Monster Manual II Part 3

Notes on the Undead

Interestingly, there are not many undead creatures in the MMII:

• Animal Skeleton
• Demi-Lich
• Juju Zombie
• Monster Zombie

This list does allow for a cleric’s Turn Undead to be relevant from the get-go.

The most interesting facet of this list, however, is that all of the entries are derivatives. Animal Skeletons imply the existence of human skeleton undead and monster skeleton undead. Demi-Lich implies the existence of Liches. Juju and Monster zombies imply the existence of “normal” zombies.

The undead picture of an MMII world, however, looks a lot more like a supernatural version of the current zombie fad (e.g. The Walking Dead) than the undead worlds suggested in literature, such as Bram Stroker’s vampire or J.R.R. Tolkien’s wights.

The hierarchy of undead might look something like this:

• Animal Skeletons (the most basic undead creation).
• Human Skeleton
• Zombie
• Monster Skeleton
• Juju Zombie
• Monster Zombie
• Demi-Lich (when a necromancer fails to complete the transformation into a Lich)
• Lich

Thus, the undead are exclusively the result of necromancy. Curses, diseases, the restless dead, etc. are not extant. This creates a very clear picture of what the undead are and where they come from. In other words, placing an undead into an adventure automatically leads to another: if there are skeletons around, there must also be a necromancer around. Without the necromancer, the skeletons would not exist.

Prepping a Sandbox Campaign: Part 8

Step 8: Villains

I have to be honest, I don’t normally do villains when I prepare any kind of campaign, especially a sandbox. The best villains are those that players love to hate and I am almost always surprised by what players end up hating. In my experience, it almost never is the person I want them to. Therefore, my job isn’t to provide them with my villain, but rather offer enough opportunities for the players to find out who they really want to have as their villain.

The first time I learned this lesson was a Champions campaign back when I was in high school. The initial sessions took place in a prison for supers where all the PCs were interred. They didn’t remember how they got there or why. Eventually, the prison was attacked by aliens, which offered the PCs an opportunity to escape. The big reveal was that the prison was actually in orbit and was just an initial phase of the alien invasion.

Thus, I had two big villains that I was planning to use: the guys who funded the prison and the leader of the aliens. Who did the players end up hating? Some throw-away fellow inmate who successfully fought off the PCs in order to get to a life boat, which the PCs were trying to hold onto for themselves. I realized that I had to make a major concession to the players by making this throw away NPC into a major villain when I heard my friends making plans on how they were going to track this guy down. Alien invasions and a group imprisoning supers in space had to wait. The campaign turned out to be a blast because they had a villain they chose.

Even if players do end up loving to hate one of the villains I want them to, they usually end up finding a way to legitimately get rid of them long before I want them to.

Having said that, I do have an idea brewing about the Old One that has too much goodness not to include in my Blackmarsh campaign thought experiment.

I was leafing through Matt Finch’s Tome of Adventure Design when I came upon an entry in his section for inspiring Undead monsters. One of the ways he suggests an intelligent undead creature became undead was by placing living body parts into a corpse to keep it “alive.” Couple this with the idea that said undead creature had a contagious form of undeath and my creative juices starting mulling over a way to have the Old One an active villain in the campaign.

The form of undeath the Old One concocted for himself involved a further refinement of the magic found in the Subterranean Lake of Watery Simulacrums. His goal was to create multiples of himself, all while sharing a kind of hive mind. He found a way to infect his own flesh so that if he injects a corpse with his blood (or any other part of his flesh) that corpse will animate as an extention of his awareness and mind.

These magics did not work entirely as planned, however. The more corpses the Old One occupies, the less powerful each possessed corpse is. At the moment, I am thinking that each additional corpse would approximately half his HD and spell casting abilities. Thus, if the Old One were understood to be a 14HD monster, for example, he could have two corpses in his hive mind at 7HD each or up to twenty-eight corpses at 1/2 HD.

This would make him a villain that not only would be really difficult to kill off, but one that could engage the party at several different power levels. To boot, he will probably know a lot more about the PCs than they ever expect him to. The thing that I find really attractive about this particular set-up, though, is that I have the option of making whoever it is that the players end up making their villain one of the corpses the Old One has added to his hive mind.

Gamer ADD: Fiend Folio Part 3

Putting the Scare back into the Undead

One of the recurring challenges in D&D is that the Turning ability of clerics tends to take a lot of drama out of encounters with the undead. As a result, they normally do not garner the kind of fear and loathing that the undead ought to. If a cleric (or clerics) get into mid-level and higher, then one has to be creative in order to make undead encounters even interesting.

One of the reasons that I have always liked the FF is that the undead found therein have some bite. Given a little bit of fiddling, undead in a Basic Edition that uses the FF for its monsters could prove to be very frightening indeed.

Let’s begin with a list of all the undead in the FF:

• Apparition
• Coffer Corpse°
• Crypt Thing*†
• Eye of Fear and Flame*
• Huecuva°
• Penanggelan≠
• Poltergeist†≠
• Revenant†≠
• Sheet Ghoul§
• Sheet Phantom§
• Skeletal Warrior
• Sons of Kyuss

Some notes about this list:

* = though the description seems to indicate undead, these are not specifically described as undead. 

† = these creatures are not really meant to be wandering monsters — crypt things and poltergeists are tied to a specific encounter area; revenants are tied to a specific encounter type. 

§ = sheet phantoms and sheet ghouls do not strike me as undead creatures, despite the fact that they are described as such. Their powers and abilities are much more akin to slimes and oozes. Indeed, the sheet phantom is said to be related to the lurker above and the sheet ghoul functions much more like the non-undead yellow musk zombie than a ghoul. Therefore, I am going to treat them this way because it makes for better undead. 

≠ = these creatures either are completely immune to Turning or there are circumstances when Turning will not work on them. 

° = these might appear on Wandering Monster Tables in a Basic edition.

If we get rid of the sheet ghoul and phantom, the lowest HD undead are the coffer corpse, the heucuva and the poltergeist. Since the latter is normally associated with a single spot and cannot be Turned if it is in that spot, poltergeists don’t really function as undead creatures and can easily be recast as dark fey or some other kind of magical activity.

This leaves the low power undead spectrum to the Coffer Corpse and the Heucuva. Check out their nastiness:

• The Coffer Corpse can only be hit by magic weapons.
• The Coffer Corpse is treated as a wraith on the Turn tables.
• The Coffer Corpse can cause fear.
• The Huecuva can only be hit by silver or magic weapons.
• The Huecuva is treated as a wight on the Turn tables.
• The Huecuva can polymorph self 3x per day.
• The Huecuva can give its victims a nasty disease.

Again, given the fiddling with the undead list from the FF, these are the weakest undead in the game.

There are a few interesting consequences to this:

1. Despite a complete absence of lycanthropes, silvered weapons would still be on the equipment list because they might do damage to the undead.
2. First level clerics are incapable of Turning the undead. At second level, they can Turn a Huecuva on an 11.
3. The undead do not drain levels, but they still have some diseased ways of making you either dead or one of their own.

The long and short: if you see the undead run for your lives! Adventurers will not be capable of having a shot at survival against the undead until at least third level and even then only if the Referee is nice and gives out a few magic weapons.

It must be noted that this renders clerics, as written in B/X, very weak at low levels. They will have no ability to Turn undead and no spells at first level, reducing the incentive to play one. I realize that this will suit many folks in the OSR and will also better justify the low XP requirements for the class. Personally, I would be tempted to use the LL version of the cleric, which at least gets a spell at first level; however, given the mechanical distance this undead list implies for clerics from those of other editions, I would be inclined to chuck it all and use Talysman’s non-spellcasting version where clerics do everything using the Turning mechanic.

In other words, the undead are properly scary and the cleric becomes its own unique miracle-working class rather than something somewhere in-between a fighter and a magic-user.