Intelligent Undead

A festrog is an undead abomination spawned when a creature is killed by a massive release of negative energy (perhaps due to planar bleeding, the destruction of a potent artifact, or even certain magical attacks by powerful undead), and then mutilated by an outside force, such as the scavenging of wild animals. Sometimes called dogghouls for their ability to run on all fours, the name often causes opponents to misinterpret this creature’s abilities and grossly underestimate its intelligence, for the festrog is in fact a rather canny monstrosity. Festrogs inhabit remote areas near places where they were slain. It’s not uncommon for a tribe of festrogs to share territories with ghouls. Most festrogs gather in small bands, based on whatever loose affiliations they might recall from when they were alive, and choose dwellings in sunless areas easily defended with group tactics. Like ghouls, they tend to skulk about graveyards, though they prefer ones with tombs and mausoleums so they can hide during the day. They hunt nocturnally in packs, preferring open areas like plains, farmlands, or open forests where they can track down prey with few places for it to run or hide. These packs wander semi-nomadically, often traveling miles beyond their dwellings in pursuit of mortal flesh.

Wights are humanoids who rise as undead due to necromancy, a violent death, or an extremely malevolent personality. In some cases, a wight arises when an evil undead spirit permanently bonds with a corpse, often the corpse of a slain warrior. They are barely recognizable to those who knew them in life; their flesh is twisted by evil and undeath, the eyes burn with hatred, and the teeth become beast-like. In some ways, a wight bridges the gap between a ghoul and a spectre—a warped animated corpse whose touch steals living energy. As undead, wights do not need to breathe, so they are sometimes found underwater, though they are not particularly good swimmers unless they were originally swimming creatures such as aquatic elves or merfolk. Underwater wights prefer low-ceilinged caves where their limited swimming isn’t as much of a liability. The wight presented here is a typical example of its kind, but sometimes when a wight creates spawn from particularly unusual humanoids, the resulting wights are quite different in power, such as the three variants listed on this page.

Brute Wight (CR 5): Giants that are killed by wights become hunchbacked, simple-minded undead. Brute wights are giant advanced wights, but cannot create spawn of their own.
Cairn Wight (CR 4): Some societies deliberately create these specialized wights to serve as guardians for barrows or other burial sites. A cairn wight is an advanced wight that fights with a weapon, typically a sword, that channels its energy drain attack and affects creatures damaged by the weapon as if they had been struck by the wight’s slam attack.
Frost Wight (CR 4): Wights created in cold environments sometimes become pale undead with blue-white eyes and ice in their hair. Frost wights have the cold subtype and their slam attacks deal 1d6 cold damage in addition to the normal effects. A creature touching a frost wight with natural weapons or unarmed strikes takes 1d6 cold damage.

Tied to the dark forces of nature and unholy magic, zuvembies employ fear and the wild creatures of the land to take their vengeance upon the living. Zuvembies appear to be withered, animate corpses but possess ruthless minds and blasphemous vigor. Revenge fuels a zuvembie, a hatefulness directed toward those who wronged it in life. Yet even when the last one who maligned it lies dead, its rage remains, turning against all who live, especially the relatives of the target of its original hate. Most zuvembies willingly performed the vile rituals to attain vengeance through unlife, but the transformation can also be wrought upon a helpless victim. The method of transforming into a zuvembie involves the creation and consumption of a vial of oil of animate dead, plus the performance of additional dark rites that take a day to perform and cost 3,000gp. The ritual kills the target, who must make a DC 20 Will save. Failure results in the victim’s death, while success means it reanimates as a free-willed zuvembie. Zuvembies stand between 5 and 6 feet tall and rarely weigh over 100 pounds.

Crypt things are undead creatures found guarding tombs, graves, and crypts. Necromancers and other spellcasters create them to guard such areas, and the crypt things never leave their appointed lairs, even to pursue enemies. Their warded area may be a single room or passage, an entire grave complex, or even a city-sized necropolis. Though naturally solitary, multiple crypt things may guard a common area, often in conjunction with constructs or other undead. A crypt thing only initiates combat if it is attacked or if the object or crypt it is guarding is touched or entered. Until this condition is met, a crypt thing is content to remain motionless—it may even answer questions or otherwise interact with visitors if its master has directed it to do so. Rumors exist of variant crypt things that do not teleport their foes, but instead paralyze opponents and turn them invisible, leaving victims to helplessly watch their allies being torn apart by the angry guardian.

Created to guard the tombs of the honored dead, mummies are ever vigilant for those who would desecrate their sacred ground. Mummies are created through a rather lengthy and gruesome embalming process, during which all of the body’s major organs are removed and replaced with dried herbs and flowers. After this process, the flesh is anointed with sacred oils and wrapped in purified linens. The creator then finishes the ritual with a create undead spell. Although most mummies are created merely as guardians and remain loyal to their charge until their destruction, certain powerful mummies have much more free will. The majority are at least 10th-level clerics, and are often kings or pharaohs who have called upon dark gods or sinister necromancers to bind their souls to their bodies after death—usually as a means to extend their rule beyond the grave, but at times simply to escape what they fear will be an eternity of torment in their own afterlife.

The hideous penanggalen is one of the most horrific vampiric monstrosities. By day, a penanggalen appears to be a normal humanoid, but at night or when provoked, the creature’s head rips free from the rest of her body, coils of viscera and entrails dangling from her throat as she launches into the air, seeking blood to sate her unholy thirst. Unlike most undead, the penanggalen is more akin to the lich in that she willfully abandons both her mortality and morality to become a hideous undead monster. While penanggalens are traditionally female spellcasters, any creature capable of performing the vile ritual of transformation can become one. Similar to a lich, a creature works toward becoming a penanggalen. More than one such transformation ritual exists, but all require heinous acts that symbolize the casting aside of kindness, benevolence, and any semblance of feelings other than cruelty. Many of these rituals call for the repeated consumption of blood, bile, tears, and other fluids drawn from captured and tortured innocents. A penanggalen keeps a vat of vinegar in her lair. When returning from a night of feeding, a penanggalen’s organs are swollen with blood. In order to fit back into her body, the penanggalen must soak for 1 hour in this vat of vinegar. Once reduced, a penanggalen slides back into her body. If a penanggalen is slain away from her body, the body rapidly deteriorates into foul-smelling grit. The penanggalen presented above was a witch in life.

Berbalangs prefer to make their homes within a day’s travel of humanoid settlements. These lairs are well hidden and sometimes protected by other undead creatures. Some berbalangs set themselves up as secluded shamans or wise old crones, using alter self to appear human. Ultimately cowardly, berbalangs rarely attack a settlement directly, preferring to pluck its meals from those who stray too far from civilization. A berbalang stands as tall as a human and rarely weighs more than 100 pounds.

Terrifying reapers of souls, dullahans are created by powerful fiends from the souls of particularly cruel generals, watch-captains, or other military commanders. Sent back from the pits of Hell to sow terror and harvest new souls, dullahans return to the towns or villages they lived in as mortals. While their favored victims are evil men and women (or their living descendants) whose souls are destined for Hell, the dullahans have no qualms about adding innocents to their lists of victims. Legends tell of powerful dullahans who can summon not just a single fiendish mount, but an entire carriage pulled by six powerful ebony horses. Known as a “Coach of the Silent,” these powerful undead are CR 14 with 20 Hit Dice, the advanced creature simple template, and the ability to cast trap the soul on those who fail to resist their death’s calling. These souls take seats in the coach, where they languish forever—or at least until the dullahan himself is slain.

Hupias are drawn to their past lives by a yearning to live again. In trying to return to their previous lives, they seek to fool friends and loved ones with tales of how they were away traveling for a long time or were busy with something else and forgot to tell everyone that they’d be gone. The ruse rarely holds up, and once the loved ones discover the truth, the results are tragic at best. Most hupias are unable to work themselves back into the life they had due to their indistinct memories and lack of understanding that they are actually dead.  Even though they don’t need to eat, many hupias still ingest the foods they loved when they were living. They seek out their favorites, even wandering into villages in order to procure them. Many hupias from tropical regions, where they are most plentiful, still love the taste of tropical fruits, specifically guava.  Some groups of hupias form their own communities. These small settlements are typically secluded in deep jungles, well away from where they might be discovered, though they are often within a day’s walk from where many of the hupias resided in life. In these bizarre communities, hupias carry out mundane tasks in perpetuation of the semblance of a settlement, hoping they appear normal to outsiders who might happen by.

Jiang-shis (often known as “hopping vampires”) are undead humanoid creatures that feed on the exhaled life energy of the living. A jiang-shi’s appearance is based on the state of the creature’s corpse at the time of its reanimation. Regardless of the state of decay, most jiang-shis wear clothing or armor that is at least one generation out of style. Additionally, each has a short parchment prayer scroll affixed to its brow by stitches; originally intended to protect the body from restless spirits, this scroll grants a jiang-shi immunity to magical effects unleashed by items like scrolls and wands. A jiang-shi is created when a restless spirit does not leave its corpse at the time of death, and is instead allowed to fester and putrefy within. At some point during the body’s decomposition, the thing rises in its grotesque form and seeks living creatures to feed upon.

Horrid undead, manananggals walk among the living by day and prey upon them at night. These creatures delight in spreading fear and distrust. By day, they tend to stay inside because of their light sensitivity. They mask this odd behavior by either living just outside villages as reclusive hermits or by obtaining roles within the community that explain away or justify their eccentricities. Manananggals pass themselves off as normal people, usually posing as mad old women, midwives, hedge witches, or mystics. This allows the undead creatures to select their prey from within the community. Manananggals particularly enjoy feeding upon pregnant women, targeting them in their sleep so the undead may feast on the blood of both mothers and the children they carry. These foul creatures drain blood via their long, black, hollow tongues. Manananggals despise the scent of garlic and strong spices like cloves and anise. As they fly through the night, manananggals make a ticking or clicking sound, leading some villagers to call the creatures “tik-tiks.” Once separated, a manananggal’s mobile torso has a 6-foot wingspan.

Consumed by the same lusts and excesses that led them in life, the souls of some sinners rise as totenmaskes, drinking the flesh and memories of living creatures and even stepping into their lives to once more pursue their base desires. Incapable of resuming their sinful pursuits in their natural form, totenmaskes often keep their victims alive for as long as possible, renewing their stolen identities regularly in order to continue indulging in pleasures of the flesh. A totenmaske can be created from the corpse of a sinful mortal by a cleric of at least 18th level using the create greater undead spell. A totenmaske is 6 feet tall and weighs 140 pounds.

Often when a particularly evil criminal is executed, suspicious folk fear that the criminal’s remains might rise from death to continue to plague the living. To combat this possibility, many mobs or rural justices take to the practice of burning the bodies, grinding the bones, and scattering the remains in the wild. Yet in the case of particularly evil criminals, even these steps are in vain, for their will is enough to reassemble a body from earth, stone, roots, and plants drawn from the region into which the remains were scattered. Such an undead horror rises as a guecubu, a harbinger of misfortune and vengeance from beyond the grave. A newly formed guecubu remembers well how its enemies treated it, and while the undead creature retains none of its previous life’s talents, its undead state grants it many new tools to seek revenge with. Typically, a guecubu does not limit its revenge to those directly involved with its execution—entire villages and towns fall victim to its rage. The guecubu’s tactics tend toward the subtle, and it seeks to spread misfortune and death on a person-by-person basis, slaying its enemies one at a time until they flee, so that all that remains is a ghost town. A guecubu is 6 feet tall and weighs 100 pounds.

Those who slay many over the course of their lifetimes, be they serial killers, mass-murderers, warmongering soldiers, or battle-driven berserkers, become marked and tainted by the sheer weight of their murderous deeds. When such killers are brought to justice and publicly executed for their heinous crimes before they have a chance to atone, the remains sometimes return to unlife to continue their dark work as a mohrg. Undead things caring less for life than they did before their own deaths, mohrgs exist solely to wreak havoc on the living. Sometimes mistaken for skeletons or zombies, they are far more dangerous than those mindless abominations, retaining some semblance of their own memories—and the delight they once took in hearing the screams of the dying. When possible, mohrgs gather in small groups, seeking out lone targets much as they did in life. If faced with capable foes, a mohrg attempts to incapacitate them one by one, starting with divinely empowered characters first, both to protect itself from holy wrath, and to make the task of paralyzing and devouring the others that much easier. Some mohrgs retain enough of their former memories that they return to the favored locations of their pasts, “haunting” old hideouts and sometimes even resuming the depredations of murderers long dead, falling back on means of death and mayhem that were more comfortable in their breathing days. Such mohrgs are even more insane than most undead beings, and can sometimes be found wandering the streets of a city or town in cowls and cloaks, carrying on their old life’s work of slaughter and murder as best they can. Of course, since those slain by a mohrg rise soon thereafter as undead themselves, the murders of a mohrg do not go unnoticed for long, even when they take extra care to prey only upon society’s dregs. A sudden uprising of undead in the streets is the inevitable result of a mohrg’s attentions. Since these zombies remain under the mohrg’s control, and since the mohrg itself possesses a hateful and cruel intelligence, it often holds its undead army in reserve, even commanding it to lie motionless until several weeks or months have passed and the local graveyard is filled with the sleeping dead. Then, when the time is right, the mohrg calls upon its army to rise and aid it in finishing the slaughter.

When hunters become utterly obsessed with the chase and indulge excessively in the savagery of the kill, their souls become progressively tainted. When such remorseless hunters perish before they can capture and kill their quarry, they sometimes rise from death as baykoks— flying undead horrors that kill purely for the ecstasy that only murder can bring them. Unlike many undead who feed on and hate all living things, a baykok seeks always to prove its mastery of the hunt. Though thoroughly wicked, baykoks often ignore all but the most powerful-looking foe in a group, only picking off lesser creatures if they dare to get between the baykok and its true prey. When it finally lays low its quarry, the baykok swoops down on the victim to devour the creature’s soul in an attempt to make sure the creature never returns to seek revenge.

Herecites are a particularly blasphemous form of undead created via an obscure ritual of sacrifice, wherein a priest of an evil god offers up at least five worshipers of a nonevil deity to her own deity. All of the sacrifices must worship the same deity. Upon the deaths of the sacrificed worshipers, their souls and bodies seethe and surge with negative energy and then melt away, only to re-form into a single entity—a herecite. Even the herecite’s appearance serves to support its heretical nature, for these foul creations always appear as undead versions of their prior god, even though in their new unlife they are devoted worshipers of the god to whom they were sacrificed. Regardless of the size and shape of the worshipers sacrificed and of the mythological size of their prior deity, a herecite is a human-sized creature.  The ritual for the creation of a herecite is recorded in certain rare and blasphemous texts that are hidden away in dark libraries. It is also known to exist in certain texts describing the Outer Planes and their denizens, and likely exists in texts associated with powerful necromancy cults, although groups composed primarily of arcane spellcasters find herecites more of a curiosity than a viable addition to their ranks. The ritual to create a herecite often focuses on the torture and slaughter of young, inexperienced priests while a captured leader of the same faith is forced to watch the cruel torment of his flock. The overwhelming pain and anguish experienced by the high priest as his acolytes are forcibly converted into undead serves as the ritual’s catalyst. High priests driven mad or forced to lose their faith after they have witnessed such a ritual often rise again as huecuvas who then go on to gain levels as oracles of the ritual’s profane deity.  Herecites never take levels in cleric or any other class capable of casting divine spells, for the ritual of their creation results in a tenuous awareness and an inability to ever again profess such powerful faith in a deity. Those who do continue to learn and train in a character class after their creation typically become sorcerers, witches, or even fighters or rogues.  Herecites, once created, typically remain as guardians for the temple responsible for their forced conversion and do not seek a greater purpose in their new unlife. In some cases, a lone herecite may wander from the site of its creation, especially if it loses its creator, but once a group of herecites forms a cabal, its members remain bound to that area for months, years, or even centuries—if they leave the area, the cabal is broken, and a new ritual must be performed in order to reaffirm their blasphemous faith. They have very little interest in their new lives save for the constant offering of blasphemous prayers to their new deity; these prayers often consist of warped versions of the sacred chants and songs of their prior faith.

Vampires are undead humanoid creatures that feed on the blood of the living. They look much as they did in life, often becoming more attractive, though some have a hardened, feral look instead.

In many lands, parents have used tales of bloody bones to frighten children away from dangerous ponds or to keep them from misbehaving, especially at night. At first sight, these monsters are easy to confuse for particularly gruesome skeletons. Bloody bones, however, have an evil intelligence. They revel in creating fear in their victims, using their natural stealth to haunt and frighten a creature for hours or even days before revealing themselves.  Bloody bones are the creations of horrific creatures known as rawheads, which have the ability to command these gory undead to do their whims. Even when not directed by the malevolence of a rawhead, though, a bloody bones is adept at wreaking havoc on local settlements. The inhabitants of a region plagued by a bloody bones often have no idea of the true nature of the creature that menaces them, which only furthers the urban legends and frightening stories that rise in the wake of these violent, undead monstrosities.  A typical bloody bones is approximately 5-1/2 feet tall and weighs about 60 pounds.

Any good general forbids mention of fexts among his ranks, but such strictures do little to prevent soldiers from whispering tales of undying officers leading enemy units.  These supernatural officers almost never seem to fall in battle, and when they do, they return for the next clash unfazed. Soldiers whisper that these deathless commanders are vulnerable only to glass weapons. Stories of fexts, usually dismissed as camp folktales derived from soldiers’ frustration at failed campaigns and lost battles, are most frighteningly true—a truth living officers keep from the normal rank and file, for it takes a truly callous leader to send his soldiers against an unkillable foe. While these abominations often serve corrupt monarchs or power-hungry and desperate tyrants, some fexts infiltrate good armies and act as double agents, defying their nation’s ideals. They use politics and miscommunication to distort the truth of their battlefield atrocities and cow those under their command into obedience. Though a fext normally acts as a commander on the battlefield, when engaged in combat, it favors its martial prowess, intermingling quick strikes and deadly blows with disruptive curses and its energy drain ability.

The ghouls of the nightmare dimension of Leng are far more powerful and more intelligent than their lesser kin that haunt and caper in the lonely graveyards of the Material Plane, yet they are also more prone to discussion and debate with intruders. Ghoul warrens that burrow deep enough can inexplicably cross over from this world to Leng, allowing the ghouls of that realm access to this world. Leng ghouls delight in feasting on dead flesh and consider themselves gourmets of rot and decay, treating a full coffin as a sumptuous banquet table.  Leng ghouls maintain complex societies and extensive warrens when they colonize reaches of the Material Planes, digging deep below the surface graveyards they choose to haunt. These creatures are not only driven to gather victims to slaughter and bodies to ripen—they also seek out forbidden texts and magical scrolls to augment their ever-increasing stores of knowledge, which often rival the greatest of wizardly libraries in size, although their subject matter tends to be limited to necromancy and the study of forbidden rites. A Leng ghoul can sometimes be convinced to let a particularly delicious-looking intruder go (relatively) unharmed in exchange for new lore.  Although most Leng ghouls venerate the Great Old Ones or Outer Gods (they have a particular affinity for Nyarlathotep), a rare few of these creatures retain more of their humanity than merely their living intellect. These unique few drift away from evil in their pursuit of magical lore—while they still hunger for dead flesh, many try their best to feed only on those who died naturally or willingly offer themselves up to the carrion feast in return for favors. While many eventually succumb to the temptation to feed on fresh kills in time, a rare few manage to maintain nonevil alignments. Such rare ghouls also retain some or all of the class levels they had in life, transferring those levels onto their new undead forms. The bulk of these Leng ghouls have levels as arcane spellcasters or rogues, since those who were once divine spellcasters, or otherwise religious in life, tend to be wholly devoted to gods of evil and decay.

Many cultures practice the sacred art of mummification, though the sinister magical techniques used to imbue corpses with undead vitality are far less widespread. In certain ancient lands, such blasphemous techniques have been refined through centuries of ceremony and countless deaths, giving rise to mummies of terrible power. On rare occasions, if the deceased was of great rank and exceeding malevolence, he might undergo such elaborate rituals, rising from his tomb as a fearful mummy lord. Similarly, a ruler known for his malice or who died in a moment of great rage might spontaneously arise as such a vengeful despot. Regardless of the exact circumstances of his resurrection, a mummy lord retains the abilities he had in life, becoming a creature consumed by the desire to restore his rule and dominate both the living and dead.

Sometimes death itself cannot come between a gunslinger and its final revenge. When a gunslinger is slain by a hated enemy, or murdered before it can achieve vengeance against a hated foe, the anger and wrath can animate its remains as a vengeful undead monstrosity. When a pale stranger first rises, it seeks out the source of its anger to finish the job—thereafter, it wanders the desolate parts of the world looking for new victims to vent its unending rage upon. A pale stranger appears much as it did in life, though desiccated and obviously undead. Rare pale strangers have the ability to hide their undead nature and appear as they did in life using veil as a constant spell-like ability (CL equals their CR). These pale strangers are often more powerful and have class levels in gunslinger or ranger, and often attract large groups of adoring bandits and followers who may or may not realize that their murderous idol is in fact an unliving horror. A pale stranger stands 6-1/2 feet tall and weighs 130 pounds.

Devourers are the undead remnants of fiends and evil spellcasters who became lost beyond the farthest reaches of the multiverse. Returning with warped bodies, alien sentience, and a hunger for life, devourers threaten all souls with a terrifying, tormented annihilation. These withered corpses stand 10 feet tall but weigh a mere 200 pounds.

Undying tyrants and eternal champions of the undead, graveknights arise from the corpses of the most nefarious warlords and disgraced heroes—villains too merciless to submit to the shackles of death. They bear the same weapons and regalia they did in life, though warped or empowered by their profane resurrection. The legions they once held also flock to them in death, ready to serve their wicked ambitions once more. A graveknight’s essence is fundamentally tied to its armor, the bloodstained trappings of its battle lust. This armor becomes an icon of its perverse natures, transforming into a monstrous second skin over the husk of desiccated flesh and scarred bone locked within.

GRAVEKNIGHT ARMOR

In death, the graveknight’s life force lingers on in its armor, not its corpse, in much the same way that a lich’s essence is bound within a phylactery. Unless every part of a graveknight’s armor is ruined along with its body, a graveknight can rejuvenate after it is destroyed. A typical suit of full plate graveknight armor has hardness 10 and 45 hit points, though armor with enhancements or made of special materials proves more difficult to destroy. Merely breaking a graveknight’s armor does not destroy it; it must be ruined, such as by being disintegrated, taken to the Positive Energy Plane, or thrown into the heart of a volcano.

Despite her ragged dress and unkempt appearance, a harionago is a beautiful and graceful creature. She walks the roads at night pretending to be a lost damsel, luring those she encounters close before striking with her paralyzing claws and jagged hair barbs. However, a harionago’s most dangerous weapon is her laugh. A resounding cackle of mocking scorn and hateful malice, it compels those around her to join in mocking concert. A harionago is formed when an innocent woman is murdered in some unspeakable fashion. She rises, twisted by the injustice of the crime against her, into an unnatural and bloodthirsty horror that hunts unsuspecting victims while trying to sate an everlasting lust for revenge. Destroying a harionago doesn’t always lay her to rest for good. On rare occasions and by mysterious means, a harionago rises again after a year and a day to resume her hunt. She can only rest after she takes her revenge on those who murdered her. If her murderers are already dead when she returns, she will rest only once every member of her murderers’ family lines has been slaughtered.

Few creatures are more feared than the lich. The pinnacle of necromantic art, the lich is a spellcaster who has chosen to shed his life as a method to cheat death by becoming undead. While many who reach such heights of power stop at nothing to achieve immortality, the idea of becoming a lich is abhorrent to most creatures. The process involves the extraction of the spellcaster’s life-force and its imprisonment in a specially prepared phylactery—the spellcaster gives up life, but in trapping life he also traps his death, and as long as his phylactery remains intact he can continue on in his research and work without fear of the passage of time. The quest to become a lich is a lengthy one. While construction of the magical phylactery to contain the spellcaster’s soul is a critical component, a prospective lich must also learn the secrets of transferring his soul into the receptacle and of preparing his body for the transformation into undeath, neither of which are simple tasks. Further complicating the ritual is the fact that no two bodies or souls are exactly alike—a ritual that works for one spellcaster might simply kill another or drive him insane. The exact methods for each spellcaster’s transformation are left to the GM’s discretion, but should involve expenditures of hundreds of thousands of gold pieces, numerous deadly adventures, and a large number of difficult skill checks over the course of months, years, or decades.

THE LICH’S PHYLACTERY

An integral part of becoming a lich is the creation of the phylactery in which the character stores his soul. The only way to get rid of a lich for sure is to destroy its phylactery. Unless its phylactery is located and destroyed, a lich can rejuvenate after it is killed (see Creating a Lich, below). Each lich must create its own phylactery by using the Craft Wondrous Item feat. The character must be able to cast spells and have a caster level of 11th or higher. The phylactery costs 120,000gp to create and has a caster level equal to that of its creator at the time of creation. The most common form of phylactery is a sealed metal box containing strips of parchment on which magical phrases have been transcribed. The box is Tiny and has 40 hit points, hardness 20, and a break DC of 40. Other forms of phylacteries can exist, such as rings, amulets, or similar items.

Occasionally called “weeping vampires” for their ability to cry tears of blood, sayonas are powerful and intelligent undead creatures that hunt mortals to steal from them what they envy most: the ability to exist within living flesh. While they aren’t true vampires, similarity between these two creatures creates substantial confusion to those unfamiliar with sayonas. While sayonas and vampires sustain themselves off mortal blood, sayonas don’t consume the blood, but rather absorb it through their skin (even when using blood drain), using it to transform their twisted forms back into some semblance of the beauty they had—or believe they had— in life. Above all else, sayonas covet youth. Stories of their origins claim that the first sayona was a vain woman who grew old and whose lover left her for a younger paramour; the woman avenged herself by bathing in the blood of her lover’s children, then killed herself. Doomed to undeath, she wanders the world crying tears of blood and preying on beautiful young women—slaying them, stealing their beauty, and transforming them into ghastly undead fiends to forever share her fate.

When a person dies a violent death in the grip of extreme emotion, such as in a blinding rage or in overwhelming sorrow, she may return from the dead as a twisted and horrific undead creature known as a yurei. These restless spirits remain consumed by the emotional torment that pervaded their demise, and can feel a measure of peace only while causing other creatures to suffer as they did. To accomplish this, they haunt the people and places they knew in life in search of fresh victims for their painful grasp. Regardless of whether she received a proper burial or not, a yurei always appears dressed in the remnants of funereal clothing, with her face obscured by long black hair. Often, the restless spirit seems to be dripping wet or caked with mud or filth, or displays other distressing signs of neglect. Her body can also appear contorted or disjointed, reflecting the pain that twists her very existence. When a yurei uses nightmare, she typically creates dreams wherein the target is placed in the role of her murderer, so it may suffer her vengeance from beyond the grave.

In their endless years of unlife, some liches lose themselves in introspection, and can no longer rouse themselves to face the endless march of days. Still others cast their consciousness far from their bodies, wandering planes and realities far beyond mortal ken. Absent the vitality of the soul, such a lich’s physical form succumbs to decay over the centuries. In time, only the lich’s skull remains intact. Yet the bonds of undeath keep the lich’s remains from final dissolution. Vestiges of the lich’s intellect remain within the skull, and wake to terrible wrath should it be disturbed. Traces of the lich’s will to live strengthen the skull, rendering it harder than any steel. The lich’s greed and lust for power manifest in the growth of gems in its skull. Lastly, though only the barest remnants of the lich’s eldritch might survive, a demilich aroused to anger still retains enough power to flense the very soul from any defiling its final rest. The lich’s phylactery invariably fails during the slow decline of lich into demilich, losing its last vestiges of enchantment if not crumbling into dust with the lich’s body. But even without the preserving power of the phylactery, demiliches retain a tenacious grip on existence. Only powerful and precise use of magic can permanently destroy a demilich and its remains. To the unwary adventurer, a demilich looks like nothing more than dust and bones within the lich’s former sanctum. Indeed, until disturbed, a demilich has only the vaguest awareness of intruders, and ignores their presence. Any attempt to steal the demilich’s possessions, disturb its remains, or harm its domain rouses the demilich’s slumbering mind, causing it to rise up in the air and voice its wail of the banshee before again settling to the ground. Should the interlopers relent, the skull returns to its torpor. But if they persist, the skull rises again, not to rest again until all in its sight have perished. Fortunately for intruders, demiliches never pursue those wise enough flee.

Some believe rawheads to be nothing more than figments from scary stories, typically associated with the childhood terror known as bloody bones. But others know rawheads to be all too real and live in fear of attracting their attention. A rawhead stands almost 7 feet tall and weighs 200 pounds.

Some tyrants execute criminals, traitors, or those who dare insurrection on the end of hooked and spiked chains. Leaving the criminal to painfully hang and rot sends a message to those who would dare commit the same crimes. Sometimes such savage deaths have a strange and terrible consequence: the victim rises, grabs the instrument of its execution, and becomes a servant of those who condemned it.

Lesser deaths are the weaker cousins of grim reapers. It is whispered among dark cabals and occult fellowships that the first soul unshackled from its mortal coil faced its final judgment with scorn and defiance. This creature was so outraged by the metaphysical order of the multiverse that it became a kind of rogue deity dedicated to the ending of all other lives. Particularly powerful creatures killed by this unforgiving deity become the servants of their slayer, spreading death wherever they wander. The least powerful of these lethal servants are called lesser deaths. The first creators of the decks of many things captured some of these twisted lesser deaths long ago and bound them to those artifacts. This handful of treacherous artifacts calls forth a lesser death instead of a dire wraith when the skull card is drawn. The vast majority of lesser deaths are not bound within artifacts, though, and are free to wander the multiverse, spreading doom wherever possible. Their choices of victims sometimes seem capricious, and have birthed myriad rumors regarding their nature and purpose. Some claim that these creatures serve the whims of a hidden force in the multiverse, while others claim they select their victims according to some dark logic that only they fathom. While these creatures possess a wicked intelligence, they converse with no one and use their haunting rasps only rarely, in mockery of those who would defy them. On rare occasions, a group of these creatures converges and works together to deal death to a particularly powerful foe. When they do, they often come riding advanced albino cauchemars in a terrifying stampede, trampling the life from any who would impede their dread work.  A lesser death appears much like a typical grim reaper, though those who have encountered both claim that it’s impossible to mistake one for the other, as lesser deaths lack the hopeless gravity of true grim reapers.

The winterwight is an undead horror born from the coldest depths of the negative energy plane. Infused with the dark, cold magic that permeates this realm of death, the winterwight takes the form of a skeleton coated in armor of jagged ice. Though it resembles an ordinary skeleton from a distance, the winterwight’s frame is much sturdier than the average humanoid’s, its frozen armor intertwining with its bone structure to form an incredibly hardy chassis. Sometimes called hatewraiths because of their insatiable lust for suffering, these frozen horrors are often found in areas that suffer from magical cold or frozen climates. Winterwights are 7 feet tall and weigh 250 pounds.

Enigmatic creatures of darkness, some cultures claim tzitzimitls attack and consume entire suns to “shut down worlds” in preparation for the end of days. Sages say that these creatures come from the cold, dark places between the stars, and that in the darkness of any eclipse, one can see their immense, world-darkening shadows. Some claim ancient and forgotten deities of death and destruction created the first tzitzimitls as instruments of apocalypse, while others speculate they come from faraway worlds where immense planets teem with creatures of this scale, and that the immortal dead of these dark globes are banished to other worlds to spread devastation. Tzitzimitls as a whole offer neither affirmation nor denial for these claims, and in fact seem to glory in such legends. Certainly, the arrival of a tzitzimitl upon a world heralds the advent of a time of great trouble, although whether or not the tzitzimitl actually presages such dark times or is the cause of them is a matter of debate. On some planets, tzitzimitls have already arrived, yet they lie dormant in ancient tombs, imprisoned ages ago by heroes who are long forgotten today. A tzitzimitl is 50 feet tall.

As silent as the grave and as inevitable as time, grim reapers are more akin to forces of nature than individual beings, being nothing less than personifications of grim, violent death.  Unlike their lesser kin, grim reapers never work together or with other creatures, save for select ancient dragons and dragon-like undead that sometimes serve these dreaded soul hunters as steeds. This lack of cooperation has led some to speculate that there is only one grim reaper who plagues the multiverse. Others claim that least nine of these creatures stalk the worlds and planes, culling the living as inexplicable servants of true entropy. According to the teaching of some death cults, the final goal of a grim reaper is to end the entire cycle of life and death and to serve as a silent lord of an empty universe.  Grim reapers are so feared that even most outsiders give them a wide berth. This suits the reapers well, as that means less interference with the harvest of doomed souls. A grim reaper stands approximately 6-1/2 feet tall and weighs about 40 pounds.