I'm confused about "creature type"

[Prestidigitalis]

The Swordmage Daily 19 power "Bane Blade" requires that you select a "creature type": animate, beast, humanoid or magical beast. We seem to get a lot of undead in our campaigns, so I decided to look up "zombie" in the online Compendium to see what type they are.

Well, it's just confusing. The various types of zombies seem to span at least 3 of the 4 types -- animate, humanoid and magical beast. To make things stranger, I notice that gravehounds (they are doggish creatures, right?) are considered humanoid.

So, is the Compendium full of errors, or am I mistaken in thinking that zombies would be pretty much all the same type, or both? Overall, does it seem that the classifications mostly make sense, or do they seem arbitrary?

 

[the Jester]

Huh- my guess is a little of both.

The zombies in the Monster Manual are all animates; this includes the gravehound. Unless there was weird, mistaken errata for it, my guess is that either at some point it was misprinted in an adventure and the misprint made it into the Compendium or the Compendium itself has a bunch of monster errors in it.

While I can see certain zombies being treated as humanoids or beasts or whatnot, it makes more sense to me if they are all animates. But whatev.

 

[malraux]

Creatures have a type and an origin. Origin describes where a monster comes from, be it Elemental (Elemental Chaos), Fey (Feywild), Immortal (Astral Sea), etc. Type describes its basic appearance and behavior. So zombies should be animate, because that describes something "magically given life or intelligence", whereas a wight is humanoid.

That said, I could see a non-typical zombie being given a different classification than animate. If it has non-trivial intelligence or cunning, then it might make sense to classify it as humanoid or magical beast. Of course, then it should be something different from a DnD zombie, but logical consistency isn't 4e's strongest suit. All that said, re-flavoring oversights or lax editing is the most likely cause.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The keywords in the Compendium are totally screwed, just ignore them. They aren't even close to correct anymore. Something went whackadoodle with that value in the Compendium a while back and it has been bogus for months.

All undead are animate, at least all the basic non-freewilled ones like zombies.

 

[Azlith]

It could also depend on how they came into being. Check out the fluff material in their sources to see if they are created by magic or spawn others of their kind. I don't have time to check them out, but that is one possibility.

 

[jimmifett]

*Digs out his Master.xml File*

As mentioned previously, you have "Type" (animate, beast, magical beast, humonoid) and only those 4 for type.

Then you have "Origins" (aberrant, elemental, fey, immortal, natural, shadow).

Finally, you have "Racial Keywords" (Air, Angel, Aquatic, Blind, Cold, Construct, Demon, Devil, Earth, Fire, Giant, Homonculus, Living Construct, Mount, Ooze, Plant, Reptile, Shapechanger, Spider, Swarm, Undead, Water. Those are the main "core" racial keywords, but there are a ton of others. The racial keywords basically just identify a creature's race if not obvious by name, such as:

El Lamo, Dread Astral Pirate
Medium Natural Humanoid (Githyanki)

or something to that effect.