Undead Origins

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Laboratory of the Forsaken

Laboratory of the Forsaken
Fantasy Craft
Lunalia's Ghost: Lunalia’s horror at these affairs led Magnus to once again confine her, vowing to brew a potion that would “make her love him again.” Unable to escape and unwilling to face whatever Magnus had in store for her, she drew a bath, slid into the warm water, and slit her wrists. She expected this would finally put an end to her suffering, but once again Magnus had other ideas. Upon discovering her still-warm corpse, the doctor extracted her brain and reanimated her as a flesh golem. This final outrage was enough to anchor her soul to the manor as a ghost, with a lone driving need to destroy the abomination made from her remains.

 

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Iron Heroes

Iron Heroes
Iron Heroes
Skeleton: Necromancy Method Animate Dead.
Zombie: Necromancy Method Animate Dead.

NECROMANCY METHOD: ANIMATE DEAD
Mastery: 1–10
Descriptor: Negative energy
Mana: 4 mana/undead HD
Casting Time: One minute
Range: Medium (100 feet + 10 feet/necromancy mastery level)
Target: One or more dead creatures
Duration: Permanent
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: No
You reach into a corpse and find the failed flame of life within it. Using your necromantic magic, you reignite that fire with negative energy, allowing the dead to walk once more—as your servant. Using this method, you can animate a creature with Hit Dice equal to up to twice your mastery rating. At any given time you can control a number of undead with total Hit Dice equal to five times your necromancy mastery rating. If you attempt to control more than that, the undead you control with the most Hit Dice becomes independent. It might flee or attack you and your allies, based on the DM’s judgment.
The undead obey your mental commands to the best of their ability. If you lose line of effect to an undead servant, it obeys your last commands as well as it can. Commanding an undead servant is a free action.
When you animate a corpse, it becomes either a skeleton or a zombie. Use the monster templates given below in the “Creating a Skeleton” and “Creating a Zombie” sections for your newly animated undead. Either apply the template to the existing stats of a creature you wish to animate or use the generic creature statistics in the table above for each size creature from Small to Huge—you don’t need many stats, such as base attack or Intelligence, because the templates determine them. You can select almost any creature type to become undead, as animating a creature makes it lose most of its type-specific abilities.
Moderate Disaster: The mote of energy you create to sustain the creature runs rampant and drains your life force. You suffer damage equal to the mana spent to cast animate dead.
Major Disaster: The undead creature animates as normal, but a minor error introduced into the process causes it to attack you immediately and in preference to all other creatures. It tracks you unerringly.

 

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Iron Heroes Bestiary

Iron Heroes Bestiary
Iron Heroes
Dire Gloom: The dire gloom arises in areas where the stuff of the Negative Energy Plane spills over into the mortal realm. Intelligent creatures slain by the influx of energy become dire glooms, chunks of negative energy given intelligence as the dying creature’s soul becomes enmeshed within the stuff of the negative plane.
Hunting Spirit: A hunting spirit is a relentless hunter, the undead essence of a creature that died while pursuing a victim. Even as the creature’s body dies, its spirit continues onward in search of its prey. The hatred, anger, or hunger that drove it forward pushes its spirit on after death.
Necrophage: Necrophages spawn in areas with a high concentration of necromantic energy. They arise spontaneously, the raw energy of death given physical form, in areas such as morgues, the site of an executioner’s block or a gallows pole, and so forth.
Plague Giant: A plague giant is the decaying husk of a monstrously large humanoid creature animated as an undead being.

 

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The Rookie's Guide to Psi-Talent

The Rookie's Guide to Psi-Talent
Judge Dread d20
Zombie: These creatures can be created by psykers using the undeath power, or may arise naturally in areas of great psychic disturbance.

Undeath
Level: 1
Manifestation Time: 1 action
Range: Close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)
Target: One corpse/level
Duration: 1 hour/level
Saving Throw: None
Power Resistance: No
Power Points: 1
This power allows a character to imbue a corpse with a shadow of its former soul, allowing it to once more walk the Earth as a zombie, a shambling creature utterly under the control of the manifester’s will. Up to one corpse per level of the manifester may be turned into a zombie with each use of this power, though the manifester may never have a total of more zombies under his control than his level, regardless of how many times undeath is used. The zombies will follow the manifester or follow simple orders, as is desired. The corpse must be mostly intact for a zombie to be created and must be of medium size or smaller.

 

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The Rookie's Guide to the Undercity

The Rookie's Guide to the Undercity
Judge Dread d20
Arlington Zombie: The world almost ended in 2114, when the time-travelling Necromagus Sabbat arrived in the Radlands of Ji, the psi-saturated radioactive wasteland near to Hondo City. A powerful sorcerer of unprecedented proportions, Sabbat made use of a psi-enhancing lodestone and raised untold millions of corpses from their graves to serve as his personal army of zombies.
for some unknown reason the undead that clawed their way out of their graves in the enormous Arlington National Cemetery in the Washington Undercity remained animated after Sabbat’s defeat.
Thinking Dead: Rare variations of the Arlington zombie, the beings known as ‘thinking dead’ are sentient undead creatures created during the Zombie War. Most of Sabbat’s zombie hordes were mindless automata, but it has since been found that some of the animated cadavers - about one in every ten thousand - had somehow retained fragments of their original personalities. Usually, the individual had been particularly forceful or single-minded while alive, or had died without fulfilling some important obligation. Others had been ghosts or discarnate spirits who took the opportunity to re-inhabit their former bodies.

 

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Soldiers and Spellfighters20

Soldiers and Spellfighters20
Modern20
Skeleton Soldier Speedfreak 4: These stats represent a skeleton warrior that might be created and controlled with necromancy.
Necromancy Spellbinding
Ye Fashan's Necromantic Spellbinding.
Zombie Soldier Tank 1: These stats represent a sample zombie that could be created an controlled with Necromancy.
Necromancy Spellbinding.
Ye Fashan's Necromantic Spellbinding.
Restore to Life incantation failure.
Revenant: Restore to Life incantation.

Restore to Life
Conjuration (Healing)
Magic Ranks Required: 14; Components: V, S, F; Casting Time: 120 minutes (minimum); Range: Touch.; Target: Dead creature touched; Duration: Instantaneous; Saving Throw: None
The restore to life incantation was purchased by members the German Imperial Army’s Sorcery Corps (Zaubereikorps) at the Bavarian Forest portal in 1918. It was hoped that the incantation could be used to resurrect particularly competent and experienced officers and thus negate somewhat the devastating effects of trench warfare on the quality of the army – especially in the infantry branch.
This incantation was purported to restore life to any deceased creature. The condition of the remains is not a factor. So long as some small portion of the creature’s body still exists, it can be returned to life, but the portion receiving the incantation must have been part of the creature’s body at the time of death.
Unfortunately, the best wizards in the Kaiser’s Sorcery Corps (Zaubereikorps) could never successfully perform this incantation. This led to much speculation that the incantation was a either a deliberate fraud or that this particular magic could not work properly in our world.
Unlike zombies or skeletons, the creature is restored to full hit points and retains its personality, allegiances and all skills and abilities it had before death - but it is undeniably undead (it has the Undead Physiology feat).
The deployment of revenant soldiers to the front had a disastrous effect on the morale of living troops but it helped prolong the battles of Verdun and Somme and thus forestalled the invasion of Germany.
Note: In game terms – revenants are the same characters they were before death – except they have gained the Undead Physiology feat. (See Appendix III for full details on this feat.) In a nutshell, their Constitution is reduced to 0 but they suffer no penalty to hit points from this. They do not heal naturally except through the use of spells or special abilities. They gain 2 Damage Reduction per level but this damage reduction has a weakness to a certain substance – in this case - silver.
Secondary Casters: Two required (not including primary caster).
Failure: The target is returned to life as a zombie and immediately attacks the casters. The target loses all skills and abilities and uses the zombie stats from the Creature section.

 

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Mutants & Masterminds Third Edition Hero's Handbook
Mutants & Masterminds 3e
Construct Undead Revenant: ?
Zombie: ?

 

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DC Adventures Hero's Handbook

DC Adventures Hero's Handbook
Mutants & Masterminds 3e
Construct Undead Revenant: ?
Zombie: ?
Solomon Grundy: Many years ago, vain and wealthy merchant Cyrus Gold was murdered, his body dumped into Slaughter Swamp near Go-tham City. Mystical forces in the swamp attempted to trans-form Gold into a new incarnation of Earth’s plant elemental, but because Gold did not die by fire as required, the process was only partially successful. Decades later, a massive, shambling figure rose from the swamp, killing a pair of escaped convicts and stealing their clothes. He adopted the name Solomon Grundy from the children’s rhyme (“Solomon Grundy, born on a Monday...”) and embarked on a series of crimes in Gotham.

 

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DC Adventures Heros and Villains II

DC Adventures Heros and Villains II
Mutants & Masterminds 3e
Looker: Emily “Lia” Briggs was a timid librarian who was, unbeknownst to her, the last royal descendant of Abyssia, an underground kingdom that her ancestor founded after he gained mental powers from a crashed meteor in 2000 b.c.e. The Abyssians kidnapped and exposed Lia to the meteor fragment, which gave her incredible beauty and mental powers. Katana, a bookseller who happened to know Lia, got the Outsiders to rescue her. Lia, as Looker, joins the team.
Looker’s powers and association with the Outsiders unfortunately puts a strain on her marriage and she separates from, and eventually divorces, her husband. Looker pursues a modeling career when the Outsiders move to Los Angeles and has a brief affair with Geo-Force.
The opposition leader in Abyssia, Tamira, returns to power and engages Looker in a Rite of Challenge during which Looker loses most of her powers. Lia retires and leaves the Outsiders but later returns to Markovia. She regains her powers during a battle with the vampire Roderick but is also transformed into a vampire.
Zombie: Zombies are typically animated human corpses given a semblance of life through magic or scientific means (exposure to a disease or toxic waste, for example).
Zombie Flesh Eater: ?
Zombie Contagious: Their condition is contagious, either to anyone killed by them, or even anyone scratched or bitten (suffering at least an injured result from damage).
Skeleton: Skeletons are essentially fleshless zombies, faster and more agile because of it, and even more resistant to various forms of harm. The kind of skeletons that show up to fight heroes are often those of ancient warriors, and so may be equipped with appropriate armor and weapons, improving their damage and Toughness by +2 each and increasing their power level by 1 (although minion rank remains the same).

 

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DC Adventures Universe

DC Adventures Universe
Mutants & Masterminds 3e
Undead: Lady Styx can raise all intelligent living beings slain by her followers as undead worshippers.
Darkstar Envoy: Once the hope for peace and justice in the universe, the Darkstars are now undead agents of Lady Styx, raised to pseudo-life in her service.
Earth 43 Batman: This is a world with a higher quotient of supernatural involvement than normal, where Batman was ultimately turned into a vampire and must control his own darker urges in order to continue his war on darkness.