Undead Origins

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Dragon 374

Dragon 374
4e
Deva Disincarnate: ?
Mournwind: Sharaea never meant to harm her sisters, but when she finally cast her soul into the unknown, it took a terrible toll on the surviving Daughters of Delight. The Prince of Frost drew the sisters to him, and his bitterness and malice shaped them. In their grief and under the sway of the Pale Prince, they wasted away, becoming wraithlike spirits of the winter wind.
Soulsorrow: Sharaea never meant to harm her sisters, but when she finally cast her soul into the unknown, it took a terrible toll on the surviving Daughters of Delight. The Prince of Frost drew the sisters to him, and his bitterness and malice shaped them. In their grief and under the sway of the Pale Prince, they wasted away, becoming wraithlike spirits of the winter wind.
Mournwind Courtier: ?
Soulsorrow Courtier: ?

 

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Dragon 375

Dragon 375
4e
Ghost of Graefmotte: Durven Graef’s murdered son did not rest easy in death. After he died, his corpse lay unburied on the floor of chambers no one dared enter until the domain shifted to the Shadowfell. After that, the body vanished when the ghost appeared, and no one knows where Geoffrey's bones now lie...
Gnoll Scavenger: ?
Griefmote: When an innocent dies, sometimes a spirit fragment survives the soul’s migration from the flesh to the Shadowfell. These fragments preserve the victim’s final suffering.
Griefmote Cloud: ?
Ghoul: Like others in the village, Martha and Guy are not what they seem. Having buried their son when he starved to death, the pair gave their souls to Orcus for the promise of food. The innkeepers are the secret source of ghouls and they perform dread rituals on villagers to complete the transformation from cannibal to undead horror.
Prince of Bone: Everything was altered, however, when the Blue Breath of Change came. The portion of the ruined fortress where the expedition was encamped was particularly thick with magic. More unfortunately for the explorers, an arm of the change storm flew directly across them. The resulting conflagration burned many of the expeditioneers to nothingness and killed many more. A few were killed and reanimated simultaneously. Of these, one was plaguechanged.
When Prince Nathur’s senses returned, things were not as they had been. Nathur viewed the world through multiple, fused skulls. His body had become an amalgam of skeletons twisted and fused together to create a shape not unlike a winged dragon but composed of the compacted bones and corpses of perhaps a hundred former courtiers, guards, and servants.

 

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Dragon 376

Dragon 376
4e
Revenant: Most of the time, death is the end of the story, but sometimes it’s another beginning. A revenant arises not as an aimless corpse of a life lost but as the embodiment of a lost soul given new purpose. Such a creature walks in two worlds. Though the revenant moves among the throngs of the living, it has a phantom life—a puppet mockery of the existence its soul once knew. The revenant is an echo haunted by the memory of itself.
Resilient souls returned from death to do the work of fate.
Revenants are souls of the dead returned to a semblance of life by the Raven Queen, but they do not appear as undead horrors or even anything like their former selves. When the Raven Queen reincarnates souls, they exist as her special creations, and they have the bodies of her choosing and creation.
Something else hounds your thoughts as you strike out into an eerily familiar world: The dead don’t come back to life by accident. Someone did this to you, and whoever that was had a reason.
Sometimes, the dead one begs to be returned to the world, and the Raven Queen listens for her own reasons.
Each revenant arises in the world only by the will of the Raven Queen. She—or someone she has made a bargain with—has a specific purpose in mind for each soul she returns to the world.
If the Raven Queen commanded the soul’s return for her own reasons, the revenant might play an important part in the future the Raven Queen foresees. The Raven Queen might send a soul to bring someone or something to the death it has avoided, and the character might have been chosen because of past ties to the target. Perhaps the character’s death was somehow wrong, and the Raven Queen reincarnated the soul as a revenant to set right the weave of fate.
If another power made a bargain with the Raven Queen, the possibilities are endless. Most deities could simply choose to raise a loyal follower to live again, so if a being of such power resorted to bargaining with the Raven Queen, there must be a reason. Perhaps a god wants more of the follower’s service, but there is something the deity wants even his most devout servant to forget. Perhaps the new lease on life is intended only as a temporary reprieve wherein the revenant must make up for some mistake made in life. A power might even want to return another deity’s follower to life for a purpose hidden from the other gods.
The reason could also be the desire of a being weaker than a true deity. Maybe an exarch raises a soul despite a deity’s wishes. Perhaps a devil or archfey has a claim on the soul of a mortal and it seeks to get what it paid for in some bargain the person made in life. A mortal might gain audience with the Raven Queen to plead the case of a deceased friend or enemy. The mortal’s aims might be altruistic, selfish, or wicked, sweeping the revenant up in a saga of great glory or terrible woe. Sometimes, the dead one begs to be returned to the world, and the Raven Queen listens for her own reasons.
This article presumes the Raven Queen put the PC revenant back in the world, or maybe she did so on behalf of some other power. A soul might even have accepted its quest from a deity directly, knowing it would lose most memories when reincarnated. It could be, however, that no power but the PC’s will returns the character from death.
Maybe some powerful patron, such as a demon lord or archfey, stole the PC’s soul and placed the PC in the world as a revenant to do its bidding. The PC might be doing the work of a prince of the Hells in order to win back a soul lost in a bad bargain. Maybe a mortal raised the PC as a hero of old and hopes the PC will do some great deed. A ritual to raise the dead might even go wrong, returning the PC to a half-life, and now the character walks the world with one foot in the grave.
A revenant need not be dead recently. The Raven Queen or another patron might recall any soul not at its final destination. A soul might be returned to the world seconds or centuries after death, but the most potential for storytelling and roleplaying might lie a generation or two later. Then revenants can see the effects of the former life, have memories of places that aren’t quite the same, meet the descendants of remembered friends, and confront old foes who might have mended their ways.
So the whole party bought the farm in that encounter last week? Maybe they all come back as revenants to take revenge.
The revenant is an undead creature who could have been of any other race in life but returns after death as a revenant with a new life and a new purpose.

 

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Dragon 377

Dragon 377
4e
Vlaakith CLVII, Lich-Queen: Not long into her reign, she performed the Lich Transformation ritual, but her undead state did little to quell her growing paranoia.
Beholder Eternal Tyrant Essence: After a powerful beholder (usually an ultimate tyrant) dies, its story might not end just yet. The most learned of these creatures can, through sheer force of will, retain their independence and power and create new bodies for themselves. These creatures are known as eternal tyrants, since they pursue immortality and rulership over as many creatures as they can.
Mentally powerful beholder ultimate tyrants cling to their intellect tenaciously. In fact, some can sustain psychic shells of themselves after death. When an ultimate tyrant’s soul reaches the Shadowfell, it can use the power of its mind to sever itself from the cycle of death. Such creatures are known as beholder eternal tyrants, and they create new construct bodies for themselves. Doing so can take centuries, and if a beholder could ever complete its body, it would be nearly indestructible.

 

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Dragon 378

Dragon 378
4e
Arantor: Long ago, when the dragonborn empire of Arkhosia warred with that of devil-tainted Bael Turath for dominion of the world, the dragonborn of Arkhosia forged pacts with dragons to aid their war effort. One such was Arantor, a silver dragon who felt that aiding the empire against the devilry of Bael Turath was a glorious and fitting endeavor for one of his power. During his service, Arantor was tasked with the destruction of a remote Turathi military outpost almost hidden within thick tropical rain forest. Its remote location and jungle surroundings ruled out ground-based reinforcements. Accompanied by his daughter and protégé Imrissa, he took wing and prepared for a swift and brutal surprise assault to eliminate the threat.
They attacked by night, diving out of a torrential downpour and raking the camp with their freezing breath while smashing tents and crude buildings asunder with tail, wing, and claw. In that first furious assault, they slaughtered scores with surprisingly little resistance. Only after the first pass did they discover, to their horror, that the tents below harbored not the battle-hardened legions of Bael Turath but civilian refugees: families, elderly, infirm, and wounded. Imrissa and Arantor broke off the attack immediately and retreated to the security of the storm clouds. Weighed down by the innocent blood they had spilled, Imrissa proposed that they return to Arkhosia immediately to report the terrible mistake. Arantor, concerned with the damage such a massacre would cause to his reputation, declared that they would inform no one of the night’s events. Their argument over a course of action grew long and heated as lightning crashed around them until irrevocable words were uttered and Imrissa, disgusted with her sire, turned to head back and report the truth whatever the consequences. In a blind fit of rage, Arantor attacked. The battle was swift and vicious. Imrissa was no match for her elder; soon her broken body plummeted through the raging storm and was lost to the jungle below.
With rage, grief, and self-loathing coursing through him like molten steel, Arantor turned to the valley below. No one could bear witness to his shame; no one could be left to tell the tale of this . . . mistake. Methodically, mercilessly, he hunted down and butchered every last refugee, leaving nearly two thousand silent corpses in his wake.
He fled the valley, but could not return to Arkhosia. Instead he vanished into the wild places of the world, surfacing from time to time as the war progressed to launch ruthless attacks on Turathi targets, military and civilian alike. Each time the slaughter was complete; Arantor left no survivors. The carnage continued until a team of Turathi dragonslayers tracked him to ground and destroyed him.
Arantor awoke, whole and seemingly healthy, in the Shadowfell as the dark lord of his own personal domain of dread: a twisted reflection of the jungle valley, complete with fortress and refugee camp, where his shame was born. As the years slipped by and he exhausted every avenue of escape he could conceive, Arantor became aware that he still aged as he would have in the mortal realm. He consigned himself to waiting out his considerable life span, hoping that his purgatory would end and he would be allowed peace upon his death. This was not to be. As his body died, his consciousness remained trapped within his decaying form, animating it as an undead prison to last throughout eternity. As his flesh began to rot away, he became aware that where his heart should have been rested the skeleton of another silver dragon: the daughter he turned upon and murdered. When the last scrap of withered skin sloughed off, it stirred and began to ceaselessly whisper the names of the innocents Arantor had slain over the years.
Gwenth, Vampire: ?
Rolain, Vampire: ?
Undead: The Undying Court is full of members who have become undead. The form they practice doesn’t use the perverse magic that creates most evil undead. To these elves, undeath is a means for ancestors to share their wisdom with future generations, not a selfish means of prolonging life.
Though many of the faith’s followers are unaware of this, the Blood of Vol’s true rulers draw on the power of undeath. Lady Vol and many members of the clergy master rituals and other methods of attaining eternal life through dark magic.

 

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Dragon 380

Dragon 380
4e
Undead: Priests assure their flocks that those who live upstanding and virtuous lives find that what happens after their deaths is free from danger, but their words ring hollow. Not even they know if what they say is true or not. Indeed, many perils await the dead. Dark, hungry things wait in shadows, luring unwary travelers to their dooms, where they are used, twisted, or corrupted into frightful undead horrors.
Vengeful Dead power.

Vengeful Dead Invoker Utility 16
When your ally falls, you intone a dread word to bind its spirit to the flesh, causing the companion to rise again and fight on your behalf.
Daily ✦ Divine
Minor Action Ranged 10
Target: One dead ally
Effect: The target becomes an undead ally until the end of the encounter. The target regains hit points equal to its bloodied value and gains the undead keyword. It is slowed, immune to disease and poison, has resist 10 necrotic and vulnerable 5 radiant, and its melee attacks deal extra necrotic damage equal to your Wisdom modifier. The target is otherwise unchanged and can act normally. At the end of the encounter, the ally dies, but can be brought back to life with the Raise Dead ritual or similar means.

 

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Dragon 382

Dragon 382
4e
Specter Familiar: ?
Tainted Zombie: The creatures here are undead tainted by foul magic.
Mage Wight: ?
Ghost: History walks the streets of Hammerfast in the form of the dead, the dwarves and orcs who died in this place more than a century ago. They are now ghosts consigned to wander Hammerfast’s streets until the end of days.
Ghosts still walk the streets, some of them orc warriors slain in the Bloodspears’ attack, others priests of Moradin or the necropolis’s doomed guardians, and even a few of them dwarves laid to rest here long ago.

 

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Dragon 387

Dragon 387
4e
Ghast: When ghouls go too long without humanoid flesh, they rot away from the inside out. The insatiable hunger that accompanies this transformation grants ghasts a desperate strength and ferocity.
Rot Grub Zombie: a corpse reanimated into a dark parody of life… and acts as a carrier for the swarm of rot grubs it carries around inside it.
Shadow: They attacked living things in order to gain their life force, draining an opponent’s Strength merely by touching them; if an opponent ever fell to 0 Strength, he’d become a new shadow.
According to most knowledgeable sages, shadows appear to have been magically created, perhaps as part of some ancient curse laid upon some long-dead enemy. The curse affects only humans and demihumans, so it would seem that it affects the soul or the spirit. When victims can no longer resist, either through loss of consciousness (hit points) or physical prowess (Strength points), the curse is activated and the majority of the character’s essence is shifted to the Negative Energy plane. Only a shadow of their former self remains on the Prime Material plane, and the transformation always renders the victim both terribly insane and undeniably evil.
Ghoul: Those slain by ghouls became new ghouls, further spreading undeath like some kind of disease or a game of all-in-tag.

 

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Dragon 388

Dragon 388
4e
Orcus: Orcus once even rose as an undead, having been slaughtered somewhere during the 2nd Edition Blood War (a topic we’ll leave well alone for now), supposedly by a drow working for Lolth.

 

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Dragon 391

Dragon 391
4e
Undead: The shadar-kai did not emerge from their transformation without a price. All possessed unique talents, strange powers, and a quickness and cleverness that could exceed human limitations, though from the start, the shadar-kai also endured a dangerous sadness, emptiness, and boredom that arose from a dampening of their sensations and emotions. Surrendering to the ennui meant oblivion and the creation of twisted undead horrors, so it is in every shadar-kai’s best interest to fight against the darkness within and triumph over it.