Ecology of the Undead

[Jakathi]

shadows come from egyptian mythology. this is a paraphrase quote from some book.

sorry i forgot the book name.
Egyptians thought that a person’s soul came in four parts and would live on after death.
The Ka is the non-physical copy of the person that needs and wants exactly what their living counter-part needs and wants. A person’s Ka could leave its body when the person sleeps, but always needed to return to it.
The Ba is the person’s personality. The Akh is a combination of the Ba and Ka and is reunited at death in order to survive the underworld.
The name and the person’s shadow are the only things that remain on earth.

 

[Jakathi]

Vampire mythology

okay. i think this comes from somewhere else. i'm just picking up stuff from here and there.

When Cain killed Able, God asked him what he did. Cain lied and said he didn't kno, but God heard the earth crying over Able. God told him this and Cain finally confessed. As punishment for Cain's crime, God cursed him with eternal life, but denying him the gift of the sun. Thus the first vampire was born.

In another thread, God also punished Judas for betraying Christ. As punishment, he too was turned into an undead creature, cursed to wander the night, unable to see the light of day for all eternity.

 

[Tonguez]

I thought mummies were just animated corpses. I guess they have some intelligence though, even if they do not have any connection to the soul that once inhabited the corpse.

Common misnomer but Mummies in most folklore (as they are not in fact found in Egyptian myth) generally have a 'Purpose' which has caused the Kha to reanimate them.
So they are willful to the extent that they have chosen to reanimate but are driven by a singular Purpose (either to Protect the Tomb or Avenge its desecration)

Nonetheless some Mummies (Arnold Vosloo and Boris Karloffs - and possibly Osiris- amongst them) have much more Freewill (The Greater Mummies of DnD).

Voadam
Yep Ghast is exactly like a PrC for Ghouls. Ghouls are intelligent and imho make wonderful NPCs. An old campaign I did featured an NPC Ghoul who actually helped the PCs, it also featured a serial killer named Ripper Jack (who was a Ghast) and the Bogeyman (another Ghast)

I checked the atlas link but couldn't find the preview you refered to

 

[Voadam]

Voadam
Yep Ghast is exactly like a PrC for Ghouls. Ghouls are intelligent and imho make wonderful NPCs. An old campaign I did featured an NPC Ghoul who actually helped the PCs, it also featured a serial killer named Ripper Jack (who was a Ghast) and the Bogeyman (another Ghast)

I checked the atlas link but couldn't find the preview you refered to

Damn, they took down the previews. One of my entries in the book is a degenerate ghoul template with a five level ghast prestige class.

 

[Deadguy]

Incidentally, just the other day I went through the list of undead to figure out which ones of them had souls. This is important in my campaign because the souls of the dead usually stay in the Region of the Dead, unless they are turned into undead or (rarely) raised. Anyway, here's the list . . .

Soul-less: Mummy, Skeleton, Zombie.

Depraved: Wight, Wraith, Bodak, Allip, Devourer (Ethereal plane), Ghoul,
Ghast, Mohrg, Shadow.

Souled: Vampire, Lich, Ghost, Nightshade

As you can see, most of the undead fall into a middle category, which I called "depraved," meaning that they still have souls, although they are thoroughly twisted and corrupted to the point that there is little connection (in terms of memory and personality) between the present creature and the living creature that once was.

An interesting analysis c_c> It's actually rather handy to be able to describe the Undead in a variety of ways, since it gives ideas as to how to use them. I recall from fantasy campaigns many years ago I divided the Undead into:

Animated Dead: the bodies of mortals given some animation through death magics. Like you I included the Mummy, Zombie and Skeleton.

'True' Undead: these are the classic undead, both corporeal and incorporeal, sustained by the energies from the realms of the dead. Examples include the Spectre and the Wraith.

Living Dead: these are creatures that seem to sustain themselves on the brink of death by devouring something from the living. In this group I put Vampires (of course!) and Ghouls. The Living Dead suffer from some sort of weakness if they do not feed (generally I didn't let them regain hit points any way except through feeding).

and then, from the pages of White Dwarf many years ago, there came the Semi-Dead, the Morbes, who oscillated either side of the line of death and undeath according to how recently they had fed from the living. They were a weird idea, and really inventive, since a village of Morbes might seem normal after scoffing a whole bandit group (how I used them once), only to become Undead a few days later... Nasty!

 

[MerakSpielman]

okay. i think this comes from somewhere else. i'm just picking up stuff from here and there.

When Cain killed Able, God asked him what he did. Cain lied and said he didn't kno, but God heard the earth crying over Able. God told him this and Cain finally confessed. As punishment for Cain's crime, God cursed him with eternal life, but denying him the gift of the sun. Thus the first vampire was born.

In another thread, God also punished Judas for betraying Christ. As punishment, he too was turned into an undead creature, cursed to wander the night, unable to see the light of day for all eternity.

Isn't that the origin of Vampires from the Vampire the Masquerade game? It's not bad, actually, and better I think than the origin story in Anne Rice's novels.

In D&D it would take an evil god to curse humanity with such a plague. Of course, they'd call it a blessing. Maybe that's what happens when you pledge your soul to an evil god - you're left undead, serving their will on the material plane for eternity.

 

[Tonguez]

and better I think than the origin story in Anne Rice's novels.

So what is the Anne Rice origin story?

 

[MerakSpielman]

So what is the Anne Rice origin story?

Now, there might be more to this in later books (especially Queen of the Damned) but I never made it past the second book. This is the story Lestat heard, highly abbreviated. Spoiler for those who are interested in the books and somehow have managed to not read them yet.

Spoiler

Way back in ancient Egypt there was a haunting going around - you know the bit, things flying around of their own accord, bad things happening to people who stayed in the building too long, etc... So these two people, I think they were royalty of some sort, a man and a woman, go to check it out and try to banish the evil spirits. They end up getting cut up real bad by all the flying knives and almost die. At this point, a mystical transformation takes place (something to do with being so badly wounded near poltregeists or something) and when they emerge from the building they are vampires. They are the origin of all vampires on earth.