[Rant] Screw Canon!

[Shemeska]

I kind of like the idea of undead fiends for the true horror they invoke, like proper zombies. I don't mean those animated husks in 3.x, I mean the rotting, ravenous, virtually mindless but with just a spark of remembering what it was to be alive kind of zombies.

Fiends on their own don't evoke proper horror? Let's take an example: an Ultroloth, the living manifestation of cold, detached evil devoid of law and chaos. Blank, mouthless and emotionless faces, eyes glowing like burning souls, and a telepathic voice that rips into your mind like a knife slashing at the center of your mind, slowly flaying you from within with every word it speaks. Not that you matter, not that it cares, your suffering is meaningless to it, but you will suffer nonetheless.

Ok me make it undead, and that improves it... how?

Take a Balor, the physical manifestation of chaos and evil merged, destructive potential and raw hatred taken flesh. It does not sleep. It cannot sleep. It is insane by any mortal conception, living in a constant waking hallucination with liquid fury pumping through its veins, and only the intention to spread sweet chaos by the most destructive possible way, freedom taken to a perverse extreme. I can't really see how making it undead improves it. It's like a half celestial half dragon gelatenous cube with cleric levels at that point, stacking things doesn't always make for a better product, and I don't see how making a fiend a lich (even if you suspend that it's not possible, and makes little or no sense to happen) improves anything.

You can capture the 'undying' properties of undead without resorting to making a fiend undead. You kill a powerful fiend but the body rapidly dissolves into a slurry of maggots, acid fumes and spontaneously combusting liquids... but its not dead... the fiends essence simply hurtles across the planes to collect and condense back upon its home plane, gaining strength from the seat of its power, funneling the raw stuff of the plane into itself and forming another physical manifestation. You killed it but it reforms till you manage to kill it on its home plane, etc. I treat any powerful fiend like that anyway, no need to resort to any notion of lichhood that really only is attractive (and thematically possible) for a mortal.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Fiends on their own don't evoke proper horror?

My point was some undead don't evoke horror. Skeletons and zombies aren't as scary as a dire wolf. Vampires are generally dramatized. Liches are by choice. Ghosts may not even be the soul of the individual. Banshees are chock full-of-psycho angry about bein' dead and are undead to get vengeance.

Only ghouls, wights, and shadows are rightfully unpleasant notions.

Besides, even a ghoul's soul is intact. An undead fiend is a tattered remnant of a soul, incomplete and decaying. Imagine "Death Becomes Her" but with souls. Ick.