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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6304741" data-attributes="member: 1465">Just to celebrate my 10k post on ENW, I want to discuss about the undead, one of my favourite type of D&D monsters, how I felt that slowly over the years they have kind of lost their appeal or thrill, and to gather suggestions about how to make them thrilling again in 5e.YMMV and all that, but personally I used to find the undead a truly creepy and scary kind of monsters. Dragons are typically at the pinnacle of the monster hierarchy, and can be totally frightening to the characters, and so can other monsters. But they are never frightening to the players for sure <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Instead, there was something about the undead that actually frightened or at least unsettled me. It's got to do with this fundamental idea that being neither alive nor dead, they are not wholly 'natural' and therefore disturbing. Monsters are monstrous of course, but you can still see them as part of nature, while undead suggest that there is just something wrong about them being there in the first place... I know for a fact, that when I was very young, trying to watch my first scary movies, I was never frightened by the huge and violent alien monsters in sci-fi flicks, but instead I would almost freak out at movies with zombies and revenants (not so much ghosts and vampires for some reason).I'm not sure if this was any better in older editions of D&D (it probably wasn't), but to me it seems that undead have become extremely normal, and as such they are hardly scary. Let's presume I'm just too old for that, but the fact is, they aren't even scary at all for the characters, PC and NPC: - They are everywhere, in all settings, so that "undeath" is rarely anymore a defining theme for a fantasy world.- There are always low-level undead which are hardly a threat to a single 1st-lv character and probably not even to a commoner. - They used to have some really crippling special abilities, but gradually these have been removed from the game.- They used to be evil, but they are now seen as tools for PC and NPC alike ("undead as technology"?).So even if I assume we're all grown ups and won't be actually scared while playing the game <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> the problem I have is that I actually can't seem to make undead scary to the characters populating the fantasy world of D&D!It seems that the players constantly play their PCs in the presence of undead, as if they are just another kind of critters, as in "there's a rat infestation here, let's call a professional to spray some rat poison" -> "there's an undead infestation here, let's call a cleric to spray some Turn Undead". But there should be a huge difference in how people in a fantasy world see rats vs the bodies of dead people crawling out from the tombs!Is it so that we had such overexposure to fantasy, that everything feels so normal? Is this all part of "losing the sense of wonder"?How would you manage to bring back some scary or disturbing feeling when using undead in your game of D&D?Does 5e give us better tools for such purpose?</blockquote>

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