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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4079832" data-attributes="member: 2067">Not quite. See, that blurb in 4e makes the bodak into a spawn, a servant creature of other, more powerful creatures, who really only exists at the whim of that 'more powerful creature.'They may be created from humanoids, but they aren't in any noticeable way that same semi-sympathetic creature. They don't retain their memories, and they have no awareness of their own evil, or of how it came to be. Mostly in 2e, but even in 3e, the bodak wasn't a servant. It was autonomous, which made it more inscrutable, and made the evil more "evil," being random and cruel rather than specific and motivated by killing. 4e bodaks seem to be, in a lot of ways, +1 Zombies. You kill them because they want to kill you (even if a more powerful evil being is the one telling them to). The plot that springs first to mind is "A nightwalker has created a bodak army that is marching in the village! Go kill the bodak army, then kill the nightwalker!"In 3e, bodaks were "unfortunate souls". You kill them because they kill things, and it isn't necessarily their fault. The plot that springs first to mind, for me, is a bodak who was once a great adventurer, but had delved too deep. He returns to his home town, vaguely aware of his past memories, and re-visits his family, taking them into his arms and killing them accidentally with his gaze. The PC's are called in to stop this "rampaging beast," and as they do, they discover what his victims have in common, and why scraps of fabric and drawings and various bric-a-brak disappear from the houses he has come to. And when they have the showdown with the bodak in the cave he has laired in outside of town, where he keeps the drawings his daughter made and the perfume his mother war, and the wedding ring from his wife, it's a bittersweet moment of release for this poor, undead being, this creature no-longer of our world who once was. And then the PC's go on to slay the "absolute evil" that created him. The vagueness worked in the favor of the bodak here because that absolute evil could vary with the campaign: in some worlds, perhaps it was the Dark Lord or the Goblin King or the Emperor Necromancer. In some worlds, it was perhaps the Abyss, or Demogorgon or Orcus.I'd rather have the latter than the former in any game, because the former can be filled with any number of faceless spawn, but the latter is a more unique (and more evocative) creature.EDIT: And I can see this carrying over to 4e pretty smoothly. The idea of the people who die in the shadowfell getting transformed into Bodaks spontaneously works a lot like the 2e idea of people who die in the Abyss getting transformed into bodaks spontaneously. This doesn't hurt the mechanics at all, and actually gives a pretty good in-game reason why people would have all sorts of trepidations about going into the Shadowfell. If you die there, you come back...twisted. Changed. It alters your soul. The Bodak Skulk may be an infamous thief who died while 'between worlds.' The Bodak Reaver might be a fighter who went into the Shadowfell to rescue his doomed allies.</blockquote>

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