Dragon 371
Dragon 371
4e
Undead: From undead spawned by his dread rituals to the descendants of those adventurers who died in the tomb, Acererak and his legend have shaped and altered countless lives.
The Shadowfell bleeds into the mortal world where Skull City stands, but the influence is not the chilling pall normally associated with such regions. Instead a conduit to a region of Darklands is not far from the City That Waits. The Darklands’ influence spills through the planar barriers, staining the mortal world with its corrupting influence, and thus Skull City and those who die here often rise as undead.
Disciple of the Devourer: ?
Mistress Ferranifer: ?
Devourer's Spawn: Horrid necromantic leavings infused with dread energy, Devourer’s spawn are wretched things, driven by an insatiable hunger for living flesh.
Devourer’s spawn are bits of organ, tissue, and rotten flesh collected and awakened into a bestial awareness.
Glistening Heap: ?
Festering Morass: Spawn grow and evolve by adding organs and blood that they rip and drink from still-living victims. In time, the loosed bits coalesce into a vaguely humanoid-shaped bag of blood and meat known as a festering morass.
Shadow Sentinel: Those sacrificed in Acererak’s name find no peace in death because the Devourer is aptly named. Consumed by the powerful lich, their essence reformed and twisted into new shapes, they serve the dark one for eternity.
Shadow Watcher: ?
Shadow Guard: ?
Moilian Dead: For all their selfish cruelty, excess sickened the Moilians, and little by little, Orcus’s hold weakened as they searched for a more wholesome power to find redemption for their evil ways. No matter their efforts or improved intentions, the demon prince’s grip was too tight and when the people refused to make sacrifices in his name, his anger was unleashed. It took form in a terrible curse, causing the Moilians to fall into a deep sleep. As they slept, Orcus seized the city and flung it into the deepest regions of the Shadowfell, where it was believed that they would succumb to the fell energy there and serve him more loyally in undeath.
As expected, the Moilians died out and awoke as free-willed undead, drifting aimlessly through their now frozen city.
Orcus laid a heavy curse on the Moilians—a curse they must bear still.
Moilian dead are the undead remains of those who lived in the City That Waits.
Blackfire Creeper: Chosen guardians created from exemplary Moilian dead, the blackfire creepers patrol the City That Waits to dispatch any interlopers they find.
Blackfire creepers are advanced undead remade by Acererak the Devourer.
Charnel Zombie: THE SAME PROCESSES THAT GIVE RISE TO GREAT CITIES and monuments invariably also sire throngs of poor, hungry, and unwanted souls barely surviving from day to day. Uncared for in life, these unfortunates receive little better in death. Thrown into burial pits or stacked in mass graves, they are quickly disposed of and forgotten even faster. Not even this pitiful eternal rest is secure, for such a wealth of uncared for remains is a prime target for necromancers and their ilk.
Charnel zombies bear the marks of their former poverty even into undeath. Their bodies are thin and malnourished from constant near starvation. What clothing was not scavenged by other destitute homeless is tattered and worn beyond possible use. Broken and crushed body parts attest that these corpses were dumped into a packed mass grave with little thought given for propriety or the state of the bodies. Their bodies and spirits broken even before being animated as zombies, they seem especially pathetic and vacant.
Zombie Grave Digger: Often made from the remains of failed, living grave robbers, zombie grave diggers are dressed in dark-colored work attire, complete with a myriad of hammers, spades, pries, and other accoutrements of their profession.
Corpse of Despair: DESPAIR CAN BE A POWERFUL EMOTION—one capable of overwhelming otherwise ordinary beings and driving them to normally unthinkable acts. Those who succumb to utter hopelessness and end their own lives at the bleakest point of their depression leave a powerful
impression upon their physical remains that can be exploited by necromantic ritual to create a particular type of undead: a corpse of despair.
The body animated as a corpse of despair could have hailed from any walk of life, since loss, pain, and despair can darken even the most opulent and powerful lives. However, certain similarities are borne by all. Their faces are masks of anguish and froze at the moment they ended their own existence. Marks of this suicide are still visible upon the zombie; slit wrists, signs of poisoning, and broken necks still bearing nooses are all common.
Lasher Zombie: DESPITE THE PROGRESS AND EXPANSION OF CIVILIZATION, countless unfortunate souls continue to live with the cruel pangs of hunger. Poverty, famine, disaster, and war all contribute to the tally of lives stolen away by starvation. Its victims suffer horribly as they wither away to pitiful, skeletal caricatures of themselves before finally succumbing. The final, agonizing hunger these poor creatures experience can be imprinted on the corpse they leave behind—a terrible need that lacks only the dark energy of necromancy to rise and gorge itself on an endless feast of warm blood and quivering flesh. Twisted rituals animate and bind these travesties to the will of their creator, who employs them as disturbingly effective guardians or terror weapons.
Shambling Nexus: UNDEAD IN GENERAL ARE NOTORIOUSLY VULNERABLE to attacks that employ radiant energy, and zombies, although cheap and easy to animate, are often cumbersome and slow to react on the battlefield. Such problems have long been the bane of aspiring necromantic overlords and have spelled defeat for countless undead, both servant and master. Created to nullify these weaknesses, a shambling nexus is the product of unspeakable rituals that bind enormous quantities of raw, dark energy into a fleshy shell.
Flayed Crawler: CREATED TO BE VICIOUS TRACKERS AND ASSASSINS for their necromantic overlords, flayed crawlers are abhorrent abominations animated from the remains of victims sadistically tortured to death. The terrors inflicted upon the poor souls are so extreme that it leaves even their animated corpses unhinged and prone to violent, psychotic outbursts.
Plague Fogger: MANY VIRULENT AND DESTRUCTIVE DISEASES trouble the world, but a dreadful few belong to a category all their own. These plagues can devastate a region, leaving bloated and twisted corpses littering the streets and fields of the blighted area. Such corpses are rife with lethal pestilence and can, through either spontaneous accumulation of fell energy or deliberate action, rise as undead capable of calling on that power.
Slavering Maw: ONLY THE MOST POWER-HUNGRY, OVERLY CONFIDENT INSANE PERSON would construct an abomination known as a slavering maw. Dozens of corpses must be raised through necromantic rituals to serve as obscene construction material. The creature is then given form by stitching together the writhing and thrashing muscle, skin, sinew, and bone of its still animate donor zombies. Rusted iron and rotted wooden scraps are crudely nailed to its flesh and frame to help support its terrible mass. A final, unspeakable ritual fuses the disparate zombies into a single, horrific whole that is far more powerful than its component parts.
Vecna: ?
Acererak: And from lich, Acererak went on, not to godhood, but to become the game’s first demilich—in many ways, a far more dangerous creature, the final vestige of a once all-powerful lich.
Ages past, a human magic-user/cleric of surpassing evil took the steps necessary to preserve his life force beyond the centuries he had already lived, and this creature became the lich, Acererak. Over the scores of years which followed, the lich dwelled with hordes of ghastly servants in the gloomy stone halls of the very hill where the Tomb is. Eventually even the undead life force of Acererak began to wane, so for the next eight decades, the lich’s servants labored to create the Tomb of Horrors. Then Acererak destroyed all of his slaves and servitors, magically hid the entrance to his halls, and went to his final haunt, while his soul roamed strange planes unknown to even the wisest of sages.
