Zombies! New Dungeoncraft article up

[D.Shaffer]

New article up in Dragon. Brraaaaiiinnnns

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/drdd/20071019a

Interesting notes.

Turning undead in.
You can critical hit undead.
Zombies are generic.

 

[HeinorNY]

link?

ty

 

[D.Shaffer]

I hit post a smidge to early. Early post edited.

 

[mhensley]

meh.. not a lot of details

 

[GlassJaw]

Very cool. I really like that monsters are getting redesigned from the ground up. These sounds like the zombies we all know and love, instead of just boring bags of hp's. Turn Undead sounds cool too!

 

[shilsen]

Interesting. Looks like turn undead is in but modified, in that it replaces the "flee" result with "unable to approach." I heartily approve the change.

 

[glass]

Zombies are generic.

'Generic' as in 'not a template'?


glass.

 

[GlassJaw]

'Generic' as in 'not a template'?

Did you read the article? In a word, yes. A medium zombie is a medium zombie, regardless if it was human, gnoll, whatever. Another plus in my book.

 

[Mouseferatu]

'Generic' as in 'not a template'?

If I'm reading the article correctly, that does appear to be the case.

I, for one, am fine with it. While there are some critters that I feel should remain templates, I don't feel that zombies need be among them. There's really no need for a human zombie to be all that mechanically different from an elf zombie or even a bugbear zombie. A shambling dead medium humanoid is a shambling dead medium humanoid.

 

[Elemmakil]

I believe so: "As a DM, you don’t have to worry about creating the gnoll zombie or the orc zombie. The one set of Medium zombie statistics should do you fine."

Meh. I can't say that I like this change. Oh, well.

On the bright side, zombies will no longer carry around weapons. Thank god.

-Elemmakil

Ninja'd.

I'm fine with a generic humanoid zombie, but when the base creature gets natural weapons, wings, much natural armor, and so on the one size fits all (or one creature fits one size) model didn't work so well in 3.0 (IMO).

Of course, you could just restrict the zombie monster to roughly humanoid creatures.