The Restless Dead#
We bury them deep and we bury them with coins. The coins are for the ferryman. The depth is for us.
What won’t stay buried
Urd has a great many dead, between the War of Souls, the Fall of Menes and the 70 Year Plague, and not all of them are resting. Some get up as bones, some as drowned and frozen bodies, and some as nothing you can hit with a sword.
In a fight a creature’s AC is its Defense, and it adds a fifth of its level to hit. Running a Fight has the rest.
Reading this page#
Each of the dead gives its rank and level, its health, armor class and bite, and where it’s met. Most of them guard a place, and a place with one usually has more. Bodiless ones are shades and phantoms: a sword passes through them, and it takes magic, or a blade that carries it, to hurt them. Their numbers are worked out from the level and rank the game gives them, on the same scale as the animals.
Storytellers first
The dead are written for the places they haunt, and their descriptions can give a place’s history away.
The dead#
By what’s left of them.
Bones#
Skeletons, and things made of skeletons. They clatter, which is the only warning they give.
- Skeleton guard
Health 9 · AC 5 · Bite 1d4 · XP x1
An animated skeleton stands at attention, rusted armor hanging loosely on its bones. Empty eye sockets glow with a faint green light as it clutches a notched sword.
- Deepshaft wight
Health 35 · AC 7 · Bite 1d8 · XP x1.5
A dwarven miner frozen at his labour and never let go. The wight still grips a rimed pick, its beard a fringe of ice, its eyes two points of cold blue light. It works the dead veins forever and kills whatever interrupts it.
- Ossuary golem
Health 76 · AC 9 · Bite 1d12 · XP x2.1
A lurching ossuary golem of fused bone, the leavings of a thousand burials packed and bound into one striding shape. Skulls stud it like cobbles, and its fists are knots of femurs that break stone when they land.
- The Menes bonewarden
Health 60 · AC 10 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1.5
A skeleton in green-black bronze scale, the funeral guard of old Menes, still standing its post with a halberd whose haft has been replaced with a thighbone. It challenges in a tongue nobody living speaks, and does not wait for an answer.
The walking dead#
Drowned, frozen, burnt or dried, and on their feet again.
- Rimebound hauler
Health 25 · AC 8 · Bite 1d8 · XP x1
A rimebound dwarven hauler, dead and frozen on his feet, frost thick in his beard and his harness still buckled across his chest. He moves stiffly but without tiring, dragging a broken hauling chain, and his eyes are clouded white with ice.
- Drowned revenant
Health 28 · AC 8 · Bite 1d8 · XP x1
A waterlogged Vaelari corpse drags itself upright, brackish water streaming from its ruined mouth. The marsh that drowned its town never let it rest, and it reaches for you with bloated, root-tangled hands.
- The Drowned Warden
Health 59 · AC 8 · Bite 1d10 · XP x2.1
Once the gate-warden of the causeway, it still keeps its post in death: a waterlogged Vaelari sentinel sheathed in corroded plate, the black water of the warrens pouring endlessly from the joints of its armour. It will let nothing pass the deep road that it did not first drag under.
- Ember wretch
Health 32 · AC 9 · Bite 1d8 · XP x1
A blackened, half-burnt corpse that will not finish dying, embers glowing in the cracks of its charred skin. It shambles through the heat that killed it, and its touch carries the fire it can no longer feel.
- Emberforge wight
Health 60 · AC 10 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1.5
The emberforge wight is the burnt-black husk of a smith who never left the forge, still clutching a hammer fused to a hand of coal. Coals glow where its eyes were, and the heat it carries never cooled with its death.
- Scalded sapper
Health 40 · AC 10 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1
A Loyalist sapper from the Morian trench lines, boiled in his own countermine, his leather jerkin cooked to his back and his entrenching spade still in hand. His tunnel, driven under the Separatist lines, broke into the lava tubes below and the steam came up it; he has been digging ever since, toward nothing.
- Sand-drowned dead
Health 44 · AC 10 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1
A troll of the Sunken City, dead as long as the city has been buried, dried hard as leather by the sand that filled its house and stopped its breath. Sand pours from its mouth and its eye sockets when it moves, and it claws its way out of the packed rooms toward anything with water in it.
- Ice-drowned delver
Health 85 · AC 13 · Bite 1d12 · XP x1
A dwarf of the Frostvein crews who went through the ice of the Hollowmere and drowned in the black water under the lid. The cold kept him, frozen hard with his beard spread and his eyes open, until the ice cracked and let him up again. He walks the shore ice in rimed leathers with a sledge-hook in his hand, still looking for the hole he went through, and drags down anyone he finds on the ice.
Wraiths#
The dead who kept their will and lost everything else. Most were someone important once, and they haven’t stopped acting like it.
- Rimeway foreman
Health 63 · AC 9 · Bite 1d12 · XP x1.75
The foreman of the Rimeway, the dwarf who ordered the crews to follow the vein to its root. He is long dead and does not know it: ice has grown through his armour and beard, a thin silver spiral is cut into the rime over his heart, and he still grips the great pick he broke through with.
- The Cistern Keeper
Health 70 · AC 10 · Bite 1d12 · XP x1.75
A tall, robed thing presides over the bone cistern, its face a lacquered Vaelari death-mask. It arranges the dead with patient, deliberate hands - and turns that same patience on the living who disturb its work.
- Gilt-masked traitor
Health 77 · AC 10 · Bite 1d12 · XP x1.75
A tall wraith in the rotted court silks of Menes, its face hidden behind a mask of beaten gold: the mask the city herald rides in at the Breaking Return, the one he sets on the first traitor to hang. This one was a knight of Ritkus's household, walled up alive beneath the processional with his king's last order, and he has had an age to brood on it.
- The Warden of Amone
Health 77 · AC 10 · Bite 1d12 · XP x1.75
The last king of Menus, who ordered the palace sealed and his people saved the night his city drowned, and went north with them; they laid him in this crypt with his crown and his oath, and he has risen still wearing both. The tellings call him the last king of Amone. He is a tall wraith in the ruin of royal cerements, a drowned light behind his eyes, and he suffers no living foot on the floor of his crypt.
- Cistern reeve
Health 86 · AC 11 · Bite 1d12 · XP x1.75
The water reeve of the Sunken City, who measured out the town's water when the conduit failed and sealed the last of it in the vault under his hall. He died in there among the jars while the town died outside the door. He is a tall, dried troll in a reeve's sash with a bronze measure on a chain at his neck, and he rises from his chair to defend water that has long since turned to dust.
Shades and phantoms#
Nothing left but cold, memory and spite.
- Veil wisp
Health 9 · AC 5 · Bite 1d4 · XP x1
A veil wisp, a pale knot of light, drifts where the boundary between realms wears thin, trailing cold. It is barely a shape at all - until it notices you, and sharpens.
- Marrow drekavac
Health 35 · AC 7 · Bite 1d8 · XP x1.5
A small, wrong shape unfolds from the dark, a slender body and a head too large for it, screaming without breath. It is said the drekavac rise from the souls of children dead before their naming, and that they cannot rest until the screaming stops.
- Tomb shade
Health 42 · AC 8 · Bite 1d8 · XP x1.5
A grey smear of grave-cold air in the shape of a mourner, its face a hollow where a face should be. The shades keep the old vigil over the ancients, and resent the living for still being warm.
- Masked mourner
Health 36 · AC 9 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1
A grey, hollow-robed masked mourner in a mask of brown and green, the old colours of Menes, walking the bier road behind a funeral that ended an age ago. It keens without a mouth and turns on anyone who breaks the procession.
- Ash revenant
Health 60 · AC 10 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1.5
A whirl of hot ash that holds a human shape by memory and spite, glowing at its heart like a banked coal. It drifts the lava galleries mourning a death by fire, and gives that death freely to any who come near.
- Sluice keeper shade
Health 66 · AC 10 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1.5
The shade of a Wet Era sluice keeper, a grey shape in a keeper's tunic carrying a lamp that gives no light, still walking the gates and the dry channel of the sluice house. It cannot turn the chained wheel and it cannot leave, and it turns on the living as if they had come to steal the water.
- Steam haunt
Health 66 · AC 10 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1.5
A pilgrim who came down to the spring to make an offering and was caught when the fire rose. Now a shape of white steam holding a human outline, scalding to touch, drifting the tubes with its offering bowl still somehow in its hands.
- Hoarfrost shade
Health 112 · AC 13 · Bite 1d12 · XP x1.5
The shade of a monk of the first order of the Yellow Dragon, one of the Under-Watch, in a yellow robe gone grey and a mantle of white frost. The watchers swore to let nothing pass on the road that should not, and the cold from under the monastery hill has kept them at it long after their order ended. They no longer know who should pass.
Others#
- Fort wraith
Health 23 · AC 7 · Bite 1d8 · XP x1
A cold, half-seen revenant of Fort Kilner's colonial dead, who desecrated sacred Amari ground and were slaughtered for it a century ago. Bound to the ruins by their own guilt and the artifact's leaking power, the wraiths drift the collapsed galleries, lashing out at the living with the same fear and fury that killed them.
