Wandering Monsters: The Ancient Dead

Wandering Monsters continues its undead theme, this time with mummies and liches.

MUMMIES

Right off the bat I am not liking that they serve as guardians of eeevil. What if someone volunteers? What if an entire culture is actually okay with this? What if being turned into a mummy to protect something (or someone) is considered an honor? Does undead really need to be automatically evil (until I guess Eberron brings back good-aligned, positive energy-charged undead)? I do like the curse aspect. I do not recall if 2nd Edition mummies rolled like that, but this provides some easy adventure hooks.

I like everything about the mummy lord-especially being able to mummify those that they kill–except for the 9th-level cleric prereq. Why even have a prereq at all? In 3rd Edition the mummy lord was simply a mummy with 10 cleric levels, but I do not see why we need to stick to that. Just make the mummy a template and let us give them as many levels as we want, from whatever we want. This way we could have super tough guardian mummies with fighter levels, or specially trained mummy assassins (for those that served Zehir).

What about a mummy wizard whose linen is a bunch of scrolls?

LICHES 

As with the mummy lord, I do not like the minimum wizard level to get the ball rolling. It works out fine for a sample lich or recommendation, but not as a hard prereq. Again, this would work better as a kind of template, preferably with a variety of powers so we can avoid supplements with alternative liches (or make them easier to incorporate).

While I am fine with the classic stuff regarding the phylactery, I do like the ability to possess over creatures and the flavor on memories (especially the bit on using them against it). Both have the potential to add in some good adventure hooks and interesting twists. 

In both cases the good outweighs the bad, I would just prefer to see templates and the level restriction removed.

The Heirs of Ruin, Play Report 8

The characters arrived at South Ledopolos and met with the Stoneblood clan to inform them about the fate of Baranus. They buried his bones and held a wake, telling stories and drinking drinks the likes of which could even get a dwarf drunk. Branor asked about any legends concerning the purported city to the west, and got some stock-legend tropes about it once being a great dwarf city that was destroyed during a great war. If nothing else, it reinforced the fact that something was out there. Maximus met with a former war buddy of his, who–after hearing about him being tried with treason, the murdered family, and having to flee Balic–offered him a job cleaning gith out of a cave that he strongly suspected contained silver.

Seeing as they were preparing a trip to the Giant’s Rib Mountains, he figured that extra coin couldn’t hurt.

The next day after their hangovers were cured they set out for the nearby hills, but quickly got caught in a sandstorm. While waiting it out they saw would could only be described as a massive chunk of ground drift overhead, and though the storm soon ended they were quickly spotted by foraging jhakars. They killed the jhakars and scavenged them for survival days before pressing on. After another hour of climbing–or teleporting in the case of the shardmind–they found a cave entrance sealed by a boulder, with a strange symbol painted on it. Being seasoned grave robbers adventurers, they moved the boulder and soon realized from the smell that it was a tomb containing a trio of gith mummies. 

Though their touch prevented Maximus from healing Branor–who was toe-to-toe with all three of them–they were able to rapidly destroy them, and once they got it down to one Sardis just marked it with her aegis and kept away, making it very difficult to land any additional hits. Later I realized that I had intended them for a party of three, and with five people I really should have added a fourth. Oh well, easy 750 XP for them. My main regret is that no one contracted mummy rot.