Echohusk

Psychic liches need meaty servants.  Psychic stalkers gonna stalk.  Spirit walkers gotta animate.  When psychic damage is enough to both kill a creature and turn its body into a puppet, you get an echohusk—a zombie-like creature animated by and yet vulnerable to psychic magic.  Dread echohusks can even hurl fear, though again they are vulnerable to it as well.

An occultist fumbles during his examination of an ancient skull, accidentally awakening the psychic stalker that had lain dormant inside the bony vessel.  By the time adventurers arrive on the scene, the psychic stalker is long gone, but the occultist and the rest of the museum staff are now echohusks—including the occultist’s bugbear litter-bearers, as well as an ogre caged in the museum as an exhibit.

A wall mosaic of a basilisk is set with a cursed gemstone eye that scorches the body and blasts the power chakra of anyone who approaches.  Those who die in front of the mosaic rise as dread echohusks.  The basilisk mosaic also eerily resembles the Serpent card found in the adventurers’ fortune-telling deck.

The lord of the land is a psychic lich—and he uses echohusks as his bailiffs, tax collectors, and silent heralds.  A party of adventurers have therefore seen these shambling corpses as symbols of a hated authority all their lives.  If they are discreet, they can dispatch these psychic zombies, gaining valuable experience in fighting undead and perhaps learning something about their lich master.  But eventually the lich will notice his puppets going astray, and his revenge will be terrible.

—Occult Bestiary 24–25

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