Zombie Lord

At first glance, the zombie lord looks like end-of-the-alphabet filler.  (The Bestiary 4 even describes them as “the fleshy counterparts of skeletal champions,” which isn’t exactly a rousing endorsement.)  But after a little reflection, I think the zombie lord has a lot of potential

First off, I love undead with class levels that aren't liches or mummies.  As we discussed in the Worm That Walks entry, when a lich or mummy pops up, nine times out of 10 we already know that story.  But a zombie lord?  That’s a story I don't know.  Was she cursed?  Did a fluke of the reanimating process return her spirit to her body, or call another intelligence into the corpse?  Is she the result of a poorly worded wish that preserved her mind but not her mortal shell?  Is the merchant class of that land not allowed access to resurrection or true lichdom?  Is she patient zero for a local outbreak of zombie rot?  Or is she a zombie queen courtesy of some enchanted crown or scepter?  There’s no one default story for a zombie lord, and that’s really invigorating.

Second of all, let’s go back to yesterday’s comments about zombies being surprising when they're unexpected.  Zombie lords work especially well in settings where undead are rare.  I think I’ve said before that one of the many, many things that made the Dark Sun setting so interesting was that its undead were supposed to be unique—each was meant to have its own intellect, goals, abilities, and weaknesses.  In a low-magic Pathfinder game, zombie lords are one great way to emulate that.  Each one is a unique NPC, just …dead.  So snap on the zombie lord template, add in some variant zombie abilities cribbed from, say, Classic Horrors Revisited, and you’ve got a unique antagonist ready to go.

Finally, most undead have their signature sin: wrath, avarice, cannibalism, and so on.  With zombie lords as described in the Bestiary 4, envy is the driving force.  Zombie lords so desperately want what others have, even as the one thing they possess rots away beneath them.

Wei-Chen was a born martial artist, but her natural aptitude made her a lazy student.  The deeper monk mysteries eluded her, and in her impatience she made a deal with a bottled entity she found locked in her master’s study.  Promising her a shortcut to abandoning the concerns of the body, the entity turned Wei-Chen into a zombie lord.  Wei-Chen now hides under her old dojo, determined to reverse her condition.  Sadly, she still always looks for the easiest way to accomplish anything, and typically attacks magic-users she suspects might have charms to aid her.

Carmilla resented her beautiful daughter from the day Ilsa was born.  As Ilsa approached marrying age, Carmilla refused to provide a dowry or introduce her into society.  Carmilla’s death by stroke should have freed the poor girl to do as she liked, but Carmilla’s envy proved too strong.  She awoke as a zombie lord not half an hour after her death, before the wake could even be scheduled, and triumphantly locked her daughter away.  Now the trapped Ilsa languishes while Carmilla uses letters and magical couriers to invite over potential suitors in her daughter’s name.  She kills them when they fail to appreciate her new, “still beautiful” form.

Turva is the pickled crime lord of Knave’s Deep.  A fall from a factory gangway into a chemical vat pickled Turva so thoroughly that even death was no obstacle for the brutish made man.  His fellow rogues still follow him out of fear of his undead condition and his proficiency with a crossbow.  All Turva fears is black dragons (he’s heard they dine on briny corpses) and tengus, as it was a crow-man that pushed him off the gangway.

—Pathfinder Adventure Path #45 90–91 & Pathfinder Bestiary 4 286

In my haste to get the Yeti and Zombie entries up yesterday, I completely forgot to mention that Ray Vallese has an entry on yetis in Mystery Monsters Revisited, and Rob McCreary has a chapter on zombies and other walking dead in Classic Horrors Revisited, with lots of adventure seeds and variants (including the first mention of the zombie lord).

A lot of folk, including ward358, have asked whether the Tumblr site has an index.  The short answer is to click “Archive” at the bottom of the page—every entry from Gar & Giant Gar is right there.  The other option (particularly if you’re looking for letters A–F) is to go to the original Blogger page.  There you’ll find all the monsters by date, and they're also tagged by type to help you find the ones you want faster.  Happy browsing!

(As I mentioned the other day on Reddit, the reason I link to the Tumblr is that it's way easier for people to share and easier for me to get immediate reader feedback. Also, I can't edit the Blogger site at all without horribly messing up the formatting...I'm assuming because of some bad code that sneaks in when I cut and paste from Word.  So if I make a single typo, I have to leave it there for all time or start the whole post over.  (The coding issue can even mess up the formatting of other entries—if you’re on the wrong browser, some of my entries near Kamadan, Kangaroo & Thylacine, and Kappa don't even show up because of this problem!)  So you can understand my Tumblr favoritism, though I still update the Blogger site every day.)

Zombie

An obscure monster from Haitian and West African folklore, the zombie is…

Um, yeah, I’ll shut up now.  Pop culture is going through a bit of a zombie bubble right now.  It's actually hard to avoid zombies—I mean, a zombie episode popped up in my Star Wars: The Clone Wars binge just last night. 

Pop culture’s zombies don't actually much resemble Pathfinder and D&D’s shambling corpses (though Pathfinder Adventure Path #45: Broken Moon’s apocalypse zombies correct this).  But echoes of the same lessons can still apply.  First, in fiction zombie plagues are interesting for what they tell us about ourselves in times of crises—they are typically a metaphor for something else (often contagion or race/immigration, for instance).  The classic Pathfinder/D&D zombie probably doesn’t rise to that level of thematic import, but zombies still offer clues to a story: A grave has been defiled.  An evil spellcaster is on the loose.  Yellow musk creepers or akatas have infected the local populace.  When you have zombies, you have a disorder that must be corrected.

Second, in fiction zombies are scariest for how they make the everyday dangerous and strange.  In Pathfinder/D&D, this translates to finding unexpected ways to spring zombies on your players.  A zombie in a dungeon is not scary.  A zombie in a spaceship is terrifying.  The recently released Pathfinder Adventure Path #80: Empty Graves kicks off with a surprise zombie attack, and it’s awesome because (spoilers) it takes place in the middle of an auction, when PCs (and players) are prepared for social encounters.

Third, even when they're not infectious, zombies’ sheer numbers and implacability start to tell after a while.  If your players aren't scared of zombies yet, it just means you need to send more zombies…

The dead have no rights in Listerpol—the poor dead, anyway—and zombies are used for menial labor and as beasts of burden.  Listerpol’s aristocratic youths with spellcasting ability often make a game of wresting control of zombies from the local death priests and sending them to cause havoc in the streets.

In the New World, nothing is the same—the men shift into the skins of animals, the snakes have feathered wings, and crows whisper secrets to the linnorms.  And when the dead rise, as they too often do, they do not shamble—these so-called “fast zombies” run.

Peasants are ordered to line the streets and cheer when the army trudges home.  But this is no parade—included in the processional are litters and wagons bearing wounded officers on their way to the temple healers.  But necromancy was used on both sides of the war, and some of the officers have been infected with zombie rot.  When they die en route to hospital, their corpses immediately rise and attack the assembled peasants, causing mass hysteria and an outbreak of plague zombies.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 288–289

I am not a zombie expert.  I’ve played maybe 15 minutes of The Walking Dead video game, haven’t yet cracked the comics, and watched Braindead in college and World War Z recently.  In today’s pop culture terms, that makes me practically a zombie virgin.

More zombies can be found in…well, pretty much every low- to mid-level adventure ever.  In particular, check out the aforementioned PAP #45: Broken Moon and the voidstick zombie from PAP #57: Tempest Rising (as well as the also-aforementioned PAP #80: Empty Graves.)  Meanwhile, we already covered the juju zombie and will tackle the zombie lord tomorrow.

Oh, and by the way, break out the champagne—with this entry, we have completed the Pathfinder Bestiary.  That’s from start to finish, every monster from the aasimar on down.  (What about the yeti, you ask?  Check it and like it, yo.)

The good news is we’ve now knocked out two out of the four hardcover Bestiaries.  The bad news is that those tend to be readers’ favorite monsters (if likes and reblogs are any judge), and they offered the most overlap for D&D 3.5 fans (as well as our many 1e and 2e AD&D-playing readers).  As we move into a lot more unfamiliar and Pathfinder-specific beasties, I hope you all will stick with us—there are still lots of great monsters to come, and I'd hate to lose any of you just because the syllables start to get weird. 

Besides, if you stick around till C we’ll be covering Cthulhu…

Holy long weekends, Batman!  With yesterday still being part of the weekend, it didn’t occur to me to give you my usual Monday link to my radio show.

The tech guys have been doing some end-of-the-semester monkeying with the board that I haven’t become accustomed to yet, the net effect of which meant that I had the music way too hot and the mic levels way too low.  So forgive me if the sound quality is a bit off.  Hopefully all the new Tangerine, new Jurassic 5, old Veruca Salt, and new(!) Veruca Salt will make up for it.

(As usual, if the feed skips, go up to the File menu and Save As an mp3.  Link good till Friday, May 30, at midnight.)

Juju Zombie

I’m honestly kind of surprised the term “juju zombie” has survived.  Juju, after all, is part of an actual belief system—one that was imported to the U.S. via slavery.  And while we’ve sort of informally adopted similar notions like kismet and karma into our lives and language, we don’t name our monsters after them. 

(Then again, we regularly use angels and devils, but that gets into a whole debate about 1) borrowing from a dominant culture vs. appropriating from a less privileged/oppressed one and 2) are religions not fair game but myths and legends are and 3) where do you draw the line when it comes to folklore and 4) aaaaaugh!  Let’s stop there.  You get the idea.  This stuff is hard.  Sometimes you just have to acknowledge a vague feeling of icky and move on.  At least we can be glad our hobby never gave a race of evil elves black skin and ohcrapitneverends—)

That said, it’s easy to see why juju zombies themselves survived—they’re simply great monsters.  Players very quickly get used to what undead can do and the recipes for defeating each, so “surprise undead” are crucial tools for the mid- to high-level GM.  Juju zombies are one of the first of these surprise undead: looks like a minion, fights like an NPC.

Story-wise, that’s automatically interesting: What sworn oaths/animating impulse/fell magicks allow them to retain such life?  Their special abilities also suggest that they are specifically created by evil priests and necromancers as mage-killers (fire resistance 10; immunity to cold, electricity, and—tellingly—magic missile). 

Finally, let’s go back to that problematic source material.  Juju often suggests a physical fetish or a magical geis has been invoked, so juju zombies might have spirits preserved/trapped in certain objects or be punishments for broken contracts—if they would not serve in life, they will in death.  Meanwhile, the original Vodou zombies were supposedly called back as slave labor…or might not even have died in the first place, being instead the result of psychological trauma or illness.  In a fantasy world, perhaps juju zombies didn’t start as undead, but became such when someone forgot to feed them or buried them alive while they were still charmed or dominated…

Mage duels in the magocracy of Harsk are ritual, highly regimented, rarely lethal affairs.  As this rarely satisfies the haughty Harsk spellslingers, mage killings are taken care of in a more direct fashion: zombies released into a rival’s tower to set off the magical defenses, with a juju zombie in the rear to make the kill.

Enchanters tend to hate necromancy, as their school is nearly useless against undead.  Quell Vartin, however, has a passion for collecting unique servants—a tengu battlemage, a female Briell dervish, a nagaji wrestler, and so on.  Rather than let death take her playthings, she seals them in glass coffins to be displayed as trophies and animated as juju zombies as needed.

The ninjas of the White Cicada Clan swear oaths that last beyond the grave.  Even after death, they serve the dojo as juju zombie guards.  The men are not the only undying sentinels, either—even the deathly white carp in the koi ponds are juju zombies (use giant gar as the base creature).

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 291

I…totally did not mean to write an essay.  I totally don’t have time to be writing essays.  D’oh!  (And I have more on the way.)

But!  Enough of that now.  It’s time to talk about Reader-Generated Random Hooks!

Friday we start on the K monsters (which is actually a lousy place to start this experiment, but we shall boldly forge on anyway).  And I want to give you, the readers, a chance to help generate the adventure seeds.

So grab your Core Rulebook or Game Mastery Guide or favorite Pathfinder Adventure Path or whatever and start rolling on the random tables.  Give me three results for whatever tables you like—perhaps a monster, a magic item, and a planar location, or a natural disaster, an NPC trait, and a terrain type—whichever tables catch your eye or that you use most in your campaign.  Send me your three results (and let me know if they come from someplace obscure like a single Adventure Path issue if they’re not from the core books), and I’ll do my very best to put them in an upcoming post. 

Deal?  I’m excited.  Hope you are, too.  Submit your roll results to my Gmail account (dailybestiary at you know the rest) or use the Ask About Monsters link.