They are marginally better in RQ, as they at least have a chance of killing you before you kill them.

How do I make them interesting? Perhaps give them a connection to the PCs. One of the zombies looks like their uncle; The skeletons wear the crest of one of the PCs' family; that kind of thing.

Control the battlefield. If the PCs can easily retreat or have a lot of room to maneuver, the threat is minimized. Take that away, and it's a lot harder.

Quote from: jeff37923;1111003Uniquely Undead by Dyson Logos for the Labyrinth Lord system.

Ooo good one Jeff! Thanks for that link.

Quote from: Doom;1110950It's tough to make mindless undead who die in 1-2 hits to be interesting, and I'm not seeing the motivation. That said, I did have an encounter where players could pit a batch of skeletons against a batch of zombies, to "see which is better." Maybe you could play "dress up" with them?

Ghouls are a bit easier, as I make them pretty hunger-driven. They'll cheerfully focus on a downed/paralyzed character rather than deal with someone swinging at them, and will take direct paths (like, over a pit or flaming oil) to get to food quicker, even if doing so isn't such a good idea. Ghasts, of course, are a bit smarter, more prone to running away and staging ambushes to give them a better chance against packs of "meat that fights back."

I do something similar, my ghouls don't like to admit to each other they are undead. They speak & prattle about all manner of inanities. It may become apparent if one listens for a while that some lived in different eras. When it comes to eating, they have individual or group reactions which differ depending how far gone they are- from horrid discussions about taste & texture as if they were simply eating chicken, to weeping at the horror of what they are doing but unable to stop etc. Somewhere between Gaimann's ghouls in The Graveyard Book & a horror film.

Skeletons which rip one of their own arms off & try to beat you to death with it... or attack by trying to stab their fingers through your chest Mola Ram style & steal your heart to replace their own- dmg as normal but if you die, that's what they have managed to do. Then they vanish with it... Or begin running back to XYZ with it.

Zombies can be made interesting in how they died or where they have been lurking since- are they waterlogged & heavy, immune to fire but actually softened & extra prone to being dismembered by slashes... did they crawl out of a tar pit... perhaps they are rife with insects now & hitting them releases a spray/swarm...

I also intend to steal the idea from The Dead Don't Die of having zombies with just a single, vestigial urge leftover from whatever they enjoyed/desired in life (+ brain eating). It actually open up a lot of possibilities & flavour & links them more strongly as "once people".

My response is that you make skeletons scary by having normal people around who are actually threatened by them. A large band of skeletons surrounds your beloved peasant village. Or you have to shepherd some civilians through skeleton territory. Or the call goes out to rescue a small village and you get there and the survivors are barricaded inside the church.

Or, you treat them like a preliminary encounter, waste them, and move on to bigger things.

5e zombies are pretty scary to low level characters, without any special details: they fall down, then they get up again, and they keep coming. And again. And again.

(They get a CON save at DC 5+damage inflicted to avoid dying when reduced to 0 hp, and their CON bonus is +3; for my players who weren't wielding great weapons, even doing 8 points of damage to drop a Zombie only had a 50% chance of putting it down for good. And they start with 22hp, so it takes a while to get them there.)

But I'm certainly yoinking some of these ideas for Barrowmaze mid-levels.

Use their INT WIS CHA. They were once sapient. How much of that they have left is dependent on the spell that animates and binds them to service.

Example, 5e Zombies (besides making punchbag Zombies) leaves a functional INT WIS CHA spread and says they know languages they once knew in life -- they just cannot verbalize like before.

Now you can have them draw a response on the dirt. Or you can have them bribe PCs with the loot of previously defeated would be looters. You can have them ambush, parley (through other means), feint retreat (play dead ), and all the other things a human could do. Their advantages of fearless morale and longevity should be very scary, however any creature played mindlessly and plodding will be boring eventually.

Original zombiis (African curse) are way cooler IMO because they are less a contagious force of nature, but a body under domination. They fulfill their job to the best of their ability, even if it means lying, fleeing, and so on. One of my favorite stories was described by Zora Neale Hurston in "Go Tell My Horse" about two girls dressed in baptismal white praying at a chapel at midnight. When questioned, the girls were obviously zombiis because of the white cowl covering their eyes. They answered they were praying for X guy, their uncle, because he has not finished paying his debt, and then they left. That's it. Two missing nieces conspicuously praying for their indebted uncle in a chapel at midnight.

There is a lot to do once you turn off the John Romero or other Western dead-end tropes.

I found this article interesting, if somewhat dramatic in its prose.

http://lizardmandiaries.blogspot.com/2014/07/undead-are-pockets-of-stopped-time.html

There were some interesting flowers amid the purple there. I liked the shifted, such as the unmoored from time, perspective contemplated from being undead. Sort of WoD questions about immortality wearing away the relatability to humanity. Thanks for sharing!

Quote from: Opaopajr;1112489There were some interesting flowers amid the purple there. I liked the shifted, such as the unmoored from time, perspective contemplated from being undead. Sort of WoD questions about immortality wearing away the relatability to humanity. Thanks for sharing!

Definitely! I like that the "time frozen" explanation lends a sort of eerie, alien-like quality to undead as well as the explanations for how they communicate and why they appear so lethargic in their pursuits. I think if I were to implement some variant of it in one of my campaigns, though, I would likely reserve it as a variant explanation for the particularly important liches or hell knights or whatever; "regular" undead I would leave as semi-autonomous puppets orchestrated by dark magic chaining their semi-aware spirits/souls back to their remains, or bound demons, or whatever; closer to constructs than 'true' undead. If even the average skeleton can perceive across time then it somewhat complicates the mechanics of even rabble undead, there are lots of ripple effects and implications that have to be considered with a mentality/motivational shift that pronounced.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1110932Skeletons and Zombies in particular, but also Ghouls and Ghasts.

What do you do to make these encounters more interesting and memorable?

First, my system is a spiritual successor to 4E so it employs roles to good effect. It also means that different critters that look the same could have a completely different role and abilities.

The basic animated dead include a Scrapper ("heedless attack" lets them make multiple attacks per round), an Opportunist (in this case it deals extra damage to prone targets as it dives down to devour them) and a Blocker (solid defenses, its slam pushes targets back and its "mindless rampage" lets it make free strikes even if its dazed).

Since I'm going non-OGL my Ghoul is actually based on the Middle-Eastern mythology and, as such, has a lot of vampire traits thrown in (indeed, including vampires at all at that point seemed redundant so I just include a note that ghouls can gain sustenance from any body part, including blood). It can take the form and memories of anyone it eats any part of (meaning it will often keep some individuals alive and eats them slowly to use their identities for their own ends) and mesmerize creatures with their gaze (both taken from the legends that they would shape-shift into forms to lure travelers off their path so as to consume them). Neither of these abilities works in direct sunlight though.

The true ghouls can also create mindless lesser ghouls, typically to throw people off their scent while they maintain a false identity. These also sub in well for Vampire Spawn.

Skeletal Hordes are for those times when a Necromancer doesn't even bother to create distinct undead minions and just animates a pile of corpses/skeletons into an force of destruction. They're blasters (meaning they specialize in multi-target attacks) that engulf opponents (basically the Game of Thrones wight overrun tactics) and regenerates or even spawns new skeletal hordes by killing opponents and adding them to the mass.

Wight is my catch-all term for intelligent corporeal undead (technically ghouls are wights with specific abilities, but they're distinct enough to get their own entries), as such they could be Infantry (blockers who use a damaging grab attack to lock down opponents and their gaze instills dread in their target), Maulers (scrappers whose melee attacks knock targets prone and whose gaze inflicts terror so great it can actually kill a target), Stalkers (the scourge opponent type whose "death mark" gives them significant bonuses against their chosen foe including ignoring all movement impairing conditions if moving closer to their target).

More potent versions Liches (controllers who command lesser undead spirits) and death knights (elites that work like a combination of the infantry, mauler and stalker and whose death glare can kill entire armies of non-heroic opponents when it takes the field (in D&D terms it can auto-kill all 1-2 HD opponents with line of sight to it with an attack it can recharge after one minute of rest).

Wraith is my collective term for intelligent incorporeal undead and they range from mere Echos (grunts that weaken nearby foes with an icy touch and fearsome glare) to the Wraith Lord that can drown their foes in icy blackness and kill them with a glare (and typically both in the same turn).

Then there's the 'undead adjacent'... Shades, when someone dies before their natural time their shadow is decoupled from them and becomes a malevolent echo of them in the Shadow World, necromancers commonly open portals to recruit the shades of dead warriors to use as armies.

Dybbuks are malevolent spirits that act more like a disease than a monster, driving those afflicted with it to homicidal paranoia and infecting those who actually survive on of their host's attacks.

Also, just in setting there's the fact that the undead are actually considered an even greater evil than even demons. Demons just want to reconquer the world and enslave people, the undead are driven by the lingering echoes of pure malice within The Shadow that empowers them to unmake the world and extinguish all life.

Quote from: Opaopajr;1112398Original zombiis (African curse) are way cooler IMO because they are less a contagious force of nature, but a body under domination.

Yes, absolutely. That sort of thing, magic of enchantment that alters the will or memory of a person, while mechanically could be very similar to "charm person" is way more interesting in terms of roleplay connotations.
It's not voodoo, but my RPGpundit Presents: Medieval Enchantment Magic has elements of those sorts of connotations; the sorcery of elves and druids to dominate or alter men's minds.

If you're running a version of D&D with morale checks, it's good to remember that even the lowest zombie or skeleton never has to make one. Ever.

Orcs get tired. Goblins get scared. A dragon might get bored and fly away. But the dead never, ever stop.

To put it another way: It can't be reasoned with, it can't be bargained with...it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear...and it absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead.

Running Ghosts of Saltmarsh and the simple alchemical treatment on the skeletons that gives them Resistance to the first attack is a pretty nice simple trick for making the players go WTF.

Quote from: ZeroSum;1113314If you're running a version of D&D with morale checks, it's good to remember that even the lowest zombie or skeleton never has to make one. Ever.

Orcs get tired. Goblins get scared. A dragon might get bored and fly away. But the dead never, ever stop.

To put it another way: It can't be reasoned with, it can't be bargained with...it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear...and it absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead.

Exactly. That's something that makes OSR undead a lot more dangerous at lower levels than other monsters.