Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 29 - Monster Series - Intelligent Undead

Episode Date: July 12, 2020

Why would GMs play unholy antagonists and Big Bad Evil Guys like morons?  In too many prepublished adventures, intelligent undead like liches, vampires, and ghasts are played as rash, unthinking, bumbling buffoons.  Jeremy presents alternate ways of thinking.  He gets into the mind of an ageless creature and hopefully gets your thoughts going on how to role play these rare, intelligent, monsters.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Taking20 Podcast, episode 29, a new series called the Monster Series, this time focusing on intelligent undead. This week's sponsor is Microwave Meals. Do you like every bite of your food to be a random temperature? Then Microwave Meals are the choice for you. The Monster Series is going to be a non-consecutive series. I'll revisit this periodically throughout the life of the podcast. By no means is this intended to be a comprehensive list of all intelligent undead and all the possible tactics that they can use. Different game systems have different statistics for undead. One creature

that might be intelligent in 5e but may not be in Pathfinder or Shadowrun. To start off, I want you to imagine you wake up tomorrow an intelligent undead. You're not a skeleton or a ghoul or zombie or some other low or non-intelligent creature. You're not mindlessly shambling aimlessly waiting for your next opportunity to attack something. No, you wake up a lich, a vampire, mummy lord, a revenant, a banshee, a wraith. a vampire, mummy lord, a revenant, a banshee, a wraith. Your mind is still reasonably preserved, if maybe slightly skewed more towards evil, but more than likely you don't need to breathe.

I mean, a vast majority of undead are immune to suffocation and don't have to breathe at all. You don't have to eat. Most undead have little or no metabolism. Some choose to eat but don't have to. Some have irresistible cravings, like ghouls on fresh corpses and vampires on blood. You don't have to work. I mean, who cares if you can make the mortgage payment this month? I mean, is that really a worry for you?

You can either relocate to a new area or eat those who come to claim your house. I mean, you might have to move after a few feedings that people might start catching on. You're undead. You don't have to worry about disease, poison, morality, social mores, non-magical threats, because most undead have damage reduction against many types of attacks. You don't have to worry about uncomfortable temperatures. I mean, you avoid extremes that would freeze you solid or set you on fire, but just about anything in between you can live with. You don't have to worry about aging. You have all the time in the world. I mean, conceivably as an undead, you could exist for thousands upon thousands of years.

With eternity staring you in the face, I mean, it can certainly skew your priorities a little bit. Sometimes in literature and sometimes in RPGs, the transformation has negative effects on a person. You're yourself, but slightly a caricatured version. Your virtue of love could become an obsession. Your virtue of oversight over someone becomes overprotection. Maybe you exist for a long time and your passions begin to cool. In some vampire mythologies, ancient vampires have seen it all and done it all, and they're just bored. Nothing really excites them anymore. But even with these skewed priorities, you still have, for all practical purposes, an eternity.

There's a lot of campaigns and adventures out there where powerful centuries-old undead are the big bad evil guy, and it kind of annoys me to see them written as impatient and reckless all the time. If you've got all that time, you could invest your money wisely and make sure you are incredibly wealthy. You can hatch plots and schemes that take years or maybe even centuries to pay off. People come and go, cities come and go, nations, maybe even continents rise and fall while you endure it all. If you had eternal life like this, why in the name of a famous undead demigod whose name was taken out for copyright reasons would you ever put yourself at risk? If there was a threat, you could put the plan on hold for a month,

a year, a decade, a century even. Wait till these fickle adventurers move on to some other threat. Then bring Cthulhu back or open a portal to the plane of endless pain. No, so many times in these adventures, they charge out and meet the PCs head-on. It's stupid. No, you wouldn't. That's why you have minions. By the hundreds. You send them in waves until the PCs eventually on. It's stupid. No, you wouldn't. That's why you have minions. By the hundreds. You send them in waves until the PCs eventually break. Then you make them your minion. Or, if you have to meet them in battle, you watch them for weeks study their battle tactics and

abilities and be ready to counter them. Intelligent undead plans should be meticulous, layered with multiple safeguards. Let's take a standard, by-the-book, D&D 5th edition lich as an example. If you look up their stat block, by the book they have an intelligence of 20. 20! That's roughly equivalent to a 200 IQ, which is equal to some of the highest IQs of anyone who's ever walked the planet Earth. I would expect their plans to be brilliant and cunning and thought through very thoroughly. Heck, they have a wisdom of 14, which is better than average.

They should know when the time is right, and more importantly, when the time is wrong to strike. Why would they let Farknog the walking tin can with a sword come between themselves and controlling the entire plane of existence when they can wait 20 years when his knees don't work? Are you telling me they haven't considered what would happen if a fighter showed up at her door looking to make a name for himself? Intelligent undead should be played as that. Intelligent. But so many times in published adventures, they're not. So, you're a DM or GM. How do you role play intelligent undead? Well, a lot of that depends on how they

became an undead. Consider their origin story, if you will. Maybe they became an undead because it was their only choice. They were sick or diseased or dying, and they knew becoming this undead creature would prolong their life to look for a cure for what ailed them. So imagine you're so close to a cure for cancer or plague or tinnitus or why beans cause gas. If you could just research another 10, 20, or 100 years, you know you'd crack the case and solve it. So you undergo the transformation to continue your research. Maybe you become an undead unwillingly. You're slain in an area of strong negative or necromantic energy.

In Pathfinder, actually, there's a country where if you die, your body legally becomes the property of the state to reanimate and serve. You can pay large sums of money or become a thrall to the right undead creature to ensure you're reanimated as an intelligent undead. Maybe it's unwilling because your soul's abandoned in the afterlife and no gods will claim it. I mean, the true man without a country, except it's man without a plane of existence. Maybe you're in the afterlife's waiting room, whatever that is in your campaign, and you're tempted by a dark power. Maybe you have unfinished business with the living. The Spawn comic book series preys on the temptation and unfinished business reasons

to return from the dead. Spoiler alert, by the way, for an almost 30-year-old comic book. I'd feel bad, but that's like me talking about the fact that Batman's parents die. Oops. Spoiler alert for an 80-year-old comic book. Spawn is murdered and makes a pact with Malbolgia to return to life. He returns as a powerful, mutated version of himself five years later. So Malbolgia honors the contract, but not in the way that Spawn wants. Maybe you unwillingly become infected with the undead virus to die and rise again. See, for example, any zombie movie ever. Only imagine you rise with your intelligence and brain intact. Maybe you've been made an undead slave to a more powerful being. A vampire drains your life force and you become a Spawn, Servant, Minion, Thrall, or Familiar. Lastly, maybe you're

free from being a Thrall. You look to take revenge or carve your place in the world. Getting away from unwilling and back to willing, maybe you have a thirst for knowledge. You want to learn more spells. You want to continue studying some esoteric topic that you enjoy. Maybe you want to become an expert in a specific field. Maybe you become an undead as a thirst for power. Your plans for your life weren't ready when the life was about to end. You just needed more time. Maybe you become an undead as a thirst for power. Your plans for your life weren't ready when the life was about to end. You just needed more time. Maybe you become an undead because of an atrocity committed to a person or an area,

and you come back from the dead for revenge. Revenge on their attacker, or revenge on the attacker of someone they loved. Maybe you're undead because you view an area as yours, or a person as yours. But back to roleplaying. Suppose you've selected a motivation, and you've come back as an intelligent undead. What would you do? What would be your focus? What would be your goal? No two intelligent undead should have exactly the same outlook. Playing all vampires the same robs the players of variety,

and it makes every monster in your world look like cookie-cutter stamps of one another. Is your goal to survive? If so, and you don't have to feed, maybe you move really far away from people. monster in your world look like cookie cutter stamps of one another? Is your goal to survive? If so, and you don't have to feed, maybe you move really far away from people. Like really, really far away. Like obscure mountains that's almost impossible to get to. How about the moon? In Starfinder, the undead occupy an entire planet that's theirs. If you do have to feed, you'll need a food source close by. So why wouldn't you breed people like cattle? Maybe even do it in such a way that they don't know about it. If your motivation is to accumulate wealth, knowledge,

and power, you're going to have to interact with humans in some way, but they can't know what you are. Obviously, all of a sudden, a bunch of mob of torches and pitchforks were going to show up. You work through your human servants, disguise your appearance, take care to make sure the humans do not know what you actually are and what you're capable of. Is your motivation revenge on the one that made you? More than likely, he or she is much more powerful than you when you're first born as an undead. So you'll look for ways to grow your power and capabilities. You'll study, gain knowledge, gain items both magic and mundane. You'll take class levels, maybe study magic and technology.

For long-lived undead, by the way, unless they put the work and adapt themselves, technology could easily leave them behind, and there's plenty of examples of this in media. From the movie and TV series What We Do in the Shadows, they had no idea the internet existed. From the series Angel, there were vampires who just couldn't get their cell phones to work right. There are countless examples of vampires using antiquated technologies like horse-drawn carriages after cars have become prevalent. In the novel, Dracula wants to understand modern world, so he moves to London. But maybe even over time, vampires, long-lived ones especially, become technophobic. So you're a vampire, or you're a long-lived intelligent undead like a lich or a mummy lord. How would you react to adventurers? Maybe your first thought is to make them minions.

Hey, maybe you try to get them to go along with you willingly. Talk to them. Help them see your purpose. Maybe try to win them over to your side. But you talk to them in such a way that where they can't just slay you outright. This is the time where you speak to them in vision crystals through communicators some way where you're not physically there so that they can't just all of a sudden turn their sunlight pistol on you and slay you outright. Maybe you try to make them minions but they're not exactly going to go willingly so you use your undead army to wear them down. While they're fighting you watch them and study their tactics. That way, you only attack them personally when they're at their weakest and give yourself every advantage to win it.

Maybe your solution is to avoid them. I mean, what's another 10 years of delaying your plans when you have all the time in the world? Look, regardless of how you'd react to adventurers, powerful undead will have multiple ways to preserve their eternal life. Face it, in most game systems, when undead drop to zero hit points, they are not downed or unconscious. They are destroyed. So they are going to take great care to make sure that doesn't happen. What do undead creatures do to preserve their eternal life? Well, they have items like the lich's phylactery. They take items to let them negate attacks against them. They give them protection

against energy types that they're vulnerable to. I mean, for example, vampires and sunlight is a classic one. Imagine the PC's horror when they're fighting this old busted up church and they burst open a window to bathe the vampire in sunlight only to have it do no damage because the vampire drank a potion of SPF 10,000 before the battle started. If they're vulnerable to fire, you give them something that lets them resist some of the fire damage. I mean, wouldn't you? If you had an Achilles heel, wouldn't you wear a thick-ass boot on that foot? Just thinking. Powerful Undead will give themselves spells and magical items, things like potions of negative or necromantic energy to heal themselves, Scrolls of powerful spells that have niche use but just in case. Most importantly, intelligent undead will leave escape routes in

their lairs for the worst case scenario. One thing you're going to hear consistently in nearly every one of these monster series episodes is that a creature's lair or home should give them every advantage, and intelligent undead are no different. If you were creating this home where you're going to live, wouldn't you make some areas unhallowed where negative energy or necromantic energy was rampant and maybe healing didn't work? You put good aligned characters at a huge disadvantage fighting you in that area. Have multiple mindless minions under your control. You place them intelligently in your area so that if there are attacks, you will know about it. If anybody invades, you'll hear it or see it. Set up traps that wouldn't affect you but would affect living creatures who tried to come in and kill

you. Things like negative energy traps or poison, disease, and so forth. You have areas in your lair that use your abilities that adventurers may not have and may not be able to counter or duplicate. I've been using vampires as an example, so let's stick with it. In Pathfinder and Pathfinder 2nd edition, vampires can become gaseous at will. In D&D 5th edition, vampires become a mist if they drop to zero hit points. So, the area where you rest and recuperate and gain hit points, like your coffin for example, where you rest and recuperate and gain hit points, like your coffin for example, wouldn't you put it in an area that had no way to walk to it at all, behind feet and feet of walls, completely sealed off with tiny little holes that you could travel through in gaseous form to get to it? I mean, you

would take every single precaution you could think of to make sure random cleric number three can't just wander into your crypt. So let's switch undead. Let's say a ghast, for example. In 5e and Pathfinder, ghasts are immune to poison, but you need to feed on flesh to heal. So you can't just move to a remote side of the mountains and never see people again. So if you've got to be close to people, why wouldn't you, for example, since you're immune to poison, surround yourself with poisonous fungi or plants? Maybe even plant them yourself. Put yourself in a sewer with poor ventilation that might affect living creatures that won't affect you. Surround yourself with mindless carnivorous plants that ignore you after they kill a creature you can feed on it as well.

Look for symbiotic relationships with other monsters that gives you an advantage as an intelligent undead. Last topic, if undead should be patient and wait out the adventurers, how do you as a GM put intelligent undead in a position where that can't happen? The easiest way is to make them desperate. Put the big bad evil guy on a clock so they have to act now. For their plan to succeed, the big Bad Evil Guy has to enact a ritual that can only be completed once per century or once per millennia, and that's right now. The planets are aligned. A certain family bloodline has to be down to a single member, and they need blood from that bloodline in order for this ritual to complete, or for the Big Bad Evil Guy's plans

to come to fruition. The magic holding the lich together is unraveling and she has to act now to stay alive. Maybe a superior undead creature or superior undead god or someone that they have made a deal with has put them on a timeline and failure means destruction. But either way, you need a set of circumstances that is short-lived and happening now. Another way you can ensure that the big bad evil guy is acting now, make the undead overly cocky. They've faced adventurers before. Here's just a new set.

We're going to deal with these interlopers as well. However, if this is an overarching bad guy, make sure you give them an escape route, and when they fight the PCs a second time, make them more wary and more prepared. If the undead has to feed and hasn't recently, maybe the hunger is getting to him. He's acting more rashly and less calculated than he normally would. Since time has no meaning,

maybe there are aspects of the creature's lair that hasn't been reset. A bunch of adventurers tried to kill her five years ago and died to some of the traps she had in her lair and they just haven't been reset because she hasn't really gotten around to it. She's lost track of time. Making intelligent undead act now gives the players the openings to possibly end the creature's plans and maybe life. But if there's no reason for the undead to act now, and they have time, they should be played as patient and calculating. Even if the intelligent undead have been careless, play them as intelligent. Don't make them mindless morons. Show the PCs that their plans have been thought out. Give them escape routes and areas of refuge. Good DMing also means that areas of

refuge can be found by clever parties. Make fights with intelligent undead memorable, difficult, and pardon the term, harrowing. Thunday and the Dwarven Fighter falls to an energy draining attack and that fireball should have done more damage to that vampire. Now how the hell is this undead bastard still alive? The cleric burns the vampire lord with holy light directly from his deity only to see him turn to vapor and seep into the wall. It's not done! We have to finish it! Find the crypt! Imagine the satisfaction when they burst through the wall using the right spell, rip open the coffin where he's trying to heal, and stake the weakened vampire in the heart. They cheer. Meanwhile, Thundane sits back up as an uncontrolled vampire spawn in the

room they left and wanders away to hide, hoping to exact his revenge. On whom? The other vampire, so he's an ally to the party. The party itself, so now it's an adversary. Or maybe society as a whole. Can Thundane be saved, or will the party have to put him down like a rabid animal? That is a topic for another adventure. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I enjoyed researching it. Do me a favor, head over to taking20podcast.com. You can listen to old episodes and provide feedback. You can also email me at feedback at taking20podcast.com. I'm getting some emails trickling in, but I would love to get more. I read every single one of them, and I appreciate you guys sending them to me.

New episodes are released every Saturday night. I hope you keep listening. This has been the Taking 20 Podcast, Episode 29, Monster Series on Intelligent Undead. As a reminder, our sponsor this week was Microwave Meals, when you just don't give enough of a shit to cook on a stove. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.