Following up on Valentine's day this Wednesdays & Woes Mark Gedak gives you a kind of love that even death cannot stop.
Illustration by Joe Calkins
Undying Love
"I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, as long as I'm living, my baby you'll be." – Robert Munch
Love is a powerful emotion in life and it can be a powerful emotion in death or undeath. Though many monstrous creatures seem tied to the power of love and its opposite emotion hate. Below is a selection of creatures that fit nicely into the theme of undying love.
The Flesh Golem: Struggling With Loneliness
As conceived in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, a flesh golem is ghoulish collection of stolen humanoid body parts, stitched together into a single composite form. Although most flesh golems are mindless, there are persistent rumors of unusual golems who somehow retain the memories of a previous life. The head (and thus brain) of such flesh golems must be just the right combination of fresh and (in its previous life) strong-willed, and even then luck and chance during the golem's creation seem just as important in retaining the creature's mind.
Flesh Golems who possess memories of their previous life are called Lifespark constructs by some sages and differ from regular flesh golems in the following ways:
- Lifespark constructs are not immune to mind-affecting effects.
- Lifespark constructs possess 3d6 points of Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma contrary to their prescribed statistics.
- Lifespark constructs have skill points equal to 2 + Int modifier per HD. They treat Climb (Str), Craft (Int), Handle Animal (Cha), Perception (Wis), Profession (Wis), Ride (Dex) and Swim (Str) as class skills.
- Lifespark creatures are not controlled by their creator and can advance through character classes.
- Lifespark creatures are not gaining sentience (like awakened constructs) but never lost sentience in the first place.
Lifesparks struggle with their existence in the world. They are unlike all other forms of life and their horrific appearance makes their monsters to normal society. Lifesparks try to form relationships with members of normal society only to be met with fear or prejudice.
Campaign Hook: Depth within the Folgur Wood their lives a strange hermit, he has never been seen directly but he is thought to protect the people of the area from bandits, evil humanoids and other night terrors. In the past few weeks, women have begun to disappear off the streets at night, their bodies found in pieces in the woods each with a single body part carefully removed. Tensions are running high in the town, and rumors of a stitched man have begun to circulate.
Camino Lavonshia has met the hermit, she knows he is a flesh golem, and worries that when the villagers discover his secret they will hunt him down and kill him. She is convinced the hermit has a kind heart and could not be responsible for the crimes of which he is accused. She seeks out adventurers to help the hermit escape the lynching party and uncover the real killer.
Has the lifespark decided to build himself a mate? Or has a murders discovered the hermit’s secret and used its freakish nature to disguise his crimes?
The Mummy: Separated By Time
Mummies are powerful undead from a different place and time. Often the cultures that spawned their ancient creatures have faded into the past like dust on the winds of change. As such the mummy provides an excellent opportunity to pull characters into unknown lands or strange temporal adventures.
Mummies do not operate by the same rules of current society, often they were the rulers of their societies and subject to no rules besides their own. This makes mummies arrogant and demanding. Mummies of regal bearing often possess high Charisma and access to clerical magic or sorcery. They use these powers to enthral others, hide their monstrous appearance and control the elements.
Campaign Hook: In times long past, a great love was lost, a king separated from his queen. Hundreds of years since her death, Ameriseris, The Queen of Cats has risen from the grave. In the otherworld, she found no trace of her love and has reawakened to seek him out. When her king died, foul magic prevented his soul from entering the afterlife. Since that time, the kings soul has been reincarnated dozens of times, with no remembrance of his former life or love.
Currently, that soul belongs to one of the campaign’s player characters. Can the players protect their teammate from Ameriseris’s foul advances? can their escape from her feline minions? Can they prevent Ameriseris from restablishing her Kingdom current world?
The Revenant: The Murdered Cuckold
The revenant is a vengeful spirit who has risen from the grave in order to gain revenge upon those that killed them. Revenants roam civilized lands tracking their murders wherever they choose to hide. Revenants can sense their murders whenever they are nearby and work tirelessly to slay them.
If a revenant is killed while its murderer still lives, it will rise from the grave again in 24 hours if its remains are not utterly destroyed and placed in consecrated soil. Some sages into the dark arts, confess that sometimes a revenant’s reason to hate can become confused and they can be driven to new acts of murder like a homicidal puppet.
Campaign Hook: Jacinth Skern is on the run, everywhere he goes he is haunted by the sudden appearance of a female corpse. She spews foul accusations of murder and adultery toward him, though he has never seen this undead creature before. He has been on the run for several months and every time he thinks he has escaped she turns up again. He has run out of options, he is looking for adventurers to assist him, to find out who the woman was and help put her soul to rest.
Is Jacinth really the victim here? Or is he trying to escape his own sins with the help of some troubleshooters?
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