In the PP, they are written as such weaklings. Now granted, they're just floating heads, but they should still have been more fearsome on their own in my opinion.
I know that they were destroyed, but my campaign basically ignores that the PP ever took place, too many really good bad guys done away with too quickly and simply for my taste. I can always run through it later if I think the world needs a shakeup.
No real motivation for this, just looking to see what people think.
That out of the way, Sacha and Wyan were both full-blown dragons in my campaign. What's more, as I've stated before, once they were "killed" by Sadira and Rikus, it enabled them to enact their contingency spells and allowed them to be reborn onto Athas (alive this time and not disembodied, undead floating heads).
That was a 2e campaign, though, and I have not revisited it in 3e. I've been saying for weeks that I was going to post my dragon write-ups, but have been fairly busy.
Off that topic, something I had going on was as follows. It was never explained either, which made it all the more creepier. You got your athasian adventurers running around, when they come across a new type of undead. Essentially just headless unstoppable undead juggernauts that wander aimlessly. They grope blindly, having no intelligence or direction, but whatever they get their hands on they rip to shreds. Just something creepy and unstoppable, never explained. The only way to overcome them was to run the hell away. Basically they were the decapitated bodiss of the loyalists, searching for their heads. No inteligence but a lot of inherent power. More incorporeal than not, but they basically were from the gray and given form through that. They stumbled about trying to find pieces to complete their bodies. Basically they would grab whatever living flesh they could and try to complete their bodies with it. Thing was, they could do it with their body and hold it together, but any heads they grabbed and stacked on top would never stay beyond a short period of time. So you'd have what was basically a mishmash zombie of sorts, constructed from different bodies that wandered until it found a head. It added the head and for a short time could think and take action. When a head was added, the resultant creature was a mixture, an incomplete mixture, between the loyalists' bodies and power and the mind of the creature. The dilemma would be something like a PC gets attacked by the zombie thing, defends himself, gets overwhelmed and killed, then wakes up on top of the zombie body that has incorporated some new pieces from the pc's body. At first it might seem nice, with such a boost in power and access to powerful magic and maybe even the ability to grant low-level divine magic to people (with a dark taint from the gray . . . also note I'm in the Rajaat granted his champions spell-granting powers camp), but at the same time the pc finds his character having dark thoughts and desires as the essence of the loyalist creeps into their mind attemptng to overwrite and make itself whole. Then it slowly becomes apparent the dark energy animating the thing lacks what it needs to keep the head whole (as that extra energy or whatever is held in the heads themselves), and a process of rejection begins, ultimately culminating in the head essentially rotting off and the character dying. So basically the pc becomes a leper with a short lifespan and they need to find a way to save him.
'course never explaining what exactly was going on (that these two unique thigns were the corporeal expression of the loyalists lost power in their consumed bodies) was what made this so keen and creepy.
nick
Originally posted by Cap'n Nick
Off that topic, something I had going on was as follows. It was never explained either, which made it all the more creepier. You got your athasian adventurers running around, when they come across a new type of undead. Essentially just headless unstoppable undead juggernauts that wander aimlessly. They grope blindly, having no intelligence or direction, but whatever they get their hands on they rip to shreds. Just something creepy and unstoppable, never explained. The only way to overcome them was to run the hell away. Basically they were the decapitated bodiss of the loyalists, searching for their heads. No inteligence but a lot of inherent power. More incorporeal than not, but they basically were from the gray and given form through that. They stumbled about trying to find pieces to complete their bodies. Basically they would grab whatever living flesh they could and try to complete their bodies with it. Thing was, they could do it with their body and hold it together, but any heads they grabbed and stacked on top would never stay beyond a short period of time. So you'd have what was basically a mishmash zombie of sorts, constructed from different bodies that wandered until it found a head. It added the head and for a short time could think and take action. When a head was added, the resultant creature was a mixture, an incomplete mixture, between the loyalists' bodies and power and the mind of the creature. The dilemma would be something like a PC gets attacked by the zombie thing, defends himself, gets overwhelmed and killed, then wakes up on top of the zombie body that has incorporated some new pieces from the pc's body. At first it might seem nice, with such a boost in power and access to powerful magic and maybe even the ability to grant low-level divine magic to people (with a dark taint from the gray . . . also note I'm in the Rajaat granted his champions spell-granting powers camp), but at the same time the pc finds his character having dark thoughts and desires as the essence of the loyalist creeps into their mind attemptng to overwrite and make itself whole. Then it slowly becomes apparent the dark energy animating the thing lacks what it needs to keep the head whole (as that extra energy or whatever is held in the heads themselves), and a process of rejection begins, ultimately culminating in the head essentially rotting off and the character dying. So basically the pc becomes a leper with a short lifespan and they need to find a way to save him.
'course never explaining what exactly was going on (that these two unique thigns were the corporeal expression of the loyalists lost power in their consumed bodies) was what made this so keen and creepy.
nick
this IS creepy! :D
can't wait to pull one like that on my players... although they'll probably feel cheated if i put this unstoppable headless undead in front of them...
that reminds me of a undead creature i created in my 2e days... the PC's had killed an entire tribe of elves to save one of their own through poisoning of their food... after a while the elven children start to rise and the PC's go "oh that's nice, at least the children survived" but then the elven children all start attacking the weakest of them and eat him. and they eventually do this and grow in power and size until this large evil undead is all that's left f the children... and it's after the ones that killed their tribe...
that really scared them!
i always liked the athasian undead for their uniqueness! and although i never played ravenloft, i think the proximity with the gray makes it easy for undead to rise everytime someone dies horribly (which is frequently!)