Corpse Walkers

Corpse Walkers Medium Undead Incorporeal



A spirit of some kind, like a failed lich that ends up in a random dead body until it's destroyed or rots away, but suffers some ill effect Everytime it possesses another body.

Make it really random what body they end up in, not proximity

I think after the first time, they could capture someone and perform a ritual sacrifice on them to make vessels in waiting for them. But the ritual would be a check to succeed so they won't always have extra bodies. Maybe they can only have so many ready and waiting, limit it to their cha or spellcasting ability bonus. The ritual either consumes the soul of the sacrifice, or they are sold to some infernal entity to make the magic work.

I think you run the risk of having them in crazy bodies, like a giant or something

I'm limiting it to medium size humanoids.

There ya go Be an evil ass serial killer

But I'm thinking the lore would teach the people who hunt these things to find the other bodies it has prepared first, which is why they work so hard to kill anyone who knows anything about their kind. I'm thinking about the rakshasa devil. You can kill their bodies, but they reform in the nine hells and can find a gateway back to the material plane. It would be cool if the spirit can't be killed by anything of mortal magic or might, at best they can be banished with the banishment spell and they have to find their own way back to the material plane. Usually in a fucked up body it found on whatever random plane it was exiled to.

I was thinking of them being less capable. Make them insane, so they fixate on someone and can act, but they want to kill that one person. So when they die, they have to find that person again and try to kill them. Mad chased and stalking, make the threat a very personal one with no overarching evil plan

I like that angle, I was already thinking they had likely lost all their magic they spent their life learning to be able to attempt the lich ritual in the first place.

Yeah No magic, no scheme, just a crazy spirit stalking a random person forever in a rotting body, coming back with a different face each time. But able to use make up and other means of hiding it's nature Make them a town sacrificed to some dark lord or that all got together and offered their souls up to never leave this plane.

Oh man that last bit gave me some inspiration for the perfect place for these to be placed in my world. It also got me to thinking about what a necromancer could do with something like this. Which made me think about the two directions these could be made from. Either a wizard/cleric performing the ritual of lichdom and failing, or having it performed on an unwilling soul. Either one drives them mad and makes them the ultimate Jason basically. A necromancer could then command and give new targets to the Corpse Walker. Maybe that's what the mask Jason wears is really for, so his necromancer mom can keep him up and killing.