Bone lord

There are many kinds of undead across the Voidrealms. Roaming packs of skeletons lurk in ancient ruins. Animated severed hands scale graveyard walls to stalk the living. Each one a product of a necromancer with an unguarded graveyard and time on his bloody hands.

But a few of these terrifying creations stand out from the shambling rest. Unliving monstrosities where intelligence beyond death is delicately mixed with a ravenous appetite for carnage. Such as the destructive creature known as a bone lord.

Bone lords are the most dangerous of all skeletons a necromancer can animate. Those chaos fiends are considered a step beyond the power skeleton warrior or nefarious skeleton ranger. Unlike those creations, a bone lord remembers exactly who they were in life and every skill they put to use. These would be skills in weapons, magic, or both.

It takes a master level of skill by a necromancer to make this masterpiece of horror. They start with the basics of creating an ordinary skeleton, then add the favorite armor or clothes of the corpse. Those are mixed in loving, happy horror with the fresh, warm blood of a dying merdragon, bone rot mushrooms, and a heated bloodstone.

Once blended in an iron coffin, the necromancer channels their dark magics for one full night. By the morning, the magic has abducted a fresh spirit from beyond the grave and trapped it in the bloodstone while it’s still screaming.

They then embedded this stone in the dry skull of the bone lord’s skeleton body. That is the unholy connection, a chaotic bond between the spirit and their new undead state. The spirit becomes a corrupted shadow of their former living self. Twisted and evil as a necromancer’s dark dreams.

Bone lords possess all the memories and skills of their former life. This gives them an advantage over their more empty-headed cousins. A bone lord not only remembers their skills in weapons, but can hone and improve them. They also keep any magical ability they had in life, but tainted with a necromantic bent. Healing harms the living, but repairs the undead. Blood can be boiled. All manner of nightmares can be conjured.

If those abilities fail to reach the desired depravity of death, a bone lord has at their disposal one last trick. The ability to spew bone rot spores. Anyone infected, if not cured, rots away in five days until they are a skeleton under the bone lord’s control.

For any necromancer, having a bone lord by their side is a match made in malicious joy. They are a corrupt, willing spirit dripping with undead potential to see a necromancer’s schemes to their deadly end. But this is a delicate dance as a bone lord can be as treacherous as a necromancer. More than one unsuspecting necromancer has found a poisoned bone knife in their back from their bone lord.

As for adventurers, there is no worse skeletal threat than a bone lord. No matter if encountered in the deepest ruin, or lost forest, they are a dire threat. A creature that can cast spells without speaking a word or dish out death in droves with uncanny skill. Bone lords are one of the greater, and last, terror that an unsuspecting adventurer might ever face.

Bone lord by Profesone

Type

Undead

Environment

Any

Geographic Distribution

Any