Risen

Unlike the mindless skeletons and zombies a necromancer might animate as their puppets, risen are truly undead, having left this mortal coil and returned. Dark magics are required to accomplish this task, though not always at the affected entity’s wishes. Risen initially exist as incorporeal spirits, called ghosts, ghouls, or wights. They can then learn to “embrace the gift” in order to gain a degree of control over objects in the material world, often donning robes, cloaks, or other clothing to help signify their presence and even wielding weapons at times. Powerful risen can invest themselves into objects like suits of armor or corpses to act as their new bodies, and the very mightiest are said to be able to manifest a wholly new physical form of their own making. These are the death knights, masters of undeath. There are a few of these unholy abominations in the service of the black dragon Tenabrius. But becoming a risen does not make a spirit immortal. Conventional means may strike down their body, but powerful magic is required to purge a risen spirit from the world. Legends exist of black rituals to turn archmages into the greatest of the risen, an immortal lich. Liches are supposedly resistant to cleansing by even the most powerful clerics, but it is unclear if they truly exist or are pure myth.

Origin/Ancestry

Risen are sentient undead which operate of their own will and volition.