D&D Undead Explained (and how to play them)

oh I'm the ghost of the DND drama that killed your campaign hello I'm Antonio D'Amico this is pointy hat and welcome to DND with a Twist spooky Edition yes I regret to inform you I am one of those annoying people that get way too much into Halloween so for the entire month of October I'm doing spooky themed videos but what are these videos even about well Duty with a Twist is the show where I take a DND thing could be a class could be a monster it's a monster it could be a race it's also this surprisingly it could be anything I look at it I talk about it and then I give that thing a Twist that you can use in your own games so when I think of Undead I think of on dead R well you know Undead they are things that used to be alive and then they weren't and now they are back to being kind of sort of alive somehow and that is a monster type a category under which a bunch of monsters are classified and it just so happens that this is one of the largest ones because of that Undead are very very different from one another they all share the trait of being brought back to life and that's basically it they are all very different there are basically two unofficial types of Undead Indian D because these are not official I'm calling them corporeal and incorporio corporeal Undead are Undead that retain their body or otherwise have a body like Ireland I can't think of other examples of this but I don't know maybe one of them found a body on sale or something this category includes a bunch of low-level beasties like your run-of-the-mill zombies Ghouls and spooky scary skeletons but it also includes some Heavy Hitters like liches and mummy Lords corporeal Undead tend to be grosser on account of you know decomposition doing a number on them but they also tend to go for a more melee approach to murder because the other ones can uh can't hit things on account of being incorporeal incorporeal Undead are ones that have transcended the need for a body and just generally float around delivering Spooks this category includes things like specters raids banshees and your garden variety ghost these Undead tend to have an insane amount of resistances and condition and damage immunities a bunch of them also get the trade incorporeal movement which allows them to go through objects things and even creatures overall they tend to hit more with magical attacks and are harder to hit but their hit points are much lower than those of corporeal Undead of similar CRS but how do Undead actually happen in D well like everything in D It's Complicated anything good it is otherwise I'll be out of a job but before we get into it let me tell you a story first before there were people land sea or even time there were just two things the gods and the empty the gods decided to fill the empty with their own Creations to do this they first constructed a tool so powerful it could Forge entire universes using their powers of creation to bring to life everything and anything they call this tools the world Anvil much as its name implies they used it to create incredible worlds and with worlds came people and with people stories once they had filled the empty with their creation they gave the world Anvil to the people that lived in their world and these people set out to make their own creations and now it's yours to use to bring your own worlds to life nobody to go into the emptiness of space anymore you can access World Anvil from your very own browser and from it you have every possible tool you could ever need to finally start writing your story or plan your own DND World building a world for your story or your DND game is hard work so World Anvil has everything you could ever need to help you make that happen you can make articles about characters factions cities countries organizations everything you could think of to keep all the info you need organized and easy to find you can connect these articles together or even use an interactive map that you or your players can use to navigate your world no more wait who was that guy no more wait what was that faction again no more what country are we in everything is ready for your players to access and for you to keep track of and read you can also use their timeline tool to keep track of the history of your world so that when your players ask so when exactly did the bad ending happen you can give them a better answer than a long time ago and if you're a player world Anvil has plenty to offer you helping you manage backstory details and character management in general no more blank stares and awkwardly looking at your DM when another player asks you what your last name is and hey no DND no problem World Anvil is completely system agnostic so you can use it for any game and if you would rather use it to flesh out the world for your book story fanfic anything all the same tools are at your disposal and extremely well suited for any sort of writing I know you have an Epic Fantasy novel content that you tell at people three cups in maybe it's time to actually make that world real so if harnessing the divine power of creation to bring your own worlds to Life Sounds like a thing you'll be down for on a Friday night you can go to the link in the description of this very video and use the code pointy hat for a frankly wild 40 off of any of world Anvil's annual memberships that's I mean I'm out of math but 40 off seems like a pretty big number so yeah if that sounds like you time to strike the world Anvil true and create some weird stuff the first reason why Undead happened and the most common one minions no no no please please no stay away what do you want from me please Undead are often minions to more powerful creatures necromancers are your usual suspects for this but there are gods that also use Undead as Messengers and military if you're in need of some extra hands reanimated dead that don't have free will and don't complain is certainly a cheap and not particularly moral option and hey at least it's more moral of an internship it's basically a step below on thinking robots in the morality scale so Undead minions are pretty common on the other side of the Spectrum in terms of reasons to become Undead are Undead that become Undead because they choose to a well-known example of this is the infamous Lich and its less powerful cousin The Mummy Lord Mortals that choose to become Undead are often evil although it's not clear why the motivation here is often just not wanting to die and although there are plenty of spooky rituals that involve stuff that one wouldn't call good like you know siphoning the souls of Innocence to use as fuel for your own life if one could find a way to become become Undead and not kill other people in the process I don't see what's so wrong with that a sort of offshoot of this that kind of proves my point is Undead that happened out of the unfinished business troupe if a mortal dies but they left the stove on it is possible for their anxiety to be so great that they simply refuse to pass away until they turn that stove off in these cases their souls cling to life and become Undead until their business is resolved this is sadly not very exploring Canada for Monsters and PCs which is a shame because I think that would be very interesting someone should do something about them hmm anyway the final reason and this is more of an umbrella reason is what I call the oopsie origin story someone did an oopsie or was in close proximity to someone or something else as oopsie and now they're Undead bit by a vampire oopsie you're now Undead in close proximity to a dark spooky ritual of Undead power oopsie you're now Undead did something so horribly evil that you lost your Humanity in the process oopsie you've been Undead it this one is less common Wordly enough although it's extremely common fiction and one of the ones with the strongest mechanical bases in the game zombies are a weird exception to this probably because they are among the lowest CRS for Undead so getting bit by a zombie does not turn you into one but vampires have it written in the Sky Block that anyone they kill with their bite attack comes back as a vampire spawn as do the victims of Shadows wraiths whites and a bunch more regardless of whether they are corporeal or incorporeal or whether they were animated by someone else themselves or were the victims of a powerful necromantic oopsie Undead have certain similarities most of them do not eat or drink vampires are outliers and should not be counted they're all immune to poison since well they're not alive and 5e is all about making the trickery Clara cry many are resistant if not outright immune to necrotic as that is sort of their Pokemon type but only a few of them are weak to radiant damage so you better all learn that Final Fantasy conditioning real fast and lastly most of them are resistant to damage from non-magical weapons which depending on how much of a hard as your DM is will be more or less of a problem for you so I've been name dropping a bunch of Undead monsters here here but let's take a closer look at some of them now and yes before you complain I'm not going into detail about the Lich and a bunch of other big ones here because they are 100 getting their own full videos so hold on tight for that first off Shadows Shadows are technically a weak Undead creature they are the lowest CR of the incorporeal under Adam leasley have cr they are literal Shadows come to life or on life I guess there's honestly not much to say about them they are unincorporeal Undead shadow that attacks living things because it hates life and happiness and rainbows and whatever so why give it its own section well to me Shadows are like the most egregious example of a monster having an entirely wrong challenge rating it's bad like bad bad real bad and I actually have personal experience with this Shadows get an absolutely insane amount of resistances for a half CR acid cold fire lightning thunder and the worst ones bludgeoning piercing and slashing from non-magical attacks not only that they get outright damage it muted is to necrotic and poison and are basically immune to most conditions they can't be exhausted frightened grappled paralyzed petrified poison prone or restrain in any way and I'm not done they of course heard of dark vision a plus four to stealth which is bumped to a plus six in dim light or darkness and the ability to pass through any space as narrow as one inch now all of this might marry the higher CR than the absolute joke that is CR at half but this is not even the worst part of the Shadow Shadows get strength trained a melee attack that hits for 2d6 plus two necrotic damage that's fine fitting all good what's the problem the strength part of strength train is the problem this attack also reduces the creature's strength score by 1d4 no no save if it hits it does this and you wanna know what happens when your thread score is reduced to zero you die instantly no death saves no nothing kaput oh and the dead person comes back as another shadow in a couple of hours you know to add insult to injury this is rough it's an extremely punishing ability but it wouldn't be so bad if what was targeted was in strength why is it a bad idea to Target strength okay here's the list of classes that commonly comments listen up here I'm saying commonly I do not want to hear about your strength based chat wizard build commonly dumb strength Wizards barge robes spell casting focused clerics Druids Rangers deck space blood Hunters Sorcerers warlocks artificers monks and the deck space Fighters like archers that's the whole 12 classes out of 14 classes only barbarians paladins and strength-based Fighters blood hunters and clerics have strength as a high priority and those classes will suffer insanely from having their strength docked as they use it to attack so if the shadow lowers their strength they are in even more of a pickle because they would be even worse at hitting the Shadow and they will do less damage yes the shadow has low hit points but as I said above it has like a thousand resistances and immunities so it's not like you're doing full damage with every attack against the thing assuming those it yes they also have a weakness against radiant damage but hey maybe you don't have anyone that can do radiant damage in the party especially at low levels radiant isn't fire damage it's not a common damage type it's very probable that your party just doesn't have it or they don't think of using it the fact that their CR is so low means that they are even more of a deadly trap because if you see that this thing has a half CR you will rightly assume it's a good idea to put it against your very low level party as a matter of fact you might assume that you need more than one for these to be challenging for your players maybe they can be minions to a bigger battery or something and that's it you're toast because these things will tear through 90 of your party with their strength train very probably outright killing some of them severely weakened the one guy who made a strength based character which in turn means that they will miss more attacks against the Shadow and before you know it you tpk the brand new bright-eyed PCS your friends made for their very first DND session and one of your very first times dming and now nobody wants to play the dragon game next Saturday anymore oh I'm fine I'm fine it's like it's hard you know so yeah be careful with this one this one is tricky anyway enough delving into past trauma moving on to the next gross little man white whites are over achieving zombies in terms of why they are Undead they can either be the Minion subtype or more commonly of the two Angie to die subclass whites hold on to undeath out of sheer Spite and anger and hatred and bad they are like the resident new metal Enthusiast of the undead faction when whites are not too busy trying to show you a corn music video that like really like touched them emotionally man they're out here murdering the living because all of that hatred and violence animating them the concept is somewhat similar to the euray of Japanese folklore people consumed by hatred at the moment of their death reach out to dark entities probably most of the time not even knowing who or what they're reaching out to and are given undeath in exchange for them spending eternity trying to destroy all living things and just generally being a hater whites are one of the few Undead creatures that retain their personality while being Undead and they are also able to create additional minions because anyone slain with their live stream ability comes back as a zombie under the control of the white side note here it is really funny to me that it's much easier to kill a PC with a shadow strength ring than a white life drain when the white is a cr3 creature these two traits along with them getting some really Nifty reasons instances including bludgeoning piercing and slashing from non-magical attacks that are in silvered not magical silvered which means your party might actually have to go out of their way to get these make white one of my favorite early campaign baddies whites are smart creatures with a personality and the potential to have a very compelling backstory think about it something awful must have happened to them for them to like three days grace this much imagine Your Heroes learn about this Undead Army that has been ravaging a town only to learn that this town burned a woman at the stake falsely accusing her of Witchcraft and now she's back as a white for Revenge that's a cool early level Baddie for your level 1 party to face but what if your party is a bit higher in level but you still crave some of that Undead batty flavor well mommy Lords when the DM wants the party to fight a lich but they're too low level to ever make it out alive mommy Lords are the we got glitches at home answer to this conundrum they work very similarly to liches but at a lower CR and I honestly kind of like them better stat block wise at least like I said we're not getting too deep into lich's this episode but mummy Lords work very similarly just like a lich has a phylactery and mummy Lord has their heart in the process of turning a corpse into a mummy Lord their heart is removed and placed in a jar a jar for their heart a Jar of Hearts if you will collecting a Jar of Hearts this is taken straight out of the real world process of Egyptian mummification what isn't taken from Real World mummies is the mummy Lord's ability to recompose itself from dust next to its jar when it's killed just like liches also like glitches mummy Lords are very powerful spellcasters with some cool theme spells like contagion encyclic anime dead and a lot of cleric spells like Shield of Faith spiritual weapon and guardian of Faith a neat way to think about mummy Lords and liches is that a mummy Lord is to a cleric what a lich is to a wizard instead of nerding out for ages to trick death into letting you be a nerd after death mommy Lords achieve immortality through faith-based religious rituals the reason why I think mummy Lords end up being kind of more fun to use in combat is twofold first they have a cool theme you can twist too much whatever Vibe you want your mummy Lord to have yes they are very much based on the trophy idea of Egyptian mummies but nothing says they have to be that there are plenty of other cultures that mummify their dead income mummies Aztec mummies Irish bug bodies and of course one cannot forget the traditional American Mummy you know just get creative with it secondly and most importantly their stat blocks are just better their wisdom and strength mod are the same which means they are just as capable of holding their own in hand-to-hand combat as they are with spells their Cod is also nothing to sneeze at and they get some really cool actions the running fist attack has an insane Effect called mummy rut which makes you lose 3D sixes after being touched by it every 24 hours this is less likely to come up in combat but makes for an amazing ticking cloth you gotta Stop The Mummy Lord or beloved NPC will die in three days their Dreadful glare ability it also brings back something I miss from earlier editions levels of failure if you fail your saving throw against it by five or more you are not just right and you are paralyzed this is not even touch watching on the legendary actions that are all super thematic and cool like blinding dust which rounds the mummy and sand and blinds the party or Channel negative energy which negates healing completely which works for Undead clerics so well the mummy Lord can even turn itself into sand and move around without provoking attacks of opportunity which means the fight can't just be the mummy Lord standing there while the party just wails on it for 10 turns straight yes the Lich hits harder and has more spells but in my opinion the fight against the mummy Lord is much more Dynamic and fun so those are some Undead monsters but of course there are many others the banshee the vampire spawn okay is there any way I could just drink their blood but not kill them you just shut up now my stupid little baby okay and uh 5 000 ones that start with G and sound exactly the same and nobody can tell them apart Okay so we've looked at Undead creatures as a whole we've talked about a Corporal and incorporal Undead we've looked at some specific examples of the monster type and that's all well and good but what if we gave Undead a new twist so you want to play Undead Undead are one of the most populated monster types if you're playing a ranger picking Undead is a pretty solid choice if you're not playing a themed campaign because there's just so many of them in basically most CRS similarly to fiends so what would be the point of making just another one what if we use this General Undead video to look at how we could play one of them that's right we're going full fifth sense here [Music] thank you [Music] the psychologist is Ghost the family is Ghost the person sending the messages is Ghost there's a big tradition in fiction of main characters being ghost hell for all I know y'all could be ghosts I could be ghost we could all be ah so what if we want our DND characters to be ghosts well as the Game Stands we do have a pretty cool Undead option in The Raven love setting there is the reborn reborn is a pretty sick racial option it's pretty broad encompassing anyone that has died and then somehow come back to life somehow is doing a lot of work in that sentence because the reborn tries to Encompass pretty much all ways a person can come back from the dead from Resurrection gone wrong to Frankenstein monster to Necromancer beta to even or Clockwork corpse thingy it's broad but one method is conspicuously missing the traditional unfinished business Matthew Mercer famously made an option for this called the Revenant that did play more with the unfinished business side of things but didn't quite delve into this spooky ghostly incorporeal stuff and the root board also doesn't touch on this at all for all their spooky flavor Reborn are very firmly in the corporeal Camp of Undead creatures so what if we made the incorporeal version of this playing a zombie slash Walking Corpse necromantic automaton is cool but what if you could play an actual ghost someone stuck between the material and the Ethereal someone that fails to die because they have something so important to take care of that they are physically and metaphysically unable to move on thanks to White we know that undeath can happen to someone that feels extreme anger and hatred at their time of death what happens if someone dies while not having accomplished their most important goal let's go when a person dies their soul travels through the material plane and into the Ethereal plane what happens after that you know for sure some say they go meet the god they worshiped in life in the outer Place some say their Essence is broken down and repurposed into the building blocks of the Ethereal plain but what few know is that sometimes the soul does not leave the material plain at all if someone dies while not having accomplished a task that weighs extremely heavily on their soul the soul itself can refuse to leave the material plane if the Soul's determination to see their goals through is strong enough that determination is enough to Anchor the soul to the realm of the living and that's how what Scholars of death refer to as a Phantasm is born simply called ghost or Spirits by the general populace phantasms are physical manifestation of souls that refuse to leave the material plane on account of needing to accomplish a specific task a phantasms unfinished business is both what fuels their existence and what anchors them to the realm of the living phantasms retain their memories and most of their personalities but these do not make the transformation into undeath unscathed their unfinished goal takes over their psyche as the most important thing to them and while they retain memories and their personality these become secondary to their sole motivator accomplishing their goal a Phantasm might be able to laugh along with their companions while huddle around the fire or listen intently as a friend shares their secrets but a portion of their psyche is constantly fixated on the goal that ties him to this realm at all times they are consumed by it every waking moment being a reminder that there's a task that they need to accomplish and that they can't afford to stray away from it this time because there won't be another chance to see their goal through phantasms might look like people but they are not true living beings this is perfectly exemplified by the most obvious physical attribute that all phantasms possess they have a perfectly circular hole in their chest a reminder that their existence in the material plane is not a full existence and that their souls worn no peace until their goal is accomplished this hole closes the closer a Phantasm is to accomplishing their goal and widens the more they stray away from the goal they are meant to accomplish a phantasms on life ends in one of two ways they might accomplish their goal in which case the hole on their chest closes and with it the anchor that ties them to the material plane they can finally Ascend free of the constant weight of an unfinished task pressing down on their Hollow soul but if a Phantasm Strays away from their goal their hole in their chest grows until it swallows them completely the soul cannot take the strain of tying them down to the material plane anymore and under the pressure it simply breaks the Phantasm and their soul are destroyed no magical item no ritual no wish and no spell can bring them back because there's nothing left of them to save there have been accounts of phantasms for ages we know of knights that died before saving those they were sworn to and came back as phantasms ghostly Protectors of the ones they pledge their lives and now on lives too there are counts of parents escaping war and torn countries are rhyming at an inn their children sleeping in their arms when they paid The Innkeeper they made him promise that the children would be taken care of and once The Innkeeper agreed the parents faded into nothingness their goal having finally been accomplished there are even rumors of full adventuring parties of phantasms all sharing a single goal refusing to give up until they see it through even if they died on their first try and those are phantasms they sound cool I think they would make for amazing NPCs that quiz Giver that was so intent on you helping them defeat the noble Tyrant that rules over a hamlet could be a Phantasm that died at the hands of that Noble they would also make for great options as a starting race or as an option if one of your players dies but they have a specific goal that they really want to see through I imagine they could have some really cool abilities that drive home the theme to distinguish them from the reborn they can lean into the incorporal aspect of undeath being able to turn themselves into wispy dark smoke go through small openings like a wraith or a shadow they could even become harder to hit when they do so I also think that they would work great with some actually punishing mechanics especially if used as a second chance for a PC they could get half healing but Advantage with death saves making them hard to kill but hard to heal they could get some Nifty mechanical integration of the whole concept of their unfinished task and to hold in their chest growing or closing as they become closer or further away from their goal yeah I think that sounds nice someone should do that and I did the fantastic is now available in the description of this very video for free that's right you can find the Phantasm racial option for you to play with right now so go out there find some new metal playlist to blast on your way to DND and talk about your feelings and welcome to the end of the video I'm so excited to get started on the spooky themed October videos and I hope you are too I hope you like the Phantasm I know it's a controversial thing to put a negative as a racial ability but for this one it just felt right to limit their healing after all they are hard to kill and kind of already dead so advantage on death saves make sense but so many healing spells specify that they don't heal Undead and the race being conceptualized as both something that someone could start as but also something someone could become during the game it just made sense to limit healing so yeah I hope you like it and I hope you have a fantastic Halloween so check your candy whatever do whatever we don't even celebrate Halloween over here I'm the only one that decorates his house and I do it because I love it so I hope you love it too okay enough outro love you have fun be spooky see you in the next video it will also be spooky bye

Channel: Pointy Hat

Views: 478,642

Keywords: DnD, D&D, DnD with a twist, 5e, TTRPG, How to, Illustration, Dungeons and Dragons, D&D with a twist, d&d battle music, pointy hat, animation, rant, hat, homebrew, trailer, D&D trailer, OneD&D, one d&d, onednd, one dnd, undead, necromancer, lich, archlich, demilich, ghost, ghosts, revenants, phantasm, reborn, spooky, halloween, D&D Halloween, DnD Halloween

Id: n1P3dhsLeZg

Length: 24min 52sec (1492 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 14 2022