What They Don't Tell You About The Undead - D&D

undead are one of the most common enemies that you will face in dungeons and dragons and also one of the most fun to fight against there's something special about surviving a horde of zombies while barricading yourselves in a small keep or entering into a haunted house in an attempt to exercise the ghost that died there years ago it is always a great surprise when the bad guy you killed a bunch of episodes ago comes back reanimated as an undead by the true evil villain undead are not just fun but extremely versatile and that's because there's just so many of them there's so many that it can actually get frankly confusing i mean what's the difference between a white and a ghoul or a ghoul and a ghast is that a ghost or is that a specter perhaps it is a wraith nah it's probably a banshee though it kind of looks like a shadow let's face it it gets pretty complicated and every undead has its own lore and properties there is much that we can talk about today but before we get into it let's 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me to cover in a single video and i kind of wanted to do something a bit more relaxing for me in order to cover this whole general topic see the thing is the nature of undead and their rules have changed so much and so often during the editions that it is very difficult to cover all of it as a general topic and so what i wanted to do was focus on one particular person and one particular setting and you of course know ed greenwood he was the creator of the forgotten realms the campaign setting where all of these fifth edition adventures are located and so what i want to know is what he has written about the undead in this world we're going to skip all of these undead related books and adventures that have been released throughout the editions and simply just focus on the undead book that he wrote and leadered because i think it'll be interesting to go through and see what undead originally were like coming specifically from the horse's mouth so to speak now the information that you will find on this video is from first edition and again written either directly by ed greenwood or code written by him but let's check it out undead can be good and they can be evil they can experience the full range of emotions and alignment that being said creating undead is always an evil act regardless of the nature of the undead that you're creating further on dead are much much more dangerous than you know fighting the undead is one of the hardest and frankly scariest jobs for any group of adventurers to take because the attacks from the undead have severe permanent repercussions in 5th edition the undead are just another group of monsters they frankly don't do anything that different from the rest the only one that's actually scary still is the ghost because the ghost can age your character a few decades and of course nobody wants that if you fail a specific saving throw and you fail it hard your character might lose 20 or even 40 years of life and if you don't fix that with a high level spell immediately then it becomes permanent see how hardcore that is well that's how basically every single undead used to be the white the specter the wraith and this creatures have an ability called life drain that basically sucks a bit of light from you and reduces your maximum hit points for the day now you do get those back after you take a long rest now originally you were not meant to get those back the ability was instead called energy drain and it used to literally lower your level if you were a level 5 fighter and you got hit by energy drain you would become a level 4 fighter straight up if your level was lowered you would lose all of your features spells and abilities and hp that you had gotten from that level i mean you would effectively be for all intents and purposes how you used to be a level prior it was hardcore all it would take for the monsters to do this to you would be to simply hit you with their melee attack and that was it the idea was to make the undead actually scary you as a player and you as a character really did not want to fight undead that was the whole reason why the clerics and paladins got so many abilities to help deal with the undead because players really needed that help they were super dangerous and greenwood specifically wrote that he understood that not many players found it fun to lose levels as you might imagine and so he devised alternatives that the masters could use but all those alternatives were frankly as brutal the idea again being that you really did not want to get hit by them if the energy drain ability hit you you could choose as at the end between a become completely paralyzed for one to three minutes b lose all the experience that you got for this level c complete loss of consciousness and permanent loss of maximum hit points alongside losing memorized spells d loss of stat points then you did a saving throw and if you failed that loss was permanent e the location where the undead hit you withered completely and became unusable so you could lose an entire arm permanently only a heal spell or something of that magnitude could cure it f you would suffer a random curse g you would get an insanity feature or if you were a caster you would permanently simply forget how to cast a spell and you could never cast it again age your alignment would change towards that of the attacking undead and i you would suffer from the feeble mind spell and then lose one point in a random stat as you can see all of these options were completely overpowered i mean getting touched by an undead was a character defining moment that would probably change your character's experience for the entirety of the campaign in the same way as the ghost still is nowadays now clearly over time they went with option c to lose maximum hit points but they made it so that you remain conscious and the hitpoint maximum returned to normal after a long rest merely a scratch from what it was supposed to be now let's talk a little bit more about the lore of racing the undead to race a simple undead you need what is called the animus the animus is a fragment of soul energy the type of energy that helps keep the soul inside of the living body when the creature is still alive this energy stays in the body after the creature dies and lingers inside until the body eventually turns to dust this energy stays behind presumably so that if the creature is brought back from the dead the soul can be reattached to the body it would also explain why resurrection is much more difficult after a certain period of time since the animus would eventually disperse making it almost impossible to raise that dead now spells like animate dead bind the animus into the skeleton and then animate it it knits the bones together magically binding them with force drawn from the negative energy plane for the spell to work though most of the bones need to be there however since without most of them it is impossible for the energy to control the body and this is why when you sever a skeleton in half most of the time it stops moving and then simply dies rather than having its mouth continue to bite you or its legs continue to move now once the energy from the negative energy plane binds the bones and the animus is bound to the skeleton the spellcaster can then tell the animus what to do and the skeleton or zombie will do exactly as the order commands nothing more nothing less the skeleton will take the literal definition of what it is told and then will brainlessly attempt to accomplish those things the magic of these spells can penetrate grave dirt really easy since it is tainted with negative energy negative energy from the negative energy plane is particularly potent in severing the material plane and at the moment of the spell's activation that energy becomes very potent for the first few seconds of the spell being cast the undead is to be bombarded with these energies allowing the newly created undead to destroy material from the prime easily for those few seconds this is actually why the newly raised undead have the strength and ability to break open their sarcophagi even whilst underground which would be really difficult in how they can dig and climb out of grave dirt easily spells that protect a corpse from becoming undead like gentle repose drive the animus from once remains and then further makes it impossible for the disease to be raised as any sort of undead creature presumably in such a way that would still allow for resurrection what holy water does is it undoes the negative energy plane's energy that binds the undead hurting the creature and then weakening it in the process cold magic does absolutely no damage to them but fire does double because the important thing is to sever the animated bones in order to break the spell the crushing damage of maces and flails deals double damage to skeletons and skeletal zombies this is why it is tradition that clerics always use maces because well they are the de facto on that slayer now slashing and piercing only do have damage while piercing projectiles basically do zero damage arrows are useless when fighting against bones since they either glance off of the bones or simply fly through the creature or maybe get stuck on the useless flesh of the skeletal zombie now something that you probably didn't know is that you can indeed create living zombies as paradoxical as that sounds in the forgotten realms there is a combination of spells that when used together can have you permanently control a living person as if they were undead as your thrall these include spells like feeblemind to mentally weaken a person dominate person to govern their mind and a form of anime dead alongside other spells now this combination of spells rely on something that is actually very hag like in that you must insert a piece of yourself into the individual for you to be able to control them typically this will be a piece of nail deposited right on the back of the neck by the spine since in the chromatic magic the spine of a person is considered to be the center of the spirit and what comes out of all of this we call living zombies and this allows the necromancer to effectively control these individuals as if they were permanently affected by the dominate spell effectively this would allow an evil necromancer to control people roughly similar to how a vampire does it though generally you can only control up to 5 creatures in this way now in order to reverse the process or save a person that has become a living zombie all you would have to do is remove the nail from the back of the neck and the person would then go back to normal if the person dies though while still affected by this magic they would turn into a normal undead zombie that would still be permanently under the control of the necromancer now this art of creating living zombies is useful in that you can have a very powerful necromancer do all of the magic and prepare the spell but then use the nail of a different creature so that that other creature will get to control the undead that is great for delegating power throughout your evil lair now when it comes to fighting some of these undead there are a few things that are good to keep in mind a casting a lesser restoration upon a zombie or skeleton will actually cure that zombie from any diseases that he might be carrying so that he cannot contract you with those diseases this is for example very useful in dealing with things like rudd grubs who are rendered inactive and passive for a time when under the spell it is also extremely useful against mommies for example because it nullifies their rot attack but we're not really talking about mummies today now garlic is effective against vampires actually but only in that it is offensive to them it doesn't actually hurt them or repel them or anything that hardcore but merely makes them hesitate for a round or two it is believed that there is a chemical reaction that is produced when the gas form of a vampire mixes with the garlic and it basically slows down their transformation between mist form and physical form which the vampire finds just simply uncomfortable now in terms of holy symbols a symbol is only useful against undead if it has been consecrated by a cleric who can cast at least level 2 spells without that consecration the amulet holds no power and it's basically just merely a drawing to the undead attempting to censor charm or turn undead using your channel divinity without your symbol will automatically fail unless you're a cleric that can cast level 5 spells but it does lower the effectiveness of the channel divinity by basically a third now a cleric who tries to use a different god's holy symbol to channel divinity can do so but must use their channel divinity as if they are six levels lower but it is important to know that this is considered a serious matter and gods do not like this now contact by the undead to a holy symbol is damaging to the undead and it functions similarly to holy water in that way in fact under the right circumstances you could even use a holy symbol as a physical weapon and strike the undead with it the alignment of the god or of the person wearing the holy symbol does not matter and the damage will always function as holy water in this regard you could theoretically have a flail where instead of the ants being balls with spikes just be holy symbols and destroy undead in that way is pretty cool now priests can indeed lend their holy symbols to others but it is frowned upon by traditional clergies oh i should also mention that the only undead who do not take damage from holy symbols are the revenants and the poltergeists the undead are creatures of the night and of course they are accustomed to darkness outside of specific exceptions like you know obviously shadows and vampires undead are actually not harmed by the light of the day they however find light to be generally irritating and annoying and most times will even attack bearers of light for this very reason lastly the old-school practice of tossing salt over one's shoulder to ward off evil is not completely without merit but it won't save you from the undead even though the undead are not directly harmed by salt a contact with salt will actually cause an undead to recoil thanks to the negative energies that course through the undead's body when met with salt it causes cold non-flammable blue flames to erupt in the undead's body and then of course it causes the undead to flinch this can be used to find hidden undead though it will only work on those that have a tangible form this will not work against ghosts now this one is really really cool the one type of undead who are severely harmed by salt are vampires believe you me if you somehow manage to salt the dirt that forms the bed of the vampire you can rob him of his ability to drain energy regenerate and its ability to reform his body in its coughing this effect will last from 10 to 40 days however and this is the crucial part if you can somehow get not just like a sprinkle of salt into the dirt but instead thoroughly mix the vampire's grave dirt with at least 10 pounds of salt the vampire permanently loses its vampiric powers and instead becomes a shadow forever hope you guys enjoyed the video there is of course so much more to talk about beyond that obviously and specifically about ed greenwood's version of the undead but i needed this video to not be very long because there's other stuff that i have to do for the channel on the background that i'm currently working on but i do hope that at least you guys got to enjoy the video make sure to follow me on twitter i'm currently in the process of growing it so that i can contact other fellow youtubers in the dnd community i'm actually seeking to bring other members of the community into the channel to talk about the state of dnd as it is now about the possible coming of a sixth edition on the horizon and other things related to the lore of the game so i'm doing my best to try and not be so isolated in the community as i've always been and i'm opening myself a bit so if you guys want to help me out with that then i would greatly appreciate it if you could follow me on twitter so that i can start just talking to some of these fellow creators i look guys i get ghosted hard because my following is so pathetically small on twitter so any help is appreciated i would like to personally thank my patreon supporters barry maskan 5v magic shop morgan johnson rusty rayne duck feeder the grey codini omega scales alex cookson benjamin bosters faulkie 951 or doric prince daylight morning crown sabine kurshabs solar rinses thomas hunt nathan mccomb solas rider lost crusader mr salty stalia jd green olaf clad trav909 tony rc famine 52 george fortland sovereign mind trevor hess brian kemp chad aiga john the wicked stephen the living guild pack michael walker street 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Channel: MrRhexx

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Id: xPhCQvowg9s

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 04 2021