Planar Adventures
Pathfinder 1e
Undead, Undead Creature: Members of a growing contingent of evil duskwalkers have been rejecting their inborn nature entirely, throwing in their lot with the sahkils, who delight in such perversion. These duskwalkers can lose the abilities that help them combat undead and gain powers better suited to inflicting fear, but such choices also have a chance of altering their ward against corruption in a particularly unsettling way. Such duskwalkers inevitably find that not only can they become undead, but that their deaths all but guarantee some form of unnatural unlife after death, often coming back as a ghost without such an entity’s classic inability to travel far from the place of its death.
The most dangerous lingering souls become haunts or undead. Typically these souls were traumatized in the final moments of life, imbuing them with enough anger, confusion, or self-centered purpose to resist the pull to journey on. Such strong emotions allow them to influence the forces of negative energy acting on their deceased bodies. This might allow them to reinhabit their corpses, rising as types of undead creatures corresponding to the circumstances of their deaths. Others don’t reconnect with their bodies, either being too spiritually weak to do so—thus creating haunts—or manipulating negative energy into new insubstantial forms as incorporeal undead like ghosts or spectres.
Maybe there is no such thing as a soul, and all who die become ghosts unless some other event transforms them into specific undead creatures.
Negative energy transforms a soul into a ghost, haunt, or other undead, while a plane’s raw quintessence turns a soul into a petitioner.
Undead Creature With the Resurrection Vulnerability Feature: ?
Undead Foe: ?
Corporeal Undead: ?
Incorporeal Undead, Bodiless Undead, Undead Without a Physical Body: The most dangerous lingering souls become haunts or undead. Typically these souls were traumatized in the final moments of life, imbuing them with enough anger, confusion, or self-centered purpose to resist the pull to journey on. Such strong emotions allow them to influence the forces of negative energy acting on their deceased bodies. This might allow them to reinhabit their corpses, rising as types of undead creatures corresponding to the circumstances of their deaths. Others don’t reconnect with their bodies, either being too spiritually weak to do so—thus creating haunts—or manipulating negative energy into new insubstantial forms as incorporeal undead like ghosts or spectres.
For unknown reasons, the House of the Itinerant Soul serves as a bulwark against the pull of both the River of Souls and the Negative Energy Plane. As such, the most populous denizens are unfettered phantomsB4. Freed from the desperation of prolonging their fall into undeath, these phantoms mix and mingle in a parody of their mortal lives. The spirits go through the motions of half-remembered lifestyles, keep homes among the baroque architecture, and trade with visitors, especially prizing relics and trinkets that remind them of their mortal lives. In time, all of the phantoms tire of this existence and depart for judgment, only to be replaced by fresh ones. In this way, the House serves as a halfway home between death and judgment, which may be why Pharasma and her psychopomps have little concern with the site, for they understand that certain souls simply need longer to accept death than others, and the House of the Itinerant Soul offers a waiting area of sorts that prevents confused souls from forming into incorporeal undead, such as ghosts.
While it is most often used by mortals as a means to move incorporeally and unseen, the Ethereal Plane also serves as the launching point for souls, for it is here that they drift to upon death, joining the River of Souls to begin their journey to the Boneyard. Not all souls succeed at this journey, however; the Ethereal Plane is receptive to potent emotion, and souls that died without finding peace may linger in the mists for a time. Souls that become lost or are unable to move on due to extreme emotional trauma at the time of death may return to the Material Plane as ghosts, spectres, wraiths, or other bodiless undead, while others are called back to existence by spiritualists to become phantoms.
Rare Undead Creature: ?
Intelligent Undead: ?
Undead Spawned From a Doomed Mortal Traveller: ?
Doomed Undead: ?
Ancient Intelligent Undead: ?
Undead Crystal Dragon: ?
Undead Terror: ?
Separate Undead Entity: Visitors to Bleakshore are assailed with overwhelming feelings of ennui and loss. Those who do not flee run the very real risk of having their bodies and souls wrenched apart and transformed into two separate undead entities, each forever cursed to envy what it lost to the other until Fumeiyoshi finally takes note of the intruder and destroys them both, once more restoring solitude to Bleakshore.
Spontaneously Generated Undead: The highest point on all of Abaddon is the peak of the White Mountain. This massive volcano belches forth neither ash nor lava but a miasma of corrosive, white-hot soul-stuff, spontaneously generated undead, and negative energy. What fuels this devastating mixture of hatred is unknown, although rumors point to leakage from a lost artifact, the unquiet grave of a dead god or harbinger, or the results of a long-abandoned but not quite ended experiment by a previous Horseman of the Apocalypse.
Undead Passenger: ?
Haunt: The most dangerous lingering souls become haunts or undead. Typically these souls were traumatized in the final moments of life, imbuing them with enough anger, confusion, or self-centered purpose to resist the pull to journey on. Such strong emotions allow them to influence the forces of negative energy acting on their deceased bodies. This might allow them to reinhabit their corpses, rising as types of undead creatures corresponding to the circumstances of their deaths. Others don’t reconnect with their bodies, either being too spiritually weak to do so—thus creating haunts—or manipulating negative energy into new insubstantial forms as incorporeal undead like ghosts or spectres.
Negative energy transforms a soul into a ghost, haunt, or other undead, while a plane’s raw quintessence turns a soul into a petitioner.
Devourer, Far-Ranging Devourer: Those fiends and evil spellcasters who find a break in the Astral Plane and escape beyond the Outer Sphere sometimes return, twisted and transformed into devourers.
Far-Ranging Devourer, Most Infamous Abductor: ?
Phericydus, Devourer Oracle 10, Favored Minion, Mouthpiece, Towering Figure: ?
Ghost: The most dangerous lingering souls become haunts or undead. Typically these souls were traumatized in the final moments of life, imbuing them with enough anger, confusion, or self-centered purpose to resist the pull to journey on. Such strong emotions allow them to influence the forces of negative energy acting on their deceased bodies. This might allow them to reinhabit their corpses, rising as types of undead creatures corresponding to the circumstances of their deaths. Others don’t reconnect with their bodies, either being too spiritually weak to do so—thus creating haunts—or manipulating negative energy into new insubstantial forms as incorporeal undead like ghosts or spectres.
Maybe there is no such thing as a soul, and all who die become ghosts unless some other event transforms them into specific undead creatures.
While it is most often used by mortals as a means to move incorporeally and unseen, the Ethereal Plane also serves as the launching point for souls, for it is here that they drift to upon death, joining the River of Souls to begin their journey to the Boneyard. Not all souls succeed at this journey, however; the Ethereal Plane is receptive to potent emotion, and souls that died without finding peace may linger in the mists for a time. Souls that become lost or are unable to move on due to extreme emotional trauma at the time of death may return to the Material Plane as ghosts, spectres, wraiths, or other bodiless undead, while others are called back to existence by spiritualists to become phantoms.
For unknown reasons, the House of the Itinerant Soul serves as a bulwark against the pull of both the River of Souls and the Negative Energy Plane. As such, the most populous denizens are unfettered phantomsB4. Freed from the desperation of prolonging their fall into undeath, these phantoms mix and mingle in a parody of their mortal lives. The spirits go through the motions of half-remembered lifestyles, keep homes among the baroque architecture, and trade with visitors, especially prizing relics and trinkets that remind them of their mortal lives. In time, all of the phantoms tire of this existence and depart for judgment, only to be replaced by fresh ones. In this way, the House serves as a halfway home between death and judgment, which may be why Pharasma and her psychopomps have little concern with the site, for they understand that certain souls simply need longer to accept death than others, and the House of the Itinerant Soul offers a waiting area of sorts that prevents confused souls from forming into incorporeal undead, such as ghosts.
Negative energy transforms a soul into a ghost, haunt, or other undead, while a plane’s raw quintessence turns a soul into a petitioner.
Ghost, Incorporeal Undead, Bodiless Undead, Incorporeal Creature: ?
Ghost Without Inability to Travel: Members of a growing contingent of evil duskwalkers have been rejecting their inborn nature entirely, throwing in their lot with the sahkils, who delight in such perversion. These duskwalkers can lose the abilities that help them combat undead and gain powers better suited to inflicting fear, but such choices also have a chance of altering their ward against corruption in a particularly unsettling way. Such duskwalkers inevitably find that not only can they become undead, but that their deaths all but guarantee some form of unnatural unlife after death, often coming back as a ghost without such an entity’s classic inability to travel far from the place of its death.
Ghast: ?
Ghoul: ?
Lich, Creature Whose Soul is Separate From its Body, Intelligent Undead: ?
Xegirius Malikar, Lich Human Wizard 20, Often-Preoccupied Lich: ?
Mythic Lich, Undead Owner: ?
Shadow, Malevolent Shadow: ?
Shadow, Animal Suited to the Darkness, Predator, Undead Terror: ?
Greater Shadow, Undead Terror: ?
The Lightless Lord, Ancient Shadow Lord: ?
Spectre: The most dangerous lingering souls become haunts or undead. Typically these souls were traumatized in the final moments of life, imbuing them with enough anger, confusion, or self-centered purpose to resist the pull to journey on. Such strong emotions allow them to influence the forces of negative energy acting on their deceased bodies. This might allow them to reinhabit their corpses, rising as types of undead creatures corresponding to the circumstances of their deaths. Others don’t reconnect with their bodies, either being too spiritually weak to do so—thus creating haunts—or manipulating negative energy into new insubstantial forms as incorporeal undead like ghosts or spectres.
While it is most often used by mortals as a means to move incorporeally and unseen, the Ethereal Plane also serves as the launching point for souls, for it is here that they drift to upon death, joining the River of Souls to begin their journey to the Boneyard. Not all souls succeed at this journey, however; the Ethereal Plane is receptive to potent emotion, and souls that died without finding peace may linger in the mists for a time. Souls that become lost or are unable to move on due to extreme emotional trauma at the time of death may return to the Material Plane as ghosts, spectres, wraiths, or other bodiless undead, while others are called back to existence by spiritualists to become phantoms.
Spectre, Incorporeal Undead, Bodiless Undead: ?
Mother's Maw, Giant Winged Vampire Skull, Herald: ?
Vampire, Standard Vampire: Urgathoa divine gift.
Jian-Shi: Urgathoa divine gift.
Nosferatu: Urgathoa divine gift.
Legendary Vampire: ?
Vampire Sorcerer: ?
Vampire, Intelligent Undead: ?
Urgathoa, The Pallid Princess, Goddess of Disease Gluttony Undeath, Vampiric Goddess of Undeath, Most Powerful Denizen, Mentor, Comrade: ?
Larynsang the Wasted, Ancient Vampire Sorcerer: ?
Wraith: Major negative-dominant planes are even more dangerous to the living. Each round, a living creature on such a plane must succeed at a DC 25 Fortitude save or incur a negative level. A creature whose negative levels equal its current levels or Hit Dice is slain and becomes a wraith.
While it is most often used by mortals as a means to move incorporeally and unseen, the Ethereal Plane also serves as the launching point for souls, for it is here that they drift to upon death, joining the River of Souls to begin their journey to the Boneyard. Not all souls succeed at this journey, however; the Ethereal Plane is receptive to potent emotion, and souls that died without finding peace may linger in the mists for a time. Souls that become lost or are unable to move on due to extreme emotional trauma at the time of death may return to the Material Plane as ghosts, spectres, wraiths, or other bodiless undead, while others are called back to existence by spiritualists to become phantoms.
The Negative Energy Plane destroys life and most forms of matter, yet still, there are denizens of the realm. By far the most common are undead—particularly those without physical bodies. Wraiths are the most commonly encountered, for when a mortal creature dies on the Negative Energy Plane, a wraith often spawns during the process of death. In this case, the mortal’s actual soul is not completely corrupted—what forms the wraith is scraped from the dying soul in a process that is metaphysically and emotionally excruciating.
Wraith, Bodiless Undead, Undead Without a Physical Body: ?
Bodak: ?
Nightshade, Dreaded Nightshade: Of the undead who dwell on the Negative Energy Plane, the dreaded nightshades are the most infamous. Though these creatures have physical bodies, they are not affected by the constant decay the plane inflicts on solidity and reality. Nightshades are, in a very real sense, physical manifestations of the plane itself. Yet even they are not true natives. Born from dead fiends, they feed upon the Void’s energies and ever seek release into other planes to spread misery and death.
Originally an inhabited planet from the Material Plane, Fallen Duromak was dragged into the Void along with its twin during a monstrous invasion of devils and qlippoth. The world, orbited by shattered, slowly disintegrating moons, remains a sterile, life-scoured tomb planet populated by wraiths, ancient constructs, an entire void-ravaged ecology, and massive numbers of nightshades formed from the sudden oblivion of the warring fiends.
Nightshade, Animal Suited to the Darkness, Physical Manifestation of the Negative Engergy Plane: ?
Nightcrawler: ?
Nightwalker: ?
Nightwave: ?
Nightwing: ?
Allip: ?
Graveknight, Intelligent Undead: ?
Ectoplasmic Human: ?
Ghoul Leng: ?
Ghoul Ghast Leng: ?
Grim Reaper: ?
Grim Reaper, Most Dangerous Infamous Predator: ?
Lesser Death: ?
Divine Gift The recipient dies and rises at the next sunset (or after 12 hours have passed, whichever comes first, but never in a situation that would result in the gift being granted during the day) as a vampire. (At the GM’s discretion, other vampire templates, such as jiang-shiB3 or nosferatuB4, can be applied rather than the standard vampire template.) If the character is already a vampire, he does not suffer any of the traditional vampire weaknesses (such as sunlight or running water) for 24 hours.