Hex Crawl 23 #54: The Red Ghost

 Four hexes southwest of Alakran.

The camel herds who walk the arroyo south of the Road of Flowers are paltry in numbers, often poached for taming, so only d20 beasts will be encountered at a time from here. And if the dice show 1, you will come across a legend strikingly similar to one that still lingers around the doomed attempt to introduce the humped beasts to the American Southwest.

Image from Annake's Garden

They speak of a red dromedary, some say normal size, some say as tall as an ogre, some swear it's grown to thirty feet tall, never ask how. Tied into the saddle is a skeletal corpse, some poor bastard who grew faint from thirst out in the desert and trusted in his camel to lead hm to water. Maybe the man's skeleton is a living revenant, consumed with hate for everything alive. Maybe the man sold his soul in vain to the Devil, and the camel is a demon, or the Devil himself, mocking the contract by bringing him back to the road dead. Maybe the saddlebags are bulging with a treasure he went too far into the sands to discover. Maybe he never found it, and all he has is the ragged map clutched in his withered hand. 

All these things can be true, or false, when speaking of the corpse-ridden camel, the legendary Red Ghost.

An M. R. James Christmas: Dead Man's Eyes

By chance, Michael Bukowski of Yog-Blogsoth has reached a stopping point in illustrating the creatures of H. P. Lovecraft's imagination and is now tackling the creations of an author much admired by Lovecraft - the teller of Christmas ghost stories, Montague Rhodes James (here's his very different take on the monster I statted up as the sack custodian).

I was inspired by this to read through some of James' less well known stories - all available here, in the spirit of Christmas scares.

Largely, there's a reason why the stories in his first collection are better known. The later tales for the most part are still soaked in that wry humor and English antiquarian charm, but require more moving parts, more apparitions and forebodings, to deliver increasingly anticlimactic shocks. James keeps challenging himself to come up with new ideas for scares, but many of these misfire (the haunted curtain pattern in The Diary of Mr. Poynter, for one).

One of these weird ideas that does work shows up in A View From a Hill (spoilers, perforce, follow). The dark secret to be discovered is that of an amateur antiquarian, Baxter, who dabbled in sorcery the better to show up his more learned peers. Two of his artifacts bear special interest for gaming. The first is a little mask ...

Lawrence was up in the bedroom one day, and picked up a little mask covered with black velvet, and put it on in fun and went to look at himself in the glass. He hadn’t time for a proper look, for old Baxter shouted out to him from the bed: “Put it down, you fool! Do you want to look through a dead man’s eyes?” and it startled him so that he did put it down, and then he asked Baxter what he meant. And Baxter insisted on him handing it over, and said the man he bought it from was dead, or some such nonsense. But Lawrence felt it as he handed it over, and he declared he was sure it was made out of the front of a skull.

The second mystery is a strangely heavy, hand-made pair of binoculars that our protagonist borrows. Gazing through them at an opposite hill, he sees a church and a gallows that had not stood for hundreds of years. As it turns out, this artifact results from one of Baxter's more advanced spells. Their optics are filled with the gelatin of boiled bones from beneath the gallows, which allow their user to "look through a dead man's eyes" in an altogether more modern and convenient manner.

Dead Man's Eyes

Be it mask, spyglass, or a more modern contrivance, this necromantic item is created with some part of a single dead being's body, and the spells speak with the dead, monster summoning of a level appropriate to the being, wizard eye, bestow curse, and magic jar, as well as 5000 gp of materials. When complete, it has the effect of showing a scene looked upon as the dead being might have experienced it, with typical or memorable activities of the day. (This power proved very useful to Baxter, as he could rifle the countryside for finds undreamed of by his contemporaries.)

However, after the first use, there is a 1% cumulative chance that each further look through the device will bring the attention of the device's spirit, who will then attempt to possess the user and drive him or her to ruin or suicide.

Scary Christmas to all, and to all a long night!

Ghosts and Poltergeists: Ira

Wrath (ira) is a hard sin to attribute to any undead. I originally thought "hey, the wraiths of wrath" but beyond a stupid not-even-pun there is not much going for that. Wraiths and spectres, on reflection, are life-stealers, so they belong with the envious shadows. Redundant ones at that; I always thought that spectres in the original D&D were Gary's realization, "hey, these wraiths are not quite badass enough to be Ringwraiths."

As an emotion, anger is complicated and hard to study. In my analysis, this is because anger can be brought on by many individual things; it's a feeling state that over biological and cultural evolution has been recruited to respond to many situations. We feel angry when we are personally threatened, so that we can put up a threatening front; when our goals are personally blocked, so that we can persevere in working on them; when an injustice is perpetrated, so that we can apply social pressure to right it. The problem with anger is that each of these three things uses the same emotion, meaning that the three causes bleed over to each other. So, even if we have a goal blocked - bad traffic, say, or somebody publishing a game on the Internet that uses ascending armor class - anger pushes us to treat it like a personal threat, and even an injustice. And anger is a very visible state, which motivates us to communicate it and to come up with reasons for it. It's no wonder the medieval church fathers classed this ubiquitous emotion as a sin.

So what undead is defined by its rage? If you look to ghost tradition, the answer is obvious: the poltergeist. A literal spirit of rage, the poltergeist manifests in a house by throwing and disturbing objects. The problem is that in D&D, poltergeists are low-level joke monsters from the Fiend Folio. So we need to make them bigger and badder, and perhaps merge them somewhat with their bigger cousins, the ghost.

If the D&D ghost seems under-used, it's because, like the mummy, it merges high hit dice with weird attack modes: aging, which you can see as a kind of fear effect from its angry expression, and magic jar attack, which in effect is a kind of possession. It's not too much of a stretch to see the ghost as possessing its victims in order to express its rage, turning them immediately to attack their companions. Henceforth, the reworking:

Ghosts are another kind of undead where their sin in life translates well to their state after death. They died possessed by anger, frustrated in the accomplishment of some goal which may even be evident in the environment: an unfinished statue, an unescaped deathtrap. They are very hard to deal with because they can turn invisible and ethereal at will, and may only be hit by magic weapons, holy items or spells. Trying to turn them directly only makes them more angry, and they attack the one doing the turning; the way to deal with them is to face the other way while holding the holy symbol and intoning the sacred words, which will affect them in the normal way. The one weakness a ghost has is for the attainment of the goal that caused its anger; for example, a ghost created when a wrathful person died trying to escape a trap will be dispelled when the original bones are moved to a place of freedom.

A ghost will have 3 (poltergeist), 6 (ghost) or 9 (greater ghost) hit dice, with all other stats as written. It has one special attack for every 3 hit dice, from this list:

1. Save (Mind/Spell) or age 1d20 years when ghost first shows itself.
2. Telekinesis, throwing dangerous objects about as through the spell (and the ghost will seek out places with such objects).
3. Possession as by magic jar.
4. Supernatural chill in a 60' radius, extinguishing small fires, and doing 1 hp of damage/round if warm clothing is not worn (this will not reduce a character to zero hp however).
5. Death wail (as banshee); once per night, all who hear must save (Body/Death magic) or fall unconscious for 1 hour (3HD), 24 hours (6HD), or die (9HD).
6. Fear effect: roll two saves (mind/Spell) when ghost first shows itself, if both are failed then stand rooted to the spot for 3 rounds, if one is failed then flee at top speed for 3 rounds.