Sir Jerden's page

I like undead that really confront you with how unnatural and wrong they are. Zombies and skeleton do that, but they're a little too familiar. One could reanimate more unusual creatures though. A zombie angel, or other traditionally good creature, would be unexpected.

The blog mentioned beheaded, crawling hands and isitoqs (flying eyeballs!), and the shredskin is similar - a hollow shell that can take over new bodies. You could even combine them all into a single encounter, implying that a hapless victim was disassembled and then reanimated by a creative necromancer, which is always the worst kind to fight.

Necrocrafts are an interesting alternative to a horde of zombies, since they're easy to customise and pretty disturbing if you get descriptive. Perhaps they're what necromancers do with the rest of the corpse after they've reanimated the head and hands?

For bosses, a zombie lord would be interesting, especially because hiding that they're undead is possible with enough makeup and perfume, adding an element of intrigue. It allows us to have a necromancer boss that isn't another lich, which is nice, since everyone knows that liches have phylacteries.
And if we want to get silly, there's always a humungous necrocraft mecha, aka finally a reason to climb up a monster to reach a vulnerable weakspot (the necromancer at the top). I'm not sure how such an encounter would work, but I'd love to find out.

I think the "reason" undead are evil is because, in general, they're motivated by a hatred of life and a hunger for the blood brains, flesh souls or spinal fluids of the living. Even the mindless undead like zombies and skeletons will attack the living if given nothing else to do, at least that's how I'd expect them to act. There's also the way that becoming undead defies the natural order of the universe, the soul cycle if you will, which is generally considered to be wrong.

The real reason for all this is that this is the story the writers chose to tell. Undead = Evil makes things simpler and, as mentioned, prevents PCs from just becoming undead for the stat benefits (which is evil because you can get away with dumping con, the primary evil in Pathfinder) and raising undead as minions (which is an inherently evil act because it slows down combat).

However, if you want to do something different as a GM there's no reason why you can't make exceptions. I'd be interested in a campaign with non-evil undead, but I feel that they should still remain an exception to the norm because otherwise you lose the novelty of them in the first place.

This generally does just depend on the champaign and its requirements. After all, the more experience the army gets, the more powerful they'll become.

While the rule of halves is probably a good rough guide, I think every army is going to have at least a few high level characters that could take on a big threat. These would be the hardened veterans, the legendary generals, and maybe a few retired adventurers, who've mostly settled down but can show up to take down any big threats like dragons and mid level spellcasters. Sure, you can make a name for yourself hurling a couple of fireballs around the battlefield, but the same wizard is not going to do so well if a group of higher level enemies wait for him to get close before attacking.

As for how monsters don't just rule everything, I guess it's because they tend not to join forces into big armies, or if they do then they must spend too much time fighting each other.

So, these trolls could either be humanoid (giant)s or monstrous humanoids. If you want to play up the troll part and not confuse players too much, go giant. Sure, they have tails and horns, but I think regular trolls are so beastial that they should all be monstrous humanoids, so go with either. Or fey, but fey are d6 half bab creatures and so you'd have to give them a lot of HD to make them challenging.

Norwegian trolls would be the classic evil Tolkien troll, with DR or regeneration to make them hard to kill, but obviously they turn to stone in natural sunlight. Give them a keen sense of smell, and if you want to really mine the myths, give them a constant detect the faithful (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/d/detect-the-faithful) style effect, but for followers of good gods (or potentially for followers of all gods?). I actually like the idea of this ability, it makes them interesting as some sort of blasphemous giant. Maybe they worship things older than gods, and that could give them protection from divine magic and some nature shaman style abilities. They'd fill the classic troll role regardless, and they'd be great as the allies of ancient evils like aboleths, quippoleths and Great Old Ones. I just love the idea of a troll inhaling deeply, and then turning to his allies. "I smell gods. Let's eat."

Icelandic trolls are similar, and seem to be the kind of generic giant that D&D giants are built on. They don't even have tails! There is something delightfully macabre about giving monsters a preference for children, but we all knew that already. Compared to the Christian eating norse troll they're rather dull. However, apparently some are nice - do they only eat bad people? If so, are they mocked like vegetarians by all the other trolls?

Swedish trolls could be a less powerful but more intelligent version, and they would be less evil, or possibly just more reasonable. They'd be less affected by sunlight though, but would still try to sty out of it, so they'd make good miners or traders, swapping ores or lumber or furs for jewelry. In an adventure, perhaps a group of them possesses a rare and shiny magical item that the players need - but they'll be surprised to discover that the "trolls" they've been warned about are happy to hand it over - for the right price. "Do you think that looking this amazing is easy? We need that +2 minotaur bane hairbrush to manage these luscious locks!"

Danish trolls are a potential PC race (regeneration 1 or less would hardly be game breaking - maybe they just recover more with rest), or at least a low HD creature that could feature in a social encounter, possibly directing players towards a more dangerous troll nearby. They could be rather secretive though, with racial illusion spells to hide their location, perhaps. The legend that they raise abandoned children is fascinating, particularly in a game if somebody gets the wrong idea and thinks they're stealing babies, and sends the PCs after them. If nothing else, "Raised by trolls" would be an amazing trait to have on your character sheet. I don't care what it does, I just write to write it.

(That valravn is interesting as a monster as well. We already have carrionstorms, but maybe a more powerful corpse could generate this undead raven, which then must seek a babies heart to regain it's former power. By transforming into a knight or a... wereravenwolf?)

I looked up trolls on wikipedia, and apparently lightning is the reason you don't see them in scandinavia today, so if you give them regeneration, use electricity to negate it. That on it's own gives them something interesting to challenge PCs.

Wow, thanks for linking this, it's always entertaining thinking of weird ideas, and you don't get much stranger than myth.