As a topic for Halloween night, I alays wonder this: should undead creatures be made as templates instead of unique monsters?
Yes, we do have vampires, ghosts, zombies, skeletons and liches, (just to name a few), but most of the time, an undead creature is "simply" a reanimated corspe or a restless spirit... of a humanoid character. Many undead look like human and/or has a human-like structure... when you could clearly get a dragon wight, a hill giant shadow or a worg wraith.
Yes, the Advanced Bestiary has a ton of "dread" undead templates to apply for living creatures, but at its core, an undead creature is often a "fixed" unique creature. This does anwser my question "what if the undead creature isn't humanoid?", but it does beg the other question about whether or not undead creatures should have been templates in the first place.
Number of pages and flavor text aside, what could be keeping them to have templates for custom banshees, dullahans and dybbuks?
On a sidenote, I do exclude obvious examples of undead creatures. When your monster is essentially a pile of bones shaped into a snake (Boneyard; Libris Mortis) or a pile of corpses like Legion, you kinda don't need a template for that.
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Too many templates; eats up pagecount and makes creatures harder to use on the fly. The dread templates are nice to have around, though. Consider creating custom monsters where necessary. I believe Monster Codex had a ghoul hound, for example.
Also, a banshee template wouldn't be that necessary... banshees only rise from female elves. Not a lot of variance there.
EDIT: I missed the part of your post saying "Number of pages and flavor text aside..." Oops. ^_^
I don't think a template would take up much more space than a monster entry in many cases, at least for the simple ones like Ghoul, Wight, and Wraith.
Some monsters make sense as one-offs like Banshees and Dracoliches, but most don't.
Like, can you imagine how cool a Dragon Revenant would be? Saint George kills it...and it pops back up a week later, twice as badass and ready to throw down for a rematch.
I'd certainly prefer it. Then I'd stop having to make them myself.
Any undead that isn't formerly a creature should be moved to another creature type
I don't understand this statement. What undead isn't formerly a creature?
Frankenstein types?
Only frankenstein type that isn't a construct are necrocraft, and they are much more undead than construct in flavour, so I don't really understand this reply.
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Templates are fine if the Undead still has some aspects of the personi it was in live.
If the Undead aspect overrides all what was once the person now transformed, then going for the general monster stats in the better solution. It is just " a thing" that looks a bit like Uncle Bob, but isnt really.
Templates are fine if the Undead still has some aspects of the personi it was in live.
If the Undead aspect overrides all what was once the person now transformed, then going for the general monster stats in the better solution. It is just " a thing" that looks a bit like Uncle Bob, but isnt really.
That was my statement.
I know that it's good to have a sample creature for quick encounters, but most undead creatures seem to be dependant on a base creature of some sort.
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A lot of them could be templates.
A publication similar to the Libris Mortis from 3.X would be AWESOME.
One of my favorite books.
Would buy again.
I'd greatly prefer undead templates to individual undead creatures.
It would make animal and monster undead easier to make.