Story Time: The Restless Dead

So in my last Story Time entry I talked about how to give someone who wants to go off the rails something to be interested in, even if it's just for a single session, and  a lot of my ideas used undead, why, I like the undead, especially mindless undead, as a minor threat. Why? there are so many options, especially at low to medium levels.

For example, and I've used this encounter to great effect, the party is walking through an old Forest following an overgrown trail and they come upon an abandoned temple (any god, but I used Pharasma), the interior is gloomy and poorly lit by intermittent beams of light coming from Ivy covered holes in the ceiling, just inside the door, there are three crumbling pillars each 10ft apart from each other and the walls. Beyond the pillars (about 15-20ft) lies a 4 foot tall wall that surrounds a murky, stagnant pool, almost 20ft wide and 40 ft long, its surface covered in rotting leaves, and thick scum, the water laps several inches below

As the PC's approach the Pillars, rotting hands grasp at the wall around the pool, and several waterlogged, swollen Corpses pull themselves from the pool and start shambling towards the PC's.

Looking at my notes from that campaign, the only difference I made to the Zombies in that encounter was to give them Fire Resistance 5, and yet those 5 Sodden Zombies were one of the hardest fights of that campaign for a group of lvl 2 PCs.

Alternatively, and this is an idea I've yet to fully expand upon or write down, was the PC's have to go through a narrow cramped dungeon before finally ending up in a wide antechamber where the McGuffin, or treasure or plot-device is on a plinth in the centre of the room. When a PC picks up the item the walls start spewing out bones, which coalesce into multiple Skeletons (Use the Exploding Skeleton template for extra fun) before any PC's who are in the room are surrounded. and the doors to the room slam shut.

Using the Explosive Skeleton template in this fight, with its cramped conditions makes for a fun potential chain reaction when the first Skeleton goes down.

And these are just the 2 most common types of undead, I can think of off the top of my head, I haven't even got into Ghouls, Ghasts, Draugr, Wights, Mummies, Haunts, Dullahans, Crypt Things, or anything else.

So I suppose what I'm saying is that, get grave-digging you'll never know what you might come up with.