Bayou Zombie

Bayou zombies are gray-skinned, gaunt humans easily mistaken for common zombies. They are actually living people whose minds have been enslaved by a spirit-priest of a slave-born spirit faith, usually as punishment for a grave crime against the faithful. Being alive, they have their limbs and flesh, but the ordeal leaves them haggard for good, even if cured.

A bayou zombie will not attack on command and lacks the will to start a fight. Attacked, it might defend itself, always acting last, but more often it just shuffles slowly away. As living beings they have no immunity to poison or mind-affecting magic. Priests can turn or control them, subtracting the creating spirit-priest's level from their own before checking success. Zombie lords cannot command them, and holy water does them no harm.

Becoming a zombie is the harshest sentence the faithful impose, kept for crimes such as revealing the faith's mysteries to strangers or slaying a kindly spirit. The spirit-priest gives the condemned a poison that brings a deathlike coma for 6 to 7 days. The family mourns and buries him in a grave outside the cemetery. On the eighth day after the dose, the priest digs him up. By then he has woken underground, and the terror of that plus the poison have drained most of his Intelligence and Wisdom. He follows the priest's simple orders except any he sees as threatening his life.

Family and friends shun him, not from malice but because he has been exiled from life and is a constant reminder of death. Neither he nor his maker is necessarily evil. Killing a bayou zombie that knows it is about to die counts as brutal murder; if it is unaware, it is a nonbrutal murder.

Outsiders deserving such punishment are usually cursed or killed instead. Rumor speaks of renegade spirit-priests who serve malevolent spirits outside the faith and might enslave outsiders. Whether demihumans can be transformed is unknown.

Bayou zombies must eat and drink normally, though they often need reminding, and sleep at least six hours in 24, usually dropping off wherever they stand an hour after sunset unless told otherwise. They cannot speak but understand languages they knew before and answer questions with gestures that can be hard to read. They do manual labor for their masters; in the bayou domain's swamps they gather plants and food. The domain's zombie lord has noticed the occasional live burial but has not acted.

A cure is possible. Spells or psionics that cure insanity bring back the lost Wisdom and Intelligence, though not memories. Seven to 12 months of intensive care in an asylum can restore those scores and the memories too, depending on the quality of the place and its physician; partial success may return only part. However cured, the victim's alignment stays Neutral until he works to change it.