Blood Skeleton

A blood skeleton is a stronger cousin of the common animated skeleton, and easily confused with one. Heroes who make that mistake learn otherwise when the bones they shattered stand back up.

It is a complete human or demihuman skeleton, usually stripped bare of rotting flesh, moving and sensing through necromancy rather than muscle, eyes or ears. Creators seldom bother with armor but always arm them, most often with a battered, rusty sword. The only telltale sign is a faint reddish-brown tint to the bones, left by soaking in blood when they were made. They cannot communicate, ignore any attempt at parley from anyone but their maker, and make no sound except a creepy clicking and creaking as they walk.

Blood skeletons have no tactics beyond what their creator orders, and those orders must be simple, so they serve as guards or blunt assault troops. Most carry short swords, attacking once a round for 1d6, though spears, axes and other swords also appear.

Their gift is reassembly. Weapons damage them normally, and a few good blows from a mace will drop one. But one round after destruction the bones rise, fit back together and are fully restored, still following whatever orders they had, as if nothing happened. Grinding the bones to splinters does not stop it, nor does blessing or burying them during that single round.

Damage from magical attacks is the exception. Cold still does nothing to them, but every other kind of damaging spell or magical effect is permanent, so the game master should track the magical damage each one suffers. When accumulated magical damage reaches its original hit point total, it stays down for good. Magical weapons do not count; a sword +2 is regenerated as easily as a plain blade.

Otherwise they share the traits of ordinary skeletons. Piercing and slashing weapons deal half damage, rounded down. Sleep, charm and other mind-affecting or life-affecting spells fail, as do disease, poison and suffocation. Holy water deals 2d4 per vial. Being mindless, they never check morale.

These mindless servants guard the treasures and private chambers of evil wizards. They are most common in the misty dread realm's lands where magic is outlawed or scarce, since any peasant swinging a sledgehammer can wreck an ordinary skeleton, but without magic a wizard's enemies have no way to finish a blood skeleton.

That logic drove a necromancer of a northern domain of science to invent them. His countrymen, ignorant of divine magic and nearly so of arcane,, still smashed his normal skeletons easily, and in a land plagued by grave robbers, assembling complete skeletons was hard work. He found a solution, though the magic allows only one at a time. A complete adult skeleton must steep three days in a vat filled with the blood of intelligent beings, after which animate dead is cast on the now maroon-tinged bones, then animate dead again, then mending. Only a wizard of 10th level or higher can manage it.

Heroes eventually cut him down, but his method spread quickly among unscrupulous wizards along the western coast of the heartland domains, and blood skeletons now appear in ever stranger and more remote places. They are nearly unstoppable in magic-poor regions, and many evil wizards hold them in reserve as shock troops, unleashing them once weaker zombies and skeletons have worn intruders down and drained their spells.

Mindless constructs, they need nothing, have no ties to their surroundings, and have no enemies except whoever their master sets them against.