Bog Mummy

When a body sinks into a swamp, layers of mud can preserve it, staining it the color of earth and toughening it like tanned hide. Scraps of clothing and hair cling in patches, the face is locked in a grimace, and the hands harden into hooked claws. Risen as undead, it lurches on stiff limbs.

It is very strong and strikes for 1d12. Its wounds carry a form of mummy rot that stiffens and darkens the flesh in blotches near the injury and kills in 1d12 weeks if untreated, lowering Dexterity and Charisma by 1 each per month. Only cure disease removes it; other healing magic fails, wounds mend at 10% of the usual pace, and regenerate repairs damage without halting the disease. Anyone a bog mummy kills stiffens and petrifies at once, and can be raised only if both cure disease and raise dead are cast within six rounds.

Onlookers save vs. spell at -1 or are paralyzed with fear for 1d6 rounds. It has 30-foot infravision. Normal weapons cannot harm it, except copper weapons, which do half damage, rounded down. After two days of rest a wounded bog mummy regains 6 hit points per hour, but reaching 0 hit points destroys it forever. Being waterlogged, it ignores normal fire and takes half damage from magical fire, but cold makes ice crystals grow in its tissues and burst it, so cold spells deal double damage. Sleep, charm, poison and paralysis do not affect it. Resurrection makes it a living human again, a fighter of 6th level haunted by memories of its death, unless it is too old for the priest; wish also works, remove curse does not.

Through waterlogged marsh ground it can open a single-use, phase door-style tunnel of at most 10 feet, and twice a day can cast transmute rock to mud.

In the domain of the walking dead where most appear, bog mummies are usually victims of murder or sacrifice, consumed by a need for vengeance. Their killers are long dead, so they vent their fury on any living thing, frightening and tormenting the living out of pure chaotic spite.

A bog mummy rises when a surge of positive energy rejoins the spirit to its preserved body. Priests or other mummies can make them, and strong emotion can raise one, but here they were an accident: supposedly when a doomsday device was triggered, its blast of negative energy shoved a wave of positive energy ahead of it. That wave rolled through a stagnant lake and a great salt marsh, long a favored dumping ground for murder victims whose bodies still held strong emotion, and the corpses began climbing out of the mud. Because of its positive energy bond, it cannot enter the domain's capital, which is drowned in negative energy.