Corpse Candle

A corpse candle is the undead ghost of a murdered person, and it takes its name from the flickering, flamelike glow in its body's eyes while it waits for an avenger. It is both ethereal and invisible; those able to perceive it describe a faint wisp of fog or vapor. It cannot speak, and its only way to make its wish known is a faint mental nudge it gives the champion it chooses.

At first it is just a ghostly flame in a dead person's eyes. Anyone who gazes into them must save vs. spell at -3. Success means the glow merely fades. Failure means the onlooker sees the killer's face reflected there and is swept into the final moments of the victim's life, experiencing everything leading to the death and powerless to change any of it. Companions see the hallucinating hero writhe, scream with fury, or act out the vision in other ways.

Afterward the champion remembers every detail. The murderer's face is seared into memory and appears to the champion alone in any open flame, whether torch, campfire, or lantern, and even in drifting smoke.

A champion who stalls longer than 1d4 days gets prodded through fire: the spirit can affect normal fires as the 1st-level wizard spell does, and can also make small flames jump up to 10 feet and shape fire into any form that does not require making it much bigger. A candle flame might turn into a spider that springs onto a bedsheet or curtain; a bonfire might take a man's shape and briefly engulf the champion. Each form lasts only one round and deals 1d6, though it can ignite anything flammable.

True seeing reveals the ghostly dead person riding the champion's shoulders. Negative plane protection or protection from evil holds the spirit off while the spell lasts; it cannot show the face then, but can still work fire beyond the spell's reach. Struck with a magic weapon, it fights back with burning hands as a 6th-level caster.

Spells such as wish, holy word, banishment, dismissal, and dispel magic drive it off permanently. It is immune to sleep, charm, hold, death spells, cold, poison, and paralysis. Priests turn it as 6th-level undead, but it returns to its champion as soon as it can. Speak with dead draws out only the killer's name, repeated.

The spirit finds peace once its champion sees the killer answer for the crime, either by killing the culprit or by seeing them tried and condemned. It also rests if the killer dies by any means, even accident. A corpse candle stays with its remains, so it may be met anywhere from a tomb to a back alley.

It serves no natural purpose. What it does satisfy is a need for justice so strong that the grave cannot quiet it.