Crypt Cat

A crypt cat is a house cat preserved as a mummy. Its body is sealed in a thin shell of clay mixed with magical oils and salves, then painted in the animal's coat pattern, often with lavish gilt. On first waking it cracks out of this shell, revealing a withered, shrunken body with patchy tufts of fur and flakes of clay still clinging to it, cracked yellow teeth, and dried-up eyes that rattle loosely in their sockets.

Each rests in an ornately carved and painted coffin of stone or wood, usually decorated with cats frolicking among mice and birds in the afterlife, sometimes with a portrait of the occupant. Many wear costly trinkets such as golden bells or a small gold earring.

Crypt cats claw twice and bite, and if both front claws connect they rake with the hind feet for two extra attacks. Every scratch or bite requires a save vs. poison; failure brings a disease that shows as a red swelling around the wound. Such a wound never fully closes: 1 point of its damage resists all healing, magical or not, until cure disease or heal is applied.

Charm, hold, sleep, death magic, and poison cannot touch them. They turn as ghasts, unless a stronger undead master is present; then they cannot be turned until the master is, and they are affected before it.

In life they were coddled pets or the holy animals of a cat cult, entombed beside their owners to follow them into the next world. They defend that master until destroyed and rise from their coffins against grave robbers and desecrators. If the master itself became undead, the cats may rise whenever it does, unless it orders them to stay in the tomb.

They lie in burial chambers, often among ordinary mummified cats. The clay recipe is a mystery, though powerful necromancy is presumed. Opening a crypt cat's coffin usually wakes it (90%). If the sealed coffin is first carried out of the tomb, that drops to 75%, and a crypt cat whose lid is left off or whose body is lifted out wakes within 1d4 hours. Finding one outside its tomb is rare but possible.

Bigger felines can be made into crypt cats too. Their disease is stronger, holding back 2 points per wound until magically cured, and they turn as wraiths. Any great cat species may be used; such a crypt cat attacks and deals damage as the living animal would and carries the large crypt cat's disease.