Crypt Thing

A crypt thing resembles an ordinary animated skeleton dressed in a flowing brown or black robe. A tiny, fierce red light burns in each empty eye socket, so intense it seems almost hypnotic.

It does nothing until grave robbers or vandals invade and defile its tomb, then springs to life to defend the dead resting there. Its opening move is a potent form of teleportation, usable once against any given group: each intruder must save vs. spell or be whisked out of the crypt. The DM rolls 1d100 for each failure to decide where the victim lands, or simply picks a spot. Victims never arrive inside solid matter, but nothing guarantees they arrive on the ground; cunning crypt things have dropped intruders hundreds of feet up in the air or over a deep chasm.

After that it fights with its bony hands, clawing for 1d8 points of damage. Only magical weapons can hit it. Like other undead it ignores charm, hold and sleep, and holy water and holy symbols harm it, but the magic binding it to its lair is so strong that priests and paladins cannot turn it at all.

Crypt things do not belong to the natural world and have no society. They appear wherever there are tombs. There are two kinds. Most are summoned, created when a priest or wizard of 14th level or higher casts the 7th-level spell described below. Rarer are ancestral crypt things, spirits of the dead that return on their own to watch over their descendants' graves, at the DM's discretion.

Having no place in nature, a crypt thing fills no niche. Rumor says its bones, ground to powder, are an ingredient in a potion of undead control. Pipes of haunting carved from its bones have an 80% chance to become an improved version that imposes a -2 penalty on victims' saving throws and has twice the usual effect on those who fail.

Create crypt thing is a reversible 7th-level necromantic spell available to both wizards and priests. Range touch, components V and S, duration permanent, casting time 1 round, area of effect one corpse, no saving throw. The caster must be in the tomb or grave to be protected and touch the skull of the body being raised. The crypt thing lasts until destroyed, and a tomb can have only one.

A successful dispel magic returns the guardian to an inert corpse, and once that happens, nothing short of a wish can reanimate it. The reverse, destroy crypt thing, annihilates one crypt thing the caster touches unless it succeeds on a save vs. death magic.