Daemon Warrior

A daemon warrior has no fixed body at all. Each onlooker sees it as whatever terrifies that person most, so a single soldier might be a skeletal knight to one hero and a looming childhood bogeyman to the next. In a fight it usually takes on a human-sized shape, though the details never matter mechanically. The armor it seems to wear is pure illusion, crafted to heighten dread; its Armor Class of 0 is simply natural toughness.

Its weapons follow the same pattern. Daemon warriors carry swords, spears and axes much like those of any mortal army, but the blades look warped, wrong and dreamlike to anyone who studies them.

Terror arrives before the blade. A 10-foot aura of fear surrounds every daemon warrior, and any living creature it closes on with an Intelligence below 20 must save vs. spell at -2 or run in blind panic for 3d10 rounds. Because the creature is each victim's personal nightmare, possessing more Hit Dice than it grants no protection.

Ordinary weapons pass through it harmlessly, as do unblessed ones. Magical and holy weapons wound it normally, while a weapon blessed by the clerical spell or by a deity's own hand annihilates it on contact. Natural attacks such as fists or horns are equally useless unless the attacker has at least 7 Hit Dice. A priest who lands a successful attack roll with a holy symbol of any faith destroys both the creature and the symbol.

Fire of every kind, from a fireball to a red dragon's breath, does nothing to it, and it has 10% magic resistance. Like other undead it ignores sleep, charm, hold and cold-based spells and cannot be poisoned or paralyzed. Each vial of holy water deals 2-8 hp damage, and a raise dead spell destroys one outright unless it saves vs. death magic. Sunlight is unpleasant to it but causes no harm.

At 0 hit points the warrior erupts in flame, dealing 1d6 hp damage to everyone within 5 feet. The blow that felled it is consumed in the blast; a magical weapon may save vs. crushing blow, gaining +1 per point of enchantment.

These undead exist to make war on the living. They wander singly or in small war bands, often mounted on fire dragons, butchering whatever they meet. Large armies of them have been raised, most famously in the siege of a great knightly fortress, yet they loathe order as much as their chaotic maker does and rarely hold formation for long.

Heroes usually meet them guarding something their master values, assaulting a place the party is sworn to defend, or simply rampaging across farmland. They never parley and never retreat. If their fear fails to break a foe, they simply keep pressing forward, shrugging off losses until the defenders' weapons are spent. They prefer shadow and often keep company with other shadowy undead.

Most undead merely blight the ground around their tombs; daemon warriors carry that blight on campaign, seeking to scour all life from the world. They need no food, drawing everything from their creator's power. Sages suspect that their essence, or the ash left after one explodes, could serve in making a wand of fear, a wand of polymorphing, a ring of fire resistance or ink for scrolls of similar spells.