Living Wall

To the eye and to infravision it is plain stone or brick, though it detects as evil and magical. True seeing or a gem of seeing exposes the truth: a gray, stringy bulk of flesh bristling with faces, hands, feet and splintered bones. Anyone within 5 yards hears a low moaning of pain and sorrow that even a silence spell cannot hush.

The wall never strikes first, except at its own creator, whom it loathes. But every time someone hits it, each creature merged into it answers with one attack in its usual mode, whether physical, magical or mental. A wall of 12 bodies hit once replies with twelve blows. Absorbed fighters attack at their own levels, using their old weapons, which stay hidden inside until a hand pushes them out and staring eyes aim them; ranged weapons work only until their ammunition runs out. Each absorbed caster grants the spells memorized at death (with components), each usable once a day and renewed daily without consuming components, so two mages holding three fireballs and one fireball give the wall four a day. Paladins and lawful good priests have their powers reversed: detect evil becomes detect good, healing hands become harm.

Absorbed magic items lend their effects, but armor bonuses shrink: every 3 points of magical AC improvement lower the wall's AC by 1, so a ring of protection +3 gives 1. The wall starts with 64 hit points and adds each victim's full hit point total.

The nonmagical armor, packs and purses shed by its victims pile up at its base and lure the curious. Within 2 feet, pleading hands paw feebly at passersby, a grip anyone can break. Those who answer the cries of 'help me, pull me free!' and grasp a hand must save vs. spell or be pulled in, and anyone holding that person must save too. Witnessing an absorption calls for a horror check. Victims are lost forever, though a carefully worded wish can free one or more.

Passwall does not work on it; intruders must hack or blast through, which triggers retaliation, and the reeking flesh beneath forces a save vs. poison to avoid fainting (success means nausea only). The wall is immune to planar and temporal magic. Probing it with ESP, speak with dead or the like yields only a din of tortured minds and a horror check.

Every corpse of a humanoid or monster dying within 100 yards after the wall forms joins it, including those killed attacking it, and keeps its old abilities while turning chaotic evil. Walls do not breed and stay active until destroyed. Villains use them in torture chambers or to mask secret passages. Walls 30 feet in length, 15 in height and 10 in depth have been reported, but each is confined to one section and cannot ring a castle or creep through a house.

Above all the wall craves its creator's death. If it kills that person, or the creator dies within 100 yards, the body is drawn in, the trapped souls go free into death, and the wall becomes ordinary stone with its maker sealed inside.

Chaotic evil mages sometimes create them through years of unknown preparation and spellcasting, using at least three corpses. Very few know that the land itself can also produce one in response to despair. It begins when one thinking creature deliberately walls up another alive, in a mountain niche, a catacomb, an asylum corner or a crypt front. The victim must scream a curse at their killer loud enough to carry beyond the stone, for the land heeds nothing less.

After death the victim's life force is trapped in the stone, fouled by the residue of its own curses, and within days it goes mad and chaotic evil. Then every body that died within 100 yards in the past month, even buried ones, claws its way to the wall and melts into it. The structure looks unchanged, but it is now a rotting rampart of fused limbs, ribs and faces that claims every later death nearby. Good folk try to destroy such walls, yet many attempts only feed them more corpses.