Lost Souls

A lost soul is a heaving tangle of rotting bodies, or of translucent spirits, knotted into one mass from which the faces of the dead stare out in misery. It never speaks, but its moan, many voices blended into one, fills listeners with fear.

Each wanderer merged into the mass, from 2 to 8 (2d4), adds 1+1 Hit Dice, +1 damage, 1 point of AC, 1 point of THAC0 and one extra attack, and the creature regenerates 1 hit point per round for each body or spirit within. The largest possible mass has 8+8 HD, AC 3, THAC0 13 and eight attacks of 1d4+8 damage. It claws, and if two claws land on a single foe that round it may also try to bite for 1d6.

The two kinds differ only in where they dwell and whom they can harm. When a traveler dies in the dream borderlands, there is a 40% chance the land raises the body as a fleshly, zombielike lost soul; these cannot enter dreamscapes and cannot hurt dreamers. A death inside a dreamscape carries a 60% chance of a ghostly lost soul instead, which drifts freely between dreamscapes and cannot harm physical wanderers. A ghostly one that lingers in the borderlands must save vs. death magic each hour or fade away, with a cumulative -2 for every hour after the first (so -4 by the third).

Once risen, it seeks out other lost souls and fuses with them, each individual dissolving into the whole. Each fragment keeps only flickering memories, while the combined creature has one mind, a storm of chaotic images and hatred for the living. It roams the nightmare realm adding victims until it holds eight.

Lost souls fill no natural role. The sight of living beings sends them into a frenzy to reclaim the warmth they have lost. Arcane heads, which need flesh to survive, hunt the physical kind.