Meorty

Meorties are gaunt, mummified dead in moldering wrappings or decaying burial clothes befitting their rank, always adorned with intricate ancient jewelry and usually bearing the weapons they carried in life. Green embers glow in their eyes, and their bearing is regal. Their voices are deep and resonant, but they speak only to pronounce a trespasser's crimes, and only in the long-dead languages they knew.

A meorty usually teleports near the offenders, walks up calmly, names the laws they broke and invites them to submit honorably to punishment. Those who will not submit to being slain are attacked. It favors psionics, especially domination, and in melee uses its old weapons or its fists (1d6+6 for its great strength).

Only +1 or better magic weapons, spells, psionics or creatures with over 6 Hit Dice or magical natures can harm one. Death magic, insanity, electricity, cold, polymorph, enfeeblement, sleep and charm all fail against it, and it has 25% magic resistance. It keeps its class abilities from life; most were psionicists and some were fighters, but none are wizards, since they predate magic. A meorty also commands other ancient undead as a 15th-level cleric.

Psionics: sciences clairvoyance, domination, life detection, mind link, psionic blast and teleport; devotions astral projection, awe, clairaudience, contact, danger sense, dimensional door, displacement, dream travel, truthear, send thoughts, psionic sense, psionic crush, mind thrust, mental barrier, id insinuation and ego whip.

In the green age, when psionics reigned and forests covered the desert world, many domains stretched across the region and beyond. Each chose a guardian to be made into a meorty by high priests' necromancy and lost psionic arts, binding it to enforce that domain's laws forever. The domains and their laws are now dust, yet the guardians serve on. Evil by nature but not by initiative, they would rather rest, rising only when a law is broken.

Since no record of the laws or borders survives, no one knows what counts as a crime where. Seasoned travelers in the wilds beyond the city-states follow local customs, especially the strangest ones, which may echo ancient laws.

Meorties sleep in vast, intricate hidden tombs crowded with undead and old treasures. No living being may enter; trespassers, and anyone else who learns a tomb's location, are hunted and destroyed by the meorty and its minions.

A meorty knows much of the world's ancient history, above all the green age that came before the age of sorcery and the great purges, but the living seldom meet one under conditions that allow questions. Their crypts are said to hold metal, psionic relics and other treasures of that vanished era.