Mud Zombie

A mud zombie is a skeleton, usually human, whole or partial, plastered with a thick coat of slick mud. One missing a leg drags itself along and has only one claw. These mindless guardians were invented by a lich-king of a mist-shrouded realm, and are normally left dormant where they were made until some trigger, typically trespassers walking past, wakes them to rise from the muck and attack.

Slow, they always act last. They rake with the jagged ends of broken bones, packing mud into the wounds. Unless cleaned with healing spells, holy water or another accepted method, such wounds fester and take twice as long to heal, and the victim must save vs. poison or run a mild fever costing 1 Strength for 1d6 days, cumulative to a maximum loss of 4.

If both claws hit in one round, the zombie clamps on and mashes the victim's face against the mud of its chest. Each following round the victim may try once to roll his Strength or less on 1d20 to break loose; each failure costs 1d4 suffocation damage. While smothering someone, the zombie ignores all other attacks. Mud zombies never flee.

Piercing weapons (thrusts, arrows and the like) simply slide through the mud; it must be smashed apart. Water is its weakness: driving rain strips the mud in 3d4 rounds, and full immersion or a direct hit of holy water (which also deals 2d4) does it in 1d4 rounds. The bare skeleton keeps its hit points but can no longer smother, and its wounds no longer carry disease. Cone of cold freezes the mud, halting the zombie for a round before it breaks out in skeletal form the round after. Reversed transmute rock to mud seals it permanently in unbreakable stone.

They are made wherever bones and mud are both on hand, usually battlefields and graveyards beside a river, bog or lake. Conditions must be right: after a long drought the ground is too hard and dry for one to rise.

With its flesh long gone, a mud zombie has none of the usual zombie stench, only the smell of mud. Even that blends into its home field and is noticeable only once it leaves, from 20 feet or closer.