Spiritus Anime

A spiritus anime is a shapeless undead vapor, a faintly sparkling cloud of dust tied by a thin thread of motes to its home body, the corpse it wore in life, which is almost always buried. The cloud is normally invisible. Detect invisibility or true seeing shows it as a glowing halo around its current host, or as a bare cloud when it has none. Without magic, someone deliberately looking for it within 10 feet can spot it with a successful save vs. spell.

In cloud form it cannot attack. To fight, it must possess some skeleton or corpse lying no farther than 100 yards from its home body and animates it as an ordinary zombie or skeleton, with that body's own Hit Dice and hit points. Damage to the host never reaches the spirit; when one host is destroyed, it moves into another the next round, at +4 on initiative for that first round. A destroyed host cannot be reused, except that a slain zombie can return as a skeleton months later once its flesh has rotted. Only humanoid, human and demihuman remains can be used, and it prefers ones like its own: a minor size difference (a dwarf skeleton for a human spirit) gives -1 to hit, and a major one (halfling versus ogre, or extra parts such as a troglodyte's tail or a sahuagin's extra arms) gives -4.

There are four ways to stop it. First, get beyond 100 yards of the home body; it cannot drive a host beyond that range. In theory a host could carry the home body elsewhere, but that much planning is probably beyond it. Second, destroy every available corpse, a slow job that backfires if fallen party members become fresh zombies, which it favors over skeletons. Third, find, dig up and destroy the home body, which has zombie or skeleton statistics but fights only if animated; killing it kills the spirit. Once the home body is threatened, the spirit throws its hosts at the diggers or animates the home body and tries to escape with it. Normal weapons work on it, and holy water does 1d4 per vial to both the home body and the spirit.

Fourth, magic. Any cure wounds spell cast on its host permanently removes that many hit points from the spirit's own total. Bless deals it 1d4 unless it saves vs. spell, and resurrection, raise dead, spiritwrack, dispel evil or exorcise destroys it outright with no save. Bless cast on an unoccupied body protects that body from it forever; cast on the home body, it deals the 1d4 wherever the spirit is.

Clerics turn it as a ghoul; a D result only wrecks the host, and a turned spirit simply leaves its body and takes a new one next round. About 10% of these spirits learn to abandon a battered host before it falls and return to it later, convincing foes the dead cannot be killed.

These undead arise only when a humanoid is buried alive, on purpose, as a sacrifice or torment, or by mischance such as a rockslide, a plague mistake or a feign death spell gone wrong. About 40% of such victims rise this way, frantic to reach the surface. Because this is rare, they are usually alone. Several sharing a site ignore each other except that they avoid using each other's home bodies unless nothing else is left. If one animates another's home body and that host is destroyed, the owner dies while the animating spirit is unharmed, so a zombie felled at one end of a cemetery can drop another at the far end, two bodies falling for one blow, though a third may soon rise.

Spiritus animes play no part in the food chain beyond leaving carrion that draws scavengers and insects. Living in shunned places, they exist only to gather hosts that keep them above ground until they are laid to rest. They collect no treasure. In a real cemetery, hosts and home bodies carry only local burial goods, from shrouds to a great tomb's riches; after an accidental burial, they carry whatever the victims had on them.