Uncle Skeleton

An uncle skeleton looks like a spotless human skeleton with chalk-white bones and no scrap of flesh, except for a pair of living eyes with glowing yellow irises staring from the sockets. Some dress in stylish clothes, while others wear nothing but a top hat and carry a cane. Many decorate their bones with strange line drawings that may be necromantic symbols.

In spite of appearances it is no undead, but a spirit wearing a physical body. It is a curious mix of cruelty and good cheer, and its unpredictable moods paired with real power make it dangerous. Most uncles know many languages, living and dead, and can speak with dead at will.

Uncles almost never attack directly, preferring to scare and torment rather than wound. Pushed hard enough, though, they can do terrible harm. Bony fingers strike for 1d6 damage each, and an uncle may instead wield a machete, sword cane or whip. Once a week it can use animate dead and control undead as a 14th-level wizard. Like an ordinary skeleton its frame is mostly empty space, so edged and piercing weapons do half damage.

It also casts as a 9th-level mage, leaning toward enchantment/charm, illusion and necromancy. Beloved first- and second-level tricks include spook, grease, friends, taunt, ventriloquism, audible glamer, change self, phantasmal force, scare, blur, fog cloud, forget, invisibility, mirror image, misdirection, improved phantasmal force, spectral hand and hideous laughter. Higher favorites include wraithform, feign death, spectral force and hold undead; fear, fumble, confusion, shadow monsters, improved invisibility and hallucinatory terrain; and teleport, dream, summon shadow, shadow magic, distance distortion, advanced illusion and demi-shadow monsters.

Though not undead, it shares some of their traits. Sleep and life-affecting spells do not touch it, and it is immune to poison, suffocation and paralyzation. Charm and hold spells work on it normally. It cannot be turned, but a lawful good holy symbol brandished with real faith keeps it back, and a splash of holy water deals 2d4 damage. For reasons nobody understands, an uncle cannot come within 30 feet of a large constrictor such as a boa, python or anaconda.

Cemeteries, crypts and burial grounds are their natural homes. An uncle's lair is a strange blend of ghoulish taste and luxury. Despite being bare bones, it relishes fine rum, good cigars, costly clothes and art, yet it also delights in the grisly, decorating with rotting body parts and letting vermin swarm. Hordes of skeletons and zombies serve it, and it often keeps company with ghouls, wights and other graveyard dead.

Part mad carnival barker, part lurking lord of the dead and part twinkle-eyed father figure, the uncle is hard to pin down. Many call uncles evil for their undead friends and love of terror, but they see themselves as guardians of a useful fear. In their view, humans who forget the perils of the night grow lazy and fall prey to the undead. So they scare off graverobbers, necromancers, trespassers and nosy children with deranged funhouse pranks. Those pranks can literally frighten a person to death, so no one should mistake an uncle for a kindly being. Parents warn children to respect the dead or an uncle will turn their hair white. On holidays tied to death, uncles ride the countryside in bone sedan chairs, inflicting their twisted fun on any travelers they meet.

As spirits, uncles are effectively immortal and do not normally reproduce. When their numbers fall too low, uncles from throughout the misty dread realm journey to a hidden jungle island in a gloomy northern sea, said to hold a gateway to a spirit netherworld where future uncles wait. There an elaborate ritual calls those spirits out and clothes them in bone, and then old and new uncles scatter again. Centuries may pass between such gatherings.

Apart from the mortals battered by their games, uncles have no true enemies. They clash with grim, mighty undead, vampires above all, and they loathe strong-willed good folk such as priests and paladins, whom they dismiss as 'sticks-in-the-mud'. The wandering fortune-tellers refuse to meddle in anything involving an uncle, while followers of a slave-born spirit faith understand the creatures better, find them unsettling, and may help those they torment.

Witches and their kind prize uncle bones for magic tied to fear and undeath, such as a wand of fear, rod of terror, deck of illusions or amulet versus undead.