War Wraith

From afar a war wraith is just an eerie, misty glow easily taken for a will o' wisp. Within 90 feet it resolves into a spectral skeleton wrapped in taut, paper-thin skin, human but with faintly fiendish features. Though it seems made of dim silvery mist, it acts as a solid being; a famous vampire hunter would have called it a corporeal manifestation. Worse, everything it touches comes away bloody.

Each war wraith holds a weapon in either hand, by common belief the very weapon that killed it, so pairs of long swords or battle axes are typical. It attacks with both every round, each hit dealing 1d6 regardless of weapon type. A hit from the first costs the victim 1 Strength, and one from the second costs 1 Constitution. Either score reaching 0 kills the victim, who, legend says, joins the wraiths.

Only spells and magical weapons of +1 or better harm it. Some say unblooded weapons, never used in battle, can as well; skeptics scoff, and others suspect such a weapon would work only once before it, too, was blooded. It has the standard undead immunities, whether or not it is truly undead.

Against a helpless victim, like the moaning wounded left on a field, it does something far worse. It kneels and murmurs an endless litany of forbidden secrets into the victim's ear. No one has lived to repeat them. The whispering does no damage, but each round the victim loses 1 Wisdom and 1 Charisma as the soul gives up, unless a save vs. death magic succeeds, and the save must be repeated every round. The wraith continues until death takes the victim, rescuers drive it off, or dawn breaks. It has never been seen using this on anyone able to fight back and apparently cannot. A rescued victim recalls only fragments about duty, damnation and the certainty of the grave, yet must still make a madness check.

All ability points drained by war wraiths return at one point each per day.

Perhaps among the rarest horrors of the misty dread realm, war wraiths appear only after great battles, haunting fields where the wounded lie dying. Folk say they can walk only on ground still wet with war's blood. Sightings so far come from battlefields along the border between a domain of the walking dead and a militaristic neighbor, though legends in nearby lands tell of them roaming a scoured fey country after all life there was wiped out.

For every hundred killed in a slaughter, 1d6 war wraiths arise. They stay only until the last wounded have died or recovered and the last dead are buried; while any corpse lies exposed, they linger. They walk only from dusk to dawn and dissolve into the morning mist at cock's crow.

An unwilling code binds them. They may attack only the wounded, anyone who has wounded or slain someone since sunrise, or anyone who attacks them. Meeting someone outside those groups, a wraith puts on a menacing show to provoke an attack, and once the person swings at it, the whole pack descends.

No one knows their origin. People of the domain of the walking dead say they come from the gray land of the dead, readying for the day the dead reclaim their kingdom; most locals dismiss them as old soldiers' tales or exaggerated wisps, yet a saying has spread warning of shadowed corners where corpses outnumber living folk. Some compare them to doom-herald spirits: if those foretell disaster, these wraiths are the crows that come after. Others think they recruit for armies of the dead, or that they are the angry fallen of the militaristic domain pulling comrades and enemies down into death together. A lich-king's vampire secret police once whispered that war wraiths answer only to the mists themselves, for not even their master could command them.