Watchghost

Watchghosts, also called unsleeping guardians, look like lovely men and women who walk or float without a sound. Some limbs may keep their chalk-white flesh, but the torso and lower body are always bare skeleton, and the eyes are always dark, empty sockets.

These clever undead cannot be turned, thanks to the peculiar nature of their unlife. Their usual weapon is a chilling touch that deals 2d8 to living flesh. Once per round, up to 12 times a day, a watchghost can also point a finger and send a ray of cold light at one target up to 90 feet away. The ray strikes with THAC0 6 and pierces any magical protection or spell barrier below 4th level. Its target takes 2d12 energy-draining damage unless it saves vs. death magic, and a second save, vs. petrification, avoids being slowed for 2d12 rounds minus the victim's level; dispel magic or haste ends the slowing early.

Charm, sleep and hold spells fail against a watchghost, as do poison, petrification, polymorph, cold and death magic, and other spells must overcome its magic resistance. Neither holy symbols nor holy water affect it. At will it can make every magic item within 60 feet shine with a cold white light for 2d4 turns unless dispelled, which helps characters see but also draws wandering monsters.

A watchghost can turn wholly or partly insubstantial whenever it likes. In that state it deals no damage, ignores purely physical attacks and can fly, and a magic weapon passing through it inflicts only twice its bonus, so a dagger +2 and a long sword +2 each deal 4 points. It also glides through solid earth and stone without slowing, and may attack or defend in the round it enters or leaves. Many lurk inside tomb or dungeon walls with only eyes, nose and fingertips showing, then reach out to seize passersby, often catching them by surprise.

Powerful evil priests and wizards set watchghosts to guard tombs, vaults and other enclosed places, and they also serve mighty undead masters: liches, vampires and spectres. Usually alone, they gather in small groups when ordered to. They may trade sharp words but never willingly fight one another, and they cooperate flawlessly as guards. Keeping their intellect and judgment, they can follow detailed orders and hold real conversations with their masters, or with strangers if allowed. Their voices are those they had alive, with a faint hiss or whisper.

Only the destruction of its creator sets a watchghost free. Free ones are willful and unpredictable: some help the living, others hunt or mislead them, many scheme to manipulate the powerful and win what they missed in life, some watch over loved ones or befriend lonely wanderers, and some cling to old grudges.

Watchghosts eat nothing, never breed, and exist only to keep intruders out, killing monsters, adventurers and other living things that trespass. Even free ones barely touch their surroundings. A priest or necromancer can create and bind one with an 8th-level spell, much as one summons a crypt thing.

Stories of watchghosts spread across the northern lands. In one troubled dale, folk whisper that a former lord, and later agents of a ruined fortress-city and a wealthy merchant nation, were thwarted again and again by the Silent Watcher, a grim, bearded, thin man in archaic armor. He is said to be all that remains of a once-famous local adventurer who vanished some forty winters ago after falling for a mysterious dark beauty, perhaps a vampire.

Beneath the castle of a great coastal city, watchghosts that a long-dead ruler bound to watch its vaults and tombs now roam all the crypts and the secret passages believed to link the castle with the palace. Tavern gossip says they once woke a lord and his wife in time to escape assassins, and slaughtered guild thieves who had climbed up through the sewers to poison the wine cellars. A wandering bard of a secretive good-aligned network is said to be shadowed by her own unsleeping guardian, and she attacks anyone who sings, or even hums, the ballad written about it.