Weeping Willow

A weeping willow is a rare, tragic incorporeal undead haunting nowhere but the bayou domain's swamps. It arises solely when an expectant mother perishes on the zombie lord's swamp estate and her corpse ends up lying by a willow. Her spirit is anchored to that tree, which limits where she can go, but her unholy bond with the living swamp grants her fearsome powers.

The few adventurers who meet one usually take her for a common ghost, a nature spirit or even a dryad. Materialized, she is a lovely phantom hovering just above the ground. Faint leaf-shaped shadows mark her pale, glowing skin, tiny yellow flowers dot her Spanish-moss hair, and a gauzy green gown drifts around her as though stirred by unseen breezes. Death makes even a plain woman striking, but her face is twisted with anguish and endless tears that run like sticky sap, and her sobbing carries across the bayou. At rest she is only the dim outline of a graceful woman in the willow's bark, unable to move or use any power, sap still trickling from where her eyes would be.

She can materialize or fade back into the tree at will, but each takes a full round during which she is open to attack and can do nothing else. While she is out, her shape vanishes from the bark, and she is tethered within thirty feet of the trunk.

Her sobbing reaches 100 yards. Anyone hearing it must save vs. spell or be overcome by her sorrow and walk toward the tree at normal pace, fighting off anyone who tries to hold them back; a successful save protects until the next encounter with her. She greets visitors, lured or not, between sobs, begging for news of her child. The question is mostly a pretext for searching their memories: honest denials deepen her grief, invented news delights her, and all the while she drifts closer. When someone is within reach, she embraces them in feigned joy or need for comfort.

Hidden in an innocent gesture such as a hug, her memory drain needs no attack roll. The victim loses 1d10 x 10 weeks of memory, counting back from the moment of contact. A successful save vs. spell makes the loss temporary, with full recovery in 3d10 days; otherwise only powerful magic or psychic surgery can restore it. The DM should roll the save in secret and tell the player privately. Victims stand dazed for a moment or two, unsure what happened, which may let her drain others before the group catches on. She avoids drawn-out fights; if attacked, she fades into her tree and waits for her attackers to leave.

Destroying the host tree is the obvious way to end her, but it is perilous. She takes no damage from harm to the tree, yet any injury to it drives her into a murderous frenzy: she materializes at once and attacks those responsible, using her cause wounds power only then. In frenzy her touch deals 1d8, and she gains +4 to hit but suffers -4 to Armor Class. Anyone she kills rises as an ordinary ghost, never anchored to her tree.

She can be harmed only while materialized and only by +2 or better weapons, and she has AC 4 if fought on the Ethereal Plane. Like all undead she ignores charm, hold, sleep, death magic and all spells that affect the mind or life force, as well as disease, poison, suffocation and paralysis. Holy water deals 1d6. She is turned as a ghost, but success only sends her back into her tree, unable to materialize again for 1d4 turns.

Her only goal is finding her child. She believes she is alive, that she gave birth, and that the baby was somehow lost, and she weaves detailed fantasies about it, with a name, looks and personality. She lures people only to learn whether they know anything of it.

Beyond her tree she has little to do with her surroundings. Treasure near the trunk is mostly the gear of past victims, armor, weapons and equipment, which the swamp soon ruins. The bayou domain's zombie lord recently learned of these spirits and, true to form, found a use for them: by disposing of pregnant women beneath willows on his estate, he creates them deliberately. He cannot command them, but since they ignore the undead, they make useful and amusing sentries against the living.