Aetrimonde

Today in my October series on Aetrimonde’s creepiest undead, I’m talking wights!

Aetrimonde’s wights share an origin: they are created undead, given necromantic magic by the necromancers who animated them. The extra care, effort, and embalming fluid that go into creating a wight means that they are more of a threat than a mere zombie. There are several common varieties, animated for different purposes, and we’ll be looking at three of them today.

Barrow Wight

Barrow wights are undead guards buried in the barrow mounds of ancient kings from Aetrimonde’s more primitive days. Barrow wights first entered the popular consciousness via the Lord of the Rings, where they were the bodies of ancient kings animated by evil spirits, and possessed of a fell, icy grip.¹

Aetrimonde’s wights are not the product of evil spirits, but they certainly have the fell grip. With Dragging Grasp, they can grab an enemy and drag them into the open, and with Shoulder Charge, they can grab an enemy and knock them prone. The real danger of their grip comes from Draining Grasp: once in their grip, PCs will be weakened (dealing half damage) and take entropic damage every turn they remain grabbed. If a PC gets grabbed, they and their allies will want to somehow break the grab quickly.

Barrow Wights don’t have nearly the HP of zombies, but they also don’t have the weaknesses. They have decent defenses and some armor resistance (which is what makes them Soldiers), and, thanks to Dead Flesh, they can’t easily be brought down by fireballs and lightning bolts. To fight a Barrow Wight, some PC will almost certainly have to get up close and personal with them.

Murder Wight

Rather than guardians, murder wights are animated to serve as a necromancer’s elite killers. Able to blend in among the living by flensing fresh corpses, murder wights get close to their targets before knifing them and giving them a wound that will not heal.

The Assassin role, as a reminder, is for enemies that can deal high damage, with the proper setup. A Murder Wight is a twist on this formula: it does need setup to be most effective, but it’s easy setup: they need their foe to be flatfooted so that they can use Entropic Stab. Once they hit with Entropic Stab, though…their best move is to run away, because the repeated entropic damage offers no way to end it other than killing the Murder Wight or getting far away from it. A Murder Wight that can break line of sight and hide, or run through a door and lock it behind it, forces PCs to hunt it down before the entropic damage brings down their ally.

Apostle Wight

An apostle wight is that rarest of things, an undead creature that can create more of its kind. They are animated by skilled, powerful necromancers with a horde large enough that they need lieutenants to manage it.

Apostle Wights are Protectors, designed to make other enemies harder to kill. They accomplish this in a couple of ways:

• Aura of Undeath removes other undead creatures’ vulnerabilities (like wraiths’ and vampires’ vulnerability to radiant damage), and grants them immunity to entropic damage. Worse, it allows them to heal (or at least, gain temporary hit points) from taking the entropic damage they are immune to.
• And the Apostle Wight has multiple ways to deal entropic damage that will heal their undead allies. Death Toll and Withering Shroud² both deal entropic damage in an area of effect, allowing the Apostle Wight to both attack the PCs and heal allies in one turn. Better yet, Withering Shroud is a concentration power, allowing the Apostle Wight to start it up and then combine it with Death Toll on later turns.

Apostle Wights are Summoners as well, able to animate dead humanoids as Zombie Walker mooks. In a battle with only the PCs present, this is not the worst thing to deal with…but in a fight with civilians around, who can’t survive nearly as much punishment as PCs, it puts a great deal of pressure on the PCs to avoid collateral damage.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrow-wight ↩︎
2. Both of these powers, incidentally, are Arcane powers available to PCs. Entropomancy is not the same thing as necromancy, but necromancers who did not first practice entropomancy are few and far between. ↩︎