How do the undead actually work?
In the 3.5 edition Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook titled 'Libris Mortis: The book of Undead'
they do address this question, and I have explained it so many times, I came up with
a pretty good metaphor, so here goes.
Imagine a bath tub full of warm water, slowly cooling down, the water itself will be mostly
motionless unless it gets disturbed, say, you put your hand in it and swirl it around...
you have energy to do this because you eat plants and meat and make chemical reactions
to break down material and produce heat and such, I don't need to explain all that to
you, you know what being alive is like.
So, you are intaking stored energy and liberating it, it bleeds off into the background heat
of the bathwater and eventually if you go away again, the water becomes still and much
later, will go cold.. a very very long time later, the water will evaporate as well and
the bath will be dry and empty, but, before that, lets say someone pulls the plug out
of the bath and the water starts to drain out of it... this doesn't add to the heat
in the bath, its taking away both heat and the water itself, but it is also creating
motion and action in that water.
That... my friends, is negative energy.
In order to be an undead creature, a being needs to first have been alive, and now, it
needs to be some sort of a conduit, a drain pipe, that is consuming the energy of the
universe away.
In D&D we say this is the negative energy plane, but it could also be the very end of
time, where the universe has experienced what we call Heat Death, all the stars have burnt
out, they have drifted so far apart, even atoms are so few and far between that its
very rare for them to even encounter one another any more.. perhaps even they can wear out,
who knows, the important thing is, its a hungry, hungry void and every undead creature is a
drain pipe that connects that void to the material plane and all its light, heat and
life.
Negative energy can absolutely power motion and action, and it certainly can do it in
a reverse way, without needing food, sunlight, water, oxygen, it is just the direct action
of entropy.
Undead beings that drain vitality can't store it, if they need it, they need it constantly,
its the destruction of it that gives them their power.
Every undead creature drains away the life and heat and material of the D&D Multiverse
by its very existence, if they are not doing that, they are not actually undead, for example,
a deceased elf that is kept seemingly alive by the energy from powerful nature entities
is still draining that energy away, even if the motives are good, the consequence is still
inherently destructive.
There are a few ways the connection to the negative energy plane can be formed, it might
be a conduit left behind by a god-like Ygorl, who exists as a god who is moving backwards
through time somehow; It could be powerful magical artifacts that create disruptions
in space and time, it could be the natural consequence of cosmic physics, wormholes and
so on.
In Dungeons & Dragons, these conduits have been around for an extremely long time, perhaps
they have always been there from the very beginning.
I will now quote a small part of page seven from Libris Mortis.
"Evil acts can resonate in multiple dimensions, opening cracks in reality and letting the
blight creep in.
A sufficiently heinous act may attract the attention of malicious spirits, bodiless and
seeking to house themselves in flesh, especially recently vacated vessels.
Such spirits are often little more than nodes of unquenchable hunger, wishing only to feed.
These comprise many of the mindless undead.
Sometimes these evil influences also manage to reinvigorate the decaying memories of the
body’s former host.
Thus, some semblance of the original personality and memories remain, though the newly awakened
being is invariably twisted by the inhabiting spirit, resulting in an evil, twisted, and
intelligent creature.
However, this being is not truly inhabited by the spirit of the original creature, which
has left to seek its ultimate destiny in the Outer Planes.
This amalgamation is something entirely new.
Other times, atrocious deeds call dark, reanimating spirits into the fleshy form of the newly
deceased, leaving the original spirit intact.
This might happen if the person was already evil, or was tempted to evil in life.
" This is very much the case with the Mohrg,
the undead monster we are about to learn about today.
Hello by the way, my name is AJ Pickett, I make videos about Roleplaying games, thanks
for joining me, I hope you are enjoying yourself, plenty more to talk about today so grab yourself
a tasty beverage, we are about to get deeply nerdy.
Appearing in 3.5 editions core monster manual, the Mohrg is the result of a truly evil person
spontaneously rising from the grave to continue the sadistic murders they relentlessly performed
in life, only now, they do it to feed their continued existence.
Unlike some intelligent undead that merely use the remnants of a person after their soul
has departed their body, the Mohrg actually is the original soul of a person, willfully
residing in a horrific physical form.
I will be talking about their appearance, game statistics for 5th edition, the spontaneous
appearance of them and also, a way that they can be created with very powerful necromantic
magic.. also of interest because it demonstrates a way that the limitations on magic on the
world of Toril can be bypassed, essentially, a method to avoid the attention of the gods
and unleash despicable terror.
According to the FBI, a serial killer is someone who commits at least three murders over more
than a month with an emotional cooling-off period in between.
Their premeditated murders are driven by abnormal psychological gratification, this is not just
sexual gratification, it can also be motivated by anger, thrill-seeking, financial gain and
attention-seeking.
In the case of individuals who become Mohrgs, they may also be mass murderers or spree killers,
there is a lot of overlap between these classifications really.
What they typically are not, are contract killers, so for example, an individual who
seduces and marries a wealthy person, then murders them and takes all their money, moving
on to the next victim, is not a contract killer, the wealth is a motive, but so is the act
of murder itself.
In the case of a spree killer, there is just a lack of a cooling-off period between the
murders, their motivations are largely the same.
Now, I am not going to go into all the things that serial killers may do to their victims,
we get enough of those horror stories in the media as it is, so, all I need to tell you
is that the Mohrg is very likely, given the opportunity, to do those same things to the
victim if they can... if they can't, then the default killing method of the mohrg is
simply represented in the stat block for the monster in the game.
But oh my word can they be so, so much worse and please forgive me, but I am going to talk
about that in this video as well.
The revenant, the wight, the lich and the mohrg are all intelligent undead, they retain
their soul, the wight I think has the most similarity in game mechanics, the lich is
far more powerful because they are just pouring energy through them into the negative energy
plane, they are generators of a lot of negative power, the mohrg is somewhere between the
wight and the lich in its connection to the negative plane, this results in a really quite
revolting characteristic physical trait common to all mohrgs.
When such killers are brought to justice and publicly executed for their heinous crimes,
or they otherwise meet a grim end to their life, the body begins to decompose as per
usual, it might be almost completely rotted down to infested bones and scraps of flesh,
it may be a corpse that was found and dug up by a necromancer or fished out of a sewer
water-soaked ditch on the side of the road outside the city, the state of the body has
nothing to do with what happens next.
As the soul of the mohrg clings to the material plane, lingering near the corpse in the border
ethereal plane, fighting with every bit of its will to avoid the horrible fate the afterlife
has in store for it, some crack born of its atrocities in life exists within that corpse
and it latches on to it desperately, slowly it accumulates more and more negative power,
those pausing near the grave may be able to feel it, a coldness in the air, animals will
shy away from there, it has a disturbing vibe.
As the negative energy grows, it feeds what wizards call entropic animancy into the corpse,
the internal organs, the vicera, begins to slowly swell and takes on an unnatural vitality.
Although some mohrgs’ appearances may vary with respect to other details, nearly all
specimens can be described as humanoid skeletons with grotesque, purple loops of intestine
growing within their torsos and winding up and out of their mouths like twisting, clawed
tongues.
Occupying the space where the digestive system once resided, these innards occasionally writhe
and pulse with a hunger for nearby life, but otherwise serve no function.
A mohrg may look as though some oddly shaped purple creature has animated a skeleton as
a means of locomotion, but the mohrg’s limbs and organs are all integral to its unlife.
Mohrgs do not begin their undeath in the forms they come to possess.
At the time of its initial animation, a mohrg has whatever flesh remains on its corpse,
which continues to rot and disintegrate from its skeletal frame as time passes.
As negative energy suffuses the mohrg, its entrails (which regenerate if they’ve been
removed) become a bloated, purple mass, stretching up inside its body and extending out through
its jaw.
Over time, as the once-living flesh falls away, the mohrg is left as nothing but a skeleton
wrapped in twining and swollen purple tendrils.
This glistening flesh is as ravenously and endlessly hungry as the negative force which
animates it and any contact it makes with the body of a living creature will immediately
cause a shock of drained heat and vitality.
The Mohrg gains nothing from this draining, it merely flows through it and into the endless
void.
For the Mohrg, its existence is nothing but hunger for death and decay, it is only by
feeding the void within it that it maintains the flow of negative force which animates
and gives it the semblance of life, the longer it takes to kill something else, the longer
all it can feel is the hunger, for days, weeks, months, years, centuries, unless destroyed,
potentially, it is doomed to this torment forever, its only, brief reprieve is acts
of murder, were for a split second, the conduit within it is being fed.
Facing off against one of these things, its easy to mistake them for just another zombie
or skeleton, but they do move at 30 feet per round and there is clearly something absolutely
cranking these things, the 5th edition Mohrg is medium-sized with an armor class of 16,
totally immune to poison, exhaustion or being frightened, resistant to necrotic; bludgeoning,
piercing, and slashing from non-magical attacks that aren't silvered, 60 foot darkvision,
passive perception of 13 and having 14d8+28 or between 42 and 140 with an average of 91
hit points, they have a strength of 21, dexterity is 19, constitution is 14 and their mental
stats are the same as an average living person.
Let that 19 Dexterity sink in for a moment, this applies to the stealth checks, ranged
attack rolls and lock picking skills of the Mohrg, it retains most of its memories from
when it was alive, so its quite possible the Mohrg could have class levels as a rogue or
something else.
Imagine watching a group of zombies moving and then they stop, one of them steps forward,
bends down and easily disables a trap... that is fairly spooky.
They are +4 to active perception and +7 to stealth checks.
Mohrgs prefer the cover of darkness and making ambush attacks, they don't suffer any penalties
for being exposed to bright sunlight though.
In combat they attempt to ambush and lash out with their tongue, also slamming with
their fists and attempting to gran a victim.
The tongue is +6 to hit a single target within 5 feet of the Mohrg, inflicting 1d4+5 piercing
damage and the target must succeed on a DC 14 Constitution save throw or be paralyzed
for five rounds.
The victim can repeat the save at the end of each of it's turns.
On a successful save, the effect ends, but this does not convey any immunity to further
paralysis from this or any other Mohrg.
The mohrg also makes two slam attacks each round, +8 to hit one adjacent target which
will take 2d8 +5 bludgeoning damage plus an extra 2d8 necrotic damage.
The slam attacks can be against two different targets.
If the Mohrg manages to kill a humanoid, it's victim's body will rise as a zombie under
the control of the Mohrg within the next 24 hours and the Mohrg can control up to twelve
of these zombies at any one time.
Mohrg spawned zombies have the distinctive trait of being faster on foot than other zombies,
moving at 30 feet per round, rather than the usual 20 feet.
Mohrg are known to gather in groups of up to four, with a small force of zombies travelling
with them, they are clever, driven and extremely dangerous.
Unlike the soul of a Bodak, Mohrg can be returned to life using resurrection magic of sufficient
power, they remember what it was like to be alive and they want to live again, being undead
is a very, very unpleasant existence.
A mohrg can never feel breath in its lungs, it can never taste food or wine again, nor
can they ever sleep, their body feels barely any sensation and yet their soul feels terrible
pain, but it is not physical pain.
Because they retain their memory, they will most likely mimic the same sorts of patterns
of behaviour, particularly if they were serial killers in life, something that authorities
who had to catch and execute them will keep a wary lookout for if there was no means or
opportunity to ensure the corpse would not rise again, by use of sanctifying clerical
rituals and burial in holy ground.
Often simply dismembering or beheading the body will do just fine.
But it pays to be cautious.
Once a Mohrg is within hunting reach of a population, it will infiltrate, kill some
victims and then establish a grim little lair somewhere, then it will drag back victims,
turning them to zombies which the mohrg will order to go out and bring back more victims
to it's harvest.
A village whose people keep vanishing, only to reappear days later as mindless, walking
dead, can be a far more compelling setting for part of your campaign than a simple cave
filled with undead enemies.
Likewise, the killing off of the poor of a dock district or the sudden disappearance
of beggars from the street near a palace might indicate that a once-wealthy or noble mortal
has been transformed into a mohrg, and is cleaning his city of the two-legged vermin.
Whatever the case, it’s important to remember that mohrgs are smart, and should be played
accordingly in combat—they know when to stand their ground and when to run, and do
their best to strike when their enemies are weakest.
Mohrgs will literally pile zombies onto the player characters, they don't care about zombies
at all, they are just tools.
Zombies are completely mindless, if the Mohrg decides to terrorise a family by sending their
zombified children to stand outside their home, tearing each others skin and flesh off
until little but shambling skeletons remain, just to draw out the screaming parents...
that's exactly what they will do.
They are very, very evil.
In the Pathfinder RPG there are some variant Mohrgs that are modified based on the way
those evil killers were executed or the environment in which they died.
One of the worst is the Mohrg mother, a woman who died while pregnant and rose again, an
unborn, undead infant clings to the exposed entrails, for some reason, this empowers this
particularly rare abomination to transform one of its victims into another Mohrg instead
of into a simple zombie, which has the potential to turn into a complete nightmare if this
woman was a serial killer of other pregnant women while she was alive.
Frost Mohrgs die by freezing, desert Mohrgs die by exposure to arid conditions and extreme
heat, typically by being buried up to the neck in sand, they have an appearance that
reflects desiccation and heat or cold, the desert mohrg can raise its victims as burning
skeletons rather than zombies, the blackened, frostbitten Mohrgs inflict additional supernatural
cold with all their attacks but are otherwise normal.
Finally, the fleshwalker Mohrg is one who was killed via poison and had their body preserved
magically with a gentle repose spell, they rise again looking quite fresh, only up close
can you tell they are dead, as they don't breathe and smell a bit like rotting meat.
When they attack though, that revolting nightmare of a tongue disgorges out of their mouth,
revealing the truth of what they are.
It is noted that those who have studied the mohrg in some detail have seen that mohrg
can feel some sort of rush when one of their victims rises again as an undead monster,
the mohrgs speech quickens, it becomes recklessly aggressive, as though under the influence
of some sort of narcotic for a short while.
Now, it is technically possible to deliberately create a mohrg, aside from the methods of
execution that might just happen to spawn a mohrg anyway, the Create Undead spell can
accomplish it, however, its not possible to do this on the planet Toril, due to the limitations
on magic over level 9... but... there are many ways to momentarily step off the planet
for long enough to cast the spell somewhere else, be it a parallel dimension such as the
feywild or shadowfell, out in the orbit of wildspace, or through a planar portal linked
to another plane of existence.
There is nothing stopping a very powerful spell caster from using a legendary spell
over level 9 and some combination of portal magic to have it affect the planet Toril...
as much as that will undoubtedly royally piss off the goddess of magic, she probably won't
bother getting involved if the result is just the creation of a Mohrg, as horrible as that
is, its not as dramatic as causing a volcano to erupt in the middle of a city, even if,
eventually, the mohrg could kill just as many people.
Speaking of Toril, you can be unfortunate enough to encounter lone, wandering Mohrg
is the regions of Channath Vale, Dambrath and Veldorn, as well as almost anywhere in
the Underdark.
Thanks for joining me in this exploration of the vile Mohrg, I pity your players but
do tell them I say Hi. meanwhile, hit the like and subscribe and notification bell if
you like what I do, wear your geek with pride and I will be back with more for you, very
soon.