This a quick and dirty resource for fleshed-out undead without the typical undead cheesiness. each type comes with a sample GMC. It is aimed as a resource. I posted this to UAML and a few people liked it, so I did again here.
Deadful Things
When someone dies – and they must be DEAD first – they roll their Soul stat, but add one for every Hardened and Failed notch on the Madness Meter. If the roll is under their modified Soul stat the dead’s soul remains but in a permanent state of fugue and confusion. If the roll was under the sum of the dead’s modified Soul stat, the spook is able to adjust to its state and is now considered a thinking ghost. Of course many of the dead are unhinged by their existence and become narcissistic psychopaths with poor impulse control. Most of the dead retain any mental problems they had whilst alive. Many of the confused dead suffer from “black outs” and are unable to recall any memory from this missing time.
The Corporeal Dead
The demon needs learn a new Body skill: Animate Corpse, Lurchin’ Dead, or something similar. Depending on the stage of decomposition penalties can be accrued. The penalties are removed from the corpse’s Body and Speed stats. The ghost’s Mind and Soul scores are also affected as long as it is in its corpse. A soul is automatically allowed to animate its own body. A minor ritual could easily bind a demon to a corpse but if it does not have the Animate Dead Corpse skill, tough. Certain GMs may allow the ghost a Soul check, and if the check is successful – but above 30 – the zombie arises. Getting raised counts as a significant unnatural event.
Looking a little worse for wear: corpses have no Quality Control
Fresh (a few hours old) No penalties
Bloated, but intact (a few days old) All stats halved*
Stringy (a few weeks old) All stats quartered
Expired Shelf-life (A few months old) Unable to restart.
* Skills cannot exceed the stat ceiling.
Zombies have double the number of Wound Points and one-twentieth or 20% of its improved Wound Points is a new Body skill called Damage Tolerance (DT). The dead’s DT reduces any damage taken and shrugs off certain small amounts as inconsequential. DT may be improved with experience. The wounds never heal naturally, but zombies can take a great deal of punishment!
A body decomposes because of non-replenishing and thus dwindling energy to keep its systems up and running. By forcibly animating the corpse, the soul hands over a lot of free energy to keep the systems going. The soul cannot heal the rot, just try and stave it off. Every month roll a Body check or reduce all stats by one die throw. Eventually the retarded decay turns the muscles and tendons in ropes and the rest of the tissue becomes leathery. This is taken as part of the zombie’s improvement of Damage Tolerance, or whatever the GM calls it.
Example,
Eustace “Sticker Stacy” Godwin
Summary: Godwin was a terminal junkie. One bad shoot and years of the shit sandpapering his immune system made his body collapse into death. The problem was that Sticker Stacy needed heroin like no one else. When he was still studying at college under a scholarship when something terrible happened. Mind-wrenchingly terrible things started crawling out of the woodwork and assaulted his safe whitebread world-view. Godwin couldn’t handle the events and that no one believed him made it worse. Everyone dumped the responsibility on his lap. The police, the due process of the law, and even the psychologists veered whatever came out of his mouth and harpooned him. All these people, even the flaky New Agers gave him the look and walked away. Godwin served time for something that gave him headaches and unremembered nightmares in the early hours.
He knows his girlfriend and roommate are dead and in a permanent coma, respectively, he has no clue to what happened. Even descriptions read out in court became blurry and vague.
Whilst in prison some Hispanics bailed his arse from a beating. He was a smart and lonely white boy. They took him in and he joined up with their crew. He handled all their trade, creating an exchange rate per item that fluctuated daily. He started writing a dissertation on the economic variance with closed-system economic dynamics. But as the time passed the nightmares got worse, fingering their way into his daydreams. Godwin was a made-man in the prison. He was a fair trade and fucked none over. But his memories where crawling out of some wound in his head and they were sniffing for blood.
One of the gang members gave him a shoot and all the nightmares and headaches blizzarded away into the white-hot static that was junk. Godwin became hooked on the oblivion. His ex-paramedic cellmate administered the nightly spikes. Godwin was a resource to be protected in the prison.
Once his five years where spent, Godwin left to rejoin the world that didn’t care what he was like inside the joint.
He did a bit of work for the local connected-boys, but he was merely another addicted gimp. After a year they cut him off. He substituted his need for crash by small time cons and few vehicle hijackings. He kept himself pretty well on the dragon, saving his money, bunking in condemned buildings, then spending his money on the best he could buy. Godwin became reckless during this time, his body’s tolerance demanding bigger and bigger hits meant the quality went worse. Three years after leaving prison, Sticker Stacy died and his junkie friends stripped him as far as they wanted to.
Four hours after dying, Stacy “woke up” needing a fix and so went off to buy.
Stacy has been dead for seventeen months now and even his old connections avoid him as much as possible, but he always finds the score; sniffing them out like a bloodhound. Some of them just give the shit to get rid of him. After a pusher blabbed to an enforcer about this fucked-up, spooky motherfucker, the enforcer went to kill him. When Eustace came for his fix the enforcer popped a nine-mil into his gut, but Stacy got back up and demanded his heroin. The enforcer started kicking him a couple of times; fifty to sixty solid bone-breaking boots. And Stacy just got up and beat the shit out of the enforcer. He didn’t do karate, just landed a punch occasionally and the unhurtable Eustace eventually slapped the enforcer down.
Suddenly the dealer heard something like the hiss of an oncoming train and Things started rising up and moving, dead gangsters and junkies and other things started loitering, eyeing the scenes. A few of them started creeping forward and they didn’t like human, kind of spidery sketches of arms, heads, legs and torsos, acting like hungry street dogs.
Seeing all this Satan’s Legion shit, the dealer panicked and decided to run but not before Stacy grabbed him and took all his stash. Stacy piled the smack into his syringe and after muddying it up with tap water, squirted the toothpaste into his arms. The figures wandered away after that. The dealer left town and the enforcer changed his name and took to tarot cards, wind chimes, chicken-blood graffiti and performing solitaire seances on home made ouija boards.
Personality: Godwin’s identity is so corroded he doesn’t respond to his name half the time and the other half of the time he’ll answer to a wolf-whistle. Not even burned-out, his obsession, when he needs money drives Stacy’s scorched psyche,
Obsession: Stopping the memories is Stacy’s priority, heroin is Stacy’s only vehicle to slow those dark dreams that snuffle up to the dim light of his consciousness. His habit of shooting up is purely reflex, but still as real as any living addiction. Godwin can “sniff out” the closest source of heroin in the vicinty. This has made him something of a bogeyman in the criminal community. If Godwin doesn’t get the junk his Unnatural event starts happening: the dead memories from his head start getting frisky and real.
Rage Stimulus: Getting stiffed from a dealer.
Fear Stimulus: his headaches and waking nightmares. Stacy needs to shoot up to still the crawling shadows and bad-telephone voices.
Noble Stimulus: Someone as obliterated and self-serving as Stacy has no good side to his wasted soul. He might be thankful for a free score, but half an hour later he has forgotten all generosity.
Wound Points: 80, Damage Tolerance: 16
Body: 40 (Broken by habit)
Skills: Fight Dirty 55%, General Athletics 10%, Damage Tolerance 8%
Speed: 37 (Shaky with permanent nerve damage)
Skills: Drive Stolen Vehicle 70%, Dodge 25%, Initiative 15%
Mind: 25 (Scorched)
Skills: Prison Education 60%, Criminal Trades 50%
Soul: 45 (Withered)
Skills: Sniff out nearest heroin 90%, Ultimate Poker Face 100%
Madness Meter
Violence 3 failed, 3 hardened
Unnatural 5 failed, 1 hardened
Helplessness 5 failed, 2 hardened
Isolation 0 failed, 3 hardened
Self 5 failed, 7 hardened
The Bodiless and revenants
Since demons don’t have a Body score they have to substitute one. By manipulation they can impose themselves onto the material world.
Most ghosts are bodiless and hungry for substance and sensasation. The astral plane is a hollow and still place and the dead are tormented by their memories to such an extent that they build unhealthy desires about what they cannot possess. The tickle of a drop of water running down skin becomes the sweetest nectar. They hover about this dry and listless existance until they pick up a voice and they close in like sharks for blood.
Sometimes the nearly departed do no wake up on the astral plane – they end up landlocked between the two, not quite there and not quite here.
There it is wandering around, a cohesive collection of memories holding its form together. The dead can try and manipulate its form into ectoplasmic substance. Certain sorcerers call this mollitium.
A ghost can exercise a special Body skill: Materialization. Sometimes this materialization affects one sense as the living sense its presence and its location, the signal from their overly-atrophied third eye is so denuded that their imaginations dress the spirit up in easily identified metaphor. But the ghost finds the stronger its spirit is the easier it is to manipulate the physical world. The ghost drifts in an everpresent psychic undertow, a gentle tugging from the astral plane.
The measure of physical effect the ghost can have on the material is based on Materialization; the ghost’s Body score is equal to the sum of their Materialization score. Basically the ghost is a body-shaped telekinetic field. With this telekinetic field, the ghost can lift, manipulate and affect material objects. Certain old and powerful ghosts pick up pieces of dust and shit and blood and form “golem-like” solid bodies with proper Body stats. It is rumoured that certain of these old ghosts have three to four of these “suits” that they can choose from to wear.
Unfortunately ghosts are partly physical and partly spiritual, trapped like a fly in water, the surface tension holding it up, but the cool depths underneath try to suck it under. Ghosts have learned to swim and can duck and dive under the surface or skim the top.
A character with Aura Sight or similar skill can perceive the ghost on the physical plane. Although the spirit is astral it exists in the material; it is subject to matter.
Aura Sight
00% – 25% Nothing there.
26% – 50% vague, sketchy shadow
51% – 75% Breezy-voiced and blurred human figure
76% + In all-senses affecting glory. Treat as a normal person. Unclothed, though.
When the person dies roll a Soul check, if it is successful use its roll as the skill, if it fails its skill is the sum of the two dice. This skill can only be increased by further Madness notches and not by spending experience points. Every notch gained in the Madness Meter will add one percent onto the ghost’s materialization.
Interaction within the Living is difficult. The Quick and the Dead instinctively avoid each other. If there is a person in reasonably close proximity, such as in the same room, reduces the ghost’s effectiveness. This is fustrating for the dead and spooky for the Living. Liver is a spook word for the living.
Environment Modifier to skills
Unaware liver in the vicinty -10%
Aware liver in the vicinty -20%
A group of aware or unaware livers in the vicinty -30%
A liver with Aura Sight in the vicinity +Aura Sight Skill
The ghost’s materalization is penalized and so is any chance of it retaining hold. If the ghost also rolls under the penalty it is also affected.
Exempli Gratia
NB: Eulegy Barnabus is from the campaign “Let’s Go Kill Ulrich Steranko!”
A demon, Eulegy Barnabus, has discovered a perfect afterlife in the world of the living.
After sating his physical lusts he thought about becoming a player and carving a niche for himself. He posited the dilemma of not having a corpse to tug around, at least for long enough to get settled and useful enough to avoid those with the ability to put him down.
He wandered around until he found Emile Cloots, an unwashed and tripping hippy trying to connect with Mother Earth in a park around midnight. Eulegy rode that hippy into the dirt and when the body, collapsing with exhaustion, finally dragged itself to its gunga din, he shaved off Cloots’ soul like he did the dreadlocks shortly afterwards. Using the Cloots’ broken collection of memories, he continued dealing dope to save some funds and get clean. After three years of getting out of tight scrapes and overnighters in holding cells, Cloots left town and was never seen again.
He changed Cloots name to Eulegy Barnabus and went straight; the hippy got a job. Barnabus found he thrived in the corporate environment, his already-dead attitude gave him a vantage the mundanes couldn’t appreciate.
Barnabus found that he retained a number of Cloots’ old hard-wired habits; a taste for soft drugs was one and so was an aversion to personal violence and sometimes when the body was nearing sleep, old Cloots’ mannerisms and word choice came out. Barnabus taught himself a few demon-tricks, such as leaving his stolen body and flicking himself back. He taught his corpse to move through its learned routine and it made an excellent receptionist and clerk. He eventually allowed it to go shopping, or play a game of pool or rent videos. And even in its robotic go-through-the-routines, it actually passed for a boring and burnt-out mortal. Just like when it was tired, Cloots’ mindset tended to annoyingly reassert itself. After a while in the driver’s seat, the Cloot would start changing voice patterns, facial muscle structure, and once, Barnabus swears, eye-colour.
Barnabus vultured around New Age book stores and Occult-Lite circles, planting seeds that he was a powerful medium. His plan worked. He voiced dangers that lured bored occult thrill-seekers.
Sitting around a ouija board and going into “trance” and then he left his body and pretended to be his own American Indian spirit guide, Red Tears. He would drift around and probe the room for the weakest and least-defended psyche. Slowly Barnabus would allow “Red Tears” to ride him. Then one of the gullible members eventually would be volunteered by his or her peers and “channel” Red Tears.
Over a year Barnabus has honed his invasive possession to a dangerous psychic martial artform.
After a modest salary and spartan living and smart investing, his floating ideas where sewn together, Barnabus left to work for himself or rather him/herselves. Barnabus had a modest collection of personnel. All five of them moved into a loft-apartment commune and pooled their earnings.
Barnabus let most of the personnel go about their jobs, only cleaning their easily addled minds which they needed frequently.
Barnabus’ collection of bodies were seen as a growing cult and attracted attention from strange sorts. Barnabus made his mark. He noticed the attention of a stupid young gun. Some of those strange sorts were watching this young gun. Apparently he suddenly dropped out of sight. Barnabus tracked them down and left an offer and an e-mail address.
A few days later he sent a reply. One thousand dollars, half now and half after, to be left in empty video boxes left at a drop off. They asked him to bring in a supposed shady suspect. He received the details and went off.
The first “repossession” was difficult, but three days later the mark strolled in to the agreed holding place. They had set up the mark to kill Barnabus. Barnabus told them through the mark to owe up the remaining money. They did. And a month later another cash-filled videocassette box was dropped off.
Thus started Barnabus’ new carreer. His personnel handle the minimal paperwork when at the loft.
Eulegy Barnabus, Demonic Repossessor
Personality: Virgo
Obsession: Holding onto your life. Keep being grounded by tending your vehicles. One slip up and you become the feral and howling impotent banshee you once were. Essentially a smooth thinking fleshy-junky.
Passions
Rage Stimulus: The potential ease of losing your integrity is what keeps you fustratedly pissed off in the small hours.
Fear Stimulus: Drowning and smothering make you piss your pants with ectoplasm to such a degree that you won’t even sit in a body while it takes a bath or swim.
Noble Stimulus: You have taken on a protective attitude to your personnel. You catch yourself making a fuss over them sometimes – like they were children not merely the vehicles you think they are.
Wound Points –
Body –
Speed 55 (Accurate)
Mind 60 (Deductive)
Soul 65 (Snake)
Body
Get Back Up
Barnabus uses the current host’s Body stat and associated skills.
Speed Skills
Elastic Astral Cord Sling Shot 60%
If Barnabus needs to jump bodies in a hurry he can roll E.A.C.S.S. If the roll is successful he jumps immediately and can still roll initiative for the new host body in the same round if not he needs a round to adjust to his new vehicle.
Barnabus assumes the host body’s Speed stat and associated skills.
Mind Skills
Ungeneral Education 40%,
Ungeneral Education includes knowledge of astral fauna Barnabus has dubbed Chakravores, psychopathological disorders including schizophrenia and DID/MPD, and a slew of ghost stories.
Notice 45%
Program Autoroutine Existence 47%
This allows Barnabus to set up his personnel a fake Soul stat equal to the sum of his Program Autoroutine Existence roll. It also allows him give commands to his already running host bodies.
Pillage Memories 61%
Barnabus can plumb his host body for privy information by rolling Pillage. He can try and use the host’s Mind skills but fails if he rolls under 30.
Soul Skills
Charm 32%
Lie 58%
Psychic Television Monitoring 59%
Psychic Television Monitoring allows Barnabus to instantly gather any recent short-term memories and current running viewings from a host. Although he has to roll Elastic Astral Cord Sling Shot to “tune in” he does not have leave his current host body.
Kwei Fu 42%
When Barnabus wants in he does not try to possess he uses his spook karate. When he rolls Kwei Fu he does hand-to-hand damage that is taken off the victims Soul stat. Although not immediately dangerous, enough blows will eventually tear away someone’s soul to spiritual ribbons. The reduced Soul stat is the current one the victim uses, although it does not lower any skills.
Aura Sight 90%
Au Naturale Camoflauge 3%
Barnabus has discovered that sometimes he can alter facial muscle tone, voice patterns, and even eye-colour if he concentrates long enough.
Madness Meter
Barnabus takes on the host’s notches in the madness guages as unwanted baggage, But whatever the notches are they will at least have two failed notches in Violence and Helplessness.
Barnabus has very sketchy memories of what his life was like and seeing those flashes-of-memories makes him happy that they are sketchy. But whatever forgotten trauma there is Barnabus has pieced together that his death was not pleasant and involves his Fear stimulus…
Barnabus is scrounging information on ghosts. He is keen on how the other dead folk are able to materialize.for long periods and not just in happenstance split-second occasions.