 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy and there's nothing like raising a child from the dead after they were murdered by goblins and now you're leading an army of shambling zombies against the creatures hoping against hope that they don't have any plans on their lawn. You know, one of those days. Today I'm going to be talking about the undead as a concept, the types of undead, how undead are normally created, and I'll be giving you tips to survive your first night against the living dead. So if you're not into the idea of an ensemble group of six mass-squaring rappers then feel free to play your undead however you want. But wait my friends, I bring warning of ill tidings ascending upwards down the ladder of time. The end of the line for the Kickstarter of Stibble's Codex of Companions is upon us. By 5pm today you will no longer be able to access this incredible book wherein you may find true platonic love in the form of dozens upon dozens of new companions for you to live out the end of days with. After all, mushrooms don't get corona. And even better, if you buy now you will unlock a wave of new spells, feats and companion loyalty mechanics that will keep you battling the forces of evil with your friends at your side. And even better than that, Stibble's Codex comes with its own personality table so that you can craft the perfect conversation partner for all those days that you spend in quarantine after the slow collapse of society. So check out the Kickstarter for Stibble's Codex of Companions, link below. Before it's too late for you and your family because the Kickstarter will end. Stibble's Codex of Companions. Order now while supplies last. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So Undead is a term that encapsulates any being that has managed to cheat death in some way, body or soul, and now roams the earth as an unholy creature that wants nothing more than to haunt cemeteries and scare people who actually buy into ghost hunters. They fall under the purview of Orcus, the demon king of Undead, and not Orcs. And necromancers that seek to make living raiding villages with meat puppets often pay reverence to the demon king as a sign of respect. Now since there's no sourcebook to tell me that I'm wrong, when I talk about the types of Undead, I like to split Undead into my own Davy brand of three categories, mind, body, and spirit. To work backwards, spiritual and dead are souls without a body. Body undead have no souls, and mind type Undead have some aspect of both. Spirits are the easiest to quantify, with ghosts, banshee, specters, and wraiths, and other synonyms for those souls that float the earth once more being the most common of the bunch. A spirit manifests in the material plane most often due to a sense of either intense anger that it clings onto and refuses to let go because it has some hugely unfulfilled purpose that plagued its life and they managed never to complete, like 100%ing the binding of Isaac, or because a necromancer summoned it here. In any case, spirits are often times the most available type of Undead to talk to, though the constant wailing of agony and sadness makes them poor conversationalists. When you can manage to get a conversation out of Casper, you'll more often than not run into a puzzle-solving situation where the ghost is super powerful or just really hard to kill for physical or situational reasons, but like that one friend of yours that constantly has problems and tries to make it your problem, they'll be more than willing to divulge that extra baggage that has been keeping them ghosting you and your friends. That being said, spirits aren't always friendly, so be sure to bring magical weapons along, or else you'll be at a huge disadvantage when you try to crack a ghost upside the head with a stick, only to find out that, lo and behold, it's a ghost, dumbass. If you want Undead that are easier to hit, but not necessarily easy to kill, then you'll want to specialize in hunting down bodies with no souls, untalking zombies, ghouls, skeletons, anything you would find in a cheap ass haunted house is what you're gonna find in this category of dead alive folk. Body undead are the exact opposite of spirit undead, because unlike spirits, there's no reasoning with zombies. They aren't people anymore, and they may never have really been people, they're just walking husks of flesh and vitamin bone that have gained animation and want to get a nice little taste of your delicious personality. Granted, not all of them want to eat you, but they all usually really really want to kill you, and that's dictated by the source of their existence, the necromancer that brought them there. See, necromancy is a tough gig, magic is difficult, nobody appreciates it, and you'll lose all your friends and family because you brought home a reanimated corpse of your ex one time. So what's a guy to do but make new friends and dead bodies? That's free real estate. This is why godly churches are so prevalent and important in the world of D&D. Usually, when a person dies, their body is sent to the priest who performs a sanctifying ritual on them so they can't be raised up as an undead at any point in time. But if the priest is lazy, or the body is never sent to be sanctified in the first place, then that's where the classic image of zombies bursting out of cemeteries becomes reality. Now there are places and cultures where body necromancy isn't seen as such an evil thing, such as a village where the villagers make it clear while they're alive that their body is okay to be used in defense of their homeland after they're gone, and it's sometimes seen as a great honor to be the one bringing further glory to a person who's died in the past. So if you cut the head off of a walker and then hear someone in the distance yell, Uncle Jimmy, you should probably get out of there quickly. Lastly, the third type of undead manage to combine both their body and soul to maintain some semblance of existence and keep a hold over their mind, at least in the sense that they manage to be a thinking thing. Mind undead include vampires and liches that have lost their mortal lives but continue on anyways, flame skulls which remember their times as wizards all too fondly while still being completely batshit insane, and even vampire fog, which despite being more of an animalistic vapor of veins and creepiness still technically qualifies as a thinking thing. Thanks, Dakar. The major problem with mindful undead is that while it's true that most of them can still be considered the same person that they were in life, the nature of undead magic is all too commonly known to twist the mind and transform good and neutral people into beings of evil. What's worse is that they're not just evil, they're smart evil, which makes them so powerful that mere stories about them can singlehandedly raise the entire public perception of pre-written campaigns from the dredges of mediocrity. It is for this reason that mindful undead are too dangerous to be kept alive, for their state of undead comes with the benefit of time, and that time is spent learning more about the world, becoming more wise, and finding new tricks to keep the fleshies at bay. However, their stolen time is also often their biggest weakness, as a long-lived undead is prone to hubris, vainly believing that since it's survived for this long, clearly it is too great and powerful to be destroyed, and mortals that try are insignificant next to the might of the undead. Those are the things that make up a mindful undead, intelligence led by hubris. Now, onto fighting undead, for you would-be ghostlayers out there. It's a doozy. As a player, undead have some of the cheapest and cruel abilities that really don't match up with their CR when you think about it, like the banshees make a saving throw, or you bleed out type thing, or the zombies, as long as I roll okay on my best stat, I'll never die, bucko, or the menagerie of enemies that have stat-sucking powers, paralyzation abilities, instant death mechanics, and the laundry list of undead beasties that take little to no damage from the average moop with a great sword. Oh, and my favorite of I'm really weak against one type of attack, so let me just get shonky thick to make up for it. Good luck finding my weak spot. Because of this, you really, really need to know what you're fighting if you want to stand any chance against the undead, or you just need to be a spellcaster that has magical powers and ignores most problems because magic is dumb. Basically, prepare, prepare, prepare. Never go into an obviously undead area without knowing what the hell you're about to dig up, because the undead are some gimmicky assholes. When in doubt, clerics and paladins obviously have some pre-built tools that can keep the party protected, but that isn't something you should just rely on. It's reliable against body undead because most of them are stupid, but both mind and spirit undead know enough to stay away from clergymen, and if you're unlucky, they've found a way to get around them. And if you don't have a magical weapon, you'd better at least carry around flasks of holy water to either coat your weapon in, or to just straight up splash the ghoulies, and then beat that wet ghoulie until it breaks. As a last resort, your final defense against the forces of undead is to just run. Run away. Like as fast as you can. Spirits tend not to go past a certain area, bodies are usually tethered to their master, or they're just slow on their own, and minds might get a kick out of it and decide to leave you alone because you're funny. Yeah, it's not a fun strategy, I know, but undead are tough, and it's better that you leave when you realize you can't help anything than stick around, get killed, and end up as just another mind, body, and spirit to fill up the ranks of the hateful dead. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to check out my social media in the description below. Remember to aim for the head, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can afford a swimming pool filled with holy water because I like swimming, but I do not like vampires. But yeah, Davi out.