What do these undead do to players instead of killing them
The main issue with the undead...
is that they are too dangerous. Yeah, the horror may be nice, but the loss of all progress isn't. Even if it isn't an end to the campaign, it is a major setback. Thus, I present to you:
d20 Things These Undead Do To Your Player's Characters After Defeating Them
- They capture them and tie them up. Then they carry them to their burrow, in order to sacrifice them to their primodial gods. If the players are quick (and have hidden knives prepared) an escape may be possible!
- They convert them into the same type of undead, which does not remove their mind. While it may change their allegiance, they remain themselves with their own equipment (and, in fact, gain some new allies).
- They steal one of the 7 parts of your soul. They take parts from each member of the party. These parts whose lack does not kill you outright. I'd recommend you get it back.
- The undead take a part of your body, in order to repair one of them with it. You can still feel it, sometimes.
- A ghost is placed in one of you, now posessing you sometimes, or haunting in other ways.
- You are transported into a deeper part of the dungeon, where a long dead necromancer has ordered them to bring any captured slaves. His skeletal remains have long since fallen apart.
- You are forced to fill out multiple forms from an obscure, otherwordly bureaucracy while stared at by the undead. The forms are about your past, including very awful and biting questions that suggest that they know much more about you than they should.
- The undead call up Death Herself (or at least one of them, or The Devil) to play a card/chess/dice game with you, for your soul. She plays fair, and will let you go if you win. She just needs a friend to play some games with, really.
- The undead take the characters to a religious service, where all the virtues and vices are inverted, and G_d is mocked.
- They infect you with infectious diseases, then set you free to go back to civilization so that you spread them.
- They tatoo blasphemous symbols on your forehead; symbols that ooze with black pus whenever you approach anything holy. The undead seem to ignore you now, until you attack them. You have been re-christened as one of them, after all.
- An undead kisses you, taking your breath. You grow cold and numb, but (nominally) alive.
- They rewire your nerves, so that you serve as livng antennae, marking the presence of living people for all undead in a wide range.
- The undead take you to their master, a Dread Necromancer who intends to have dinner with you, while gloating over you and telling you his evil plans. Do not show it that you have never heard of him before.
- They steal your faces, sending impostors in your clothes to take your places. In the meantime, they leave you alone. Maybe this is an opportunity for a new start?
- They bury you alive at a local cementery, in order to show you what they've had to go through. They laugh at you as you dig yourselves out.
- They take your eyes out, placing them in machines that show them images and subliminal messages, while dosing you with harsh chemicals. After they put them back in, the messages all sink into your mind. You can not be sure what is true and what is just what they want you to see now.
- They wound you and use you as bait to get more victims from the surrounding villages.
- They place a tiny undead creature inside your body, trying to pull you towards evil. It whispers things to you that you know are true, and yet try to avoid. It threathens to bite through your heart if you don't kill that person (it will not, it dies with you, but it can surely make you badly hurt, cutting at tendons and writing insults onto your bones).
- They make you swear oaths of loyalty, binding you into the service of their wicked masters.
For extra spice, roll once for each character.