Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
I gotta say, I really like that Kobold Press is asking themselves "why" on these legacy monsters, something that TSR never seemed to do when creating a monster for every name they could extract from the thesaurus or other sources.
For the wight, here's the why:
Life drain attacks maximum HP, which victims recover after a long rest. Easy to adjudicate, but a big problem in a fight, since one simply can't heal themselves out of danger.
For the wight, here's the why:
That's great! Even a wight on its own now at least has a place in a setting -- they're former lieutenants created by a necromancer or other powerful undead. Left alone, they'll likely eventually acquire a small band of mindless undead and are likely to then use them to cause bigger trouble later on. Once player characters know about a wight, they should feel the pressure to do something about it, before it becomes a bigger problem. Fantastic -- it's a monster that creates its own adventures by merely existing. Their undead lieutenant stuff manifests in play through bonus actions to command up to five skeletons or zombies.Kobold Press said:Today’s example creature is the wight, a deathly lieutenant of undead armies. When approaching the wight, one of the questions we wanted to answer was, “for what purpose do they create zombies?”
Our answer was to give the wight a bigger role in the grand scheme of necromancers and greater undead like vampires and liches. The trouble with undead armies is they are filled with many mindless undead, which eventually get to be too much for one necromancer or lich to micromanage. Enter the wight! Undead warriors who retain much of the martial prowess they had in life, the wight is a perfect lieutenant for commanding units of skeletons and zombies. The wight can command skeletons and zombies on its turn, and it can create more zombies to fight alongside it. These changes make the wight a challenge on its own for equal-level PCs and a threat to watch for higher-level PCs facing a horde of undead.
Life drain attacks maximum HP, which victims recover after a long rest. Easy to adjudicate, but a big problem in a fight, since one simply can't heal themselves out of danger.
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