Hello all! I present for your consideration a new undead PC race that I hope manages to balance once being alive and now being dead with it's various traits. I don't yet have any ideas for Afterwalker racial feats, so if you come up with anything, please feel free to contribute!
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Afterwalker
I don’t know why I was called back, of all people… But maybe THIS time I can make a difference…
Racial Traits
Average Height: As When Alive
Average Weight: As When Alive
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Ability Scores: +2 Con, +2 Int
Size: Medium (Treated as Medium even if origin race was differently sized)
Speed: 6 squares
Vision: Low-Light
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Languages: Common, choice of two others
Skill Bonuses: +2 History, +2 Endurance
Once-Beating Heart: Choose a race other than Afterwalker. You can take feats that have either Afterwalker or the chosen race as a prerequisite as long as you meet any other requirements.
Undead: You are considered undead for effects that relate to that keyword. You are NOT considered alive. You also have the following features:
-You do not have to eat, breathe, drink or sleep, this does not prevent you from suffering any Effects. You never need to make checks to resist starvation, thirst or suffocation.
-You have a +5 bonus to saving throws against poison effects and +5 to rolls against disease.
-You must still rest 4 hours to gain the benefits of an extended rest. During this time you must remain inactive but you are fully aware of your surroundings and notice events as normal.
Never Sleep Again: As long as you are bloodied you gain a +1 to all defenses.
Still Walking: You have the Still Walking power.
Still Walking
Afterwalker Racial Power
You died once. Your enemy will soon see that a second death is not forthcoming.
Encounter ✦ Healing
Immediate Interrupt
Personal
Trigger: An attack or effect reduces you to 0 hit points or below.
Effect: Spend a healing surge but do not regain hit points from it. You do not fall unconscious and retain 1 hit point regardless of the damage you took from the triggering effect.
Walking the earth after their initial death, the Afterwalkers resilient, adaptable nature means they can fit in almost anywhere, if they can convince people to have them. Though unobtrusive and generally amiable, there is a strong stigma against the undead that permeates living society, a society the Afterwalkers must navigate.
Play an Afterwalker if you want…
• To be resilient and steadfast with the knowledge of multiple lifetimes.
• To belong to a race finding its place in a world that may not trust them.
• To play a member of a race that favors the Wizard, Warlock or Swordmage.
Physical Qualities:
Afterwalkers may look much like they did when alive, but the marks of death are obvious upon them. The energy that animates them stays the hand of decay and rot as well as the unpleasant side effects of such a state, including the smell, but they retain the cosmetic effects of any damage their body took when dead as well as the marks of the death that killed them. Those that starved may appear gaunt, those that were strangled must unlive with an eternally bruised throat, those that drowned may be pale blue or somewhat bloated. Their eyes almost always become black, white, orange, yellow or red orbs that luminesce softly.
Afterwalkers find, oddly, that after they've taken their Second Chance they lose some of what made them what they used to be, but not all. They all tend to even out as far as physical ability goes. Some races like Elves find themselves moving slower but becoming tougher, Small races find that their strength and agility have evened out and they are just as capable as their larger counterparts. These ideosyncracies have come together to help the Afterwalkers identify as a single people. To them, now, the dead are dead. What they were isn't as important as what they've become, though many retain ties and memories to their former race, and none would forsake the skills their previous lives would have afforded them. Most of all they all tend to settle into their new walking dead forms and start drawing on the knowledge more than one existence can offer you as well as the toughness that such an inviolable body has to offer.
Afterwalker fashions tend to be as varied as the undead themselves. Some who band together into communities or even, rarely, small cities or nation-states tend to begin dressing alike. Those who are forced to live in the gutter or on the run from the living tend to cling to the rags they awoke in. Some, after all, are buried in finery. Their undead forms mean that Afterwalker have no real scent and lose color to their flesh, so more than clothing it is cosmetics, colognes and perfumes that the undead covet. Some who live closer to nature take to rubbing herbs into their flesh to give them some semblance of a smell and crush berries and use roots and earth to paint their skin.
Playing an Afterwalker:
Sometimes when people die, especially in an area close to the Shadowfell or saturated with negative energy, they rise again as an undead creature. Some as zombies, others as ghouls or ghosts. Afterwalkers, however, are special. Something about their will, their reason, their drive allowed them to rise from their grave not as a mindless beast or as a disembodied spectre, but as a semblance of their former selves, necrotic energy animating their own bodies as their souls tenaciously anchor onto it to move it once again. They call this phenomenon the Second Chance.
Afterwalkers soon find that the trauma of this unnatural reanimation has left their minds somewhat muddled, the memories and skills of their previous lives beyond them. They retain their name, memories of friends and family and all the BASIC details about themselves and they always remember their strongest passions and the things that drove them to great emotion, but other than that they are rather amnesiac, left to find their own way in a world that no longer understands them. Some Afterwalkers work hard to integrate themselves back into the society they left behind, some find that interacting with people they once knew who now know them better than they know themselves is too unsettling or upsetting and they leave to find new shores. Indeed, most Afterwalkers take this stance, truly striving to make more of their Second Chance than they did their First and divorce themselves from their former lives so as not to pain the people they left behind. To be with someone you know you love while knowing you can never love them as you did with a beating heart is too much for many to bear.
Even the attitudes of Afterwalkers have changed, even if slightly, from their living selves. They possess the full range of emotions they had while alive, but some may come through muted and others amplified or their importance may have shifted. Some Afterwalkers who were impulsive in life have become patient, some who felt they did too little in life become more proactive, some who were passionate become more tranquil, some who were joyous become more melancholic and vice versa. Of course just as many haven't changed noticably at all. Many, though, take new names altogether, usually naming themselves after something simple like a personal trait, regret or cherished ideal or an aspect of death.
In communites they are a pragmatic, practical bunch. They don't feel much of a need for luxuries with the exception of the aforementioned scents and with visual art. Many Afterwalker abodes do away with things such as beds, chairs, couches and kitchens to have more room for storage and personal effects. It is, of course, then considered rude to invite living friends over to one's place, at least without informing them that you can't feed them or offer them a seat. Of course it is rare to find a city that is willing to house a population of sentient undead, but those places that DO are often rewarded by a hard-working, clever class of people. It's getting past the initial prejudice that is the most difficult part.
Afterwalker Characteristics: Steadfast, Lost, Intelligent, Tragic, Curious, Enduring, Eternal, Practical, Reserved.
Male Dead-Names: Walks-Again, Sage-Breath, Suture, Knives, Once-Handsome, Black-Feet, Bone-Finger, Sinew, Venge, Rattle.
Female Dead-Names: Blackrose, Refrain, Spider-Locks, Rusalka, Silver-Voice, Once-Lovely, Poison, Stitches, Ghost-Dancer, Ivory.
Afterwalker Adventurers
Rusalka is a vestige-pact warlock with memories of her own murder tugging at her heart. These memories keep her from moving on from her former life and she drifts from party to party, hoping one day to recognize the faces of the men who did such horrible things to her and bring them swift vengeance using the powers she has gained from making compacts with beings just as dead and faded as she.
Walks-Again is a swordmage who did terrible things before he died. He knows that he deserved to die. But he also knows that the Second Chance means he can make up for all of the awful things that he knows he once did, and he is determined to do so, using his newly learned mystical martial arts to protect his friends and do as much good as possible wherever it is needed.
Once-Lovely is a wizard who does not mourn the loss of her face or that she must now wear a veil constantly to not frighten her co-workers. To her, the pursuit of knowledge is and always will be her driving force, it is what she remembers most strongly from life and in undeath there is nothing to stop her from making it her one true goal. She travels from place to place with her allies, collecting and disseminating knowledge in hopes of being the ultimate teacher and sage.
