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Hi All

I'm looking for a monster to serve as the final boss of my campaign and am after either links to a published source or your own ideas of what powers this thing might have.  My game is 3.5 but I'm as keen on flavour ideas as mechanical ones, so things needn't be edition specific.

Basically I want the monster to be some kind of ghost like creature composed on the souls of many different people.  It usually acts like one individual but has some ability to fragment individual spirits off temporarily.  The closest thing I've found in published sources is the Caller in Darkness in Expanded Psionics Handbook, but that creature doesn't seem all that interesting.

The general gyst is that the creature is formed of people killed by a certain magical sword since it was forged hundreds of years ago.  The PCs have been in posession of this sword for most of the campaign and killed a lot of people with it, so it gives me a chance to rehash some of the most memorable villains from throughout the game (the sword has a tweaked version of the power of the oathbow - DMG p227- and only people killed with oaths sworn against them have formed the ghost, but this is naturally the most significant enemies the PCs have encountered) as well as certain key charecters from the history of the world that died before the campaign began.

The sword was the imperial sword of the most powerful nation in the world and by the time the campaign began society had crumbled leaving that nation the last bastion of civilisation. Thus the sword became symbollic of not just that nation, but civilisartion as a whole.  In the course of the campaign the PC who wielded the sword became the emporer of that nation (it was a pretty crappy nation at that point) and over time the have reversed the crumbling of civilisation, making him effectively emporer of all humanoids.  This has prompted those slain by the sword to awakene to take their vengence on society as a whole.  The ghost is evil and angry, but not mindless, and fragments of it have been possessing and manipulating people towards it's own ends for some time.

Other than being able to possess people I'm not sure what this thing can do, so any ideas are most welcome.  I imagine fragments of it can act like individual ghosts but not sure what the composite being as a whole should be able to do. 

Ideas for mechanics and flavour eagerly awaited  

Why not make the monster a humanoid?  Binder seems to sort of mimic this kinda well.  You may need to develop your own whatever the hell they're calleds, though.

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Thanks for all the input so far folks.  I did look at the fusion idea, but the problem Ahruhn identified was a biggy.  I imagine I'm going to have to defineately homebrew something, but would still love any creative suggestions from forumites.

 I'm looking for something with a CR in the low to mid 20s (figuring the campaign will end at level 20 as I don't really like epic level stuff, lvl 15 currently) so maybe if it has 1hd per soul that could work.  That way if any of the individual ghosts that bud off from it get killed there is a downside.

On a related topic, anyone know of or any any cool homebrew ideas for variant ghost abilities?  I've used ghosts a couple of times in the campaign and all the abilities in the MM are getting a little stale for the party I think.