Spooky Scary Skeletons
The ideal skeleton army is in 4k Ultra HD
This one's short! I haven't blogged in a bit, and since tomorrow's Halloween, I thought I'd take a look over at our favorite skele-bois. If I still feel in the Halloween mood in a week, I'll probably do hags next.
Also, as a little (actually kinda big) announcement, I made a thing! It's called Into the Odd+, it's free on itch.io, and it's a really tight 3-page Odd-hack to get the vibe of 5E with an Into the Odd inspired ruleset. It's also what I'm playing right now.
Anyways,
Skeleton Basics
The goal is to make skeletons really fun to clobber with as few tweaks to the base stats as possible. Let's start with what we know from fantasy media:
- skeletons are generally weak to smash-y weapons (clubs, hammers, etc.) but not to slashy and stabby ones
- you can make them out of anything that has bones
- often lingering in crypts, graveyards, and the armies of evil necromancers
- the limbs and heads keep bouncing around after death
So how do we implement this? A really easy way to make them weak to smashy weapons (and to make weapon choice more impactful) would be to make attacks against them with slashing and stabbing weapons be disadvantaged/impaired, and to make attacks against them with smashing weapons enhanced. All other damage types (fire, ice, general magic, etc.) will do normal damage.
Now, if the players know they're going to be fighting some skeletons soon, they might stock up on weapons that could be useful in fighting them. No one wants impaired attacks!
I think point number four is also really important. After the skeleton's body is broken, it should still kinda hop around for a bit and bite people's feet until you smash the skull (Legend of Zelda style). So we can add that as an attribute. Perhaps when it's reduced to a certain level of health the GM can narrate the body breaking apart and the head jumping around and snapping its teeth.
- In Into the Odd and Cairn: when the skeleton first takes critical damage, its body breaks apart, and the head remains. The head deals a d6 damage on a bite, and can only hop around 5 ft. at a time.
- In Into the Odd Plus, this would occur when the skeleton fails a direct damage save (essentially the same thing)
- In GLOG and similar systems with to-hit rolls, this would probably happen when the skeleton reaches 0 HP. Instead of dying, the head survives with 1 HP.
Things are already looking a little complicated with our skeleton, so we should probably stop adding mechanics here. Our basic level one skeleton now looks like this:
Other Types of Skeletons
You'll probably be able to find skeletons on their own in some haunted crypts and tombs, but for the vast majority of cases there's a reason why they're there. Usually it's a necromancer of some sort, and every now and then you'll get liches leading the troops.
Skeleton battalions are also rarely "just" humans, so expect skeletal ogres and trolls, skeletal goblins, and possibly even the odd skeletal dragon. The rank and file will be a odd mish-mash of orcs, dwarves, humans, elves, and all sorts of humanoids. The big guys will be skeletal versions of any big monsters, plus some odd creations that are the combinations of a lot of different species' bones.
I'm not going to make stat blocks for any of those guys just yet, partially because I'm lazy and partially because I said this was going to be a short post. But hopefully it gives some room for thought on what larger skeletal forces could look like, and who all might be leading them.
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