Zombies (Paths Beyond)
The walking dead. Brain eater. Shambling corpses. You all know what the classic reanimated slowpoke (not that one) is all about and Pathfinder supplies them in spades. Today, I'm going to handle the four in 2e's first Bestiary since they all get super short entries.
The brute, hulk, plague, and shambler variations all follow the same basic zombie pattern - slow, plodding motions without anything in the way of thought or tactics. They make up for this with customization, the entry comes with multiple additional abilities to make zombies even grosser and tougher. Notably, while d20 games don't usually roll with the infectious dead idea like pop culture does (at least for zombies), the plague zombie does and the plague-ridden ability allows other walking dead to as well. If you want a swarm of walking dead to attack, Bestiary 3 also has the Shambler Troop, which also covers you military necromancy needs.
While the shambling dead make great canon fodder for a villain, think about using them as metaphors in planar adventures.Β Obviously, they can be symbols of illness or disease, but given their decaying state, they can also be signs of societal rot or corruption. If you want to pull on Planescape, they can be signs of callousness and cynicism when treated as things rather than human remains. If you've played Torment, think about the Post having flyers nailed to its skull.
Zombies aren't intelligent enough to sing, but in the Furrows entire choruses sing the same songs in Necril. While many are rightly afraid that this is some new scheme of the Whispering Tyrant, the Esoteric Order of the Palatine Eye is not convinced. They hire adventures to investigate key junctures between the mortal world and the Negative Energy Plane in Ustalav, Osirion, Geb, and Mzali in order to find the origin of the mysterious undead language.
The Order of the Eternal is a hellknight order convinced that in order to bring perfect law to the planes, mortals must become immortals. Without immortality, they will be subject to the whims of fiends, celestials, gods, and monitors alike. Erkas is a signifer who seeks immortality through undeath, but has chosen a quicker path than a lich or graveknight. He aims to become a zombie lord, but first must refine his reanimation techniques, resulting in an overflow of zombies near his citadel in the Hanging Marches.
The One-In-Many started off as an ordinary Gebbite plague shambler, but exposure to the Nexian war machine granted it intelligence and flung it into the Great Beyond. Now, whenever the One animates a new corpse, its hive mind spreads to infect the new body. One-In-Many is careful about using this power, preferring to act as a covert information broker across the planes. After all, who watches what they say around zombies?
