Undead in Dungeons and Dragons

It's not easy to invoke fear among players of a pencil and paper game.  Especially for a generation raised on the time honored 'save/reload' style of video game play.  Death is cheap.  At best, an inconvenience.  How does one make death something you truly fear?  Well, you make it more than just 'roll up a new character'.  You hit them where it hurts.  And it hurts in few other ways more than having to recalculate and reduce all of your abilities, only to start from scratch a level or two lower than you were a moment earlier.

Such is the wonder of the Level Draining abilities of certain undead.  One thing I remind my boys when we play: In the end, it's a game.  In the early days, many rules were implemented for the sake of game play.  Fans and devotees would ascribe meaning and insight to various game mechanics over the decades.  I personally have my own image of what Level Draining is and why it causes one to lose abilities and learned skills.  But in the end, it was there as a game mechanic to give the lords of the netherworld a bit more umph. 

And that it does.  This is keenly felt when setting the early versions in juxtaposition to the later 3 and 3.5 editions of D&D.  Like many things, those editions seemed to strip the game from its historical and literary roots, and replace everything with a +2 bonus to this or that die roll.  Even the much feared Level Drain was given a few safety nets.  One could still experience it, but you had chances.  There were opportunities to go toe to toe with a Wight or a Wraith and still come out more or less unscathed.

But not in 1st Edition.  Back then, one hit, one measly little slap, and you just lost an entire level, perhaps weeks or months of game play.  Against the more terrifying foes like Spectres or Vampires, you lose a whopping 2 Levels!  Ouch.  But that's good.

For the undead should terrify.  With some skill, a game session can be creepy, perhaps even scary.  We ran one a few autumns ago, right around Halloween, and it couldn't have been better suited to give a few chills.  I'll unpack that particular jaunt through haunted manors and graveyard mausoleums someday.  On the whole, however, instilling fear isn't easy.  Some healthy reluctance to send a 1st level party against a colossal Red Dragon may be there, but actual fear of something worse than hit point loss, or even character death, is needed for those special cases.

And undead is a special case. Let's face it, we'd all love to see a ghost.  A real live ghost.  And yet it would terrify us just the same.  Even the thought of it terrifies.  All of materialist atheism hangs on a gossamer thread of one verifiable encounter with a supernatural element.  That is the power of meeting the afterlife, the netherworld.  And so when the PCs meet such creatures of the hereafter, the encounter should come with a greater price than 'lose 5 hit points.'  There should be something more.

Ghosts and mummies have their own special attacks, and ghouls and ghasts as good as always.  But it's those level draining undead.  Two or three game minutes with a Vampire, and your 10th level fighter may be back to square one, or at least level four.  And that hurts.  Sure there are magical ways around this.  But as anyone who follows the unpacking of my blog will realize, magic doesn't fall about in my campaign world like apples from a tree.  To obtain such a prize as 'Restoration' will require an epic quest in its own right.  And therein lies the fun of the old versions. 

3.5 almost discouraged such trauma, and made playing safe. I know why they did it.  I understand the marketing and sales aspects.  Yet it stole from the impact.  It reduced the stark terror that encountering such a creature should invoke.  So here's to the Level Draining undead of the early D&D editions.  They scared the pants off the first party I ever played in all those years ago.  They still do quite a job of instilling fear today, as it should be.