13th Age Magic Item: Mask of the Charred Zombie

This past weekend I finished judging the Lost Magic spell design contest at Kobold Press (go vote on the finalists!) and so I had magic on the brain when I saw Dave Thompson’s 13th Age True Magic Item Mask of the Charred Zombie on his blog To Hit Arse Class 0.

It’s a fun item and Dave kindly gave me permission to repost it here.

Mask of the Charred Zombie: A plain, slightly charred-looking porcelain mask. (Alternatively, it could be made of burnt wood or something similar.) The mask is always warm, and becomes very hot when its power is used — often burning the face of the wearer.

Chakra: Helmet, Crown, Diadem, Circlet

Bonus: Mental defense; +1 MD (adventurer), +2 MD (champion), +3 MD (epic).

Once per day the wearer can remove a copy of the mask from the front of it, and place it onto a corpse. This chars the corpse and animates it as a Charred Zombie (see below.) The wearer can control 2 of these zombies per level, but can make more if they have another way of wrangling them.

Quirk: The wearer’s skin to starts to crisp; they become unsightly, and averse to cold temperatures.

Charred Zombie

1st level mook [undead]

As a zombie shuffler, but damage taken from fire attacks heals the charred zombie instead of damaging it. If a charred zombie catches fire (takes ongoing fire damage) it regenerates hit points equal to the damage.

Fire damage cannot heal a charred zombie to above its maximum number of hit points. If a burning charred zombie is hit with a cold damage attack, the fire is put out and it ceases to regenerate from any ongoing fire damage.

Nastier special

Oh great, now it’s burning:  When a charred zombie taking ongoing fire damage makes a natural even hit, the target takes 5 ongoing fire damage.

Photo credit: Justin Hall, shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license