Undead turning and "Salem's Lot"

[Finarvyn]

I'm in the process of reading Stephan King's "Salem's Lot" book, which was published in 1975 so after OD&D, but I was wondering about how Turn Undead might have been different had "Salem's Lot" been published before OD&D.

WARNING: SPOILER AHEAD (although producing a spoiler for a 40-year-old book seems a little absurd) In the book a priest is confronting a bigdude vampire and holding him at bay with a cross. The cross is glowing with golden light and the vamp is cringing from the light. The vampire is holding a kid hostage. The priest tells the vamp to let the kid go and the vamp says sure but only if the priest throws away his cross. The priest agrees, the vamp pushes the kid far away to a safe distance, but then the priest has second thoughts and decides to keep the cross. This turns out to be a loss of faith and the cross stops glowing, whereby the vampire grabs the cross and breaks it. The vampire comments on how if the priest had thrown away the cross and trusted to faith he would probably have forced the vampire to retreat, but the loss of faith ruined all that. My thought at this point, "that's so cool!"

So I've been thinking about Turn Undead all morning and wanted to share some thoughts on the matter.

(1) We know that anyone can use a cross to keep a vampire at bay. The movies support this and Gronan confirmed that the rules intend this. (This was in another Turn Undead thread. I nearly just revived that one but thought it might be better to start over.) I know that Gronan also said something in one of these threads about the way Turn Undead worked back in the day, and I can't find his comments and can't recall the exact "ah ha" moment from that thread, and searching isn't helping me, so perhaps Gronan will chime in again to refresh my memory on how this was done.

(2) A priest or cleric is clearly better at this than anyone else. That's why they gat the Turn Undead ability.

(3) Instead of making the undead flee perhaps Turn Undead would just keep them at bay (perhaps a hex or two distance) for a round. Instead of a regular attack, the undead turner would be spending their turn to continue keeping the undead back. That seems like it would make undead monsters a lot more scary.

(4) If I remember correctly you roll for each undead for effect, but this can create wonky results because the die roll may come up that the most powerful one is held back while the weaker undead might not be held at all. (I imagine Dracula running away while his skeleton minions cheerfully charge into battle. Not too logical, that.) With this in mind, I'm thinking that the way to do this would be to start with the most powerful undead and work down. At any point when an undead roll fails all undead who are weaker would automatically fail, sort of like in a pyramid.

Anyone else have any Turn Undead thoughts today?

[tetramorph]

Yes, I imagine it that ONLY vamps can be held at bay by anyone holding a cross.

I imagine this to look like the bearer holding up the cross continually (not being able to do anything else) while the vamp cowers, but does not necessarily go away.

I imagine only clerics being able fully to turn.

I imagine that this looks like the undead hissing and cowering but that the cleric (or party) does not have to keep holding the cross up and can attack on the next round.

I imagine dispelling actually to cause physical undead to flee and incorporeal undead to dissipate.

I imagine exorcism and d**ning of incorporeal demons to follow the same logic.

[Starbeard]

I've always done it the way Piper describes, going from weakest to most powerful. In editions where a certain number of HD are turned then the cleric turns all 1HDs before moving up to 2HDs, and in editions where it's by type then I roll for the weakest type, moving up until one of them passes the check (but as long as at least one creature is turned then I consider it overall a successful turn by the cleric). I also allow the cleric to target a specific group or individual and attempt to turn just them.

Going from the top down is something that I've never actually considered, but could make for interested ramifications. Going from the ground up puts extra emphasis on hordes of lowly undead: Dracula's best protection is to pad his forces with as many lower undead types as he can, because they each have to be turned before it gets to him. From the top down, the highest level undead becomes the lynchpin in the whole group, since as soon as it gets turned they all go like a domino effect. I can see a rationale for both effects.

If you require the character to concentrate in order to maintain the turn, then that might provide a good counterbalance to using the top-down domino effect.

[chicagowiz]

This thread is giving me some neat ideas on how to expand Turn Undead - perhaps give the player the option of stating intent before the roll "go from powerful to least" or vice versa. I love the idea of weaker undead fleeing, stronger undead being held at bay...

[Porphyre]

Maybe we could take inspiration from the Spell Complexity tables from Chainmail with a Immediate and Delayed result. if you hit the score-to-turn, the Undead ar just kept at bay, and the turner must amintain his posture to keep them such . If he score one (or two) points better, the Undead flee.

[doublejig2]

Of course, if the vampire is invited into a home, then all bets are off and let no roll save them then...

[fogboar]

I've come to appreciate the version of Turn Undead given by aldarron at his blog and in Champions of ZED. It's more like a "deer in the headlights" power, or point (3) above that Finarvyn makes, where it's a sort of conical area of effect, and the first success keeps the monster from advancing toward the cleric, and it takes 3 successful rolls in a row to cause the monster to flee or be destroyed. Likewise I think the progression from affecting the weakest to strongest targets in the area of effect is a good method. When I combine these, it results in the following behaviors: The player is encouraged to use Turn Undead in a narrow space like a 10' wide corridor, much like fighting in ranks, because in a wide or open space the monsters can maneuver out of the area of effect, and then attack from the side or rear (relative to the cone area of effect). Keeping the monsters at bay instead of fleeing creates a tempo where the player characters can loose their arrows, or silver arrows for the more dangerous undead, while keeping effects like ghoul paralysis and level draining from coming into play, because the undead can't advance to engage in melee. Requiring 3 rolls in a row to cause the target to flee/be destroyed creates tension, because there's a much lower chance of the flee/destroyed result, and each successive roll forms a dramatic hinge on which the players may be relying to push the fight in their favor. A result of keeping the monster at bay prompts the players to consider whether they should engage in combat or flee, whereas causing the monsters to flee at first success allows the players to immediately continue pressing their luck deeper into the dungeon; overall I find that makes players more skittish and scared of encounters with the undead. Applying the effect to targets with the least HD first means that I can use lower HD undead as an ablative screen against the effect (as Starbeard says), and sometimes it can give players a hint about which target has the most HD. This is useful when, for example, I'm using the Gygaxian tactic of mixing a wight in with zombies, so the players can't distinguish the wight from the zombies on sight alone. If all of the "zombies" are held back but one of them is not, and the rolls indicate that extra zombie should have been held back, that's an important clue that the zombie is really a wight or another look-alike monster.

Further, I use a slightly stricter table, where a level 1 cleric succeeds on a 2d6 roll of 9+ (1 in 3 success) against 1 HD undead, and 10+ (1 in 6 success) against 2 HD, and no effect on 3 or more HD, and then each level after that improves the effect from none, 10+, 9+, 7+, 5+ (1 in 6 chance of failure), automatic flee. Automatic flee becomes the automatic destroy result at cleric level 8 against 1 HD undead, so there are 4 levels (4 through 7 inclusive) until the chart result upgrades to automatic destroy. That means a level 4 (heroic) cleric automatically makes skeletons flee, and a level 8 (superheroic) cleric automatically destroys skeletons, which helps to maintain a systemic notion of player character level tiers, in the same way that fighting-men have the normal/hero/superhero distinction. I think this is already present in the original table, where a level 4 cleric is the first to automatically destroy skeletons, and the level 8 cleric is the first to automatically destroy wraiths. I have the player make two rolls, one for the Turn Undead table to see which types of targets are affected, and then 2d6 for number of targets, applying the effect against the targets with the least HD first. The number affected improves to 3d6 at level 4, and to 4d6 at level 8, and the area of effect changes from a cone to a radius from the cleric at level 8; these changes are in place to better accommodate no. appearing for wilderness adventures, and at level 8 it becomes useful for a superhero cleric to defend a unit of normal soldiers against an undead horde.

Another way of handling this that I've seen more recently is to convert Turn Undead into a cleric spell, so that it's a strategic resource that can be expended like any other. I think that would appeal to people that don't like myriad subsystems as much; converting it to a spell makes it more congruent with the existing framework for magic. It can be written in the style of the sleep spell, where we make a roll to determine how many creatures are affected, weaker targets are affected first, and it uses the saving throw system instead of introducing a separate table.

The Salem's Lot example made me imagine that the vampire had used the equivalent of the Turn Undead table on the priest! We can use that as a model for testing faith when it's reversed, so that the character or characters attempting to ward off the vampire can't use the typical methods (a holy symbol, a silver mirror, garlic, etc) if the vampire's reversed Turn Undead roll can beat their HD on the table.

[Finarvyn]

Nov 10, 2018 8:43:10 GMT -6 fogboar said:

The Salem's Lot example made me imagine that the vampire had used the equivalent of the Turn Undead table on the priest! We can use that as a model for testing faith when it's reversed, so that the character or characters attempting to ward off the vampire can't use the typical methods (a holy symbol, a silver mirror, garlic, etc) if the vampire's reversed Turn Undead roll can beat their HD on the table.

This is a really cool thought!

[DungeonDevil]

Nov 11, 2018 6:43:57 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

Nov 10, 2018 8:43:10 GMT -6 fogboar said:

The Salem's Lot example made me imagine that the vampire had used the equivalent of the Turn Undead table on the priest! We can use that as a model for testing faith when it's reversed, so that the character or characters attempting to ward off the vampire can't use the typical methods (a holy symbol, a silver mirror, garlic, etc) if the vampire's reversed Turn Undead roll can beat their HD on the table.

This is a really cool thought!

Indeed! I'll have to remember that: a Turn Mortal table is a must!

[chicagowiz]

Nov 16, 2018 7:25:01 GMT -6 DungeonDevil said:

Nov 11, 2018 6:43:57 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

This is a really cool thought!

Indeed! I'll have to remember that: a Turn Mortal table is a must!

I would almost think it's the same as Turn Undead.

• The undead creature has to speak or some way of projecting their will.
• I would rule that skeletons and zombies can't do it. Ghouls would be the start of the undead that can turn.
• Turning mortals works like "fear" in its effect.