Homebrew Awakened Species Details

DEAD AND REBORN

Typically having no lands to call their own, undead with an awakened sense of self are typically perpetual foreigners, wanders in a land and often a time not their own. Compounding matters, most mortal cultures carry within them an instinctual fear of death and the dead, and many associate necromancy specifically with dark tidings. This forms a wall of (often well earned) prejudice and hatred that sentient undead find themselves up against, and many undead choose to hide their necrotic natures behind clothes, masks, and pungent perfumes when journeying into civilization. Depending on composition, humanoid undead typically range a wide gamut from 20 to 300 pounds, and may possess empty eyes, a colored flame-like magical animus in their sockets, or harrowed, surprisingly mortal eyes burning with an inner fire. Hair (if they have it at all) is usually lank, dark, and wrought with grime and gravedirt that amount of cleansing will fully remove.

SERVICE AND FREEDOM

Undeath is effectively immortality, a strong reason why many mortal spellcasters of a certain moral bent consider it a viable alternative to actually dying. Still, it is not immortality without price - senses and emotions dull, food and drink no longer have taste, and often an undead state comes alongside a subservience of will and unthinking service to a master who likely does not have the world's best intentions at heart. Some undead are born into freedom, while others earn it or have it thrust upon them. Regardless, all undead that have freedom greatly cherish it, as the reminders of what could easily happen were they not fortunate enough to possess free will abound throughout history. Many consider it their sacred duty to free other mindless undead, or simply to dispatch them wherever they may be found. The reasoning is straightforward enough: a final rest awarded to all mortals is greatly preferential to eternal slavery to the likes of a short-sighted, megalomaniacal wizard.

FALLEN HOME, FORGOTTEN PAST

For many awakened undead, the past is a distant homeland to which they may never return, holding names and faces now partially-forgotten, and loves and lives as dead as they are. The anguish of this loss is enough to drive many mad, but others use this rage and pain as a source of power and drive, carrying them further on the road to whatever dark destiny awaits. Frequently, entire countries, customs, and cultures the undead may be familiar with no longer exist, and the sentient dead behaves or speaks in an antiquated fashion because of this. It may be even more difficult than usual for such undead to relate to more modern mortals, and typically these undead leverage what companions they may have to bridge this epoch-long communication gap.

UNDEAD NAMES

Many undead that awaken into sentience prefer to keep the names they held in their mortal lives. For others, however, their mortal names are forgotten or have lost meaning. These undead often adopt nicknames given to them by their former masters or present companions, and hold them to be as true as any other creature's birth name.Examples of names given in this fashion may be seen, below:

Names: Rattlebones, Spore, Rotface, Raven, Bane, Carver, Drudge, Rook, Mort, Pale, Minion, Crumble, Shad

CREDITS:

Photoshop & design by /u/the_singular_anyone

Visit WALROCK HOMEBREW for more! walrock-homebrew.blogspot.com

Art by Erik Ronnblom, Adam Badowski, Tamer Kara ta§, Adam Paquette, Michael Jaecks, Zhou Shuo, Eva Widermann, and Tyler Jacobson 

Thanks to the kind folks of reddit, and to /u/skybug12 for his Photoshop guide!

Awakened Traits

Ability Score Increase, Dead Immortality: You do not age. Past Life. Choose another living race besides this one. Before your death, you were a member of this race and appear as an undead version of it. Your size, height, and movement speed are the same as a typical member of that race. You are immune to disease and treat exhaustion as if it was one level less. You do not need to eat or breathe, but you can ingest food and drink if you wish. Instead of sleeping, you enter an inactive state for 4 hours each day. You do not dream in this state; you are fully aware of your surroundings and notice approaching enemies and other events as normal. Darkvision

Dead Immortality

You do not age. Given time, the necromantic energies that sustain you will heal most wounds you take at approximately the same rate as a mortal, and your hit dice function as normal.

Darkvision

Through the necromantic energy animating you, you are able to perceive with greater clarity that which lurks in the darkness. You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You can't discern color in darkness, only shades of gray.

Ability Score Increase

Your ability scores each increase by 1.

Size

Humans vary widely in height and build, from barely 5 feet to well over 6 feet tall. Regardless of your position in that range, your size is Medium.

Speed

Your base walking speed is 30 feet.

Languages

You can speak, read, and write Common and one extra language of your choice. Humans typically learn the languages of other peoples they deal with, including obscure dialects. They are fond of sprinkling their speech with words borrowed from other tongues: Orc curses, Elvish musical expressions, Dwarvish military phrases, and so on.