Chương 63: Bonus Content - Bestiary Entry — Zombie Elk

ZOMBIE ELK Medium undead, unaligned Armor Class 9 (natural armor) Hit Points 30 (4d8 + 12) Speed 20 ft. STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 16 (+3) 6 (−2) 16 (+3) 3 (−4) 6 (−2) 5 (−3) Saving Throws: Wis +0 Damage Immunities poison Condition Immunities poisoned Senses: darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 8 Languages understands the languages it knew in life but can't speak. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Challenge 1/2 (100 XP) · Proficiency Bonus +2 Undead Fortitude. If damage reduces the elk to 0 hit points, it makes a Constitution saving throw with a DC of 5 + the damage taken, unless the damage is radiant or from a critical hit. On a success, it drops to 1 hit point instead. It keeps coming. Relentless Advance. The elk always moves toward the nearest creature it can sense, by the most direct route available. It does not retreat, flank, feint, or wait. It has forgotten speed but not direction.

Actions Antler Gore. Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 7 (1d8 + 3) piercing damage. Hoof Slam. Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (1d6 + 3) bludgeoning damage. Ecology & Behavior What it is. A reanimated elk-person — a corpse raised and set walking. The frame is big and cervine, broken antlers still carrying enough points to matter, cloven feet, heavy through the shoulders; the rest is rot at whatever stage death has reached.

A freshly raised one still wears a recognizable face and only lightly soiled clothes, moving with a confused stiffness. An older one has gone grey and loose over the bone, fur shedding in clumps, old dirt falling from wounds that stopped being wounds and became simply gaps. Either way, it is one of the common bodies that make up the front of a raised horde. What drives it. Nothing it could name.

There is no mind left, no hunt, no malice — only a fixed direction and a patient, bottomless hunger shared by everything in the horde. It walks toward the living because that is the one instruction still running, and it will keep walking toward them until something takes it apart and keeps it apart. In the horde. Alone, a zombie elk is almost nothing — slow, graceless, its every move telegraphed a full beat before it lands, cut down by a single clean strike before it closes the distance.

Its danger depends entirely on numbers. The horde comes from every direction at once and keeps coming; each body that drops is replaced from the trees behind it faster than the line can be emptied, and the gaps close within seconds. The zombie ranks are the slow wall a living thing has to get through first — and behind them wait the faster, worse things that use the wall as cover: ghouls that move with intent, mummies, and shapes with no names and the wrong number of joints. In a fight.

It gores with its antlers and tramples with its hooves, and that is its whole repertoire. It does not guard, does not recover, does not adapt. The one real trouble it gives is refusing to stay down: struck hard enough to drop, it will keep moving for a moment longer than it should, and often get back up. Fire ends that argument — dried fur and old cloth catch fast and spread through bodies pressed close — and radiant damage, or a clean enough blow, puts it down for good. Standing in the world.

This is where a zombie elk stops being an ordinary monster. In a kingdom where the mammals are people, the thing shambling out of the treeline is not a beast that was always a beast. It is a person's body — someone's neighbor, raised against the whole natural order and marched against the living, wearing a face that still half-remembers whose it was. Putting one down is not a kill. It is the end of a desecration, and a mercy. Whatever is owed for it is owed upstream, by whatever did the raising.