I’m sure many of you have seen the movie Pirates of the Caribbean.
For the few of you that haven’t, the main “bad guys” are a pirate crew that have been damned by an evil curse, turning them all into some form of undead. Normally, they look like regular people. But when they’re exposed to moonlight, their true cursed form is revealed.
Personally, I like some of the nuances of these undead and I wanted to talk about them for a bit. They tend to share many of the classic undead traits, but there are some points that seem unique to this type of undead. If nothing else, it may give you some ideas for sprucing up some baddies in your campaigns.
What’s So Special About Pirate Zombies?
Typical undead in most D&D worlds tend to be fairly linear. If they have any special abilities or powers, that ability is their focus and the rest of the undead is balanced against that. Let’s take wraiths for example. They’re scary. Incorporeal + Con draining touch attack = stay the hell away. In addition to that, anyone that’s killed by a wraith becomes one. In an attempt to help balance that out, they have a pathetic armor class of 15. But that’s pretty much it. Wraiths aren’t really diabolical enemies that instill fear through their cunning or greed - they’re just scary undead that are really good at killing people and making more undead.
The Pirate Zombies (as I’ll refer to them as) have some rather neat abilities that tend to beat out normal undead in a few ways. It’s not so much that they had a zombie or skeleton template applied to them, but a unique undead template that is very difficult to obtain.
I’m going to try to find comparative D&D mechanics wherever possible, but will describe in detail abilities that aren’t easily associated with other abilities.
Spec’ing Out The Pirate Zombie
Let’s try to list out the clear abilities that the Pirate Zombies likely have first.
- Damage Reduction 10/magic - we see zombies being attacked throughout the movie and no apparent damage done to them in all but the rarest of occasions. During the initial battle at Port Royal, Will Turner downs a few Pirate Zombies with his attacks. If they were immune to melee damage, then his attacks would have had no effect. Since he’s one of the “heros”, we have to assume that he does some higher-than-normal damage.
- Regeneration 5 - unfortunately for Will, one of the zombies he dropped showed up a few minutes later. While this may also be representational of fast healing, we’ll see later why fast healing doesn’t fit as well as regeneration. Force damage is treated as lethal against Pirate Zombies.
This isn’t supposed to be all sunshine and rainbows after all - this is a curse. As such, we need to give specific detriments to our Pirate Zombies.
- Unquenchable thirst & voracious hunger - Captain Barbosa outlines this quite well. No matter how much they eat or drink, their appetites are never appeased. We don’t really need to define this in game terms, but it would be a great thing for an affected PC to RP.
- Insatiable lust - pretty much the same as above, but for intimate contact.
- Compulsion to break the curse - this seems to be their only real goal and quite a good goal for any curse to impose: to rectify that which imposed the curse in the first place.
- Zombie Form - the moonlight shows the zombies for what they really are. In the presence of natural moonlight, all cursed appear to be decrepit and rotting corpses. There are some oddities to this that need further explanation. Note that for the most part the Pirate Zombie will be in human form, which is a clear benefit.
- Vulnerability to force damage - The only thing that really seems to mess up the Pirate Zombies is force effects. We see one get crashed by a cannonball in Port Royal and another get blown up from a grenade in Isla de Muerta by Will.
Zombie Form
This is the part that fascinated me the most. The human form (which the Pirate Zombies are usually in) functions exactly like a normal human body for all intensive purposes. When Elizabeth stabs Barbosa in his cabin, he pulls the knife out of his chest and there’s blood on it. Not very zombie-like, is it?
However, when exposed to moonlight, even partially exposed, those body parts become more obviously undead. A Pirate Zombie in the moonlight functions as if mostly skeletal. We see a great clip of Captain Barbosa drinking a flask of wine while in zombie form and the wine draining out onto the deck of the ship. Compare this to scenes where Barbosa eats an apple and the lack of the apple parts falling onto the floor beneath him.
What we see by this is that the human form is not just an illusion. We see this further illustrated in the final battle inside Isla de Muerta. Will puts a bomb in the chest cavity of a pirate in zombie form and then he and Elizabeth push the zombie back into the shadows, where the zombies assume human form. At that point, the pirate is unable to get the bomb out of it’s chest. If the effect was purely an illusion, then he’d still be able to pull it out no problem.
The other thing worth noting is that zombie form alters any apparel worn to look rotted, worn and tattered. We see this most clearly illustrated when Ragetti and Pintel put on the dresses and row out of Isla de Muerta. As soon as they’re on board the ship, their previously fine attire is now tattered looking and shredded. This is an important scene because we are shown that the curse affects all manner of clothes worn - not just those worn when the pirates were afflicted with the curse.
Personally, I’d assume that this is just a vehicle for Hollywood since a zombie in full garb doesn’t have the same punch as a zombie that shows it’s innards and looks like a true rotting corpse.
Other Healing
The only other thing worth noting is that it appears that when a pirate zombie transforms from zombie to human form that all wounds incurred while in zombie form are healed. At the very least, there’s no cases where we see otherwise.
The only oddity to this is Ragetti’s eye. The only plausible justification that I’ve been able to come up with is that the regeneration granted by the curse only affects damage incurred after it’s onset. If this wasn’t the case, then it would have healed as well. This is consistent with the way that the Ring of Regeneration works:
If the wearer loses a limb, an organ, or any other body part while wearing this ring, the ring regenerates it as the spell. In either case, only damage taken while wearing the ring is regenerated.
Zombietastic!
This may be a big of a tangent, but I think it’s a fun exercise to look at other sci-fi and fantasy examples in the context of D&D. Some things don’t mix well at all. But other things can be modeled rather well using core game mechanics.
Being able to break down a monster or effect into it’s component parts is a great skill for DMs to have as well. Knowing the nitty gritty allows you to better understand the dangers you’re putting your PCs into. One of the worse things is to let your NPCs and encounters get out of hand and have little way to reign them in in a believable way.
In addition to that, it lets your flex your muscles and gives you some non-D&D sources for influence. Some of the best additions to D&D start off as inspirations from other worlds, genres and stories. There’s nothing wrong with a little homage now and again.