Rules as written, the official D&D spectre is mostly just a copy-paste wraith with a couple more hit dice and an attack that drains 2 levels (the horror!). It will come as no surprise to readers of previous entries in this series that I want my Spectres to be more distinct.
Rather than position Spectres as another undead, impersonal void, I've opted to make them larger than life characters. They are the souls that have somehow dodged the Reaper and by intensity of personality or drive have maintained ego cohesion without corporeal form.
Maybe they were snagged by a witch-bottle in transit to Gehenna or the assigned Valkyrie got waylaid by demons before fetching the fallen warrior to Valhalla. Perhaps the magical-warding on a criminal mage's prison (I'm picturing Magneto in X2) kept the Anubian soul-couriers at bay. It is not a good thing when your friendly local psychopomp is putting up Missed Connections listings on Craigslist.
An Anecdotal Interlude
Over all my years as a player, I can only recall one memorable encounter with a Spectre. It was in the long running Arden Vul game that I've mentioned before.
This spectre was a named ancient archon guarding an ostentatious tomb at the bottom of a deep descent and so when we woke him, it was difficult to escape the way we'd entered. We lost a few characters and he became a bogeyman for us for several months.
He stands out because he was:
- Extremely dangerous
- Kept popping up at unexpected times & places
- Was a persistent obstacle along a route that we wanted to travel
- Had just enough of a personality that we could hate him specifically
- Had a cocktail of abilities that made it very difficult for us to deal with him at all at the level we were when we encountered him.
Eventually, we defeated him by leveling our cleric until we could come back with "Dispel Evil". The "fight" was almost an anti-climax. He appeared, got spell-nuked and it felt like a real arrival for our party. Spectral undead were no longer a threat. We found another incorporeal undead shortly thereafter, "Dispel Evil" was already on the list and he got zapped like a mosquito. Never learned his name or cared about him even a little.
All this to say, there's a rich niche here for a terrifying challenge with high-mobility that can hold a whole dungeon-region under threat. Personality, and near-invulnerability on first encounter cultivate player-hatred. Ultra Bastard doesn't have "Dispel Evil" on the standard list so we will need another victory vector.
