World: Any
Diet: None
Height: Any
Lifespan: Several Months
Habitat: Any
Activity Cycle: Whatever it was in life
Necromancy is simple, in some ways. All that is required is a dead spirit and dead flesh, bound together to form a complete servant. However, sometimes a full corpse is impossible to acquire, and in this case a substitute is needed, one of dead plant matter. By creating a body of straw, held together by old clothes or bags, a temporary home will be made for a spirit. These animate scarecrows are disposable sentries, frail and unstable; a straw body is incapable of holding an animal soul for long, and they will quickly degenerate, first losing their minds then soon after completely collapsing.
Despite their frailty, scarecrows can be surprisingly lethal. They range in intelligence depending on the freshness of their soul, but even the dimmest understand basic pack tactics. More importantly, their light bodies allow them to move quickly and quietly, and importantly to swing their limbs faster than a human ever could, bending jointlessly to act like a whip. While too weak to wield heavy weapons, many scarecrows will have metal claws or simple clubs built into their limbs, allowing their strikes to carry terrifying power. When fighting a scarecrow, the fight often comes down to who tears the other into pieces quicker.
The world’s most feared scarecrow is the former Jagar Mes-Teh. A killer in life, he was consigned to an afterlife of service. Nobody knew that he had necromantic skills of his own, and he quickly escaped the body he was tied to into a scarecrow of his own construction. Since then he has spent decades hunting the countryside with packs of undead, jumping into a new body whenever his connection to his current one begins to fade.
