The dead do not always rest easy on Tymaera. Magic permeates the land, in some places perhaps a little too much and here energies may focus and coalesce, drawn to vessels that once held the most precious energy of all; life. Enough may gather to reignite the spark of being and cause a corpse to reanimate, or to perhaps call back an echo of the departed in incorporeal form, even easier if the spirit had unfinished business and fought against passage to the afterlife. This new existence is no blessing and these lesser dead (the Greater Dead are something worse) roam mindlessly and know only a hatred and envy of the vitality of the living that drives them to kill and consume in the hope of taking that for themselves. A futile and destructive want. They may display some shreds of memories of their former lives but this only makes their suffering worse.

That said, the undead don't have a monopoly when it comes to skeletal beings. Dark spirits and daemons, embodiments of death and corruption, abound.

So amidst these fine lines and grey areas, how do you know what you're looking at? (We'll put aside for a moment the fact it's mostly academic as its victim will end up dead whatever the unnatural being that's doing the killing). The balefire - the glowing essence all creatures with magic in their veins exhibits in some shape or form (in the eyes, aura, inner glow, etc) - is a good indicator. For the undead it is often pale, ghostly white, very sometimes light blueish, blood red for vampires or most often sickly greens. Lesser undead are much less 'glowy' than Greater. Daemons mostly exhibit good old fashioned hellfire reds and physically they tend to look like, well, daemons.

Like the Walking Blight here in fact, a spirit of decay that makes crops fail, spreads disease amongst livestock and happily eviscerates any sentient being it might encounter. They possess enough reason to understand and enjoy the misery they bring and also like to clothe themselves in bright colours if they can get their claws on the cloth, that is. Some rural communities, at great expense to themselves but better than losing their harvest, make offerings of silks and dyed fabrics for the beasts to leave their land alone. Sometimes this works but the Blight's aura of decay quickly ruins the clothes, fading the colours and breaking down the fibres into meer tatters so soon they want more.