Wakeful Remastered
Today we have not a new piece, but an old favorite; as we learn and grow, we are eager to reexamine old work and tune it up to our current standards. Going forward, we’ll be slowly remastering our old homebrews, taking favorites from our backlog and revising them with our experience and your feedback. To set the tone, we get to breath fresh life into the wakeful, a race of skeletons who themselves are filled with life again. As much as we liked to old wakeful, we’re excited to see what you make of the leaner, meaner new edition, which we think is notably better.
If you have opinions about what old brews need attention, you’re in luck! We have and will continue to decide what to remaster with polls on our Patreon. Patrons get to vote on what gets a facelift next, and they get to suggest what gets on the ballot, so if you want your opinion heard, join today! And, if you want all the latest news and memes about our releases and remasters, Discord is the place to look for everything you could want to know, never more than an @ away.
BE SILENT IN THAT SOLITUDE,
Which is not loneliness—for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee—and their will
Shall overshadow thee: be still.
—Edgar Allan Poe, Spirits of the Dead
Skinless, meatless, and ever grinning. Though stories of their origins vary, it is known that these ageless skeletal humanoids have no particular antipathy toward the living and they only superficially appear to be undead. The wakeful are the animated bones imbued with new souls, yet have no memory of the former lives to which their bones belong. The wakeful are, essentially, newly born creatures in second-hand skeletal bodies.
Ivory Decorators
Nearly all wakeful thoroughly decorate their bodies, carving, painting, embedding and accentuating their bones with accessories. Some weave ribbons and trinkets through their ribcage or drape fabrics through their bodies in ways impossible for other creatures. Others prefer simplicity, but will at least have distinguishing markings on themselves. Every wakeful strives to be recognizable by these unique designs, though they can serve utilitarian purposes as well, including the modification of their bodies for use with tools such as lanterns or knives.
Tireless Devotion
Every wakeful is inclined to explore new hobbies. With no bodily needs or known maximum lifespan, the wakeful are often in search of new things to entertain themselves. The achievements of notable wakeful are due less to great ambition than to tenacity and time. For instance, many wakeful who take a liking to reading become librarians simply by virtue of possessing a great number of books, earning them a reputation as a keeper of knowledge. Eventually, others begin to call their steadily-expanding collection a library, perhaps without the wakeful even noticing. Wakeful artisans and scholars can become masters of their craft merely due to having nothing to do except ply it.
Tenacious Bones
The wakeful are very hardy. The magic that animates a wakeful’s body slowly reassembles their body over time. The worse the damage, the longer their bones might take to repair themselves, but there is no known mundane method and very few magical ways to destroy a wakeful completely. Even when disassembled or crushed into powder, the bones of a wakeful will inexorably reform and reassemble themselves. This process can take years, even centuries, and can lead to unpredictable effects on the reforming wakeful such as memory loss or personality shifts. As such, wakeful are as wary of injury as any other race despite their resistance to conventional harm.
Wakeful Names
The wakeful have a rather loose relationship with names. They are very aware that they have already forgotten at least one name—that of their bones’ original owner—as well as the names they may have had in centuries past. As such, the wakeful are fond of letting other races give them monikers circumstantially or using a suite of similar pseudonyms. If a wakeful does choose their own name, they often choose something easy to remember. Some of these names may be vocational, such as Smith and Carver, or even the name of a historical figure that the wakeful admired or met at some point.
Wakeful Traits
As a wakeful, you have the following traits:
Ability Score Increase. Increase one ability score by 2, and increase a different one by 1. Alternatively, increase three different scores by 1.
Alignment. Wakeful are generally peaceful, lacking the glands that make living people so upset, and so tend toward neutral alignments.
Life Span. Wakeful have no known maximum lifespan. Due to one calamity or another, most wakeful can trace their history at most to only 100 or 200 years back. “Young” wakeful are quite rare.
Size. Wakeful are the height of whatever creature their bones formerly belonged to, if a little shorter without the meat. You are Medium or Small, your choice.
Speed. You have a base walking speed of 30 feet.
Constructed Resilience. Your body is durable and low-maintenance, represented by the following benefits:
-You have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned or exhausted, and you have resistance to poison damage.
-You don’t need to eat, drink, or breathe.
-You are immune to disease.
-You don't need to sleep, and magic can't put you to sleep.
Skeleton for all Occasions. Your extensive lifespan has imparted some useful skills others simply lack the time to master. You gain proficiency with one skill, one weapon, or one set of artisan’s tools. You also gain proficiency with one musical instrument, one gaming set, or one additional language of your choice.
Skeletal Modification. You have modified your skeletal form in ways other creatures can only imagine. Choose one of the modification options below.
-Graveyard Whispers. You have embedded a copper wire onto the inside of your skull. You know the message cantrip and you are never without the cantrip’s material component.
-Midnight Oil. To accommodate your many hours spent reading in the dark, you have built a small lantern into your ribcage. This lantern is built into the side of your ribs, and doesn’t occupy your hands or impede your movement. Otherwise, it functions just like a normal hooded lantern.
-Vertebral Dirk. Your lowest pair of ribs have been modified with metal reinforcement, allowing you to use them as weapons. You can draw either or both of these ribs from your body as you would draw a weapon, and they each act identically to a normal dagger. If they are ever thrown or lost, they return to you on their own and reattach to your ribcage after 1 minute.
Falling Apart. When you take a long rest, you must spend at least 6 hours in a relaxed, resting state instead of sleeping. While relaxed in this way you can see and hear as normal, and you are indistinguishable from a benign skeleton.
Reassembler. Your skeletal body stubbornly refuses to be permanently destroyed. Broken or lost bones return to you and slowly repair themselves. If you would die, your spirit falls dormant instead, rendering your body inert for 5d6 x 10 years.
Languages. You speak, read, and write Common and one other language that you and your DM agree is appropriate for the character.
Wakeful Resurrection
While you can run the wakeful with normal resurrection spells and rules, the constructed nature of the wakeful is intended to change how resurrection works for them. Since wakeful do not actually die when they fail their third death saving throw, resurrection magic such as raise dead cannot return a wakeful from dormancy. The condition acts as a sort of coma, and so a greater restoration spell or equivalent magic can restore a dormant wakeful. Instead of the normal material components, a greater restoration spell cast to rouse a wakeful requires 300 gp of limestone, chalk, or marble, which is consumed when the spell is cast. Alternatively, you could allow upcasting of lesser restoration to reduce their period of dormancy, by 1d4 x 10 years per level above 2nd. A wakeful whose dormancy is reduced to zero regains consciousness after 2d4 hours. I encourage you to experiment with the options and numbers here, but remember that returning a wakeful is not meant to be more difficult, simply different, and what works best for your group or setting will vary.
