Aggressive Undead Tomb Guardian

What It Is

This one looks like the thing you put in the front chamber to discourage grave robbers with poor impulse control. It is a hulking skeletal guardian in a hard forward stomp, jaw hanging open beneath a crested helm, with a huge spiked mace cocked back for the swing. The best detail is the off-hand slab shield, which looks less like forged armour and more like it tore a carved tomb panel off the wall and decided that would do. Between the exposed ribs, hanging strips of cloth, piecemeal armour plates and cracked-stone base, it has the right mix of ancient soldier and shambling catastrophe.

At The Table

For D&D 5e or Pathfinder 2e, this is a superb boss monster for the last room before the real treasure vault, especially if you want something more memorable than another generic skeleton brute. Give it a job: guardian of a saint's reliquary, jailer of a sealed wight king, or the final watchman in a necropolis whose burial rites have gone very wrong. That gravestone shield practically writes the encounter for you. Maybe the inscription on it is the clue the party needs, but reading it means surviving long enough to get close.

In Shadowdark or Dolmenwood, I would use it as the old champion of a forgotten barrow cult, still marching its rounds centuries after everyone else has rotted away. It fits beautifully in a torchlit corridor where the players first hear the scrape of stone before they see the thing carrying half a tomb door as a shield. You could also drop it into Call of Cthulhu as an impossible museum relic that should not be moving, or into Blades in the Dark as a Spirit Warden vault sentinel from a less humane century. However you use it, this is not subtle undead. It is the argument for bringing a second ten-foot pole.

Printed in high-quality resin. Supplied unpainted. Available in Large, Huge, and Gargantuan sizes on 2", 3", and 4" bases.

Available Sizes

Large - 2" base | Huge - 3" base | Gargantuan - 4" base

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See It In Action