OSE Encounter Activities - Skeleton

To celebrate the completion of a quarter of the monsters, I decided to skip around a little bit for a change of pace. Here are one hundred Encounter Activities for some more first-level fodder favorites: Skeletons!

I’m unabashedly addicted to making my Skeletons a little more stop-motion Harryhausen at every available opportunity. Sometimes I’ll surprise Players by giving one or all of them an X in 6 chance to simply re-animate until completely annihilated in a more creative fashion than banal bashing. The occasional relentless and indefatigable “Living Skeleton” is always a rattling revelation. I also enjoy how perplexing and unsettling it can be to portray these low-level Undead as eternally trapped and idling away endless hours parodying the activities they performed in life. One can finely tune the level of fright they incite, though these days with the over-saturation of Halloween decorations, it is a little more challenging to make confronting our osseous remains truly chilling. Curiously, I’ve found that humanizing them in ways that go unexplained can actually help leaven an otherwise lusterless encounter with a bit more horror and dread.