Wizards of the Coast. Accessed from the Underdark Art Gallery here
[The sluagh is described as the spirits of the restless dead, which means that some people interpret them as ghosts and others as faeries. I took them in a ghostly direction, and made them a little more…piecemeal that traditional interpretations.]
Sluagh A hideous howling mass of translucent
body parts flies forth. Skeletal hands grasp blindly in all directions as the
thing moves and partially fleshed skulls wail and gnash their teeth.
Not all those who die in a tragic manner have a strong enough force of
will to return to life as an undead monster, but when enough of these weak
souls perish simultaneously, a sluagh may form. Sluaghs consist of thousands of
incorporeal organs and limbs, thrashing and writhing in unison in order to find
living things to prey upon and add to their collective mass. A sluagh might
form in the wake of a natural disaster or as a result of a massacre.
A sluagh possesses a unified mind, but it is little more than jumbled
chaos. Sluaghs are not intelligent enough to sort through the memories of the
hundreds or thousands of mortals that they once were and speak in dozens of
wailing voices in unison—they rarely have little to say except for threats or
lamentations. The touch of a sluagh
empowers the walking dead; mindless undead creatures are attracted to a sluagh
as if by instinct, and necromancers and wicked clerics often seek to recruit sluaghs
into their undead armies as support units. The disjointed minds of a sluagh
make them very difficult to control, however, and sluaghs often break free of
their controllers and turn on them.
A create greater undead
spell cast at CL 17th can create a sluagh, with an additional
requirement of 100 corpses of creatures slain within a 24 hour period.
Sluaghs are commonly associated with ruins of the Kingdom of Kown-Dam, apparently being formed from the catastrophic earthquakes and storms that plagued the Kingdom as it fell.
Shores of Swords 