I Never Thought You'd be a Zombie Because Mummy Rot is so Passé
After a prank played many years ago, it has been traditional for an absent player to return to the next session to find that his character has been treated badly by fate, changed in some horrid and occasionally irreversible way. Partly because of the initial prank, and partly because one of my own characters became afflicted with the disease yet continued to succeed in the saving throws until the end of the adventure and so lived in ignorant bliss, it has been customary for the character to have mummy rot.
Of course, despite the initial scares and worries about beloved characters dying to a dreadful curse, it didn't take long for players to realise that their character probably didn't have mummy rot for the tenth time, particularly when it happened when they were absent and the party was in the middle of an adventure so far devoid of undead. Never the less, the tradition remains.
This week, Bert is not to be seen and we take a little too much glee in defacing his photocopied character sheet. As much as we want to try to convince him his elf has mummy rot, Will has a better idea. And so Bert is returned his character sheet and, with as straight a face as I can muster, I tell him that 'your pet received some kind of buff, I'm not sure what, I was out of the room when it happened'.
Intrigued, he checks his pet's character sheet and is curiously happy to see that his cat now has DR 5/slashing. He also spots the immunity to mind-affecting effects and, sadly, the crossed-out constitution score. Rather than accepting all this as some benefit, he works out pretty quickly that we let Skelra raise the cat to be an undead companion. Such a shame, it would have been amusing had the penny dropped only during the next session.
He is, however, assuming that we modified the character sheet for giggles, and that his cat really wasn't killed and subsequently raised.