According to the RPG book More Magic and Mayhem, Section: Weapons, under Vorpal, it says, and I quote;
"Others, such as golems and undead creatures, are not affected by the loss of their heads"
That being said... How do they die? I've always been under the impression the only way to actually kill them for sure WAS to cut off their head, now this is saying otherwise. Can someone explain? Does the head need to be bashed in, and the brain destroyed for the undead to truly be... Dispatched?
Does the undead act like a chicken without it's head, flailing it's sword around, trying to hit, and does the head continue to spit out insults as his body runs around in circles?
Um, hrm... I think either you need to dispel whatever magic is animating them, or just beat the body enough so that it cannot function. If that fails, I'm pretty sure the brain is what you need to smack.
complete destruction of the physical manifestation.
...but what if its a ghost.
...and about the brain thing...a skeleton.
If this -would- be the case, though - I'd love to RP a body-less forsaken head carried arround by someone.
Would that mean a special profile?
Undeath in Wow is all magic, no 'Land of the Dead' virus or anything. The magic that animates a body is situated in the wholy body, it does not need a brain to control the thing. They usually don't rely on eyes, ears or nose either but one can always try to ruin their balance organs.
Essentially, undead are corpse-golems. But that brings us to the forsaken and death knights, in essence the playable undead. How much to they rely on thier physical visage? Forsaken don't breathe (much) but can eat and they don't seem to need eyes to see. I would imagine that they bodies could still work after being beheaded, but I think you'd have to loose alot of the personality and such, if not all with the loss of the head.
The rules I've always played by state that Forsaken/etc die due to decapitation or destruction of the skull/brain.
/opinion
I have always assumed that decapitation results in the body becoming lifeless and the head being in essence the Forsaken character except they cannot do anything because they are only a head.
Edit: Also, wouldn't being headless render you unable to talk? You have no lungs to force the air through your vocal chords.
Just pulling this from the
guide to Forsaken on the forums.
Quote:Losing a limb is not as devastating to an undead as it is to the living (some may take more mental damage than others, being more attached to their body or not fully coping with their state or for many other reasons) limbs can be reattached and most organs/body-parts have little use anyway, exceptions are the brain (without it they cannot function, they "re-die"), vocal-chords, and in some cases stomach.
I'd assume that losing the head would mean no brain which is where the whole death through head loss comes in. If you read on there is a discussion about the possibilities of why the brain is needed, etc etc.
Quote:Raising the dead is essentially the process of taking a spirit and binding it back into the corpse it came from. In theory, you COULD bind a spirit into something else...a weapon, another body, whatever, but it'd be much more difficult. Why?
The brain. Even if it's not functional, it serves as a storehouse of memories, and provides a familiar frame-of-reference for the spirit when it is pushed into that mortal shell. Without the brain, the spirit may not "recognize" the body it has been forced into, and not be as easily trapped inside. When the brain is destroyed, the body is no longer "familiar" and the spirit escapes.
Quote:Anywho! To answer the thing-in-a-brain question, I do believe that you can survive it, yeah. There´s a few zombies out there (some that I figure are free-willed too, being Forsaken and all), but I also think that it will disable them a lot. Looking at the zombies (for quick reference just create a Forsaken and check out the ones in Deathknell) they not only walk pretty... oddly but the few one can talk to don´t really give the impression of being part of the upper crust of intellectuals, so to speak.
I suppose in the end the final conclusion would be that without the head/brain an undead would either die or be completely useless anyways. Either way not a character I think anyone would particularly want to play. There's more discussion on it, mostly within the first three pages of the thread but I think the quotes I put up get the gist of it.
Still, the quote that I've put up says that they are not affected by it whatsoever. I, personally, trust the RPG book more than a forum guide.
I was guessing when they said
undead creatures they may have been more so specifically referring to creatures like the Scourge. Forsaken are after all not exactly the same as the mindless undead.
While the mindless I could completely understand as continually functioning without a head (as they don't need a brain anyways, they will just continue to attack, kill etc). They are after all 'mindless' so a brain doesn't sound very necessary. I don't believe it would be the same for a Forsaken. They do share a lot of similarities but also have different properties.
Also. Afterwards there was some info about Forsaken which I think might add to shed further light on the situation:
Quote:Also, from the Libris Mortis (D&D Book) I found some info on senses that you might care/not care about:
...
The energy that animates an undead extends to the organs of scent and hearing as well. Thus, undead can smell and hear just as the living beings do. As with sight, however, if an undead physically loses a particular organ, it can no longer use that particular ability.
I can't say for sure but I'd assume that losing any organ would thus make a Forsaken lose the ability associated with the organ, which is where some of those previous observations about the need of a brain I think came from. Of course, I'm not a WoW expert and most of those things (as I mentioned earlier) I think were just theories, possibly not actually written somewhere.
Despite that, as I said before I think that losing a head and still functioning makes perfect sense for undead creatures, mindless undead that don't really know much more than to continue destroying and such.
As for forsaken, I'd guess that if they've got certain functions tied to a certain organ than without that organ remaining they no longer can use the function. For those who are born without certain Organs there is another thing mentioned in that same D&D book that I'll put here:
Quote:Some undead, especially those without the customary organs that grant the ability to sense their environment, sense the world as a great darkness illuminated only by the "light" given off by living creatures. To such an undead, each living creature gives off "light" in a 20-foot radius, illuminating all objects within that radius.
I'd assume that explains why we have Forsaken that can see without eyes and function, having been risen without some of the things they need. To be honest though, I doubt this discussion will get much further. The problem was run into in the thread I quote from about just how much we can actually understand about undeath considering the information explaining it isn't actually 100% given by Blizzard.
Unless a GM says otherwise I rather think that Forsaken don't need to be disassembled into different pieces to finally be rendered useless. Really, I think if removing the head doesn't kill them, they should at least be majorly dysfunctional.
In the RPG game, a forsaken needs to be brought down to zero HP to be considered useless. At that point, you need to keep beating on him or her until he or she is down to negative ten points of health for the necromantic energy to fully disperse, and thus have them completely die. They aren't affected by the raise dead spell again, but are, if done by a shadow priest, able to be resurrected once again.
Beltharean Wrote:In the RPG game, a forsaken needs to be brought down to zero HP to be considered useless. At that point, you need to keep beating on him or her until he or she is down to negative ten points of health for the necromantic energy to fully disperse, and thus have them completely die. They aren't affected by the raise dead spell again, but are, if done by a shadow priest, able to be resurrected once again.
All characters are considered downed at 0 HP and below in D&D. At -10, all but the hardiest (High Con/special feat) characters are rendered lifeless. They're on par with other races in that regard.
Well what of a graven one or necromancer's minions. They are essentially mindless.
If you were fighting a necromancer's minion, I think you would have to just destroy its body until it could not move at all.
So if removing the head kills undead... What about the Headless Horseman?