Dungeon Wight

Appearance:

A wight is a medium humanoid sentient being. They are commonly mistaken as undead because they are bone white, and are lean to the point of looking emaciated or gaunt. They have black hair, which as they age will eventually turn white. Male and female wights are difficult to tell apart as they are almost the same size, and female wights do not have demonstrable breasts, or an easily identified waist to shoulder ratio. Males likewise do not demonstrate greater upper body musculature, nor do they have prominent or bulging genitalia.

Hypermobility is common, and they have sharp fingers and toenails, allowing them to easily navigate in caves and dungeons.

The Wights of the Gygaxian Gyre are a little less gaunt and deathlike than the common wight. Likewise, they have a well established culture, language, religious system, and economic system. They are more of a culture than a dungeon spawn mob. Male wights favor martial traditions, while female wights favor rogue and 'clerical' roles. Both sexes have equal aptitude for working magic.

Attitude and Demeanor:

Wights are adapted to living in the perpetual darkness of a cave or dungeon and accordingly have sharper senses of hearing and smell, but poor eyesight. They are generally cautious and quiet, preferring to shadow their potential prey before taking them out in an ambush.

The average adventurer is not ready to encounter Gygaxian Wights, as they are neither skulks nor sneaks. They certainly count cave rangers among their numbers, but they are more akin to an underground race of elves. They almost never speak to adventurers but rather seek to wound and capture them, dragging them down into the depths of the Gyre where they keep their own city, a reverse image of Terrasquestone above. Feral wights can be found crawling out of tombs, catacombs, and untended basements in Terrasquestone during Dark Nights and Unholy Days, terrorizing locals until they are put down. These very much resemble the more cadaverous version of their reputation.

Abilities and Classes

Dungeon Mage - a common class for Gygaxian Wights, they are excellent magic users with a natural aptitude towards illusion, necromancy, abjuration, and enchantment.

Dungeon Beastmaster - Another common dungeon class, Gygaxian wights summon and control variants of bats, and other creatures native to caves, as well as all the horrors the Gygaxian Gyre can conjure up for them.

Dungeon Ranger - as per the normal ranger class, but aspected for underground

Rogue and Fighter - as per normal

Dungeon Cleric - a Dungeon Cleric is an unusual being. They look and act like a cleric, with religious patterned vestments, tools, and general behavior of their magic. The difference is that the Dungeon Cleric doesn't worship any god, but rather can commune with the dungeon core itself, and the core will do things as the cleric requests, so long as it finds the request acceptable and not violating its internal contracts and commitments. Dungeon Clerics tend to be the leaders of the Gygaxian wights, and the supreme leader is known as the Baadishah of the Gyre and functionally speaks for the dungeon.

Dungeon Lord - what happens when a Wight survives a century or so and gains weapon aptitude and magic ability? Dungeon Lords lead the forces of the Gygaxian Gyre when required, and are the mini-bosses and bosses of the dungeon where sentient foes are required.

Dungeon Champion - a special class where a being or creature is picked by the dungeon core to exist in near-constant contact with it as not just a minion, but a companion to it. The Gyre core always has at least one Wight champion, but usually closer to three, and all have consistently been females, and show dramatic vigor and vitality compared to the average wight.

Religion:

Worship of the Dungeon Core through the hierocratic organization of the Baadisha. Death in the service of the Core is the highest honor, and the most worthy readily expect to be reborn, and rebirth of slain heroic wights is very common. The Baadishah is currently nearly 600 years old and has been brought back eight times. Likewise the Dungeon Lords are centuries old themselves, and the dungeon champion Negnanthi is over a thousand years old herself.

Personality:

Slavic, the Wights are dour and phlegmatic. They live in darkness, commune with a sentient rock, almost all their leadership is female, and they know that if they die well enough, the stone will bring them back to die again. Their food is bland, they are stoic to a fault, and they knowingly accept a long life of slow deliberate suffering under a powerful tyrant, because they have no other choice.

Why are they aggressive when adventurers penetrate their realm? Because it's exciting, it's something to do. Spelunkers have supplies, food, clothing, and the like. If nothing else, each one of a medium humanoid worth of meat for their hunger.

Wights have a diet based around mushrooms, blind cave pigs they call txerria, and a subterranean potato-like gourd they call a Duug. They make a hallucinogenic wine from the mushrooms as well as a gruel, and a heavily salted 'jerky'. The txerria is the foundation of their diet, and they use everything but the squeal when they process them. Surface dwellers who are slain and given the same treatment, but as humanoids are considered inferior protein to txerria, the bodies are typically only used to make wight sausage, wight jerky, or wight souse. The earthy Duug is used primarily to make wight water, a raw white liquor of stunning potency. It is also used as any tuber or gourd would be used.

The Unholy Trinity

Wights do not engage in cannibalism. The dungeon provides.

Wights do not engage in incest. As a matriarchial society based around worshipping a glowing seld-aware rock, they are fairly well organized, and just as many wights are grown from the dungeon itself as are created by natural reproduction, though the dungeon is encouraging the local population to sustain itself. It has other things it wants to do other than resurrect slain wights and birth new ones from its own energy.

Wights do actively engage in rape. When adventurers are wounded and captured, they are brought back to the Wightish City. Those deemed worthy can find themselves exploited as breeding stock. The half-wights who result from these pairings are almost identical to normal wights, but have better vision and cleaner features. Males are just as vigorously used for their seed as the females are used for their ability to bear offspring. Captives deemed not suitable for breeding are evaluated for their ability to be laborers, or if they have a useful skill that can be exploited. These individuals can expect to be maimed to prevent their escape, and to live a life of toil respective to their basic skill. A brewer might have a fairly comfortable life, while a menial laborer will have a short life shoveling feces, feeding txerria, and digging new warrens for the wights. Those with no skill or breeding prospects might get fattened up and then served at a feast reminiscent of a Southern French or Gulf Coast family get-together where a whole hog is butchered as a reason for the family to get together.