Environment

Special abilities

Fight power 2 | Dark vision 10 | Aura vision 10 | Weapon invulnerability 1 | Vulnerability to silver 1 | Evil essence 1

The rusalka is a restless undead being that arises almost exclusively from the death of a woman connected with betrayal, unhappy love or violence. Most often she is a drowned woman, or a woman who in despair ended her life in the water. Her soul refuses to depart and remains bound to the place of death, where she rises as a being on the border between spirit and body.

Unlike most undead she has an almost human form and can hardly be told apart from a living woman. Daylight does not bother her, and in water she moves with supernatural ease and strength. Because she is held by a personal curse, she cannot be controlled by necromancy or forced into service.

She is driven by a desire for revenge. She lures lone travelers to the water with song, a plea for help or feigned helplessness, and then drags the victim under the surface and drowns them. After a kill she falls for days or weeks into a motionless, sleep-like state until the curse awakens again.

Destroying her body does not free the rusalka. Her soul returns to the Interface, and after a time, sometimes only after months, she appears again at the place of her first awakening, in the body of the first woman she comes across.

Lifting the Curse

A rusalka can truly be freed only by atoning for the cause of her death: most often by burying her remains together with the remains of the one who caused the curse, or by righting the wrong. Rarely, compassion can also help, a reminder of her past life, a gift or a sincere acceptance of her fate, but such an attempt is very dangerous, because a thin line runs between the longing for peace and the urge to kill. Moreover, the one guilty of her death has often become a wraith himself.