Dungeons and Dragons Lore: Wight

i've always loved the idea of white walkers from G.O.T. but they were always abit too tame. not quite the complete personification of "winter's al-lIve now boy, it's gotten up, its walking around & it isn't content that you freaze to death... oh thats too go, thats a lesser winter spirit. no this winter has a blade, one made of jagged ice & it wont be contented untill it draggs yuh guts out with ih!?!?" frantically jabs at a stomach that cold fire is better, breathing it and throwing it around. maybe creating lesser wightes out of the people it life sucks to death. and ofcourse raising the dead like it's nothing. putting out fires. and maybe a powerfull hypnotic stare that pulls you towards it, making you defenceless to get life sucked & whitified. with a perticular prefrence for leeching children. and it has to be unaturally tall and lanky for some strange reason, and it has to have a supernatural ability to move unslowed by snow. (because everything is slowed down by snow somewhat.) and maybe an ability to make it invisible to you and always able to find you if it touches you. so you could have people pend in like cattle, slowly being leeched into wightdoom by "farmers" they can't even see. and that roar of thousands of whites on the horrizon unseen, just because they detect life in the distance. sending chills down the spines of everyone in the village... but where can they go? it's "long... cold... fridged... dread... forsaken... winter... yes boy, the gods are asleep, hibernating... even the winter ones, no one can answer your prayers. no one's listening but "them"... because now they are awake, when the gods sleep." they have to stay, huddling together, trying to stop the well from freazing over. i loved the lore here on this, that wights are set to perma rage... they're not sucidal, just angry, at all life, all the time, for being alive, "because they're evuwl". >XD and they're photophobic too, so you could use magically captured sun light to lock them away in caged up camps in a evil army... pictures a death knight walking past a bunch of whites playing cards causally, then a dark paladin & they're all against the cage bars in a flash hissing and roaring, another death knight and they're right back to playing cards like nothing happened XD hmm maybe a wight ancient white dragon that has a leeching thus wight making breath weapon that wants to get revenge on the hero who slayed it thousands of years ago, who happened to found the local kingdom. but up untill then it was frozen in a lake.

So it's a self actualized zombie with some spells basically.

Vecana as a Wight :D ?

Still one of my favorite corporeal undead to this day (been in the hobby since I was 14 back in 1995, but I have always loved undead and Necromancy since I read a lot of Edgar Allen Poe and countless horror stories - especially ghost stories - as a kid). In terms of my favorite corporeal undead, Wights are beaten only by Death Knights and Liches (both equally favored despite my love of the Wizard class and magic in general).

Thanks for the great video!

I agree, Wights are much more fitting as singular powerful sentient undead rather than some kind of slightly stronger zombie.

is that an NZ accent i detect? perception check

I'm not feeling the new logo :(

Norway!? Vikings Untie! Vikings were never good at spelling. Unite! :D Just kidding to any fellow Vikings out there.

I prefer "Dragon Wight" to "Wight Dragon," especially when context doesn't distinguish it from a "White Dragon."

In AD&D undead campaigns: Wights, the underrated bane of life, and as such more dangerous than specters and vampires. A single ghoulish looking creature approaches? The veterans laugh, the one paladin turns to his party and says "Stay here, I will put this one to rest alone." Then, the party in their horror discovers that is no ghoul and jumps in to help the distressed paladin.

Wights: Undead self loathing bullies who hate the living for being alive, Ghosts: Poor Chap who didn't get buried correctly and needs to be corrected, Zombies: some poor sod who got killed by some undead dude to become mindless undead dudes, Vampires: Gothy sad dudes who got undead via drinking blood of other undead dudes( or Alchemy) super smart and cunning, Liches: Wizards who becomes super bad powerful undead dudes because the Raven Queen is a scary bitch, Skeletons: WHAT HOW DO THEY EVEN MOVE? Orcus king of undead dudes, Vecna: Undead Dude God of spoopy stuff. Okay I think I got everything airtight now

Wights in DnD is based on the Norse Draugr. Here in Scandinavia we also call them Afterganger or gengångare. meaning a dead person that returns.

I like your new intro. :)

Troglowight!

I just remembered a major pain wight couple I had in a campaign. They were a married couple, serial killers in life. They were killed by a mob burning them in their home. When they returned, Orcus agreed to their plea... they are to come back and come back pretty. They were wights but looked like normal lovely people. Only gouging out an eye would reveal the glowing hate orb behind it. Only cutting them would reveal their undead nature. They, in that campaign, were a well-off married couple that hired undead killers. When adventurers weren't around, they would drain and animate townsfolk and vagabonds. They had permanent proclamations of rewards for the killing of undeads... undeads they created but did not admit to. They delighted in killing their victims and watching their victims either die again or kill others. Their serial-killer business savvy kept them rich. My players were veterans, and figured out how the plague of the undead kept spawning missions for them and ended up killing their benifactors. The lone player with the evil character argued it as a cash cow, but he was out-voted.

my favorite monster!

in game of thrones . The wights are the mindless corps with make up the army of the dead .The withe walkers are the ice demons who control the wights

Borderline personality disorder, lol.

I like to think that wights represent negativity with the illness of the human body

I love wights.. zealously twisted people, the mentally I'll man unlocked, the real crazy man comes out instead of the friendly crazy dude

Nice vid kiwi! Love Wights as a way to knock a player with hubris down a peg or two 😉

"Cold be hand and heart and bone,

and cold be sleep under stone:

never more to wake on stony bed,

never, 'til the Sun fails and the Moon is dead.

In the black wind the stars shall die,

and still on gold here let them lie

'til the dark lord lifts his hand

over dead sea and withered land."

Lava Wights... because being a life draining, intelligent undead wasn't scary enough. They had to set it on fire, too!

Undead Taylor Swift = wight girl?

Was it the... "Wight Box Set"? 😏😄

LoTR wights are basically generic skeleton enemies though... Like a midpoint between Liches and skeletons, and technically they are possessed corpses (possessed by evil spirits), not what we typically imagine when we say undead.

Most of the time "undead" means a spell animates the corpse, but LoTR wights are, technically, more akin to golems then undead.

A Fallen Knight, bitter that he had to bury all of this children before His Time.

My players are going up against the Hunt Lords from Noanor's Hold. This video inspired me to make each one a different kind of wight!

This is great.

One snippet in old monster descriptions if the wight I liked was when it said that their name is an ancient name for man. So much potential in a little snippet of a monster still calling itself human.

Anti-Necromancy is code for Anti-Wight

So wights are basically angry old men?

Create undead at 8th level isn’t difficult in necromancy. Compared to how hard it is to create shadows or ghosts with necromancy.

.... Introduced, of course, in the Wight Box

I've wanted to know, do most undead continue to decompose after being resurrected? Like, in art they always seem to look moderately decomposed, despite the fact that they were usually raised directly after dying and so would look relatively similar to how they did when they were alive. Perhaps the necrotic energy that animates them rapidly decomposes their body to get it to have that sort of appearance. Otherwise, perhaps the energy serves as a sort of repellant to the microbes and carrion feeders that would otherwise feed on the corpse during natural decomposition. Could bacteria even survive inside an undead long enough to feed on it, or would the necrotic energy suffusing the whole body just kill them immediately? Of course, they'd all have to drain their stomachs immediately if they didn't want the stomach acid inside of them to start eating away at their torso. I don't know, I just think these are some interesting questions that it would be nice to have answers to when running these creatures.

Makes me wonder what would happen if a Wight were to fall into the River Styx.

Wights are from England :)

Does anyone have a link to the story that AJ tells about the norwegian wight and the farmer?

there is just something so satisfying about fighting and killing undead.

Oh how did this one get past me ? I watch every AJ video repeatedly. Kinda reminds me of the Hobbit audiobook I can relisten to it many nights in a row. I heard Abraham Lincoln was the same way reading the same book over and over.

Wights are called Draugr in Norway

A Troglowight!

You should do a video on an undead distopia,with a lich-King & his undead army.

Now I'm gonna bring back my Gibbering Mouther Wight!!! MUAHAHAHAHA

An undead white dragon. A white wight dragon. Or a wight white dragon?

Wight white dragons hate bright light, some wight whites might have darksight and favor the night. Try not to engage in a fight for fear of a white wight's bite that close on you tight. You'd be right in thinking they'd give you a fright.

I took a middle way when using a wight to start an undead problem. A wight is able to raise other wights occasionally they find someone evil enough, but typically a zombie rises. This lets me scale up the threat as needed while also providing lots of zombie splat.

If we were to allow the undead to participate in democracy, would we be giving them the wight to vote?

uyi