Mellow Gold
When the Monster is Also the Treasure
Death masks made of gold are found throughout Java. Bodies of dead important people were buried wearing them. Our current understanding is that people place these masks on dead bodies to prevent their souls from getting out and haunting the living. Gold must either prevent or capture spirits. I’m going with capture.
There were at least three form variations. They don’t seem to follow a linear evolution, so maybe each form is used according to the deceased family’s wealth. Simple golden eye cover as the cheapest option, followed by loose patches that also covers mouth and nose, then the full face golden mask as the most expensive.
Many of these specimens are taken across Amer*ca. The few that are still in Indonesia are, for the most part, in private collections. One full mask is even stolen from a museum in 2010! To this day, the majority of Javanese people don’t even know about these masks. Our history classes never mentioned them.
Imagine if these masks were imprinted with the souls of the body they covered. As the souls try to depart, the conductive gold captured their image like a spiritual version of photograph. The original body may rot, but their soul is copied within the metal. A golden undead.
Gold Experience
Let’s say that there exist a full mask that covers the entire body, not only the face. The body’s ventral side of course, as if you take the upper half of a Chinese jade burial suit. Because it’s been infused with a soul, the golden half-suit is able to wake up and walk. Let’s call them Mellow Gold.1
I imagine they look like Zarab from Shin Ultraman, just made of gold and has human face. Hey, it’s the proven TSR method of creating new D&D monster from Ultraman alien!
Put this entity in the central setpiece room of your dungeon. Suddenly you have a boss that’s also the main treasure. Dealing with a (possibly) murderous undead while also trying to carry them back to town is a natural open-ended puzzle. Every table must have different solutions.
I can’t even give any solution because how do you even deal with this? You can cleave Mellow Gold but the pieces can still move, maybe even fuse back. Melting them is the same: the printed soul within the gold material is unaffected. Even if you mint the melted gold into coins, now you have a pile of ensouled coins that can still move as one.
I’d say exorcism wouldn’t work either, because the gold is already exposed with soul like a film negative is with a picture. It has altered the medium irreversibly. At best you can only banish the whole Mellow Gold away. Destroying them with turn undead will also disintegrate the gold, like transmuting it into lead. Fact is, anything you do to destroy this undead will also destroy the treasure you wanted to bring home.2
Since they’re as much a character as anyone, violence might not be the answer.
Love over Gold
A dead person buried with a golden half-suit must have obtained such wealth by unethical means. Nobility, merchant, warlord, and the likes. In death, the wealth that they hoarded outlive them. Exposed to their escaping soul. Their soul’s image forever burned upon the gold.
Mellow Gold is an ultimate denial of wealth to the masses. A humanoid gold sheet possessed by a dead tyrant, forever unclaimable unless someone finds a way to separate the soul from the gold. Like separating the artist from the art. Cherry on top is that they’re a byproduct of burial rites. An unintended entity.
Without lungs nor vocal cords, they can speak telepathically to those who can Speak with Dead. Otherwise just try to read their lip movement, or use sign language, or get them to write.
Hearing and vision is possible, because gold can feel vibrations and absorb light. Their vision is without yellow/gold color since that’s the spectrum that gets reflected.3 Their blank eyes don’t blink.
They feel pressure but they don’t feel pain. At first they thought they can still feel pain, and that manifests as real pain in their mind. With practice, they can ignore the instict.
As a copy, they mimic the original soul’s personality and demeanor. They think they’ve turn immortal. They don’t even know that they’re a copy. Pointing this out will insult their huge ego, most probably.
When someone shines a light directly in the darkness of their tomb, it triggers their awakening. Mellow Gold experiences a continuous memory from the moment the original soul died. Even if centuries has passed from the original death, there is no perceivable gap for them.
Concrete and Gold
Because their palms are on the convex side, a direct punch from their fist must feel like being hit by a flanged mace. The curled hollow concave side is, by all intensive porpoises, spiky.
Attempting to crush or cut their body feels like striking bronze plate.4 Since they’re made of gold, annealing5 will soften their body significantly until someone can forcefully bend them with bare hand.
Other than those, their capabilities are identical to the original body. If the dead person was a witch, then they can also do witchy stuff. But spellcasting might not work because they’re mute.
Neon Golden
Multiple exposure is possible. A single gold mask-suit can imprint more than one soul. Result is guaranteed to be jumbled. They merge together into one personality. Might be a patchwork or a blend or anything in-between.
Maybe, if you do enough exposure, the amalgamated souls cease to exist discretely? Or turn into a legion of collective consciousness. A single Mellow Gold hell-bent on being exposed to everyone’s soul is a walking Human Instrumentality Project.
Enveloping a living person works similarly to possession, except it’s purely physical. Symbiosis is possible if the possessed person does it willingly or shares the same goal.6 Treat it like wearing a full harness of plate armor, but only on the front side. Killing the user will just expose their soul to the gold.
Chop a Mellow Gold up limb to limb like Exodia and make the pieces possess more than one person. (Each piece is treated like an armor.) Instant long-range coordination is now possible even if the party splits.
I’m sure there are many more creative uses of a Mellow Gold. Their properties as noble metal and photography analogue is ripe for ideas.
Gold & Platinum
Bonus! For the eye cover- and face patches-type Javanese burial masks, you can use them on other undead as accessories. Sprinkle some spice to the usual boring corpse description.
If your party has necromancers, have them wear it as fashion statement. Maybe those are also components spent for the Animate Dead spell.
Stay Gold
Your encounter a living golden suit awakened by light. What do you do?
I have been informed that this is the name of a Californian ganja.
You can also dissolve them in aqua regia. Pocket-sized Mellow Gold! (Mellow Red?)
Yellow blindness is impossible in normal human from the way our retina is constructed. The closest we can get is blue-yellow blindness, but Mellow Golds can still see blue.
Bronze and gold have similar hardness. Close enough anyway, only a .5 difference in Mohs scale.
Heating and then cooling to reduce a metal’s hardness.
There was once a female Mellow Gold possessing a top male conqueror. To satisfy her sexual urges, he must bottom in her stead.