Wight
Wights are intelligent undead spawned through inescapable cycles of spite. This spite might come from their own malevolent will in life, or can be instilled by necromantic rituals, typically involving the desecration of burial sites. Wights usually haunt burial grounds, catacombs, or other places of the dead. Their hunger is targeted toward the living—those whose pumping hearts and ruddy warmth inspire visceral hatred.
Ecology
As many types of wights exist as types of people from which they might be created. Hulking brutes, skittering sneaks, and cunning tinkers all make for different wights with different niches to fill. The environment, too, plays a part in determining a wight's special abilities and defenses. Frost wights, for instance, can be found in parts of the world where exposure is a common end and the resentment of being left alone in the wild is a common source of spite. Durable and sustained by void energy, wights can last in harsh environments without decaying the way some lesser undead do.Threat
A single wight can wreak significant havoc if it is compelled to rise from its tomb. Because creatures slain under a wight's curse can become wights as well, all it takes is a single wight and a handful of unlucky graveyard visitors to create a veritable horde of these undead. Thus, canny priests and adventurers know that the best solution to a wight problem is swift and total eradication. Care must be taken, though, to destroy wight spawn before attempting to destroy the parent wight, for spawn without a master gain the ability to create spawn of their own.Types of Wights
Cairn Wight
Jealous guardians of tombs, barrows, and sepulchers, cairn wights usually spawn from necromantic rituals. For those mortals who cannot abide the thought of separation from their earthly possessions, the undead existence offered by transformation into a cairn wight can be tempting. Perhaps as frequently, particularly avaricious and wealthy royalty or merchants seek out victims to transform into cairn wights to guard their precious wealth for all time. Only in the rarest instances is the greed of a mortal strong enough to spontaneously transform them into a cairn wight without a dark ritual or the intercession of a powerful divine being. On those occasions, however, the resultant wight exhibits unmatched viciousness and likely owns rare treasure indeed. As guardians of material possessions, cairn wights are supernaturally bound to the armaments they wore during the ritual used to create them. They can spread their necromantic powers into the weapons they wield. A slash from a cairn wight's sword channels life from the victim into the wight.
Geographic Distribution
