Skeleton (monster)
For the item sometimes left behind by butchered or rotting corpses, see skeleton.
| A skeleton compelled to unlife by the exercise of necromancy.
"God save us from the skeleton |
Skeletons are the reanimated bones of once-living creatures and are a type of derived undead. Either way, they are considerably slower, stupider, and clumsier than whatever they were when they were alive. They also cannot heal, but on the flip side they do have undead resistances.
Skeletons may appear in the Dungeon as random monsters or be created by players (or other monsters) through Necromancy or the Invocations of certain gods. Note that hostile skeletons can serve as a "preview" of upcoming monsters: since they're weaker than the original, the skeletal version of a monster will often show up a level or two before the live version.
As servants, skeletons are useful for characters who need meat shields (so to speak). Zombies may be more durable, but skeletons let you get both minion and meat from the same corpse: using Animate Skeleton on a whole corpse will leave the chunks behind, or you can animate a skeleton left behind from butchering. (The former is more reliable, as butchering doesn't always leave a skeleton.) Of course, only corpses with internal skeletons can be raised in this manner -- various types of monsters, such as insects or worms, can only be made into zombies.
A newly-animated skeleton will sometimes wield weapons or armor on the tile it was animated on (usually their old equipment). This is your only chance to equip them, as they won't pick anything up or wield/wear new items. If they should be destroyed later on, you can get this gear back.
Skeletons created through the player's Necromancy are temporary and will eventually crumble to dust on their own, but using Yredelemnul's Animate Remains ability creates skeletons that will persist until they are destroyed. Additionally, skeletons are unable to use stairs, but you can lure monsters up or down stairs to where your thralls are.
Identifying Skeletons
Different monsters will leave behind skeletons with differing stats, but Crawl tends to lump them all together, making identifying them at a glance difficult. Console mode will display skeletons as either z or Z, depending on their size. Tiles mode provides different tiles for several different kinds of skeletons, but there are still many different monsters that fall under each type. In any case, if you want to find out exactly what you'll be fighting, simply hit x and highlight the skeleton in question.
Below are all the categories of skeletons in tiles mode:
Fish
Humanoids (small)
Humanoids (medium)
Humanoids (large)
Lizards
Quadrupeds (small)
Quadrupeds (large)
Quadrupeds (winged)
