Spectral thing

Version 0.13: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

A hideous glowing apparition.

"On the hungry craving wind
My Spectre follows thee behind."
-William Blake, "Broken Love". ca. 1800.

A form of derived undead, spectral things are the phantasmal spirits of slain creatures. Like other undead creations such as zombies or skeletons, spectral things are slower and weaker than the original creatures they were made from and have the standard undead resistances to cold and negative energy. Unlike zombies or skeletons, spectral things retain their original intelligence, their original spellset, can use stairs, come with draining-branded attacks, and take damage normally, meaning they can eventually regenerate.

They are occasionally found in The Crypt, naturally or summoned by a revenant's Ghostly Flames spell. The mid-game unique Nergalle is capable of summoning large numbers of spectral orcs, which will often be armed with reaching-capable polearms.

The player can summon spectral things via the Death Channel spell, though the effect is only temporary. Yredelemnul's Enslave Soul invocation can also give you a single permanent spectral thing that retains all of its former powers.

Spectral things are somewhat less durable than skeletons or zombies, but their increased intelligence, ability to follow you between levels, and ability to heal all help make up for this. Their draining attacks can prove quite useful against enemies that do not resist them. On the other hand, your created spectral servants are only temporary (unless you're using Yredelemnul's invocation, which only allows for a single permanent servant at a time), making some of their benefits less useful in the long run.

As insubstantial beings, they are inherently levitating. They also uniformly see invisible, a power the original creature may not have had.

Identifying Spectral things

Though spectral things will have different stats depending on what they were made from, Crawl currently tends to lump them together, making identification somewhat difficult. In console mode, there are unique tiles for several categories of monster, but there are still possible variations within those categories. Press x and highlight the spectral thing in question to get a better idea of the monster you are dealing with. However, this is not definitive: eg, when an ironbrand convoker dies, it comes back as a "spectral human" and the creature's (still active) spellset is omitted in the description.

Below are all the categories of spectral things in tiles mode:

Bats