A post on G+ about Mummies got me writing this...
I know that Mummies occur all over the world, and result from both intentional and unintentional processes. However, their place in popular culture and in rpgs has pretty much been defined by Egypt and the bandage wrapped monsters produced by Hollywood cinema over the decades. When I think of Mummies that's where my brain goes first, followed shortly by Japanese monks practicing self-mummification (which is just scary) and then bog-men (because I am British and didn't learn about South American mummies until much later than I heard about bog mummies).
So, when thinking about our friend the D&D Mummy, Egypt is where my imagination shoots to first. And when thinking about what to do about Undead in my homebrew world (the one I'll never get written because I spend too much time playing computer games), of course, Mummies get associated with deserts, dervishes and legions of Jackalman soldiers.
In my version of the world, the creation of a mummy is a deliberate act, a process designed to preserve not only a body, but the person themselves. It's cryogenics done primitive style (and hence accidental mummification does not produce mummies). I'm decoupling it slightly from the spiritual journey to the afterlife, from the ka and the ba and the akh. Perhaps the Ka, the animating force, leaves the body upon death, and perhaps the funerary rites allow the Ka to leave the corpse to travel, but these things are temporary states. When the time is right, or perhaps *if* the individual is deemed worthy, the Ka and Ba are reunited in the embalmed body - the Akh retaking the flesh it once inhabited.
As an act of ritual and preservation of the soul as opposed to reanimation of a corpse therefore, a mummy is not simply a creature obsessed with vengeance and getting it's canopic jars back (as pop culture might have it). The mummy possesses most (if not all) of the knowledge of it's previous existence. Where a great general was mummified, the Se-Akh (a dead person made living Akh) of that general is still a great general. Where the mummy was once a cleric, they are still a cleric (assuming that said clerics gods aren't all offended by undead), and so on. I'm definitely thinking more Imhotep from 'The Mummy' than other depictions here.. Note that this leads to some crossover with the Lich, which may bear some thinking about.
So then, I envisage a great desert nation rules by the Twelve Tomb Kings of Stygia (It's Stygia until I come up with something else.. or decide to keep it). These guys and gals are all powerful mummies. The last (subject to the laws of drama) members of a dynasty of kings and queens that ruled here in human form hundreds of years previously, they decided to stay on because they could do a better job than the current mortals could. I'll flesh this out later.. Anyway.. At the top are the Tomb Kings. Beneath them are likely to be all kinds of mummified servants of varying power - the most basic of which will be a standard Monster entry mummy.
Rules-wise, my current ruleset du jour is ACKs, which handily it includes rules for what to do if you're transformed into something else. The example given is even a mummy. Bonus!
Ok, that's egyptian mummies.. what about the rest?
Well, given that ACKs has the transformation rules, it's easy to sort the rules elements out. Perhaps mummies created via different rituals have different strengths and weaknesses - mummies such as the Ice Maiden could be more resistant to fire because they're not 'dry', but perhaps they suffer thawing instead so maybe it doesn't matter..
And the Japanese self-mummies just freak me out. They're probably Liches because they do it to themselves. You've got to be seriously bad ass to do that.. that's gotta take some mental fortitude.
