Zombie Grave Robber

Appearance
Purple skinned humanoid clad in a grey adventuring outfit, with blue gloves, boots, a blue bag, and a blue cloak. Their eyes cannot be seen, appearing as black holes on their face.

Background
Adventuring is a tough job, demanding training, bravery, good equipment, and often good luck. As such, only a select few are fit to go forth into monster-infested ruins. Still, the promise of riches is enough to lure many people to try and take a shortcut ; instead of going to the ruins, they instead raid the vast graveyards beyond the lands of the living, hoping to strike it rich by unearthing the grave of a past king or a deceased merchant. Those grave robbers almost never manage to make a profit ; they tend to forget that being the most easily accessible areas, adventurers have emptied most graveyards of all their relics decades ago, making their entire enterprise quite pointless. Those who instead target the graveyards still in use by the living are outright seen with disdain and hatred, for whatever adventuring skills they had could be used to bring back actual relics instead of mucking about in the graves and this behaviour tend to be seen as unhealthy and cowardly.

Most importantly, most grave robbers seem to think that this job is somehow safer than being an adventurer. The vast majority are disappointed when they are struck by Death's curse, their bodies turned into a prison as they are doomed to become the eternal guardians of the very graves they wished to rob.

Tactical analysis
Zombie grave robbers are different from common zombies in the way that they have been cursed relatively recently and as such, their flesh and their gear is not yet rotten to the point of uselessness. Most of them are still alive or at the very least, recently deceased, and as such do not suffer from rigor mortis yet, giving them a level of agility that can easily startle those who expect them to be just like other zombies. Their gear, although often rusted almost to the point of uselessness, has not yet fallen to dust and rags like zombies and allow them to be recognizable.

When a living being enter their territory, zombie grave robbers will be overwhelmed by the lust for blood and charge to attack, like all common zombies. However, due to their still living or very recently dead state, there exist enough of their sanity left for them to mount an intelligent assault. Thus, instead of merely charging in for a melee attack, they'll close distance and then strike. Most of their gear having rusted to uselessness, zombie grave robbers will instead throw their shovels as an improvized weapon. Adventurers should beware of laughing off such assaults ; zombie grave diggers throw their weapons with the accuracy and speed of a still living person and a shovel will kill someone just as dead as a spear, no matter how ridiculous the concept may sound.

A zombie grave robber can be handled given an adventurer stay on the move while facing them ; though intelligent enough to keep their distance and to use their shovel, the blood lust from the curse prevent them from retreating if faced with a disadvantageous situation and they are incapable of leading their shots, always aiming directly at their target. Unfortunately, zombie grave robbers are aware of this weakness and as such, will always attack from within mixed groups, which make them one of the most dangerous enemies one can face in graveyard-type environments ; they will almost always come leading large squads of common zombies and use them as cover, allowing them to snipe at their foes without them being able to strike back and distracting them. This combination is an extremely deadly one and the cause of countless novice adventurers' demise. Crowd control skills are thus vital.

It is, of course, preferable to strike the zombie grave robbers themselves than the zombies they use for cover but one should keep in mind that as their flesh is still relatively intact and that they still wear their cloak and armor. Though their flesh is still easier to destroy than a normal sapient's and their dusty cloak and rusted armor give them limited durability, they will still survive handily strikes that would return normal zombies to the earth. Mixed with their tendency to use other monsters as cover and one may understand why they are difficult to handle.

Generally, adventurers should stay aware of their surroundings and not allow the zombie grave robbers to maneuver them into a position where they can be sniped or cornered by their escorts. Due to their reliance upon other monsters to attack, zombie grave robbers will be easily destroyed and their threat neutralized through the use of piercing weapons like boomerangs or tridents ; the blood lust of the curse will prevent them from realizing their tactic has failed.