Making a Dracoghast. What do?

[Brendanicus]

Everybody knows the beauty of the dacolich, that deadly union of two common BBEG's. However, my girlfriend and I are working on a one-shot together, and we want to have a dragon as the boss. As a twist, we wanted the dragon to be undead. The party will be 6 players of levels 5 or 6.

As Dracoghast would make an awesome, challenging fight, as players would have to contend with potential paralysis with each of its many blows. Furthermore, they'd have to contend with potential save penalties from Stench and Frightening Presence. I can picture the fight opening with the dracoghast using Flyby Attack to bypass the party's front lines and peg the wizard with paralysis. Utter chaos ensues.

Only problem is that there are no stats for non-humanoid ghasts. How would one go abut statting such a beast? Should I tone it down to a Dracoghoul?

[WhamBamSam]

The Dracolich template is honestly more like a ghast/ghoul template when you look at what it actually does. Dracolichdom is much, much more attractive to Dragon varieties that don't cast. The Dracolich version of Paralyzing Touch works as you're describing, (in fact, it makes all physical attacks force a save against paralysis, so you could use a bow to convey paralysis to the back line if you were so inclined),

A fight I'm personally fond of is to surround the Dracolich with other Dragon corpses, then bury their phylactery ~60-65 ft below surrounded by protective magic and things. When they break one body, the dracolich flits to another one until they find a way of getting to and breaking the phylactery. It's about as nasty as pure melee encounters get in 3.5.

[OldTrees1]

As DM, pretend the Gravetouched Ghoul template[libris mortis] can be applied to dragons


Special Attacks: A gravetouched ghoul retains all the special attacks of the base creature and gains those described below. Saves have a DC of 10 + 1/2 the gravetouched ghoul's HD gravetouched ghoul's Cha modifier unless otherwise noted.

...

Paralysis (Ex): Victims hit by a gravetouched ghoul's bite or claw attack must make a successful Fortitude save or be paralyzed for 1d4+1 rounds. Elves have immunity to this paralysis.

[DrMotives]

Dragon Magazine Anthology also has ghoul & ghast templates. I think they can only be applied to humanoids & monstrous humanoids, but of course you're the DM, so invoke Rule #1 and do it. As is, those templates oddly require more HD than the MM entry for ghouls and ghasts, so a bit of editing them to make sense is in order.

[Inevitability]

Taking a dragon and giving it levels in the Ghoul Template Class (Libris Mortis, page 35) should do the trick.

[atemu1234]

Taking a dragon and giving it levels in the Ghoul Template Class (Libris Mortis, page 35) should do the trick.

Can't template classes only be taken by the creatures to which they were originally applicable?

[OldTrees1]

Can't template classes only be taken by the creatures to which they were originally applicable?

The OP is a DM.

But I think the Gravetouched Ghoul template from the same book is a better choice.