Medusa are parasitic Snake Kings.

What if I told you a rumour I heard?

Medusii are not, in fact, snake-haired gorgons, but human limbed snake kings.

Hear me out.
Rat Kings are ditch witch abomination comprised of seething hatred, bitter intelligence and potent magic taking the form of half-score or more rats tethered like the star of chaos around the knot of discord, thus bound and ritualised, a King is born, seven minds become one, in agony and confusion sapience, nay sentience is born and through the center binding magic may flow.
Rat King controls rats, Rat King hates those with hands, Rat King can channel magic.

What, WHAT!, does Rat King have to do with Medusa and her progeny?
A different witch in a different gutter, more tropical perhaps, more humid.
Imagine me seven snakes and one knot, a new binding.

But now, as sentience congeals, hear not the squealing bitter fear of the gutter rat, but the reptile-cold acceptance of a patient hunter.
Watch in horror, the confident control of arrogant predator. Biological survivalism that declared evolution obsolete a millennia past.
Reel back in fear, as seven heads dart in turn, and pause to taste new magic in the air.
Before venom reaches the heart, that medusa-core, a new queen, rips stone-form from the strands of the ether and flexes its new instinct.
Fall back in death, shatter, the first victim, the mother of monsters.

Not a medusa you say? Sure. A medusa wig perhaps, you may joke.
Have you ever seen seven snakes attempt to move in tandem? You haven't and you never will. Perhaps after millennia of smooth undulation, it is time for the snake to feel legs, the queen requires a chariot.

The answer! A human corpse easily acquired in this wild land, nerve toxin stills it, neither dead nor stone.
An eye socket slowly invaded, a skull cap wrenched free, a jerk of psychic linkage and muscular testing, some stumbling steps and now! Now, in mocking defiance of its creator we have a walking talking magic flinging queen of snakes and men- stony gaze and snapping hair. A thrall for a body and a knot for a core, all hail the queen snake, Medusa of the sweating jungle.

This is just a rumour, mind. No man nor snake could look a medusa in the eye and live to tell the tale of what he saw there, behind those lids does one see black glistening scales, or the glazed orbs of a human? Truly though, I cannot envisage a  human of any type that could house a head of snakes and not die to their fickle whims within a chickens fart of cock-crow. 

Clearly it is the snakes that hold sway- if you MUST look a Medusa in the eyes, look with pity for the thrall of the snake queen, and look with awe for the reptilian mind of an alien creature gifted human locomotion, and ask yourself.... will I be granite, or will I be marble?

Farewell stranger, but before you go, can I interest you in this fine mirror,  50% gorgon proof, or your sliver back, that's our guarantee!

Why are none of the undead just smug?

Aside from the not-truly-undead Fallout ghouls, none of the undead seem satisfied with being immortal and free.

Previous posts and some podcasts have talked about peaceable skeleton communities or ecosystems but I feel like if I was a zombie I would kick back, relax, read a few dozen RPG books, play my Steam back-catalog and chuckle at the suckers who have to sleep, eat and face the black abyss of death.

Must be the eternal hunger or something, but aren't the living the ones who are truly trapped, having to eat constantly just to function?
 I know many undead are necromantically bound to serve others, but given 300 years to guard a tomb you could really work on your reasoning skills. Cut a deal, work a trade! poetry, man.
Or like... mine some precious ores? Create fine and intricate artworks. you want to be a gift-shop so good they forget the main attraction.

Horrible happy health potions

If health potions existed in a shitty world they would be the brandy of the rich and the heroin of the poor.

If drunk at full health it makes you warm, contented, swaddled in muffled bliss. This is a place you want to be. As much as possible.
It will heal your rat bites and your barked knuckles, it will salve your soul for an hour or two, and yet your belly remains empty, your muscles waste, your eyes become hollow.
You are free from bodily trauma, but trapped in the rapture of false happiness. Instead, a slow gyre of decay traded for fleeting perfection, initially free but increasingly difficult to obtain. Expensive in many ways, adventurer, there are easier sources of gold than goblinoids and dire beasties.

The lairds, the barony and the courtiers enjoy a healthful punch after supper. Peeled berries, champagne, a spritz of hartflower oil and an aged bottle of '84 health draught. It soothes a gentleman from the corns of his feet to the tips of his ears, brings back the warm memories of summers past. It is a pity the, '84 draught is almost deplete, good clerics are hard to come by and rarely last long, finding fatal aversions to indenture and servitude as a general rule.
Truly a balance must be found between the volumes a man can produce given local ingredients, and the amount that must be expended healing the reticent do-good back to productivity after applying judicious motivation.

Indeed, a man begins to wonder, how much of this fine aperitif is  even consumed on the battlefield, for a fighter must first battle the noble and then the gutter for a simple expedient field dressing.

Perhaps, a man considers, he who controls the draught controls muscle, controls the gutter, controls the noble houses.
It is hard to kill a man who controls the only means of rejuvenation, but it is easy to work for him.

Ok its a hamfisted heroin economy, whatever. Just give me a glass of HP punch and let me on my way. In most games health potions are middling, not too expensive but hard to get, but i assume that is on an adventurer budget which is higher than the average peasant. I do wonder who makes them and how. What if its made of people?