Hey Veeky Forums i was wondering if you guys could help me out.
im in a 5e game and our GM has said all our characters origins are based in certain cities, when it was my turn he told me i was in the kingdom of Seelie, which is apparently the city of necromancy, where the government is a bunch of necromancers and the undead cover the streets as public servants like construction workers.
The GM then told us to bring a description of our city and all about it to him next game. AKA he wants us to make the cities for him, no problem, i love player input.
tl;dr was wondering if any of you had any cool ideas for a city run by legal necromancy
The Kingdom of Seelie used to be nothing but a small fishing village near putrid marshes. A mere stop-by for travelers on their way to places of more beauty and wealth. Barely a name on the maps, it was the perfect place for a young wannabe necromancer to settle after his master had been killed by adventurers.
As most wielders of the dark arts, the hearth of the young lad was hardly pure evil, seeing his trade as but a tool and his studies a mere path to greatness. Such outlook usually get twisted over the years until the made-up excuses to justify the sufferings inflicted on others eventually stop being believable even by the necromancer himself.
Still, here, the young man was somehow forced by fate. As he was living near the village as some kind of hermit, laying low while studying what few books he had grabbed from his dead master's collection, Seelie was raided by a warband of gnolls. The defenders of the small settlement were no match for the beastmen and when the monsters they had slained rose up to join back their brothers, the village thought everything lost, until the undead gnolls attacked the living gnolls, throwing chaos into their ranks. Mere marauders, the gnolls were looking for easy loot and meals, not for a full fight.
Most townfolks were grateful for the necromancer's help. Sure, some were full of fear and distrust but, hey... the kids were alive and the undead abominations hadn't tried to murder any human so far. And as long as the marauders might be around, tolerating the wizard and his pets seemed a safe bet.
He did show some gratitude to that : putting the zombies and squelettons to use helped the village rebuild faster. And with a tireless workforce, many additionnal work could be done. Work that would have broken the back of men or mobilized cattle could now be done in less days and without any cost.
Owen Russell
Aesthetically, it would be cool to have the undead wear masks of stone to hide themselves from their old loved ones. And it would say something about how were all the same in death.
For the undead who work as public servants, is it volunteered? Punishment? Or mandatory?
Grayson Clark
After a few winters, the village came to accept the undead gnolls, espacially since those were the ONLY undeads : no villager had been raised, as this had been a sensitive topic from the very start.
Some animals had, though : Cows and horses which died of illness or age would be brought back once stripped of their meat, their strength now usable without pause until the very bones should be grounded. Undead cats proved useful in tracking and eliminating the vermin from the swamp and fields, increasing the food supply and health of all.
Still, the necromancer had his limits. He had been but a bubbling apprentice and was now trying to learn by himself, based on incomplete texts. And his very mind had limits too, unable to control more than a handful of undeads at a time.
When he was seen teaching his dark arts to some children of the village, a deep rift formed among the people. Most were obviously opposed. Sure, the wizard had saved the village and, for this, he was welcomed to stay in good-yet-uneasy friendship. Sure, his pets had been of great help, allowing better harvests while also providing formidable defenses. But that didn't mean he could turn the village's children into his apprentices, losing their souls to the dark arts !! Yet some had come to see necromancy as nothing but the animation of bones into useful tools and so they didn't mind too much the idea of being able to create more of such tools. In the end, it was agreed that only the children whose parents agreed could learn. In the end, only a single child proved to have both the talent and the understanding parents necessary to be trained.
Ryan Anderson
A decade passed, the necromancer and his apprentice grew in power, the number of undeads grew in number and the tales traveled. This attracted three kind of people : - First, adventurers hell bent on killing the "evil wizard that tyranized the village of Seelie" - Second, people wishing to actually benefit from the undead workforce, source of Seelie's wealth. - Third... other necromancers. Often far less frequentable but sometime also far more powerful. Each saw in Seelie something different, who an opportunity and who a threat.
After a few battles between the newcomers, an uneasy peace settled around a "council of eleven" whose members were all necromancers and united by a common vision : To make Seelie a haven where they could, for the first time, study the dark arts in plain sight and freely, without fear of being killed by rightous heros or jealous rivals. A university of some kind where the necromancers could come and exchange their knowledge while putting to use for the benefit of the local population.
The council proved powerful enough to keep most threats at bay and wise enough to advertised itself as a neutral, pacifist power who would welcome all creeds... as long as no wizard or his property (including the undeads) be attacked.
The village grew into a town at an alarming rate, what with the sudden wealth of dozens of workshops where hundreds of undeads provided as much mecanical power as many watermill could have, creating something of a small industrial revolution. And since the council was the main provider of both undead workforce and security, it got a sizeable interest in all ventures, making it very very wealthy.
Said wealth was not hoarded : The old families of the village received their share, rising into something of an aristocracy. The rest of the population received its share too in the forms of various public services born from large infrastructure works made possible by an endless supply of tireless workforce.
Jordan Nguyen
Said supply, however, had its limits.
As said before, no human had been raised so far. Only animals and the occasional monster. This had helped a lot into getting the necromancy accepted by the population as just another legitimate form of magic. But marauding bands had stopped even passing near Seelie for years and the limits of undead animals became quickly clear.
With the ban on human undeads still in effect, the only alternative to get undeads who had actual hands was to find some other, more acceptable humanoids.
Adventurers were hired to find and bring back goblins, kobolds, orcs, gnolls, ogres,... and all manners of humanoid monsters. Preferably alive but this wasn't a necessity. The necromancers had the gold and many a poor fool was ready to cast his luck for this. Over the next ten years, Seelie became similar to a slaver town, with large holding pens accomodating a great variety of creatures who would be killed and animated as needed. More and more people flocked to Seelie and, as the council built up the idea of university, the first generation of "Necrobarons" came to be : talented apprentices who, after years of studies, had mastered enough to, if not animate undeads, at least control a few. They were the taskmasters and sergeants of the town, watching and guiding the undead workforce. They were part of an rising aristocracy that would one day culminates in the sixty-three families of Seelie, the supporting cast around the Undying Throne and its ruling couple.
Robert Hughes
There you go. You can probably build up on that.
Matthew Carter
I read on an RPG blog about an undead city that was essentially a ramshackle mass of ruins, scaffold and eccentric housing dragged across the desert by hoards of undead and slaves (it becomes hard to tell the difference) in search of flesh to reanimate. It would seek out the sites of battles or the corpses of megafauna and all of the strange inhabitants would strip away the meat for their own ends before the 'city' moved on, like a huge carrion beast.
Easton Flores
Hallowfaust is a book all about a necromancer city. You should be able to download it for free just by googling it. I would recommend it.
Some highlights >Built by exiles at the base of a volcano >Ruling class of necromancer >Fear or scare parties are the big means of entertainment >Citizens wear tokens to be out at night. Visitors get different tokens >Anyone caught without a token gets taken by skeleton guards >all the dead are collected for use after appropriate grieving time. You can pay a tax to keep your dead >Any child with magic talent is recruited for training and membership in the ruling class, is seen as a good thing by the populace
Juan Fisher
What happens to the poor, the lower classes, when their jobs are taken by undead and there's no incentive to keep them alive? Are they disposed of or left to fend for themselves? Or perhaps among the rulers the idea of becoming undead is distasteful so they must keep some people around to fuel the numbers of undead workers. Families of servants kept for specialized work and to reproduce and provide undead materials when they pass. Or maybe the poor are forcibly enlisted into the army, fighting at home and abroad to defend their country and upon death they are shipped home to become workers.
