Skellingtons and undead exist in some universe

good lich alternative

>people start cutting the hands off of corpses
>necromancers just start attaching metal claws to their raised zombies

nice
and maybe cremating bodies just leads to a ton of ghosts and spectres

I don't get it either. Burn the body, scatter the ashes, necromancers have nothing to work with.

And if they can pull together these (heretofore unknown) "smoke knights" and "ash elementals", then they're damn powerful and you've got bigger things to worry about than a zombie army.

At a minimum you're depriving the BBEG of his mook army.

>Undead exist
According to those adventurerer folk, but that lot are right mental. Now hush and let me farm me dirt.

Not all dead have the opportunity to be disposed of properly. Battlegrounds for instance, plague towns, other disasters.

Grave robbing is the least likely place a necromancer can find fodder. In fact animals are a better option nearly all the time, hounds are relatively easy to breed and purchase. Kill them and raise them.

According to traditional belief it did. Sometimes people placed chopped at the feet of the deceased.
Basically many cultures believed that beings of other world including spirits, fae and the dead hate things done wrong and improperly and it wards them off. Man buried that way can't find his way to the world of the living. Bandits or killers would use such methods to stop vengeful dead from haunting them.

>At a minimum you're depriving the BBEG of his mook army.

Which is actually pretty important. Most BBEGs can't singlehandedly take on an army without backup. And the ones that can can only be in one place at a time so while incredibly dangerous on the local scale their ability to be a threat to a whole region is limited.

That mook army is what lets them extend their control to entire kingdoms. Take away the army, and the majority of BBEGs are just slightly more powerful wizards or whatever. There is a reason why amassing the army in the first place is such a big part of their plan.

Massive pyres require a lot of fuel. What if your religion demands specific burial of the dead? You want to help the dead reach afterlife and protect their bodies from sorcerers and necromancers.

*placed chopped head

>Trying this hard to be the contrarian.
Do you not cook meat for fear that raw meat will make you sick?
Wash your hands?
Bug spray?
Yeah, thats what I thought.

Don't care if it's bait, don't be stupid.

This is when the necromancer makes his own corpses.

I don't know if you just phenomonally misunderstood my post, or if you're just dumb.

The point was that magically animated evil skeletons are probably rare enough compared to regular non-animated skeletons that the physical and emotional cost of destroying the bodies of the recently deceased doesn't outweigh the potential damage that an animated skeleton could cause.

Obviously, if we're in a setting where you have a 50% chance to encounter a necromancer every 10 minutes, it might be worth the effort, but in most settings, the number of necromancers encountered by the average peasant in their lifetime hovers around zero.

Undead form from all kinds of ways, including cause of death, place of death, loose ends, and even the condition of the corpse. There could be undead out there that are clouds of ash. I don't know about you, but I think I have better odds of smashing in a skeleton's skull than punching out a cloud of ash.

eh if cremating the bodies stopped them from returning, I think that would make cremation more prevalent
after all magic doesn't exist IRL and still people went and still go to great lengths to protect themselves from evil magic, especially in primitive cultures
C'mon, looking back at what the Egyptians did to their Pharaohs cremation or chopping heads off isn't that bad

> This week, on how its made, we see master necromancer Xaotrax the Unspeakable, Binder of souls create a skeleton warrior from scratch.
> First, he starts with blocks of human bone. Industrial quality, these solid bricks come is sizes that range from cubes a few inches thick to blocks several feet long. To make a skeleton, he will need all sizes.
> For arm and leg bones, a lathe is indispensable. Spinning the boom and carving it down into long shafts, while also alternating the thickess to create the necessary shapes of the natural skeleton.
> Some bones require more work than others. The skull, for example, first starts with carving the jaw. For this curved shape, Xaotrax first carves it as a long flat peice and then soaks it in vineger to leech out the calcium, making the jaw soft and rubbery. This allows the jaw to then be bent and shaped to the skull, its own a week long project of painstakingly filing and carving, to ensure that the jaw fits the skull perfectly. Once the jaw is in place, some simple necromancy allows him to repair the bone back to its original hardness while retaining its now shape.
> After the break, Xaotrax shows us the "hands on" approach to making functional human hands out of leftover bone fragments.

>C'mon, looking back at what the Egyptians did to their Pharaohs cremation or chopping heads off isn't that bad

Cultural differences, yo.

They believed that parceling up the body was necessary so you could check the bags in the afterlife and not get harassed by the TSA jackals. Again, there's a lot of implications about the setting and the beliefs of the people who live in it. Humans on Earth generally view the bodies of their deceased loved ones as more appealing when preserved in one unbroken unit. It would probably take a big spike in the percentage of necromancers to change this.

>emotional cost

What emotional cost? Its a cremation, an entirely normal practice.

And for gods sake, people IRL chopped off heads or buried corpses upside down to stop them coming back to life until the 19th century in many places. If these things actually exist such practices will be vastly more common.

>And for gods sake, people IRL chopped off heads or buried corpses upside down to stop them coming back to life until the 19th century in many places
But they weren't happy about it.

> Blocks several feet long

Kek.
Also, the fuck does he use as a source? Whales and dragons? Pretty sure the source creature would be a more valuable undead if he could actually control it.

>destroying skellingtons
>not using skellingtons and undead as free/low-cost labor force
DISGUSTING

Gentlemen the solution is obvious, we dump the bodies into the deep ocean so they just haunt fishes and stuff

Some settings actually have desecrated corpses making even worse undead.

Take Innistrad for example, where cremated bodies won't rise as rather wimpy skeletons or zombies that can be bludgeoned back to death by the average peasant. There you have to worry about the ghost finding his body is nowhere to be found and he can't enjoy that Blessed Sleep.

In which case you have a burning ghost that roams the countryside making more undead from it's victims.

Gentle Repose.

>local fisherman protest the movement after the growing number of wight strangulations

>dump the bodies into the deep ocean so they just haunt fishes and stuff

>someone hijacks a corpse barge
>players have to track him down and neutralize all the unliving minions he's been accumulating

Not all Necromancers need a physical body to work with. Ghosts, wraiths, shadows; there are all kinds of incorporeal undead that are just a soul called back from beyond.

Making zombies harder to acquire is nice, but it wont stop any Necromancer worth the name.

Do you want Drowned? Because that's how you get Drowned. Seriously these fuckers are under-CRed by at least four points.

They do, whenever possible. Or perform consecrated rites that otherwise invalidate the cadaver for undead raising.
Of course, plenty who die simply don't get these burial rites. Accidents in the wilderness, or simply being unrecovered from battlefields, or any other numerous reasons for your body to not be reclaimed, means there's plenty of fodder for necromancers to pluck at. But not any tended-to graveyards.

Chucking a corpse into water does not make Drowned Ones. Drowned Ones have to actually drown. In case the name somehow did not give it away.

Wouldn't it be better to assume that every proper burial or cremation prevents necromancy? Otherwise what's the point? Practical concerns lie behind real world funerary customs, and if you live in a world with necromancy then you just have a different definition of practical.

That said, I do like the idea of a skull-heavy aesthetic born of respectfully chopping the heads off every corpse. It'd actually look very different to the Warhammer stuff we're used to, because that uses skulls to be badass/gothic/metal/whatever, whereas a world where skulls represent you respecting your dead relatives would have them be symbols of security, wisdom and tradition.

In some settings that just pisses off the spirit of the deceased, and removing the head doesn't always work, again, depending on the setting.

>hexxus
Fucking pollution elementals

I meant something else entirely. But this works too.

Still makes it a must have
If we in real life did it without ever actually having it actually be needed imagine if it actually happens every so often...

> yea you gotta watch out for some of these fly by night funeral priests They don't do all the right things and you can get peoples bodies back... did I ever tell you about when Great Aunt Grizelda show back up 13 years after she died?