How do you like your undead?

I treat undeath in my setting as a gift. Then again one of the only two human kingdoms I have is ruled by liches with the undead protecting that kingdom.

My favorite type of undead is the Revenant. Someone so stubborn/loyal/determined in life that they just got back up after dying. They're mostly the same person, but tend to become very goal oriented and stop at nothing to accomplish these tasks because they no longer need to. Once they complete everything, they either continue to hang around because they want to, or willingly go back to the grave.

In the setting I'm working on they're practically a race of their own.

Mexican. They come to the world of the living from time to time for some down time with family and old friends, eat a shit ton of delicious food and just chill for a couple of days. Comfy as fuck.

My man.

Utterly Fucking Fabulous, with a strong dash of Body Horror thrown in.

I like revenants who don't retain their former selves, rather people who clung to life and gained unnatural power by burning every last ounce of their self but their undying vengeance - sort of like Asura's Wrath, when Asura goes apeshit.

Dark Souls type. Look like normal people who regenerate some time after taking fatal damage. Start to deteriorate physically and mentally as they lose their will to persist.

INFERNO COP

youtu.be/gy0E-1MD0bw

>Dash of BH
>Post Dio, a man who slaps together man and animal and only stops when he is reduced to head

But not before successfully killing the main character.

Seriously though, holy shit Dio won as just a severed head.

Depends on setting.

If intelligent, eventually bored, and therefore very angry and curious. Can't taste, can't feel, can't sleep. Imagine if you were in that state; you'd genocide an entire kingdom for a decent hamburger. Vampires are really fun for the first 300 years, but after that their taste/feel drops off. Liches are perpetually angry and only find satisfaction in high magic. You won't get an intelligent undead with reason or logic, but you can manipulate them with curiosity.

If mindless, they just go around trying to eliminate life as much as they can. Their very existence kills off plants, where they walk grass won't grown for decades. That's their ultimate mission, to make everything around them lifeless. Intelligent undead go above this baseline instinct to achieve bigger things, but still taint all living things around them.

Whatever makes the "Good-aligned vegan vampire" and "Good-aligned necromancer industrial revolution" memes fall flat on their faces.
Let monsters be monsters, not everything has to be just misunderstood.

I like them how I like my orcs, demons and halflings:
Out of my fucking setting.

Spooky murderclowns with twisted sense of humour involving self-loathing and evil satire. They need to be goofy, addicted to calcium derivates, and rattle their bones like xylophones. My last lich was a stand-up comedian

This is relevant to my interests. I don't think I've seen any sort of friendly undead, aside from The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy; and I never watched Warm Bodies due to the implied sappiness.

I need this

Dio is the pinnacle of Undead. Nigh unkillable, Cunning, ruthless, and knew how to use his power. He's shown to actually put effort into Training himself. He doesn't take his Undead status for granted, and utilizes it to great effect.

My bad, I meant to say enough body horror to look like the prop room of a Cronenberg film after an earthquake.

Any undead that gets laser eyes as a racial trait gets points in my book.

I really enjoy goofy skeleton undead. Funny guys using bone puns, commenting on people so skinny they might as well be skeletons, so on and so forth. Skullmageddon from Double Dragon Neon would be the best drinking buddy, I swear.

That being said, most comedy comes from a dark place. Look at all the drug abuse and emotional pain SNL cast members have had in the past. Makes you wonder, then, why a skeleton would be so funny. After all, they're dealing with a loss of loved ones, the loss of most of their senses, and being freakish outcasts. I bet, deep down inside, those goofy skeletons aren't so goofy. Catch my drift?

>undead that gets laser eyes as a racial trait

WHY IS THIS NOT A THING?

It is a thing user. Dio discovered it, because the bastard is a genius and one of the best villains around. I'd honestly like to see him go toe to toe with a Pillar Man.

Mexican undead are the friendliest. Dia de muertos is actually a pretty chill holiday, it's all about remembering the dead and celebrating their lives, but also about laughing at both death and the dead. And, above all, about reminding yourself that death is innevitable, so you might as well enjoy life. A common day of the dead gift is a sugar skull with your name on it.

As I said, the flavor of the holiday is basically dead get a free day from whatever afterlife they live in, come and chill with family and friends, eat their favorite foods from when they lived and leave until next year. In popular culture, they act exactly as they did while living, and dress more or less in the same way. Except they look way spookier now. Other than being skeletons, nothing really scary about them.

No I mean setting wise. This is fucking awesome.

Also pretty sure that RAW the Pillar Men would just eat him by touching him since he doesn't have Hamon.

Technically it's blood projected at high enough pressure to slice shit up, a la water-jet machines

Two words:
> OVER JUSTICE!

Replace 'skeletons' with 'clowns' and you might catch on to something.

Also, Skeletor has the best exits.

I like the idea of a lich who became undead purely because he got so wrapped up in his magic studies he simply didn't have time to die. Probably doesn't even realize he's an undead abomination. Probably tossed his phylactery into a shoebox because he just can't be arsed to step away from his books long enough to make a proper container for his immortal soul. Probably made it just so he'd have a place to put it, damn thing kept slipping out.

in my setting there are different ways one can become undead

>Vampires
Vampires are huge assholes, but to be a successful vampire you kind of have to be. They can still die if they are wounded and drained to where they cannot regenerate.

>Lichborn
Cursed by witchcraft into becoming undead. It really sucks and they hate it. They band together usually and a large group of them serve as mercenaries. They can still be killed.

>Worshipers of the Dead Queen
Those who worship her are granted life after death should they choose it. There is a lot more degradation that occurs over time with this route, but they are also completely immortal, unlike the others.

>Good old fashioned necromancy
This just animates the dead. Good for spooping people but they are mindless and are only as useful as the necromancer cares to have them be. If you destroy them they can be reanimated again, though the necromancer might get tired or bored after a while.

All undead feed on refined Magical Energy that can be extracted from the enviroment or other living things. If none can be procured they simple stop working until some can be found

>Zombies and skeletons
"Flesh" golems moving around doing simple tasks asked by their master. They will go after the living because they detect magic on them but they have no way to extract it. If you are creative enough and know a thing or two about crafts you can mix and match corpses and bones to customize your own servants. As long as it was a living animal at some point it goes

>Wraith
Incorporeal intelligent undead. Can refine their own magic. They hunt by "debuffing" their prey until it dies

>Poltergeist
Wraiths who are bound to physical objects. They stay lethargic until prey comes around, then proceed to hit them with said objects. Might be a whole house, a suit of armor, a wagon, etc

>Revenant
"Martial" liches. Warriors who refused to die and kept on existing and gained some magic abilities. They are as self sufficient as Wraiths. Their own bodies are their "phylacteries" and have to be completely destroyed relatively quickly because they regenerate very fast

>Lich
Mages of of incredible power who either acquired this form by the means of a ritual (True Liches) or their sheer magical energy corroded their bodies away (Unawares)

Both Revenants and Liches require a high intake of magical energy so by rule of thumb the areas where they live tend to be desolate and devoid of life. They can choose not to feed on the magic of the enviroment but then they have to feed on living things unless alternative methods are used

>Vampires
They are monsters who feed on the living for their magical energy. But they are Fey, not undead. They aren't all evil consuming monsters, but no one is going to give you shit for shooting first and asking questions later. You can't become one.

>leaving the thread and hitting the hide-button

In my setting, an undead is never the same "person" as the living body's original occupant. The soul is a thing, and the original has fucked off. What takes up residence in the undead is usually some lesser spirit which is then imprinted with the memories of the body, ranging from things that have basic motor function but no real cognitive powers to things which are either fully aware of what they are to things utterly convinced they're the person who once lived in that particular body.

Most undead will slowly regress from their starting state to the "mostly mindless, hostile towards living things" mode zombies and the like attain, only holding on to one or two basic concepts from the original occupant's mind and everything else just comes from muscle memory. This process can be staved off by keeping your undead focused and avoiding thoughts on entropy or the utter pointlessness of being the clone of a dead guy who just does things because the inescapable nothingness they're born from has allowed it for a time.

Hilarious results occur if you manage to discover a means to bring a dead man's soul back to its body in a living state.

Yeah. For all his power, Dio simply cannot beat one of the pillar man. None of the wounds Dio can inflict on them would be lethal, and if they touch him at all he loses.

I like my undead to be wrong in the spiritual sense of the word, a sort of thing that absolutely shouldn't exist. Nonsapient undead are innately antithetical to life unless actively controlled, and sapient undead slowly but surely fall into madness no matter how good a person they were at life. The best people might be able to hold on to who they were for a while, but eventually they'll become a caricature of their former selves, if there's anything left at all.

Fuck necromancy supercomputers and skeleton farmers

I like how Dank Souls did it. You can range from a totally lucid person that looks and acts human, a depraved peice of beef jerky still trying to cling to sanity, or a murderous unthinking machine that's had his last drop of humanity squeezed out and has essentially become an animal that's just a bit more clever.

>Lichborn
rename them to wights and you bought me

Well, you can tie a soul of a dead man back to his decaying carcass and use said soul as the fuel... or, which is much more bothersome but won't earn you bad karma, make a magic brain simulacra and steal energy from elementals. Or pull the soul out of the Soul Ocean and through a really difficult ritual grant it will and conciousness it had in life, tie it to body and give energy - bam, good ol' friend is back. Still a servant to your will as a necromantic product, but can resist, and you won't push a friend around, right?
Legal undead are expensive. Illegal bone puppets... Dirty deeds done dirt cheap.

You forget about Dio's range and his ability to freeze anyone he touches.

A Non-perfect pillarman could touch Dio sure, but Dio would freeze all of those cells if he knew about their ability, and lets be honest, Dio wouldn't rush head long into a fight against these things without sending mooks to test them first.

His Ripper Eyes can cut through stone just fine, and the German cyborg was able to rip hunks off of Kars, I don't remember if any of the pillarmen ever re-attach body parts. So Dio could reasonably handle a pillarman at a distance and even deal with their ability to harm him upclose.

Am I the only one seriously dissappointed in the fact that none of the vampires that the pillarmen make for their army display ANY of Dio's abilities?

I am willing to bet that is all the pillarmen know about vampires, that they are slightly stronger than humans and can't use Hamon. That makes things scary for them one on one.

If they are dumb enough to underestimate Dio and think he is just a vampire and not the magnificent bastard that he is, I think he could quickly dispatch one of them if they were alone. He could easily handle Santana, simply by dismemberment and freezing. Then chucking the guy into the sunlight from a dark alcove, or more likely having a ghoul-mook do the actual touching.

Also for reference, for Dio to freeze Van Dire (a very skilled Hamon user) solid, it only took a fraction of a second and he only had to be touching his shoes. So it appears Dio doesn't need skin contact to freeze someone.

Also it wasn't a Jojo that cut his head off, Dio cut his own head off after Jojo managed to sneak some Hamon into his body.

It is entirely possible that Dio may be able to freeze things solid if he was using a weapon so long as the weapon touched it.

So pretty much if Dio had been a vampire longer than a couple months before having to decapitate himself, it is entirely possible he could have been a major problem for the average pillarman. Also, if he had taken a body that wasn't packed to the gills with Hamon like Johnathan's and had been able to re-infect it with his vampiric traits.

Imagine Dio with 100-200 years more of silent progress showing up and taking on the Pillarmen because he wants to see what the perfect mask does to a vampire.

They would be lucky to make it out of Rome against his army of Mancats.

Araki says canonically, A Piller Man shits all over Vamp!Dio.

The tables then turn just as hard once Stands come into the picture.

Cheerful. Oh sure you're bummed out for a while because all your fleshy bits are decaying or gone, but then you realize the whole existential dread of death and the afterlife is already behind you and you don't have to worry about that shit anymore

>three species of lich exist
>liches of knowledge, liches of pleasure, and liches of power
>never hunt a knowliche on its home turf, never fight a power liche one on one, and never ever dance with a pleasure liche by the pale moonlight.

>those non-native mortals who die while travelling through the innerplanes often end up becoming trapped in that element plane and reemerging as one of the elemental undead, such as the sentient and cultured mole-ghouls or "true" ghouls of Earth, Drownies of Water, wendingos of Ice, Skeleton-Jellies of Ooze, or the ravenous and mindless ghosts and wraiths of flame, smoke and air.

I like the typical undead tiers.
Zombies and skeletons? Mindless garbage. Vampires and liches? Powerful immortal beings who have long since lost their sympathy for the living.
Revenants are tied to pure wrathful revenge, ghosts have unfinished business that they cannot let go, and so on.
I'd say all undead should be unnatural, though. If it's appealing, the immediate question is why doesn't everyone become undead.

Revenants in various states of decay (do they decay even further or they are frozen in a certain state depends) that became so through various means (accidental or not), and have to deal with it.

that's cool

Dio's creativity is the perfect ability to combine with the vampire's initial power. The ability to alter one's own body in any way is perfect for him, as he can advance to absolutely ridiculous levels. The Pillar Men outclass him in most regards, but their arrogance against cunning foes has left each of them dead or worse.
Dio might be able to take a Pre-ultimate Pillar Man if he has prep time.

Now imagine if Joseph had his Stand during Part 2.

I quite like when undead are just like any normal man, but born in unfortunate circumstances.

They may possess no soul, slowly rot over a couple hundred years, but hell will be damned if they wont try and enjoy these years finding a place where they belong.

Interestingly enough I tripped over this old 3e setting that sounds like it might have been the inspiration for elements of Dark Souls and Dungeon Meshi, called Ghostwalk:

>The central locale for the Ghostwalk setting is a city called Manifest, a mausoleum city built atop a geological feature known as the Veil of Souls which leads the spirits of the departed on to the True Afterlife. In the immediate surroundings of the city of Manifest, the ghosts of the dead may cross the barrier into the land of the living and interact with their loved ones as translucent beings forged of ectoplasm, their ghost bodies marked by whatever injuries killed them and often driven by some craving for some aspect of the living world, such as music or food. A manifested ghost may fairly easily be returned to his body by resurrection magic and so in the City of Manifest one may die a great many times and be returned to his body with no harmful side effects. The one danger in exploring the other side of death as a ghost is the Calling, an unshakable urge that overcomes ghosts at some point in their unlife that drives them to forsake the world and pass into the True Afterlife.

>While all sentient races have spirits, only the human and demihuman races (human, half-elf, half-orc, elf, gnome, dwarf, and halfling) can travel to Manifest and live again as ghosts. A great many nonhuman races are jealous of this gift, and have sought to destroy Manifest throughout its history. Several times they have succeeded, razing the city to the ground, forcing it to be rebuilt atop its own ruins. This has resulted in an underworld of forgotten catacombs, all that is left of the many cities left behind. Below these are vast natural caverns and tunnels that increase in size and complexity surrounding the Veil of Souls. All of these are filled with all manner of monsters and villains, but also treasures lost. Hence Manifest is home to adventurers as well as mourners and the dead

>liches of power

Looking at that guy's scepter, it kind of resembles a Van de Graff thing. For a moment there I envisioned a battlefield filled with 5500 undead mages wielding the power of Tesla.

Can you imagine if every lich in a setting just wanted to make everything metal as fuck? Like, they all get together in a single army or create batshit insane creations for the sheer virtue of getting to scream about it in a hammy voice.

> "FACE THE FORCES OF FIVE-THOUSAND POWER LICHES!"
> "MECHA-PLAGUE!"
> "GO MY ZOMBIE BARDS, AND ROCK THE FUCK OUT!"
> "WE'RE CRASHING THIS DEMI-PLANE, WITH NO SURVIVORS!"
> "WE'RE CRASHING THE GOD, WITH NO SURVIVORS!"
> "Zombie, hand me my axe. IT'S TIME TO ROCK."
> "THE RITUAL CAN ONLY BE STOPPED WITH A BITCHIN' GUTAR SOLO, BARD. Think your skill can stop the sun from burning down?"
> "But will you be able to stop me, ONCE I ABSORB THE SUN!?"
> "Sit tight, bitches. I've got a bone for each of you."

this is actually some baller flavor my dude

And "are there undead of animals?" is a question that should probably be answered at some point, because even if the answer is usually "no" you can still throw a mass of angry squirrel skeletons at a party under unusual circumstances.