Which fantasy setting has the strongest undead? Please no ''good'' undead I want good old fashioned monsters

It works different between Fantasy and 40k. Part of the reason for this is that 40k was built from the ground up after borrowing from its inspiration, one of which is Fantasy. Fantasy came about as a gradual evolution over time beginning as just generic Dungeons & Dragons and selling Citadel brand D&D minis, so many things are afterthoughts elaborated on but not directly integrated into the origin story of the setting.

In 40k Chaos IS souls. Everyone feeds it. It originates from mortals and mortal souls originate from it. There's no escaping it because everyone, EVERYONE, begins and ends in it and now it has become self-aware and cannibalistic in four directions.

In Fantasy, its just magic. Chaos Gods and Daemons are self-aware magic. Souls are magic, but once they become a specific part of one of the eight basic types of magic, Death, they're part of Death inextricably. Death makes those souls actually immortal, while non-Death souls can be damaged and consumed.

40k and fantasy spent a while as literally the same setting, with the exact same chaos lore, with fantasy simply being a world covered in warp storms inaccessible except though the warp.
Death magic isn't the same as Undeath, which is mostly dark magic.Necromantic undead are different because they refuse to let souls go back to swirling around in the warp like they're meant to, using not death magic generally, but dark magic, which is magic that has not divided into a specific wind, which keeps them well enough out of the chaos gods grip, but plenty of undead are also chaos corrupted, nurgle has plague zombies and plague skeletons, chaos champions can be brought back to life by chaos power ect.
Unless you're talking about end times and later lore which doesn't count and everything went batty.

>40k and fantasy spent a while as literally the same setting
That was literally never true.

They 100% began as different games, both in concept and in gameplay.

40k didn't even exist until Warhammer 4th edition was being written. Rogue Trader had no resemblance to Fantasy in any way, shape, or form.

>Death magic isn't the same as Undeath, which is mostly dark magic
Necromancy is Dark Magic.

Undeath is specifically the Death wind. Black Library novels dating back to 6e said it, and both End Times and Age Of Sigmar rely on it.
> which keeps them well enough out of the chaos gods grip, but plenty of undead are also chaos corrupted

Again, gonna have to call bullshit on that. Literally NO undead has ever been Chaos corrupted. The Blood Dragons willingly turned to Chaos, as have Necromancers in exchange for power, but that's it. Isabella had to be possessed by a Daemon because Undead souls cannot be corrupted.

>nurgle has plague zombies and plague skeletons
Never really been explained, but non-canon since they haven't been mentioned in Fantasy in any lore past 6e.

>chaos champions can be brought back to life by chaos power
They get brought back to life living, skeletal champions is retconned. They haven't been in anything since...5e I think?

Is there even a single setting with good undead?

Daily reminder that Settra was a true hero who got offered everything by the assorted Chaos Gods, and then told them to fuck off before going full Don Quixote and charging off into battle as the world ended.
Fuck Nagash with a rake.

Krell used to be a chaos tainted wight, but that turned out to be false as revealed during the End Times. What exactly is the difference between necromancy and Undeath magic? Can you give me some examples of someone using necromancy and someone using death magic?

>tfw you will never see Settra become some fantasy Doomguy as he attacks legions of daemons

RIP Tomb Kings
too cool for this world

Tought to beat Nagash, but I like Kel'Thuzad from warcraft. He was resurected in a fancy bath and is still alive almost 15 years into the franchise

>My fellow robotc cunt!

The amethyst wind of death magic and the Vampire Count's brand of dark magic named necromancy?

One of them returns life and death to it's original intent. Burying the long dead and bringing it forth in corporeal form is amethyst "death" magic.

VC Necromancy goes on do eat souls, rot bodies, bolstering and raising the dead and perverting the natural cycle of death and rebirth.

Uh, what happened to him, actually ?
The last time I saw him was pic related, which was hype as fuck, and also the last time End Times was actually good, but he didn't showed up again later.

He decided he is too cool for this shit setting GW decided to mutilate because ''HURR I'M MENTALLY 14 YEARS OLD GONNA SHILL MY SPIKEY STEROID ABUSERS AND MAKE THEM WIN ALTOUGH NO ONE ASKED FOR IT'' and left forever. He's propably in the setting of Might and Magic now.

Nurgle HATES undead, instead of rotting and decaying and spreading plague, they simply stay, forever, stasis

Is that why he has a zombie plague in 40k?

Warcraft
>fight me

Did Warcraft Orcs ever won a proper war?

I vote for the Lord of the Rings. Everyone here knows Nazgul and their merits

>their strongest guy got rekt by a woman

shittiest undead by default

The Hive, from Destiny.
They are simultaneously a vaguely buggish-species and a race of undead sorcerer zombie motherfuckers that worship/serve a race of superhuman deity-beings that resemble vastly more powerful versions of their species, and these deity-beings serve a disembodied cosmic entity-thing who is so antithetical to our level of conceptual reasoning that it can cause events that it causes to happen before it's actually around to make them happen but is still intelligent enough to reason on our level without loosing sight of the bigger picture it exists on.
They combine the traits of an endless zombie-swarm (only alien zombies) but their more intelligent members are skilled warriors with access to advanced technology (including interstellar space flight), and farther up the tier are an even more powerful version that basically employ space wizardry.

>disembodied cosmic entity-thing who is so antithetical to our level of conceptual reasoning that it can cause events that it causes to happen before it's actually around to make them happen

how does that even work

Nobody really knows/understands.
One of the smartest beings in the solar system (an AI which was as smart as the combined computing power of the entire solar system) actually described it's arrival as "acasual", meaning it somehow happened before it happened.
It arrived retroactively, basically.

Destiny was a middling game in many ways but the almost unused in-game background and fluff is filled with some pretty crazy shit even by sci-fi standards.

Doesn't really make much sense for him to have it, unless his view on undead are different in 40k, but in AoS he despises them. Perhaps zombies in 40k still rot

The current setting of Might and Magic is boring uninteresting crap, although the music is still kickass.

Only if you mean Sylvanas. WoW turned the Scourge into pathetic jobbers.

LotR if you consider Sauron a lich

Never really understood what WoW did with the scourge. By the end of 3 they had taken over northrend. Owned pretty much all of lorderan. Fair they weren't particularly present in Kalmidor, but after that they just sorta did a Kerrigan and fucked off for 4 years?

Oh and don't get me started on the "There must always be a lich king" because "scourge become even more dangerous and likely to win if there is no intelligent leader guiding them" ... what?

They were also kind of a thing where they in affect had infinite numbers and the setting treated it as such. It didn't matter how many you killed because as long as they killed AT LEAST an equal number of your guys then they could use you to replenish their resources and thus they break even and you come out at a loss which means they win by default.

That's a logical thing when it comes to undead armies but the Scourge were the only ones who genuinely seemed to apply the theory to it's logical extent; they were in affect an alternative plan to ending literally an entire world, and given a long enough time frame they WOULD have done so.

It didn't make much sense when the alternative Lich King was an insanely powerful wizard asshole who's stated goal was ruling everything, but the basic reveal that the Scourge had enough numbers to end all life on Azaeroth was not surprising at all (I mean they had the total number of dead things equal to two whole continents and at least four major civilizations to draw resources from and to unfailing serve them), but that brings up the question as to why he hadn't ALREADY conquered everything when he clearly had the numbers to do so.

The undead in Skyrim itself are pretty weak. Draugr are mostly mindless and have only a basic capacity to use the Thu'um. Dragon Priests are powerful mages, but not powerful enough to note them among any of the truly powerful.

Mannimarco is an entirely different beast.

undead in Skyrim serve as bandit tier cannon fodder

Vampires count? Cus if they count im whipping out the Jojo's card.

Azeroth. Well, good undead certainly exist there, and the bulk of them are at least not evil.

What makes you think he's not doomguying it up in the Realm of Chaos right as we speak? He just outgrew the need for an army.

...

Adventure Quest.
It quite literally is an entire plane set in what one can only equate to Demiplane of Elemental and Planar Chaos.

Liches in it are so powerful, YOU HAVE TO PRACTICE BECOMING ONE BEFORE ACTUALLY BECOMING ONE because untrained ascension leads to explosions that reduce entire planets into Ebberon/Dark Sun settings, then there's everything pic related does effortlessly, this thing is the king of template stack right here, you want absurd undead? His calling. Dragons attack every day of the week, and every month the entire continent is at war, Dragons exist for every infintasmal concept there is in existence equating dragons on the same scale as Japanese deity belief, the entire universe is run by Elementals and it's cosmology plagued by not!Galactus/Atropus, except with a saga so long boring and convoluted it ceases to be anything but the longest thing ever in any RPG, and it's not recorded so all of it is this infinite lore-expanse made horrible by that awful text font they use.

People actively die so much in it, Death ITSELF has filled it's quota for entropy by the sheer omnicide that happens every day.

The ultimate antichrist Evil's village was burnt down in it's youth by the current Public enemy number one, and his life was forever changed by becoming a terrifying Chaotic Good Paladin of mass Undead Abuse and slaughter that regugitates entire Graveyards worth of undead as a warm-up exercise to the grave, who is literally powered by his own selfless good manifesting as an elemental force and outright divinity.

Oh right, and Monster Loot is made possible by a QT3.14 ranger who sticks money to them she steals from Rich people who own vast planar real estate.

Then there's Vampires and werewolves, which are so fucked because they made Werepyres, but then this one Werepyre ate 1000 Dragons and Became a Dracowerepyre which is the awful combination of all all three, so (Stronger at full moon, Stronger as it ages x2 Vamp/Dragon Stronger the More dosh it has in a hoard Stronger) and can only ever be killed with a macguffin.

And this nigga dies and his kids of awful design standards fight, but the male one is better, Trust me, I tested both.

That said, the most dangerous Undead monstrosities in D&D are devourers, Atropal Scions, Lichfiend Infernals, Thjat long forgotten undead from 1e, and the utter butt-fuck that is a the long-forgotten Defiler Lich AKA Fuck the Planet, I'm an agent of Anti-fun, and I power My spells with your very ecosystem, and had 3.5 and onward follwed me any my Geomancy abuse, i'd be the top Elder evil shit.

And said Top paladin is called Artix VON KREIGER, so you know he is literally a walking Undead Holocaust out to cremate as many skeletons as possible before his time on this earth ends, but not before his enthusiasm does.

Don't even get me started on the Dragonslayer, In a world where Dragonkind can exist for every conceivable concept known to sapient mind, there exists a single man, driven by bloodlust WHO KEEPS THE ENTIRE SPECIES IN CHECK AS A HOBBY.

Yeah, knowing that he had the numbers to destroy everyone, but instead went with a 'just as planned' scheme to lure players to him and at the last moment turn them? Which went laughable terrible for him?
Like, the only way to make that make ANY sense is to say that Arthas was trying to rebel against being the Lich King, which would be retarded. (Then again, Illidan being secretly a good guy the whole time is even more retarded, and that didn't stop them...)

>Talking about vidya mechanics not lore
You know, there's a board you may be interested in...

Literally a godslayer

I liked undead and necromancers in HoMM3.
It was so overpowered that Necropolis was banned from competitive gameplay.
And Sandro was badass, most of plot in HoMM 3 was because of fucking Sandro fucking everyone trying too pull some kind of "just as planed" shit.

>Which fantasy setting has the strongest undead?
>we have a weekly TESG for lore and tabletop discussion on this board and have for years
>leave it alone and you wont look like an asshat.

Yeah, I retroactively amend my answer. The various chosen-bearer-ashen heroes could do the Icecrown raid solo, naked, with a wooden club if they had enough practice time.

That's not necessarily that hard when "gods" in the setting are not all-mighty beings with fantastic powers but instead are taller then average humans (seeming to average around eight to nine feet tall) who just happen to have magic that anyone at all can learn.

The "gods" of Dark Souls aren't really proper deities, more like a species related to humans (and fully capable of interbreeding with them) with some mild advantages to humans in terms of physical strength and magic.

Oh, also they appear to be naturally immortal or so close to immortal that it makes no practical difference, though in the Dark Souls universe this might not be anything to be actually happy about.

I feel like this is another example of gameplay and story segregation, though.

In-game, every enemy is just an enemy. But in-lore, Gwyn was powerful enough to lock to whole universe into a decaying time loop. Characters like the Witch of Izalith had the effects of their influence felt across millennia, and whole kingdoms rose and fell due to the tactics, magic, and might of godlike heroes.

What we see are these gods at the back-end of the world, when everything's losing power and decaying. And again, we're just viewing it through the context of a video game.

Also, either way, the PCs in Dark Souls are essentially perpetuals, which is always a nifty power to have.

I feel obligated to respond to you because you clearly put more effort into these posts than anyone else would have.

in skyrim inexperienced civilians regularly go tombdiving
>vidya mechanics
That's why I said Mannimarco is a different beast. If I was going by game mechanics, he's weaker than plenty of the undead in Skyrim, but lorewise he's one of the most unstoppable fuckers in the setting

Reminder that the Ashen One is by far the most powerful character in the setting, as the Soul of Cinder is the combined might of all who have ever linked the Flame.

>Krell used to be a chaos tainted wight
What? He was an actual chaos champion that was brought back as a Wight.

Lore wise they are generic undead warriors who look like shit because devs couldn't decide if they want skeletons or zombies so they turned them into boring mummies. No style, no grace just some fucking normie tier undead for housewifes and 13yo's who couldn't deal with Oblivion undead because ''EMERGHED WHY ARE THEY SO SCARY :(''

Dominions 4 is the best undead game, prove me wrong.

>If I was going by game mechanics
God no, please fight against him in Oblivion did not happen.
After all build up of great dread necromancer I was fighting some bananaman fag in unimaginative robe.

Oblivion was a mistake.

That's canonically no more the true Mannimarco than the glowy dragon in the Imperial City is all of time.

He did at the last battle when he had a chance at killing Nagash but killed a giant instead, saying that he'd have a reckoning with Nagash after they save the world

No,the reason Nurgle hates undead is because they are not affected by illnesses or plagues,though he gets a small relief from the fact that zombies are plague vectors. The one that hates undead because of their unchanging and stagnant nature is Tzeentch,user.