I haven't seen one in a fantasy setting that wasn't ridiculously hostile, namely to either humanity or the living. If not just evul.
And how do you go about making one without having them as humans with skin conditions? In other words, keeping them alien enough.
Other urls found in this thread:
amazon.com
twitter.com
(OP)
a condition of citizenship is the use of your bodily remains and animating spirit(if thats required) after your death for a duration of 100 years in service to the state, or until wear makes the remains unusable. it's what they do in lieu of charging more than light taxes
>"we thank you for your service citizen"
longer if you volunteer it so.
or if the nation is stirred to a time of war.
undead services may be rented from the state by any citizen either as a 1 zombie per person or a case of "surplus zombie-hours as needed" in cases of there being more zombies around than living people.
sure they aren't particularly smart but they'll dig irrigation ditches all day and night or swing sledges at a smiths forge or haul stones or walk on hamster wheels to power things or etc.
certain and sundry governmental tasks take precedence over citizen jobs but it's basically promising free slave labor to every citizen.
naturally executed criminals are re-purposed for a millennium for their crime.
they don't usually instigate war or conflict because they have a fully acceptable death/undeath/wear-out/birth rate.
and if they DO instigate battle; their own enemies will serve as fodder for their own war effort
>"don't fuck with us, we WILL use your dead inappropriately"
the first step in politics is learning more than the rudimentary necromancy needed to direct an undead.
Easy.
Some evil force begins killing off some magical society with a disease. This society has great technological/mystical/psychic/magical/rune powers but severely lack healing powers, so they are all destined to die.
But their immense magical power/sheer force of will revives them out of death, to stand vigilant against the evil force that slew them.
An obscure but powerful paladin organisation that focuses not on dogma or fighting ability, but instead focuses on willpower. Death means nothing to these paladins, except for a dramatic drop in their charisma. A dead man can still march, a dead man can still shield the weak, a dead man can still smite evil.
Another fun one is to combine ancestor worship with a bit of King Arthur legend.
>the land is in danger
>the dwarves and orcs have banded together into a mountain alliance and threaten to literally flatten the lowlands
>nothing can stop them...
>...except for the power of king Leopold the III, who swore his soul would never rest as long as his domain would have enemies
I am with orcs on that one - humans in fantasy are dicks
S&S did a lot of really cool stuff for 3rd edition.
>The Healers Guild is pissed because a new organization called the Blessed Wheel is undercutting their costs.
>Even worse people are able to sign for lifetime memberships, the only stipulation is that their remains become property of the Blessed Wheel.
>These "lifers" are assured that their remains will be used respectfully. In fact they will be used to save lives.
>Internal organs and other important tissues are magically grafted to people in need.
>In addition members of the organization begin to educated the community about hygiene, and other ways to prevent disease.
>People are getting sick less often, and are living longer lives.
>At this point the Healers Guild is foaming at the mouth.
>They complain to the Lord of the city, only to find out that the Blessed Wheel is providing free medical care to the military.
>At this point the Healers Guild begins to send assassins after the head of the guild, who proves to be a nigh-indestructible white mage. It is also around this time that some of the transplant recipients pass away, only to rise as free-willed undead with all of their former mental faculties intact. They may be cold and pale, but they act like their former selves.
>The Blessed Wheel revealed to an organization manned by intelligent undead, and friendly necromancers.
>Their leader is a necromantic masterpiece. The product of one of the most feared sorcerers on the continent. He used parts from long dead necromancer lords to craft a sentient flesh golem modeled after his long dead daughter.
>Despite being a flesh golem charged with a nigh-endless supply of necromantic energy, she is quite friendly, if a bit awkward. Like someone who forgot how to interact with people, and is re-learning as she goes.
>Her ultimate goal is a world where the living and the dead exist in harmony. The living are caterpillars, and she wants to turn them into beautiful butterflies.
Gold
It was a fun campaign. Ended on a cliffhanger with the other players unsure whether to oppose or help me.
do you think that'd turn into a classist scenario, though? Toiling dead and the living who enjoy living, to an extent more than the dead can, who are civil servants?
especially when you enjoy yourself first in living then die and work all your unlife. It's a parallel for childhood, or something
Also, something I remember blurting out a while ago on Veeky Forums.
>desert lands
>nomads looking for water
>they grab a coffin from a cart
>a lid opens on the coffin and a gravely voice can be heard
>"my children, water can be found two days of travel to the east"
Desert nomads that use vampires as dowsing rod, a shaman and an oral "library". By day, the vampire is locked in his or her coffin. This allows the vampire to focus its mind across the wide planes, let its mind soar across the emptiness until it detects water. The vampire provides the clan with that water and wisdom gathered from living for hundreds of years. The clan provides the vampire with voluntary given blood, human in times of plenty, camel in times of few. When the vampire grows weary of life, the vampire turns its apprentice in a vampire, leaves its coffin, and just walks away from the clan into the sun, slowly shedding clothes and burning up in the desert sun. Obviously, these clans don't like outsiders and certainly don't like vampires that aren't part of the whole symbiotic clan system.
The problem, OP, is that there is no conceivable normal motivation behind necromancers. The only way to make them work is to just have them be arbitrarily evil dicks who want to hurt a lot of people and be powerful and be protected by a wall of 7000 skeletons. Any attempt to humanize such people comes off as silly.
The Undead in Divinity: Dragon Commander were ultra conservative and religious, but not evil.
Also, best waifu. If you gave her some flesh.
>not cartoonishly hostile
Make them cartoonishly friendly.
True story.
Undead don't NEED anything. They don't need food, so they don't need plants or animals, so they don't need land.
They don't need to stay warm, so they don't need shelter. They aren't scared of the dark or much in it, so they don't need fire. They can't reproduce, so they don't need to look good to attract mates. They don't sleep, so they don't need to ever take breaks in whatever they're doing.
But what would they bother doing, if they don't NEED to do anything?
Well, assuming they're still human in thoughts if not in body- they're probably going to get bored. SO bored. Bored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They have no chores to kill daily hours. They can't sleep in and waste 12 hours a day. Bored out of their skulls. Bored to death (they wish).
I think they become a wandering culture of entertainers and thrill seekers, in small bands of other undead who share their tastes. Traveling circuses, or archaeologists, or adventurers.
Or maybe a static civilization of artists- artists who do whatever they want because they don't need to pander to a consumer base. They build ridiculous architecture just because they can. They whittle hundreds of weird little statuettes, daily. They practice swordfighting with each other until they become duelists unmatched. Maybe they hollow out a mountain and use the insides to build a duplicate mountain nearby to confuse people. They might seem crazy, but again- they're creatures with no needs, only wants, and none of their wants are biological because they're not biological anymore.
>and that's how middle earth experienced a skeletal singularity
nah, it actually does the opposite in a medieval society, since more of the work is being done faster and/or more efficiently the citizenry has more free time to expend on the arts and the sciences.
that allows for technological advancement; inventions like the Steam Engine, the McCormick Harvester, ETC. which themselves allow more free time for citizens and more efficient creation of resources.
and why would the rich want the smell of death about the house? if anything I can see them wanting live servants.
whats more, even low intelligence rulers would grant more undead as subsidies to farmers, miners, and industrial works. advance the flag and the state of the country and what-not.
FUCKING AMAZING
MOAR, TELL US MOAR ABOUT THIS, HOW DID IT GO WHAT MEMORABLY THINGS HAPPENED
>there is no conceivable normal motivation behind necromancers.
wrong.
power, immortality, a love of complicated systems, perfection of a craft or skill, the potential to just up and break an economic system...
perfectly normal motivations for a necromancer.
I like this concept but only if there is suitable "natural" undead production
Essentially I set out to create a character that would commit atrocities under the guise of the "greater good". She honestly thought what she was doing was the right thing, after all she was built that way. Early on in the game I passed her off as a slightly ditzy mad scientist type. I think the other players may have taken her in out of pity. The moment that made them question this occurred on the way to the city.
>The group was riding with a caravan, one of the other players was a prince of some kind. I think he was part dragon too, or at least evolving into a draconic creature. Due to my character "eccentricities" she got her own covered wagon.
>Earlier in the session the character was introduced to "music", again one of her charming and clueless moments. She got it into her head that the process could be improved on, and after consulting a book on the matter began to gather body parts.
>I think there had been a recent fight with a monster. So lots of spare parts.
>My description of the device was a Harpsicorpsean. A church organ, well made from organs. Reanimated organs. While the visual was disturbing enough, the sound was even worse. I think it was described as "proof that god does not exist". The Harpsicorpsean was burned to ash, and never spoke of again.
The game was quite a while ago, so I don't quite remember all of the players. Aside from the scion of the dragon sultan, I think there was a ranger/ wilderness type whose main ability was to magically perceive things. Initially the magic used to create her blocked his efforts, but over time she began to look more, and more corpse like to him.
>The dragon prince ended up being one of my bigger allies. I think his people were hunted and persecuted, hence living in the middle of the desert. My character didn't care about race, species or gender. Everything else was just potential raw material. Despite not realizing she was ageless, and deathless, the character still took the long view on things.
Undead campaign in Heroes of Might And Magic 4 was about that.
Man dude was just some weirdo hermit and former Necromancer apprentice who just lived alone and occasionally stealing from peasants to survive, not wanting to use his Necromantic powers and knowlage and trying to hide his nature of literal half dead (half of his body was alive and half was undead). At one point he got captured and tried to be executed by local lord but used his powers to save him and summoned undead and started revenge on that lord, after conquering his castle and lands and turning that lord into his ghost servant he decided to forge kingdom in this place and did it. He was satisfied with ruling his own country and not to conquer to much, both out of lack of desire for it and common sense (since everybody else will team up on Necromancer who become to powerful like it was in past). He even send plans of his servant (that lord ghost) to neighbor kingdom what that servant wanted to invade while it was busy with other wars, so that kingdom reincorced their borders. His rule was probably typical feudalism with only diffrence that solders were undead and deceased corpses were part of tax, but it was only for when someone died, otherwise people were left alone as long they didn't rebel, where was urged need to create undead servant this guy payed peasant family greatly for life of one of their members. He rejected idea of good and evil and considered concept of creation and destruction as real forces rulling world and nature. Things got fucked when his old master returned and he saved him and tried to work for him in while but eventually he turned agaist him when that master was working for some big apocalyptic plan.