Would it be possible to build a peaceful society of necromancers?

Depends on how your DM sees undead and necromancy. I've had DMs that see necromancy as not evil itself but the application of it, though you'd still have to deal with the stigma that comes with it, and I've had DMs that see the act of necromancy as evil and any spell that had the evil descriptor as an abomination to the natural order of things. It really depends on the setting. This isn't because evil or good has anything to do with peaceful, just whether it's enough of an affront to the natural order to be constantly attacked by the various forces of the world or not.

I've actually done this before. One of the most peaceful nations in my setting is owned by an ancient LE red dragon who took over because the nation was run by a line of dragon blooded sorcerer kings (one guess who they were descended from)

Long story short, peace is good for business. A concise war would involve getting his variosu bickering nobles on the same page, getting his various bickering offspring on the same page, and worrying about both those groups trying to kill him while also fighting a war. Plus, alot of his many times great grand children are totally nuts so other nations aren't really super psyched on upsetting the status quo.

So yeah, rules one and two for that place are:
1. Be rich
2. Don't be poor
Because the whole thing is kinda a crapshoot if you're not wealthy but if you don't happen to live there and aren't particularly poor it's just your super evil neighbor that happens to be a great trading partner that you should absolutely never ever fuck with because destabilizing it in any way would almost certainly plunge the entire continent into war the second it went wrong.

>The dragon knows all of this and is fucking loving it.

Yes.
1d4chan.org/wiki/Millennial_King

GURPS Banestorm: Abydos.

Infinite man-power which does not require pollutant technologies to work. An army made of recycled corpse, that feel no pain, no exhaustation, and no fear.
Yeah, I really cannot imagine a society where people does not need to do the heavy work or fight to defend it prospering... Like, what people would do free of the burden of work? Study? Develop science and magic? Perfect themselves and society through development of arts?
Are we mad, what kind of hell is that?

Magic?

Art?

Develop computing and make necromancer Veeky Forums?

Yes, although it's really hard to create a perfectly peaceful society in general. They tend to be conquered by less peaceful neighbors.

necromancers are people like you and me, they probably dont want a fight unless its absolutely needed

they probably cant just ask for spare skellies, so they may need to look for "free" sources of bones that people dont care about

Only if you consider graveyards and wastelands peaceful. Necromancer's "utopia" is a common man's nightmare.

Necromancers are not people. They have forsaken their humanity.

Depends if they are undead or not.

You can be a necromancer and human

Hath not a necromancer eyes? Hath not a necromancer hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a conjurer is?

treating necromancers like scum will drive the ones who act like normal people into hiding, and cause the unstable ones to lash out in kind

I could see a Necromantic society work.

The Necromancers form a ruling Council that organizes the Necromancy.

They sell undead labour and get a yearly tribute for the guarantee of state security with their undead hordes.

They also manage foreign policy (de jure, de facto its determined by various interest groups) and intervene when matters of state security are at stake.

Oh and every dead body belongs to the state (except the dead bodies of rich people because they Pay a high fee).

The rest is managed by Local councils and guilds.

The people are actually pretty free and wealthy. No nobility opressing them (Necromancers are mostly scholars), taxes and tarifs are MUCH lower than in the other states and no one dares to attack because of fuck large Zombie hordes.

>dead bodies owned by the state
If you ate the states food, your body belongs to the state

I think all people should be able to become undead, mostly a generic skeleton one, though all undead are welcomed.

Predatory undead have to be sated, ghouls could prepare corpses for skeletonation by eating their flesh. Large companies could sell blood to vampires

Military would be a bunch of decked out skeletons commanded by some wizards.

If anything most people would be highly magical, making an invasion stupid

Pretty cool, bro.

Who exactly controls the undead? Is it the one necromancer that raised them?

Do boat-fulls of corpse shipped to the capital where powerful necros can raise them, or are the itinerant low level necros travelling the land and raising the dead?

In either case, who is in actual control of the undead?

In the first case control would be centralized to a few powerful necros, and we'd need check and balances on them.

In the second case, control would be spread through a multiple of "clerks", and we'd need a bureaucracy to manage them and coordinate the undead.

What checks and balances are in place to prevnet abuses?

Corpses are owned by the government, which sells them to groups of necromancers.

They can then proceed to sell the flesh or blood to other undead, or don't depending on the type of undead they want to make.

Citizens can hire these groups to do jobs, as can the government.

Certain jobs are only done by government groups such as power generation.

A government branch oversees these groups

giving blood should be required, and you should be compensated for it

>Pretty cool bro

Thanks!

>Who controls the Undead.

The individual Necromancer who raised them. Control is transferable to other Necros and mundane people (via magic artifact).

I honestly see the Necromancers organized in a guild/collegium that resembles a University.

The executive positions (commanding an army, overseeing the Bureau of Undead labour etc.) are actually unwanted busy work preventing research and magical progress. So these positions are assigned for a mandatory ammount of time before a Necro is free to pursue his research (until the next assignment is due).

The Necros are organized by their skill and highly skilled Necros are not involved in the day to das business of raising plain Zombies/Skelettons. Thats is grunt work for Novices. Highly skilled Necros either reanimate more complex Undeads (or worse) have to do administrative work.

>system of reanimation

The mundane part of the Government is responsible for collecting the dead bodies. For a high fee a dead body might stay in possesion of the Family (thats why rich people have crypts or reanimated ancestors that dwellin their estates).

The mundane part of the Government is mostly City Councils manned by guild representatives and Land owner councils of free peasants and large Land owners.

These collected bodies are then brought to the nearest branch of the Necro Guild. They have centralized Guild houses at strategic points.

Also withholding a dead body is a serious crime. The Necros and the Councils have a joint Security force that Travels the Country and is authorized to invest possible theft of a dead Corpse.

First Time offenders pay a doubled fee and serial offenders are imprisoned.

Ideally you would have an easy bake undeath package that anyone could partake in(skeletons would be ideal)

If your colleges could get the costs low enough, people could foot the bill of undeath by themselves, or get colleges or churches to sponsor them.

Most people would have to either be trained as a mage, artisan, entertainer, or scientist. Religious organizations could provide jobs as well.

Golems should be taken advantage of, as that way invaders would have to have anti-wizard, anti-undead, and anti-golem forces.

There would always be something to do in the city of bones.

Ideally you could reach a higher tech level than the rest of the world within about a hundred years

One of the cool things undead let you do is sub-water table mining. Normally, an ore deposit more than a half dozen feet under the water table was unminable since the mine would always flood and you can't pump the water out fast enough. With undead you A. don't care and B. don't need slaves to keep the mines running.

You do loose some tricks like using a hot fire and cold water to break up the rocks but it's still a monopoly on the deeper ore deposits.

I can see vampires buying blood over the counter. It actually makes more sense to shepard humans to harvest their blood more than outright murder

Well it could be an industry, company pays people to donate blood, company sells blood to vampires

If you have this well of neutral enemy to make automatons, why bother with corpses at all instead of making living statues?

Do statues have built in joints and/or are built for you already?

Corpses don't tend to have functional joints either. By that logic, you could probably get away with just animating a scarecrow.

>and are built for you already

Corpses aren't that much more free than statues are. If you're going out killing and graverobbing to get 'free' corpses then it's not exactly neutral like you want, and if you're paying people for the use of their dead relatives, then you could probably afford to stuff some clothes full of straw, plant fibers, and some lengths of wood for support.

Strawmen are flammable.

Skeletons aren't.

Also if all corpses are owned by the state, then you basically have an infinite source of bodies.

You just have to make sure a person has 2 kids before becoming undead

It's also exponentially easier to repair or replace a torn seam or broken stick than a pulverized or fractured bone. Since skellies aren't living, they don't naturally heal, which means every minor injury requires a replacement. Unless you've got mass graves full of replacement parts, there's not much you can do to fix a broken skeletal thrall.

>Strawmen are flammable.

If you're a pacifistic nation, then that shouldn't be a major problem

>Also if all corpses are owned by the state, then you basically have an infinite source of bodies.You just have to make sure a person has 2 kids before becoming undead.

Not as infinite in supply as planks, straw, and fabric. If you lose a skeleton or one breaks a bone, it's basically useless and you have to have -somebody- die to replace it.

If you lose a scarecrow, who cares? Just go get some bits of dead organic material from some plants and fix it up or make a new one.

I thought magic took care of basic matience, plus what happens if you want to become undead?

I wouldn't want a straw body for eternity

If magic can repair cracks and fabricate tendons and joints for skeletons, then it can do the same for clay, steel, or any other material. The only reason a skeleton-based workforce is superior to a golem-based workforce is if animation magic is magically better for animating corpses.

>Would it be possible to build a peaceful society of necromancers?
Sure.
Bunch of farmers, but when they die, the giant crop circle they carve into the face of the land turns them into a ghost, which then hangs around and natters with friends, and they form a giant death wall that stops anyone else attacking them. The ghosts can't stray too far from the settlement or they vanish, probably to the equivalent of heaven, if they want to go.

No-one has any energy to think of attacking others because they need to do farming, the spirits are there of their own free will, the "taint of undead" can't spread because it's limited to a certain radius of the magic's origin (and doesn't really exist since that's a made up thing by the church) and outside attackers can't really get to the living core on the inside of the society.

No-one's ever heard of them because they live on a mountainous region. Also the death wall of ghosts warn people to stay out, too, so no-one wanders in by accident.

You'd need a way of keeping the blood fresh. Blood coagulates in under a minute and the blood cells will die in hours of open air.

You could either devise some means of preserving blood (Gentle Repose?) or have the company set up meetings between buyers and sellers (Think craigslist).

So many exciting problems that can be solved so many exciting ways.

I just am wondering if evil undeath churches would be allowed.

And how in the world you would feed ghouls

>I thought magic took care of basic maintenance

To repair a skeleton, you need a necromancer. To repair a scarecrow, a lot of the time you just need some straw and some thread.

>plus what happens if you want to become undead? I wouldn't want a straw body for eternity

And in those cases you could actually go through the process of making a proper golem. After all, bones also aren't going to last for an eternity either.

Basically >The only reason a skeleton-based workforce is superior to a golem-based workforce is if animation magic is magically better for animating corpses.

If this state can so easily make this many undead constructs so simply, then there's really no reason to use them compared to other types, especially if you're worried about the perception of neighboring countries and are trying to be pacifists.

Corpses tend to have structurally functional joints that just need the driving mechanisms revived.

Even skeletons have the advantage of being structurally sound and light weight when compared to a wooden maniquin and the painstaking process of crafting joints is bypassed.

Straw doesn't have the structural integrity to stand on it's own and wood is more bulky and less rigid than bone.

Basically bodies are another resource to take advantage of, why build graveyards when you can just have them work for you.

Sure you could have a bunch of clay statutes, but you would have to shape them, and find clay for parts. As long as you have food, you have bodies, meaning you could effectively set up anywhere.

Plus there are far more benefits to undeath, many gods support it, you gain many spells that are great, and you can take care of other basic problems like ghosts

Have you SEEN the demographics of pre-industrial cities? They were hauling corpses by the cartload some days.

A) Depends on the type of wood

B) Skeletons don't have joints. If you can animate a skeleton, you can animate pretty much anything.

>Corpses tend to have structurally functional joints that just need the driving mechanisms revived.
Are you high? If a corpse has decayed to the point it's been SKELETONIZED, there's no way in hell the joints and tendons are still in a usable state. And if you're using fresh corpses, you've got a short amount of time before rigor mortis sets in and renders it unusable.

Not sure about the churches. People tend to have weird belief systems.

Ghouls would be a matter of limiting the ghoul population. A ghoul would harvest the naturally dead for meat, remove all the perishable organs, and then deliver the bones to necromancers for raising. Because rotten flesh tends to bring diseases ghouls would be an essential part of the corpse economy. You might see smokehouses dedicated to preserving human meat if the ghoul population is big enough.

Skeletons are made to be moved by muscles. if you replace the muscles with magic, they would move as fluidly as a human.

You would have to go through great pains to make a wood construct move as nicely as a human

Yeah, like the movie Fido

>Plus there are far more benefits to undeath, many gods support it, you gain many spells that are great, and you can take care of other basic problems like ghosts

None of this sounds likely based on the assumptions that were put forth. The energy to make undead comes from a random, neutral magical source. Any spells that affect undead should work just fine on anything animated by the same energy. Anyone with the ability to make a golem should be able to handle a ghost that is presumably caused by the same energy. And how are there multiple gods that support creating undead when it's just another generic type of magic involving making golems from corpses? If anything, I would expect more gods to condemn it rather than support it, due to it being considered a desecration and require you to take the body of someone's relative.

Ah, now we're arguing two different things. First, if the meat is still on the bones it's just a matter of reviving the muscles.

On the other hand, if the meat is gone then you're just creating another golem. The only difference is that it's made of bone rather than granite.

Keep in mind that the premise is that dead bodies are easy to obtain.

Round out the ends of thin planks of wood for makeshift ball joints

You now have something that can move more fluidly than a human, since it can bend its arms backwards. Magic holds it all in place anyway, since the skeleton doesn't have muscles anymore.

Magic is serving as what holds it together and moves it. The only advantage a skeleton has is that it's pre-built to fit together. Of course, the skeleton also has the downside that you'd have to melt all the flesh off of a corpse and sterilize it so it wasn't spreading disease.

There are gods of undeath.

I don't remember there being any gods of using the negative energy plane to animate wood statues.

Reminder that the negative energy plane is completely neutral

You also have the upside of keeping a bunch of ghouls happy, who are more than happy to help you clean your corpses.

If this is D&D-style negative energy you're dealing with, there's a whole host of other problems to worry about. We were working with the assumption that this was just generic setting-independent animating energy and not something that verifiably does terrible things to the land and people exposed to it in most settings it's described in.

>negative energy plane

This isn't the premise we were working off of If it's a plane of 'negative' energy like in D&D, then you're dealing with skeletons being a shitty idea because negative energy is the opposite of actual living creatures and will cause other problems because of it.

You're adding other assumptions to the baseline that don't necessarily apply in the slightest.

There are no gods of undeath, because in this world undeath isn't different from golems. At most, there's one, and another god of craftsmen that support the golems, but the magic that affects them both is the same.

Even if all magic comes from the same source, necromancy is kind of its own thing.

The elder scrolls has all magic come from the same source, why don't they only use golems?

Plus there probably is more than one god of undeath, there is probably a god of vampires or evil undead.

>keeping ghouls happy
>an upside

Only if you can keep up with their demand for flesh, which seems to be the root flaw with all of this.

>Keep in mind that the premise is that dead bodies are easy to obtain.

I'm still not certain this holds true. The premise didn't include that dead bodies were any easier to obtain, just that they didn't have any sort of negative or harmful energy.

You still have to either have a state-controlled government that taxes all of the undead, buys them, steals them, executes people for them, etc. No matter how you slice it, it's going to be expensive and shady compared to wood, straw, clay, stone, or any other materials.

Carving out ball and socket joints is professional work. You can't half ass it or the joints will grind. Professional work means a professional wood worker and that means expense. The joints for the hand alone would be at least a week of work by a journeyman carpenter.

A ghoul, on the otherhand, would strip the flesh off the bones for free.

This is what a joint looks like. If magic can replace joints, cartilage, ligaments, and synovial fluid, then literally all you need to animate a mannequin as well as you can animate a skeleton is a few artisans with whittlin' knives and some wood. And I can very safely assume that the production rate of mannequin sweatshops is much faster than the production rate of the human womb.

Once you get rid of the large supply of pre-finished goods rotting away in the cemetery, you aren't getting any until you either get to mass murdering or wait a generation for the old-timers to leave their corpses for you to harvest.

Read the premise again and stop making assumptions that don't fit in it.

Undead are powered by neutral magical energy. There should be no difference.

If there is a difference, then why is the easy magical route just as clean and neutral as the harder more difficult creation of golems? That's pretty shit from a narrative perspective. Why should magical shortcuts not involve sacrifice?

Say the nation started out with a group of only necromancers, why would they go through the trouble of learning a different kind of magic to make it a bit more moral.

It's not like corpses are helpful to a society. And so they made them be helpful.

Plus most wizards aren't craftsman, why go through the trouble to make a body when someone has already made one for you.

When you want a really good thing, crafting it is a good idea.

But when you need a bunch of expendable workers for dumb labor, then why go through the trouble of making a statue?

Just sand the tops and bottems of a plank so they're rounded, then varnish them. You don't need a ball and socket, just two balls. The magic will hold them together regardless.

Remember that you're using this as the frame for the inside of a scarecrow, so it also has the advantage of having straw as a cushion and padding for these joints.

>Once you get rid of the large supply of pre-finished goods rotting away in the cemetery, you aren't getting any until you either get to mass murdering or wait a generation for the old-timers to leave their corpses for you to harvest
No, no, the plague from having dead bodies walking around will be fantastic for the death rate, even though it'll help slow down mortality from overworking.

The sacrifice nobody seems to be noting here is that the supply of skeletons is very easy to dry up. After the supply of already-existing corpses is used up-- since this is hard labor they're doing, that'll be sooner rather than later-- you're fresh out until the next battlefield massacre. This would mean either the labor pool stays small due to the sporadic nature of war and death, or the state shifts its economy to the skeleton economy and becomes a nightmarish predator-state turning prisons and nearby countries into corpse-farms to feed their labor pool.

Compare that to the long-term benefits of using more plentiful raw materials to form your workers' bodies, and you can see where things can go wrong.

>Say the nation started out with a group of only necromancers, why would they go through the trouble of learning a different kind of magic to make it a bit more moral.

Because it isn't a different sort of magic by the original premise. The Animate spell works just as well on bones as it does on anything else.

If you need cheap labor, make a scarecrow. If you need an expensive war machine, make a golem. If you need one when you're in the wilderness and not in a city with the infrastructure to make those two things for you? Then yeah, using a skeleton makes sense. But if you're building a city based on animated labor, then why not use the types that are the simplest to make when you're in a city?

Why would you use straw?

It's just pointless, flammable and rots.

Skeletons don't light on fire, are a detriment to all societies, and if stripped clean and washed, don't rot.

There is also the issue that wood is far less stable for movement than hardened calcium. There is a reason why we switched to steel bike spokes

Two balls would run into issues under load. The joint wouldn't distribute the weight evenly and you'll have deformation. Straw would wear out too quickly under normal human loads. Straw also would be far more succeptible to damage as even a dagger would be able to do some significant damage. A wooden skeleton would also need to be far more bulky than bone as wood doesn't have the rigidity of bone.

You don't use up skeletons.

Just and more energy to repair them.

The only reason you need more bodies is to build better skeletons

So in this world, you can cheaply animate skeletons using magic from the negative plane that is entirely safe to use, is supported by the completely neutral gods of undeath, and you can repair anything that goes wrong with them using more magic?

>The joint wouldn't distribute the weight evenly and you'll have deformation.

The thing is animated and held together by magic. It'll be fine

>Straw also would be far more succeptible to damage as even a dagger would be able to do some significant damage.

We're a pacifistic nation, so these aren't designed for combat. A skeleton is about as vulnerable to a hammer, but you can't just shove in some straw and sew up a skeleton.

>A wooden skeleton would also need to be far more bulky than bone as wood doesn't have the rigidity of bone
>Straw would wear out too quickly under normal human loads.

Depends on the labor you're using them for, but since it's magic that's keeping them held together and compelling them to move in the first place, then the specific materials matter a lot less.

It's also a lot cheaper and more easily replaced. It also isn't capped by your population in any way. If you have a town of 1000 people, you could get 10,000 strawmen. If you want skeletons, you're going to be stuck waiting for the population to increase. You have a far lower supply that might not keep up with demand.

As the supply of corpses dries up human labor moves in to supplant it. This brings you back to normal feudal standards but as there isn't enough corpses for hazardous work human labor is brought in to supplant it. First in fields and eventually in quarries and mines. Hazardous work, however, means more corpses and the cycle starts anew.

However, having some of the labor done by undead means that the standard of living is higher. Higher standard of living means more children. This leads to a population boon and eventually more corpses.

You think this is crazy?

I could just heal people with magic, why wouldn't I be able to repair a skeleton just as easily?

>The thing is animated and held together by magic. It'll be fine
>A skeleton is about as vulnerable to a hammer, but you can't just shove in some straw and sew up a skeleton.

These two arguments contradict one another. Either you can hold the thing together with magic or you can't. If the former then you can repair skeletons with magic. If the later then bone is the superior material to work with.

Also, there's no reason to limit yourself to just human corpses.

Because a human body will typically heal over time naturally, compared to inanimate objects?

Either way, the premise already established a single source of animating magic. No reason those same repair spells wouldn't also work on any other type of construct that could be made more cheaply.

I'm sure that every corpse brought in from mining and ranching accidents will be in good enough shape to be used in the workforce. I mean, unless you're going to be using your negative energy to heal that too, in which case everything should be fine.

The implication you're giving me here is that it's okay to operate on the assumption that your workers are going to die horribly, so you can feel free to turn them into slaves that don't need to be paid.

It's the former, and you can repair both with magic, but you can also more easily repair a strawman through mundane means.

>Also, there's no reason to limit yourself to just human corpses.

There's no reason to limit yourself to corpses at all except 'muh good necromancy'

Magic is just the muscles of the construct, the thing in which they are acting through is important as well.

Don't forget that this setup relies on the idea that the government has free ownership of all corpses. You really think the people of the country wouldn't try to get some compensation when dad dies in the mines, and his skeleton is going to be used for an infinite amount of slave labor?

How does the government even decide where the undead work anyway? The people owning the mines would certainly rather have them over mundane workers who they have to worry about the safety of, but there's only so many. Does the government rent them out? If so, wouldn't demand naturally increase so that the government is simply stealing wages from its own people?

>Stab scarecrow with dagger
>it loses some straw and its containing fabric is torn
>solve through mundane stitching
>hit skeleton with hammer
>breaks bone
>need magic to fix it
>hit scarecrow with hammer
>wood is less rigid than bone
>straw cushions the blow
>if any wood breaks, fix it with magic

Seems pretty clear.

>Why would we limit ourselves to corpses?
Because we are a small nation. We don't need a huge workforce because we are peaceful and about 90% of us don't need food. we don't want to expand because we don't need resources and are a trade nation.

>we don't want to expand because we don't need resources and are a trade nation.
Increasing your economic output would be an incentive to expand, though. And since you're a trade nation, importing raw materials to turn into finished goods and ethical workers to sell out would be easy for you.

The government sells corpses to groups of necromancers, then those necromancers undead are rented by people who need things done.

I mean having Dad's corpse working sucks, but he chose to peacefully pass on. He could have become undead, but he chose to go to the afterlife instead.

Your body being used after your death is a small price to pay for living in the nation with the highest living conditions in the world

>and are a trade nation

That sounds like a very good reason to use constructs rather than undead, as various traders might have cultural outlooks on the treatment of dead that might make extensive use of them unappealing.

As a trade hub, it'd also be far easier to import wood and export wooden servants that would deteriorate over time, meaning that people have to come back for a new one.

>but he chose to peacefully pass on.

He died in a mineshaft

>He could have become undead, but he chose to go to the afterlife instead.

Becoming an undead is presumably rather expensive. Also, your system is flawed if everyone can just become a free-willed undead, since then nobody will want to do any labor.

>the highest living conditions in the world

You mean no living conditions, because everyone is dead?

Yea but why?

You have a bunch of wizards, you can mine infinitely in the plane of earth. You don't need to expand at all.

You don't have to trade with people who don't like what you do with corpses if you don't want to. Many planes could care less

>you can mine infinitely in the plane of earth

Not part of the premise. You're assuming that there's an infinite plane of earth, when we're explicitly not working with a strict D&D setting, as undead are neutral and not evil.

>You don't have to trade with people who don't like what you do with corpses if you don't want to

And they don't have to trade with you, making that other trade city nearby that doesn't use undead a more appealing option. And since more people are going there and less here, then more people with stop going here and start going there, because there are more traders.

>many planes could care less

Again, assuming that you have a world where there's unlimited planes to ply your trade in.

Why would we have living workers at all?

just have an overseer command skeletons to do stuff, you legitimently need one dude to do one project.

People can get funding from the government, universities, or churches to become undead, especially if they are super skilled.

If you could get it cheep enough(I mean you have entire universities researching this stuff) people could just pay out of their own pocket.

In which case bone is superior to wood and straw.

Except when it comes to production, as you'll run out of corpses before you run out of plants

90% of your population doesn't need life support.

You are only farming to let people have babies if they want to.

You have a tireless population, you can trade with whoever you want because you don't have to pay for travel costs, distance means little.

You don't even need a plane of earth, you could just mine under water, your workers(and overseers) don't breathe.

>Why would we have living workers at all?

Because what started this whole chain was pointing out that you'd be stuck with very few undead laborers since you're waiting for people to grow old and die.

If everyone is sitting around living off of government checks and expecting skeletons to do all the work before they become a sentient non-labor skeleton, then you'll run out of actual labor to use.

At a certain point, you could argue to simply have the entire nation be nothing but undead, but at that point you also don't really need necromancers to raise the dead anymore, just a way to heal your immortal skeleton bodies.

>90%

Any other numbers you want to pull out of your ass?

>You are only farming to let people have babies if they want to.

Which you need them to, because otherwise you run out of corpses and your population stagnates.

>you can trade with whoever you want because you don't have to pay for travel costs

Unless your marching skeleton caravan runs into anyone who doesn't like undead

>you could just mine under water

You could just not mine at all, since your country really has no need for anything if you just want to be a few liches sitting around in a shack playing cards for eternity.

Presumably some people want to die.

Also presumably, you could raise like monkey skeletons for labor.

You forgot some steps here
>Stab scarecrow with dagger
>it loses some straw and its containing fabric is torn
>Stab skeleton with a dagger
>No damage worth noting.

>Sets scarecrow on fire
>Total anihilation
>Sets skeleton on fire
>blackened parts but otherwise fine

>Scarecrow gets wet
>Scarecrow starts to rot
>Skeleton gets wet
>skeleton gets dry

>Scarecrow runs through thornbush
>Scarecrow looses most of it's close and some of it's stuffing
>Skeleton runs through thornbush
>Skeleton now smells like thornbush

People like doing things

You would have to mine for materials to make buildings and art out of.

And ultimately

>scarecrow is destroyed
>make a new one out of cheap materials

>skeleton is destroyed
>kill a man to make a new one