The Undead (was:A Roleplaying thread? Surely fucking not!)

[Caesar Slaad]

ack! :eek:

isn't there an upper-class dead thing from libris mortis, the necropolitan, or  the like?

Yeah. Though somehow, the archetype was lost on me until I read Clark Ashton Smith's Empire of Necromancers.

For that matter, after reading Smith's The Charnel God, I have an entirely different view of ghouls, too. Therein, Ghouls are a secret cabal that really only mess with the dead... and only do anything to the living if they dare to intercede with their charge over the dead.

Edit: For those interested in the inspiration:
The Empire of the Necromancers:
http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/61/the-empire-of-the-necromancers
The Charnel God:
http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/22/the-charnel-god

[beeber]

thanks for the links, CS.  i'll have to scope them out later!

[HinterWelt]

[One Horse Town]

Nazi zombies...right. Staple of the genre, i guess. I think i'd be more scared of the real thing than the dead version though.

[David R]

All this talk of Zombies and no mention T-Willard and YotZ.

Read this:
http://www.therpgsite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2884

Regards,
David R

[J Arcane]

I think the pat cop out of "necromancy/undead" = "EVIL!" is a major failure of potential.

I have a lot of fun exploring alternate mechanics and moralities for necromancy, and I also jsut dig necromancy itself.  Who the hell doesn't wanna raise an army of skeletons to do their bidding?

Often, I will draw a distinction between those undead forms that entrap or enslave a soul, and those that preclude one.  Zombies are skeletons might be OK, because the bodies have long since been abandoned, but stuff like vampires, or deliberately creating ghosts and the like, aren't acceptable.  In my "Fullmetal Necromancer" setting, intelligent undead are major taboo, because intelligence without the moral agency of a soul essentially produces a psychopath, and thus a very dangerous being to toy with.

By and large, if no one's using the damn corpse, it seems rather silly to me to just let the thing rot in the ground, if it could continue to serve a purpose well after death.  Blanket judgements of the sort usually made about the subject just lack any enjoyable nuance.  

And that kind of nuance can open up interesting story and character possibilities.  I played a character once who was a LN necro cleric, who came from an order who served to monitor the passing of the dead, and essentially police the misuse of undeath, hunt rogue intelligent undead, and free ghosts or spirits trapped in the mortal plane.  

He creeped out the party somethin' fierce, but he also fascinated the players, and any time the players are as interested or more in a character as I am, I consider that a win.

[James McMurray]

So not the 'don't realise they are dead' and more the 'i refuse to be dead'?

Definitely. The shambling dead and unknowing dead types are probably better for horror setings, but I play mostly fantasy and manapunk, so threats with purpose fit my style better.

[TonyLB]

It can also be fun to use walking corpses in a way that points out the deadness of them, rather than the undeath ...

I'm not expressing that well.  How to say this ... sometimes the fear isn't just that the thing is going to claw your jugular out.  Sometimes the fear is "Oh shit ... DEATH.  That's gonna happen to me!"

Like, underwater zombies.  Inherently cool ... because in order to get down there, people have to be underwater themselves.  So they're looking at these waterlogged corpses, and (I hope) some part of them is thinking "Oh man, I really hope my Airy Water spell holds.  I do not want to go out that way."

[jrients]

Howzabout an undead that is born out of self-loathing?  In life, the person hated himself so much that he won't allow himself to rest easy in death.  He lashes out at the whole world because of his rage, but it's really himself he's angry with.

[ghost rat]

How about the middle class undead? You know, regular old working stiff. :haw:

I recall my teenage V:tM games producing characters like this occasionally.

necropolitan

That was always my least favorite flavor of ice cream...

[Brantai]

The chocolate and vanilla parts are okay, but then you get to the rotting corpse part and it's just gross.

[Caesar Slaad]

The chocolate and vanilla parts are okay, but then you get to the rotting corpse part and it's just gross.

:haw:

[Keith]

Once ran a game where the undead were the servants of everyone else, cause everyone else was a necromancer.  There were laws about who you could raise (only family members) and so on with stiff fines and the like.

Zombies were labor.  Vampires were more animalistic in nature in the game so I made them like the K9 unit of the police.  Ghouls were the living who wanted to be undead (not actual undead).  

The game was set in a big city and I think it was about family politics.

Keith

[TonyLB]

Oh, why did I not draw the mental link to Shaman King earlier?  Keith, your post reminded me of the whole "House of Tao" thing, with them farming the corpses of the greatest people of the age, to keep a perpetual formaldehyde-farm of ready-to-raise specialty zombies.  Now there's a fun, wierd, creepy take on the undead.

[Keith]

Oh, why did I not draw the mental link to Shaman King earlier?  Keith, your post reminded me of the whole "House of Tao" thing, with them farming the corpses of the greatest people of the age, to keep a perpetual formaldehyde-farm of ready-to-raise specialty zombies.  Now there's a fun, wierd, creepy take on the undead.

Isn't that how Cobra made Serpentor?

Keith