Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Why bury the dead when undead exist?

A question I came across is "why does anyone bury the dead when undead are around?" Which is actually quite a reasonable question to ask. You would think that if undead are a problem then people would not leave bodies around to reanimate. So what keeps people building cemeteries and tombs and so forth?

In order to answer these questions, I had to devise a cosmology that departs from the incoherent D&D standard. Instead of souls passing to the outer planes, they enter the shadowfell and retain a connection to their bodies even after death. The souls of the dead are not disconnected from the living world, but connected to it. This forms the basis of ancestor worship and respect for the dead.

Cemeteries and tombs and such exist for the psychological comfort of the deceased. As spiritual beings, the dead may actively benefit from spiritual activities. Offerings of food, goods, servants, etc provide a benefit to their afterlives in the shadowfell. If the dead aren't properly appeased, then they haunt the living. Naturally, they'll look very unkindly on any adventurers who go around robbing graves. (In my setting, adventurers are murderous hobos, mercenaries, looters and generally bad people that sometimes believe themselves to be heroic because medieval morality is not modern morality.)

Cremation is an option but, as you can probably guess, necromancers will compensate by developing spells that can raise soldiers from ashes. Read about the "essential salts" from the stories of Charles Dexter Ward and Necroscope some time. Necromancy isn't some quick and easy path to zombie apocalypses, either. It involves either building a rapport with the dead, or summoning demons to possess their corpses. If you're going around enslaving the dead, then they will hate you. In order to maintain an army that doesn't hate your guts, you need to devote effort to making the dead follow you willingly.

But I digress.

No comments:

Post a Comment