Cranky Druid here with the first post of Dead Stay Dead, tackling some of the bad ideas in fantasy role-play gaming. There are a lot of ‘em out there, so let’s get started. In our sites today is zombies. Stop using them, because they make no sense.
What? But zombies are sacred to gaming! And there are zombie novels and movies and avoidance guides and muffins and . . . you speak heresy!
Try this on: in a world that expects zombies, there wouldn't be any. Zombies and their rotting kin in a fantasy world should bother a population exactly once and then never be seen again in any great number. Stupid, slow, smelly: their sole advantage is surprise. The day they crawl out of their graves is the last day anyone is burying dead people. Run into a walking corpse and every major culture incinerates its deceased starting that very morning. People do not want to parlay with their smelly and invariably hostile forefathers, so annihilating the body post-mortem becomes de rigour, incorporated into tradition overnight. That means no more ghouls, ghasts, skeletons or mummies troubling the living (who frankly have enough to worry about eking out a living in these overtly dangerous fantasy worlds). Spirits? OK, sure. An occasional chittering warrior awakened by a cult? No problem, we can be down with that. But randomly finding zombies attacking a town from its little cemetery or shuffling around dungeons is a big ‘ole FAIL, of both reason and imagination.
The worst case I’ve seen so far is the D&D 4e module Keep on the Shadowfel. According to that adventure’s history, when the place was still running as an active, populated citadel, a horde of clerics was employed to keep the corpses of their brethren down in the face of perpetual encouragement to the contrary from a nearby rift. When the clerics eventually went away, the corpses popped up and stayed up.
So who was paying these clerics? Who was buying their clothes, their food, their books, ritual supplies not to mention seeing to their defenses, maintenance of the grounds and everything else they would need to live in a remote keep? And all to keep corpses snoozing. Someone’s going to think, “Hey, there’s a low cost alternative available: harness people who can can start fires.” That’s unskilled labor right there: no pensions or insurance loads on the ‘ole payroll department.
Government money comes from taxes, and leaders are going to be receptive to saving gold and manpower in going with a cheap, perfect solution. This is not even mentioning lost tourism dollars from threat of zombie apocalypse. Also, not to pile on against a truly terrible idea, but these people built this fortress here because there was a rift to a plane whose mere proximity activates dead bodies. So they knew what to expect, and they buried the bodies of their kin, right there, anyway.
What I’m saying is: no, they didn’t.
Because even if there’s infinite money to station a major god’s full complement of clerics here to do this one stupid, everlasting, completely thankless task, the whole concept fails from a societal point of view. People die. Everyone knows this but it’s horrible anyway. The only thing worse than burying a beloved friend or relative, though, is fighting her again later. A few tussles with maggot-infested Grammy-grams and her zombified terrier Patches, and whatever misguided resistance any family might have put up at the thought of a blazing permanent solution will flit away like dandelion seeds on the wind. Burning the bodies will be not merely the preferred approach but the strictly required one.
So use the undead sparingly, and if there are walking corpses in whatever guise, there should be a real back story behind it, something clever or weird or exciting or even humorous. Don’t throw reanimated rotters in there without thought because people don’t behave this way.
Anyway, thanks for reading all the way to the bottom.
Cranky Druid, a.k.a.
Verdre Aspianne, CEO
Dead Stay Dead, Inc.
Stamp out mediocrity: DM intelligently.
Dig it! I never could palette the horde rising from the crypt trope. Now a arch-lich reanimating the bodies of recently deceased slaves for use as cannon fodder in the next phase of empire building, that's classy!
ReplyDeleteHey! Nice post! I occasionally use undead in my games. What do you think about dead bodies that guard their honored resting place?
ReplyDeleteAny thoughts about the elven tombs at Evereska?
Another issue that you perhaps haven't considered is perhaps what would logically be the greatest source of undead: battlefields. Even assuming relatively small armies, I'm thinking that with all of their foes and comrades lying dead around them that they might just not have the time to burn them all.
ReplyDeleteAnother issue is that of flammable materials-wood is often hard to find for an army on the move, and while other materials can stand in (animal dung, grass, oil) they're either not as effective (animal dung, grass) or expensive to procure (oil). Even assuming that the armies in question both have pyromancers or something on reserve, such fire does need something to catch on to-and human bodies don't burn well.
I can also see undead arising from "secret" deaths. A couple wanders into the woods for a tryst and is set upon by a group of murderous bandits, cutting their lives short and sending their souls back into rotting bodies. The most depraved man in the village drinks himself into a drunken stupor, hanging himself in his shack on the outskirts of town and coming back as a wight or a vampire.
While I agree with you that the undead are often used with no forethought or reason (and that goes for many other sorts of "monsters" as well), they do have a consistent place in FRPGS that can be justified using the material.
Riffing off of your assertion (with which I happen to agree) that every npc needs some manner of story, all undead at least need some indication of where the body came from, if not how they died.
(Another option as far as smaller groups of undead go is that of willful ignorance. "My george was a good man, he won't come back." And if you think people aren't that stupid, think about the aids epidemic which resulted from a lot of people assuming "it won't happen to me.")