Why would you ever bury your dead

[Spuddles]

Given how extremely common necromancy and the undead are, why would you ever leave dead creatures in conveniently marked places for reanimation?

Why isn't every corpse burned?

I can't help but feel that any village with a graveyard is crawling with cultists of Death and the Undead.

Corpses invite calamity.

[Drakevarg]

I once had a character that made a point of burning every body he came across, which slowed him down quite a bit when he came across a fresh battlefield.

Anyway, I usually explain this by simply not making spellcasters super common, and with enough of them having no interest in undead to keep it from becoming commonplace. It still happens, but usually only in small villages where if you build your cemetery a few miles from town and avoid it when you can, the undead won't harass you so much. Plus the local ghosts might shoo off any of the greener aspiring necromancers.

Plus, undead in my campaigns are neutral, not evil, so in some cultures they intentionally reanimate them as tomb wardens. Others do cremate, of course, but it varies from culture to culture whether they view undead as sacred, unpleasant, or dreaded.

[Yora]

Given how extremely common necromancy and the undead are, why would you ever leave dead creatures in conveniently marked places for reanimation?
How extremely common is necromancy?

[Spuddles]

I once had a character that made a point of burning every body he came across, which slowed him down quite a bit when he came across a fresh battlefield.

Anyway, I usually explain this by simply not making spellcasters super common, and with enough of them having no interest in undead to keep it from becoming commonplace. It still happens, but usually only in small villages where if you build your cemetery a few miles from town and avoid it when you can, the undead won't harass you so much. Plus the local ghosts might shoo off any of the greener aspiring necromancers.

Plus, undead in my campaigns are neutral, not evil, so in some cultures they intentionally reanimate them as tomb wardens. Others do cremate, of course, but it varies from culture to culture whether they view undead as sacred, unpleasant, or dreaded.

I just can't see any government being alright with leaving all those potential weapons buried underground. It'd be like just leaving a bunch of tanks outside in a field and crossing your fingers that no aspiring warlords decide to use them.

It's absolute insanity, considering how high magic your average D&D world is (Golarian, Eberron, Faerun, Oerth). I suppose if you literally have like 4 casters in the entire world at any one time and they don't use any good spells and also don't have access to high level stuff, it wouldn't be a problem.

But the first time an army of the dead rolls through town because there's 400 years of corpses lying around? Yeah, they're always gonna burn those bodies, forever.

The graveyard thing is the result of a Middle Eastern real world religion that showed up around 2000 years ago. With your typical D&D cosmology, I don't really see the reason why bodies are even religiously significant. Unless you're into some really dark stuff. In which case, burying your dead is probably something only the foulest of cultures undertake.


How extremely common is necromancy?

How many D&D games have you played where you fought a skeleton or zombie?

[Ageir]

Plus, undead in my campaigns are neutral, not evil, so in some cultures they intentionally reanimate them as tomb wardens. Others do cremate, of course, but it varies from culture to culture whether they view undead as sacred, unpleasant, or dreaded.

That's a good idea I love it.

[Vaz]

Why do we bury the dead in marked plots in todays world? Surely it would be more economical to just cart them off to an incinerator, after we've harvested all of their organs and given them to the hospitals, or had our cadavers given to hospital universities ready to cut open and practise?

You could also say why do they even need burying in the first place? A cleric can just as easily resurrect/revivify them.

There's very little rhyme or reason to todays world, other than it's traditional; typically only the less rich of us burn our remains, as we cannot afford the expansion to the plots, so having several urns of the family buried in the same plot is more spacially conservating than burial; alternatively, scattered in the wind or served into a drink, or made into a diamond are other ways to go these days than plain burial, but for the western world, burial is typically tradition; it goes back to the Pharaohs at least, who made massive burial chambers in an attempt to get to the afterlife.

So, why do anything? It's down to the general intelligence of the populace, and if the populace believe that Necromancy is a particular plague of theirs, they will do stuff to stop it happening - face down burial, silver in the eyes/mouth, garlic cloves, stakes through heart, or even burning.

[Spuddles]

Why do we bury the dead in marked plots in todays world? Surely it would be more economical to just cart them off to an incinerator, after we've harvested all of their organs and given them to the hospitals, or had our cadavers given to hospital universities ready to cut open and practise?

You could also say why do they even need burying in the first place? A cleric can just as easily resurrect/revivify them.

There's very little rhyme or reason to todays world, other than it's traditional; typically only the less rich of us burn our remains, as we cannot afford the expansion to the plots, so having several urns of the family buried in the same plot is more spacially conservating than burial; alternatively, scattered in the wind or served into a drink, or made into a diamond are other ways to go these days than plain burial, but for the western world, burial is typically tradition; it goes back to the Pharaohs at least, who made massive burial chambers in an attempt to get to the afterlife.

So, why do anything? It's down to the general intelligence of the populace, and if the populace believe that Necromancy is a particular plague of theirs, they will do stuff to stop it happening - face down burial, silver in the eyes/mouth, garlic cloves, stakes through heart, or even burning.

Don't bring the real world into this- you know very well that how we treat our dead corresponds virtually directly with the religion that shaped our culture.

Let me ask you a rhetorical question that doesn't have a "because of things we can't talk about here" answer:

If every 40 years the dead crawled out of their graves and messily tore apart and devoured your family, how long do you think you would continue burying your dead?

[Drakevarg]

If every 40 years the dead crawled out of their graves and messily tore apart and devoured your family, how long do you think you would continue burying your dead?

Keep in mind that these dead are buried under six feet of dirt, are often nailed into a coffin, and not uncommonly that coffin is inside a stone box. And even then, back in the old days when people suspected the dead of rising and feeding on them, they would dig the bugger up and nail him into the coffin to make sure he didn't get up again. That's where the vampiric "stake through the heart" thing comes from. It's not meant to kill them, just make sure they can't get out of the coffin.

Plus, the undead in DnD are usually found in dungeons. Since we're looking at a Fridge Logic moment here, we can't just take the actual truth of the situation (people are building large, underground complexes with logic-puzzle-based security systems for no particular reason) for granted because it's very dumb, and instead try to write them off as mausoleums. Mausoleums which, by the way, generally have a very heavy stone door in front of them and the monsters generally are perfectly content to stay inside.

Really, the undead in DnD are, apart from the odd zombie apocalypse, only really dangerous to intrepid adventurers and dumb peasants who feel like poking around in ancient crypts.

And honestly, you can't really stop the undead from showing up entirely. There's always going to be fresh battlefields to plunder, and if the aspiring necromancer can't find a crypt she's just gonna murder her some corpses and reanimate those. And if all they want to do is hide in a smelly hole and study the dark arts, it's probably safer to just build a hole for them in the first place instead of making them get all stabby.

[Vaz]

Why should I not? Our religion, yes. But *why* does our religion tell us to do this? I'll leave it at that in regards to religion; however, other religions in the game might have similar clauses in the "return soul to sender" contracts; as in they must be buried, not burned, or whatever.

With wizards and necromancers around it wouldn't matter whether they were buried or not; if they were intent on the undead, they'd make their own. A few select choices, here and there, and then begin the crusade.

And like I said, if Necromancy was a problem they'd take the relevant precautions; whether it's mystical burial rituals which prevent unlife from returning, dismembering, burning, or loading the bodies with objects inimicable to the undead.

[Mystral]

Why, of course you'd bury the dead for the eventuality you'd ever need to resurrect or question them with speak with dead.

[Rubik]

Why, of course you'd bury the dead for the eventuality you'd ever need to resurrect or question them with speak with dead.Depending on the spell, however, all you'd need would be the head.

[Mystral]

Imagine a world where necromancers would be forced to develope undead that consist of flying skulls, perhaps on fire.

Yeah..

[Kelb_Panthera]

There's a couple things that have the notion of undead being that abuseable being a shaky assumption.

Animate dead is a cleric 3/ wiz 4 spell. That means it can't be produced by a caster under 5th level. A cleric can controll 1HD worth of undead per cleric level by rebuke undead. The command undead spell offers only very limited control and requires the undead be able to hear you give commands in addition to be a sorc/wiz spell which means that a caster with this option needs to be at least 7th level to have animate dead. In either case animate dead only allows you to control 4HD worth of undead per caster level.

Averaging the figures for determining the class breakdown of a population tells us that there's only about 1 person out of every 500 or so that are capable of this.

So that's 1 person out of 1000 (cleric) that can control 25HD worth of undead pretty well and 1 person out of 1000 (wizard) that can control up to 28 HD of undead well or up to 7 undead creatures, regardless of HD, rather poorly if he's willing to burn a 2nd level slot every day; 14 if he's got a lesser rod of extend.

That's hardly an undead army in either case.

[Hopeless]

Have you heard about the movie "Warm Bodies"?

This thread makes me want to run a game where a priest or follower of a faith actually tries to call upon divine aid and they all think he/she has failed only to have their skeletal foes suddenly turn on each other as the souls of a few of them are restored to their skeletal remains with a singular desire to be able tp pass over since most forms of necromancy usually steals a part of the soul of the remains to animate it.

Well if you're going to consider undead essentially neutral especially if they're supposed to be mindless then there should be a reason why there can be good aligned undead however temporarily they stick around!:smallwink:

[Yuki Akuma]

In a lot of settings, corpses that aren't given proper burial rights... animate as undead.

So.

[Murmaider]

In a lot of settings, corpses that aren't given proper burial rights... animate as undead.

So.

Certainly there must be an undead in one of the Monster Manuals that comes into being only if its dead body was incinerated.

Maybe people just think it's easier to deal with some skeletons and zombies instead of some ghost that uses fireball several times a day.

[Rubik]

I would think that most places would animate them as skeletons or dread warriors. A lot more sanitary than zombies, and you can't turn bodies that are already undead into the seriously infectious undead, such as vampires or wights. Plus they're a cheap source of labor (over the long haul, anyway), and they're great for use as shock troopers to prevent actual people from having to die when all the monsters living around the settled areas inevitably attack.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Almost forgot, most graveyards are hallowed ground. Undead can't be raised from hallowed ground. This necessitates manually digging them up and removing them from the site before they can be animated and graveyards are typically fenced in and at least attended, if not guarded.

[Malroth]

Zeus/Odin/Osiris/Helm/Corelon Leathon/etc commanded that it be done that way and every time a cleric gets enough common sense to start burning the dead they're stripped of their powers and forced to undergo atonement.

[Lonely Tylenol]

I like to think a necromancer that sneaks into graveyards and goes digging for fresh bodies for their necromancies is still better than the alternative: killing live people and using their still-fresh bodies for their spells.

[Vaz]

I like to think a necromancer that sneaks into graveyards and goes digging for fresh bodies for their necromancies is still better than the alternative: killing live people and using their still-fresh bodies for their spells.

Why? Yes, it might be a bit Burke and Hare-esque, but what's so wrong with the Necromancer killing people, or using his risen dead to kill people, and then raise them? Why does he have to go around digging them up?

Is it morals? In which case, why is he digging them up, and not asking for them? And if they say no, why do those same morals allow him to ignore their wishes?

[Drakevarg]

Is it morals? In which case, why is he digging them up, and not asking for them? And if they say no, why do those same morals allow him to ignore their wishes?

Because there is a wide gulf between upstanding citizen and psychotic loony? Theft (even graverobbing) and murder aren't on the same moral wavelength. A necromancer could easily be fine with one but not the other.

As I mentioned previously, most necromancers probably have no real interest in wanton slaughter. After all, mages are scholars often enough, and are probably more interested in figuring out how to live forever than murdering peasants, as long as people leave them alone and they don't run low on corpses.

[Vaz]

It's one hell of an oddly principled person who in a society of none-permissive attitudes regarding raising the dead is able to go around happy as larry with bringing them to life, but not killing. While I'll be the first to admit Necromancy isn't entirely the most sane of the spell schools, that takes the bucket. If it's permissive for the dead to be raised, then there's no issue with needing to grave rob, there should be a Dead Body 7/11 available for the budding Necromancer.

Now admittedly, there's not much that can be related to Necromancy in the current world, the nearest I can think of is grave-robbing and cannibals. As far as I'm aware, the notorious "Cannibals", like Sweeney Todd, Alfred Fish, the Sagawa case, Chikatilo, Dahmer, etc, all were killers.

There were some extraordinary mitigating circumstances for some (such as the Plane Crash in the Andes with the rugby team), but those also ate purely out of survival and from those who died. The correlation between Necromancy and Cannibalism is that Necromancy is not a requisite to survive - the need for food does not include the act of raising the dead, QED, the Necromancer's raise the dead for their own purposes, and consequently, have no care of whether they were dead or not; simply that they were dead.

[Ashtagon]

The graveyard thing is the result of a Middle Eastern real world religion that showed up around 2000 years ago. With your typical D&D cosmology, I don't really see the reason why bodies are even religiously significant. Unless you're into some really dark stuff. In which case, burying your dead is probably something only the foulest of cultures undertake

Strongly disagree. Burial customs date back to 130,000 years ago, which pre-dates pretty much every major (and most minor) known religion.

As for reasons...

* Respect for the dead. In a magic-ridden universe, NOT burying the dead might be a good way to risk the corpse randomly rising up to seek revenge on those who failed to pay their proper respects.
* Burial may be necessary for the deities of the universe to continue to receive whatever spiritual energy they obtain from worshippers. A soul whose former body has been destroyed loses all remaining connection to the prime, and hence no longer provides spiritual energy to the deity he worshipped.
* Hope that the body could one day be raised.

[Clistenes]

There's a couple things that have the notion of undead being that abuseable being a shaky assumption.

Animate dead is a cleric 3/ wiz 4 spell. That means it can't be produced by a caster under 5th level. A cleric can controll 1HD worth of undead per cleric level by rebuke undead. The command undead spell offers only very limited control and requires the undead be able to hear you give commands in addition to be a sorc/wiz spell which means that a caster with this option needs to be at least 7th level to have animate dead. In either case animate dead only allows you to control 4HD worth of undead per caster level.

Averaging the figures for determining the class breakdown of a population tells us that there's only about 1 person out of every 500 or so that are capable of this.

So that's 1 person out of 1000 (cleric) that can control 25HD worth of undead pretty well and 1 person out of 1000 (wizard) that can control up to 28 HD of undead well or up to 7 undead creatures, regardless of HD, rather poorly if he's willing to burn a 2nd level slot every day; 14 if he's got a lesser rod of extend.

That's hardly an undead army in either case.

On the other hand, if you don't bother controlling them (just send them out to hunt and kill the living, and once they are far away you release them and create new batch that you send out to hunt the living...etc.) you can create as much skeletons and zombies as corpses you have.

And I you are able to cast Create Greater Undead all you need to start a zombie Apocalypse is to create a single infectious undead and send it out to kill and multiply.

I think the default D&D world only works if it's either controlled by powerful magocracies and churches that prevent it from happening, or it's a post-apocalyptic world (think Rain of the Colorless Fire, Creeping Doom, Fall of Karsus, Sundering, Crown Wars level of destruction) in which people are back to a subsistence level economy and magic is almost lost, and only beginning to be recovered (hence all the ruins and dungeons you explore in search of old magic).

In the High Magic magocracy/theocracy kind of world the powerful mages and clerics keep watch to prevent an undead apocalypse (think of a Tippyverse).

In the post-Apocalypse world there are very few spellcasters, and people lives mostly in insolated hamlets hidden in the middle of the forests that aren't marked in any map, so the chance of either a random undead or an evil necromancer finding it are slim, unless said necromancer is using a lot of divinations to find them. The few bigger settlements and castles are usually controlled by people with adventurer levels.


Strongly disagree. Burial customs date back to 130,000 years ago, which pre-dates pretty much every major (and most minor) known religion.

For all we know those people had complex religious beliefs. Anatomically Modern Humans who were exactly like us already existed 80,000 years ago, and even the people who lived 130,000 years ago were probably almost as smart as we are.

[Answerer]

Also, I'd point out that in a lot of settings where necromancy is very common, cremation often is more common too. It's a matter of just how common each is. Adventurers see more undead than most because they go looking for it, but I'd guess that the average commoner has very low odds of ever seeing an undead, or ever being reanimated after death.

There's even real world analogues for this. At least one real-world religion that banned cremation had a special exception for Hawai'i, where space was too limited and issues of disease were far too serious to not burn bodies.

[Kelb_Panthera]

On the other hand, if you don't bother controlling them (just send them out to hunt and kill the living, and once they are far away you release them and create new batch that you send out to hunt the living...etc.) you can create as much skeletons and zombies as corpses you have.

And I you are able to cast Create Greater Undead all you need to start a zombie Apocalypse is to create a single infectious undead and send it out to kill and multiply.

I think the default D&D world only works if it's either controlled by powerful magocracies and churches that prevent it from happening, or it's a post-apocalyptic world (think Rain of the Colorless Fire, Creeping Doom, Fall of Karsus, Sundering, Crown Wars level of destruction) in which people are back to a subsistence level economy and magic is almost lost, and only beginning to be recovered (hence all the ruins and dungeons you explore in search of old magic).

In the High Magic magocracy/theocracy kind of world the powerful mages and clerics keep watch to prevent an undead apocalypse (think of a Tippyverse).

In the post-Apocalypse world there are very few spellcasters, and people lives mostly in insolated hamlets hidden in the middle of the forests that aren't marked in any map, so the chance of either a random undead or an evil necromancer finding it are slim, unless said necromancer is using a lot of divinations to find them. The few bigger settlements and castles are usually controlled by people with adventurer levels.



For all we know those people had complex religious beliefs. Anatomically Modern Humans who were exactly like us already existed 80,000 years ago, and even the people who lived 130,000 years ago were probably almost as smart as we are.

You didn't address my other post. One 9th level cleric present at the time of a church's dedication means that no corpse buried in the graveyard behind it will ever rise in that place, barring an evil cleric of that level reversing the effect with unhallow. A necromancer's gotta start somewhere and a graveyard is a terrible place to do it.

As for higher level casters trying to start a more general undead apocalypse; why? With the power mid and high level characters wield there are far more efficient ways to get what you want and an undead outbreak that's not monitored and guided will be quickly stomped out by agents of almost every good church and more than a few neutral ones.

Higher level casters are comparatively even more rare; making the number of people both willing and capable of pulling this sort of shennanigan even less common and they're all subject to legend lore telling those who're fighting against such outbreaks who they are and their last known location.

Lastly, as screwy as it sounds for someone to be okay with animating corpses but not with making them, never underestimate the human capacity to rationalize irrational crap.

[Spuddles]

There's a couple things that have the notion of undead being that abuseable being a shaky assumption.

Animate dead is a cleric 3/ wiz 4 spell. That means it can't be produced by a caster under 5th level. A cleric can controll 1HD worth of undead per cleric level by rebuke undead. The command undead spell offers only very limited control and requires the undead be able to hear you give commands in addition to be a sorc/wiz spell which means that a caster with this option needs to be at least 7th level to have animate dead. In either case animate dead only allows you to control 4HD worth of undead per caster level.

Averaging the figures for determining the class breakdown of a population tells us that there's only about 1 person out of every 500 or so that are capable of this.

So that's 1 person out of 1000 (cleric) that can control 25HD worth of undead pretty well and 1 person out of 1000 (wizard) that can control up to 28 HD of undead well or up to 7 undead creatures, regardless of HD, rather poorly if he's willing to burn a 2nd level slot every day; 14 if he's got a lesser rod of extend.

That's hardly an undead army in either case.

Wizard with command undead can control A LOT of skeletons, no HD limit. Animate Dead to bring them to life, then use command undead.

Or just animate a few and let them run amok.


I like to think a necromancer that sneaks into graveyards and goes digging for fresh bodies for their necromancies is still better than the alternative: killing live people and using their still-fresh bodies for their spells.

The graveyard has starter undead.


Strongly disagree. Burial customs date back to 130,000 years ago, which pre-dates pretty much every major (and most minor) known religion.

As for reasons...

* Respect for the dead. In a magic-ridden universe, NOT burying the dead might be a good way to risk the corpse randomly rising up to seek revenge on those who failed to pay their proper respects.
* Burial may be necessary for the deities of the universe to continue to receive whatever spiritual energy they obtain from worshippers. A soul whose former body has been destroyed loses all remaining connection to the prime, and hence no longer provides spiritual energy to the deity he worshipped.
* Hope that the body could one day be raised.

1) How is leaving a corpse around to get raped into unlife 'respect'? Cremation seems the way most of the Good churches would go; Pelor especially. I could see druidic sects doing sky burials or other practices of returning the body to nature.
2) A fabrication, unsupported by any WotC material on the subject.
3) A body can only be raised 1 day/CL after it dies. I don't think that's why mausoleums, etc. exist.

I am pretty sure Mausoleums, Crypts, and Graveyards only exist so adventurers have a place to go where there are many undead to fight.

[Clistenes]

You didn't address my other post. One 9th level cleric present at the time of a church's dedication means that no corpse buried in the graveyard behind it will ever rise in that place, barring an evil cleric of that level reversing the effect with unhallow. A necromancer's gotta start somewhere and a graveyard is a terrible place to do it.

As I said, in a high magic level world the churches would protect population from an undead apocalypse. In a low magic world where there are few clerics and most are 1st-5th level, protecting the population would be more difficult.


As for higher level casters trying to start a more general undead apocalypse; why? With the power mid and high level characters wield there are far more efficient ways to get what you want and an undead outbreak that's not monitored and guided will be quickly stomped out by agents of almost every good church and more than a few neutral ones.

Why do we have bombs, nukes and chemical weapons? For evil people undead hordes woud be weapons of mass destruction against their enemies.

And the undead outbreak is cheap and requires relatively low investment and low power, unlike other ways to do the same. High level adventurers won't be threatened by it, maybe, but if you kill or drive away all the commoners you will f*ck the economy and society of your enemies and win the war.


Higher level casters are comparatively even more rare; making the number of people both willing and capable of pulling this sort of shennanigan even less common and they're all subject to legend lore telling those who're fighting against such outbreaks who they are and their last known location.

Create undead is 6th level, and it only requires a single 11th level cleric to build an army of thousands of infectious undead under its control.

Animate dead is 3rd level, lower level than Hallow. There are more people able to create zombies and skeletons than people able to prevent it.

[Mnemnosyne]

It's not even the intentionally created undead that bring this question to mind for me. My question is even more basic: how did the tradition of burying dead even develop in a world where undead can spontaneously arise under some circumstances? Not every undead is intentionally created - many types spontaneously arise based on method of death and various other such conditions.

It seems to me that when the first undead got up and started attacking his primitive tribe, that tribe would have very quickly learned to completely destroy dead bodies; the practice of burying them would never have even entered tradition because even the earliest examples of people wouldn't have practiced it.

Burying the dead only makes sense to me in a world where the undead thing is a new phenomenon, and where natural conditions could never result in a corpse rising from the dead, at least not until something happened after civilizations had thousands of years to develop and solidly ingrain the tradition of burial.

[Jerthanis]

In Rokugan, there was a giant war like, 500 years ago with an immortal blood sorcerer who raised the dead to make his army, and he nearly took over all of Rokugan before being defeated. Since that war, every major power group in Rokugan cremates their dead.

So it could be that the undead problem isn't major enough yet to really affect culture.

Maybe every forty years, a group of zombies is raised and kills 10-15 people in Ruralistan, but over in Nextcounty, they don't even hear about it except in rumor. In Ruralistan, they blame the necromancer and try to destroy knowledge of necromancy because they don't want to change their culturally valued burial rites.

[ericgrau]

The comment about hallow (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/hallow.htm) is a good point. Both for fluff and practicality every town should spring the 1,000 gp for a hallow every year and graves should be tightly spaced to fit as many as possible in it. 1,000 gp is a lot for an individual but for a town to protect several people and only once a year it seems like a pretty good idea that's well within their budget. Furthermore its duration is instantaneous so it cannot be dispelled. EDIT: Even if we consider high level caster rarity 9*5*10=450 gp for a total of 1,450 gp. This is a fair price and it's not unreasonable for one to visit every year.

A couple of guards would make sense too.

At a minimum of level 5 necromancers aren't unheard of but they are uncommon. A few people in each large town are powerful enough casters, and any of them may or may not be necromancers. I imagine half the large towns wouldn't even have one. For small towns it would be very rare.

Finally with so few necromancers for so many people, the corpse supply might not be the issue and attempting to limit it may be futile. Heck if they wanted necromancers could kill some forest animals instead. Warding the 4,000 bodies right outside the town gates to prevent an army invasion should be plenty. Other threats must be carried in and there's no way you could prevent a necromancer from getting at least a few bodies anyway.

[MukkTB]

To be honest graveyard-risen undead shouldn't be as much a problem as you might think. We recently had a thread about an aspiring necromancer wanting to raise a full army of undead and run over some local cities. The general conclusion was that he would bankrupt himself and wouldn't pose that terrible a threat to the local area. It would have cost a fraction of the undead army's expenses to raise and hire an army of living guys.

Evil clerics and so on that can control a number of undead relative to their hit die aren't going to care much for graveyards. They'll kill some big monster over the normal course of adventuring and make that into a much more fearsome undead than granny lvl 1 commoner ever could have been.

Undead raising from graveyards is more a DM fiat thing. Theres really no rules for how it would normally happen. As such it should probably not be as much of a thing as it is.

The most threatening undead to civilization are wights, ghouls, vampires, and things of that nature. They attack a living person and if that person fails his save he turns into one. There's not really time to burn the bodies. By the time they're a dead body that dead thing is now trying to eat you.

So in conclusion burning your local dead will not significantly protect you from the real undead threats. At the same time there is no reason not to do it unless you plan on some local benevolent necromancy. The old time stake through the heart story demonstrates people doing this in real life. If they were worried something may become/was undead, they did enough damage to the body to prevent it from being a threat.

[Draz74]

I can't help but feel that any village with a graveyard is crawling with cultists of Death and the Undead.

Yeah, and it only EVER rains when something really dramatic is about to happen! (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0199.html)

I.e. this is a selection bias: there are plenty of graveyards around that never have trouble with necromancy; it's just that the PCs don't notice them (assuming the DM even thinks to describe them) unless there is some kind of cult or undeath activity going on.


* Burial may be necessary for the deities of the universe to continue to receive whatever spiritual energy they obtain from worshippers. A soul whose former body has been destroyed loses all remaining connection to the prime, and hence no longer provides spiritual energy to the deity he worshipped.


2) A fabrication, unsupported by any WotC material on the subject.
So? Just because it's not factually true in the mechanics of Planescape doesn't mean traditions won't have caught on based on the idea. Urban legends catch on like wildfire all the time.

(Not to mention an individual campaign setting is free to have different afterlife fluff than Planescape. But I understand that's not what you're asking questions about here.)


3) A body can only be raised 1 day/CL after it dies.
Nitpick: depends on the spell to be used. Could be a LOT longer.


Animate dead is 3rd level, lower level than Hallow. There are more people able to create zombies and skeletons than people able to prevent it.

Kind of a hard-to-judge argument, considering Animate Dead is a single target, while Hallow has an area effect. If Hallow can protect at least 9000 bodies, you have to start asking: are 9th-level good Clerics more than 9000 times as rare as 5th-level evil Clerics?

... hmmm. The answer very well may be "yes," once you add in Level 6-8 evil Clerics, as well as Level 7+ evil wizards, and factor in the difference in casting time and material components. Hence, adventurers can still have adventures with graveyards of undead. But at least for the people who can afford it, the Hallowed graveyards make sense as an alternative to cremation ... and maybe the poorer people are just trying to imitate the richer people.


In a lot of settings, corpses that aren't given proper burial rights... animate as undead.

So.
I like this option. :smallamused: It would be cool to see the greater attention adventurers pay to their defeated foes in a world where this was emphasized.

[Grollub]

Even in a world with "all bodies are cremated" you would still have undead. The only step the DM would add in is "bribe the dude who is responsible for cremation".

You bribe the guy, to funnel bodies to you on the sly, and he can "fake a burning" ceremony, all the while getting rich off it.

[Flickerdart]

The most threatening undead to civilization are wights, ghouls, vampires, and things of that nature. They attack a living person and if that person fails his save he turns into one. There's not really time to burn the bodies. By the time they're a dead body that dead thing is now trying to eat you.
Most reanimating raises the target after a bit of time has passed (such as on sundown, or a day later). It takes days for a ghoul's victim to turn.

[Psyren]

How many D&D games have you played where you fought a skeleton or zombie?

Those aren't necessarily due to necromancy though. Libris Mortis:


Atrocity Calls to Unlife: Evil acts can resonate in multiple dimensions, opening cracks in reality and letting the blight creep in. A suffi ciently heinous act may attract the attention of malicious spirits, bodiless and seeking to house themselves in flesh, especially recently vacated vessels. Such spirits are often little more than nodes of unquenchable hunger, wishing only to feed. These comprise many of the mindless undead.

[Story]

High level adventurers won't be threatened by it, maybe, but if you kill or drive away all the commoners you will f*ck the economy and society of your enemies and win the war.

Doing pretty much anything breaks the economy and society of D&D.

[Twilightwyrm]

Because spellcasters are already established to not be terribly common, high enough level spellcasters to actually caste Animate Dead even less so, and ones that specialize in necromancy and have an interest in raising undead minions are even less. Necromancer cults are like you say, a calamity. And the thing about calamities is, they are uncommon, else they cease being calamities and become particularly unpleasant regular occurrences. For villages in places where the threat of necromancy is a common concern, you can imagine they would take the step of burning their dead. But for 80-90% of the world, potentially more depending on your setting, this is not a concern, hence they bury their dead.

[zlefin]

one game world addressed this properly: in Rokugan (legend of the five rings setting); they originally used to bury their dead I think; but after a massive attack by a dark mage who did some mass reanimation the law was changed to require cremation of all bodies.

I have to agree that while religious custom is important; when it comes to survival there's a lot of flexibility; if undead are a real threat, i'd expect cremation to become the standard regardless of religion pretty quickly.

I'd say the reason for burial is that the default setting for d&d is a pseudo-medieval world; so they tend to just copy things from medieval times even if they make far less sense in the new setting. The same way castles may be common despite their being far less useful in a d&d setting (at least one with mid-level adventurers).

I don't have my old ad&d manuals around. I'm not sure but I vaguely recall a low level cleric spell that was basically a burial rite, which also protected the body from reanimation/some other necromancy stuff. If that existed and was standard; then burial would still be fine.

[lord_khaine]

And again, human skeletons and zombies are pushovers compared to undead animals and monsters, something the real dangerous necromancers would go for anyway, while ignoring the puny human deads.

So the peasants might as well bury their dead, not like anyone else would want them for anything, and its proberly easyer and cheaper than a cremation.

[Azoth]

On the same vein as the original question, if necromancy, and to a lesser extent all magic, is common enough people would have to go to great lengths to prevent undead apocalypses...why does anyone do anything for a living that doesn't involve reshaping reality?

Back on topic now, I like to have funeral processes vary from area to area in my games. Some places burn their respected and highly honored dead. Some bury them normally. Others make giant elaborate ceremonies to honor the person before floating them down river. It all boils down to cultural customs and practices.

As it should be really. It is entirely unrealistic even in a D&D world for every region regardless of its pantheon, climate, terrain, and languages to follow the same practices for every facet of life...especially how they treat their dead.

[Spuddles]

Those aren't necessarily due to necromancy though. Libris Mortis:

Wow, so that's even more reason to burn all corpses. Just leaving them around to reanimate is unconscionable.

[JaronK]

I agree that cremation would likely be standard, but consider the fact that those undead can be raised to fight enemies, and the dead can be resurrected if they didn't die of old age. A culture that had casters with Animate Dread Warrior, or where relatives might save up for money for a resurrection, might save their best warriors' or wealthiest citizen's bodies in secure crypts for later access.

JaronK

[Tr011]

Imagine 97% of the people being mundane. That means, 3 out of 100 people have supernatural or spellcasting abilities. Now imagine, that those 3% are divided into the diffrent casting classes (some are wizards, some sorcerers, some warlocks, some binder...) and now imagine most of the elvish casters i.e. as CG, while the dwarvish ones are usually LG, etc. So you don't have many evil casters that might have access to creating undead in the first place. And now two more things: Just because you have access to it, doesn't mean you use it (I once had a Dread Necromancy in my party that almost never created undead), since necromancy isn't just about creating the undead.
And now imagine that some are too low in level to create undead or do not have the necessary components (it costs gold). Those few people that are now still capable and willing of creating undead, usually can't create legions of undead, nor could they control such armies. So I really don't see the problem to bury corpses since it's a religious thing to do. Given how painful some people could feel burning their lost friends, I can totally understand why most bury their friends and even don't take their stuff before they bury them.

[Flickerdart]

and now imagine most of the elvish casters i.e. as CG, while the dwarvish ones are usually LG, etc. So you don't have many evil casters that might have access to creating undead in the first place.
There are plenty of "usually evil" races, and they're more likely to engage in necromancy anyway, since evil societies wouldn't frown on it that much. Even so, "usually" means something like 70%, which leaves lots of room for evil. Dwarves are "often" which isn't even 50%, Deep Dwarves tend to be Neutral, Orcs are usually evil, so are goblins and kobolds.

Even if we discounted all evil races, and had your 3% magic user rate (in actuality, the DMG proposes that every class has an equal amount of practitioners), and assumed that 99% of all magic users did not raise the dead, that still gives us 300 necromancers in a population of a million. A big city will have anywhere from 5 to 30 necromancers, every city will have at least one, and even villages have a 30% chance of having a necromancer around. Necromancers are likely to spread out the same as populations are, because they all compete for corpses, so there's no advantage to clustering. Furthermore, as powerful casters, they can cover a lot of ground very quickly - a necromancer might live in one village, but visit the ten neighbouring villages for their corpses.

[lord_khaine]

Even if we discounted all evil races, and had your 3% magic user rate (in actuality, the DMG proposes that every class has an equal amount of practitioners), and assumed that 99% of all magic users did not raise the dead, that still gives us 300 necromancers in a population of a million. A big city will have anywhere from 5 to 30 necromancers, every city will have at least one, and even villages have a 30% chance of having a necromancer around. Necromancers are likely to spread out the same as populations are, because they all compete for corpses, so there's no advantage to clustering. Furthermore, as powerful casters, they can cover a lot of ground very quickly - a necromancer might live in one village, but visit the ten neighbouring villages for their corpses.

I still think that rate of magic users are a bit high, how many caster who were able to use animate dead would a standart city of a million people have according to the DMG's npc generation table?

[Flickerdart]

I still think that rate of magic users are a bit high, how many caster who were able to use animate dead would a standart city of a million people have according to the DMG's npc generation table?
The NPC generation table gives us a 19% chance of an evil NPC being a Cleric, a 4% chance of being a Sorcerer, and a 14% chance of being a Wizard (curiously, Good characters are 19% likely to be Wizards). I can't find any table for determining their levels, though.

[HalfGrammarGeek]

It's one hell of an oddly principled person who in a society of none-permissive attitudes regarding raising the dead is able to go around happy as larry with bringing them to life, but not killing. While I'll be the first to admit Necromancy isn't entirely the most sane of the spell schools, that takes the bucket. If it's permissive for the dead to be raised, then there's no issue with needing to grave rob, there should be a Dead Body 7/11 available for the budding Necromancer.
Max security prisons are full of oddly-principled criminals. "Well of course I repeatedly raped and then murdered those women...they all gave me phony phone numbers. How did I get caught? I returned their bodies to their families, and the CSI guys found one of my hairs on the seventh one. How could I not, though? Anything but a proper burial by their families would be a heinous tragedy."

Everybody thinks they're doing the right thing...even the bad guys.

[Spuddles]

I still think that rate of magic users are a bit high, how many caster who were able to use animate dead would a standart city of a million people have according to the DMG's npc generation table?

For a metropolis of 25,000 people:
4 adepts level 13-18
8 adepts level 6-9
4 clerics level 13-18
8 clerics level 6-9
4 sorcerers level 13-16
8 sorcerers level 6-8
4 wizards level 13-16
8 wizards level 6-8

A city of one million is 40 times bigger than a city of 25,000, so you end up with around 1280 characters capable of animating dead.

But none of that really matters, because that murderer you hung last month and didn't cremate? Yeah he spontaneously re-animated as a mohrg. Good luck handling that, small village.

[hamishspence]

I still think that rate of magic users are a bit high, how many caster who were able to use animate dead would a standart city of a million people have according to the DMG's npc generation table?

The DMG table stops at 25,000- but the Epic Handbook has the "planar metropolis" with 100,000+ inhabitants. It also raises the max levels for NPCs for the larger settlements.




A city of one million is 40 times bigger than a city of 25,000, so you end up with around 1280 characters capable of animating dead.


The rules don't actually tell you to multiply the number of high level NPCs though. As written, a city of 25,000 and a city of a million (just using the DMG) will have roughly the same number of "characters with adventuring classes".

[Togath]

I just can't see any government being alright with leaving all those potential weapons buried underground. It'd be like just leaving a bunch of tanks outside in a field and crossing your fingers that no aspiring warlords decide to use them.


That reminds me of a Cracked article I read once, which featured a literal field of tanks:smallbiggrin:(I'll see if I can find it, it's a pretty funny read).
edit: here it is :D (http://www.cracked.com/article_19449_6-images-abandoned-weaponry-you-wont-believe-are-real_p2.html)

[Psyren]

Wow, so that's even more reason to burn all corpses. Just leaving them around to reanimate is unconscionable.

You'd rather deal with allips and shadows than zombies? :smalltongue:

[Kelb_Panthera]

Once again, hallow is crushing this concept. Seriously, it's not once a year. It's once. The duration is instantaneous. The one year thing is for the attached spell effect. A 1000 year old church that was hallowed when it was built will never have had an undead made from anyone buried there that wasn't dug-up and removed from the premises for the last 1000 years unless an evil cleric came along and unhallowed it at some point.

The serial killer that would've spontaneously risen as a mohrg, he's buried in hallowed ground too. As are all capital criminals in a society that buries the dead. Just throwing the corpses off of a nearby cliff would be irresponsible, but it'd also be so abhorent to most cultures that they wouldn't even do that to the corpses of the scum of the earth.

Then consider that there are many more churches that abhor undead than there are that celebrate undeath by at least a factor of 3. Not every member of those churches will be a cleric or even a spellcaster but low-level undead aren't that hard to kill. Zombies are tough but slow. Even a first level warrior could bludgeon one to death more often than not, unless it's made from the corpse of something bigger than a human. Simple pit-traps and burning oil, dead-falls, etc. Traps that an animal wouldn't fall for will crush these beasties practically without fail.

Control undead is next to worthless for creating an undead army. It's single target and 1 day/CL and offers only limited control of even mindless creatures. A 3rd level wizard that burns all his slots on it might be able to hold onto a dozen undead that way as long as he's comfortable burning practically all his resources on it.

The spontaneous creation of undead isn't at all common, and the deliberate creation of undead is, at best, wildly impractical and ineffective for any but the most dedicated, mid-level necromancer.

The baseline assumption this thread was made on dramatically overestimates the scope of the potential problem here.

[avr]

I also think people are seriously underestimating the power of hope here. One day my relatives will want me alive enough to spend big returning me to life; one day my god will return to this world and resurrect the faithful. Either of those would justify any number of crypts and graveyards.

Falls down a bit when the afterlife is a nice place which living people can visit and report back on, of course. Did I mention Eberron's cosmology makes more sense to me than Greyhawk's?

[Flickerdart]

Hallow affects a 40ft radius sphere, and costs 1450gp to cast. That's 14,500 work-days for the average labourer. A village of, say, 100 people would need to spend half of their annual earnings to get a single casting of this. It's ridiculously expensive and covers a small area, so the villagers are going to need to get more and more castings just to keep up with the body count.

[Psyren]

I also think people are seriously underestimating the power of hope here. One day my relatives will want me alive enough to spend big returning me to life; one day my god will return to this world and resurrect the faithful. Either of those would justify any number of crypts and graveyards.

Falls down a bit when the afterlife is a nice place which living people can visit and report back on, of course. Did I mention Eberron's cosmology makes more sense to me than Greyhawk's?

Eberron's afterlife sucks so much that necromancy might actually be preferable :smallyuk:

[Kelb_Panthera]

Hallow affects a 40ft radius sphere, and costs 1450gp to cast. That's 14,500 work-days for the average labourer. A village of, say, 100 people would need to spend half of their annual earnings to get a single casting of this. It's ridiculously expensive and covers a small area, so the villagers are going to need to get more and more castings just to keep up with the body count.

This assumes that the villagers are footing the bill. The church has a vested interest in protecting the people and spreading its teachings. Choosing not to charge the 1450gp per casting to hallow the church site, when the church stands to gain more followers and tithings from its presence in the town, isn't just reasonable, it's good business.

[Flickerdart]

This assumes that the villagers are footing the bill. The church has a vested interest in protecting the people and spreading its teachings. Choosing not to charge the 1450gp per casting to hallow the church site, when the church stands to gain more followers and tithings from its presence in the town, isn't just reasonable, it's good business.
And where's the church getting all this money from?

[Kelb_Panthera]

And where's the church getting all this money from?

Tithes from other churches in the region, growing the herbs themselves and negating that cost, spell-casting services provided by casters in nearby abbeys and other towns.

Most churches are massive organizations for whom spending a bit of money now to make more money in the long-run is normal.

You really think the church of Pelor would mind dropping a few thousand gold on a new church in Ruralistan when over the course of a generation tithes from the Ruralistani people will cover that entirely and begin to generate profit?

[Flickerdart]

You really think the church of Pelor would mind dropping a few thousand gold on a new church in Ruralistan when over the course of a generation tithes from the Ruralistani people will cover that entirely and begin to generate profit?
Peasants can barely afford to eat, much less give money to their church. And when that tiny graveyard space runs out, you're gonna need another casting. Have you ever been to a village graveyard? They are not small places.

Overall, this is an awful investment.

[HerrTenko]

I see a lot of talking about Burning The Body, but I'd like to remind you all gentlemen that burning a fresh body, when you do not possess modern technology and are pretty much left with wood and oil, is pretty well damn expensive.

Fresh bodies don't burn easily, thus requiring a lot of wood (I think the numbers are around four cubic meters of wood to completely consume the fresh corpse of an average weight man - don't quote me on that, I still need to find reliable sources).

Of course, one possibility would be to wait 'till the bodies are good and dry, and then burn them. Yet, we can't just let them hang on hooks outside the village. It's a poor sight, and dreadfully unsanitary : you have to bury them... And honestly, once they're six-feet-under, digging them up is just a hassle, ain't it? Let them rot in their bloody coffins.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Peasants can barely afford to eat, much less give money to their church. And when that tiny graveyard space runs out, you're gonna need another casting. Have you ever been to a village graveyard? They are not small places.

Overall, this is an awful investment.

Not all tithings are in cash and not all peasants are barely crossing the threshold of subsistence.

What I've outlined is exactly what churches have done for uncounted eons IRL. It worked for spreading the catholic church all over the world and they can't even cast spells.

[avr]

I see a lot of talking about Burning The Body, but I'd like to remind you all gentlemen that burning a fresh body, when you do not possess modern technology and are pretty much left with wood and oil, is pretty well damn expensive.
Trouble with this argument is that the economic system in all versions of D&D is pretty whacked out. Essentially no amount of firewood can stack up to the cost of a hallow spell. Unless there are constraints on the amount of firewood actually available this doesn't work.

[Kelb_Panthera]

On the comment about Hallow's radius:

A) seems like as good a spell as any to have widened by a metamagic rod.

B)If we assume the bodies are packed 1/ 5ft square, a rather loose packing, then a single casting of unhallow can cover 216 bodies.

It wouldn't take many to cover a small-town's graveyard.

[Flickerdart]

Not all tithings are in cash and not all peasants are barely crossing the threshold of subsistence.

What I've outlined is exactly what churches have done for uncounted eons IRL. It worked for spreading the catholic church all over the world and they can't even cast spells.
Yeah, they also don't expend massive fortunes on every podunk village they come across every dozen years or so. Far from every village even had a church, much less one that was any good. And even a Widened Hallow still runs out of space soon enough.

[The Viscount]

There are several reasons why societies don't just cremate their dead. If they are going to rise as some odd undead to to some specific circumstance or another, the time is not usually stated, so people might assume that if someone isn't undead immediately after death, they won't animate at all. Townsfolk don't have ranks in knowledge (religion). They don't have access to the books. Undead are strange creatures, and even in the books it simply says something like "x is believed to be the spirit of a being who has died in y manner." Much of the information about them is likely to be both contradictory and false, in addition to the fact that some people might not put stock in it. You don't see much in a small farm community, so you might dismiss these old ghost stories as just old ghost stories.

As mentioned before, animating hordes of undead with animate dead is costly and difficult, and many handbook tells you the same thing: don't waste your time with humans and humanoids. Necromancers are busy shopping for interesting monsters to make their pets. When brought back, humans are either skeletons with 6 hp or zombies with 16 hp. These are not enormously dangerous beings. They can be put down without much trouble. If the caster is high enough level to be casting create undead or plague of undead the roving bands of murderhobos will be attracted to the commotion and eliminate the threat.

Another thing that doesn't seem to be considered by those who consider dead bodies too dangerous to keep lying around: bodies rot. After time, all that will be left is the skeleton, and even that can break apart with the right conditions. After about a year, zombies are out of the picture, making the job of defending much easier.

Finally, and most importantly, if everybody cremated their dead, the BBEG would have to work far harder to reanimate a huge army to fight the PCs with.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Yeah, they also don't expend massive fortunes on every podunk village they come across every dozen years or so. Far from every village even had a church, much less one that was any good. And even a Widened Hallow still runs out of space soon enough.

A villiage small enough that it doesn't have a church probably doesn't have a communal grave-yard either. People will bury dead relatives on the family's land. This necessitates roving about the country-side collecting the dead a few at a time.

As for the cost, it's negligable. Herbs grown in the gardens of churches of the same god don't cost the church anything, and neither does the casting itself. Even if the priest dedicating the church had to buy the herbs that are the spell's material component they're still massively less expensive than the building itself. The DMG lists a grand house at 5000gp. Four to ten room wooden building with a thatched roof; sounds like a basic church to me.

And all this is just economic feasibility. Good churches generally uphold the idea of altruism. Providing the hallow effect for a communal graveyard in a rural villiage simply as a means of shining a positive light on your god or to further that god's stance against undead isn't at all unreasonable either.

Also, a widened hallow effect covers a radius of 80ft. That's over 700 squares on the grid. More than 700 people buried if you bury them quite loosely and it costs the church next to nothing. In a larger church that can be a sphere at the center of a crypt covering thousands of dead who're buried under the church.

Self reproducing undead necessitate a caster of enough power to be able to unhallow the ground anyway and whenever there's an outbreak the undead have to contend with large predators in the area, clerics of good an neutral churches coming to cleanse the undead blight, clerics of neutral and evil gods coming to pick up a few free slaves, and roving bands of adventurers after the treasure that rumor says is in the dangerous place these undead are gathered. Nevermind the internal politics that some undead have to deal with causing re-death to some through back-stabbing or accidents and -weather- taking out the mindless undead that can't think to avoid these things.

Undead outbreaks and armies are just plain unfeasable for the most part.

[Yukitsu]

Imagine a world where necromancers would be forced to develope undead that consist of flying skulls, perhaps on fire.

Yeah..

I've done this. Beholders are what you go for here.

[Vespertilia]

1. Even Neanderthals buried their dead. Any cultural rationalizations probably grew out of the facts that dead bodies attract scavengers and disease and stink, and most people don't want to watch their loved ones slowly decompose, and burning a body is not that easy or convenient and probably also stinks.

2. Everyone's probably right about how rare necromancers are compared to say, laws prohibiting grave robbing (not that it doesn't ever happen), town guards, and good clerics and adventurers on the lookout for them.

3. The hallow spell, absolutely. It's permanent, it doesn't need to be cast every year (only if it has an additional spell attached and that's the only part that wears off anyway). In 3.5 it costs 1000gp forever.
-If NPCs have a Profession, they make about 1gp per work day, unskilled laborers make about 1/10th as much. If a village of 100 people was half skilled and half unskilled (and no one any wealthier, assuming no outside church support, and no highly skilled artisans) it would take less than a 10% tithe in a year to pay for a casting of hallow, to cover an area that's probably sufficient to handle the body count from a village of only 100 people.
-Scale up the population and the wealth increases even more by including skilled artisans, wealthy nobles, specialty trades, and church franchise support.
-People usually pay to bury their dead on hallowed ground rather than tossing them in a ditch (because they don't want some necromancer to animate their loved ones) - and if they can't pay, the church will stuff them in a mass crypt which takes up even less space per body. So space vs. cost, even to a village that only has a parish priest and a small shrine, is really not an issue.

4. The only place a necromancer will flourish is in a place with little religion, few guards, and therefore few people - and spooky little towns on the edge of nowhere, or poor gloomy neighborhoods with corrupt law enforcement, are exactly where adventurers are supposed to be finding evil stuff to slay.

5. In a village (or in a world) where wizards can cast fireball, why do they use wood and thatch as construction materials? In the real world why doesn't everyone who lives in Tornado Alley live in a bunker? Not everyone lives their lives according to preventing some catastrophe that may or may not ever happen or ever affect them personally - and not everyone can afford it.

[Ashtagon]

And where's the church getting all this money from?

Cost to the church is 1000 gp. Or a third of that if the church crafts grows the herbs by itself. That's chump change to any caster capable of casting the spell.

[Gnomish Wanderer]

It's one hell of an oddly principled person who in a society of none-permissive attitudes regarding raising the dead is able to go around happy as larry with bringing them to life, but not killing. Heh, the way I read this makes it sound funny. Obviously they have no problem with bringing things to life rather than killing them, at least after they cast the spell the creature is no longer 'dead' dead, right? :smalltongue:

I now have to make my players fight a misguided and altruistic necromancer.

[Flickerdart]

Cost to the church is 1000 gp. Or a third of that if the church crafts grows the herbs by itself. That's chump change to any caster capable of casting the spell.
Yeah, sure, once. But the cost adds up.

[NecroRebel]

-People usually pay to bury their dead on hallowed ground rather than tossing them in a ditch (because they don't want some necromancer to animate their loved ones) - and if they can't pay, the church will stuff them in a mass crypt which takes up even less space per body. So space vs. cost, even to a village that only has a parish priest and a small shrine, is really not an issue.

You could save quite a bit of space if you were to break corpses up into pieces and store them by body part rather than as full bodies. The Parisian catacombs are an example of this principle; the city's huge graveyards were exhumed and most of the skeletal remains were sorted into femurs and skulls and ribs and so on, and then these bits were stacked underground. A Hallowed ossuary could probably store hundreds of bodies in a way that makes it difficult to remove a raisable corpse. Do a sky burial to skeletonize a corpse more quickly and the dead can go into the ossuary with less chance of rising.

[Story]

Yeah, sure, once. But the cost adds up.

As pointed out before, it costs less than even a small church building. And if the village is too small to even afford that, they're not going to have many bodies buried in one place anyway.

[The Viscount]

You could save quite a bit of space if you were to break corpses up into pieces and store them by body part rather than as full bodies. The Parisian catacombs are an example of this principle; the city's huge graveyards were exhumed and most of the skeletal remains were sorted into femurs and skulls and ribs and so on, and then these bits were stacked underground. A Hallowed ossuary could probably store hundreds of bodies in a way that makes it difficult to remove a raisable corpse. Do a sky burial to skeletonize a corpse more quickly and the dead can go into the ossuary with less chance of rising.

I'm picturing some poor necromancer trying to sort through all those bones, screaming "Which part goes with which?!" and I'm laughing. You need a complete corpse to cast animate dead, so that's actually a very clever and low-tech solution. Well done, NecroRebel.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Yeah, sure, once. But the cost adds up.

No more than the cost of building a church in the first place.

Say we have a 9th level cleric sent from the city with a rod of extend and enough herbs to cast hallow three times. It costs the parent church 1000gp (they got one of the faithful to "craft" 3 sets of herbs for cost) and one day's worth of man-hours from the visiting cleric to cover enough ground to bury over 2000 people in a loose pattern. Compared to the 5000gp it took the church to have the actual chapel built this is a negligable up-charge. In a town where the people -want- the church built they may end up paying even less thanks to people volunteering to help in the chapel's construction.

[Lonely Tylenol]

Why? Yes, it might be a bit Burke and Hare-esque, but what's so wrong with the Necromancer killing people, or using his risen dead to kill people, and then raise them? Why does he have to go around digging them up?

Is it morals? In which case, why is he digging them up, and not asking for them? And if they say no, why do those same morals allow him to ignore their wishes?

Believe it or not, more people exist in every game world than the hypothetical necromancer of everyone's concern, and I'm willing to bet "everybody who is not the grave-robbing necromancer" would rather deal with the inconvenience of the robbing of some loose graves rather than the slightly greater inconvenience of being killed outright to fill the missing role.

[Bouregard]

Given how extremely common necromancy and the undead are, why would you ever leave dead creatures in conveniently marked places for reanimation?

Why isn't every corpse burned?

I can't help but feel that any village with a graveyard is crawling with cultists of Death and the Undead.

Corpses invite calamity.

A powerful necromancer appears. He goes to your graveyard and starts raising.

Nothing happens.

Do you want to be the lucky mayor that has to explain this?



"Hello my name is Igthorn the Evil you might remember me from the plague of bones two years ago, I come to your village to clean up the graveyard. You see... I started raising but nothing happend... Where there no deaths this year? And what about Ol'Alfred the good old sheppard? He looked like prime material for a skeleton, had good teeth he had..."

Mayor: "Uhm ahm... see after last year we ah... had to burn them... you know king ordered us and all...uhm.. please don't be m-"

"YOU DID WHAT? YOU BURNED A WHOLE YEAR OF SKELETAL HARVEST BECAUSE A FAT GUY WITH GOLD ON HIS HEAD ORDERED IT? WHAT DO YOU EXPECT ME TO DO? ATTACK THE CONVENT UP THERE WITH TWO WOLFSKELETONS TRYING TO FETCH THEIR OWN BONES AND AN INCONTINENT SPECTRE WHOS LEAKING ECTOPLASM? I WAS COUNTING ON YOUR LITTLE VILLA- Ah see there you had me. Always keeping my bloodpressure up despite having no blood and all. Don't worry, I'll fix it. Be a dear and gather your little village and then order them to murder each other, but please no clubs, just daggers and chocking, we don't want any skeletons damaged, do we?

[Garwain]

Be a dear and gather your little village and then order them to murder each other, but please no clubs, just daggers and chocking, we don't want any skeletons damaged, do we?
No. This is exactly why it's safe to burry the dead. The respectable necromancer you describe has no interest in peasant corpses. He's looking for higher HD, and he's not gonna find them amongst peasants.

The more powerful people are burried under the churchfloor, for good measure.

[Spuddles]

Those of you advocating burial because you like preserving your pseudo-medieval european feel: that's fine, but at least admit that's why you're advocating the inconsistency.

If neaderthals had to regularly deal with their dead turning into this:
http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110817031732/forgottenrealms/images/6/69/Morhg.jpg

I doubt they'd develop a burial practice at all.

So many undead rise spontaneously that before there are necromancers to raise corpses, the corpses are coming back to life already.

You know how superstitious people in real life were so freaked out about vampires that they actually dug up corpses? Now imagine if that wasn't just superstition. The dead actually literally rose from the dead and then went around killing and eating people. How long would people cling to burying the dead? Would there even be any people left to do that? A single mohrg can wipe out virtually any community of town size or smaller, if it operates intelligently.

Raising an army of the dead is pretty much free if you spell stitch. Even if you don't, you have some logistical advantages of a dead army- no morale failures, no having to feed them in the field, no supply lines, no problems with weather, no insurrections, no issues with fatigue. A skeleton army moves faster, much faster, than living armies, which means you can out maneuver just about anything mundane. Every dead enemy becomes a new recruit. When your enemy loses strength, you gain it. There are a limited number of level 5 npc warriors (see DMG tables)- once you lose them to the undead, there aren't anymore. But guess who just gained some 5 HD skeletons?

Fighting undead at low levels requires you to be rather specialized in handling them, due to their DR. DR 5 vs. a level 4 npc warrior is not an inconsequential amount. If you're going to be trained in how to handle the undead (everyone carries bludgeoning & slashing weapons in addition to whatever they like to fight with), then that means the undead aren't an uncommon problem.

Which leads me to this thread- why leave a graveyard full of dead people right next to your settlement? That's like 3x your population right there, and on average, they're far more capable than most of your citizenry in warfare.


I also think people are seriously underestimating the power of hope here. One day my relatives will want me alive enough to spend big returning me to life; one day my god will return to this world and resurrect the faithful. Either of those would justify any number of crypts and graveyards.

Falls down a bit when the afterlife is a nice place which living people can visit and report back on, of course. Did I mention Eberron's cosmology makes more sense to me than Greyhawk's?

Then they keep your skull or a finger bone. Anything requiring a whole corpse won't work after much time has passed at all.


This assumes that the villagers are footing the bill. The church has a vested interest in protecting the people and spreading its teachings. Choosing not to charge the 1450gp per casting to hallow the church site, when the church stands to gain more followers and tithings from its presence in the town, isn't just reasonable, it's good business.

Burning the dead is even better business sense.


I see a lot of talking about Burning The Body, but I'd like to remind you all gentlemen that burning a fresh body, when you do not possess modern technology and are pretty much left with wood and oil, is pretty well damn expensive.

Fresh bodies don't burn easily, thus requiring a lot of wood (I think the numbers are around four cubic meters of wood to completely consume the fresh corpse of an average weight man - don't quote me on that, I still need to find reliable sources).

Of course, one possibility would be to wait 'till the bodies are good and dry, and then burn them. Yet, we can't just let them hang on hooks outside the village. It's a poor sight, and dreadfully unsanitary : you have to bury them... And honestly, once they're six-feet-under, digging them up is just a hassle, ain't it? Let them rot in their bloody coffins.

A bundle of wood costs 1 copper. The average peasant makes 10 times that in a day. That is a hell of a lot cheaper than throwing 1450 gp away to hallow 40 feet of burial plot.

Crypts, mausoleums, and funeral beds are all great ways to keep bodies exposed until they dry out a bit.


I'm picturing some poor necromancer trying to sort through all those bones, screaming "Which part goes with which?!" and I'm laughing. You need a complete corpse to cast animate dead, so that's actually a very clever and low-tech solution. Well done, NecroRebel.

A complete corpse doesn't necessarily need all the pieces from the same creature, does it?

[Bouregard]

You could save quite a bit of space if you were to break corpses up into pieces and store them by body part rather than as full bodies. The Parisian catacombs are an example of this principle; the city's huge graveyards were exhumed and most of the skeletal remains were sorted into femurs and skulls and ribs and so on, and then these bits were stacked underground. A Hallowed ossuary could probably store hundreds of bodies in a way that makes it difficult to remove a raisable corpse. Do a sky burial to skeletonize a corpse more quickly and the dead can go into the ossuary with less chance of rising.


I'm picturing some poor necromancer trying to sort through all those bones, screaming "Which part goes with which?!" and I'm laughing. You need a complete corpse to cast animate dead, so that's actually a very clever and low-tech solution. Well done, NecroRebel.

Reminds me more of shopping mall for necromancers.

"Sweetheart, are we out of femurs again?"

[Aasimar]

Because for your average person, rising undead are so incredibly rare that they might as well never happen. Most regular country-folk probably don't even believe undead exist. (not around these parts anyway)

[Kelb_Panthera]

Those of you advocating burial because you like preserving your pseudo-medieval european feel: that's fine, but at least admit that's why you're advocating the inconsistency.

If neaderthals had to regularly deal with their dead turning into this:
img]http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110817031732/forgottenrealms/images/6/69/Morhg.jpg[/img
I doubt they'd develop a burial practice at all. You're probably right. It's a good thing that's not at all common. Some serial killers rise as a mohrg after they die. Thats a fraction of a fraction of the general populace. You're dramatically overestimating the frequency of spontaneous reanimation.


So many undead rise spontaneously that before there are necromancers to raise corpses, the corpses are coming back to life already.

You know how superstitious people in real life were so freaked out about vampires that they actually dug up corpses? Now imagine if that wasn't just superstition. The dead actually literally rose from the dead and then went around killing and eating people. How long would people cling to burying the dead? Would there even be any people left to do that? A single mohrg can wipe out virtually any community of town size or smaller, if it operates intelligently.The only noteable difference between a mohrg and the serial killer he was when he was alive is that he's got a few new tricks. He's really not a significantly greater threat than he was before, only now if someone witnesses his crime, he's got half of the gods in the setting gunning for him.

As for the whole development of rituals thing, it doesn't hold. This is a world where religious creation myths are historical fact. Religion predates the mortal world.


Raising an army of the dead is pretty much free if you spell stitch. Even if you don't, you have some logistical advantages of a dead army- no morale failures, no having to feed them in the field, no supply lines, no problems with weather, no insurrections, no issues with fatigue. A skeleton army moves faster, much faster, than living armies, which means you can out maneuver just about anything mundane. Every dead enemy becomes a new recruit. When your enemy loses strength, you gain it. There are a limited number of level 5 npc warriors (see DMG tables)- once you lose them to the undead, there aren't anymore. But guess who just gained some 5 HD skeletons?Nobody, since only the racial HD count toward the skeleton's new HD count.

About the underlined; no. The spell-stitched undead is the one in control of the undead it creates, not its creator. That's one hell of a weakness in your army. "Kill the one with the runes in its bones and the rest will flounder because they're not controlled anymore."


Fighting undead at low levels requires you to be rather specialized in handling them, due to their DR. DR 5 vs. a level 4 npc warrior is not an inconsequential amount. If you're going to be trained in how to handle the undead (everyone carries bludgeoning & slashing weapons in addition to whatever they like to fight with), then that means the undead aren't an uncommon problem.Clubs are free. Bypassing the DR of a skeleton is, therefore, also free. Slashing weapons are pretty standard since even a commoner probably carries a dagger. All you need is one guy in town that's got a single rank in knowledge religion and the two types of DR that a "common" necromancer's minions will have are trivially ignored. No specialization or extra expense required.


Which leads me to this thread- why leave a graveyard full of dead people right next to your settlement? That's like 3x your population right there, and on average, they're far more capable than most of your citizenry in warfare. Not if they're raised as skellies and zombies they're not. Mindless undead are incapable of adapting and can be overcome by -very- simple strategies; the kind of strategies that prankster children think up. As for the church, we've covered hallowed ground rather extensively at this point. It costs next to nothing to make a graveyard big enough for generations of dead before it even approaches full, by which point you can start reusing plots because anyone that would've cared is dead now too.




Then they keep your skull or a finger bone. Anything requiring a whole corpse won't work after much time has passed at all. This is a valid point. The non-trivial cost of ressurection magic also makes such a hope utterly fleeting for any but the wealthy.




Burning the dead is even better business sense. How do you figure? The people can do that themselves. If the church isn't offering a service it's not doing business at all. Nevermind there may be religions that believe the corpse being buried intact has some significance to the deceased's afterlife.




A bundle of wood costs 1 copper. The average peasant makes 10 times that in a day. That is a hell of a lot cheaper than throwing 1450 gp away to hallow 40 feet of burial plot. 20lbs of firewood will burn for maybe an hour and won't do much more than cook a small corpse. You'd need at least a silver's worth to have a shot at burning the bones if you soak the whole thing in a few pints of oil. That's for -every- corpse that the villiage produces. At about a gold per corpse an average small town will have spent as much on corpse disposal as a single casting of hallow would've cost in a generation. A cost the church would've helped foot or may even have provided free of direct charge; intending to more than make up the cost in tithings over the lifetime of that particular chapel.


Crypts, mausoleums, and funeral beds are all great ways to keep bodies exposed until they dry out a bit.If the town is large enough to have these structures in a graveyard, its big enough to have catacombs for burying the dead instead of burying people only one layer deep in a graveyard like you'd see in the boonies.




A complete corpse doesn't necessarily need all the pieces from the same creature, does it?

Why wouldn't it?


Complete: 1 Lacking no component part; full; whole; entire

[icefractal]

Anyone powerful enough to animate the dead is powerful enough to kill a whole bunch of townsfolk. Therefore - graveyards are ablative armor for towns.

Larger cities may have a strong enough watch to keep away your garden-variety necromancers - but in that case they can just keep the graveyard inside the city and guard it. After all, if a Lich or something shows up, it's still better that they animate some existing corpses rather than make new ones.

Really, the only bodies I can see cremating are those that would be sufficiently valued/dangerous that the risk of their animation outweighed the risk of living citizens being taken in their stead. So, royalty maybe, and people that could be used for "deluxe" undead.

[Mnemnosyne]

Tithes from other churches in the region, growing the herbs themselves and negating that cost, spell-casting services provided by casters in nearby abbeys and other towns.

Most churches are massive organizations for whom spending a bit of money now to make more money in the long-run is normal.

You really think the church of Pelor would mind dropping a few thousand gold on a new church in Ruralistan when over the course of a generation tithes from the Ruralistani people will cover that entirely and begin to generate profit?
Alternately, at the grand cathedral of Pelor or or whatever god, they have a half-celestial of at least 13 HD summoned by Planar Ally who they keep on staff to send out to every new church they're establishing, that way he can cast hallow as a spell-like ability. I think that'd be considered a relatively worthy job for the half-celestial (especially if he gets other worthy things to do whenever there's not a church to go hallow) and he'd be likely to waive most of his fee for the task, voluntarily doing it.

In a culture where burying the dead is already a well-established tradition, I can definitely see continuing that tradition because there's lots of ways to protect yourself and there's going to be resistance to change.

I still don't see how the 'bury your dead' tradition would have ever developed, though, in a world where buried dead can and do rise on their own. Even if it's uncommon, it seems like the concept would have been nipped in the bud before it became established tradition.

Edit: Oh hey, there's a third page I didn't notice. Editing to add a quote so it's clear what I was responding to.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Burying of the dead in any culture outside of a culture found in a moderate climate with ready access to wood is pretty easy to figure. When burnable material is immensely more important for cooking and keeping people warm and you can just come up with enough for those tasks, putting together enough material to burn a humanoid corpse puts a strain on the whole community.

In prehistory, before man learns to readily harness fire or how to decide which wood will burn well, even temperate wooded areas will be burying their dead long before they start trying to burn them. Assuming, of course, that such a period existed. Like I said earlier, this is a world where religious creation myths are historical fact. It's entirely possible that no humanoid race ever went through a stone-age like period since gods of forge and furnace taught their chosen races how to wield fire and make tools from go.

[SlyJohnny]

Dragon Age plays this straight and has the dominate religion cremate their dead as standard practice. Dragon Age does a lot of things like that right, actually.

Otherwise, zombie holocausts are really not that common, and digging up a graveyard full of dead bodies is hard. Smashing your way out of a coffin and digging to the surface (even if you don't need to breathe and your coffin is a ****ty wooden one) is also hard.

[Eldan]

Peasants can barely afford to eat, much less give money to their church. And when that tiny graveyard space runs out, you're gonna need another casting. Have you ever been to a village graveyard? They are not small places.

Overall, this is an awful investment.

That's why you go with the city graveyard route and stack the graves. I've seen that. Prague is a good example.

[Brother Oni]

I just can't see any government being alright with leaving all those potential weapons buried underground. It'd be like just leaving a bunch of tanks outside in a field and crossing your fingers that no aspiring warlords decide to use them.


Why not? It's what happened in Russia and other Eastern European countries post WW2 with a vast number of abandoned tanks and other AFVs.

Depending on the country, the general rule as I understood it was if you can get it to move, it's yours. There's a couple of Youtube videos of a bunch of gearheads getting an old Russian tank destroyer (I think it was a SU-85) moving that had been abandoned for ~70 years.
Admittedly the cannon had been deactivated, but the engine, tracks and steering all functioned after some considerable TLC (and lots of percussive maintenance).

[GolemsVoice]

Why the practice of burying the dead would emerge at all? A lot of religions and cultures had a strong link between the state of the body at the time of death and the state of the person in the afterlife.
That's why some cultures mutliated the dead of their enemies to punish them even more, or why other cultures placed a very high value of preserving their dead as best as they could.

[Eldan]

I just had an idea.

If you need a complete skeleton in order to raise someone, then why not just take one bone out of the corpse, a small but structurally important* one like one of the vertebrae and put it in a sacred spot away from the rest? Bury the corpse, then stack up the vertebrae somewhere in the local church, say, under a hallowed altar.
I can remember much more complicated burial rituals than that. For this, you'd just need a knife and a big saw or a small axe.

*I almost wrote "vital" there :smallbiggrin:

[Togo]

Hm...

Burning the dead is vastly expensive, both in terms of heating materials and labour. And it doesn't stop them rising in any case. The easiest way to get rid of them is to bury them.

But what about undead! Well the safest way to avoid undead is to make them hard to get at. You bury them deep, in the immediate vicinity of a holy shrine or church, preferably on concentrated (ie Hallowed) ground, and within handy reach of your local undead specialist, the village priest. Where else would be safer? Make it a vaguely nice garden, so they don't want to leave. Of course you can improve things. Inidividual boxes for each corpse, heavy stone on the top to stop them getting out, and a clear marker so you know what you're dealing with if you come back and find a hole. Particularly powerful people you bury under the church itself, sealed in stone.

Murderers and other undesirables you don't bury in the churchyard, because it's too dangeous. They get exposed, ideally by being hung in a cage or gibbet with plenty of access to the local wildlife. Even if they rise, the chances are high they won't go anywhere. You also put the gibbet on a crossroads, as that is supposed to confuse the undead and stop them coming home. It also means that if they go missing, everyone knows.

So yeah, in a world where undead are a major problem, and fuel is not cheap, the best way to go about solving it is through a network of holy shrines with associated burial sites, coverd by hallow, watched by a priest, buried deep, carefully and individually marked, and with severe cases being put in cages by the roadside. Otherwise known as the vaguely-western themed church in your campaign world.

You get necropolises in the UK too, in cities like Exter. Basically anywhere where space is at a preamium, you can't afford to wait around for the bodies to go entirely. So you wait about 40 years or so, and then dig up the bones and store them in a big vault. The alternative would be burying them outside the city walls, and thus not on hallowed ground, where anyone might steal them, if not raise them as part of their zombie hoarde.

Incidentally, considering the expense of making even a single zombie, isn't the best way to counter the necromancer threat (tm) not to control the bodies, which are readily availalbe all over the place, but rather the material components, such as black opals, which are rather rarer?

[Rogue Shadows]

Why isn't every corpse burned?

Because burning a corpse is expensive.

Take a look at Medieval myths about vampires. They'd fill the coffins of suspected vampires with grain or seeds or garlic, or bury them upside down, or paralyze them with a stake, or do any number of other things before finally resorting to the only thing that was sure to kill them, which was burning. And they did all that because it's freakin' expensive to burn a body to ash. You need to get a blue-hot fire and keep it burning for an hour, at least. The only way you're gonna get that heat is by slaughtering a few pigs and lathering the corpse in pig fat, not to mention the sheer amount of wood needed.

Partially burning a body is easy, but that'll probably still leave you with a charred but functional-for-the-purposes-of-reanimation skeleton.

No, in D&D to prevent necromancy, the only sure, cheap way ("cheap" relative to the cost of burning a corpse to ash, that is, I'm certain that the funeral ceremony will still be the best that the mourning family can buy) is to chop the body up and feed it to the wildlife, Tibetan sky-burial style.


Why not? It's what happened in Russia and other Eastern European countries post WW2 with a vast number of abandoned tanks and other AFVs.

I think you'll find that it is much less expensive and labor-intensive to dig up a corpse than to get a tank or other AFV moving again after it's broken down.

Although...then the cost of reanimation comes into play...


Because for your average person, rising undead are so incredibly rare that they might as well never happen. Most regular country-folk probably don't even believe undead exist. (not around these parts anyway)

The DMG specifically warns against thinking along these lines. In D&D, magic is a known quantity and should be treated as such. Remember that even the tiniest hamlet in D&D is guaranteed (not likely, actually guaranteed by the community generation rules) to have at least a few adepts, and there is a good chance that there will be clerics, druids, sorcerers, and wizards as well. Even if none of them are actually capable of making undead, they'd certainly know that it is possible, and it might come up in typical conversation at the local taphouse, thereby spreading to the peasantry.

[Answerer]

For another thing, I'm pretty sure most undead are not physically capable of getting through a pine box and six feet of earth.

[Mnemnosyne]

If I was trying to destroy corpses, I wouldn't burn them because as noted, it's hard. I'd grind them. Cut away the meat and fat, grind the bones to powder, feed the meat to animals.

That's what I would figure would become traditional with corpses in a world where undead rise at any rate of one out of every two or three hundred or higher. From the earliest settlements, people would chop corpses up into little pieces, grind the little pieces, and either scatter or contain the dust.

[Rogue Shadows]

For another thing, I'm pretty sure most undead are not physically capable of getting through a pine box and six feet of earth.

Why not? Leaving aside even the ones that are incorporeal, wood only has a hardness of 5 but a human zombie's slam deals 1d6+1 damage. No, they won't typically deal enough damage to the coffin to break it in any one single hit, but over time? It's not like they're going anywhere, have anything better to do, or have a time limit on accomplishing the goal.

(Skeletons are kinda' screwed, though, what with only dealing 1d4+1. Unless you can critical coffins? I can't remember. But vampire spawn and ghoul also each do d6s of damage. It'll be slow, but again, not like they have anything else to do).


That's what I would figure would become traditional with corpses in a world where undead rise at any rate of one out of every two or three hundred or higher. From the earliest settlements, people would chop corpses up into little pieces, grind the little pieces, and either scatter or contain the dust.

Of course, that just makes me want to create a monster that's a sort of cloud of undead ash or dust...

[DeltaEmil]

It's cheaper to burn or dissolve corpses than have churches cast hallow on a graveyard. One sorcerer/wizard apprentice simply has to cast acid splash on the corpses often enough if there is really a limited amount of burning wood or oil.

Although most efficient would probably be to simply throw the corpses at a corpse feeding creature, like a pack of specially trained wolves/dogs or otyughs and gelatinous cubes or anything similar that can be tamed.

[Twilightwyrm]

There are plenty of "usually evil" races, and they're more likely to engage in necromancy anyway, since evil societies wouldn't frown on it that much. Even so, "usually" means something like 70%, which leaves lots of room for evil. Dwarves are "often" which isn't even 50%, Deep Dwarves tend to be Neutral, Orcs are usually evil, so are goblins and kobolds.

Even if we discounted all evil races, and had your 3% magic user rate (in actuality, the DMG proposes that every class has an equal amount of practitioners), and assumed that 99% of all magic users did not raise the dead, that still gives us 300 necromancers in a population of a million. A big city will have anywhere from 5 to 30 necromancers, every city will have at least one, and even villages have a 30% chance of having a necromancer around. Necromancers are likely to spread out the same as populations are, because they all compete for corpses, so there's no advantage to clustering. Furthermore, as powerful casters, they can cover a lot of ground very quickly - a necromancer might live in one village, but visit the ten neighbouring villages for their corpses.

I'm not quite sure where you are getting these population statistics, but they aren't coming from the DMG. First of all, the DMG most certainly does NOT assume an equal amount of practitioners of each class. Assuming a small town of approximately 900-2,000 people (since they have no population modifier) you have on average approximately 3 wizards (one 2nd level, two 1st level), 3 sorcerers (one 2nd level, two 1st level), 3 druids (one 3rd level, two first level), 3 clerics (one 3rd level, two 1st level), and 3 adepts (one 3rd level, two 1st level) (DMG, pg. 139). Even assuming the minimum population, that makes full casters 1.6% of the population, 0.1% of an average population of 1,450, and 0.75% if we have maximum. Factoring in Bards, Rangers, and Paladins, you have 20 casters, making them a mere 2.2% of the population, at minimum population levels, and 1.3% of the population at average levels. All things being equal, at the next level up (large towns of 2,000-5,000 individuals) all casters are they are only 2.4% of the population at minimum levels, with full casters being only 1.75%.
Now let's look at the population you propose: in a population of 1,000,000 (which is forty times the 25,000 minimum for a metropolis, meaning such a city would be exceedingly rare to nonexistent). Assuming the basic modifiers for a Metropolis, we can expect 60 wizards (4 of 14th level, 8 of 7th level, 16 of 3rd level, and 32 of 1st level), 60 sorcerers ((4 of 14th level, 8 of 7th level, 16 of 3rd level, and 32 of 1st level), 60 clerics (4 of 15th level, 8 of 7th level, 16 of 3rd level, and 32 of 1st level), 60 Druids (4 of 15th level, 8 of 7th level, 16 of 3rd level, and 32 of 1st level) and 60 Adepts (4 of 14th level, 8 of 7th level, 16 of 3rd level, and 32 of 1st level). That is 300 full casters, the same as your minimum level of necromancers. This number jumps to 480 if we add in Rangers, Paladins and Bards. Now, of this number, only approximately 240 individuals (Clerics, Adepts, Wizards and Sorcerers) have the ability to create undead on their spell lists. Of those, only 32 can actually cast the necessary spells to create undead. And if we assume, as you did, that 99% of spellcasters have no inclination to do so, you have only about a 33% chance of a single one of these individuals being inclined to do so. But, let's say that these numbers aren't quite accurate, since you propose a city that is forty times as large as your standard Metropolis. The average percentage increase in population between city intervals is 2.8, making a city of a million approximately four "intervals" higher. All things being equal, this gives a population bonus of 24, rolled seven times. Assuming just the classes that can actually cast Animate Dead, that is 868 individuals. Now, taking of those only the ones that can actually cast the spell, we have 104 individuals. If we take your 99% figure from earlier, that leaves a single individual that is dedicated to making undead. But let's say the 99% figure is wrong, and we instead just look at the percentage that are Necromancers, assuming maybe 3/4 actually want to create undead. Assuming an equal distribution of school specialists between all schools, (We'll say for all the casters with the ability to create undead on their spell list, for simplicity's sake) we have eight schools of magic (excluding "Universal"), making nine different types of casters (assuming an equal percentage are "generalists"). So then, of the 104 casters actually capable of creating undead, about 11-12 will be necromancers, with 8-9 being inclined to create undead (for whatever reason). In a city of a million individuals, you only have a 0.0009% chance of meeting one, less if we reasonably assume that they are keeping their practice secret, let alone having your body reanimated by one. Given this, I cannot reasonably imagine a "fear of being reanimated" being enough of a concern to warrant universal cremation. Even if we assume that some undead spontaneously reanimate, the chances of this happening are never given, meaning that the likelihood is probably about the same as any once in a generation "calamity", possibly even less.

TL;DR- Casters are already an absurdly low percentage of any average D&D population, making the chances of finding a necromancer interested in creating undead next to nothing. This, coupled with the undefined, and logically rare chances of spontaneous reanimation, means that burning corpses to stem the threat of necromancy is generally a waste of time.

[hewhosaysfish]

If you need a complete skeleton in order to raise someone, then why not just take one bone out of the corpse, a small but structurally important* one like one of the vertebrae and put it in a sacred spot away from the rest? Bury the corpse, then stack up the vertebrae somewhere in the local church, say, under a hallowed altar.
I can remember much more complicated burial rituals than that. For this, you'd just need a knife and a big saw or a small axe.

And if an aspiring necromancer does actually have to match the right vertebrae to the right skeleton then he could spend months sorting them out, even with the help of divinations.
You could crack the bones with a hammer too, force the necromancer to cast a ton of Mending spells too. And/Or burn the vertebrae, force him to cast Make Whole (much easier than burning a whole corpse, I imagine).

If I were a god in a DnD setting, I would (assuming that the metaphysics doesn't require that body be intact for the soul to get into my realm in death) instruct my worshippers to dispose of bodies with a form of sky burial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial):


The body will be exposed where scavengers can get to it (but presumably where large predators can't) until reduced to bones, then the bones broken up, mixed with something edible and fed to further scavengers.
One DnD specific addition would be a waiting period for important people of up to 12 days, in case a cleric wants to Raise the from the dead. Any cleric who can Raise them after this time is capable of casting Ressurection instead. According to Wikipedia's article on purefaction, the deceased should be bloating by now but not exploding yet, so I guess that's ok.
In increasingly urbanised areas, temples may have to keep tame carrion-eaters. They will be the sacred animals of my religion and will wary between geographical regions.
Once only (mostly) bones remain, before they are broken up, one bone will be taken and given to the family as a token "to connect them to the the spirit of their loved one" and as a target of any future Ressurection spells. Stealing Eldan's idea, a vertebrae will be favourite.
Obviously a vigil will be mounted during both the waiting period and the skeletonization - to alert everyone if an aspiring necromancer tries to swipe the deceased.
Also, I would authorize a "quick and dirty" consecration for use after a battle (or while dungeon-diving) which involves breaking the arms, legs and skull while reciting aplogetic prayers and promising to come back and do this properly if you get the chance.


Cheaper than cremation, safer than burial, can anyone see any problems with this outline?

[Roderick_BR]

I just can't see any government being alright with leaving all those potential weapons buried underground. It'd be like just leaving a bunch of tanks outside in a field and crossing your fingers that no aspiring warlords decide to use them.
(...)
More like hoping no aspiring warlord, loaded with thousands of galloons of fuel and ammunition, as those "tanks" are no much tanks but old broken cars.

Maybe the world is just not that paranoid about, what, let's say, every 11 adventurers (usually), you have 1 wizard. Of these, 1 out of 9 will be a necromancer specialist, but since almost any of those can cast necromancer spells, let's ignore this part. On the other hand, also 1 cleric.

Now, you need at least a 9th level arcane caster (or 5th level divine caster). With lots of money for all the animate dead. And reminding that he needs to be a high level caster to get a moderately sized army. And those won't have more than 2 or 3 HDs.

And because of thoese, you think every culture in a world would decide to cremate their deceased.
Remember that in many of those places, everyone heard about monsters, but mostly won't really do anything active until something actually happens near their towns.
Commoner1: "Did yer hear that town near the Sword Coast got attacked by zombies?"
Commoner2: "yep, some nec-ro-mander or somethin. I think some adventurers killed it, thou. You think it's gonna rain?"
Commoner1:"I think so. will go get my things off the rain."

You'll have more luck stopping people from chopping trees for bows and arrows or mining mines to make swords and armor.

[Rogue Shadows]

[Stuff]

First, please learn to break for paragraphs. I'm not trying to be confrontational, I mean it as actual advice: people are more likely to read and, more importantly, actually absorb what you write if you format better.

Second, you miscalculated for adepts (I think, I'll admit I skimmed your wall of text - again, paragraph breaks are your friend). 1st-level characters for NPC classes are calculated differently. Once you've allocated the total number of PC class-characters and 2nd level or higher NPC classes, you take the remaining town population and divide it into 91% 1st-level commoners, 5% 1st-level warriors, 3% 1st-level experts, .5% 1st-level aristocrats, and .5% 1st-level adepts.

So a 1,000-person small town (I used 1,000 'cause it's easier, but whatever) statistically actually looks like this:

Adepts: 5 (4 1st-level)
Aristocrats: 5 (4 1st-level)
Barbarians: 3 (2 1st-level)
Bards: 3 (2 1st-level)
Clerics: 3 (2 1st-level)
Commoners: 872 (865 1st-level)
Druids: 3 (2 1st-level)
Experts: 31 (28 1st-level)
Fighters: 7 (4 1st-level)
Monks: 3 (2 1st-level)
Paladins: 1 (1st-level)
Rangers: 1 (1st-level)
Rogues: 7 (4 1st-level)
Sorcerers: 3 (2 1st-level)
Warriors: 50 (47 1st-level)
Wizards: 3 (2 1st-level)

Actually when all my math was done, thanks to the magic of rounding, I actually only had 862 1st-level commoners and a total population of 997. I put the remainder into 1st-level Commoners

The numbers seem to be the about same, for a 1,000-person small town, but I think the number of adepts in your hypothetical megacity rises significantly from the numbers you posted.

And then we have to re-do the calculations to account for magewrights in Eberron...

But anyway, my point is that even if casters are a tiny percentage of the total population next to noncasters, they're still significantly more present than they are on Earth, what with not existing at all n' such. A magical world is going to take that into account.

As to your larger point...


TL;DR- Casters are already an absurdly low percentage of any average D&D population, making the chances of finding a necromancer interested in creating undead next to nothing. This, coupled with the undefined, and logically rare chances of spontaneous reanimation, means that burning corpses to stem the threat of necromancy is generally a waste of time.

That's all well and good from a logical, unemotive standpoint. Let me give you another.

The population of the United States in 2001 was 285,082,000 people. The number of people who died as a result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States was roughly 3,000 people. That is about 0.00001% of the US population at the time (and not even everyone killed on 9/11 was an American citizen, but whatever). Yet, I have to take my shoes off if I want to board a plane.

You don't need to have a huge number of spellcasters in order to elicit a huge change in cultural dynamics. All you really need is one or two really big events. Certainly, at least one spellcaster at one point in time was a high-level necromancer or death-worshipping cleric looking to create a giant undead army for no damned good reason. Or perhaps a wight or shadow plague spread, once, through a bevvy of villages unable to handle the problem.

If it was large enough, and memorable enough, it could easily provoke a cultural change.

[Draz74]

That's why you go with the city graveyard route and stack the graves. I've seen that. Prague is a good example.

I was thinking this same thing, and I especially like it for two reasons:

Going 3-D lets you fit a LOT more graves into the area of a single Hallow spell (especially Widened), making the spell much more economical.
Going 3-D in graves naturally leads into making catacombs instead of graveyards, which naturally leads into making dungeons, explaining why this typical D&D world of ours has so many of the dang things. :smallamused:


Hmmm, now I'm thinking that an easy campaign MacGuffin for a low-level Cleric could be a mission from her church: "It's your job to take this Metamagic Widening Rod the Sacred Alabaster Scepter of Velon the Holy to all the villages in this region, for their local priests to use this autumn. Don't forget to leave a Scroll of Hallow in each location where the priest can't cast it on his own; complimentary for shrines of Pelor, Heironious, and Yondalla; otherwise, make sure to collect their letters of credit. Bonus points if you get the Scepter to each village in time for their regularly scheduled ceremonies of Memorial Day; but in any case, make sure you get them all distributed by the Winter Solstice. The alignment of Nerull's planet in the sky this year makes it clear that this Solstice will be a bad one for undead outbreaks otherwise."

[Coidzor]

But the first time an army of the dead rolls through town because there's 400 years of corpses lying around? Yeah, they're always gonna burn those bodies, forever.

My understanding was that corpses surviving for 400 years were the exception, not the rule. :smallconfused:

Anyone recall how long it takes a corpse to rot when it's not stuffed full of preservatives and can be got at by... detritivores rather than sealed in steel and cement?


It's one hell of an oddly principled person who in a society of none-permissive attitudes regarding raising the dead is able to go around happy as larry with bringing them to life, but not killing. While I'll be the first to admit Necromancy isn't entirely the most sane of the spell schools, that takes the bucket. If it's permissive for the dead to be raised, then there's no issue with needing to grave rob, there should be a Dead Body 7/11 available for the budding Necromancer.

Going about murdering people attracts a lot more attention than stealing a corpse or two. Stealing a whole graveyard's stock of usable bodies is stupid and everyone knows this.

Besides, you were answered with why the society would prefer corpse-stealing to murder sprees, and I don't see what's so difficult to understand about why people would prefer someone else's grandad got dug up than for their Liam to get shanked on the way home from the pub. :smallconfused:

[Ashtagon]

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070804095320AAabFgu

Based on that post, it seems for a "typical" casket burial, you have a corpse that can be raised as a zombie for six months, then as a skeleton for 50 years. Longer than that, and it probably isn't viable as the target for an animate dead spell.

Obviously, times vary depending on environment. A corpse left in the jungle will be stripped of flesh inside a week. And Egyptian mummies are remarkably well-preserved.

But as a rough guide, the amount of corpses near a pseudo-Euro-mediaeval community useful to a necromancer is approximately equal to the living population, barring recent catastrophes or migration events.

[Answerer]

That's a really interesting fact, nice find. Can you find any reliable source on medieval life expectancies? I'm tempted to suspect that 50 might be low even for low-tech (especially considering magic), especially since life expectancy will be driven down considerably by relatively high infant mortality rates, but infant corpses aren't very useful (I'm guessing/hoping) to a necromancer.

Which would imply that a stable population will have fewer potential targets for animate dead than there are living people. Skeleton and zombie are pretty poor templates; they'll be enough to outnumber the fighting-age members of the population but not by large numbers.

Yeesh, necromancy really doesn't work that well does it? At least, animate dead doesn't.

[Rogue Shadows]

Wikipedia! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy)

In Medieval Britain, life expectancy was 30 years, but if you could survive to age 21, your life expectancy was instead 64.

[toapat]

especially since life expectancy will be driven down considerably by relatively high infant mortality rates, but infant corpses aren't very useful (I'm guessing/hoping) to a necromancer.

outside of gestalt, no, but i am AFB and so dont have access to the siege rules, which could make less then optimal corpse choices useful.

This still relies on the entirely useless Human Commoner as a base for your zombies or skeletons though. Cats make better zombies.

[SimonMoon6]

Wouldn't six feet of earth block line of fire (or line of effect or whatever it's called), making it impossible for the dead to be animated until the bodies were exhumed?

That's a decent enough reason to bury the dead. You want zombies? You've gotta dig for them.

And then the magic mouth spells on the coffins would alert everyone that you're a grave robber. :) What? Doesn't everyone cast magic mouth on coffins?

[Elderand]

One thing I didn't see adressed is the "undead arrising on their own" argument.

Sure it happens: mass murderer produce Morgh.

But how many of them do ? Is it every single mass murderer ? One in ten ? One in a hundred ? We have no idea for certain but I think it's just as reasonable to assume that not all of them do as it is to assume that they all do.

In fact I think the "not all of them" route is more likely. A morgh whn it come down to it is a less fancy lich animated by hatred rather than by magic, but that means it's an actual soul in there. An evil soul, one of those things demons and devils want to get their grubby little paws on to extract power from. I think a Morgh, and other self animated undead, do not always arrise even when the conditions appears to be right.

[hamishspence]

Complete Divine had some things to say- which I think apply to mohrgs, based
on the "die in specific ways" reference. Except maybe for the soul creating a new body- might be closer to lichees:

p126

The souls of characters who die in specific ways sometimes become undead. Those driven to suicide by madness sometimes become allips, while humanoids destroyed by absolute evil become bodaks. As with ghosts, the soul creates a new body, whether it's incorporeal such as an allip's or corporeal such as a bodak's. The soul is twisted toward evil if it wasn't already. The new undead creature retains some general memories of its former life, but doesn't necessarily have the same mental ability scores, skills, feats, or other abilities. Not every suicide victim becomes an allip, and not everyone destroyed by absolute evil becomes a bodak; as with ghosts, the exact nature of the transformation is unknown. Similarly, liches are characters who've voluntarily transformed themselves into undead, trapping their souls in skeletal bodies.

In Dragon 336 (October 2005)- the Birth of the Dead article, mohrgs are covered in more detail:

Mohrgs are mass murderers or similar villains, but not all dead murderers become mohrgs. To become a mohrg, a killer must not only fail to atone for his crimes, he must intend to kill again. In other words, only murderers whose sprees are interrupted by death rise as mohrgs. A hanged killer possesses a better chance of rising as a mohrg than one slain through any other means. Even the wisest sages maintain no real idea why this should be, although some speculate it is because hanging is often considered the most dishonorable means of execution.

Only the spell create undead can form a mohrg from a corpse that is not a murderer.

[Vespertilia]

This argument became weird at some point, it started to sound like "Most corpses will spontaneously reanimate, including all murderers even if they're buried on hallowed ground, and there are thousands of necromancers around so everyone must burn their dead (because burned dead never spontaneously reanimate as revenants)."

With those assumptions - yeah. Go ahead and run a campaign world where necromancy is so ubiquitous that everyone burns their dead. What would be more interesting is a campaign world where there were occasionally undead for the players to fight.

But if you're running the campaign, you can make that decision. Say that dragons terrorized the land in the past, and then a genocidal war wiped out all dragons, then all the other monsters just to be on the safe side, why wouldn't they? They're a much bigger problem than necromancers. Say an evil wizard's dungeon claimed the lives of so many adventurers that zoning laws prohibited any building from having more than a root cellar, and anything deeper was filled in with cement. Extraplanar outsiders caused trouble so a powerful council of magic isolated the world from the outer planes so that no such beings could ever appear again. But then wizards were causing so much mayhem that not only was magic outlawed entirely, magic was sealed forever by a powerful curse.

Congratulations, your campaign world has no dungeons, no dragons, no monsters or magic, and everyone is safe. Players get experience points by running a successful merchant business, and if they're really good they'll get elected mayor. :smalltongue:

[Ashtagon]

This argument became weird at some point, it started to sound like "Most corpses will spontaneously reanimate, including all murderers even if they're buried on hallowed ground, and there are thousands of necromancers around so everyone must burn their dead (because burned dead never spontaneously reanimate as revenants)."

With those assumptions - yeah. Go ahead and run a campaign world where necromancy is so ubiquitous that everyone burns their dead. What would be more interesting is a campaign world where there were occasionally undead for the players to fight.

But if you're running the campaign, you can make that decision. Say that dragons terrorized the land in the past, and then a genocidal war wiped out all dragons, then all the other monsters just to be on the safe side, why wouldn't they? They're a much bigger problem than necromancers. Say an evil wizard's dungeon claimed the lives of so many adventurers that zoning laws prohibited any building from having more than a root cellar, and anything deeper was filled in with cement. Extraplanar outsiders caused trouble so a powerful council of magic isolated the world from the outer planes so that no such beings could ever appear again. But then wizards were causing so much mayhem that not only was magic outlawed entirely, magic was sealed forever by a powerful curse.

Congratulations, your campaign world has no dungeons, no dragons, no monsters or magic, and everyone is safe. Players get experience points by running a successful merchant business, and if they're really good they'll get elected mayor. :smalltongue:

Anyone for a game of Papers & Paychecks?

[Kelb_Panthera]

Anyone for a game of Papers & Paychecks?

Given the success of such games as railroad and zoo tycoon, sim city, the sims, etc, I would guess; yes. There likely are at least a few people out there up for a game of papers and paychecks.

:biggrin:

[ahenobarbi]

Given how extremely common necromancy and the undead are, why would you ever leave dead creatures in conveniently marked places for reanimation?

They create the undead, then slay them again and make wanna-be undead army owners waste their onyx. Also Humans, Dwarfs, Elvers etc. make very weak undead so it's not really a problem.

[Flickerdart]

Say that dragons terrorized the land in the past, and then a genocidal war wiped out all dragons, then all the other monsters just to be on the safe side, why wouldn't they?
Unlike corpses, dragons fight back.

[Rubik]

Unlike corpses, dragons fight back.And trying to outlaw magic is...kind of a losing proposition, since spellcasters are the most powerful things in existence. Hell, level 20 wizards are more powerful than non-spellcasting gods.

[Scow2]

Because you don't need a body to get undead. Cremated undeath-prone people become flaming ghosts. It's safer to "trap" an undead Six Feet Under (Even if they punch through their casket, the dirt falls on them and immobilizes them. No more slams) or locked away in a stone tomb. And, you'd want it near the church, as others have said, so that when a case of the Zombies DOES arrive, it can be safely extinguished. Would you rather deal with flimsy skeletons and zombies that are buried and locked away (And even a commoner can smash with a hammer if it gets uppity), or a bunch of flaming ghosts you need to bust out priests, mages, and heroes to even BEGIN to have a chance of containing?

It also 'traps' necromancers.

[Flickerdart]

And trying to outlaw magic is...kind of a losing proposition, since spellcasters are the most powerful things in existence. Hell, level 20 wizards are more powerful than non-spellcasting gods.
I don't see why you need to outlaw magic to set a couple of stiffs ablaze.

[Threadnaught]

One DnD specific addition would be a waiting period for important people of up to 12 days, in case a cleric wants to Raise the from the dead. Any cleric who can Raise them after this time is capable of casting Ressurection instead. According to Wikipedia's article on purefaction, the deceased should be bloating by now but not exploding yet, so I guess that's ok.



Cheaper than cremation, safer than burial, can anyone see any problems with this outline?

Just the one. You could cast Gentle Repose to keep a corpse preserved during the grace period.

[Rogue Shadows]

And trying to outlaw magic is...kind of a losing proposition, since spellcasters are the most powerful things in existence. Hell, level 20 wizards are more powerful than non-spellcasting gods.

Is there such a thing? I thought every god could cast every spell from every domain that they grant as at-will spell-like abilities, and given that any god with a Divine Rank of at least 1 has at least 3 domains...


Even if they punch through their casket, the dirt falls on them and immobilizes them. No more slams

They can't dig their way out? Living people unfortunate enough to have been buried alive have dug their way out of graves in the past, you know. It's not easy, but then, they're working on a limited supply of oxygen and get tired from the exertion. Undead don't care about the supply of oxygen and can't get tired. They literally have nothing better to do than keep rolling those Strength checks to climb out, even if it requires a natural 20 each time.