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Cheiromancer
2013-06-09, 08:09 AM
I think every edition of D&D has had spawning undead. Some are slow spawners (e.g. vampires) and some are fast (e.g. wights or shadows). The spawning mechanic raises the question of why undead haven't overrun the game world. I've been trying to brainstorm some reasons, and most involve house rules. I thought I would ask the playground for some input. Here are some of the best possibilities I have thought of:

Lack of motivation: Undead don't like to create spawn. They do it only rarely and for specific reasons, such as defense of their lairs. If unwanted spawn are accidentally created, they will be destroyed by their creator after their usefulness is ended.

Limited power: Undead do not have unlimited ability to create spawn. After creating a limited number of spawn (1 + Cha bonus?) they must wait an interval (a year?) before regaining the ability. Newly created spawn must wait until the interval has elapsed before they gain the create spawn ability.

The attraction of 'lack of motivation' is that it requires no mechanical rule change. The difficulty is that it seems unlikely that evil and/or chaotic creatures would be uniformly opposed to reckless spawning, especially ones that are relatively stupid, like shadows. And what happens if an evil spellcaster wants to 'shadow bomb' a small city?

A modification to this proposal might be that only independent undead can spawn; a rebuked or summoned undead lacks this ability, as do spawn under the control of their creator. This independent spawning option can be naturally combined with the 'limited power' option.

The attraction of 'limited power' is that it will not normally be visible in play. A shadow (Cha 13) can create 2 spawn by these rules; a wight (Cha 15) can create 3. This will be more than enough for most encounters. A difficulty arises if the DM wants it to be easy to raise an army of undead, but it should be straightforward enough to say that an evil ritual or artifact has boosted the ability of local undead to create spawn.

Thoughts?

Moriwen
2013-06-09, 09:15 AM
Well, going off the first one, maybe creating spawn is really unpleasant/inconvenient/dangerous? The undead doing the spawning has to use large amounts of their own blood, or stand vigil over a grave for three nights without leaving it for a moment, or the spawning draws on the spawner's negative energy as fuel and could easily draw so much as to destroy them? (Obviously the particular motive would have to vary by type of undead.)

Hyena
2013-06-09, 09:31 AM
There is a reason the undead haven't overrun the world yet - clerics, paladins and other types of undead hunters put them down faster, then they procreate.

Madfellow
2013-06-09, 09:32 AM
I would think that the undead haven't overrun the worlds because anytime just one of them shows up the clerics and paladins get together with all the scrappy adventurers to kill them. They never get the chance to multiply too much because the holy types keep constant vigilance over every graveyard in the game world.

Edit: Argh, ninja'd!

Hyena
2013-06-09, 09:36 AM
They never get the chance to multiply too much because the holy types keep constant vigilance over every graveyard in the game world.
And those that are not protected are not constantly visited - so, no constant growth for the army.


Edit: Argh, ninja'd!
I swordsaged it when you let your guard down for a split second, and I will do it again.

Samshiir
2013-06-09, 10:21 AM
Its the related to the reason wolves can't kill all the deer in a forest. If the population of the prey drops too low, the predators don't have enough food to go around, and their own population starts to drop.

If vampires (and such) were to convert too many humanoids into undead, they wouldn't have a lifesource or source of reproduction to depent on.

Once they reach the optimum predator-to-prey ratio, the predator population levels off, generally. Add the fact that a lot of undead are immortal, so they won't need to replace those that die off.

In the end, undead are smart, and realize that if they reproduce too much, they will undermine their own lives, because there would be way too many immortal predators competing for mortal prey.

Friv
2013-06-09, 11:40 AM
Intelligent undead are able to understand the potential dangers of over-spawning (loss of feeding ground, drawing attention to oneself, and so on). As such, they aren't likely to do it in a big way.

Unintelligent undead typically stick to the locations where they were created - shadows don't just wander the countryside killing folks. As such, they tend not to create a "spreading doom" scenario.

Any undead who does spread like that and is also prone to rapid expansion will almost immediately run into heroes, resulting in one of three scenarios:
1) Total extermination (the focus of a campaign, perhaps)
2) Total victory (the end of a campaign, perhaps)
3) A lone undead surviving the purge, hiding somewhere remote until it can return to start the process again... (focus of a different campaign)

Cheiromancer
2013-06-09, 01:48 PM
Do folks really think that there are enough clerics and paladins in a city to handle a shadow apocalypse? I calculate that shadows can double their numbers every minute or so if they really try. Say that a swarm of 6 or so attack the same, sleeping victim on the same initiative count: almost certainly an instant death. Go to the next bed and repeat.

That's a thousandfold increase every 10 minutes, provided there is sufficient prey. No wolf pack can grow that fast! And shadows can fly and pass through walls, so it is not like people can lock themselves into their houses to protect themselves. They'd go through a city like fire in a tinder-dry forest.

Characters with magic weapons and spells could fight them, but nothing else will slow them down. Sure it would be self-limiting - just like a forest fire is self-limiting - but there wouldn't be a city afterwards.

edit: I'm thinking of shadows in 3.5, and a standard demographic where 99% of the population are commoners, experts and warriors. The numbers might work out differently in a different game system.

Slipperychicken
2013-06-09, 02:37 PM
Motivation: Almost no-one wants to eradicate all life, because that's crazy. The undead have little will on their own -only the most corrupt and insane villains have this goal, and fewer still have the competence or power to attempt it. Though some undead may dislike the living, they often see good reasons for their continued existence (they're needed for food/reproduction, they keep out extraplanar conquerors, etc).

The Defenders of Humanity: Those who desire the end of life are battled constantly and vigorously by holy warriors, heroes, and everyone who wants life to continue (a surprisingly large portion!).

Safety Measures: Burning and destroying corpses wherever possible within 24 hours so they don't rise again, inspecting packages entering populated areas, stationing a Paladin by the gates, and so on.



Do folks really think that there are enough clerics and paladins in a city to handle a shadow apocalypse?

Preventing such incidents is an ongoing struggle, requiring vast resources, divine favor, constant vigilance, mighty heroes, and luck. Sometimes villages and cities do fall, but the efforts of these brave defenders have thusfar been sufficient.

kieza
2013-06-09, 02:50 PM
Somewhere out there is an organization composed mainly of clerics and paladins, who are constantly casting divinations to predict upcoming undead apocalypses. When they get a ping, they warn people in the region, send out a hit-squad of paladins, summon some angels, and hire mercenary adventurers to go in and exterminate every undead they can find.

The only reason they can do this is by constantly keeping ahead of the undead. If they let one incident get past their guard, then the base population of undead will skyrocket and they have to either call a crusade or start looking for a new plane of existence to colonize.

Adventure hook: Somewhere out there is a vampire/lich/ancient ghoul that has seen several undead hordes rise and fall, and is slowly working out how this organization operates. It's experimenting to figure out how they phrase their divinations, so that it can lay the groundwork for an undead apocalypse without being detected. Purely by chance, somebody (the party, duh) stumbles upon one of his hidden lairs and realizes that the next undead apocalypse is about to happen with no time to prepare.

Scow2
2013-06-09, 02:59 PM
Motivation: Almost no-one wants to eradicate all life, because that's crazy. The undead have little will on their own -only the most corrupt and insane villains have this goal, and fewer still have the competence or power to attempt it. Though some undead may dislike the living, they often see good reasons for their continued existence (they're needed for food/reproduction, they keep out extraplanar conquerors, etc).[quote]Actually, ALL Spawn-creating undead are both Intelligent, and are explicitly stated to have undying hatred and the goal of eradication for all life. Only liches value self preservation beyond running from a battle that turns against them, and there's no risk of a Lichepocalypse as there is with a Wight, Shadow, or Wraithpocalypse.
[quote]Safety Measures: Burning and destroying corpses wherever possible within 24 hours so they don't rise again, inspecting packages entering populated areas, stationing a Paladin by the gates, and so on.This offers no protection against a Shadowpocalypse, and if you can destroy a body, it's generally not one that's at risk of becoming an undead anyway.

The only real solution is to make undead rare and not prone to wandering. Or houserule their "Create Spawn" ability to not be so absurd.

Randel
2013-06-09, 04:12 PM
In settings where divination is possible, you just need to keep an eye out for "undead apocalypse scheduled in three weeks".

There just has to be four or five high level oracles out there with the power to foresee upcoming disasters in order for them to direct heroes to stop the threat. Actual divine beings can do that as well and can presumably send prophetic visions to whoever the need to in order to put a stop to it.

Basically, whenever an undead apocalypse is going to happen, the cosmic forces of Good and Evil (and Law and Chaos) already know its going to happen and the proper heroes, villains, clowns, or lawyers will get directed there to put a stop to it.

Slipperychicken
2013-06-09, 04:53 PM
Actual divine beings can do that as well and can presumably send prophetic visions to whoever the need to in order to put a stop to it.


The gods themselves do have strong interests in preventing this sort of thing, and certainly have the power to do so.

awa
2013-06-09, 06:18 PM
You could use conservation of ninjutsu or in this case negative energy as an excuse.
A single vampire is a deadly foe lots of vampires are a swarm of mooks.
One vampire is filled to the brim with power but if there are tons of other undead in the area all the negative energy is divided up amongst them.
something like say a zombie uses very little juice becuase it's stupid and has few special attacks but the more powerful they are the more negative energy they require.

alternatively positive energy is linked with negative energy so the more undead are in the world the positive energy based creatures/ items exist and they balance each other out.

also the shadows description is they lurk in dark places waiting for living creatures to come by they explicitly do not go looking for prey.

Cheiromancer
2013-06-10, 08:57 AM
It should not require divine intervention to keep CR 3 monsters in check. Nor networks of oracles with strike teams of paladins and clerics. There ought to be solutions that would work in an E6 or E8 campaign.


You could use conservation of ninjutsu or in this case negative energy as an excuse.
A single vampire is a deadly foe lots of vampires are a swarm of mooks.
One vampire is filled to the brim with power but if there are tons of other undead in the area all the negative energy is divided up amongst them.
something like say a zombie uses very little juice becuase it's stupid and has few special attacks but the more powerful they are the more negative energy they require.

alternatively positive energy is linked with negative energy so the more undead are in the world the positive energy based creatures/ items exist and they balance each other out.

I like this idea, but I am not sure how to implement it mechanically. The following link has the reverse idea; when there are lots of undead present, they all get +4 turn resistance. But the content on the 'about undead' page provides no suggestions on why undead apocalypses are not regular occurrences. Well, except for a rule that says that undead can choose to attempt a DC 15 Intelligence check to not create a spawn. Something shadows would have a hard time with.

http://www.realmshelps.net/monsters/aboutundead.shtml

Maybe lowering the turn resistance when there are lots of undead present. I'll need to think about that.


also the shadows description is they lurk in dark places waiting for living creatures to come by they explicitly do not go looking for prey.

According to 'about undead', shadows have an 'inescapable craving' to feed on strength, a craving that eventually leads them to behave like a 'ravening beast' and take insane risks to satisfy their craving.

The craving is satiated as soon as they feed, so they might be content to attack once and then go back to their lairs, but as Scow2 notes, "ALL Spawn-creating undead are both Intelligent, and are explicitly stated to have undying hatred and the goal of eradication for all life."

The more I think of it, the less plausible is the 'no motivation' fix. It would represent a thorough change to how undead are depicted. Instead of hateful monsters intent on eradicating all life, they would be shy, retiring creatures who fight only to defend their lairs, but who otherwise try to exist in harmony with the universe.

Coidzor
2013-06-10, 09:20 AM
I think Frank and K took a stab at this in the Tome of Necromancy (http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=34248), though I believe it mostly involved tying naturally occurring shadows to pools of shadow with a connection to the elemental plane of shadow which they couldn't travel very far from, without being either destroyed by sunlight or they'd be sent back to the pool if they felt the sun's light upon them. And any spawn they created would be linked to that same pool anyway.

Which meant that they'd create areas where any humanoids that were there overnight were increasingly likely to die in, but wouldn't threaten population centers unless the pool of shadow was formed inside a population center or close by.

Summoned undead were just treated as having their spawn ability deactivated by virtue of being summoned, IIRC.

I think for wights and other spawners that weren't locale-limited, they limited the pool of spawn they could control and tweaked the undead so that they were loathe to create uncontrolled spawn or release previously controlled spawn in order to make new spawn and could choose whether their victim would rise or not.

awa
2013-06-10, 10:59 AM
well you could have it so that the spawn making works normally under most situations but once you get say a hundred shadows in one place (or whatever) then additional people drained are just dead.
for stronger undead you say could say once you reach a certain threshold of bodies you start getting weaker undead so people getting killed by the vampire come back as zombies and the people killed by wraiths come back as shadows or if your feeling more homebrey a custom even weaker vampire spawn with.

Doug Lampert
2013-06-10, 11:44 AM
well you could have it so that the spawn making works normally under most situations but once you get say a hundred shadows in one place (or whatever) then additional people drained are just dead.
for stronger undead you say could say once you reach a certain threshold of bodies you start getting weaker undead so people getting killed by the vampire come back as zombies and the people killed by wraiths come back as shadows or if your feeling more homebrey a custom even weaker vampire spawn with.

My 3.0 houserules included a low level cleric spell that prevented spawning inside the walls of a settlement (town, village, manor house, farmhouse whatever), it used permanent inhabitants and walls as the defining features (based on the fact that vampires can't enter a dwelling the presence of people living somewhere is a plausible thing to effect spells used to keep out undead).

3.5 I didn't really worry about it too much, the gods stop it.

Another possible houserule is that the rapid spawn and such powers depend on the TARGET being a powerful creature (AKA an elite character with levels in a PC class), and nothing else spawns in less than 3 days (during which an appropriate consecrated burial will prevent spawning). This allows the spawn power to work full force against PCs, but not to destroy cities as exactly the people best able to defend themselves are the only ones the shadow can rapidly spawn with.

My current homebrew all undead except "mindless zombie created by magic" types are helpless during the daytime. You deal with a ghoul or similar population explosion by waiting till daylight, and then decapitating everything you can find and lighting the remains on fire for anything you can't find.

illyrus
2013-06-10, 01:06 PM
Intelligent undead do not have to be friends. If wight A creates wight B who creates wight C then wight A directly controls B but only indirectly controls C. If B gets a smite to the face C is free and may even hunt down A for daring to give him orders. Like the infinite horde of the abyss undead can be their own worst enemies.

Or an undead controlling cleric/wizard knows a quick and easy path to gain an undead army is to find wight A and control him, indirectly controlling all the wights under his command. The cleric/wizard can just find a random wight, command it, order it to lead them to its leader, then repeat until they get to the top of the chain.

So if wight A builds up an army will make him a prime target for destruction or domination without even needing to consider what the forces of good do. A shadow is a bit less intelligent so it may not be as likely to realize this but it might not be out of its intellectual bounds.

DigoDragon
2013-06-10, 02:57 PM
Like the infinite horde of the abyss undead can be their own worst enemies.

I was thinking of that idea myself. Territorial undead creatures may be very discriminant on what lives next door. If a vampire moves into a wraith's territory, the two undead may attack each other to fight over the limited "living resources" in the area.

Lord Vukodlak
2013-06-11, 12:13 AM
I'm reminded of this quote.
"We like to talk big, vampires do. "I'm going to destroy the world." It's just tough guy talk. Struttin' around with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is, I like this world. You've got... dog racing, Manchester United, and you've got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs."
—Spike

Undead like shadows, ghouls and vampires feed off of living creatures. They have a vested interest in keeping there own populations in check or the humans will flee the area

Another question is the hierarchy of command might not actually function perfectly.

First its a chain not a pyramid it could in fact be a very complicate mess of many chains of varying length. Wight 1 commands Wight 2 who in turn commands Wight 3. The first Wight can't give commands directly to Wight 3 they has to go through Wight 2. Now if Wight 2 is killed then 3 is now free to do whatever the hell he wants. Including ordering Wight 4 to help him kill Wight 1. When you start talking an army you have six or seven generations which makes keeping them organized impossible. That's presuming when there numbers reach swarm status (6-11) it doesn't alert a group of adventures with death ward to come in and wipe them out.

Secondly what does enslaved mean? how far does that control extend? Could the enslaved underling could still plot to use his own spawn to kill his master. Could Wight 2 simply order his own spawn to kill Wight 1 then slip out before his master can order him to stop the attack? Either way Wight 1 likely won't want his spawn creating to many spawn otherwise he'd risk losing control over the pack.

Doxkid
2013-06-12, 08:14 AM
Lack of motivation: Undead don't like to create spawn. They do it only rarely and for specific reasons, such as defense of their lairs. If unwanted spawn are accidentally created, they will be destroyed by their creator after their usefulness is ended.

Libris Mortis and several other books actually list this as one of the main reasons. Several create spawn that the either don't or cant control; ghouls/ghasts do not control those they infect while vampires have an upward limit on how many spawn they can personally control.

Intelligence of the Spawn creator, available resources, spawning limitation and the undeads environment all play major roles in regulating their populations even before Undead abuser (necromancers, demons, devils, warlords, etc) and undead haters (paladins, clerics of pelor, etc) come into play.

Then there are the problems of posed by being whatever kind of undead they are: Shadows, for example, can't share food. Commanding other shadows is a pretty useless ability to them (and difficult, given that they are halfway between the intellect of a human and a wolf, but they are preying upon humans who can and will go get help from people who can destroy incorporeal squishies); leading an army makes them safe, but having that army fight means they go hungry.

Alejandro
2013-06-12, 10:17 AM
Its the related to the reason wolves can't kill all the deer in a forest. If the population of the prey drops too low, the predators don't have enough food to go around, and their own population starts to drop.

If vampires (and such) were to convert too many humanoids into undead, they wouldn't have a lifesource or source of reproduction to depent on.

Once they reach the optimum predator-to-prey ratio, the predator population levels off, generally. Add the fact that a lot of undead are immortal, so they won't need to replace those that die off.

In the end, undead are smart, and realize that if they reproduce too much, they will undermine their own lives, because there would be way too many immortal predators competing for mortal prey.

Some kinds of undead don't (to my knowledge) need any kind of food or sustenance. They just exist eternally until destroyed. Those would be the kind that would get out of control if they kept expanding.

Lord Vukodlak
2013-06-12, 06:29 PM
Some kinds of undead don't (to my knowledge) need any kind of food or sustenance. They just exist eternally until destroyed. Those would be the kind that would get out of control if they kept expanding.

Most of them can't create spawn

Drakevarg
2013-06-12, 08:38 PM
My usual explanation for the issue is simply that the vast majority of undead exist on highly skewed perceptions of reality. Without direction, most of them have no interest in going anywhere, they just stay in their general territory (their tomb, the house they haunt, a forgotten battlefield, whatever) and try to kill anything that comes in. Maybe because they're mindless and just try to murder anything in their immediate field of vision, or because they only see living beings as shadowy figures creeping around their home.

The few that have the slightest interest in the outside world (vampires, liches), generally have no interest whatsoever in genocide. A vampire likes having food on hand, and the lich is mostly just interested in avoiding the afterlife.

When someone comes along with "vision," and actually starts a zombie apocalypse, it's kind of a big deal, not just the logical conclusion of undead existing.

Rabidmuskrat
2013-06-13, 03:47 AM
Basically, what the op wants is for undead apocalypses to be POSSIBLE but not INEVITABLE.

Most spawn-creating undead are either smart enough to not spawn too much for either logistical (food) or political (infighting) reasons, or too dumb, weak and slow to effectively leverage their numbers to snowball effectively as is the case with ghouls or the hypothetical infection-zombie-apocalypse scenario. Turning shuts this group down hard as well.

The oddballs are shadows. They are smart enough to split up to hunt, but dumb enough not to realize that if they keep multiplying they will run out of victims very quickly and probably draw some unwanted attention. In addition, they spawn very quickly and can't be stopped by walls and they don't starve. As has been calculated before, starting from a single shadow they can completely depopulate a small city in a single night, known as a 'shadow-bomb'.

However, shadows are not wanderers. They will not go looking for prey. They would probably not even leave the building they spawn in, content to sit and wait for victims to come to them. If we reject this assumption, at the very least, consider the following points:

1) Any city that had a shadow in at any point in the past would have succumbed to a shadow bomb the moment the shadow appeared. If this was before the town/city had been established, no town would have been built there without the shadow being eradicated first.

2) This leaves us with shadows introduced at some point after the city's founding by something with more intelligence, but increased intelligence brings us back to the first group of undead who do not spawn-bomb by choice. Odds are they have better spawn anyway, if they wanted to attempt something like this.

3) Of course, there will always be crazies. People who would do it for no other reason but to watch the world burn. But how many of them have the caster level 15 and the ability to cast level 8 spells? True, in a dnd world most individuals with caster level 15 are probably this crazy, but there are so few of them it doesn't matter. And they are probably on the watchlists of a number of powerful cleric/paladin organizations anyway. Besides, if you can cast level 8 spells a shadow-bomb is the least of everyone else's worries.

4) This leaves the final villain that might resort to a shadow-bomb: govenment. It certainly seems a nice weapon; shadows clean up the squishies but leave the infrastructure intact, ripe for a small group of Death Warded clerics to clear them out with little risk. Easiest conquest ever. No way to effectively defend against it, except to use it as well. A shadow-bomb would definitely rate as the dnd equivalent of a WMD, with similar consequences arising from its use.

In conclusion, while there are certainly a number of individuals capable of employing undead-apocalypse type situations, most (if not all) have a vested interest in NOT doing it. Besides possibly the BBEG, of course.

Omegonthesane
2013-06-13, 03:59 AM
The Tome of Necromancy covered some of this, in particular a way to avoid an infinite number of shadows conquering the world:

Pools of Deep Shadow:

Veteran players of Dungeons and Dragons often ask "Why don't Shadows just take over the whole world?" Certainly, there are very few residents of the worlds of D&D that can fight against a Shadow at all, and their victims rise from the dead as Shadow Spawn, so it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see where this is going. However, there are a few things limiting the growth of Shadow armies that are not mentioned in the core books at all.

The first is that only intelligent creatures slain by Shadows turn into spawn. That's important, as it means that Shadows cannot simply hunt frogs in the swamp until they number in the tens of thousands before they roll over cities and dragon caves like a fog of Death Incarnate.

But perhaps even more importantly is that almost any time you see a Shadow, or for that matter any incorporeal undead creature, you are looking at a summoned creature. When the Shadow's summoning ends, all of its spawn vanish. Most of the time, an incorporeal undead is summoned forth from the Negative Energy Plane by an object that looks much like a puddle of very oily water, called a Pool of Deep Shadow. Whenever light falls directly upon the pool, or the sun rises high enough in the sky that there are no shadows (about half an hour before and after noon), the summoning effect ends and the Shadow vanishes. When the shadows grow long and darkness has fallen upon the pool, a Shadow is again summoned.

This means that an individual Shadow or Wraith has a very difficult time destroying the whole world, as there is no particular way for them to get more than a day's float from their pool. It also means, however, that areas inhabited by Shadows are extremely dangerous – for even if such a creature is destroyed it will return again the following day. And on every day it will return until those charged with exterminating it are caught unlucky or unaware. In order to permanently destroy such a pool, a flask of Holy Water (or Unholy Water) need simply be poured into it, causing the blackness to depart and the water to become quite clear and drinkable.

For anything that requires an actual body, there is the limit that each body can only be used once - but that's more a way to make sure that a Wight Apocalypse setting has hope in it than a limit on it getting that bad at all.

Rabidmuskrat
2013-06-13, 04:31 AM
The Tome of Necromancy covered some of this, in particular a way to avoid an infinite number of shadows conquering the world:


For anything that requires an actual body, there is the limit that each body can only be used once - but that's more a way to make sure that a Wight Apocalypse setting has hope in it than a limit on it getting that bad at all.

That works for naturally occuring shadows, but how does it work with this spell (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Create_Greater_Undead)? Shadows created by these aren't summoned. They never disappear.

Mastikator
2013-06-13, 04:50 AM
[snip]
Undead like shadows, ghouls and vampires feed off of living creatures. They have a vested interest in keeping there own populations in check or the humans will flee the area [snip]

or kill them.
In order to not exterminate the living the dead basically need to be at most 1:100 in terms of population, this also means that the living severely overpower the undead, so the undeads only way is to sneak around undetected, meaning in small groups, and they gain nothing by the existence of other groups of undead, in fact they risk everything by sharing the living with other undead, the undead have a huge incentive to be as few as possible, even if it means killing other undead, which they should have no problem with, there's no alliance between the undead, only domination and rare mutual benefit.

The kind of undead that don't depend on the living (liches, zombies, skeletons) are either mindless or super rare, lichdom isn't something you can be inflicted with, it's a higher state, zombie/skeleton is a mean/bone puppy with a mindless evil spirit behind the wheels and negative energy strings attached to a necromancer (usually).

Ghouls are nearly mindless and will exterminate humans if left unchecked, so paladins are always vigilant to hunt them and destroy them, wights are more clever, but not so clever they won't ever be caught, vampires are pretty clever and can survive for centuries before finally being staked. It usually takes being clever to survive, and being clever means being few and far in between, as to not alert any heroes to save the day by turning you into dust :smalltongue:

Coidzor
2013-06-13, 05:26 AM
That works for naturally occuring shadows, but how does it work with this spell (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Create_Greater_Undead)? Shadows created by these aren't summoned. They never disappear.

Then you go back to high level characters and access to 8th level spells. A 15th level character can wipe out cities. But doing so attracts a lot of attention.

Omegonthesane
2013-06-13, 01:40 PM
Then you go back to high level characters and access to 8th level spells. A 15th level character can wipe out cities. But doing so attracts a lot of attention.

This.

Honestly, the entire feudal D&D model breaks down completely by about 9th level - if you need 8th level spellcasting to cause a problem, you can discount that problem for the majority of worlds as actually portrayed.

Scow2
2013-06-13, 02:00 PM
Necromancy is not the only way to end up with Undead. Saying it takes a level 7 spell slot as the only way to get shadows is like saying you need a level 15 Druid, Cleric, or Wizard to get any rainfall or thunderstorms.

Places of great evil can passively and sporadically animate the dead. Some people naturally reanimate as undead without magic or other undead, usually as circumstances of their life and death - horrific murders, executions of evil people, and the like.

Omegonthesane
2013-06-13, 02:08 PM
Necromancy is not the only way to end up with Undead. Saying it takes a level 7 spell slot as the only way to get shadows is like saying you need a level 15 Druid, Cleric, or Wizard to get any rainfall or thunderstorms.

Places of great evil can passively and sporadically animate the dead. Some people naturally reanimate as undead without magic or other undead, usually as circumstances of their life and death - horrific murders, executions of evil people, and the like.

You don't need a level 7 or 8 spell slot to create the undead either - most clerics and dread necromancers need a level 3 one for the most basic forms, in fact. What was being proposed was that a level 8 spell slot should be the only way to get permanent shadows - that the ones that form naturally are temporary summons, spawning around a pool of deep shadow, condemned to remain within a certain long but finite radius of the pool of deep shadow, and unable to exist while the sun shines on their spawning pool.

The Fury
2013-06-13, 03:22 PM
I'd have to look it up but I think that most undead that create spawn are either powerless in sunlight, are destroyed by sunlight, or they just plain don't like sunlight. That in itself would severely limit the range in which spawn-creating undead can travel. Also, even though it's never stated outright in the fluff of most games I've played, I'd assume that proper funeral rituals would prevent a corpse from rising as undead. Y'know burial, cremation or something. Midnight is the one exception in that it states outright that any corpse will rise as an undead creature unless it's dismembered or cremated, which is why doing so is standard procedure for that setting.

Coidzor
2013-06-13, 03:46 PM
Necromancy is not the only way to end up with Undead. Saying it takes a level 7 spell slot as the only way to get shadows is like saying you need a level 15 Druid, Cleric, or Wizard to get any rainfall or thunderstorms.

Places of great evil can passively and sporadically animate the dead. Some people naturally reanimate as undead without magic or other undead, usually as circumstances of their life and death - horrific murders, executions of evil people, and the like.

I was being specific to the mention of Greater Create Undead, but yes there's many ways that need to be addressed. You also have to address the Summon Undead line and the wibbly-wobbly plot/backstory/world creation ways that undead occur. Personally I'd just rule spawning as one of those things that summoned creatures can't do and call it at that, since there's already other limitations on what summons can do.

Certain people may not get executed precisely because they're so scared of what might happen so instead they seal them up until they die of natural causes and are then properly disposed of. A big thing about undead outside of D&D canon is that they usually can't rise if they're seen to properly or some types only arise as the result of not receiving funerary rites or desecration. I can see salted cremation being houseruled to be an effective component of funerary rites to prevent someone from casually rising as an undead though.

edit: I always feel that undead spawned by locations generally should be bound to those locations in some way in the general case.


You don't need a level 7 or 8 spell slot to create the undead either - most clerics and dread necromancers need a level 3 one for the most basic forms, in fact.

Hard to get worried about a plague of zombies and skeletons though, as that's mostly dependent upon the personal power of a high level PC or an organization of lots of necromancers. And that's going to attract attention and can be a source of conflict without necessarily being apocalyptic.


What was being proposed was that a level 8 spell slot should be the only way to get permanent shadows - that the ones that form naturally are temporary summons, spawning around a pool of deep shadow, condemned to remain within a certain long but finite radius of the pool of deep shadow, and unable to exist while the sun shines on their spawning pool.

I generally concur that permanent shadows make the most sense as being bound to a creator, either a place or a necromancer.

Marxism
2013-06-14, 12:05 AM
I operate my games under the assumption that undead are created by necromancers.

The whole acts of great evil creating undead is okay in theory but I don't really see them as the kind who create spawn. A single horrific murder would create an angry spirit or specter, if it claimed any victims it would not want to make them into spawn as it killed them out of hatred.

Now Necromancers: A Necromancer is someone who uses undead as a tool, a weapon, an army. They want to be able to control their creations. When they create a wight or a vampire it's because they want a body-guard or a weapon. Having two is better, three, four, ten, twenty, all are wonderful. But around the time you have forty or fifty the necromancer realizes that he has an army and the potential for a bigger one. He could set them loose in the world and deliberately create conditions optimal for "breeding" or he could loose control of his bowels when he realizes that they might kill him. Really what stops an apocalypse is that somewhere along the line someone realizes that they don't want an apocalypse. The necromancer really just wants some slaves. He wants a few tools but not so many that they are a danger to him.

Now let's talk about ambitious necromancers: They don't want a set of tools or a set of weapons, they want an Army (note the capital A) They want organized extermination of civilians to swell the ranks they want Sargents, captains, and generals to keep the troops in line, They want to take control of land and people. Against them is the entire rest of the world. These undead will be killed by clerics, paladins, well paid murder-hobo's, wildfires, and druids. The survivors will be hunted down for kicks by rangers. If any survive the battles then they will wander into a town maybe turn a few people but then be put down. Maybe they get lucky and turn the whole town but then the clerics come back. Ultimately the number of people who don't want to die will out-weigh the number of wights or vampires. Or will it?

What if the Ambitious necromancer is not only ambitious but also very powerful and very well connected or in the case of a game I am currently running a pawn of a demon lord. In this case they win the battles. Then what they turn the whole population? No they want a constant supply of new soldiers for the next set of battles. They set up a system for constant new "recruits" the exact process is unimportant. The bottom line is that there will never be an undead apocalypse because for it to occur someone must put great effort into making it happen and nobody would ever want it to happen.