Country of the living dead

[arixe]

So ive been world building and have decided to make this contenent of undead and drow. So first off the over world is run by litch lord a group of ancient kings and cort wizards. Then their phalaceries are protected by a group of eilet undead made to either protect or house their phalaceries. The general population are humans that are bred to be food or to be made into resurch subjects for more powerful undead/necromancy spells. The underworld consist of drow slavers who travle using their vast under ground networks to neighboring contenets where they either flesh warp them or sell them to the over world undead. My main consern is the over world what would the land scape consist of would it be waiste land or swamps and such. Im pretty hazy how undead affect the land scape would the majority of the content be unhallowed/perpetually dark would that be too far fetched. My question to the internet would how do you run a country of undead. Or if any one has tried howd it turn out

[Saintheart]

Sounds a lot like Thay after the Spellplague hit, but that's 4e.

[ExLibrisMortis]

What kind of undead are you using? If it's all about liches and necropolitans, there's no need for humanoid cattle, or indeed any kind of cattle, as they don't eat. That would affect the landscape considerably, or rather, the landscape wouldn't be managed nearly as much by undead as by living farmers.

The effects of undeath on the environment aren't captured in rules, mostly. There is a variant rule in Libris Mortis, page 12, that suggests adding turn resistance to undead that are near many other undead, as they suffuse the area with negative energy. However, desecrate - which explicitly fills an area with negative energy - has no ill effect on living creatures, so presumably plants would be mostly unaffected, with only cosmetic differences.

In general, undead don't eat plants or drink water, but their cattle does both. That probably means you have non-desecrated fields worked by slaves, who grow nice and meaty on the crops they grow. The undead, meanwhile, live in the desecrated cities, where they do the skilled work. After all, an undead master blacksmith might have hundreds of years of experience. Not even a venerable dwarf can match that kind of skill.

[atemu1234]

Remember that certain things will definitely shift-

The economy will definitely shift. More people will take up adventuring due to the loss of certain requirements keeping people at home (they are immune to most things that limit distance traveled, they cannot starve and do not need to sleep).
Thus goods and services will become different. Supplying someone with negative energy healing is valid, since undead do not heal naturally.
Many will most likely take up magic, due to the inordinate lifespans for study and research.
Gathering knowledge will become far more popular, but many sources (Libris Mortis in particular) indicate that undead are limited in the field of personal growth. They cannot change to suit new situations and (possibly) are incapable of innovation.

[Psyren]

Sounds a lot like Thay after the Spellplague hit, but that's 4e.

I was thinking Geb (http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Geb), in Golarion.

[ExLibrisMortis]

Supplying someone with negative energy healing is valid, since undead do not heal naturally.
Mindless undead don't heal naturally, but intelligent undead do. Page 10 of Libris Mortis: "Necromantic Healing: With 8 or more consecutive hours of inactivity in any 24-hour period, an undead with an Intelligence score recovers 1 hit point per Hit Die. If such an undead is completely inactive for a full 24-hour period, it recovers 2 hit points per Hit Die".

Of course, it can be debated how 'natural' this healing is, given that undead don't need to sleep, and just sitting there is kind of weird. It's pretty standard for spellcasters, though, who can't do much of anything while recovering spells.

[jiriku]

I have run a nation in which the ruler and nobility were living, but undead had a prominent role in society. It sounds like you're aiming for something about opposite that, though, where living creatures fill a service role in an undead society.

Undead beyond the simplest zombies and skeletons are immortal, ever-hungry predators. They are unnatural creatures and have no interaction with living ecosystems except to destroy them. You could expect that undead will gradually depopulate the wildlife with their eternal hungers, and the combination of ecosystem collapse and the predominance of negative energy from so many undead in one place will blight the land. Swamps, wastelands, and deserts would gradually come to predominate after a few hundred years of this, and even the more normal terrain areas will be sickly, unhealthy, and lacking in the normal wildlife diversity of normal terrain. However, if the undead choose to raise living creatures as livestock and/or slaves, there will be places where living beings, and the food crops that sustain them, exist. They are probably not thriving. After all, undead will lack any mercy, compassion, or empathy for the living, and if the cattle must toil day and night in unproductive fields just to grow enough wheat to avoid starvation, well, that's good -- it keeps them too busy surviving to spend time planning revolts against their undead masters.

In a D&D 3.5 environment, is entirely reasonable to have huge areas of unhallowed land. There are a number of outsiders capable of using unhallow as an at-will spell-like ability. A powerful lich merely needs to call and bind a few, put them to work, and massive areas can be made unhallowed in a matter of weeks. The spell lasts for a year so a team of a dozen such creatures working continuously could spread and maintain an unhallow over an entire city and its surrounding countryside with ease.

[arixe]

The main idea was undead forming sociatle norms so vampires maintaining a large amout of humans to support their numbers knowing that renwable resorces are better then eating and eating till everything dies out. Ghouls would tend graveyards they eat corpses if in not mistaken . morgs im not sure where they would fit in mindless undead would be little more then slaves and cannon fodder humans would fall into a few cattigories food, slaves(future mindless undead), traders because undead rarely can do trade them selves and finaly future necromancers or litches.

[Karl Aegis]

Seems like the perfect opportunity for outsiders to invade the Material Plane en masse.

[Kahlendrrari]

I have been bouncing the idea around in my head for quite some time (which is weird because I have only ever played one session of 3.0, when it was still new) of a country, or city with the head position of "ruler" occupied by a vampire lord. Kind of a theocracy based in the faith of Wee Jas. Despite the fact that this would most likely never happen, the Vampires and the living would some how come to a truce. While the laws of this area would be strict from the law/chaos standpoint, on the moral compass of things like the slave trade, trade of arms and armor from duergar/drow, would be allowed.

Basic trade routes, tolls, and other forms of commerce from surrounding countries would keep this place's economy up and running. To the citizens of this country, taxes wouldn't be paid in monetary form, but through "donations" of blood. For those who are richer that don't want to pay in blood, a monetary tax may also be paid. Fines for those caught breaking minor laws would be paid in blood. For those individuals that are found guilty of committing the more serious crimes, they would be put first to death by exsanguination, and the final punishment would be being put to undeath, to do the simple menial labor that most people don't want to do such as digging ditches, manure sweeper, and other forms of unskilled labor.

There would be people in charge of the undead in order to keep them from going all "zombie apocalypse" on the living population. In return for paying their taxes, the citizens would be protected by an armed force directly under the command of the vampire lord, as he has complete control over his created spawn, and through them all of their spawn and so on and so forth. There would also be a living contingent of the armed force to regulate stuff during the hours of the day, until the un-living could take back over at dusk.

To further protect the nation/city all citizens that are of an age could be summoned into the militia, unless they have a specialized skill set. blacksmith's, leatherworkers, shoemaker's/cobblers. would be required to for so many days out of the month to provide goods that the country/city could use. (uniforms, boots, armor, arms) Of course there would be farmers, which would pay an amount of their crop/livestock yield since persons of those professions need their strength and it would be silly to ask them to pay their taxes in blood.

Since Wee Jas is a Deity of magic, there would be schools that the country runs, that would also spread the word of the Stern Lady.

[nerghull]

A great inspiration for undead nation is Nekross (http://mightandmagic.wikia.com/wiki/Nekross) in Heroes of Might & Magic IV. Funded by Gaudloth (http://mightandmagic.wikia.com/wiki/Gauldoth_Half-Dead) it is an over-rationalized system, diverging from classics as it doesn't opress people because it is evil and instead try to lure them into living here. The living population is viewed as another ressource, it is a potential undead army, if the country is invaded and any family offering a child to the necromancers' education receive social benefits, assuring everful reserves of necromancers.

In to words rationnalized evil. Best evil.

[arixe]

Im liking what people are saying and with a high population of drow living in the under ground cavers and catacombs humans are easly kidnapped by drow and sold to the undead

[Talar]

If you do a search for the Silverclawshift Archives in one of the stories (believe it was the third, which was never finished) there is an undead city in which you may want to cherry pick some ideas and expand them to be for a whole country and not just a city. One of the things I can think are blood shops where vampires can buy blood of varying quality. The DM had a whole list of how different attributes affected the price of the blood (gnome and dwarf was the cheapest, good outsider was the most expensive). Also I always imagined an undead city or country would have one kickass library seeing has it probably has had the same librarian for hundreds of years if not thousands, and it would just slowly collect knowledge over all that time.

[arixe]

Thats one of the reasons i like this concept so much also i think humans would have been bred into two breeds so to speak one is the high str high con low wis human that make up the working class farmers and food for vampires. Then the high int high cha low wis spell casters that get conscipted into the necromancy collage. And im guessing being chosen as a vampires servent/meal would be simular to being a noble or something simmilar

[Karl Aegis]

...Farming is based entirely on wisdom.

[arixe]

Right but it dosnt take superior wis to farm and you want bred out for easy to control sheeple

[Kahlendrrari]

from the SRD....


PROFESSION (WIS; TRAINED ONLY)
You are trained in a livelihood or a professional role, such as
apothecary, boater, bookkeeper, brewer, cook, driver, farmer, fisher,
guide, herbalist, herder, hunter, innkeeper, lumberjack, miller,
miner, porter, rancher, sailor, scribe, siege engineer, stablehand,
tanner, teamster, woodcutter, or the like.
Like Craft, Knowledge, and Perform, Profession is actually a
number of separate skills. For instance, you could have the skill
Profession (cook). Your ranks in that skill don’t affect any Profession
(miller) or Profession (miner) checks you might make. You could
have several Profession skills, each with its own ranks, each
purchased as a separate skill.
While a Craft skill represents ability in creating or making an
item, a Profession skill represents an aptitude in a vocation requiring
a broader range of less specific knowledge. To draw a modern
analogy, if an occupation is a service industry, it’s probably a Profession
skill. If it’s in the manufacturing
sector, it’s probably a Craft skill
Check: You can practice your trade and
make a decent living, earning about half your
Profession check result in gold pieces per
week of dedicated work. You know how to
use the tools of your trade, how to perform
the profession’s daily tasks, how to supervise helpers,
and how to handle common problems. For example, a
sailor knows how to tie several basic knots, how to
tend and repair sails, and how to stand a deck
watch at sea. The DM sets DCs for specialized
tasks.
Action: Not applicable. A single check
generally represents a week of work.
Try Again: Varies. An attempt to use a
Profession skill to earn an income cannot be
retried. You are stuck with whatever weekly wage your
check result brought you. Another check may be made after a week
to determine a new income for the next period of time. An attempt
to accomplish some specific task can usually be retried.
Untrained: Untrained laborers and assistants (that is, characters
without any ranks in Profession) earn an average of 1 silver piece per
day.

[arixe]

Level 1 commener with skill focus and a 8 wis has a +6 meaning to do the most basic of farming tasks youd need to roll a 4 and a 11 if its advanced i see no reason that wisdom is requred to farm especially if these humans were bred with controlability in mind. And ultimately thats if theres no overseer who could easly be a lvl 3 commoner whod need to roll a 2 and 9 respectively. Ultimately ability scores are arbitrary for farming and fishing and mundane.

[ExLibrisMortis]

I agree, wisdom's not much of an issue for farmer commoners. Arguably, the profession (farmer) check is done only a couple of times per day, by the taskmaster or whatever, when deciding which parts to irrigate and how much and such. If the weather stays put, you don't need a check more than once a day, to make sure the fields are still doing okay. The people doing hard labour are going to need more con checks to keep working than profession checks to break earth the right way.

[arixe]

That's Why im considering this countrys humans to be bred to be works. In fact i doubt any clerics would be anything other then spawn for control reasons

[Bonzai]

I had created a city in the FRs for a campaign during the year of rogue dragons. It was originally an Iron Mine. Then a Necromancer belonging to the cult of the dragon moved in near by. He made them a simple offer. He would trade with them from time to time for basic supplies, and otherwise they would leave each other alone.

One day the mining camp was attacked by Orc raiders (this was during the rise of the kingdom of many arrows). The Necromancer found it annoying, and defended the camp. It was practically on his doorstep and he found it insulting that they would dare attack it. Once the orcs were slain, he set about fortifying the camp to discourage further attempts. This lead to the camp growing to a small town. This fed the Necromancers ego, and led to him taking a more active role in the town, improving it further. Roads were made, trade increased, and it began thrive.

When the orcs invaded, it became a safe haven for refuges and swelled further. The Necromancer ruled with an iron hand, but provided order and stability (LE). The people love and respect him as their savior and protector. Public works and protection were provided by Skeleton workers and soldiers. Criminals are executed and used to bolster their forces.

The plot hook was this; harpers have tried to investigate and remove him, but have gone missing. The party investigates and learns that he is beloved by his people and the only thing that is keeping the city alive and from being over run by the new Orc kingdom. However if left to his own devices he will amass a huge undead army. Worse he has been stock piling dragon corpses from the year of rogue dragons. There is no telling what evil he will unleash. Thus the party is left with a damned if they do, damned if they don't dilemma.

[RedMage125]

I have been bouncing the idea around in my head for quite some time (which is weird because I have only ever played one session of 3.0, when it was still new) of a country, or city with the head position of "ruler" occupied by a vampire lord. Kind of a theocracy based in the faith of Wee Jas. Despite the fact that this would most likely never happen, the Vampires and the living would some how come to a truce. While the laws of this area would be strict from the law/chaos standpoint, on the moral compass of things like the slave trade, trade of arms and armor from duergar/drow, would be allowed.
*snip*
Since Wee Jas is a Deity of magic, there would be schools that the country runs, that would also spread the word of the Stern Lady.

I've got something for you. Old thread of mine, but the spoiler-blocked thing at the end of the first post sounds like EXACTLY what you're suggesting.

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?335215-Character-Concepts-Non-Evil-Necromancer

Feel free to cherry-pick/poach whatever you like from it.

[arixe]

Pretty much agreeing with what you guys are saying. sorry for the farming tangent. The main idea was a kingdom that has been ruled by the same king for centuries where they chose necromancy to preserve the order and stability. Good king becomes litch and so on. But the down fall of all undead is evil out of nicesity. So the king dose out live his stay but people start to notice. Revolts start and what dose he do to stop relvolts creates more undead to control the people. After that word spreads and the country starts to be besiged by palladins and clerics. But under the assuption that the country must be clensed. So the king raises an undead army to save his people and over the centuries the people of this land have come to depend on these undead and vise versa. I doubt the palladian campaigns ever stopped so the hate of good creatures is strong. Yeah i like how this country is evolving i mean your can pretty much slap a campaign at any point in its history and it will probably be engaging and challenging

[RingofThorns]

you could look into an old comic called requiem chevalier vampire for ideas. Though to warn it is super dark and twisted so view at your own risk and discretion.

[arixe]

Sounds pretty good i thank everyone for their suggestions. I hope my players enjoy it