Undead Ideas for a new game

[90sMusic]

Hey folks. I'm developing a game along a similar vein as Dwarf Fortress but using pixel graphics instead of ascii characters to represent everything. Part of the game is a religion system that involves designating worshiping areas and gaining certain abilities you can use based on the number of faithful using a resource that is slowly generated as they spend time worshiping instead of doing other tasks.

Anyway, long story short, one of the gods is of course a death god and grants death and undeath themed abilities. The ultimate ability they have can make one individual (presumably your player character or one of their descendants who is currently ruling, but could be anyone you choose) into an immortal through undeath.

So far, these are the options I have and how it works. Keep in mind the names aren't final or anything, they're basically just placeholders but represent the general theme i'm going for. To become the immortal you have to bind your soul to something, so these are the options:

Lich- These are basically the "default" and created by binding your soul to almost any object that isn't specified for use in one of the other types of immortals.

Mummy Lord- These are created by binding your soul to your own heart after it has been removed. (Killing you and removing the heart aren't part of the actual ability, they must be done immediately prior)

Master Vampire- These are created by binding your soul to your own body after it has been drained of it's blood. (like above, draining it's blood is an unrelated process that must be done first)

Death Knight- These are created by binding your soul to any kind of a weapon.

Now under normal circumstances, skeletons are the only type of undead you can raise and all followers of the god of death have the ability to raise humanoid skeletons from corpses. Skeletons have very little intelligence and all have the same amount of strength and endurance which is equal to the starting values for humans but is only half of what humans can eventually develop into if they work on raising these scores.

So anyway, each of these Immortals has different ways of influencing and interacting with their citizens once created.

Death Knights for example will bind the souls of everyone they kill to themselves. This gives them that individual's soul they can transplant into these otherwise mindless skeletons which then grant them mental stats equal to the soul's mental stats as well as their skills and ability to learn skills. So Death Knight's predicted playstyle is to ultimately kill all of their own subjects and transplant them all undead skeletons, but unlike standard ones, these will actually have skills and intelligence so they will be more useful and it won't harm the settlement's ability to produce anything from lack of skills for instance. If these skeleton bodies are destroyed, the death knight can just pop that soul into another skeleton.

Mummy Lords are a different animal altogether. Once created, the mummification process becomes something you can essentially queue up to do to other individuals (subjects) after they die. They each require a sarcophagus to be bound to. Mummies keep their stats that they had in life as well as their skills, however, they can no longer gain stats or skills, they're basically "fixed" the way they are. So the predicted playstyle here is to only use this process on your truly valuable citizens that have good stats and skills to preserve them. Got a blacksmith that has mastered the forge over a long lifetime and become legendary? No problem, mummify him and keep him working for you. Mummies will respawn in their sarcophagi one season later when destroyed (the immortals themselves reconstitute themselves after a single day). So unless somehow your crypts get broken into and destroyed, you'll be able to keep these guys running more or less indefinitely.

Master Vampires need blood from the living or else they'll go into a catatonic state until they are fed blood by someone else. Predicted playstyle here is the master vampire will turn it's most valuable citizens into vampires to keep these undying servants around forever (presumably). It's worth noting that in this world, vampires cannot create other vampires, they can only create Ghouls which are another type of undead, only a master vampire can create more vampires. Ghouls aren't intelligent, but they can learn combat-oriented skills and their physical stats can improve through use. We expect players to only change their favorite and/or most valuable citizens into vampires, use ghouls as their primary military, and then maintain a large enough human population for feeding.

The Lich is the problem. I'm having trouble thinking of a way to implement their personal control and mastery of undead within the game. I would like for them to be sort of "swarm" focused immortal that only makes basic skeletons but somehow produces more of them than anyone else. I haven't thought of a reasonable way to accomplish this though and there a secondary flaw to this design which is it would make a completely undead populace not be viable because as skeletons are mindless and can't raise skills, the lich would always take longer and be less efficient in literally everything. I suppose if you just had 5 times as many mindless servants doing the same jobs as skilled workers you could sort of make that work for a lot of jobs but for things that rely heavily on skill like high quality armor and so on, it would never happen putting them at another disadvantage without high quality weapons and armor (and anything else). So it seems unreasonable for the lich to be doing all the skilled labor themselves and also seems a little unreasonable for a lich to have a mostly human population serving them. So i'm open to suggestions if anyone can think up a better way to handle the lich and their specialty undead.

The best solution I have come up with so far is to stick with the swarm/massing mentality but giving their skeletons intelligence so they can learn skills. But when they are destroyed, there is no soul transfer like with a death knight and no reconstitution of a body like with the mummies, so any replacement skeletons would have to learn those skills again. I'm really leaning towards this but i'm wondering if anyone has any better ideas/thoughts/suggestions. The only issue I have with this model is the death knight would essentially always be superior to the lich which I don't really want. They don't have to be exactly perfectly balanced against each other, but they do need to feel unique and different and this method just feels like a weaker version of what the DK has going on.

Also open to any suggestions for other types of powerful undead "lords" that a leader of a settlement might want to ascend to one day.

[JellyPooga]

The Lich is, of all these archetypal undead villains, the "loner"; he's the scholar, the recluse, the one that abandoned life for an eternity of study and ever increasing personal power. Giving him a "nation" seems counter-intuitive to this, somewhat; he doesn't want a bunch of other sentients around bugging him. What he wants is some mindless servants that can get the day-to-day drudgery done for him, so he can focus on his research/plans for world domination.

So to that end, I say give all the power to the Lich himself. His mindless skeleton servants are just that; mindless, basic and relative to the others, pretty useless. On the flipside, the Lich has more of them and more personal power. He can also, as a result of this, create more poweful artefacts, including being able to bind souls into objects (that is the Lich's "path to power" after all), which transfers the "skills" from the people to the place or the gear itself.

- The smith working it may be a mindless skeleton, but if the forge is bound with the souls of thirteen master blacksmiths, what kind of weapons might that mindless slave produce?
- The "champion" may not have the skills, but if his weapons and armour are infused with the souls of the nations greatest warriors, what deeds of arms is he capable of?

This would give the Lich a very defensive play-style; he doesn't want to lose his awesome soul-infused gear by sending it out for foes to capture. It also makes him a juicy target for others to go dungeon delving raiding to try and capture his magical artefacts, which in turn provides the Lich with a steady income of powerful souls (that he otherwise lacks due to his weaker "living" economy) to bind into his ever more powerful suite of badass magic items and places of power.

[90sMusic]

I agree a lich is usually a loner and doesnt make much sense for a lich to have a settlement of people following him, but that is the nature of the game and the core premise. But you don't begin as a lich, your settlement is a small group of humans that you eventually expand and develop into a thriving town or community and through specific choices you can end up with a lich. So it's just a process that develops over time and eventually finally happens as a reward for their faith in the god of death.

From there, a lot of things kind of fall off because there isn't much more development that can take place. The undead don't have needs to satisfy so you don't need places for them to sleep, food to eat, water to drink, any sources of happiness, etc. They also won't be raising any skills or ability scores. So all progress actually kind of goes backwards once the blessing occurs and you get a lich because you can downsize your entire city full of a multitude of industries down to basically a tireless war machine of nothing but creating weapons and soldiers because nothing else has any value at that point.

Gameplay would then focus entirely on progressing that character. It is possible to take some of your forces and go into other territories for various reasons, I suppose gameplay at that point for a lich would revolve around either directly going out with an army searching for powerful magical relics and spells or creating powerful lieutenants to lead those armies. In the base game, before all this religious stuff is considered, it is possible to send your player character out to do the same, or any of his children. One of the neat little options you have available is to create a bastard and train him up and use him as a good commander of your forces because he inherits all of your character's positive traits but you don't have to worry about the consequences of losing an heir.

Perhaps the lich should have an ability to directly control one of his skeletons, like a form of possession, and lead them off to do something. While possessing it, it would have greater stats and the lich's skills. That might work, so you could send raiding parties out into the world seeking the things you want.

Another "Immortal" type is going to be ghost themed but it hasn't been too fleshed out yet. Basic idea is haunted city, haunted fortress, ghost ship, that sort of thing. But still a lot of decisions to be made there.