ToA DM question: when to use undead?

[wilhelmdubdub]

When are you DM's planning to use undead humanoids and dinosaus? I bought beasts of the jungle rot and was wondering if I should use them sparingly. Players are level 5's. I was thinking of using them as a way to counter rest spamming by having the monsters the party kills rise as undead if they short rest too often. Should they be used for random encounters when traveling at night? I was trying to think of immersive choices for encounters, including having warm blooded creatures attack during the day as they would be more active. Any other ideas for how to pick random encounters that make sense?

[jiriku]

I was thinking of using them as a way to counter rest spamming by having the monsters the party kills rise as undead if they short rest too often.

I would discourage this sort of thinking. Players rest when the environment around their characters seems safe. If you punish frequent resting with undead, you're teaching them not to trust your descriptions of the environment -- even if you describe an area as safe, they have to break the 4th wall and guess "does the DM think we've been resting too often?" Plus, intelligent players will just start mutilating or burning the corpses of their enemies, forcing you to resort to increasingly contrived ways of reanimating fallen foes.

If you don't want characters to rest often, just make it clear that the area isn't safe.

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The best place to use undead is wherever it makes sense in your world.

Fill your game world with shunned barrows of ancient kings, lairs of fearsome necromancers, and tombs of powerful villains who publicly swore they would return after death to torment the living. Taint the natural world with rotten swamps teeming with negative energy and corruption and mysterious planetary conjunctions that call the dead from their graves. Add bizarre nations ruled by necromancer-kings where the dead belong to the king by law and are used as a national labor force and a standing (shuffling?) army, or wilderness frontiers ruled by necromancer-dracoliches who demand that tribute from villages in their territory be paid in the corpses of the newly dead (or the freshly sacrificed bodies of traveling adventurers, if not enough local corpses can be found).

The undead bring the spiritual, the fantastical and the amazing into the game world. They confront the characters with questions about death, the afterlife, and the natural order of the world. And they make damn good villains.