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Vahnavoi
2023-03-14, 06:49 AM
Split off from the OGL discussion thread.

I'll note we could as well be talking about orcs, goblins, elves, robots, space aliens, or any other widely abused device of fiction. Details of the discussed cases would change, the general principles would not.

So, in the other thread, a point was made: that it's possible to ask questions of the type "what makes killing undead better than killing humans?", without ever really providing answers for such questions. Another way to put that is that any such question can be answered with another, (such as "what would ever justify killing anyone?"), which in turn can be answered by yet another ("Why do we need to justify anything?"), so on and so forth, untill you hit an infinite regression and it becomes clear no-one was really interested in the answers.

So, of course, a bunch of people jumped in to give answers anyway.

What's wrong with that?

Bluntly, it's because the answer to the title question "whatever arbitrary thing an author of a given work wants", with no promise given anywhere that these will be coherent across works. As a result, answers given to questions of the type "what makes killing undead better than killing humans?" only make sense when limited to specific works, or at least specific tradition of interpretation. Trying to answer them in general is a fool's game, because there are no universal binding rules for what the undead are.

But, people clearly want to talk about what the undead are. So let's dig into this.

The root idea for an undead is, of course, a dead person. Somebody died. Their body's on the floor. To understand how we get from there to the wide array of fictional undead, we have to understand different layers and methods of representation.

The ground floor is the thing itself, in this case, a dead body. If you want to talk about dead bodies, you'd just find one and call your friends to see it. But sometimes you can't do that or it isn't sufficient for the message you're trying to tell, so you move to another floor.

The first floor is documentary realism - for example, a photograph or photorealistic drawing of a dead body. The goal is to, accurately, in detail, show a dead body as one would be, without undue romance or abstraction. Maybe you can't reach perfection, but you can reach a good enough illusion of a dead body as it would be, so someone else can learn or experience what a dead body is even in absence of the real dead body.

The second floor is propagandist realism - for example, a public service announcement with image of a dead body, asking you whether you want to end up like that? The tools used are the same as in documentary realism, but there is an additional part, a part equally or more important to just showing the thing: a message of values, a story attached to the thing.

The third floor is allegory - for example, rather than showing a dead body, you show someone who is in deep sleep, or turned to stone, but from context, it's clear these are stand-ins for a dead body. For some reason, you were unable to produce a representation of a body as it would be, so you had to get clever and make a symbolic representation of the thing.

It is here where the madness starts - because, once you understand that other things can be used as a stand-in for a dead body, you can also understand that a dead body can be used as a stand-in for other things. If there's a scene of a man next to a dead body placing logs in a fire, that body can be symbolic of his abandoned childhood dreams, and the logs can be symbolic of the actual bodies of the people he's murdered.

But the floors don't stop there. Fourth floor is speculative or counterfactual realism. There is no dead body, but you're trying hard to think what one would be like, if there was.

Fifth floor is aesthetic experience. Here, you're no longer trying to represent things that are or could be. You are portraying a dead body because of how it makes you feel, or portraying earlier allegories of dead bodies because of how they make you feel, etc.. Never stop the madness.

Genre fiction tends to live at third floor or up. Pure fourth-floor takes are the rarest: not many hard sci-fi takes on how to keep a dead person going, without any moralizing or shock factor involved. Most, at least, mix in second floor ideas. Fantasy trends towards living on the roof of fifth floor - including undead because they looked cool, or because they were in past works and make people nostalgic, or because someone discovered they have a fetish for unhealthy skin tones. In the process, whatever past meaning was there is obscured or lost.

So now that the groundwork is laid: what's your favorite take on the undead? How do you use them in your own games?

Satinavian
2023-03-14, 07:25 AM
I don't think it is a good idea to focus that much on the corpse when the probably most common type of undead in folklore is the ghost (and variations) which is basically everything relevant from the deceased person except for the body.

KorvinStarmast
2023-03-14, 07:31 AM
Bluntly, it's because the answer to the title question "whatever arbitrary thing an author of a given work wants", with no promise given anywhere that these will be coherent across works. As a result, answers given to questions of the type "what makes killing undead better than killing humans?" only make sense when limited to specific works, or at least specific tradition of interpretation. Trying to answer them in general is a fool's game, because there are no universal binding rules for what the undead are. Correct.

Does Weekend At Bernie's count within in the Undead genre?


What's your favorite take on the undead? How do you use them in your own games?
1. Monsters in tombs, old ruins, graveyards, protecting or guarding something up to and including Mummy Lords and dead kings/queens.
2. Ghosts haunting a place.
3. Banshees. Similar to ghosts, with a twist.

Aside:
As long as I've been RPG gaming, I have never liked the lich as presented in D&D. It's iconic, I know, but it never resonated with me. (I did use a Mind Flayer lich to test a party last year. Among other things, he disintegrated the dwarf but they defeated it).

As the editions have gone along, the "how do you find my cleverly hidden phylactery" sub game/meta game borders on annoying unless the players like a puzzle/mystery style game, or, the players invest heavily in divination magic.

4. Vampires. When played well, these are masterminds whose evil is usually cloaked in something. They should be adventure BBEG's, in my opinion. In any given area, there should only be one, maybe two (a mate) but how many vampire spawn are associated with a given vampire is variable. Vampires are, if nothing else, egotistical and megalomaniacal. They don't put up with competition/rivals.

False God
2023-03-14, 08:18 AM
I generally dislike the undead as a matter of fiction. I find them boring and easily replaceable with what could be "more interesting" threats, bugs for example have much of the same threat rating of low level undead, but come in a much more interesting assortment and do not necessarily need to be bent on exterminating the living.

When I do run them, there are two types:
Unthinking: any sort of undead which does not have conscious thought. These are the "ok to kill" types, comparable to rabid animals. They are dangerous and destructive and have no ability (on their own*) to fix that. These are your typical "low level" zombies, skeletons, ghosts and such. I generally portray these as "the bodies of the dead, reanimated with dark magic against their will".
*Some game systems might give players the power to fix these beings at high levels, but that doesn't necessarily make that answer "better".

Thinking: any sort of undead that has conscious thought. While often more dangerous and destructive than the unthinking undead, they have the ability to think about their actions just like anyone else. They can love and hate and grieve and feel right up there with anyone else. I usually portray their status as affecting their line of thought, but never to the point of inability to think(this approach of external energies affecting the way people think is common in my games and not limited to the undead). Killing them is comparable to killing any living being.

Generally speaking, I run low-violence campaigns more focused around exploration, social interaction and so on. So I don't train my players to kill in order to advance their characters, whatever resolves the situation in question is exactly as acceptable to me as anything else. I do try to prod my players to give some thought to every situation they find themselves in and especially ones where they might be asked to kill.

animorte
2023-03-14, 08:43 AM
The Undead - What do they stand for?
In my experience? Brains, usually. :smallsmile:

Rynjin
2023-03-14, 09:01 AM
In my experience? Brains, usually. :smallsmile:

Darn you, the only contribution I wanted to make to this thread was just to say "Braaaaaaiiiiinssss" and you've ruined it!

Now I have to address the actual OP, and honestly the best thing I can say is "it's not that deep, bro". Yes, there are different cultural things the undead represent yadda yadda boring. The point of them existing in the game is just to be another thing to kill, but with a spooky horror bent because they can also turn you into one of them.

Satinavian
2023-03-14, 09:29 AM
In my experience? Brains, usually. :smallsmile:
Where does this even come from ? I am not aware of folklore where undead are particularly after brains. Is this from some zombie film and has become a meme later ?

stoutstien
2023-03-14, 09:35 AM
In my head canon undead are only possible for those who have been forgotten. They stand for both the fear of being forgotten and the guilt for forgetting others.

Revalants are reanimated but not technically undead.

MoiMagnus
2023-03-14, 10:06 AM
Where does this even come from ? I am not aware of folklore where undead are particularly after brains. Is this from some zombie film and has become a meme later ?

According to this article (https://gizmodo.com/why-is-it-that-zombies-eat-brains-1669204056), while it originated in a film (Return of the Living Dead, 1985), it is a Simpson episode from 1992 that popularised this trope.

Mastikator
2023-03-14, 10:06 AM
The undead are for the most part a product of something Evil™ that has happened.


A revenant comes back to exact vengeance on someone who has done them wrong, something evil has been done to the revenant.
A zombie rises either because of some unnatural and dangerous medical experiment has gone awry, or black magic has been used to rise them, or forbidden magic has had some side effect.
A poltergeist is the sum of many very bad experiences that resulted from abuse and cruelty, an undead spirit that reflects the evil acts of people.
A lich performs evil acts (often murder) to remove their own soul from their body and into a phylactery/horcrux.
A skeleton pirate is the result of a pirate stealing cursed gold.
A white walker is the revenge of the genocide of the children of the woods.
A death knight is a righteous warrior who forsook his oath and turned to evil, or was cursed by something evil


The undead are not necessarily evil, but their existence necessitates evil. The undead represents the evil of man. That's what they stand for.

Vahnavoi
2023-03-14, 10:08 AM
I don't think it is a good idea to focus that much on the corpse when the probably most common type of undead in folklore is the ghost (and variations) which is basically everything relevant from the deceased person except for the body.

The ground floor concept for a ghost is still a dead body; the concept of a ghost comes from looking at dead matter that used to be a person and wondering "where did the things that made this matter into a person go?" There's a book by Pascal Boyer that explains why this concept of a bodiless person is particularly memorable.

The complementary invention, is a personless body, from which we get both ordinary and philosophical zombies.

This split sometimes seen in games, such as in D&D, which has both mindless corporeal undead and incorporeal undead almost solely defined by their mental state.

I actually favor incorporeal undead these days, but quite often how I start a game or a story starring them, is by them observing their own corpses, which then segues into questions such as "if you're not the lump of matter on the floor, then what are you?" and "if it's not the destruction of your body that is final death, what is?" Indeed, I've used ghost stories as a vehicle to deconstruct the notion that there is a "you" that can survive physical death; I'd call it ironic, but it's par for the course for several philosophical traditions.

For the record, lot of the same explorarion could be done with vampires or other corporeal undead, paying special attention to how physical "immortality" does not preserve anything of the non-physical person. Once operating at third floor or above, distinctions between corporeal and incorporeal undead matter even less. (World of Darkness games, supposedly, do a lot of this, but I don't play them, so I wouldn't know.)

Willie the Duck
2023-03-14, 10:21 AM
But the floors don't stop there. Fourth floor is speculative or counterfactual realism. There is no dead body, but you're trying hard to think what one would be like, if there was.
IMO, good example of this might be alcoves in a funerary structure where a body is supposed to be, but isn't; someone walking on a widow's walk; or maybe the old Hemingway story in six words ("For Sale: baby shoes, never worn").

Genre fiction tends to live at third floor or up. Pure fourth-floor takes are the rarest: not many hard sci-fi takes on how to keep a dead person going, without any moralizing or shock factor involved.
Would someone's influence reaching past the grave count, or would those be second/third-floor? Some super-genius/five-dimensional-chess-player reaching out into the future to control things, with the protagonists still feeling the influence of the person well past them being corporeally there? If so, C. J. Cherryh's Cyteen might be a good example there -- Ariane Emory is so dead set on running things, she arranges to have a clone of herself raised as close to the same as she was as possible such that 'she' can run things in the next generation -- and her clone Ari and everyone else still feeling under her thumb throughout the novel.

Fantasy trends towards living on the roof of fifth floor - including undead because they looked cool, or because they were in past works and make people nostalgic, or because someone discovered they have a fetish for unhealthy skin tones. In the process, whatever past meaning was there is obscured or lost.
This seems a little too jaded towards the genre for my tastes. There is plenty of formulaic or schlocky fantasy literature, but the good stuff today is still good. These can include floors 1-3 dead for rather straightforward reasons -- the dead are something we all have an innate relation to/emotional resonance surrounding. If your story requires scary threats but isn't about the specific nuances thereof, using undead keeps the focus on the narrative upon which one might be seeking to focus (or, yes, just mean you don't have to establish the lore for a new beastie and develop the emotional resonance, etc.).


So now that the groundwork is laid: what's your favorite take on the undead? How do you use them in your own games?
Oftentimes they, like demons, are simply the designated villains you don't have to establish as innately evil. Why are they innately evil? DM fiat. Does it make sense for the intelligent ones with apparent agency? No, but that's the conceit with which we're working. Mind you, I tend to do worldbuilding enough to have enemies who are evil for actual reasons (things they have done) as well as antagonists who aren't evil (just competition), and so forth. Thus, I don't usually need designated evil. However, every once in a while you just want an ancient abandoned crypt to open up and spill forth a bunch of cartoon villains who are going to kill innocents and twirl their mustaches and the PCs know they don't have to try to negotiate or attempt to redeem anyone or so on.

Sometimes I'll also include a vampire/mummy/lich as an intelligent mastermind villain who does have complex motivation, but in general then their undead status is an afterthought/subservient to their primary motivations (they are trying to bring forth the ancient death-demon QWERTY ASDFG, who will make them a king under the new order, oh and they happen to be undead).


I don't think it is a good idea to focus that much on the corpse when the probably most common type of undead in folklore is the ghost (and variations) which is basically everything relevant from the deceased person except for the body.
Also ghouls which (depending on the lore) never were a living person but instead just seem to be a scavenger of the dead which is undead simply by association. As OP points out, little consistency.


Does Weekend At Bernie's count within in the Undead genre?
IIRC, the first one would be just the Dead genre, with undeath (or flesh golemhood, which honestly is only not-undead in D&D for legacy reasons) only showing up in the sequel (or is that your point?).


As long as I've been RPG gaming, I have never liked the lich as presented in D&D. It's iconic, I know, but it never resonated with me. (I did use a Mind Flayer lich to test a party last year. Among other things, he disintegrated the dwarf but they defeated it).

As the editions have gone along, the "how do you find my cleverly hidden phylactery" sub game/meta game borders on annoying unless the players like a puzzle/mystery style game, or, the players invest heavily in divination magic.
This is one of those 'can only be resolved by...' instances that work well only with good DMs and good group-dynamics. Otherwise it can easily devolve into arguments over what is reasonable. Doubly so if PCs ever try to become these beings themselves (the DM is going to innately know where the phylactery, and can decide if the PC's enemies can, but how reasonable is it, etc.?). Same with vampires (who at least most PCs don't want to be, except in all-underdark campaigns) -- smart vampires will have coffins accessible only by gaseous form (with traps for PCs who use spell of same name to access them) and be relatively untouchable (and how fun is that?).


4. Vampires. When played well, these are masterminds whose evil is usually cloaked in something. They should be adventure BBEG's, in my opinion. In any given area, there should only be one, maybe two (a mate) but how many vampire spawn are associated with a given vampire is variable. Vampires are, if nothing else, egotistical and megalomaniacal. They don't put up with competition/rivals.
Like you with liches, I don't really like the D&D implementation of vampires. Too many powers that they all have. I'd rather they be more build-a-bear style with this one having charm and dangerous natural attack, and the other one having animal forms and flight, etc. As masterminds, they work, but again this is the spot where I never really had trouble with an NPC wizard (or even just a really smart leader with no notable powers of their own) in the same role.

PhoenixPhyre
2023-03-14, 10:29 AM
My personal setting (D&D) canon is that undead are one of three major types:

1. Those animated by jotnar, which are effectively entropy-spirits from beyond reality. These malignant (from the perspective of everything in the setting, really) entities leak in from beyond and, under certain conditions, infect living things, animate dead bodies (the easiest option), or wear spiritual entities as metaphysical skin suits. In all these cases (with three exceptions, discussed below), the result is a destroyed soul and a puppet "body". If the creature was living at infection time, they become one of the higher classes of undead. If the creature was not living at the time of possession, they become one of the lesser undead types.

Jotnar infection is BAD for everything around it. Jotnar effectively consume the stuff-of-existence (aether) of everything around them just by existing, like tiny hungry black holes. An undead infestation in an area will gradually (depending on numbers and types) turn the area sterile, unable to support life of any kind (starting with fertility of plants and animals and eventually breaking down the very rocks themselves into a featureless sand...and then into nothingness). It also thins the veil between the parts of reality, making it easier for other jotnar (and jotnar-associated entities such as demons) to slip through.

The exceptions are
a) by highly specialized and nasty rituals, one can pull a bait and switch on the jotnar, giving it access to your body while keeping your soul safe somewhere else (in a phylactery). This produces a lich. And as long as you feed the jotnar other living souls to keep it mostly sated (jotnar can never be entirely sated), you can balance that way for an indefinite period, drawing off the residual energy to power yourself and your magics.
b) a lesser version of this produces vampires, although vampires are cursed to degenerate into mindless hunger eventually as the jotnar gnaws at the (protected) soul.
c) under certain circumstances (mostly a strong will), the being can trap the jotnar inside themselves and protect their soul from it after death. These become demons who must feed on other souls to keep the jotnar from consuming their souls. They can only exist naturally in the Abyss, being too abhorrent for nature to bear.

2. Those animated by some extremely strong cause. Usually this involves a major ritual of self-sacrifice where one binds their own soul into their decaying flesh until <purpose> is fulfilled. This is unstable. Here, even the "lesser" undead retain some semblance of consciousness and self-will. They don't have quite the same effect on the metaphysical world, although they do naturally consume aether to maintain their existence.

3. Those animated as puppets by some other force (such as powerful, generally evil fey). These aren't true undead--they don't have the nasty metaphysical effects at all, since the animating force is purely external. As soon as the strings are cut, they collapse.

Type 1 undead are hostis humani generis--kill on sight by just about everyone including "evil" nations. As are those who create type 1 undead. Sometimes liches and vampires can escape if they've found some other power source (other than souls), but this is rare. Note that evil and good doesn't come into it--they're dangerous to everything around them by their very nature. Kinda the combination of a walking, infectious, malignant nuclear waste dump combined with plague factory.

Type 2 undead are extremely rare and tend to be bound to a single place or purpose. As such, most people don't know they exist.

Type 3 undead are also quite rare and generally tend to be being used for some macabre farce. Which might involve attacking people, in which case they're justified kills. Most people confuse them for type 1 undead unless they're smart/educated enough to see the (lack of) side effects.

Ionathus
2023-03-14, 11:06 AM
Every adult human is familiar with death, and has a biological aversion to rotting/decayed human bodies, so the idea of "hey what if a rotting body stood up and attacked you?" has instant appeal as a horror trope across the board.

After that, it's all a matter of personal preference and the story you want to tell. Are they mindless ravenous beasts, just wearing a supernatural horror hat? Are they thinking, feeling people cursed with compulsions (drinking blood, Doing Evil) that they choose to resist or embrace? I think D&D is somewhat unique for wanting to have both -- you've got free-willed undead and mindless undead in the same setting, and they don't do a lot of work to distinguish beyond "yeah if you come back as ABC you're basically just a walking corpse but if you come back as XYZ you're still you but with some fun roleplay constraints."

I think D&D has also drawn a much clearer line between "undead" and "demons" than in ages past -- a lot of old stuff blurs the lines and has the "animating spirit" behind an undead frequently be some sort of supernatural evil from, say, The Nine Hells. The Castlevania Netflix series also does this with its "Night Creatures" - they're corpses, but animated and mutated by either demons or souls condemned to hell.

Most of them are ravenous unthinking monsters that blindly obey their creator's commands...but at least some of them are capable of thought and reasoning, and Isaac has long philosophy conversations with one of them.

animorte
2023-03-14, 11:33 AM
Darn you, the only contribution I wanted to make to this thread was just to say "Braaaaaaiiiiinssss" and you've ruined it!
:smallbiggrin: You're welcome!

Some 12 years ago a few friends and myself did a 5k zombie March, in which everyone gathered to get their faces painted and we all traveled through the city with the chant:

Leader: "What do we want?"
Zombies: "BRAINS!"
Leader: "When do we want 'em?"
Zombies: "BRAAAAIIINS!"


According to this article (https://gizmodo.com/why-is-it-that-zombies-eat-brains-1669204056), while it originated in a film (Return of the Living Dead, 1985), it is a Simpson episode from 1992 that popularised this trope.
Thanks for answering that for me, as I wasn't entirely sure either.

I quite like that "undead" covers plenty of more specific creature types.


In Land of the Dead (2005), the zombies start learning to use equipment (like guns) and figure out they don't need to breathe, so islands aren't safe anymore.

Vahnavoi
2023-03-14, 11:53 AM
Would someone's influence reaching past the grave count, or would those be second/third-floor?

Can go either way, depending on how said influence is portrayed. The chief speculative element in the story you mention sounds to be human clones. Other classic speculative elements in that direction ("Could we copy or recreate a dead person?") are robot doubles and mind uploads, often being sci-fi equivalents to corporeal and incorporeal undead.

Willie the Duck
2023-03-14, 12:43 PM
Can go either way, depending on how said influence is portrayed. The chief speculative element in the story you mention sounds to be human clones. Other classic speculative elements in that direction ("Could we copy or recreate a dead person?") are robot doubles and mind uploads, often being sci-fi equivalents to corporeal and incorporeal undead.

Okay, makes sense. However, the part I'd hoped to emphasize was the reach of the dead person after they had died. In the story in question, the clone effectively forges her own identity(in the end circumventing the quasi-resurrection), but the dead original's presence can be felt throughout the novel. What she predicted, the things she set in place, the people who still professed loyalty to her -- she may have been dead, but she was an active threat to everyone and needed to be dealt with very much like a living mastermind (except that you couldn't kill her or negotiate with her or the like, only spoil her plans). I was just wondering what you felt level that kind of dead character would inhabit.

Vahnavoi
2023-03-14, 01:24 PM
It's hard question to answer, because I think I've seen this done at every floor, I'm just struggling to name good examples. For the fourth floor especially, it's almost easier to think how to craft one. To give an idea, if you wanted to make a hard spe-fi game with that concept, you could start by asking the question "how could a person abuse existing bureaucratic systems to effectively haunt another well past point of their death?" and then turn that into a puzzle. At least two variants come to mind, one where players know from the get-go that they're casing a paper ghost (and the puzzle is mainly about shaking off their influence) and another where the players don't even know their tormentor is dead (and figuring that out is part of the solution).

Phhase
2023-03-14, 02:24 PM
Hmm. I think in my takes, they're mostly the result of others grasping at power through every available avenue. Vengeance of the bottom-feeders, with a shade of hubris, maybe?

Just to Browse
2023-03-14, 02:59 PM
I like Willie's take on undead on how fantasy tends to use undead & how they like to use undead.

I would say that these analytical floors are delving a little too deep into the "why", because fantasy games don't always preoccupy themselves with providing a consistent answer. In D&D, something as narrow as "the spirit of a dead person" can be used in one adventure as an NPC that the players help in one instance, a set piece in another instance, and a story-less combat encounter in another instance. The game can freely shift between the various analytical floors depending on the type of undead creature and the type of story being told. I can't give you a favorite take on undead or a prescriptive use of them, because there are many divergent uses of undead-ness that serve many overlapping uses.

IMO undead-ness is best viewed as a tool in a GM's / designer's toolkit. Undeath is valuable for storytelling, for making throwaway enemies, for describing a spooky aesthetic, for asspulled supervillain powers, for reflections on mortality, and much more.

Jay R
2023-03-14, 03:00 PM
No, insects cannot replace the undead, unless you only have undead in our story to create an encounter of a certain CR. But that's not true. Stories and legends of the undead pre-date role-playing games. They were included in the original three-pamphlet D&D because they are part of the stories that inspired that game.

Since many of the ideas of undead come from real-world culture, religion, and spiritual beliefs, we cannot discuss the actual answers in this forum.

Any answer we give that is not hundreds or thousands of years old is retro-documentation -- not the reason that they are included in our games, but some modern notion that was built out of the fact that the undead are already in our games.

The real answer is this: they are in our games to "stand for" the idea of the undead that exists in some fantasy stories.

Millstone85
2023-03-14, 03:44 PM
I think D&D has also drawn a much clearer line between "undead" and "demons" than in ages past -- a lot of old stuff blurs the lines and has the "animating spirit" behind an undead frequently be some sort of supernatural evil from, say, The Nine Hells.Not that much clearer, in my opinion. Undead are animated by "negative energy" from a place that is closer to the elemental planes than to the heavens and hells (or is its own separate thing, as of 5e) but you still end up with descriptions where that energy hates the living.

NichG
2023-03-14, 04:10 PM
So now that the groundwork is laid: what's your favorite take on the undead? How do you use them in your own games?

From an authorial stance, I use them as a standing for transhumanist potential along with the various complexities associated with both achieving it, and doing it in a way that is satisfactory. So for example the solo peaceful undead of a type who is normally hostile ends up being a way to explore compatibility between way of being and way of thinking - that one managed to have a psychology or philosophy that did not come into conflict with the realities of their new form of existence, even if that psychology or philosophy is so rare and alien to most people that in general them becoming that type of undead would be a mistake. It's also good for pushing a 'traditions/ignorance/squick holds us back' message and allowing that to also be complexified in that you can dig down into the squick and interrogate 'what aspects of living are really essential to you, versus what aspects of living do you just believe to be essential?'

The prize of doing undeath right is immortality, which is a traditional transcendent and impossible to realize goal - the same mythic space as the pursuit of alchemy to attain immortality, or the pursuit of tasks with a reward of being raised to divinity in Greek myth, or afterlives only for the worthy (but often very specific forms of afterlife existence that would be squick if you didn't buy into the whole set of values), etc, etc. So it fits nicely in all of that for me as author.

Now from the perspective of (my) players? Please throw all of that out and ask your own questions and make your own meaning. The interesting stuff isn't in what I'm telling you something means, even if I do have something I'm getting at. It's the process of asking yourself uneasy questions and what the practice of navigating those questions does to your mental capacities in general. Getting the right answer isn't the valuable thing; being familiar with how to move and think in the mental space is. So I'd much rather players go down their own path of 'what justifies killing anyone?' sorts of recursive questions until they find the cycle that actually feels satisfying to them, than that they receive the message I'm transmitting.

gbaji
2023-03-14, 05:46 PM
I don't think it is a good idea to focus that much on the corpse when the probably most common type of undead in folklore is the ghost (and variations) which is basically everything relevant from the deceased person except for the body.

Depends heavily on the game system you are using though. Some would consider ghosts as "spirits", not undead. Spirits are the souls of the dead, and everyone ends up as one at some point (it's a natural part of "death"). If the spirit does not move on as it should, and remains "haunting" some area (either due to some trauma, or some evil magic holding it there), then it's still a spirit, but it's haunting the area and needs help to move on.

Undead, on the other hand, are specific to physical bodies that are being kept animated and "alive"(ish). The whole point of the word "undead" is that these are things that should be "dead", but are not. Ghosts and the like can't be "undead", because they are just as "dead" as the souls who moved on. They're just "stuck". Actual undead should refer only to the parts of us that die (our bodies).

Again. Game system and/or cosmology within that game system dependent, of course. I find that making that distinction makes things much easier/clearer. But, of course, many games do things very differently.


From an authorial stance, I use them as a standing for transhumanist potential along with the various complexities associated with both achieving it, and doing it in a way that is satisfactory. So for example the solo peaceful undead of a type who is normally hostile ends up being a way to explore compatibility between way of being and way of thinking - that one managed to have a psychology or philosophy that did not come into conflict with the realities of their new form of existence, even if that psychology or philosophy is so rare and alien to most people that in general them becoming that type of undead would be a mistake. It's also good for pushing a 'traditions/ignorance/squick holds us back' message and allowing that to also be complexified in that you can dig down into the squick and interrogate 'what aspects of living are really essential to you, versus what aspects of living do you just believe to be essential?'

The prize of doing undeath right is immortality, which is a traditional transcendent and impossible to realize goal - the same mythic space as the pursuit of alchemy to attain immortality, or the pursuit of tasks with a reward of being raised to divinity in Greek myth, or afterlives only for the worthy (but often very specific forms of afterlife existence that would be squick if you didn't buy into the whole set of values), etc, etc. So it fits nicely in all of that for me as author.

Now from the perspective of (my) players? Please throw all of that out and ask your own questions and make your own meaning. The interesting stuff isn't in what I'm telling you something means, even if I do have something I'm getting at. It's the process of asking yourself uneasy questions and what the practice of navigating those questions does to your mental capacities in general. Getting the right answer isn't the valuable thing; being familiar with how to move and think in the mental space is. So I'd much rather players go down their own path of 'what justifies killing anyone?' sorts of recursive questions until they find the cycle that actually feels satisfying to them, than that they receive the message I'm transmitting.

Yeah. From a game mechanics perspective, it's just about "how does one end up this way", possibly followed up with "why would one choose to end up this way". And we can look at the classic forms of undead to noodle some of this out. One might choose or even desire to become a vampire (depending on how they are depicted), so that may require secret blood rites, initiation into the "family", etc, to achieve. Assuming most people don't want to end up as Zombies (and other "lesser undead"), we might assume that in this case, some necromancer enchants a dead body and gives it "unlife", to act as some sort of servant/muscle and not much more. Various different and possibly exotic undead might become so via other means, which the person who find themselves to be undead may or may not appreciate.

In the game system I play in most, we have a pretty well defined cosmology, which makes this extremely clear (and the game system actually has spells that affect spirits and undead differently, so the distinction actually does matter a lot). What is called a "spirit" or "soul" is made up of the two non-physical stats: Power and Intelligence. When people die, their souls travel through the underworld and then enter hell. There, they pass through a gateway, where some part of their soul is stripped away (the parts that form emotional attachments, or Power), while the parts that are knowledge and whatnot (intelligence) "move onward", finding their final resting place. On the spirit plane, the soul is "reborn" (gains a new power stat), and then moves to... wherever. Hanging with the god they worshiped, with their ancestors, whatever. This is why spirits aren't always hanging around after death with their former loved ones. They've lost the part of them that held those attachments, so they feel no need to do so. Except, of course, in extreme circumstances, when they may come back as ghosts or wraiths or whatnot (unfinished business and/or extreme duress/loss/whatever). But mostly, they move on and have no actual desire to go back.

Power is like the motive force of the soul, while Int retains the knowledge and ability to act. Power is also used magically in the game's spell system, so it has "value". It's what makes things "alive". So anything that prevents this process can result in "undeath", if the body itself dies. So all forms of undead creation in some way use some bits of the original souls power stat to reanimate the body. In the case of simple skeletons and zombies, there's still bits of the original power left lingering in hell, and these tiny bits are used via necromancy to animate the body, resulting in an unintelligent moving body that just follows instructions and not much else. Whether it's a zombie or skeleton kinds depends on how much flesh is left (how old the body is), and which enchantment is used. The advantage here is the soul is already "gone" when the undead is created, so relatively easy (and the part that "moved on" is none the wiser that its body may still be walking around, and frankly doesn't care either). Other forms of undead require rituals performed at the time of death to "trap" the original soul inside the body. This results in intelligent undead, but has some other issues. With vampires specifically, "death" doesn't like being held at bay, so they "leak", so to speak. Which is why they must consume blood of the living to keep themselves active. Other forms of "greater undead" (basically any that actually have intelligence) also have various limitations that affect them in various ways as well (liches, mummies, etc). Oh. And ghouls are actually a special case of "undead". They are actual denizens of the underworld, who mostly serve to drag any hesitant souls all the way to hell, but occasionally may find passages to the land of the living (digging tunnels under the graves perhaps?), but can only stay there for short periods and must consume living flesh to do so.

But that's my game system, and my cosmology. I've spent a lot of time working things out so they both make sense and work within the game system itself. But having done that, it's actually really easy to tell what is undead, and why it's undead, and what may motivate undead, why folks might create undead, and why folks might want to destroy undead. They are always some form of abomination that is defying the "natural order". They are rarely "good people" (but can be at least "not horribly evil people"). Most are created with a purpose, and serve that purpose. And the folks who create undead rarely do so to raise puppies and duckies or something. In the entire time playing in this game setting, I think there have been exactly two undead that haven't more or less been "evil things bent on doing evil things", and actually were "allies" (ish). Even then it was more of a "enemy of my enemy is my friend" and "well, this undead thing is managing to exist without killing tons of innocent people and otherwise causing horrific problems, and they're offering to help us destroy some other bad guys who are". So it's more of a "these things are at the bottom of the list of things we might try to destroy in the game setting" sort of thing. And they were usually pretty powerful, so not really worth the effort at the time.


Obviously, if you're playing in a game where undead are more "mainstream" (like V:tM or similar), this is all going to be very very different.

Jay R
2023-03-14, 07:36 PM
Skeletons exist in D&D, probably because Jason fought them in a well-known scene in the 1963 movie *Jason and the Argonauts*.
Zombies exist in D&D, probably because of several zombie-oriented horror films.
Wights and wraiths exist in D&D because they were included in *The Lord of the Rings* (just like orcs, hobbits, ents, and balrogs, though the latter three were quickly renamed “halflings”, “treants”, and “balors”).
Mummies exist in D&D primarily because of several mummy-oriented horror films (and possibly a Jonny Quest episode).
Vampires exist in D&D because Dracula movies were popular in the mid-20th century.

EC Comics of the 1950s was also probably a major influence on several of them.

These things exist in D&D because they exist in the fantasy & horror genres. There’s no point looking beyond the known sources for D&D inspiration.


So now that the groundwork is laid: what's your favorite take on the undead? How do you use them in your own games?

My take on the undead is that they are abominations against life and nature, and generally considered sacrilege.

That's not my invention; it's the cultural background, totally independent of D&D. I think of them that way for the same reason I think of dwarves as short, bearded miners. I'm simply using the most common cultural approach.

KorvinStarmast
2023-03-14, 08:05 PM
Every adult human is familiar with death, and has a biological aversion to rotting/decayed human bodies, so the idea of "hey what if a rotting body stood up and attacked you?" has instant appeal as a horror trope across the board.
Yes, and there is a reason for that.

Stories and legends of the undead pre-date role-playing games. They were included in the original three-pamphlet D&D because they are part of the stories that inspired that game.

Since many of the ideas of undead come from real-world culture, religion, and spiritual beliefs, we cannot discuss the actual answers in this forum.

Any answer we give that is not hundreds or thousands of years old is retro-documentation -- not the reason that they are included in our games, but some modern notion that was built out of the fact that the undead are already in our games.

The real answer is this: they are in our games to "stand for" the idea of the undead that exists in some fantasy stories. Correct. Best answer so far, and certainly better than mine.

From an authorial stance, I use them as a standing for transhumanist potential along with the various complexities associated with both achieving it, and doing it in a way that is satisfactory. People matter.
Edited to remove noise.

Mechalich
2023-03-15, 12:05 AM
My take on the undead is that they are abominations against life and nature, and generally considered sacrilege.

That's not my invention; it's the cultural background, totally independent of D&D. I think of them that way for the same reason I think of dwarves as short, bearded miners. I'm simply using the most common cultural approach.

Undead are a little bit more complex to handle than dwarves, or funny-shaped animal monsters like owlbears. They require some measure of world-building specification to explain why, in any given fantastical world, these abominations against life, nature, and basically all known principles of biology, are able to occur at all, and what the implications of their occurrence might be. This is one of the areas where D&D - which does indeed have undead simple because undead are in the source material - has a problem, because it has a bizarre blank spot regarding what the existence of undead means. This tends to show up a lot when people ask questions like, 'why is animate dead evil?' and the D&D system doesn't really have a good answer. However, that's a game-specific failure and lots of other games have much better answers on the how and why of undead in their specific settings. Nor are undead unique in this. Ethically-affiliated monsters like Angels or Demons (assuming they actually are ethically-affiliated and not just funny shaped beings with a lot of magical power because reasons) likewise impose a set of cosmological questions merely by existing. The common cultural background associated with these beings offers an answer but that answer is not necessarily the answer best suited to a given campaign world. This can be quite easily illustrated by monsters that have roughly the same abilities, but vastly different cultural context and cosmological implications when transposed across cultural boundaries. Vampires are a well-known case, with the divide sufficiently strong that White-Wolf foolishly chose to create two entirely different Vampire games (VtM and Kindred of the East) set in nominally the same world to try and handle the problem.

Satinavian
2023-03-15, 09:46 AM
How i use Undead :

1. Servants of necromancers

Mostly skeletons because zombies are smelly and carry diseases. It is basically cheap labor and loyal labor. It is not much different from golems as far as story structure goes, but golems are generally treated as not cheap. There is not much evil here because those undead are not really sentient, so it doesn't count as slavery. At worst it is about where the corpses come from.

2. Search for immortality/transhumanism.

Here Undeath is a way to transform the mortal form into something more... durable and occasionally more powerful. That is not particularly surprising as not having life is a pretty good way to prevent the loss of life. Living things are changing all the time but chasing immortality is about conserving the status quo.
The methods are generally expensive and difficult, sanity is generally preserved and often both strengthening and cosmetic modifications are used. It is generally not particularly evil, but can be quite vain.

3 Assorted specific monsters

Ghosts are setting dependent : Either cursed beings beings bound by some regret or task or anchor and the story is often about how they can finally move on. Their mind is rarely intact here.
Or they are basically ancestor spirits helping their family or other spirits duty bound to fulfill a certain task even after death. Those are generally sane and not cursed, but terribly stuck in their way.

Vampires are extravagant, violent, emotional, hammy individuals. They need to feed on the living and thus can't really keep their distance. They have a whole bunch of strange powers. Most of them are quite attractive. They are unaging, timeless monsters. Generally their use in stories is extremely similar to that of the darker fey.

Gouls : Those are just cursed cannibals, not undead at all.

Jay R
2023-03-15, 10:31 AM
Undead are a little bit more complex to handle than dwarves, or funny-shaped animal monsters like owlbears. They require some measure of world-building specification to explain why, in any given fantastical world, these abominations against life, nature, and basically all known principles of biology, are able to occur at all, and what the implications of their occurrence might be.

No, they don't. In nearly 47 years of roleplaying, I have never required any "world-building specification" to explain why the sky in my world is blue, why iron is harder than gold, why diamond is more valuable than granite, why dwarves have beards, why rapiers thrust and axes slash, why mammal/bird crosses like hippogriffs, pegasi, or owlbears can exist, or why undead exist.1

1With one exception. I have done one similar experiment, described below.

Some of these are rooted in real-world science, and thus we can talk about them. Some of them are inherited from fantasy literature, and open for discussion. Undead are rooted in religious and spiritual background, and are off-limits for this forum. But all of them are equally inherited by us, and none of them require any explanation beyond that.


This is one of the areas where D&D - which does indeed have undead simple because undead are in the source material - has a problem, because it has a bizarre blank spot regarding what the existence of undead means. This tends to show up a lot when people ask questions like, 'why is animate dead evil?' and the D&D system doesn't really have a good answer.

So? D&D doesn't have a good answer why a chimera's heads are a lion, a dragon and a goat. It doesn't explain why the third level fire spell is a ball, and the 3rd level lightning spell is a bolt. It doesn't justify mammal/bird crossings like hippogriffs, pegasi, and owlbears. Why do wizard spells have to be written down in a book and sorcerer spells don't?

The answer to 'why is animate dead evil?' is either
a. because the rules say so, or
b. because it has virtually always been believed to be so, in pretty much every culture that considered the question, or
c. for specific cultural, religious, and spiritual reasons from those cultures that we are not allowed to discuss here.


However, that's a game-specific failure and lots of other games have much better answers on the how and why of undead in their specific settings. Nor are undead unique in this. Ethically-affiliated monsters like Angels or Demons (assuming they actually are ethically-affiliated and not just funny shaped beings with a lot of magical power because reasons) likewise impose a set of cosmological questions merely by existing.

That makes it seem like your issues aren't about undead, but about traditional morality — which we also can't discuss here.


The common cultural background associated with these beings offers an answer but that answer is not necessarily the answer best suited to a given campaign world.

It is the answer associated with the creation of a role-playing game in the 1970s. It really was just inherited, like so much else in D&D. If you want to invent an in-universe reason why fireballs are round and lightning bolts are long and thin, why cold is not just the absence of heat, or why animate undead is evil, feel free to create more work for yourself. But whatever your invention, it isn't the real reason; it's an after-the-fact justification.


This can be quite easily illustrated by monsters that have roughly the same abilities, but vastly different cultural context and cosmological implications when transposed across cultural boundaries. Vampires are a well-known case, with the divide sufficiently strong that White-Wolf foolishly chose to create two entirely different Vampire games (VtM and Kindred of the East) set in nominally the same world to try and handle the problem.

This leads to the obvious conclusion the the actual explanation is the cultural background that the game was invented within.

The iconic depiction of a vampire these days has a tall collar. That part of vampire lore came from a high collar made for a 1920s play, to make it easier for the actor playing Dracula to "disappear" on a dark stage just by turning around. If you want to invent some in-universe reason why vampires wear high collars, feel free, but it won't improve the game in any way, and it won't be the real reason.

[For this example, I racked my brain to come up with a bit of undead lore I would be allowed to discuss.]



Back in the mid-1970s, I was annoyed by many things in D&D I thought were unreasonable – experience levels instead of continuous development, lack of scientific progress, race limits for advancement, monsters from many different cultures, the arbitrariness of the spell lists, etc. So I tried to develop an explanation that would justify all the unreasonable aspects of the D&D – experience levels, lack of technological development past the middle ages, racial advancement limits, etc.

The world was identical to ours in all respects until 1054, when the light from the Crab Nebula supernova arrived, bringing with it raw manna - the stuff of magic. Originally, this had no effect, since nobody knew how to shape it. But all the legends of wizards and magical creatures existed, just as they did in our world.

The first effects were that slowly, things people believed in started to exist. Little kids started seeing the bogeymen of their nurses' stories - goblins, kobolds, orcs, etc. They existed because all the children believed they did (children's beliefs are stronger than adults').

This also explained inconsistent multiple pantheons. If everyone in Scandinavia believed in a storm god with a hammer, then that god existed – in Scandinavia

The presence of magic enabled new creatures to be created, out of the imaginations of the people - which is why so many of them look like medieval monsters of heraldry, legend and myth.

Imagine a world of superstitious medieval people in which people's worst nightmares could become real. It soon descended into chaos, filled with monsters from every story from every culture.

But in a few places, there were little islands of sanity. If the lord, or priest, had a strong enough will, and enough determination, and could sway the minds of their followers, then a certain degree of order persisted in their lands.

Over time, these people started to die off - but their influence remained. The essence of the great Warriors joined together into a great subconscious archetype of the Fighting Man. (Yes, that was the term in the books then.) Eventually, any Fighter who grew powerful was forced into the form of this archetype.

Similarly, the archetypes of Cleric, Wizard, Paladin, and Thief grew. As a person gained more experience, they could align themselves more fully with the archetypes, but only in certain quantum levels, which became experience levels as we know them. That explains why there were discrete experience levels of experience - why a fighter with 7,999 experience points had the same abilities as one with 4,000, but very different from one with 8,000.

Since the original Heroes were human, non-humans could not attune themselves to the archetypes past a certain point. Hence, racial limits on levels. The exception was the Thief archetype, made of those who didn't really fit into human society.

The scientific method of repeated experimentation does not work when an experimenter's (or an observer's) beliefs can change the results of the experiment, so the technological level never developed beyond the Middle Ages. By contrast, if somebody developed a way to use magic to form, say, a fireball, then everyone started to believe that a fire spell was necessarily a ball. Over time, specific arbitrary spells became standardized, because people believed that's how magic works. So it became much easier to learn the spells others were using than to develop new spells.

That's the gist of it. It was much longer and more carefully worked out, and explained everything in the rules I could find a way to fit, and I was quite proud of it. But I eventually realized that it had no purpose. It did not help any player, DM or character in any way. Any in-game explanation is meaningless unless it can improve the experience somehow.

You appear to be in the same state I was in then. I urge you to try to go ahead — come up with what you think the justifications, explanations, and implications of undead in your invented universe should be.

But recognize that that is your own doing, and your own invention. You know the real answers, and they aren’t about in-universe logic.

Rynjin
2023-03-15, 10:55 AM
I'd suggest getting out more. People matter.

You wanna clarify why you decided to just randomly insult a poster? I'm not sure if it's because you don't understand what transhumanism is or because you really were just trying to dunk on someone for no reason.

gbaji
2023-03-15, 03:12 PM
No, they don't. In nearly 47 years of roleplaying, I have never required any "world-building specification" to explain why the sky in my world is blue, why iron is harder than gold, why diamond is more valuable than granite, why dwarves have beards, why rapiers thrust and axes slash, why mammal/bird crosses like hippogriffs, pegasi, or owlbears can exist, or why undead exist.

None of those require explanation beyond the physical stats/effects they have on the game world though. And even then, most game systems do actually spend at least some time explaining where some magical creatures come from and how they come to exist. But at the end of the day, they are just creatures, like any other, just with their own physical shapes. Undead are a bit different, because you are starting with something that already exists (and is alive), and then using some magic to transform it into something else (that is neither alive, or dead, hence "undead").

Some explanation of the process and effects of this does seem somewhat reasonable.


The answer to 'why is animate dead evil?' is either
a. because the rules say so, or
b. because it has virtually always been believed to be so, in pretty much every culture that considered the question, or
c. for specific cultural, religious, and spiritual reasons from those cultures that we are not allowed to discuss here.

We don't at all need to engage in real world spiritual beliefs to discuss the basic effects of undeath, and the moral implications thereof. What happens to the person when they are turned into an undead? There's a huge difference between "body animated by magic, but the soul/spirit/whatever moves on like normal death" and "I've bound your soul into a bag, stuffed it in your mouth, sewed it up, and now you shamble around as a zombie serving my every whim, aware of every horrific thing I order you to do, and powerless do do anything about it. Muhahahaha!".

That's a little bit more than just a stat block for the "monster: Zombie", right? And from a worldbuilding/storytelling pov, it might just be useful to spend a leeetle bit of time actually thinking about how this stuff works in your game.

This sort of thing is presumably why Rich came up with his own method for what being turned into a Vampire actually means. Complete with "evil vampiric spirit created by appropriate deity, that traps and gradually absorbs the memories and knowledge of the original soul". Not only was this relevant for Rich to define in his world, but absolutelly essential to the story. Clearly, just appying the vampiric template, while sufficient to toss a generic "vampire" opponent at an adventuring party, is not sufficient to actually explain the process involved, and how that affects Durkon, and what can be done about it (heck. The implications of "you don't get an afterlife until that vampire is destroyed" is absolutely huge from a cosmological standpoint).


That makes it seem like your issues aren't about undead, but about traditional morality — which we also can't discuss here.

No. I don't think it's just about traditional morality. The mechanics of undeath are what leads us to *any* form of moral "rules" for these things, traditional or otherwise. The question "why is it evil to create undead" really does rest on such considerations. And discussing "evil" within a game, is absolutely not outside the boundaries of this forum (there are whole threads, a lot of whole thread, on alignment discussions, right?). We can certainly discuss "it's evil because you are preventing the person you turned into an undead from continuing on to their afterlife" (literally the moral quandary Rich created in his own story). And whether that is true or not, really does depend on the "Rules for undead" in the game system you are using.

Failing to consider this, or create those rules, is what leads to some adventurers just willy nilly thinking nothing at all of "let's just animate dead on them and use them as fodder" type actions. GMs who haven't established such "rules" are going to be hard pressed for an answer that isn't a simplistic "because the alignment rules say so", or "um... because that's just the way it is" type things. Which is not terribly satisfying, and is unlikely to sway your players.

Run one session where a PC gets turned into an undead, and the rest of the party has to search for his now animated corpse and then "free his soul" in order to allow him to "move on", or even "ressurect him", and it might just turn on a light bulb for the players why doing this is "evil" in the first place. Again. That's more or less what Rich did with Durkon. But with an added twist of "even the person we think is Durkon isn't really him, so we don't even actually have him working with us in vampiric form".

Lots of characters who might think becoming a vampire is cool, or will lead to immortality, might be horrified at that same prospect if they learned that, no, you wont actually be immortal. You'll just be trapped inside your undead body for eternity while someone else pretending to be you gets to "unlive forever". So yeah. Kinda important to think about these things.



That's the gist of it. It was much longer and more carefully worked out, and explained everything in the rules I could find a way to fit, and I was quite proud of it. But I eventually realized that it had no purpose. It did not help any player, DM or character in any way. Any in-game explanation is meaningless unless it can improve the experience somehow.

Fair enough. But sometimes, coming up with these rules and "how things work" in a game setting can make handling other things that come along easier. So determining what is a "spirit/soul", and then "what happens when people die", leads to "what happens when you are turned into an undead". If you don't start with the first question and answer, you can't progress to the second, and therefore can't get to the third. One leads to the other.

You can certainly just treat everything as a stat block and not not worry about it. But it certainly did seem as though there's some interest in the subject, or the OP wouldn't have raised the question.

Duff
2023-03-15, 05:25 PM
The next banshee I introduce to a story will be ample and female.
So you know it's over when she sings

KorvinStarmast
2023-03-15, 06:29 PM
The next banshee I introduce to a story will be ample and female.
So you know it's over when she sings Now that's the right attitude. :smallbiggrin:

Quertus
2023-03-15, 09:43 PM
The Undead - What do they stand for?


In my experience? Brains, usually. :smallsmile:

Ever. The undead stand forever. :smallwink:

That said... IME, undead stand for the past, for the old ways, for the inability to change, the inability to let go. Or, in the case of mindless Zombies, they can stand for "all you mindless idiots", to stand as a counterpart to whatever message the author is pushing.

Mechalich
2023-03-15, 11:27 PM
Fair enough. But sometimes, coming up with these rules and "how things work" in a game setting can make handling other things that come along easier. So determining what is a "spirit/soul", and then "what happens when people die", leads to "what happens when you are turned into an undead". If you don't start with the first question and answer, you can't progress to the second, and therefore can't get to the third. One leads to the other.

You can certainly just treat everything as a stat block and not not worry about it. But it certainly did seem as though there's some interest in the subject, or the OP wouldn't have raised the question.

Yes. It is certainly possible, for game purposes, to treat the setting as utterly irrelevant, just a series of movie set style backdrops the characters move through scenes in, with accordingly no real need for coherency. In D&D, which has never managed to produce a setting that doesn't shatter into a thousand pieces when the world-building receives even the least stress and because of its commitment to a kitchen sink nature fundamentally can't (D&D's most robust setting, by an overwhelming margin, is Dark Sun, the one with an order of magnitude less stuff in it), this approach has considerable appeal.

However, pretty much every other TTRPG, and especially games that are explicitly based in a specific setting with a discrete list of elements and themes, the explanation for how those elements - especially the supernatural elements for which 'as in the real world' is not a viable option - is an extremely important part of the world-building and essential to build stories that actually interact with the setting in a reasonable fashion. Notably, in cases where the creators produce nonsensical answers to such questions that can crush suspension of disbelief. The Matrix universe, for example, fundamentally doesn't work and the moment the series stopped simply being a pseudo-kung fu action romp (meaning all films after the first one) it could do nothing but spin around in circles.

There are, of course, fictional universes where undead are either the primary or even the only supernatural element involved. Vampire fiction that manages to restrain itself to just vampires (admittedly somewhat rare these days) is such a case. For example, in Vampire: the Masquerade, becoming a vampire means inheriting a divine curse passed down by an all-powerful and frightfully vengeful monotheistic deity. VtM vampires may be cursed with awesome, but they are very much still cursed and ultimately doomed. Now this was a bad explanation and went against the kinds of games most VtM enthusiasts actually wanted to play - most gamers aren't really very interested in playing out an unwinnable struggle trying hold off their inevitable degradation into a soulless monster because their character made a bad decision before play even began and would prefer to chop off bloodsucker heads with katanas while partying like it's a very red-tinged 1999 - but it was central to basically everything in the game's published fluff.

OldTrees1
2023-03-16, 12:23 AM
So now that the groundwork is laid: what's your favorite take on the undead? How do you use them in your own games?

Well, like the opening post said, it is the wrong question:

Undeath is one of the broadest categories one could name because it is roughly as broad as the category "life". What is your favorite take on living creatures? Do you prefer petunias, intelligent shades of the color blue, or whales?

So if it is such a broad category, how do I use them? On a case by case basis. There are some base traits of undeath, just like there are some base traits of being corporeal. I use an exception based rule system, so more specific context can mitigate, modify, or supersede some of those base traits. This means "what do these undead stand for?" is only answerable at the individual level (although similar answers might congregate together).

In the open desert corpses of fallen travelers might arise as mindless hazards (Zombies) that stand for part of the wasteland's isolating effect keeping communities apart. However within a desert ruin corpses of fallen explorers might be reanimated as cursed souls trapped within their corpses as the ruin uses them as defenses, thus those different type of zombies stand for the dangers of the ruin. Of course if an NPC eternal mayor (a zombie stand for the inertia of the status quo) sent a party of zombie PCs (ask the Players what those zombies stand for) across the desert to the desert ruin, well then we have 4 different types of undead which are all standing for something different despite all being "Zombies".



Also this conveniently separates "how can undead exist?" from "how did these specific undead arise?" and puts the authorial meaning more on the latter to the exclusion of the former. This means I can have really easy answers for how can undead exist (same way carrots or Constable Carrot can) with more detailed answers for the specific instances of undead (or Kakarots).

Bohandas
2023-03-16, 02:56 AM
A lot of undead are imagined as arising from people who already had it coming the first time, this comes up both in traditional legends as well as in hollywood tropes such as nazi zombies.

Zombimode
2023-03-16, 02:57 AM
In D&D, which has never managed to produce a setting that doesn't shatter into a thousand pieces when the world-building receives even the least stress and because of its commitment to a kitchen sink nature fundamentally can't (D&D's most robust setting, by an overwhelming margin, is Dark Sun, the one with an order of magnitude less stuff in it), this approach has considerable appeal.

However, pretty much every other TTRPG, and especially games that are explicitly based in a specific setting with a discrete list of elements and themes, the explanation for how those elements - especially the supernatural elements for which 'as in the real world' is not a viable option - is an extremely important part of the world-building and essential to build stories that actually interact with the setting in a reasonable fashion.

So your telling us with a straight face that (the settings of) Shadowrun, World of Darkness and Exalted are just so much more coherent then any D&D setting?
{Scrubbed}

Bohandas
2023-03-16, 03:00 AM
b. because it has virtually always been believed to be so, in pretty much every culture that considered the question, or


This sounds like a workable in-game explanation, at least for D&D. Part of the premise of Planescape is that if enough people believe something it becomes true

Mechalich
2023-03-16, 04:37 AM
So your telling us with a straight face that (the settings of) Shadowrun, World of Darkness and Exalted are just so much more coherent then any D&D setting?
{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

No, I did not say anything of the kind. I said that A. All D&D settings are incoherent (which is absolutely true, though some of them, like Planescape do not need to be nor do they care) and that because of this it is easy to treat the setting as irrelevant and therefore questions related to the structure of the setting, like 'why do we have undead and how do they work?' are comparatively less important and B. that in other settings that are explicitly integrated to the game rules, treating the setting as irrelevant is considerably more difficult and therefore answers to those questions are more important.

If you disregard the setting in D&D you're left with a dungeon crawl simulator, which in many cases is all a given table wants from it in the first place. If you disregard the setting in VtM you're left with nothing. It's not a value judgment at all, but a dissection of structure.

Quertus
2023-03-16, 08:35 PM
There are numerous other things that various undead could stand for. For example...

Infectious / spreading undead are obviously able to be a stand-in for disease... but potentially even for more abstract things, like the spread of an idea or a culture.

Many undead can also act as a stand-in for "sins", like the Gluttony of Ghouls, the Lust of Vampires, or the Sloth of Zombies.

Undead are good proxies for some form of relentless inevitability; whether that's a natural or man-made inevitability depends on the specifics of the undead. The nature of the undead also helps with the delivery of the message - is the heat death of the universe something that mankind can postpone by fighting against it, or are we merely looking at how they respond to knowledge of their inevitable demise?

But, ultimately, in an RPG, I don't expect players to play based on some abstract notion of whether fighting the undead is their noble duty to maintain their purity vs a sign of insanity tilting at windmills vs some other conceptual purpose based on some high-minded call to the abstraction. No, in an RPG, I expect players to take the undead at face value, and deal with them in accordance with their own personal values - or, if I'm really lucky, in accordance with the values that their characters hold.

Bohandas
2023-03-17, 03:17 AM
I think one of the most horrific things the undead could represent is simply people who have died, particularly people who have died along time ago. Imagine if troglodytes like [list of names of colonial era through civil war era historical figures redacted] started coming back in their masses; it would be a catastrophe!

Ionathus
2023-03-17, 10:05 AM
I think one of the most horrific things the undead could represent is simply people who have died, particularly people who have died along time ago. Imagine if troglodytes like [list of names of colonial era through civil war era historical figures redacted] started coming back in their masses; it would be a catastrophe!

"They left us on the veldt–side, but we felt we couldn't stop
On this, our England's crowning festal day;
We're the men of Magersfontein, we're the men of Spion Kop,
Colenso–we're the men who had to pay. (https://www.poeticous.com/robert-w-service/the-march-of-the-dead)"

Yep - undead are creepy, undead who hold a grudge for past wrongs are worse, and undead who hold a grudge and have combat experience? Bad time all around!

Bohandas
2023-03-17, 12:16 PM
"They left us on the veldt–side, but we felt we couldn't stop
On this, our England's crowning festal day;
We're the men of Magersfontein, we're the men of Spion Kop,
Colenso–we're the men who had to pay. (https://www.poeticous.com/robert-w-service/the-march-of-the-dead)"

Yep - undead are creepy, undead who hold a grudge for past wrongs are worse, and undead who hold a grudge and have combat experience? Bad time all around!

Actually, none of the people on my original list were miliyary men. The colonial era ones were judges from Salem and the civil war era ones were "officials" from the confederacy

Vahnavoi
2023-03-19, 06:42 AM
Notably, in cases where the creators produce nonsensical answers to such questions that can crush suspension of disbelief. The Matrix universe, for example, fundamentally doesn't work and the moment the series stopped simply being a pseudo-kung fu action romp (meaning all films after the first one) it could do nothing but spin around in circles.

Oooh, them's the fighting words. :smallamused:

Animatrix, Reloaded and Revolutions don't fail for the reason you suppose - the philosophy they do builds on the original in interesting ways, it's the original that was poor, philosophically speaking, promoting a fairly naive "us versus them" mindset.

If the franchise did get screwed over by over-extending, it did that by trying to cram in absolute all references to things the authors liked, trying to build a cross-media franchise (part of Reloaded's story is told in a videogame) and trying to out-kung fu and out-special effect the original.

Since we're on the topic of undead, the wraith brothers exemplify this.

On itself, the idea that the undead exist in the Matrix as holdovers from past versions, is an interesting one. But it's wasted in the movies (save for few moments of spectacle) because we already know the world is a simulation and because the crux of the conflict is already elsewhere.

To make use of that concept, they would've had to tell an entire new story, from viewpoint of someone who doesn't know they're in the Matrix, and then using the apparent incongruity existence of the undead has with the materialist world they live in to figure out... well, the plot of Matrix: Reloaded. This would've also allowed for fairly poignant study of the concept of afterlife, or lack there of: after all, there IS a level of existence beyond the obvious one, a realer and truer space, but it makes no allowance for any kind of eternal self: who you are is still a construct tied to the sensory world and your death in the sensory world offers no escape to the realer, truer one. Well, okay: one Animatrix short has the Kid apparently commit suicide and escape the Matrix through belief in Neo, but Reloaded and Revolutions go a long way to deconstructing that notion. It would be easy to use the concepts introduced in Reloaded and Revolutions to flip the script around and argue that the Matrix is a spirit world instead of being a prison of sensory experience, and continue from there to explore ideas of mind uploading or other modes of existence beyond death. Matrix: Resurrections almost does this, but it's too little too late and the story it ends up telling is less than the sum of its parts.

Asmotherion
2023-03-19, 08:01 AM
Each Undead serves a different purpose.

From the generic Skeleton or Zombie being basically little more than a Puppet, to an All Poweful Lich that I usually use as a BBEG, every single one of them has some sort of glamor.

I like using undead as a means to bring back a character killed. A zombie may make a good reminder of "Look at this person you couldn't save, having a fate worse than death".

Intelligent Undead however, usually come back more powerful than they ever were in life, they seek revenge, or some other purpose. Even if their purpose is a noble one though, the Undead's twisted mindset makes them obsessed to that purpose, to the point of overlooking other important things. An Undead who wants to protect their family for example, might lock them into the house, and never allow them to go out again.

I like the idea of Undeath being a twisted version of Life; Like Shadows only show the perspective of the item they are shadowing, so does Unlife give a gross pattern of the person's psych for the undead body to follow; There is no colour, no context of what that shadow is, only an amoral black and white pattern that guides the thoughts and emotions of the Undead.

In my lore (and head cannon, when not playing in my own Setting), Life is born from Holy intervention as a pure thing. Undeath is a Shadow of that thing, born, not from something Unholly or Evil (though it can be the case), but of the Shadow of Life. An undead is not the "self" they were in life; That person is long gone, into their respective afterlife (with the exception of Liches). It is the Shadow of that self, that animates the body. And that Shadow is purelly Amoral, knows nothing of right and wrong, good or evil, just tries to follow that pattern left by the person they used to be as best they can.

Example: An Undead Paladin would try and do "good" and destroy "evil" as best he can, but without knowing good and evil emotionally, just by a textbook definition. So he might decide that killing a kid who comited the "Evil" act of thivery would be the best option, without considering that the kid just stole an apple, because it was hungry.

Quertus
2023-03-19, 08:15 AM
the kid just stole an apple, because it was hungry.

Save the hungry apples! Free them from the clutches of their evil shopkeeper overlords! :smallbiggrin:

Bohandas
2023-03-20, 02:40 AM
An underused possibility is that the undead could represent people's inability to let go of the past. To continue a feud or conflict long after the people who the conflict was between was between were dead. Possibly even long after the conflict was officially decided both sides may still hate each other. The undead cound easily symbolize such a conflict, which is itself the undead

Satinavian
2023-03-20, 02:44 AM
Why would one even try to use the undead to "symbolize" anything ?

They are just fine as fantastic creatures to engage with in their own right. Making some metaphor out of them is a waste.



If i want to explore concept X, it is way easier to just put concept X in the game.

Quertus
2023-03-20, 10:31 AM
I feel like a great comedy skit… a good comedy skit… an ok comedy skit… an 8-bit arcade comedy skit could be made about this, where a group of adventures encounters an undead (say, a single zombie), and starts arguing about what they should do based on their preconceptions of what the undead stands for, and the zombie slaughters the entire village while they debate symbolism, or something.

So, where did this start? With the question, “is it ok to kill a Sentient being that is physically different from you?”? Is that really why we’re asking if undead represent Death or Taxes? I feel that the original question is far better asked on its own, rather than looking at what undead represent. After all, as a software developer, I “kill” bugs, but that doesn’t mean I should go around killing people who make mistakes, just because I feel that they represent bugs, should I? How would you feel as GM if, every time an NPC made a mistake, my character killed them, and chanted their mantra, “the world must be free of bugs”? I don’t feel like that would be an especially productive approach to gaming. Even if it is an intriguing basis for a character concept.

NichG
2023-03-20, 12:51 PM
I feel like a great comedy skit… a good comedy skit… an ok comedy skit… an 8-bit arcade comedy skit could be made about this, where a group of adventures encounters an undead (say, a single zombie), and starts arguing about what they should do based on their preconceptions of what the undead stands for, and the zombie slaughters the entire village while they debate symbolism, or something.

So, where did this start? With the question, “is it ok to kill a Sentient being that is physically different from you?”? Is that really why we’re asking if undead represent Death or Taxes? I feel that the original question is far better asked on its own, rather than looking at what undead represent. After all, as a software developer, I “kill” bugs, but that doesn’t mean I should go around killing people who make mistakes, just because I feel that they represent bugs, should I? How would you feel as GM if, every time an NPC made a mistake, my character killed them, and chanted their mantra, “the world must be free of bugs”? I don’t feel like that would be an especially productive approach to gaming. Even if it is an intriguing basis for a character concept.

I mean, that'd be right there with a lot of villains in various media and games. Whether you want to GM for a player playing that is one thing, but its certainly sufficiently relatable and resonant that lots of different people come up with more or less the same idea. If its not bugs its 'lies' or 'hypocrites' or 'nobles' or 'those who do not serve the blood god' or (ironically) 'criminals' or 'evildoers'.

But yeah, the root question is part of the family under the umbrella of 'well, why shouldn't we just kill people?': what makes people 'people' and therefore demanding of moral weight and consideration? In another setting it could be e.g. is it okay to kill aliens? How about if the aliens are actually just planet-sized brains made of patterns of sand on a desert that stick/slip in specific ways when the wind blows to act as neurons? How about if the aliens are mandatory parasites that can't exist without killing the personality of their host? How about if the aliens are a hive mind and their personality and sapiency is distributed over all the bodies, even if the bodies have locally independent existences? And what happens when we turn around and have the aliens ask that question - 'is it okay in our morality to kill humans'? If you take the obvious labels off, do you discover that you just came up with a rule that says its morally okay for you to be killed?

Then the zoomed out questions like, lets say we agree on a total war stance - its morally okay for the living to kill undead, and (to the undead) its morally okay for them to kill the living when applying the same standard. Is the existence of a total war stance like that itself morally acceptable?

Mastikator
2023-03-20, 01:35 PM
Why would one even try to use the undead to "symbolize" anything ?

They are just fine as fantastic creatures to engage with in their own right. Making some metaphor out of them is a waste.



If i want to explore concept X, it is way easier to just put concept X in the game.

Everything in art can be a metaphor if you want the art to say something.

PhoenixPhyre
2023-03-20, 01:52 PM
Everything in art can be a metaphor if you want the art to say something.

Or if some reader decides it's a metaphor. Even if the artist strongly opposes it or denies that reading.

Vaguely relevant story from high school--

We were reading poetry as part of AP English Literature[1]. The teacher was trying to get us to analyze the poem "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time" as a bunch of metaphors and analogies, in a vaguely "oh, that's sweet/deep" mode (I can't remember the details). One of the students (a wise-donkey debater) stood up and said "really, he [the author] is just trying to get in the girls' pants. That's all there is here." And it ruined the poem for everyone that had bought in to the artsy metaphors...because it was obviously the most reasonable reading of the poem. "Hey babe, get with me because we're going to get old and die."

It's been nearly 25 years and I still remember that and am amused. Every time someone tries to dig deep into the "deeper meanings" of a piece of art, I tend to think "really, he's trying to <insert something simple here, like "get girls" or "make money" or "tell a nice story">" and the proposed "deeper meaning" tends to fall before that fairly obvious surface truth. Art isn't really as deep as we make it out to be, most of the time. And, in my opinion, you can lose a lot of enjoyment and, yes, wonder, by over-analyzing things.

[1] Where, oddly, we wrote much more than the AP English Language class did and read less...

Bohandas
2023-03-20, 01:54 PM
The issue of sould passing on, not passing on, etc. is complicated in D&D by the fact that in the default afterlife the soul that passes on is even more diminished and broken than the undead. If the soul passes on and the body is reanimated as a templated undead by a new spirit then the body still contains the greater part of who the person once was. It is still that person to some extent, while conversely the soul wanders its outer plane in a fugue state bereft of most or all of what made it who it was.

Vahnavoi
2023-03-20, 05:54 PM
An underused possibility is that the undead could represent people's inability to let go of the past.

I am rather puzzled. What makes you think this classic use of the undead is somehow underused?

---


Why would one even try to use the undead to "symbolize" anything ?

It's kinda silly you're asking this now, when it was already answered in the opening post. Sometimes, for whatever reason, an author is unable to represent a thing as is, so they need to use symbols. Like I am doing right now, encrypting thoughts in letters that represent sounds, because I can't speak to you.


They are just fine as fantastic creatures to engage with in their own right. Making some metaphor out of them is a waste.

If i want to explore concept X, it is way easier to just put concept X in the game.

True, which is why controversial, abstract or hard-to-parse concepts such as death, consciousness and continuity of self are talked about explicitly, with no analogies, allegories or metaphors in sight. :smalltongue:

Seriously: a preference for 4th floor takes is fine, but pure 4th floor takes are rare. Most uses of undead are symbolic to some degree or another. Often, they were metaphors before they became fantasy tropes.

Which doesn't mean there aren't pointless symbolic takes. I'm not particularly fond of using undead as a symbol for, say, sexual minorities. Some past authors did that, because explicitly talking of sexual minorities would've been too spicy for their time and age. Nowadays, yes, it's a waste.

---

@PhoenixPhyre:

Symbols are cyphers, a symbolic text is akin to an encrypted message and needs the right key to decrypt. As with all other such messages, allowing for arbitrary keys leads to arbitrary interpretations: you can get any text from any other.

So yes, some texts, even if seemingly flowery, have in their proper context straightforward and even banal meanings.

So what?

It's rather silly to simultaneously try to rebuke pretentious (incorrect) interpretations and then say overanalyzing things will ruin a sense of wonder, when what actually killed the sense of wonder in your example was not overanalysis. People were enjoying their pretentious, overanalyzed takes, what killed their sense of wonder was the simple, banal take. Seriously, reread your text. You are simultaneously saying that "deeper meaning" fall on the face of "obvious surface truths" and then trying to argue that over-analyzing will kill enjoyment and sense of wonder. These just don't go together. The first half of your argument means that any correct analysis will kill enjoyment or sense of wonder, because the obvious surface of the world does not sustain any.

PhoenixPhyre
2023-03-20, 06:26 PM
@PhoenixPhyre:

Symbols are cyphers, a symbolic text is akin to an encrypted message and needs the right key to decrypt. As with all other such messages, allowing for arbitrary keys leads to arbitrary interpretations: you can get any text from any other.

So yes, some texts, even if seemingly flowery, have in their proper context straightforward and even banal meanings.

So what?

It's rather silly to simultaneously try to rebuke pretentious (incorrect) interpretations and then say overanalyzing things will ruin a sense of wonder, when what actually killed the sense of wonder in your example was not overanalysis. People were enjoying their pretentious, overanalyzed takes, what killed their sense of wonder was the simple, banal take. Seriously, reread your text. You are simultaneously saying that "deeper meaning" fall on the face of "obvious surface truths" and then trying to argue that over-analyzing will kill enjoyment and sense of wonder. These just don't go together. The first half of your argument means that any correct analysis will kill enjoyment or sense of wonder, because the obvious surface of the world does not sustain any.

No. Just no. You're overanalyzing things and extending a specific case to a general rule, which is usually (but not always) an error. And I don't care to go further, because this whole discussion is a lot of words signifying nothing but the fact that people can bloviate and assign random meanings to anything without it really describing anything about the work. Instead, it only tells you about the speaker, and nothing good. Just like literary interpretation and "symbolism", most of the time.

Vahnavoi
2023-03-20, 06:52 PM
Your own example has you extending a specific case to a general rule right here:


It's been nearly 25 years and I still remember that and am amused. Every time someone tries to dig deep into the "deeper meanings" of a piece of art, I tend to think "really, he's trying to <insert something simple here, like "get girls" or "make money" or "tell a nice story">" and the proposed "deeper meaning" tends to fall before that fairly obvious surface truth. Art isn't really as deep as we make it out to be, most of the time. And, in my opinion, you can lose a lot of enjoyment and, yes, wonder, by over-analyzing things.

And that is the crux of your argument.

It's pretty sad if you don't see where your (justifiable) dislike of pretentious interpretations turns into weird double-think advocating for symbol illiteracy.

Quertus
2023-03-20, 07:12 PM
its certainly sufficiently relatable and resonant that lots of different people come up with more or less the same idea.

Oh. Cool. One of my assumptions was wrong. I learned something. Thanks! :smallbiggrin:


If you take the obvious labels off, do you discover that you just came up with a rule that says its morally okay for you to be killed?

It's a pity that most people jump to "the logic must be wrong", and try to "fix their mistake", rather than actually evaluating whether it should be OK for them to be killed.

But, yeah, I do love such things, especially in RPGs. I don't recall it being explored well in stories; the most recent (and surprisingly certainly nowhere near the worst, given its brief treatment) example I've encountered touched on it in (probably - darn senility) just a few seconds of an episode of Dr. Who.

Bohandas
2023-03-20, 07:18 PM
I am rather puzzled. What makes you think this classic use of the undead is somehow underused?

I should have said society's inability to let go of past conflicts. Your standard revenant is usually avenging a personal grudge, and the soldiers on a haunted battlefield, while potentially closer to my point, are generally portrayed as barely sentient - little more than a recording - and generally are shown as owing their undead existence more to having all died untimely deaths around the same time than to the conflict actually still being active

Satinavian
2023-03-21, 01:39 AM
It's kinda silly you're asking this now, when it was already answered in the opening post. Sometimes, for whatever reason, an author is unable to represent a thing as is, so they need to use symbols. Like I am doing right now, encrypting thoughts in letters that represent sounds, because I can't speak to you.

True, which is why controversial, abstract or hard-to-parse concepts such as death, consciousness and continuity of self are talked about explicitly, with no analogies, allegories or metaphors in sight. :smalltongue:

Seriously: a preference for 4th floor takes is fine, but pure 4th floor takes are rare. Most uses of undead are symbolic to some degree or another. Often, they were metaphors before they became fantasy tropes.

Which doesn't mean there aren't pointless symbolic takes. I'm not particularly fond of using undead as a symbol for, say, sexual minorities. Some past authors did that, because explicitly talking of sexual minorities would've been too spicy for their time and age. Nowadays, yes, it's a waste.
But we are talking RPGs, not single author fiction. Settings and the creatures therein are primarily toys to play with, not vehicles to get messages across. I mean, people regularly try that but it never works.

Furthermore if a gaming group wants to engage with issue X they usually can do just that, there is no need for allegory. The way RPGs work also makes the use of undead as allegory pretty hard as players can engage with undead in many different ways, most of which make no sense for the concept the undead stand for.



So you could say that i use undead in RPGs only on the fourth and fifth floor. Same as nearly everything else that is not first floor.




Then the zoomed out questions like, lets say we agree on a total war stance - its morally okay for the living to kill undead, and (to the undead) its morally okay for them to kill the living when applying the same standard. Is the existence of a total war stance like that itself morally acceptable?One thing i always hated was the idea that the undead want to kill all the living. Sure, sometimes undead are portrayed as insane, but if we ever have anything like an undead society then this will depend on the living around for its continued existence. Because you only can get new undead if someone suitable was alive before and only the living can procreate. So undead morality should always gravitate towards some state of coexistence.

NichG
2023-03-21, 02:33 AM
One thing i always hated was the idea that the undead want to kill all the living. Sure, sometimes undead are portrayed as insane, but if we ever have anything like an undead society then this will depend on the living around for its continued existence. Because you only can get new undead if someone suitable was alive before and only the living can procreate. So undead morality should always gravitate towards some state of coexistence.

Yeah, in general I agree.

Though its also interesting to think about societies and entities that are structured in a way that doesn't inherit its common sense from an replicative/lineal/evolutionary background at all. Its not so hard to imagine even a living individual who says 'it doesn't matter if society continues to exist, what matters is that the people existing today continue to exist', which would give a very neutral stance with regards to the existence of the living - great so long as they make continued existence joyful, but to be discarded if they threaten the continued existence of individual undead even if they might provide new numbers.

Or you could imagine a society driven to undeath by e.g. some of the existential horror surrounding the ultimate fate of the soul otherwise. D&D's 'experience personality death and get subsumed by a plane unless a deity directly intervenes for you' is pretty bad from a point of view that values identity over continuity of experience for example. Go a bit further and have something really horrifying awaiting all souls (like the hells in Worth the Candle, or to a lesser extent the Mistwatcher in Vigor Mortis), and even if its ultimately self-destructive, an undead society in that sort of setting might prioritize keeping existing souls in circulation and preventing new souls from coming into being (as even with undeath you might not be able to avoid that fate forever).

Certain forms of very strongly immortal undeath, like 'it is an inevitability that this entity will at all times exist' sorts of things (the immortality/undeath of Death Becomes Her might be like this, or the various Re: X genre of stories where a character time loops/reforms/etc if they are destroyed, or quantum observer mumbo jumbo where 'you can't experience cessation and therefore any universe in which you cease is not the real one' or ...) might not even be able to comprehend the need to try to sustain a society - the important entities 'simply are' and there's no changing that, so why try to supply more to that number? They would still probably get the idea that e.g. good times can become bad times if not protected, but there'd possibly be a bit of dissociation that could make interactions with the normally-living 'interesting' in the sense of allowing all sorts of different equilibria or disequilibria that could all make sense.

Go even further afield and you can imagine entities which don't even have a concept of their future self and present self being the same entity, much less a future organization of a collection of agents having anything to do with the present organization. Though things like that would find it hard to form something you could call a society at all, and we're getting away from 'undead' here a bit unless its the p-zombie sort...

Satinavian
2023-03-21, 04:08 AM
Yes, that would all be interesting takes (and i have seen some of them occasionally).

But way too often we get "I want undead as enemies. But killing the undead just for being undead doesn't seem very heroic. What to do... Oh, I know, just let the undead be omnicidal maniacs with a hate for all life". I am really sick of it. It is sooo lazy and boring.

Vahnavoi
2023-03-21, 05:33 AM
@Bohandas: oh, okay. Extrapolating the metaphor to societal level is indeed a distinct take and somewhat less common.

---


But we are talking RPGs, not single author fiction. Settings and the creatures therein are primarily toys to play with, not vehicles to get messages across. I mean, people regularly try that but it never works.

Nothing about the medium of roleplaying games, or any other format of multi-author fiction, excludes symbols. To the contrary, any activity with multiple people necessarily includes messaging, including symbolic messaging. The idea that it never works is false on the face of it. It's hyperbole, nothing else.

I don't even need a roleplaying game to prove you're wrong. Any variant of Chinese Whispers where a message is transformed from text to image and back will do. Vehicles to get messages around are themselves toys to play with, something you can build games around. On a basic level, it's possible to include simpler games, like aforementioned Chinese Whispers variant, as subgames in a more complex game, like a tabletop roleplaying game, and make correct interpretation of a symbol part of the core challenge of the game. There is nothing exotic about this.

---


One thing i always hated was the idea that the undead want to kill all the living. Sure, sometimes undead are portrayed as insane, but if we ever have anything like an undead society then this will depend on the living around for its continued existence. Because you only can get new undead if someone suitable was alive before and only the living can procreate. So undead morality should always gravitate towards some state of coexistence.

That "should" does not follow from anywhere. It assumes the terminal goal of undead is to survive, or at least that natural selection can select for undead with open-ended goal to survive.

Neither needs to be true.

The undead can stand for a mindset for which to exist is to suffer, and it's thus better to not exist. As a corollary, existence for an undead society can be just an instrumental goal towards the day when all life can be made to end. The undead can genuinely want for the day when there will be no more living, and no more undeath, in a way that's distinctly not insane. (https://existentialcomics.com/comic/241)

Alternatively, undead can stand for pathological mutations that lead to self-defeating or self-destructive behaviour in organisms - the kind which is naturally selected against and exist only as byproduct of larger populations of organisms doing the opposite.

Tl;dr: the kind of entities that would gravitate towards co-existence and continued survival can be excluded from the undead as matter of definition, and there's no logical flaw with that. Dislike the trope all you want, but there's no reason why it should not exist.

Satinavian
2023-03-21, 05:48 AM
The undead can stand for a mindset for which to exist is to suffer, and it's thus better to not exist. As a corollary, existence for an undead society can be just an instrumental goal towards the day when all life can be made to end. The undead can genuinely want for the day when there will be no more living, and no more undeath, in a way that's distinctly not insane. (https://existentialcomics.com/comic/241)

Alternatively, undead can stand for pathological mutations that lead to self-defeating or self-destructive behaviour in organisms - the kind which is naturally selected against and exist only as byproduct of larger populations of organisms doing the opposite.None of this is what i would call a "society". A group of people believing it is better to not exist is a suicide pact and the other is by definition self-destructive. That is all not viable for the functioning stable social institution called society.


Aside from that i have no use for undead as metaphor. And no interest in treating them as such even if someone else uses them that way.


And why would beings that gravitate to cooperation be excluded from the definition of undead ? That makes no sense whatsoever. It is basically taking the analogies too far. The undead stop being defined over their unliving existence and get instead defined over what they stand for as proxies and carry its limitations for no reason.


Nothing about the medium of roleplaying games, or any other format of multi-author fiction, excludes symbols. To the contrary, any activity with multiple people necessarily includes messaging, including symbolic messaging. The idea that it never works is false on the face of it. It's hyperbole, nothing else.
Have you ever seen an RPG that the author used as personal soap-box to share their view with the audience that has succeeded as such (wasn't either rejected by players or used ignoring the authors views) ? That really changed opinions because RPGs are a medium for preaching ? That would be a new one.

Vahnavoi
2023-03-21, 07:19 AM
None of this is what i would call a "society". A group of people believing it is better to not exist is a suicide pact and the other is by definition self-destructive. That is all not viable for the functioning stable social institution called society.

As far as I'm concerned, a suicide cult is a society, and isn't even the only real example of self-destructive counter-culture, or other kind of society caught in a downward spiral. Societies are dynamic systems, they are not by definition functioning and stable, any more than organisms are. You are, effectively, including survivorship bias in your concept of what a society is. But, just like an organism can remain relatively unchanged for ages and then suddenly go extinct because the context of its environment changes, a society can appear stable for long periods despite ultimately being self-defeating.


Have you ever seen an RPG that the author used as personal soap-box to share their view with the audience that has succeeded as such (wasn't either rejected by players or used ignoring the authors views) ? That really changed opinions because RPGs are a medium for preaching ? That would be a new one.

Yes. I'm rather tired of reminding you that in significant parts, modern tabletop roleplaying descended from a genre of wargaming expressly made as an instructional tool by military personnel for military personnel. That wasn't an isolated moment in history, all kinds of games, including tabletop roleplaying games, continue to be used for instructional purposes today. This discussion of how to interpret symbols? It can be integrated wholesale into a simulated discussion between two characters in a game. I've done that to convey facts about mythological allegories to other players, succesfully, many times, and other have done it back at me. There's nothing exotic about any of this.

Your problem is that you're extrapolating amateur efforts of preachy people to an entire medium. That's nonsense. It's like you heard Sturgeon's revelation, 90% of everything is crap, but then forgot the corollary: 10% isn't. Dislike bad preachy takes all you want, that doesn't mean there are no good uses of symbolism in games.

Bohandas
2023-03-21, 12:13 PM
The undead can stand for a mindset for which to exist is to suffer, and it's thus better to not exist. As a corollary, existence for an undead society can be just an instrumental goal towards the day when all life can be made to end. The undead can genuinely want for the day when there will be no more living, and no more undeath, in a way that's distinctly not insane. (https://existentialcomics.com/comic/241)

That's the Doomguard

PhoenixPhyre
2023-03-21, 12:52 PM
Have you ever seen an RPG that the author used as personal soap-box to share their view with the audience that has succeeded as such (wasn't either rejected by players or used ignoring the authors views) ? That really changed opinions because RPGs are a medium for preaching ? That would be a new one.

I completely agree, and it's not just RPGs. Polemics have their place, as do apologetics. But in fiction, they tend to both detract from the message and detract from the fiction. Even if I agree with the message, "message-pushing" fiction is always weaker for it, and the message being pushed gets muddled. It's also why "edutainment" games are usually weaker both as games and as educational materials. A good teacher can use games as a tool for teaching. But games specifically designed as educational tend, in my professional experience as a teacher[1] and my less professional experience as a gamer[2] to suck. Because they're trying to do two things that are in tension with each other. And the game doesn't have the same status as a "teacher" that an actual teacher does. And this goes exponentially so if it's more than just facts trying to be conveyed--conveying moral or philosophical messages that way has a great track record of backfiring badly.

[1] 5 years at the college level and 7 at the high school level
[2] since before I could read, and I was reading in kindergarten.

Vahnavoi
2023-03-22, 03:15 AM
And the game doesn't have the same status as a "teacher" that an actual teacher does.

You could replace "game" with "book" or "video" or any other medium of teaching, the same would apply. It's not an argument against anything that's been said by anyone else and it does not establish any weakness unique to games.

As for the rest, your experience of teaching does not make your points more convincing, they make them even sadder. Why? Because if your teaching experience is reasonably contemporary, it ought to have allowed you to spot a steadily increasing quality in edutainment games across time, simply because such games became less controversial and hence more common. The reasons why edutainment games tend to suck have much less to do with this supposed tension between goals, and more to do with pragmatic things like lack of funding or lack of capable designers - same reasons why your average edutainment video doesn't have quality of a Hollywood movie.

Your idea that edutainment games are weaker as educational materials is not substantiated by the wider world. To the contrary, there've been studies, even of D&D specifically, of how good they are at teaching various things, in case of D&D, foreign language... and unsurprisingly a game that involves reading and then discussing what you read as a matter of course works just as well in teaching language as any other method. Let's not even get to arts or acting, you know, the other subjects that would involve crafting and interpretation of allegories in a way directly relevant to thread topic.

You and Satinavian are just being cynical of what the medium of your hobby can do. Again, it's like you remembered Sturgeon's revelation but forgot the corollary. 90% of everything is crap, yes. 10% isn't. Using that 90% of crap to draw wide-reaching conclusions of what the entire medium is capable of is hence dubious. There is nothing inherent about tabletop roleplaying games as a medium that makes it unable to carry 2nd or 3rd floor takes.

Satinavian
2023-03-22, 04:52 AM
You and Satinavian are just being cynical of what the medium of your hobby can do. Again, it's like you remembered Sturgeon's revelation but forgot the corollary. 90% of everything is crap, yes. 10% isn't. Using that 90% of crap to draw wide-reaching conclusions of what the entire medium is capable of is hence dubious. There is nothing inherent about tabletop roleplaying games as a medium that makes it unable to carry 2nd or 3rd floor takes.
I am not convinced of "10% of everything is good". Some things don't work. And i have yet to find an RPG that uses 2nd or 3rd floor and is such a hidden gem instead of another disaster. Maybe i am cynical, but i don't think so. It is not something i need or particularly want our hobby to be able to do, so i don't feel any negativity about this weakness.

As for discussing undead : 4th+ floor or i am not interested.

Bohandas
2023-03-22, 02:31 PM
Or if some reader decides it's a metaphor. Even if the artist strongly opposes it or denies that reading.

Vaguely relevant story from high school--

We were reading poetry as part of AP English Literature[1]. The teacher was trying to get us to analyze the poem "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time" as a bunch of metaphors and analogies, in a vaguely "oh, that's sweet/deep" mode (I can't remember the details). One of the students (a wise-donkey debater) stood up and said "really, he [the author] is just trying to get in the girls' pants. That's all there is here." And it ruined the poem for everyone that had bought in to the artsy metaphors...because it was obviously the most reasonable reading of the poem. "Hey babe, get with me because we're going to get old and die."

That reminds me a bit of a class I took in college about the Sherlock Holmes books, where the professor stressed that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle personally considered the series to be played out, and himself completely out of good ideas for it, as of The Final Problem and he only wrote the adventures that followed it because the series was a cash cow




It's been nearly 25 years and I still remember that and am amused. Every time someone tries to dig deep into the "deeper meanings" of a piece of art, I tend to think "really, he's trying to <insert something simple here, like "get girls" or "make money" or "tell a nice story">" and the proposed "deeper meaning" tends to fall before that fairly obvious surface truth. Art isn't really as deep as we make it out to be, most of the time. And, in my opinion, you can lose a lot of enjoyment and, yes, wonder, by over-analyzing things.


Yeah, for every one actual deeper meaning you get three people in tinfoil hats saying that Through the Looking Glass is about LSD, and that the White Album contains coded instructions for bringing about the end of the world

Also, even if there is a metaphor, that doesn't necessarily mean there's a deeper meaning. There's a strong case to be made that the Old Ones from Cabin In The Woods represent the audience, but not nearly as strong a case to argue that the producers set out to say that their audience are monsters

NichG
2023-03-22, 03:05 PM
Whether there 'actually is' a deeper meaning is often the wrong question I think. Its more useful to ask whether you can gain something by drawing connections between a thing and other things which share some of their properties.

That is to say, an author could intend their depiction of the undead to be about sexuality, but if instead you find that aspects of that particular account of the undead share a weird similarity to the life of an office worker and actually end up understanding your own position about the ethics of office work or something like that instead, that's more useful than correctly figuring out what the author meant and absorbing their message.

Understanding authorial intent is mostly useful just as self-protection from propaganda sorts of messaging, but its not the only way to go about that (nor is it necessarily the most foolproof way to go about that...)

Angelalex242
2023-04-20, 03:08 AM
Depends on the genre. If you switch to, say, Buffy...then you have 'always evil' vampires...unless they get cursed (Angel) or chipped (Spike) or are too dumb to be evil properly (Harmony).

Blackhawk748
2023-04-21, 10:50 PM
F it, I'll bite.


what makes people 'people' and therefore demanding of moral weight and consideration?

Well, sapience is a requirement, so zombeis and skeletons (which don't have that) are auto out. Intelligent Undead need more steps.


In another setting it could be e.g. is it okay to kill aliens?

Idk, what are they doing?


How about if the aliens are actually just planet-sized brains made of patterns of sand on a desert that stick/slip in specific ways when the wind blows to act as neurons?

I don't see how this changes my statement from before? Like, are they just floating in the void? Then no, they're minding their own damn business.


How about if the aliens are mandatory parasites that can't exist without killing the personality of their host?

Find something that isn't sapient or else this is a "You or me" situation and I am near always picking me. So it's self defense. Sucks for the parasite alien but I'm not gonna let it kill me, and I assume its gonna give its damndest to kill me too.


How about if the aliens are a hive mind and their personality and sapiency is distributed over all the bodies, even if the bodies have locally independent existences?

...I ask again. What are they doing? You're just describing weird, yet sapient, critters and we aren't the Imperium of Man.


And what happens when we turn around and have the aliens ask that question - 'is it okay in our morality to kill humans'? If you take the obvious labels off, do you discover that you just came up with a rule that says its morally okay for you to be killed?

Well without knowing anything about these aliens other than extremely vague physical descriptions I can't tell you how their minds or morals work. But, depending on the situation, the aliens may be in the moral right.

It depends.


Yes, that would all be interesting takes (and i have seen some of them occasionally).

But way too often we get "I want undead as enemies. But killing the undead just for being undead doesn't seem very heroic. What to do... Oh, I know, just let the undead be omnicidal maniacs with a hate for all life". I am really sick of it. It is sooo lazy and boring.

They shouldn't be read as "hating life" but as "Anti Life" which is very different. Theres no emotion to it, they are just the opposite of life. They either seek to cancel it out, or, and more interestingly, they need to rip out the Life bits of you to keep themselves running.

Like, this takes 5 seconds of work to make them "run of life juices". Just do that.

Bohandas
2023-04-22, 03:39 AM
Old ideas. Old ways of life. Old values. Old beliefs. Brought back to meance the living once more.

Fiery Diamond
2023-04-22, 07:10 AM
To the person arguing that real-world issues we can't discuss are the only and true reasons for undead in games...

There is a difference between "Why" undead are in games, as in "how did it come to be the case that the undead are in the game," and "why" undead are in a particular game, as in "what purpose do the undead serve in the game." Those two questions are not the same, and your take only addresses the first while this thread is actually about the latter.

NichG
2023-04-22, 01:48 PM
F it, I'll bite.

Well, sapience is a requirement, so zombeis and skeletons (which don't have that) are auto out. Intelligent Undead need more steps.

Idk, what are they doing?

I don't see how this changes my statement from before? Like, are they just floating in the void? Then no, they're minding their own damn business.

Find something that isn't sapient or else this is a "You or me" situation and I am near always picking me. So it's self defense. Sucks for the parasite alien but I'm not gonna let it kill me, and I assume its gonna give its damndest to kill me too.

...I ask again. What are they doing? You're just describing weird, yet sapient, critters and we aren't the Imperium of Man.

Well without knowing anything about these aliens other than extremely vague physical descriptions I can't tell you how their minds or morals work. But, depending on the situation, the aliens may be in the moral right.

It depends.


A given implementation of undeath could fall all over the place on these considerations, and furthermore different people at the table might have different gut reactions or initial evaluations or even standards they use for these things. So including those elements in a game but subverting some of the genre expectations, either in the form of individuals or subgroups or even undead as a whole, can highlight these questions and get people to identify the specific reasoning they're using. And often people at the table will not be using the same reasoning. Furthermore, even if you get past that stage and everyone agrees to boil it all down to sapience and only returning aggression, how in practice to recognize sapience when it doesn't look like you is also an interesting exercise. Or how to recognize voluntary versus involuntary aggression versus aggression that itself was prompted by previous aggression from your 'side' of the life/death boundary, etc.

Walter Tye from Never Die Twice for example: a lich posing as a shopkeeper in a town, in a world with a staunch anti-undead Norse-mythology-adjacent religion; however, he kills someone for discovering his secret, but is also in some sense vindicated by the fact that when stuff starts to be discovered, the royalty of the setting tries to hunt him to score points in a succession game of 'whomever does the most impressive deed succeeds the throne' even in the face of an actual existential threat to the setting that he's in the process of helping them deal with; and in the end he gets fed up enough to essentially kill the cycle of life and death (in the form of taking out Hel, and then Yggdrasil) and basically makes everyone immortal undead of a sort by fiat and in doing so effectively brings back (most of) anyone he's ever killed except for a few load bearing deities that needed to stay dead for his immortality plans to go off. The story does a good job of making it such that neither letting him be, supporting him, or opposing him is the obvious and justifiable choice - it boils down to details that different people are likely to fall different ways on. That's part of what makes it interesting.

Jay R
2023-04-22, 11:13 PM
To the person arguing that real-world issues we can't discuss are the only and true reasons for undead in games...

If this is addressed to me, then it is a misrepresentation of my words. Those real-world issues are the original reasons, and have influenced all later reasons, but I specifically wrote the following as other reasons:

Skeletons exist in D&D, probably because Jason fought them in a well-known scene in the 1963 movie *Jason and the Argonauts*.
Zombies exist in D&D, probably because of several zombie-oriented horror films.
Wights and wraiths exist in D&D because they were included in *The Lord of the Rings* (just like orcs, hobbits, ents, and balrogs, though the latter three were quickly renamed “halflings”, “treants”, and “balors”).
Mummies exist in D&D primarily because of several mummy-oriented horror films (and possibly a Jonny Quest episode).
Vampires exist in D&D because Dracula movies were popular in the mid-20th century.

EC Comics of the 1950s was also probably a major influence on several of them.

These things exist in D&D because they exist in the fantasy & horror genres. There’s no point looking beyond the known sources for D&D inspiration.

I will try to expand and explain this without breaking the rules.

Most traditional attitudes about the undead come from cultures that believed in life after death, believed in the sanctity of life, and believed that reviving a body into undead was desecrating something sacred.

We cannot discuss whether we share those beliefs, but trying to understand why undead are considered evil without recognizing that these attitudes are (at least originally) behind it is like trying to understand why months are the length they are without considering the phases of the moon.


There is a difference between "Why" undead are in games, as in "how did it come to be the case that the undead are in the game," and "why" undead are in a particular game, as in "what purpose do the undead serve in the game." Those two questions are not the same, and your take only addresses the first while this thread is actually about the latter.

For those of us trying to simulate classic fantasy to some extent, they are, if not the same question, then at least closely related questions. The undead are in my game because they existed in classical fantasy stories, and I'm using them to attempt to re-create the emotions of those stories. [Yes, I also use several D&D-specific monsters, but I lean far more towards traditional ones. I would much rather have trolls than beholders, for instance.]

Also, I specifically addressed the second question as follows:


My take on the undead is that they are abominations against life and nature, and generally considered sacrilege.

That's not my invention; it's the cultural background, totally independent of D&D. I think of them that way for the same reason I think of dwarves as short, bearded miners. I'm simply using the most common cultural approach.

That is the answer to "what purpose do the undead serve in the game", at least for the games I run.

Fiery Diamond
2023-04-23, 11:31 AM
If this is addressed to me, then it is a misrepresentation of my words. Those real-world issues are the original reasons, and have influenced all later reasons, but I specifically wrote the following as other reasons:

Skeletons exist in D&D, probably because Jason fought them in a well-known scene in the 1963 movie *Jason and the Argonauts*.
Zombies exist in D&D, probably because of several zombie-oriented horror films.
Wights and wraiths exist in D&D because they were included in *The Lord of the Rings* (just like orcs, hobbits, ents, and balrogs, though the latter three were quickly renamed “halflings”, “treants”, and “balors”).
Mummies exist in D&D primarily because of several mummy-oriented horror films (and possibly a Jonny Quest episode).
Vampires exist in D&D because Dracula movies were popular in the mid-20th century.

EC Comics of the 1950s was also probably a major influence on several of them.

These things exist in D&D because they exist in the fantasy & horror genres. There’s no point looking beyond the known sources for D&D inspiration.

I will try to expand and explain this without breaking the rules.

Most traditional attitudes about the undead come from cultures that believed in life after death, believed in the sanctity of life, and believed that reviving a body into undead was desecrating something sacred.

We cannot discuss whether we share those beliefs, but trying to understand why undead are considered evil without recognizing that these attitudes are (at least originally) behind it is like trying to understand why months are the length they are without considering the phases of the moon.



For those of us trying to simulate classic fantasy to some extent, they are, if not the same question, then at least closely related questions. The undead are in my game because they existed in classical fantasy stories, and I'm using them to attempt to re-create the emotions of those stories. [Yes, I also use several D&D-specific monsters, but I lean far more towards traditional ones. I would much rather have trolls than beholders, for instance.]

Also, I specifically addressed the second question as follows:


My take on the undead is that they are abominations against life and nature, and generally considered sacrilege.

That's not my invention; it's the cultural background, totally independent of D&D. I think of them that way for the same reason I think of dwarves as short, bearded miners. I'm simply using the most common cultural approach.

That is the answer to "what purpose do the undead serve in the game", at least for the games I run.

And that's fine for you, personally, but your goals and experiences are not universal. Just because your answer to the questions are same because all you care about is mimicking previous fiction and its tone/emotions/asthetics does not make the questions, in their essence, the same.

Also, you've done quite a bit of equating related things as though they were the exact same thing in your arguments, such as referring to "traditional morality" and historical religious and spiritual reasons as being the sole explanation possible as though a specific moral framework within a game is the exact same thing as those, just because the game's moral framework was undoubtedly heavily influenced by those things by necessity (otherwise we'd have Blue and Orange morality).

You also seem to have this odd idea that starting from a conclusion and working backward is somehow wrong and disingenuous. It's not. Saying "In my games, I want undead to be evil. What, specifically, in my game setting makes them evil? Well, let's define exactly what undead are and how they work, and in the process include details that will make them evil" is not wrong, disingenuous, or anything of the sort, and does not make that explanation somehow not the "real" reason. Because the reason they are evil on the fiction layer is just as valid a thing as the reason they are evil on the real world layer. Similarly, if you want to use them as metaphor or whatever, that is also just as valid as whatever cultural precedent brought you to your starting point.

Mechalich
2023-04-23, 02:34 PM
You also seem to have this odd idea that starting from a conclusion and working backward is somehow wrong and disingenuous. It's not. Saying "In my games, I want undead to be evil. What, specifically, in my game setting makes them evil? Well, let's define exactly what undead are and how they work, and in the process include details that will make them evil" is not wrong, disingenuous, or anything of the sort, and does not make that explanation somehow not the "real" reason. Because the reason they are evil on the fiction layer is just as valid a thing as the reason they are evil on the real world layer. Similarly, if you want to use them as metaphor or whatever, that is also just as valid as whatever cultural precedent brought you to your starting point.

Exactly. I'd also add that, even if the inspiration for something in game is based in real world cultural context or even stolen from a specific single work of fantasy, importing that thing into a game applies that reasoning to the fiction layer of the game. 'Undead are sacrilegious abominations against life and nature' is a statement that presumes multiple things about the fiction layer. This is important because, in the universe of the game, those myths are true, and without consideration of how that works this can produce contradictions. For example, many D&D settings have a god of undeath, to whom the existence of undead is the opposite of sacrilegious but is instead a direct divine goal and becoming undead is potentially a sacred mission. The very idea of something being universally sacrilegious doesn't work in a system of D&D style polytheism, because universal taboos make no sense in that context (which is why D&D has a whole bunch of non-deity based reasons involving negative energy and stuff to try and explain why undead are bad).

MetroAlien
2023-04-24, 01:00 AM
as for "why is it evil to raise the dead", at the very least, it's because it's disrespecting the dead and/or the surviving family.

A close enough example would be if a party member started harvesting organs from the local mortuary to sell on the black market, or worse yet use in their own experiments.
Extra taboo since it involves the violation of bodily autonomy, as opposed to mere 'property'.
Pretty sure that's universally considered a faux pas.

speaking of... more often than not, said dead are then used for evil purposes.

which then makes it more OK to "kill" undead, as opposed to the living

I don't think you'll find many players unironically trying to argue that it's OK to randomly kill the "vegan" vampire who hired the party to build an orphanage.


As for why it's usually considered "evil" to become undead oneself,
it's because it usually involves evil prerequisites, such as a blood sacrifice, etc...
Once again, more often than not, the people who do become undead of their own accord, do so for evil purposes anyway.


I guess there's a bit of selection bias going on.
Some undead that committed no evil and weren't the result of evil are unlikely to become part of a story worth telling.
At that point you might as well ask why there's conflict in our games and we can't just all have an in-character tea-party.
(a legitimate question my 4-yo sister asked me when I tried to introduce her to D&D as an edgy teen)

NovenFromTheSun
2023-04-25, 10:24 AM
Undead have lost part of what makes them fully human (relatively speaking). Zombies have lost their mind, making them little more than feral beasts. Skeletons have lost their will and identity, making them mere tools for who or whatever entity or force controls them. Ghosts lose their bodies, a constant reminder of their death despite still being themselves. And so on and so forth.

Angelalex242
2023-04-26, 07:55 PM
That's interesting.

Vampires are notably more human than every other sort of undead.

And yet they've perhaps lost the most of all.

Bohandas
2023-04-27, 07:51 AM
You and Satinavian are just being cynical of what the medium of your hobby can do. Again, it's like you remembered Sturgeon's revelation but forgot the corollary. 90% of everything is crap, yes. 10% isn't. Using that 90% of crap to draw wide-reaching conclusions of what the entire medium is capable of is hence dubious. There is nothing inherent about tabletop roleplaying games as a medium that makes it unable to carry 2nd or 3rd floor takes.

I thought the corollary was that "everything" includes the remaining 10%

gbaji
2023-04-27, 04:45 PM
Most traditional attitudes about the undead come from cultures that believed in life after death, believed in the sanctity of life, and believed that reviving a body into undead was desecrating something sacred.

I think you may be overselling the "traditional attitudes" angle a bit here. Most of the references you previously mentioned, the undead were not villains merely because they were a "mockery of life and/or the natural order, or whatever", but primarily because they were trying to kill people in the stories.

No one showed up at Dracula's castle to kill him in the original story, just because he was a vampire. He held whatshisname prisoner, then travelled to London to take his fiance as his bride, killed a bunch of people while there, and then escaped back to Transylvaia, with our heroes hot on his heels. He was a villain because of what he did, not what he was. Now yes, we could argue that "what he did" was due to his nature and his curse and whatnot, but we could go down that rabbit hole for any antagonist if we really wanted to.

And sure. That attitude may very well be mirrored in a game environment as well. Heck, doubly so in many fantasy genres where there are specific deities, with specific ideologies, and perhaps a known afterlife mechanism. So that's setting dependent IMO. But what's not is the whole "you're a villain based on what you do" element to this.

I think this is part of what makes vampires specifically very interesting as villains. They *need* to drink blood. Usually sentient blood (sometimes not though). Which creates an interesting quandary in terms of "my life versus your life" sort of thing. Or "could you have a good vampire"? And I think you can have a lot of fun playing around with these concepts. But sure, outside of ideologicallly focused opposition, generally speaking it's going to be about the actions. So an undead that "has to kill the living to survive" is kinda automatically set up to be an enemy. But you can also introduce some forms of undead that don't have that requirement, and then see what happens.

Does a mummy have to be evil? I don't see why. In most of the films, they are killing people cause the people are invading their home and stealing their stuff. Maybe the mummy is right to do those things? Maybe not? kInda depends on the specific situations. That Barrow Wight may not be "evil" at all. It's just defending its resting place. As long as you don't go there and potentially steal his stuff in his burrial mound, you're fine. It wasn't like he was wandering around the hillsides haunting folks or anything (at least I don't recall so). Or maybe he is evil (I think he pulled them into his realm when they rested on top of his mound) and desires to kill the living, but just can't reach out beyond the mound itself? Who knows. This is all stuff you get to decide when you create a setting and put undead into it.


Regardless of whatever you think is "traditional" or "classic", you are free as a game setting creator to do whatever you want with undead. IMO, that's the beauty of RPGs. We get to create different worlds with different rules, and entirely different cultures.