Threats a graveyard keeper faces during his shift

[GraySeaJones]

Graveyards in tabletop RPGs are almost invariably dangerous, dangerous places. Obviously, then, grave keepers have got be at a pretty high level if they've lasted a while.

I need help in coming up with a list of things that a fantasy graveyard keeper could reasonably be expected to face over his career. So far I have:

• Vengeful spirits of the dead
• Curses (usually as a result of the above)
• Zombies and skeletons
• Necromancer raids
• Grave robbers
• Ghouls
• Giant maggots
• Being avoided by polite company

Specific monsters that frequent graveyards, from any system, would be appreciated as well.

Thank you for your help. It's getting late, so I may not be able to respond until quite half a day later or so.

[HolyCouncilMagi]

Yet another major concern is just about any meat-eating creature with a burrow speed.

I've heard being a wizard makes everything easier, and this doesn't appear to be an exception.

[Slipperychicken]

Maybe he's a 1st level commoner who just runs out and files an extermination request whenever the undead show up?

EDIT: If it's a serious enough problem, and his employers are sufficiently loaded, and they care enough about his life they issue him a shirt of wraith-stalking, to let him keep working, even during infestations.

[JellyPooga]

- Pesky kids (potentially creepy looking) getting drunk behind the mausoleums and littering.
- Stubborn weeds (optionally infused/animated with the dark energies of the dead).
- Dogs, rats and other scavengers
- Adventurers looking for grave goods (similar to grave robbers, but less pragmatic about the actual details of their chosen profession...adventurers tend to think of themselves as "the good guys" after all)
- Adventurers looking to pick a fight (they often like it so much that they do it during their time off)
- Irate family members of the recently dead (similar to adventurers looking for a fight)

[Broken Crown]

Don't forget moody, black-clad Danish princes showing up and delivering soliloquies at you.

[Rhynn]

- Wizard's apprentices sent to recover unsavory spell components. (Not necromancers looking for corpses, just stuff like "the thighbone of an ancestor" or "the skull of an adulterer," etc.)
- Wizard's apprentices sent to find non-existing body parts as a form of hazing. ("Hahaha, he really dug up a grave! What a geek!")
- Cultists performing ceremonies in a place of death.
- Followers of a rival deity of death who want to take over running the cemetery, either by literaly invading and conquering it, or making it look so incompetently run the town fathers give the job to their temple.
- Kobolds / goblins / dwarves / etc. who dug their way into the catacombs by accident and now refuse to leave.

[BWR]

- People trying to build houses there because they "like the neighborhood/ambience"
- Members of highly intrusive (and annoying) missionarying religions coming and trying to perform their own death rites for the dead "so that they may be embraced by the loving arms of XXX, rather than waste away in hell"
- Similar to above, only try they dig up and cremate the dead to prevent undead from rising (Rokugan is the only RPG culture I know of that learned its lesson after the first great zombie outbreak - cremate your dead!)

[Necroticplague]

- Similar to above, only try they dig up and cremate the dead to prevent undead from rising (Rokugan is the only RPG culture I know of that learned its lesson after the first great zombie outbreak - cremate your dead!)

There's a special type of undead that's a burning skeleton that can be created when you try that.Fire immune, obviously.

-Bone Oozes
-Negative energy elementals
-Morhgs (if executed people are buried there)
-Shadows

[GraySeaJones]

Yet another major concern is just about any meat-eating creature with a burrow speed.

I've heard being a wizard makes everything easier, and this doesn't appear to be an exception.

Earth elementals seem like the way to go there. A cleric might see some success in dealing with such things as well.

Maybe he's a 1st level commoner who just runs out and files an extermination request whenever the undead show up?

EDIT: If it's a serious enough problem, and his employers are sufficiently loaded, and they care enough about his life they issue him a shirt of wraith-stalking, to let him keep working, even during infestations.

I'd at least hope the grave keeper is able to take a wight or two, since the infestation problem only gets worse as you let it... Any spawning undead has the potential to get pretty nasty, and a 1st-level commoner just adds fuel to the fire.

Thanks for the suggestion about the wraith-stalking attire. At-will detect undead looks very, very useful. It's unfortunate that graves are over three feet deep, so you can't tell whether something just came back or not.

- Similar to above, only try they dig up and cremate the dead to prevent undead from rising (Rokugan is the only RPG culture I know of that learned its lesson after the first great zombie outbreak - cremate your dead!)

You know, I started thinking about that not long after I posted the thread. The only problem is that the Raise Dead spell, the most accessible form of resurrection, needs the entire body intact. But since that doesn't work after CL days, once a corpse has been left around for 2-3 weeks you could cut off a finger, stick it in a labeled jar, and cremate the body.

Of course, a 2-3 week window while keeping a "fresh" corpse is pretty darn significant.

[BWR]

You know, I started thinking about that not long after I posted the thread. The only problem is that the Raise Dead spell, the most accessible form of resurrection, needs the entire body intact. But since that doesn't work after CL days, once a corpse has been left around for 2-3 weeks you could cut off a finger, stick it in a labeled jar, and cremate the body.

Of course, a 2-3 week window while keeping a "fresh" corpse is pretty darn significant.

I....don't see the point. Most dead people are left that way. Either raising them is too expensive or the gods get a bit upset at people ignoring the natural order of things too often and withhold their blessings. And you wouldn't inter people you planned on resurrecting anyway. At least I've never come across people digging up dead people in cemeteries to riase them.

[GraySeaJones]

I....don't see the point. Most dead people are left that way. Either raising them is too expensive or the gods get a bit upset at people ignoring the natural order of things too often and withhold their blessings. And you wouldn't inter people you planned on resurrecting anyway. At least I've never come across people digging up dead people in cemeteries to riase them.

Eh... You're probably right. I'm thinking too much from an adventurer's point of view, here - "irrevocably lost" feels harsh, but most people wouldn't be able to afford a Raise anyway. (And those who can will just pay up front.)

[Sartharina]

- Pesky kids (potentially creepy looking) getting drunk behind the mausoleums and littering.

-- Pesky kids and their meddling dog unmasking his attempts to fake a haunting in the graveyard to artificially depress property values and scam the local villagers.

[Melville's Book]

-- Pesky kids and their meddling dog unmasking his attempts to fake a haunting in the graveyard to artificially depress property values and scam the local villagers.

--- Incredibly genre-savvy adults and their freakishly large talking great dane (who for some reason doesn't just maul the costumed criminals) figuring out the odd and inefficient plans of amateur criminals through a mixture of lucky guesses and being in the wrong place at the right time.*

Sorry, my internal spellcheck activated.

[Slipperychicken]

--- Incredibly genre-savvy adults and their freakishly large talking great dane (who for some reason doesn't just maul the costumed criminals) figuring out the odd and inefficient plans of amateur criminals through a mixture of lucky guesses and being in the wrong place at the right time.*

I think you misspelled "Player Characters".

[Sith_Happens]

I think you misspelled "Player Characters".

Actually, I think he defined it.

[Kid Jake]

--- Incredibly genre-savvy adults and their freakishly large talking great dane (who for some reason doesn't just maul the costumed criminals)

That's always bothered me! I actually made a comic that's just a giant rant about it.


On topic though, isn't this why there's so many gods of Death? Wouldn't a gravekeeper be a cleric so he could be like 'No! Bad wight! Get back in your grave!"

[LokiRagnarok]

- Pesky kids (potentially creepy looking) getting drunk behind the mausoleums and littering.

There is a lot of potential here!

- Pesky kids making out in the graveyard and getting hunted by zombies
- Pesky kids performing a "fake" ritual to summon something and accidentally succeeding
- Pesky kids smoking <insert local drug here> and accidentally setting fire to something
- Pesky wizard kids harrassing you (let's see how well you can dig a grave after a Mud to Stone on the ground!)

[Melville's Book]

I think you misspelled "Player Characters".

Actually, I think he defined it.

This is just going right the hell into my signature.

[Doorhandle]

There's enough material in here for a campaign.
* Pesky mafia types trying to bury a former associate alive.
* Two-bit necromancers trying to be the next BBEG.
*A perky necrophiliac looking for love in all the wrong places.

...sounds familiar.

[Rodin]

Itinerant time travelers wandering in, trying to steal a certain book, then mis-saying the ritual words to safely grab it and waking all the dead in the graveyard instead.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

Surely the point of a graveyard is that it's holy ground - so the spirits of the dead are at peace?
Are the gods / churches in your game setting so slack that they let an obvious thing like this slide?

[~xFellWardenx~]

Surely the point of a graveyard is that it's holy ground - so the spirits of the dead are at peace?
Are the gods / churches in your game setting so slack that they let an obvious thing like this slide?

That might be the point, certainly, but it's a rare thing to be meant literally, as your average hillside villages and the like are highly unlikely to each have enough level 3+ Clerics to maintain a 24/7 Consecrate on an entire graveyard (they can get rather big).

[CarpeGuitarrem]

"*sigh* Not another wight infestation..."

[Slipperychicken]

"*sigh* Not another wight infestation..."

[Reaches for his +1 Undead-Bane Shovel]

[Gildedragon]

[Reaches for his +1 Undead-Bane Shovel]

And his Lantern of Rebuking; after all you ought give the tennants one chance before you lay down the Smite

Clearly the grave keeper is a venerable-age fella

As to dangers: taint elementals, undeath fueled plants, living headstones, vandals, PCs (ie vandals), Deer, Hunters (seriously look at Vienna's Zentralfriedhoff, so big it was used as hunting grounds), Druids, Druids wildshaped into Deer, constructs made of grave dirt or broken tombstones, Vampires gathering up dirt, Historians taking rubbings, Fog

[~xFellWardenx~]

Awakened Deer Urban Druids Wildshaped into gravestones...

[Venom3053000]

attacks from a Corpse Gatherer looking to add more corpses to itself

[TuggyNE]

That might be the point, certainly, but it's a rare thing to be meant literally, as your average hillside villages and the like are highly unlikely to each have enough level 3+ Clerics to maintain a 24/7 Consecrate on an entire graveyard (they can get rather big).

Nah, just have a single bishop or whatever come in and cast hallow, once, and there you go. (Might need it cast again when the graveyard expands, but the "undead prevention" part lasts indefinitely.)

[Slipperychicken]

Nah, just have a single bishop or whatever come in and cast hallow, once, and there you go. (Might need it cast again when the graveyard expands, but the "undead prevention" part lasts indefinitely.)

That really depends on the availability of mid-level clergy. Besides, hallowing a graveyard would be expensive (visit a graveyard sometime. Even for a small town, a 40ft radius circle is barely going to make a dent. And those things are 1000gp a pop), and the bishop probably has better things to do, such as running his part of the church or persuading mercenaries to clear zombies out of the graveyard.

[veti]

I can't believe no-one has yet mentioned:

• Freshly made vampires rising
• Gargoyles
• Weeping angels