The Undead - What do they stand for?

[Vahnavoi]

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]

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]

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]

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]

The Undead - What do they stand for?

In my experience? Brains, usually.

[Rynjin]

In my experience? Brains, usually.

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]

In my experience? Brains, usually.

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]

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]

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, while it originated in a film (Return of the Living Dead, 1985), it is a Simpson episode from 1992 that popularised this trope.

[Mastikator]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

Spoiler: Castlevania (Netflix)

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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]

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

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, 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.

Spoiler: Land of the Dead

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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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

• 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]

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]

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]

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]

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.<sup>1

1</sup>With 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.

Spoiler: 1970s World Background from Jay R

Show

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]

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.