The Undead - What do they stand for?

[gbaji]

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]

The next banshee I introduce to a story will be ample and female.
So you know it's over when she sings

[KorvinStarmast]

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.

[Quertus]

The Undead - What do they stand for?

In my experience? Brains, usually.

Ever. The undead stand forever.

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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."

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]

"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."

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]

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.

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]

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]

the kid just stole an apple, because it was hungry.

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

[Bohandas]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

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]

@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]

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]

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!

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]

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]

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.

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.