The Undead - What do they stand for?

[NichG]

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

Yeah, in general I agree.

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

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

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

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

[Satinavian]

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

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

[Vahnavoi]

@Bohandas: oh, okay. Extrapolating the metaphor to societal level is indeed a distinct take and somewhat less common.

---

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

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

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

---

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

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

Neither needs to be true.

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

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

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

[Satinavian]

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

[Vahnavoi]

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

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

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

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

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

[Bohandas]

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

That's the Doomguard

[PhoenixPhyre]

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

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

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

[Vahnavoi]

And the game doesn't have the same status as a "teacher" that an actual teacher does.

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

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

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

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

[Satinavian]

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

I am not convinced of "10% of everything is good". Some things don't work. And i have yet to find an RPG that uses 2nd or 3rd floor and is such a hidden gem instead of another disaster. Maybe i am cynical, but i don't think so. It is not something i need or particularly want our hobby to be able to do, so i don't feel any negativity about this weakness.

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

[Bohandas]

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

Vaguely relevant story from high school--

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

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

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

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

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

[NichG]

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

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

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

[Angelalex242]

Depends on the genre. If you switch to, say, Buffy...then you have 'always evil' vampires...unless they get cursed (Angel) or chipped (Spike) or are too dumb to be evil properly (Harmony).

[Blackhawk748]

F it, I'll bite.

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

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

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

Idk, what are they doing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It depends.

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

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

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

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

[Bohandas]

Old ideas. Old ways of life. Old values. Old beliefs. Brought back to meance the living once more.

[Fiery Diamond]

To the person arguing that real-world issues we can't discuss are the only and true reasons for undead in games...

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

[NichG]

F it, I'll bite.

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

Idk, what are they doing?

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

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

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

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

It depends.

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

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

[Jay R]

To the person arguing that real-world issues we can't discuss are the only and true reasons for undead in games...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also, I specifically addressed the second question as follows:

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

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

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

[Fiery Diamond]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Also, I specifically addressed the second question as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Mechalich]

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

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

[MetroAlien]

as for "why is it evil to raise the dead", at the very least, it's because it's disrespecting the dead and/or the surviving family.

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

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

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

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


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


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

[NovenFromTheSun]

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

[Angelalex242]

That's interesting.

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

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

[Bohandas]

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

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

[gbaji]

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

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

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

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

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

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


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