A lot of people are mentioning organ donation/ donating bodies for science as an alternative system on which we can base an ethical undead system. I should have touched on it in the video, but didn't. Essentially, I dismissed it early because I became immediately wary about incentives. If regular people were to get any kind of reward in a programme like this, either for themselves or their family, we would likely see a class divide rear its head immediately. The very poorest and most desperate may find themselves with no choice but to sign up. I completely failed to consider the version of this where people donate their bodies with full knowledge of what will happen for a purely altruistic reward. I'm not certain if that works or not; it is possible that there aren't enough genuine altruists to make it work, or that burial/cremation practices are too entrenched in a culture to get any volunteers. Sure, a society with a different conception of what to do with a corpse may find many more volunteers, but with those news stories every so often where 'bodies donated to science' are used in weapons tests instead, I fear that it may be a system prone to being killed off by even the spreading of a bad rumour. I will say, I should have discussed it regardless. Maybe I'll make a video discussing alternate death and burial practices... stay tuned; it's spooky season after all. -Tom.
I think you're Seeing a Good thing as though it was potentially a Bad thing there... If a System of incentives and rewards for signing a "Organ donor Card" were to be put in place, this would HELP Poor people more than Hurt them. Sure this System would Eventually Cause some people to be Effectively forced to sign it, But doing so would effectively Remove them from Poverty, or at least Reduce their poverty, while they live. Which to me seems like a pretty Good Alternative to just STAYING poor, starving and Miserable until the day they die. Remember, they'd have Been poor Regardless before signing the Card, or if such a system existed or not, But with this system in place, there's a way out of Poverty that would not be available to them if it didn't Exist (And no other Social programs to reduce poverty existed either). Plus, it's not like Signing the Blasted Card is gonna lower their standards of Living WHILE they're alive, in fact it's Nearly Assured to improve them. For all intents and purposes, this is a Social Welfare System with Extra Steps and Benefits for the state(or whoever is gonna Put the Corpse to work). It should also be noted that if they live in a Society where they consider the Soul to be the person(Which would likely be Standard in any Setting where Souls are Tangible things Like D&D), not the body it inhabits(That Belongs to them but it IS not them), then what attachment would they have to their Body after their death? Why would they care in ANY way what gets done with their body after Death? If they get payed, while they are alive, to allow their body to be used after they've Left it behind, all the better! I Mean I guess they could be Selfish and do the equivalent of "No, you're not allowed to use my car or my house after I die! When I'm Dead you Destroy them!", but That sounds pretty Petty when put in that context eh?
The thing about real world poverty exploitation is that the people are still alive. Plasma Centers primarily target poor people, because a hundred bucks a week is enough to probably not starve. But with it being after death, it's less exploitation of poor people, and more an income form to provide for a family even in death. While I could see the wealthy preferring to avoid it and wanting lavish tombs to show they are special, I would expect most families, poor and middle income alike, to participate because it provides more stability over time and lifts their family upwards. Imagine if your dead grandpa got paid a normal wage to work, even in death. In a job their muscles could no longer perform due to age, but their bones can. It moves most dangerous jobs away from the impoverished, and into an undead labor force. In addition, it's entirely possible that a kingdom could, if it held a system like this long enough, enter into a near post-scarcity economy. As more basic jobs are filled by the dead, less need for the living to fill basic roles are needed. Only a few people would be needed to direct and oversee the dead, and of course highly skilled craftsmen to produce luxury goods. And voluntary intelligent undead could also fulfill the latter as well. Eventually you hit a point where your entire primary labor force is undead, and you can simply allow the citizens a reversed tax. In life, they are paid a monthly stipend to live a modest but comfortable life, but in death they will work to provide for the nation in exchange. They can still choose to work if they desire to do so, but are otherwise free to follow their passions and interests. The only major downside to any form of compensation would be that if desperate enough, a family might selectively unalive specific members who are unable to work due to age or cognitive impairment.
Morals and Ethics are relative to society culture... I can think of a society where only ppl who distinguish thenselfs will be animated. In this particular case reanimation is more of a reward them a punishment.
In my games: Undeath and necromancy are morally neutral, but it's surprisingly easy to get from "we may as well animate the dead to work our fields" to "the biggest difference between a live serf and a dead one is the amount of complaining".
Yeah, this is a huge problem the video doesn't discuss. Especially if the undead are cheaper to maintain or easier to control than people with free will, it puts the living and the dead into competition. I think zombies are slaves, but even without the ethical considerations of the zombies, people who have to compete with slaves for their lives and livelihoods are hardly better off.
Funny enough, I ran what I liked to call the "Friendly Neighborhood Necromancer" in a D&D campaign. He went around helping with harvests, rooting out bandits and culling monster populations. Initially, he erred on the side of justice and caution in his quest to de-vilify and normalize necromancy, first getting the permission of the townsfolk in general, then contacting each soul in question to ask for permission (You might be surprised how fast some folks are willing to crawl out of the grave to protect their kin). After much study, and in one instance directly consulting with actual divinity, he confirmed that Reanimation as applied by Animate Dead did not infringe on the rights of the soul. It was purely his own life force giving motion to the skeletons and zombies. Thanks to his efforts, the kingdom he was in adopted the practice of using skeletal draft beasts (horses, oxen ect ) for much of the kingdom's brute force labor and to allow families to animate their loved ones bones to help bring in the harvest, after which they were respectfully interred once more.
That last part sounds very fun. I'd imagine that they would have harvest festivals based around the raising of their family members, harvesting crops, then returning their loved ones to the ground.
Eldar wraithguard are often volunteers who let themselves be reinstated in a wraithguard automata to defend their craftworld. It's still gnarly and awful for them, and the living eldar don't like it when they have to. They are stirred when the gestalt spirit of the craftworld as a whole turns to martial moods.
@Embassy_of_Jupiter Only went to war once. By the end of it I had 10 Dracolichs under my command and a standing army of some 40k Skeletons, Death Knights and Wraiths (All composed of volunteers who wanted to defend their homes). Utterly steamrolled the invading country and sacked their capitol city within a month. Zero civilian casualties. Built a massive mausoleum to house the army and laid them to rest, ready to be called on again should the need arise. After that, my necromancer declined all rewards save the induction of the aforementioned use of undead draft beasts and the harvest holiday (which was themed much like the mexican day of the dead). He retired from active service to watch over the mausoleum city as a good lich, to ensure their rest wasn't disturbed without very good reason.
@Embassy_of_Jupiterconsent is key there... what's wrong with an undead army of consenting resurrected? Plus you'd need very high level magic to bring back any undead soilder a second time because their bodies would likely be destroyed in a physical battle. I don't see how this is a slippery slope at all.
Cool, how did they deal with the fact the necromancer had to recast the spell every day to regain control over the undeads, otherwise they'd turn 'feral'? Or was this just homebrew to avoid that huge issue?
I ran a RP campaign some years back where the players were moving into a region that had been plagued by the undead for thousands of years. And as the story progressed little by little the players began to realize that they were infact being the villains invading the lands of a peaceful culture following a sort of Druidic religion of life and death. "You receive in life and serve in death" So the soulless skeleton trying to murder you was actually some old grandpa just trying to defend his family, his home and his country.
It doesnt sound too bad when you put it like that "You will receive in life" meaning you can find reasons of purpose without the need of worry And "Serve in death" meaning your body will help others less worry and better find their purpose Its not like anyone can capture souls as it can lay to rest So i see this as a win!
Also had an idea for a human faction like this for a game/world. A feudal society where in life you're allowed to enjoy it to the fullest. You can relax, eat, sleep, drink, and party till you drop. And then upon death your lord who decides by whoever is born to be a Necromancer. Revives you to work the manual Labor and fight in defending the land. And this can lead to some pretty interesting situations like what if someone wants to be a soldier? Well under the tradition of this land you would indeed have to sacrifice your life before serving in death the benefit of this being that since not many of the people take this route they die old where their body is of a less vital condition. So if you offer your life in your prime the Lord can maintain your body in a better condition. These undead soldiers are usually the champions and perform better in battle. Ofc the neighboring factions few this as sacrilegious and the people as debaucherous but at the end of the day they're enjoying their lives and paying for it in their deaths.
Makes me think of a story I saw and cherish when I'm world-building for others to this day. Players come into this dark forest where undead monsters are said to reign. Our heroes show up, find the monsters in question; a family of vampires masquerading as nobility. Plans made, adventurers are off to go stake them and/or kill these creatures of the night when their villagers, up to this point thought to be thralls, show up with all their worldly possessions, begging them, take it as tribute and leave. Turned out the vampires *do* feed on the villagers in their domain, but do their utmost *NEVER* to kill, only slake their thirst. In exchange, the villagers are asked for just enough to pay their dues to the king they live under plus just a pittance of gold for themselves. They have no need to push their bootheel down on the peasants, they are fed and *maybe* take a little off the top to furnish their home to legitimize themselves as aristocrats when other nobles come through. Otherwise a solid 80% of the villager's wealth stays in their pocket, they get to afford the nicer things in life and maybe almost live like middle-class folk as time goes on. They also slaughter any bandits that harass them and scare away any monsters that bother them.
Does it include an encounter with a little zombie girl with intact and well maintained clothing and headpiece and the villagers defending said zombie girl? I remember watching someone doing a reading of that specific reddit post
Its always inteigued me that, as far as DnD and its derivatives go, necromancy is the subject of so much debate, when theres a whole school of wizardry that revolves around tampering with the minds of the living to get what you want. The Enchantment School is just magic roofying.
It comes from D&D's roots as a game about IRL Religions waring like countries. IN old school D&D hey had "alignment languages" that as Gary put it was like, Latin being the language of the Church. Enchantment is a lower priority as it was being used by the "right" side, but necromancy was a symbol of "evil" while healing was a symbol of "good." Like Cavaliers/Paladins/priests, etc. leaned heavily on the Catholic? church, while Bards were based on the Celtic Fili, with heavy handed restrictions based around depictions of the original cultures they were borrowed from. IIRC Cavaliers had to be lawful and had a code of conduct they could lose their class abilities over.
@IrvineTheHunter old-school D&D alignment also had genuine impacts on the world. Alignment, just like magic, was absolutely real, and the various planes of existence each encompassed an alignment. The plane of negative energy, the ultimate source of magical undeath, is inherently evil in most published settings, and so raising undead and controlling them was almost always inseparably associated with evil magic-users seeking to dominate them for their own personal gain. Someone who uses charming magic would clearly dictate it's use based on their assigned alignment and use it (to their knowledge) genuinely for good, if they were aligned so, whereas an evil caster would use it to further their personal aspirations.
@@UpToSpeedOnJaguartheres a reason the saying "God save us from men doing the lords work", and the variations thereof, exists irl. a very good chunk of the worlds atrocities have been commited in the name of some god or another and "the common good". ultimately there is no scenario where using magic to force someone to do something is a good thing. a violation of free will is a violation of free will. WHY you did it is ultimately irrelevant to that fact.
One easy solution I can think of for ethically sourcing corpses for reanimation is volunteers. In modern society we can donate our bodies to Institutions and they'll use our remains for scientific research. A similar system might exist in a fantasy world regarding raising of undead by state sanctioned necromancers. And for the aspect of the public's perception of these undead workers, traditions might begin to form where it is seen as an honour to be reanimated, and the normalisation of the undead in everyday life would desensitise the general populace to their presence. If you've grown up with skeletons harvesting the food you eat, you won't have a negative perception of them.
Imagine having a great king and bringing him back to rule indefinitely as a vampire or lich-type. Never have succession wars and their laws will always follow the same general line. The society will be very stable and they can gain more power as a warrior or Mage until they peak in both. They also will have decades to centuries of experience.
This is a topic I've explored at length myself, admittedly in a setting that's much different than the Forgotten Realms, so I feel like I might have some comments of use. Here are a few more base cases of possible ethical use of undead: - Voluntary Reanimation. The main provider for a family has died, leaving in their will that they wish to be reanimated to help their family survive. A body of volunteers which would like to contribute to an important cause, just not at the risk of their soulful lives. An artist who has left directions to how to use his animated remains to finish his yet most important works. - Highly Dangerous or Specialized Labor. Cleaning up toxic waste, looking for survivors in a fire, playing bait to draw out a town-wrecking beast, collecting precious goods that were lost at the bottom of the sea, tirelessly guarding a depot of highly volatile material. Any job that's too dangerous or costly to perform with regular people would be more ethical or at least sensible to carry out with undead. - Reanimating Appropriate Creatures. Brainless giant arthropods that can be easily mummified with cheap alchemy. Plants and fungi, if the magic allows it. Beasts and monsters, literal or figurative, that were killed to stop them from killing. - Passive Labor. Irremovable ghosts used as part of a refrigeration system. Will-o-wisps kept away from civilization by also tricking them into fulminating and recharging arcane crystals. Letting obsessed but harmless spirits carry out the productive activities they would do anyway, such as teaching their craft, entertaining a public, share first hand recollections of historical events. I do feel like I'm only scratching the surface, here. This topic becomes even more immense once we concede that "ethics" can be highly malleable no matter what philosophies are most established in a society, especially in times of war, famine, and general crisis.
I see this absolutely leading to a (more) dystopian capitalism led by the market of souls lmao. poor families having to keep working for the good of their families as only the rich are allowed eternal rest
@@arthurwkm And despite having earned their eternal rest, the rich are still tied down by their mortal desire for more wealth, causing their own families to tear themselves apart in an attempt to get an inheritance that their dead rich relatives refuse to part with.
The Voluntary Reanimation aspect is someyhing I've been intrigued by. Perhaps common people can enter into contracts with a governing body, selling the labor their animated remains provide and the proceeds going to their next of kin for a set amount of time. Criminals can be given sentences of a specific number of years, and can serve out those sentences even after death should they expire. The most obvious problems involved on a community scale use of this includes having enough highly skilled practioners of necromancy (and possible necromantic magical enhancers) available to provide the needed reanimation, and of course the possibility of wrongful charges or draconican laws that abuse a populace to gain access to an undead workforce.
I have attempted to tackle this conundrum as well and my best efforts led me to a society with a strong military tradition employing military contracts including "life insurance" wherein soldiers opt to give their bodies to the state in exchange for a stipend to be paid to their next of kin for the duration of their service as an animated corpse. The dead could be honored annually in a parade under the guise of illusion magics to give the public some catharsis to offset their inherent revulsion.
There is an anime that had something like that where they used Frankenstein’s work to reanimate corpses to do things like labor and war. The only nation in that anime that did not do it was America because they focused a lot on machinery instead.
Funny thing is life insurance could also mean that for a part of your pay and depending on the plan you choose could mean a raise dead, resurrection, true resurrection, or reincarnation spell.
As soon as you mentioned hiding identifying features I thought of plague doctor clothing I wasn't thinking in terms of alternative races like elves but covering them head to toe, stuffing their skeletons with pleasant smelling hay; flowers; and grasses, and letting the necromancers make a competition out of creating the most complicated masks/headgear seems like it'll solve most of the anonymity issues
i had a necromancer a while back who learned his craft from a farming village. the way we ran things, people could donate their bodies to the town upon their death, and we made a variant of gentle repose that didn't preserve revivability but did preserve the body from disease and decay. as this was a game set in theros (the mtg greek setting), "returned" were different creatures. returned have intricate golden burial masks, and so we gave the zombie laborers smooth bronze masks, with no features. basically just elongated bowls. i really enjoyed it, though it ended up being mostly background detail and not factoring in too much
In the world of Overlord, the baharuth empire was experimenting with undead labor, but secretly and without much success trying to naturally create new skeletal undead. Ofc the op protag brings undead labor into the world at scale, mostly brute forcing a shift in views on necromancy in the world. The protag himself uses it for guards and farming, a vassal state starts using them for labor and their army to show their loyalty, and the dwarves use it bc mining is still pretty dangerous and their population was pretty low after warring with their enemies underground. Then people are just happy with how useful they are, while all the moral implications being put aside bc hey, do you want to argue with the undead king? He's the evil one for killing people and creating the undead, everyone else is just adapting and surviving this sudden change.
That's one thing Overlord always did quite well. It initially comes off as your usual OP isekai protag type story, only to reveal itself to be far less about the "power fantasy", and far more about how the world around Ainz reacts to having someone SO insanely powerful just appear out of nowhere. He, and the rest of Nazarick, are leagues beyond anything most of the residents could dream of, and that is naturally going to cause some massive shockwaves across all the various cities, kingdoms and empires, which watching how they all respond to these massive, rapid, and unstoppable changes makes the series rather special compared to most other isekai stuff out there.
@@NecromancyForKids Some still do their old jobs (since there is still demand given the amount of work that needs doing) but many are hired as supervisers/controllers for undead workforces. Aka they tell the undead what to do and make sure they dont mess it up.
So a ethically ambiguous technology found itself into popular fruition due to a strong advocator. Who is also a scapegoat for the adopters who ultimately use the technology to their benefit. Adopters of the technology loath and chock their ethical responsibilities to the scapegoat.
@@daniellin1726 naa they come around to it very quickly and are happy to use it. Sure its a pretty big culture shock (combined with him allowing nonhumans to also live there) but the next time we see the city its filled with calm and happy citizens. (and given that the POV characters are actively distrusting of undead and loocking for wrongdoing we can fairly confidently say its mostly real as well ^^)
@@crhoades555 ah, this type of enchantment. I'm really not used to thinking about the term in this way except for when the content is exclusively about dnd. Thanks for the clarification!;)
@@nin0fthat people see necromancy as more “inherently” evil than altering someone’s very mind really shows you how little humans truly care about reality over feelings. This extends heavily into Star Wars and the force for example: using the Jedi mind trick isn’t frowned upon but using force lighting is soooo evil your face melts to represent how evil you are. Except using the mind trick is, literally, striping someone of free will. Very tangible example of intent mattering and “grey Jedi” being a definable thing: you use mind trick to not get caught by the gestapo: you’re good. You use mind trick to kill someone to take their cool stuff: you’re evil. You use force lighting to fight off a rampaging gundark and save grandma: you’re good You use force lighting to torture your employees’ son to get him to be evil with you: you’re evil.
@@bitharne I always perceived the Jedi Mind Trick as altering perception, rather than stripping people of their free will. At least in the few instances I, not a Star Wars fan, have seen, it’s always been in the form of presenting a piece of information to your target, and having them perceive it as unquestionably true. The guard hunting down the droids didn’t stop trying to find them; he just “knew” that *those droids over there* weren’t the ones he was looking for.
I think it's interesting he landed on criminals as a moral source for necromancy. I remember reading a couple books from an indie fantasy series about a boy coming from a line of necromancers. Necromancy was painted as evil, while life magic was portrayed as good... except that necromancy allowed the dead to come back and serve humanity, working off karmic debts... and life magic had some hidden costs. It was an interesting way to flip the morality of traditional magic systems on its head.
@@Connor_McKinnon Necromancer Awakening and Necromancer Falling were the first two. There is some roughness (I think Necromancer Awakening was a debut novel), but I enjoyed them.
@@fishyfish1917 Spoilers, but the costs were that they were taking life magic from the population. As the book progresses, you find that fewer and fewer babies have been born in recent years because the high priests have siphoned off the population's energies to craft a gigantic magical barrier around their kingdom.
In my DnD setting I have a City that stores special "Death Ward" corpses in the city's Walls (think like a morgue), inside of tombs marked with plaques. This is a tradition in the city of Ravencliff; the city is on the border of a swath of the world called "The Dead Lands", named so for it having been blighted by a war between the massive armies of gods and eldritch horrors. Now there are absurd number of corpses that litter these badlands. Necromancers, adventurers, criminals on the run, bandits, slavers, monsters, and daring traders are the types that traverse this region. There are several towns and cities in the area, most of which are run by villainous sorts, Slaver Kings, necromancer cabals, mindflayer warlords, etc. There are few sanctuaries in this hostile and deadly desert of bones. This is where Ravencliff comes into play: They specifically honor their dead in various ways; some are burned and turned into ash/bone powder to be made into bricks, others are used to feed the local Ravens in a set of bi-yearly festivals, whilst others may chose to become part of the Death Ward. Those who become Ward Corpses are honored, their tombs are prayed over by the Wall watch, who are themselves necromantic clerics. These watchmen honor the dead, and raise them should trouble arise. If trouble does indeed show up, the dead are brought out to fight for their homeland. In the interior of the city, there are even spots in alleyways and in the ground near certain clearings where they store bodies in such a manner as well. This process significantly boosts the defensive ability of the city. Becoming a Ward Corpse is fully optional, but it is culturally acceptable and seen as a glorious way to honor the city and your family. I would also say that, your talk of the disgust of the dead doesn't apply to all cultures on our own planet, much less in fantasy universes that could/would be much more violent and dark. People can and will get used to such things as corpses, especially if they are brought up in this system.
@@jasdanvm3845 I wouldn't know where to start lol. Been playing it for about 15 years or so now, and the lore goes on a ways. I suppose a basic lore overview of general events may tickle your fancy? In-setting (we call it Arde, named after the main planet) stars are the truly powerful deities of the universe. They usually fight against the beings of the void, Eldritch monstrosities which seek to corrupt and destroy the light of the Starborn beacons in the inky black of space. This is am eternal war that resets and recycles itself every time the universe dies and restarts. It is the way things will always be, for light is the antithesis to darkness. Not all Starborn are good, just as not all Eldritch beings are evil. Starborn create worlds from debris in the void, and use their divinity to create life. These divinely created beings are usually subservient to their masters, though some don't even know the Star is their Master. Often Starborn create children, or "Gods" for their little creatures to worship. Other times they only make thekr Gods and watch what they do from afar. Either way, this often separates the Stars from the little ants that unknowingly owe their existences to the starborn. Starborn can manifest as physical shapes, outside of their stellar shell. This is a projection of their Divine souls, and usually takes on an aspect of their personality. Rasalas takes the form of a Lion, while Polaris takes the form of a Devilish guide dog (a hound with horns and a long tail ending in a lantern). Starborn tend to form long lasting alliances with those of their kind who agree with or benefit them, and these are called Constellations. Constellations grant Boons to those Starborn within it, like a group empowering buff of sorts. The Starborn Mirakar forms, and creates her first world: Arde. This is a peaceful planet thatbshe designs to be her own little garden. She creates dragons and other massive beasts, gifting them each with sparks of divinity of their own with which to create underlings. Dragons create lizard folk, dragon born, kobolds, tortles, and elves. Dwarves enter into the solar system via voidship-runecraft called Cladds, looking for places to settle and mine in the name of their Gods. They recognize the bountiful nature of the planet Arde, and work out a peaceful deal with the natural inhabitants, though it heavily favors the Draconic servants by far, and the elves look down on the Dwarfish explorers as though they are some form of advanced vermin. After centuries of the Dwarves typically keeping to themselves (unless the Eldritch invaded) an unnaturally massive storm breaks out the ocean, freezing any who dare sail close to it. From the tempest, the Blood of Ymir spreads, creating land as it freezes the ocean. The storms calm, but a wall of icey mist covers the interior of this newly formed frigid landmass. Arde alters it's size accordingly to account for the new landmass, seemingly not effecting the residents of the planet in any way. Humans, Giants, and various monsters invade through the mists. Entering through them in the reverse order leads to Jötunheimr, a cold plane that is not of Arde, nor seemingly this universe. The elves are disgusted by the emerging humans in particular, as they bring even more heathen gods to their already tainted planet. Even worse however, the Humans carry the obvious contagion of Starborn influence. The dwarves see a kindred spirit in these manlings, and begin to establishgood relations with them. The humans and Giants bring their own gods and starborn deities, even bringing the memories of The Dead Gods (the Norse Gods, Egyptian Gods, Abrahamoc God, etc) with them. Clashes over divine rights, land ownership, and racial purity begin to swell, leading to unmanageable warfare that still, in part, lasts to the setting's current day.
@@slippyfruit8538 A recurring primary villainous figure of sorts is a particularly gifted Elf King who sought to free Arde of it's perpetual cycles of violence: Astrom Movestil, the Frost King . He wanted to push himself and his fellow mortals far beyond the power of the Ancients, Starborn, Eldritch, and Gods to show that the creations of the Gods aren't as constrained as they seem to be. For even thinking he could make peace between the races, he was called the Mad Elf King by the majority of those who heard about his plans. At first he thought that gaining enough power would be encouraging to his fellow mortal races, but soon he found that everyone began to distrust and fear him once he made significant ground on his own. Astrom traveled to distant realms, such as Jotunheimr, the Ethereal Sea, the Valley of Bone, The Nine Hells, etc to lkearn foreign magics and secrets. He bartered with the Dwarf Durr and gained the secrets of Rune Smithing. He swam into the Astral Sea and learned Astromancy form an insane Starborn Hiding on the dark side of the Moon named "Kest" (a place where a certain faction of elves named the Sestuthi would later be banished for trying to create a God that could devour Mirakar's light and gain Her power). Astrom establishes a grand magic-based city along a desolate stretch of Jotunheimr, and invites the greatest minds of his era to join him in creation and research. The area is transformed from an icey desert wasteland into a thriving magical metropolis. After hundreds of years of research The Frost King "discovers" (is shown) secrets of the Universe, and is told how to steal the powers of foreign Stars. His knowledge of this is unknowingly flawed; a trick by an Eldritch infiltrator who sought to make the mortals of Arde into servants. This eventually ended up with Astrom creating a series of powerful artifacts that had hidden side effects, the Crowning Achievement of this research was the Crowns of Control: a series of 8 Crowns that were meant to grant massive power boosts to the wearer, and allowed them to instantly communicate with one another. These were also custom tailored for each wearer, and granted them unnatural lifespans. The reality was that the main crown that Astrom wore, (the Crown of Command) would slowly poison his mind subconsciously and as he slept. It gave him visions of great power, and ideas that would cement his downfall: Astrom would augment and tweak his creations over the decades as he was corrupted by the Outer Beings, eventually tricking those he'd given the crowns to into allowing him to augment their crowns once more. This last augmentation gave him control over them, but also twisted and cursed their forms. Seeing his allies and friends turn into monstrous forms pulled him out of his corrupted-control, but far too late to save them. Without their leaders in their right minds, nor champions strong enough to challenge them, the nations of Mortals slipped into chaos. The Frost King was blamed for pushing the world into instant war and chaos, and was shunned by most peoples, if not outright attacked by some nations. Most of the Horrible Ones (the mutated Lords) were unkillable, so they were banished via magic, trapped/sealed away, or were lured to other locations. Eventually the Arde-born God of Mankind, Zarus, devises a way to seal away Astrom in order to pave the way for the future of Arde under the banner of Humanity. Zarus has 5 children, and sends these children out to go create powerful nations of Men. After centuries, these children reunite and invite The Mad Elf King over to their Great Hall for a feast in order to allegedly discuss making perpetual peace with the Draconic Races. They set for him spot at the table with a throne of Brass for him to sit, and told the Arcane master that it was a seat of honor created specifically for him. During the feast, Zarus suddenly appeared, and tore the now emboldened Divine Sparks from all 5 of his children in order to bind Astrom to the specially designed Brass Throne. Brass is a metal of evil, and takes to cursed magics better than any other; in this case it was the magic of a powerful and hateful God who was being empowered by the belief of 5 large nations of Men. Zarus tied the curse to a powerful bloodline of Kings, and only they (when donning the correct suit of powerful gear) undo his curse if they so needed to use Astrom for some means or another in a time of great peril. Then Zarus cast the Frost King into the Ocean between the main continent of Men (Barressea) and the Landmass of Ymir's Blood (Jotunheimr). He knew this wouldn't kill him, but it would prevent him from getting in his way any longer. Unsurprisingly this really pissed Astrom off, and he began to radiate his own curse: Astrom cursed the briny waters around him to forever know the TRUE meaning of Cold, and those who touched their waves would know the feeling of a frigid death. Thus the Ice Grave Sea was born, and mortals to this day tend to blame the shores of Jotunheimr (the blood of Ymir) due to not knowing of the truth. Monsters, spirits, and chunks of unnatural ice are found in the deathly waters of the region, and many say they hear the maddened laughter of a Dead God some days when the winds are calm and the skies are clear. Astrom would be blamed for many, many more incidents in time as his creations and blueprints ran rampant across the planet without his guidance. He was able to project himself every now and again when the stars aligned just right, but he was never able to break free from his binds. He was in a state of mind to try and wipe the slate clean on a number of occasions, but was convinced to alter his course by a charming old-man who bore a sweet brew to quench Astrom's parched lips. Eventually, The Mad King landed on merely breaking free from his bonds, and would see what the state of Arde was before he made any rash decisions. His Wife, an Ancient Green Dragon driven a bit mad form years of solitude, seeks to trick adventurers into helping collect the artifacts necessary to free her Husband. (This is the current Campaign's major plot-line, with a lot more detail than i care to type quickly here lol). There are many smaller engagements and side stories with Astrom, but his role as the Mad Elf King is quite fun to me: he was/is the "good guy" in a broad sense, but he's always slipping up/being tricked just as he's about to finish something big. He was Called mad by the majority of elves of his homeland for wanting to seek peace, and by the majority of other races later on as well. The meaning of mad changes when he is corrupted, and now it has changed again as he is twisted by natural emotion in his throne at the bottom of the sea.
I've always thought of doing a dungeons & dragons run where the group is sent to kill a lich who has been raising the dead only to find out the lich is a good person who makes deals with the living to enrich their lives and in exchange they sign a contract stating that they will work as free undead labor for a set amount of years before their soul is allowed to be let go. And the king who sent you after him is just really angry that the lich has been persuading his subjects to leave his Kingdom.
The lich can’t really be good person, especially with them from Wizard line, they can’t be form from positive energy, only negative energy, and they eat soul, good or evil soul, still a soul and eating it pure evil
An interesting case can be found in Magic: The Gathering, on the plane of Amonkhet. The inhabitants of the plane are basically obsessed with training to become the ultimate warrior, learning from and obtaining the blessings of their 5 gods. For one thing, that means that somebody other than the trainees/warriors has to perform the basic functions of society, such as growing food, janitorial duties, etc. The solution employed in Amonkhet is to use the bodies of those who die during training - i.e. those who fail to complete the process of becoming perfect / complete warriors - as a labor force. These "Anointed" are mummified using a combination of magic and practices similar to those of ancient Egypt, such as removing the organs (i.e. most of the soft tissues that would otherwise rot), and the use of embalming agents to prevent the remainder of the body from undergoing decay. The body is then wrapped head-to-toe in clean white gauze (which, presumably, is replaced periodically with fresh wrappings), and reanimated using an enchanted cartouche. This fairly neatly addresses the hygiene and disease issues mentioned in the video. The results are shown as mute, anonymous, almost mannequin-like figures, wrapped in white and given simple clothing. The Anointed can be seen all over the place, going about their assigned tasks in the way that a more techologically-oriented society might employ robots, doing the less "glorious" jobs while the living are free to focus on other pursuits. As the Anointed are animated by magic rather than the souls that once inhabited them, these mummies do not think beyond what is necessary to accomplish their given tasks, do not rebel, and (lacking soft tissues like lungs or tongues) literally cannot complain. The people of Amonkhet know and understand that these mummies are made from the bodies of their fellows - that any one of them might be the body of a friend or family member who failed the trials - and that, if they do not complete their own warrior training, this will be how their own corpse will be put to use. However, they accept this - while they strive for glory as warriors of their God-Pharaoh, if they falter on their path to greatness, at least they know that their bodies will be put to use as Anointed mummies, for the benefit of their community. Thus, becoming one of the Anointed in death is considered a lesser, but still significant, honor. Of course, there is a hidden dark side to Amonkhet - particularly regarding what happens to those who DO complete their training and become "complete" warriors. Still, I thought the way the people accepted the creation and use of this undead labor force - and their acceptance of the likelihood that they might wind up as part of it - was unusual and interesting.
This is very similar to the Imperium from Warhammer 40k. Because the Imperium was build on the ruins of a great machnine rebellion, thinking machines re forbidden, and technology is worshipped religiously. Instead of robots, the Imperium uses Servitors, lobotomised cybord slaves very similar to borg drones. These can also be found everywhere where you might find robots.
It also happens to literally everything that dies on the plane. Outside the magical protections of the city, zombies roam the desert until their bodies completely fall apart. Mummies are not just a practical solution, but almost necessary to protect the living.
@@ShinyGoldSteelix Excellent point! If you're living in a world like Amonkhet (or like the world of The Walking Dead), where anyone who dies is guaranteed to rise again, one way or another, what is the best way to deal with large numbers of naturally-occurring undead? Ritual cleansing and "domestication" ala the Anointed? Burning/destroying the corpses of loved ones / community members before they have a chance to rise as mindless husks? Erecting walls or magic barriers around settlements to keep the undead away? Mass destruction of the undead via nuclear, thermobaric and other weapons?
@@AndyDickens-n4x Right. So, in the end, it turns out to be another case of "Necromancy = Bad". I just thought that the Anointed, and the generally positive way the living inhabitants of Amonkhet regard them, was unique and interesting.
So in my DND world one of the core themes is irony. One way I implement this is there are 8 main countries on the continent representing the 8 edges of DND's alignment table but their seeming morality is only surface level. The LG faction is actually CE and so on. So the "neutral evil" country is a barren frozen waist land ruled by vampires and necromancers. It started when the vampires wanted to create an ethical renewable food source. They would never kill anyone with the '"blood tax." Then the necromancers created a cheaper, renewable alternative to slavery with undead labor. This freedom from the undead labor and stability from the vampire government gave the mortals the time and resources to pursue other goals such as education and the arts. Not to mention live healthier lives, thus giving the vampires better quality blood further incentivizing vampires to use the system.
That's late stage development of vampires in the Witcher world. In the Addon Blood & Wine you find books on that. Because sick and stressed humans taste worse and they don't really need a lot of blood to begin with.
One of the most fun character I've ever played as and conceptualized was a Chaotic Good Necromancer, reunificating souls with bodies temporarly to grant them one final last wish. As a mean to help the soul be at ease or let them reassure their close ones. Character was actually very friendly and chatty instead of those cliché edgelords.
@@Ugarimpty I'm not really an edge lord so much as an edge regional manager. Efficient and business-like with my edge. None of the pageantry, but with enough free time to do some non-edgy things on the weekend.
I actually have thought about this a lot and done a LOT of research into different explanations behind necromancy and how it works, and I have to say my favorite explanation (because it makes sense) is that when a necromancer reanimates the dead, they are not reunifying the soul with the body to animate it, they are accessing the (for lack of a better term) muscle memory of the corpse (explained in the source as “remnant” in the form of an impression the soul leaves on the body). They then write instructions that use this “remnant” to make the body move filling in the missing pieces with magic that uses the bones as scaffolding. I love this explanation for 2 reasons, the first, it bypasses most of the moral quandaries about redirecting the dead while also explaining how reanimation works and 2 it provides both an explanation and incentive for necromancers to care about the quality of the corpse, because as part of this explanation they explained that since the magic operates on “remnant” or the body’s “memory” left by the soul, they cannot learn to do anything that they could not do in life. This means that if you raise a farmer they will never be a great warrior or mage, but if you raise a fallen warrior or mage they can retain the skills they had in life, making the quality of the corpses you require much more important, and explains undead experiments, combining corpses to get more out of the materials. Anyway I just thought I’d share with you guys since it seemed like a brilliant explanation for me at least
@@EricWalkerswildride how so? i'm not arguing the morality per se. just offering up my favorite explanation for why the necromancers don't see themselves as evil, and why they look for better corpses.
I have talked with my brother about this and found some things that I find interesting: At least the lesser undead only require the body and "animating spirit" which seems to be distinct from the soul It seems given this that normal humanoids have a body, soul, and animating spirit When they die their soul usually goes to an outer plane, and the animating spirit is lost but both can be restored through magic So a living person would be body, soul, and animating spirit; a ghost may be an animating spirit and a soul; and an undead would be a body and an animating spirit. I believe that as long as you don't mess with the soul without consent, necromancy can be an interesting and fun thing Now as far as the forgotten realms goes necromancy originates from Orcus and there I don't think it can be said that something demonic in origin is ethical but that's just the forgotten realms.
Pathfinder has a great approach to necromancy. There is an entire nation of undead named after its former powerful wizard now eternal ghost ruler, Geb. It exemplifies everything listed in this video, even to a fault, resulting in mortals being treated as second class citizens and even cattle to be farmed. If anyone who likes this video wants to play something similar, check out the pathfinder second edition adventure path, Blood Lords!
One thing that i saw someone talking that happened in their DnD campaing, was when before going into a diffcult battle, a Necromancer asked the town guards if they would be willing to be raised back to fight to defend others even after their deaths. And with some considerarion, they actually accepted and because of this selfless act, they managed to repel the invading forces while the Zombies helped them defend their loved ones.
You mentioned Christianity but they actually had a very different response to dead bodies. They met in necropolis for weddings and communion, they made their homes in catacombs, they venerated the corpses and bones of their saints. Heck, eventually they built churches out of those bones, like the Sedlec Ossuary. A theology developed of memento mori. Honestly, i feel the most likely place to find undead labor would be the willing monks of a Christian monastery who choose that their corpses be perpetual reminders to their brothers of a holy death.
@@xzilerq.5471 i mean, now. But for any amount of deep history, only catholic and orthodox matter, and this is true of both. Other denominations don't exist until after the middle ages, and for the first thousand years even these two were one thing.
Also, many miracles, including (or even especially) the ones performed by Jesus, fit the definition of necromancy quite well Current church is just very sanitized to fit contemporary understanding of and approach towards life and death
@@Invizive st. Severus literally gets a corpse to tell him who his murderer is to settle a dispute of his dispossessed widow. And another saint whose name escapes me has his corpse posthumously animated to arrest and deliver a graverobber robbing his grave to the people of the town for judgement after offering his own forgiveness; a story about how sin even if forgiven by those it is done against still has just temporal consequences. One litany of saints ive seen that includes him gives him the title, "Zombie of Justice".
We had a game where the necromancer created something like life insurance. He made a contract with people that he would pay a sum to the family after death, in exchange for the body. So it was agreed to by the person, and the family was compensated.
@@EricWalkerswildrideSlavery was actually widely varied in history to be honest. A lot of it was very much for a set period of time, such as enslavement for a few years to gain citizenship into a nation, unlike American slavery which was mostly cradle to grave and had the added indignity that any children you produced where also slaves. It's all still pretty bad, but there is a question of magnitude.
@@EricWalkerswildride I feel like it being slavery really depends on how the spell works. If all the spell does is puppeteer the corpse, then it's really just paying for someone's corpse. I mean, according to the monster manual you can still resurrect a skeleton, which I assume to mean that its original soul isn't there, and "a zombie retains no vestiges of its former self, it's mind devoid of thought and imagination.". I dunno, take that how you will.
@@PhoenicopterusRyeah necromancy’s morality is very dependent on it’s mechanics. You can use the Ka and Ba model where lifeforce is separate from consciousness and memory. But then how is lifeforce made? Is it infinite? Why do you need a body as a life force vessel when you could make a golem? Is taking lifeforce disruptive to natural order or reincarnation, or is it equivalent to using a river as power? It’s up to DM to answer these questions, but these sorts of questions I think really affect the morality of the magic
Warbreaker has its own brand of undead referred to as Lifeless. Basically an animated corpse that's had its blood replaced with a preservative ichor. They're difficult and expensive to make and thus are pretty much only owned by the wealthy, but they also make up a majority of the military of Halondren. Their neighboring country considers Lifeless as abominations, but the Halondren just see them as expensive tools.
i've always enjoyed the headcanon that Animate Dead effectively summons a spirit/entity that takes control of the assembled bones. Animate Dead itself doesn't actually animate the dead, it's just a highly formalized ritual that allows that entity into the body and gives the caster control for a while (feeding off the spell slot/intimidated into following). that helps justify, to me at least, why the zombie persists after animate dead wears off, and why Dispel Magic can't unmake an animated corpse.
I've always thought that Animate Dead summons a spirit from the Negative Energy plane to take over the body rather than using the original soul, because there's no way in Hell (pun intended) a 3rd level spell could be that much better at trapping souls than 7th and 8th level spell alternatives, or exceedingly rare magic items.
The problem with this version of animate dead is that it takes the bite out of necromancy imo. It becomes identical to just animating objects. And if you're going to do that, you'd be better off animating suits of armour (ala Full metal Alchemist) rather than flimsy bones and rotten flesh.
@@Bazzyboss Um, good :)) a 3rd level spell shouldn't have that much bite. BTW, you ARE canonically right, fighting with an animated armor is more effective than fighting with animated flesh and bone. Which is why you can't just make your own Alphonse Elric with a single cast of a 3rd level spell. You have to either craft it from zero, give up your bonus action to command it every single round, or perform multiple costly rituals.
@@tudornaconecinii3609 When I say bite, I more mean like how spicy and interesting it is. I just feel like necromancy being something that defiles your soul and enslaves the dead makes it really interesting. Liches commanding armies of slaves, twisted abominations. I feel like animated objects are a little too whimsical for my tastes, reminds me of the furniture from beauty and the best. This is all just my preference though. No one's personal headcanon for their campaign is wrong.
@@Bazzyboss I think it's perfectly fine for liches to be able to force a soul back into its body and make an undead servant that way. Not only are liches rare and very powerful, but they'd have to have specialized in soulcrafting to make their phylacteries in the first place. What I don't think is fine is for a level 5 wizard to be able to do it, without even giving the soul a chance to make a will save, when even stuff like True Resurrection allows will saves to resist. I understand that it makes for a more interesting setting if necromancy is more horrific, but you can achieve that without making it canon that *all* undead and *all* undead-creating spells pull original souls.
This is actually my current DnD character (reborn): he was an aspiring magic student in a high magic society, one of his experiments caused a lot of deaths. And as a punishment he had to serve as a kind of laborer zombie forever. Although not usual kind of zombie: his tissues were preserved with alchemy, he retains ability to use magic, and his own magic keeps him alive, but his memory and personality were erased and his free will bound to do what was ordered by his superiors. In this form he served on a spelljammer ship, till it got into combat with a nautiloid and crashed on a planet, where the adventure takes place. It so happens that during said combat, illithid psy weapon messed something up with his "programming" and after the crash he regained his free will and started regaining some memories. P.S. I was inspired by adeptus mechanicus and their servitors from WH40k
I actually have a character whos a necromancer who has the unique ability to communicate with souls of long daed bodies if the soul exists and asks for permission to use the body and if the soul wants come back can't fully heal the body but will make surrogate bodies like armor or similar vessels. They themselves are not very strong but have helped do everything from reunite families, allow trapped souls to be at peace, and even aid in funeral rights to heal pained souls that she gotta a small army of friends who want to protect them on their quest which ends with them filling a role of a reaper in helping souls even in their own death to their afterlives
Haven’t watched through yet, but a note I’ll make beforehand is the existence of the Orzhov Syndicate on Ravnica within MTG & D&D. They are the religious and banking guild of Ravnica, and you will work off your loan in death. They use spirits for manual labor, to ensure that their contracts are fulfilled: even in death. They do let the souls rest once the loans are paid off, though
The ethics of necromancy and the use of necromancy as a positive force have always fascinated me so thanks for the fantastic breakdown. You mentioned that you would like recommendations for worlds with magic in the middle of cultural revolutions, specifically similar to the enlightenment, and I have a few suggestions. Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett has a magic system quite similar to standard programming, except instead of a computer you program reality itself to disobey its own rules and do things like make wheels roll up hill or mimic an objects state onto another. There are a few main plot threads but a few are related to overthrowing a guild structure in favor of a more Democratic one. Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone is a series of books all in the same world each jumping around the timeline quite a bit but broadly it’s following a cultural and Industrial Revolution. It’s magic system is most similar to contract law and does go deep into some of the weird intricacies that entails with the first book basically acting as a legal drama/investigation set in this bizarre world. It also features some interesting deep dives into concepts like a god of justice acting as the police force through citizens who have willingly given up their autonomy to join its ranks. Merchant Prince’s by Charles Stross is a bit of a weird one for this because it’s arguably closer to Sci-Fi but it fits in a similar niche. The core mechanic that’s originally presented as magic, but slowly is revealed to be genetic tampering is a kind of timeline hopping where by looking at a specific Celtic style knot design you can switch between worlds. The alternate versions of earth also have pretty deeply realized backstories of exactly what’s different and lead to their current existences. The main one visited is called the Gruinmarkt and is effectively still feudal, except with even more separation of the upper class as they have modern amenities they have bought in our world and brought to their own. The series mostly follows feudal politics and the weird economics presented by this ability. Finally I also have The Laundry Files also by Charles Stross, which is also a bit of a weird recommendation considering it’s modern day urban fantasy but there are some important features that make it interesting for this discussion. First of all it’s a weird mix of a spoof on the british spy genre and a dark workplace bureaucracy comedy that quickly progresses Into absurdity as the banality of filling out forms in triplicate clashes with lovecraftian Eldritch horrors. It also plays into the workplace necromancy trope quite nicely with dead agents being resurrected as parts of either the night crew or for the file room, with this just being part of the standard employment agreement. The really important part however comes from the progression of the regular world over the course of the series. Over the first few books we keep getting warned of an apocalyptic breakdown of society where magic becomes easily accessible to the common man, titled Nightmare Green. Unsurprisingly this event occurs and is the major backdrop of the middle and most recent thirds of the series, with the middle being the odd transition period only for the insane and horrifying to become the banal in the last third, such as a grocery store using Necromantic meat puppets in gimp suits as labor and a small Channel Island’s population turning their owner into a god through praise both being seen as pretty much normal.
I like the "undead radiation" theory from Libris Mortis. Even if you animate undead for purely good purposes, undead dont belong in our world, and more of them being in our world makes it more likely that uncontrolled, ravenous undead will spontaneously appear.
Kind of reminds me of this idea I had for a setting with a distinction between science and magic. While science is about using physical laws, magic is about destabilizing reality so that those laws can be subverted, which often requires the assistance of an extradimensional entity (not unlike how a warlock forms a pact with a demon). In it, the magic users are rightfully persecuted as using magic for even benevolent reasons could spell disaster for the entire universe.
In Pathfinder setting undeath is similarly inherently evil. Reanimating undead increases the amount of negative energy in existence which contributes to entropy and eventual destruction of the world. Even if you animate a corpse for the most benign purpose you are contributing to the end of the world. It also shifts your soul towards evil (in this setting good and evil are literal concrete metaphysical forces) so even if you created the undead for a noble purpose the power you used to do so will corrupt you and you'll end up using them for evil
It depends on the setting really. I can imagine some necromancer having idea to use undead in ethical way in Warhammer Fantasy but it'd end sooner or later with him becoming tainted by the magic and go with the classic "I'm an evil sorcerer" route since the magic juice that is used in the necromancy there is pure black magic that taints both the user and everything around it. In that case it'd be a matter of what will become fecked first, nature become barren and mutated from the magic or the necromancer become unhinged more and more.
@chillax319 I totally agree that you could make a setting where reanimating the dead isn't evil. It doesn't seem that such a setting exists in published D&D however. (The closest is Eberron with the Aerenal elves, but they aren't truly undead.)
In my dnd games, the creation of undead (usually zombies and skeletons as those are the easiest) is generally seen as, at best, a reckless act and, at worst, a straight up evil act. This is because, when left to their own devices (ie without the influence of their creator), these undead will seek out and try to kill living things. The usual spells for creating undead require that control over the undead be reassured every 24 hours, or else the undead breaks free and goes about doing their natural thing. So if any mage slips up and can’t perfectly keep up, their undead becomes a danger to everyone around them.
As a necromancy apologist, I'd argue that fire is a vastly more difficult force to control than undead, and it destroys all sorts of things indiscriminately, yet we view fire as a useful tool available to everyone, and necromancy as a foolish evil. "Dangerous if uncontrolled" can be a source of superstition, but an inadequate bar for evil.
To safely manage your undead without expending magic, instruct them to restrain themselves in ways that allow you to tie thier joints back and store them until you can renew your control, or even just destroy then when you are finished, just like properly extinguishing a cooking fire after use.
So, can't say about any other part of the world, but where I'm from, around 1000 years ago arson was the worst crime imaginable. You not only destroy and possibly kill somebody else, but you put whole settlement at risk. And even if you're not campaigning in a city, burning wildlife can have a similarly disastrous consequences. With that in mind, I would say that everyone's favorite fireball is way more dangerous, then resurrecting 1/4 DC skele.
@@twilightgardenspresentatio6384because typically creating undead is vastly easier than permanently animating objects. And necro-engineering should only be used with powers that create undead devoid of souls.
For existing settings with undead labor, the webcomic Unsounded has zombie labor (called Plods, if I recall correctly) who are used mostly for construction or other heavy labor, used mostly out of sight of the citizens, and who are garbed in heavy work gear that already obscures the body's former identity. I think the reanimation process also warps the body somewhat, so it'd be hard to recognize a plod even if you could see their face. Though part of the face covering is a muzzle, to prevent them going feral and trying to attack anyone. For the ethics of souls, their magic system makes it easy for a competent wright to tell the difference between someone that has a soul and something that doesn't. It's still somewhat looked down on, though, being morbid, creepy, and risky if one gets loose and goes feral. In some iterations of the Heroes of Might and Magic franchise, the undead are treated as just other people, and of course necromancers use mindless undead as cheap labor. In one game, part of the main storyline involves an angel getting his human girlfriend resurrected as either a lich or vampire, which raises no eyebrows from anyone involved. The eyebrow raising comes from the fact that he wanted her body animated so it could be the vessel for his *real* girlfriend's long departed spirit, and he didn't care about the body's owner that he was planning to just evict from her own body, read kill, in the process. For my own D&D setting, there's an entire country nicknamed the Land of the Dead since almost 70% of its intelligent population is undead. The ranks of mindless undead aren't counted in the same census, but outnumber intelligent inhabitants nearly thrice over. It helps that my setting doesn't use alignment as a strict requirement for most things, so the founder, a lich of extreme power, is not at all evil. He's pragmatically altruistic, which means he does generally good things because that's the most sensible course of action for him, and he encourages people towards good behavior because that again benefits him. He's also had several centuries to help formulate laws around the creation of undead and the status of persons. In short, intelligent undead must obtain a permit to reproduce if they can do so naturally (like vampires) and a very long contract must be made if they want to retain control of their spawn (most of the time it doesn't wind up happening). Mortals can undergo any of several processes to become an intelligent undead, but that also requires significant permit red tape. Mortals can sell their body rights to either the government or private interests, and mortals who have not established such preferences before death are questioned using magic; if the questioning fails to provide a clear yes, then the mortal is assumed to not consent to the use of their body and is given to an appropriate church for burial. This is also done if an illegal mindless undead (such as one raised by a foreign necromancer or one that spontaneously arose from wild magic) is found; illegal mindless undead made from mortals who don't consent to their continued use are destroyed and given to the church. On the subject of cleanliness or health, zombies are embalmed and enshrouded in durable wrappings (often magical) so that they do not decay or risk disease, and this also makes them impossible to identify without defacing their masking. I was partly inspired by Unsounded and Egyptian mummification, and was quite vindicated to see the same idea show up in Amonkhet a few years later. This winds up deeply affecting the political landscape in several ways. One is that the regular apocalypses the setting suffers scale their monster spawns based on the number of minds nearby, so the large army of mindless undead laborer-soldiers gives them an enormous edge in defending themselves and thus preserving infrastructure through the disaster. Second is that their abnormally large standing army is useful for defending against the adjacent nation of xenophobic conquerors, and they can, have, and do loan out regiments to their fellow sane nations who share borders with the xenophobes. For extra irony, one of the nations with whom the undead are allied is a paladin nation; thanks to alignment detection and truth-telling magic, they are fully onboard with the nation of good-enough undead. And finally, there's a standing offer for anyone in the allied armed forces for purchase of body rights; it's again volunteer-only. Since actual resurrection magic is damaging to the subject's soul, it's generally advised against except for heroes, those who really have unfinished business, and in times of extreme need. There are also a fair few ways to resurrect someone without a complete body, so it can be done that a person's body is to have a sample removed for resurrection, have the body reanimated, and then have the person resurrected using magic that rebuilds the body, which is to say builds them a new body. There's one infamous eccentric noble who did this deliberately so he could own his own former body's zombie; rumors range from morbid to horrifying about why he wanted it. The main problem that prevents other countries from doing anything similar is simple lack of any way to control so many undead. A few groups have adopted similar practices, but most places just don't have enough clerics or death mages to handle many. In the undead kingdom, more than two thirds of the mindless undead are under direct control of the king, which is a mind-boggling feat of magic. Still, it has caught on in the last couple centuries for churches to have some zombie staff for menial labor, though the further from the undead kingdom you get the more resistant to the idea people usually get. Edit: I just finished the last couple minutes of the video, and I noticed something: Several of your assumptions are based entirely on our world, our history, and thus our cultural mores. Thus, for example, you seem to assume that people would automatically believe that the body is not something that ought to be used indefinitely. Assuming proper maintenance, an undead can last forever, since several kinds of magic can rebuild lost tissue. Thus, a race with a very short lifespan (kobolds, who in some settings usually expire before 60, spring to mind) could have a cultural expectation of their bodies as being basically disposable resources; this encourages them to make use of their dead just as much as their living, and becoming a long-term benefit for the community is an exponentially larger net benefit than just the few day's worth of feeding that even cannibalism could provide. At the other extreme, very long-lived people such as elves would all the more instinctively see the benefits of long-term investments, and having their body become an undead to help care for their descendents is about the best legacy they could leave. To take a leaf out of Eberron and the Arenal elves, if the zombie acted as a mobile ancestor shrine for the spirit of the departed to return and visit, then it ascends to being an oblique form of immortality and cultural oneness. You also assume that burial rites would have evolved the same way in a magical world as in our mundane one, when they really should not have. Magic to preserve bodies can be incredibly easy, requiring only faith in a god and a little experience. Thus, caring for (or disposing of) the dead could evolve in a radically different direction. Indeed, with magic to cure diseases (such as prion diseases, which are a common fear that discourages modern capitalism) and to purify food, ritual or mortuary cannibalism could be extremely normalized the way Martians do in Stranger in a Strange Land, viewed as a form of respect, community care, and ritual closeness with the departed. This would be all the more relevant when food may have been scarce for a culture when it's young; the Netflix Sabrina reboot has a holiday based around honoring a witch who gave her life so that her companions could avoid starvation by cannibalizing her. Thus, a culture that grew in a barren land may view eating the dead as a final gift to the community, endocannibalism as a cultural norm. There's also the fact that there are ways to produce soulless bodies in the first place, which could then be turned into artificial undead. Stone to Flesh (for editions that have it, 5e is just not good in this way) turns statues into corpses, and the Clone spell, though expensive, creates corpses too. With such methods as these, there aren't even ethical hurdles to jump through; these were never people, they're objects with simple and known provenance.
One of my friends made an encounter where you are offered to "pay" some dimensional weirdos with a clone of yourself for a magic item. You play the clone. You are disarmed, chained up and led away. Or you are the original, and you see your clone take your place. You have no way of knowing.
I was thinking much the same about the expectations and assumptions he was making. It is also a point of fact that DnD worlds are FAR more dangerous than our own, and I do not find it difficult to imagine people being willing to come back to defend their homes against threats like trolls, demons, bulletes, dragons, ect ect ect Also, since you can use Speak with Dead, it seemed strange to me he seemed to very quickly discount Consent. Sure, a "powerful enough" necromancer can surpass that, but the terms "powerful enough" show the limit. Weaker Necromancers can't.
I've always had a fascination with the machinations on necromancy. The mechanisms that actually allows it to work. One of my favorite ideas on how it could work is this: Injecting mana into a _fresh corpse_ that is tasked with taking hold of every muscle, nerve, and neuron in a body. Then like some sort of metaphysical computer, the mana converts itself into miniscule amounts of electricity to stimulate said muscles, nerves, and neurons to send and receive signals. All to complete caster authorized objectives. Like a biological automoton meant for mana efficiency to circumvent costly uses of mana. •Like conjuration of entirely new entities (sometimes made of mana themselves). •Or circumventing technological limitations of making machines that let mana do the same. Then there's the _skeleton/decayed corpse_ version of it, which is a bit trickier, and mana intensive: Same deal with the _fresh corpse_ version, except any missing or thoroughly decayed muscles, nerves, or neurons are replaced with mana formed versions of them (skeletons being most mana intensive due to requiring the most replacements). •These mana muscles can be latent kinesis sub-spells for faster and stronger than natural muscle replacements (though they require a lot of mana to maintain locomotion). •The muscles can also be mana conjurations of thread that constrict like muscles that are visible on the body for lower mana consumption. •And finally, with some very clever enchantment work bordering on bioengineering, you can lower mana consumption to near zero for locomotion by forming physical runes on the body to designate where simple push/pull force enchantments will be activated by the "mana computer" for locomotion.
Corpse muscles cannot regenerate like living flesh so they'll cast a spell or few then rot. If a corpse wants to be undead then it will be. Just donate that mana to a Lich Transformation if you're truly dedicated to this.
@@MK_ULTRA420 That's also another way entirely to go about it, and just as interesting for different reasons. It's much simpler when the soul is involved to do all the complicated interactions for the caster. If the cells of the muscles; slow-twitch and fast-twitch are dead, then there must be mana dedicated to preservation, restoration of ripped fiber. But if the corpse is fresh enough, or didn't die due to any form of organ failure, many cells still live. And will continue to live a little longer if the heart is pumped, and lungs are contracted through mana. The cells will live longer still the more organs are usable/in use. It would depend on the magic system, but the latter option seems like it would be more mana efficent; hence more decayed corpses being less mana efficent due to all the substitutes necessary.
Terrifying for shitty living artists you mean. Imagine the GOATs of every art form supplied with unlimited tools with unlimited time to create. It would be a never ending golden age.
@@max7971Historically, long-lived "greats" often cause stagnation of development. While great scientists are praised, when a major popular scientist dies, it opens up room to question and challenge and thus...grow in our understanding. And beyond that you have the ethical and societal problems of Billionaire oligarchs and Corporate AI exploiting communities and peoples...
This entire thought process is hilarious and I love it. It's so absurd. I think the real situation would be just some level of cognitive dissonance, and the undead would just be dehumanized.
It's true. people forget that for 90+% of history, slavery was considered acceptable. If people can condone and ignore that, having zombies that weed your garden would likely be easy.
@@kylelind6239 I'm going to implement a character in our nex session. A necromancer who has summoned an undead scourge. We are tasked with defeating it to free a person's family's land. We will discover that the land was taken after a genocide. The necromancer offered undead to replace the slaves so they could be freed, and the owner instead killed all the people to make them all undead. The necromancer ran the slave owners away and has the resurrected undead practice land and water management. We discover a child that we rescue from the undead that starts to reveal this plot. I think it will be a great murder hobo plot.
On the cognitive dissonance note: I do wonder if the bridge between normal citizen life, inevitable death, and potential utility as undead would lead to a bizarre fetishization of the cycle. Because of course undead are the very foundations and backbone of this ever so comfortable society, so truly it's an honor to be among that class after death. But also of course, they're just tools, so don't worry about treating them well. This is just _how_ we venerate the dead, and we should be so lucky as to contribute to filling out the ranks that uplift our society, not just with our own deaths but also those of the inevitable scores of however many progeny we have. Really it's all quite simple, you see.
You inspired me, see I have this concept for an undying Roman Republic. The use of reanimated courses slots pretty well into that society: The Necrotic Mines. A necromancer supplies the raw ores needed for metal manufacturing at the cost of the dead plebians. The general public doesn't know what happens to the corpse, they assume they're deposited in the mines. They're correct. But also not. The bodies are reanimated and spend the rest of eternity harvesting ore. The longer they last the more their flesh rots away until they're just animated skeletons. As they decay, their strength reduces (you know less muscle) so their roles shift to less and less laborious tasks, eventually their bones break or lose magical cohesion. When that happens they're ground into powder and sold back to the society as a flux. Any weapon forged with that necrotic flux has special features that are unique to the weapon smith's skills. Ultimately I'm avoiding the major ethics questions you're asking, but resolving the societal problems of "what to do with our corpses" and "where/how do we get our raw goods" The undying Republic is headed by vampiric senators, who feed off the life force of their constituents, the plebians. Who basically worship their senator like a god. (It might be inspired by modern American politics)
In my fantasy setting, the region I focus most on has a popular religion called the “Way of Glory”, which elevates 6 deities above all others as objects of worship. One deity, who is only referred to by euphemism, is the god of death and smithing. In the south, on a strangely cool island for such a locale, they worship the God of Death above all others. While there are others that do the same, such as the Western Dwarves, this island places great importance on the God of Death, and his role as a smith-and also, to them, a god of Wealth. These people inter their dead in places they call “Halls of Silence”, great open-air tombs that allow their dead to decompose and be eaten by carrion beasts, before they clean them and dump them into a central pit filled with warm holy water. Following this the bones are given a final once-over and then covered in lime, before being articulated (usually, the bones are mixed up at this point, so resulting skeletons rarely belong to a single person). The bones are then painted with complex sigils, and reanimated, before being put to work. For the people of this culture, death is not a taboo-and the working of the bones of the dead into useful things after death is a great honor, combining aspects of their most revered God. Of course, outside cultures have varying views on this. The Western Dwarves especially, who consider the same God their creator-deity, consider this an affront to his will and call often for a holy crusade against the land of the dead’s people-which usually falls on deaf ears, as although the practice is distasteful it allows for the land to produce exceptionally high quality goods at a relatively cheap cost, which the other nations revel in. Alongside this, it should be noted that this system is not entirely ethical-the nobility of the island often avoid this fate, instead being interred in great tombs as mummies.
I have a system where you can sell your corpse while still being alive. Signing a contract with a lord(usually) and being tattooed for identification. After your death, the Lord can mummify you and use you as they see fit. The mummification significantly reduced the decay and disgust factor while preserving the worker for maximum economic gain. Similarly, if you die while in large amounts of debt, the debtor can sell your corpse to a lord to settle your debt, assuming that your corpse has not already been preemptively sold to another. The government regulates the selling of corpses, though this doesn't stop a black market from arising. Plantations not having proper documentation for their corpse workers can lead to the confiscation of said workers and hefty fines.
There's an entire setting around ethical necromancy on 1d4chan (the wiki for the site's Traditional Games board, a lot less bad than you think), where soul-bound necromancy (which is willing) is completely separate from bone/corpse golem necromancy. Undead are treated with respect by relatives/descendants, and are the labor and military force. The lich king is actually a cool guy and engages in diplomacy in international affairs. And soul-bound undead are fully conscious and willing. The culture developed artistically and literarily and such because labor is taken care of, unless a citizen really wants to do labor. And becoming undead after death is seen as a good thing, but people can be laid to rest undisturbed if they want, with the understanding that if the empire was in dire need of more troops their remains would be resurrected. By default, undead are the bone golem kind, but iirc people can request to be made soul-bound as a skeleton.
Yes I remember that. And I mean if it is possible to become a sentient undeath and do something meaningfull after death this would actually be seen as a reward. It could also be interesting to compare the drawbacks and advantages of different types of undeath. A scholar might prefer lichdom, since it gives them perfect memory and focus and they are no longer distracted by bodily needs, hedonistic nobles on the other hands prefer becoming vampires etc.
I made a lore character in my DnD world who was basically an attempt to create a heroic necromancer. This was what I came up with. Aavard Bloodbane male human necromancer. Aavard never originally intended to be a hero, let alone an adventurer, content to live his life working as town coroner, dabbling in necromancy simply to assist his profession. When the lands were wracked by war, the priest he served under spent several months compiling a list of the names of all those killed in the years of pointless fighting. He wished to present the list to the warlords hoping it would convince them to stop the wars or at least try to minimize the damage. Instead, the priest was publicly tortured to death by the first warlord to grant him an audience as a lesson in "respect." That was the last straw for Aavard who could stand idly by no longer. He devoted himself to learning all that he could about his art, determined to see the dead would have their day. That day would finally come and the land at last knew peace when the spirits of the wrongfully slain rose up and ground the cruel warlords and their armies into dust. Aavard is a man of few words who does hold a good heart under his grim demeanor. He employs necromancy as a way to speak for the dead and give them a chance to settle scores they couldn't in life.
The first "ethical" example of an undead labor force I've heard of is in the "Dread Isles". When a person dies their body is given to the tribe to use as benefits the tribe. It's not a punishment it's part of their lives. Not everyone agrees of course and you actually find someone running away from the tribe so they can't be used. Though he did gladly benefit from the system he doesn't want to participate. It's a "fun" moral dilemma, that also ignores the whole germ problems :P
So, my Pathfinder group made our own setting, and we ended up with an interesting answer to this question. We have a nation filled with ensoulled automation, who gain their souls from a magical ritual. That same nation uses the *same* ritual on the skeletons of the races in the nation to "rekindle" their souls as well. The vast majority of those skeletons come from the Xulgath, a lizard like people who become adults at 13, but only live to 16. Skeletons are considered full citizens in this nation, and are fiercely protected from other nations that think of them as inherent evil.
Fantastic video! Oddly enough, I am actually writing a fantasy novel that features ethical necromancy! It is a noir fantasy murder mystery. The protagonist is an investigator by the name of William P. Graves. He has a degree in Runic Law and is a CEN (Certified Ethical Necromancer). The story is set on an alternate version of Earth in a technological era roughly equal to about 1890. It's sort of a steam and gunpowder era, where some technological innovation has been held back because of the prevalence of magical solutions. A few different types of magic exist in this world (Alchemy, Runic Law aka "contract magic", Necromancy, and various Psychic powers) and magic is fairly common although not universally highly regarded. In fact, Necromancy, though critical to the economy, is looked down upon by several religious groups. In this world, Necromancy has had a massive effect on economics, specifically with regards to insurance, inheritance, and labor. Many people don’t have to work in an actual job. Instead they sign a magical contract that allows a company to use their body for 100 years of labor after they die. The company pays the individual a monthly income for the deferred labor. It is essentially a universal basic income, as long as you are willing to sign the dotted line. Factories, mines, and fields are filled with the dead. Since the dead don’t feel pain, tire, or complain, they don’t need breaks or pleasant working conditions. They do however need to be recharged electrically via copper terminals that are surgically inserted at death, and must be supervised and directed by an overseer, usually someone with telepathic abilities. Also, they represent a significant investment in purely monetary terms and hence are treated more like expensive tools. They are bought and sold, re-tooled for different duties, etc. The obvious sub-text is a mirror to the slave trade. The plot revolves around what amounts to insurance fraud by a particularly brilliant famous magical theorist (also a necromancer) who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Dr. Graves solves the mystery and in the process asks some very uncomfortable questions. He discovers that the souls of the undead don't actually pass on to the afterlife until their contract expires. In fact, it is possible to bring someone back...
Someone else mentioned the Anointed mummies from Magic the Gathering's Amonkhet plane which walk among the living doing manual labor, but I'd like to also bring up a little bit about the plane of Ravnica, and how various undead are used there. Ravnica is a plane that is entirely a giant city. Spirits and other undead appear naturally and necromancers aren't too uncommon either. It's overall not seen as unethical for undead to be used for labor on this plane, and at least half of the guilds that run things use various undead in one way or another. The Azorius Senate are the guild of law, and will use spirits as untiring beaurocrats or protectors of the law. The Orzhov Syndicate is the guild of business, and also serves as a religion so they are called the church of deals. The spirits of their honored members may become part of their high council, while those in debt to the church may have their spirits pay off that debt during their death. Members dead bodies may also be animated into a living creature called a thrull, an unthinking servant. House Dimir are secretive, often acting as spies, hitmen, or smugglers, among other things. They may use spirits as spies or to pass messages, while they may make skeletons and wights to carry out other missions due to their disposable nature and inability to answer questions. The Golgari Swarm are the guild that provides cheap nutritional food, and cleans up any dead from the streets. They see life and death as part of a cycle. They will recycle the dead into plant zombies, and their zombies can either be mindless for labor purposes, or still thinking for important members such as the current guildmaster. The Cult of Rakdos mainly features a macabre circus, with the main intent of keeping their founder, the demon Rakdos, entertained when he is awake, but everyone is invited to watch the shows at their own peril. Zombies are used for labor and entertainment, often adorned with spikes, given the nature of the Cult's shows.
Amonkhet's mummies were the first and last white zombies in the game so far. They are the outliers, but that in itself told a good story in the cards. Zombification is not a terrible fate decided on the whims of a mad mage, you were chosen to be an eternal champion of the gods.
@@pairot01 That first sentence is not true at all. There are several WB zombies outside of Amonkhet mummies, including Putrid Warrior all the way back in Apocalypse. Amonkhet doesn't even have exclusivity over monowhite zombies thanks to Vladimir and Godfrey from Alchemy Horizons: Baldur's Gate. Also, I don't understand why you are bringing them up here when my comment is explicitly not focused on them. I only mentioned them to lead people to the other comment specifically talking about them. Oh, and the mummies were not chosen to be champions. The mummies are explicitly the failed champion candidates. They are still glorified, serving the purpose of allowing others to focus on their candidacies, but they are not champions themselves.
Man, I love this channel so much. So good. On the ethics of crime and punishment Im gonna tear you apart. There can be no true lifelong prison terms in a just society. Prison not only exists to punish, but also to reform. To dish out a punishment that takes that last aspect away denies the prisoner the possibility of reformation, or becoming better through prison. That is completely apart from the whole undead question. That prison is just punishment, or even that the punishment takes place in prison (violence etc) is a very american view. One way to circumvent this problem would be regular checks if that person has been reformed and if not keep them in mental institutions instead of prisons. In a fantasy setting, this check could be done relatively easy and reliably depending on your magic system. It also opens up this possibility of horror mental asylums were things went horribly wrong, yay. What you describe as ethical here is actually my worst case scenario for Thay. Imagine a red wizard traveling abroad to dig up some ruins, with his undead labor force. They are all "prisoners", and as such bound and shackled with collars around their necks. And since you cannot easily identify them, of course they would need some markings, right? Things that cannot be destroyed by hard labor. Like branded or tattooed numbers, maybe on their forearms? Coding their remaining time, maybe? You know what mental image this evokes? This is also pretty horrifying, considering a lot of actors would have interest in very long prison sentences. I know you are talking about a utopia here. But lets be real here: People who lobby for the "rights of undead" would be seen as complete lunatics as soon as the first megaprojects were completed by that work force. Or wars won. Or money earned by that cheap labor be put into propaganda by a ruling caste. If I were you, Id think about this a bit more, because to me in the end your tries sound like dehumanizing based on the fact that they are prisoners and "of course they have done horrible things, imagine yourself what would be necessary for this punishment": And that's not really an argument. That is just leaving it up to the viewer. There is no way you could do this "more ethically", since there is no way at all to do this ethically and especially no way to make it so it would not be abused instantly or thrown in a justice system that always has flaws. Yes, even with Zone of Truth. The comments under this video how to do this ethically are horror all the way down so far. Really think about it, in our world. How it would feel if you did that shit. How it would *really* feel. Also, dem damn undead are takin our jerbs! The only "ethical" way I can see necromancy happening is when you bring back your dead family members once a year in a festival of some sorts to ask them for guidance and celebrate with them. It happens in Indonesia btw (google: Indonesian Tribe Removes Dead From Their Coffins Every 3 Years To Celebrate). On that note: Happy Halloween!
He's talking about mostly pre-modern judicial systems, in which branding was used in living people as a form of punishment & the idea of corrective - not punitive - jailing wasn't yet invented.
@@monkeibusiness please, tell me what human(oid) rights will be unquestionable in 300 years. With which certainty can we state that gender affirming cirurgies won't be seen as barbaric as we see some crazy treatments that were the state of the art of medicine back in the late 1800s & early 1900s? We just don't know.
A lot of RPG settings are not based on "ideal potential societies" but ones with the conflict priorities, scopes of these conflicts, and what is/isn't known to be "true" shuffled around in ways that make for interesting stories and challenging play sessions. For D&D (and related games such as PF or OSR games) one question that differs would be: "Are gods real?" In the real world, we don't know. In most D&D settings the answer is "Yes, and [laundry list of what that means for the world, depending on how it's implemented.]" The ethics argument you presented has completely different implications if asked in a world where creatures literally made of evil energy exist. However, in such settings the problem is also sidestepped (usually) by the fact that raising undead creatures is, in and of itself, an evil act as well. As most D&D settings work in a very deontological "some acts are just inherently evil no matter why you do them," you don't get to justify the act by the consequences. This does mean that people who follow consequentialist and utilitarianist systems in most D&D settings are most likely neutral, unless they consistently find that evil acts further their goals better. A big classic element of "how evil works" in fantasy settings is that of temptation, and evil can also be polite enough to where neutral farmers may not care that their blackguard lord is digging up graveyards so long as they are kept safe from bandits.
Going this in depth on a total fantasy idea is so fun! I've been looking for content like this forever. This would've been so much fun to bring up in my ethics course.
My main thought on making such a system would be less on cheap labor, more along the idea of using undead for labor that is dangerous and/or hazardous for living laborers.
What most interests me about this discussion is the fact you came up with the same solution as "Babylon 5," though they were less literal with the idea. In that series, they had something called the "death of personality," in which they'd psychically and chemically destroy the personality of the offender, implant new memories, and set the criminals to work serving the very communities they harmed. Though figurative, you could see this as "killing" the criminal and "repurposing" the body that remained.
This is how I've implemented the "ethical" use of undead. As a last line of defense from the invaders of the underdark, great catacombs were constructed. With narrow maze-like corridors designed to bottleneck and disorient, and legions of the honored undead commanded by death priests. They stand as the unseen defenders against the dark.
I have a fantasy setting in which everybody gets drafted after death into the militia, since the world is overrun with demonic creatures, and the last stronghold has to use everything they can to stay alive, which means the necromancers are in charge of the defences.
I can see a druidic group or culture in a fantasy setting where there is no incentive but to help your people long after you’ve gone as an undead labourer. Where people just choose that upon their death, they either are laid to rest or join the workforce to help their fellow people and homeland prosper even after they’re gone. I can see a culture loving this, people going to their loved ones who have passed and seeing generations of their family all doing work and them being able to talk to them the same as one would at a grave, and then hoping one day, in death, that they would all join together once again, helping their next generation get further in life.
Thanks man. This gave me some insight i can you to one of the most important characters in my universe, who started off as a restoration magic teacher in a mage college who secretly studied necromancy/vitamancy because he wanted to find a way it could be useful withing society's ethics. He saves the college with by using the vitality of both himself, the guy attacking and the entire forest surrounding it as energy to contain an explosion but is then shunned and has to flee now half dead, with missing organs and everything. Tho he ends up being the oldest mortal in the universe and got a job under the gods
I might be way too early posting this - only 2:31 into the video - but I want to chime in to say that whether undead have souls in D&D is complex even just looking at the rules for individual undead. ((Edit: Oh, good, he discusses undead that "are souls." End edit.)) Liches and vampires are treated more or less as the people they were in life, save (perhaps) for being dominated by a vampire lord or being twisted to evil by the nature of the curse animating them. (Liches are "simpler" to answer, because they have to willingly commit an "unspeakably evil" act in the process of making their phylacteries, so they ARE evil, by virtue of the fact that nobody who is not evil can become a lich, and anybody who becomes a lich has become evil before they did become a lich. So the soul isn't "twisted to evil.") Do these undead have souls? If not, then their state isn't much of a curse to the person who was cursed with undeath, as that person's soul is shunted to the afterlife. Similar questions arise with a number of sentient undead, like ghouls and ghasts and wights. Sure, zombies and skeletons probably _do not_ have souls, because they're mindless, and a spell that can rip the soul back AND deny it any control would be MORE powerful than a spell that rips a soul back from the afterlife and gives it control of its body, not less. But then, we get... ghosts. Wraiths, specters, and other incorporeal undead are, lore-wise, typically _the bodiless souls of the dead_ who have not moved on to the afterlife. Helping ghosts pass on is a major trope and story archetype. So, not only must these "have" souls, they _are_ souls. In short, undeath's relationship to the soul is often case-by-case.
Skeletons are not mindless, but they do possess no connection to their former lives. I imagine them to be like open vessels that wandering souls can choose to rest in, because it attempts to explain the habitual behaviours they perform when idle -- ghosts often have faulty memories, indicating erosion or degradation of the soul, and these souls are so weak (almost wisp-like) that they can recall nothing concretely, but still retain some habits and preferences. EDIT: The weak, visiting soul is almost certainly not the bones' original soul, I think, but may have the same habits, causing some confusion -- a guard's bones might have the wandering spirit of a different soldier who died nearby, or the skeleton of a miner might pick up the ghost of another miner who had died years before and haunted the mine ever since (and may even have been the cause of the skeletonised miner's death), etc.
In my campaign setting I have Doctors be necromancers. I saw some old paintings of medical students in the 18th 19th century studying anatomy on cadavers and just thought they all looked like necromancers. So theres a whole legal system surrounding how the acquire bodies sort of like how donating your body for science or being a organ donor. I also have some third party books that going into democratic uses of magic and it has some medical spells in there like bonding new limbs for amputees, preserving blood for transfusions that kind of stuff.
The Pillars of Eternity game franchise (especially #2; but #1 has plenty of it too) has a lot of that spiritual/religious enlightenment themes, exploring the concepts of the afterlife, resurrection, aftermath of overt "profane" divine intervention, and moralities and ethics of "Animancy" (soul magic), that you were asking about.
In the Swedish TTRPG "Drakar och Demoner" in the 1980s there was indeed a small but rather wealthy nation run by a necromancer with this idea; how it worked was that nobody (almost) had to work manual labor because you had the option to sign a contract with the necromancer ruler that he would use your body for 10 years after your death and then give it a proper burial with all the necessities and religious rites so you would not end up damned or anything. This was more for the person as such since we were indeed talking about soulless skeletons.
So I would actually say the world of Golarion from the pathfinder games is very close to what you are describing. Specifically I would tell you to look up the history of the nation of Geb, Nex, and alkenstar. This tiny part of the world building explorers and undedation and the beginnings of an industrial revolution. On top of that, there wasn't event recently in the world, lore, a major God of humans called arrogan, died, creating a situation where there is a deep doubting of faith.
In the setting I'm working on, Necromancy is a field of holy magic strictly controlled by the priesthood of the god of death (among other things) who is the patron god of humans in the setting. Due to reincarnation being a known fact, It's common practice in some human kingdoms to donate your body to the church to be reanimated and used as labor. As a result, much of the menial labor such as mining, logging, and farming are done by the dead under living supervision.
Please tell me that at some point a reincarnated PC has or will encounter their previous body in some capacity? The RP potential in that set up is just too tempting to not imagine it happening onscreen at least once 🤞🏽
Imagine a side story involving finding a mine with undead workers while out adventuring and having to trace it back to the owner and finding out the procurement of said corpses. Kinda the opposite of video but use with lack of ethics for a storyline can work. One solution could be "out of sight out of mind" which is a real world solution sadly being used in current times. Cheap luxories comes at a cost somewhere.
I don’t think you will see this but still: Amonkhet. It’s from magic the gathering. A place where they embalm dead people to use as servants. It also has a bigger main plot but seeing a embalmed good smelling person in front of you would also probably look not that horrific
about 40 years ago my gaming group got into a long drawn out discussion on this subject we came up with *"Skeleton Crews"* of labor force to do simple menial tasks like field work, "public works" digging ditches building walls and simple structures etc. we came up with the idea that it beat slave labor your upkeep was almost nill no food or medical costs as for housing they could be stacked in warehouses when not needed and can be worked 24/7 worst case scenario is wolves and dogs stealing arm and leg bones! their were no souls extracted as they were raised like GOLOMS imbibed with rudimentary programing and sent to their work crews
The problem with undead labor force is figuring out the power source for the undead. If they have absolutely no maintenance cost then there is no downside. But undead usually need a power source like souls, magic, or eating the living.
I'm only 50 seconds in to the video, but I always found it weird that necromancers would never talk to an allied amy and be like "Hey, if any of you die in this next battle, *do I have your permission* to raise your body for a few days, that way you can save your friends' lives? Afterwards, I will let your body rest again so you can buried properly."
In Fates Worse Than Death there's a cybernetic implant developed by the german army that keeps people alive for a couple hours after death. People apparently experience a weird flashing in and out of conciousness and painful strobing but they can aim a rifle at dudes for a while. The enemy army might not need to be asked politely. Control of the field of battle is now vital.
Planescape: Torment had an interesting faction that made use of undead labor, The Dustmen i think. been years since I played it they would essentially buy your body from you while you are alive, you get like 1000 gold now, and whenever you eventually die, they get your body to raise and use as labor
@@arthurjeremypearson if i remember right it had a questline about some guy who regretted selling his future corpse and you could try to get him out of the contract
Well, unless you consider magic to juat be an perpetual energy machine, youre going to have to pay for the physical motion of the undead bodies, in which case it could be just as resource costly as normal laborers, although probably not quite as much, as they require no actual comfort, no housing, no tasty food, no entertainment, no breaks, not even sleeping. It would still be cost effective, though not free. I'd like to see it explored how one pays for the energy to keep them in motion. Do they end up turning to sacrificing souls and living people in the end anyway? Or maybe just sacrificing animals, basically consuming food anyway, but maybe the local townsfolk still see it as wasting food since no one can actually enjoy the taste?
Now i imagine Hazmat skeletons working the rest of their undeath with in highly sanitary facilities holding them during non working hours. The suits on the insides keep the skeletons clean and cover their race for the most part. Industrial showers and sterilization whenever they enter or exit their designated holding block. This would be an awesome thing to see in a D&D campaign or video game, tbh. I'm thinking about it. It would raise ethical questions on why the undead are kept so clean compared to living but also kept in massive storage units like animals or tools. So much potential!
Fun fact, Revivify doesn't require the soul to be free and willing. So even if someone wanted to die, you could keep reviving them if you can get to them in under a minute.
One explanation I've heard is that since revivify has a limit of one minute, within one minute of having died, the soul hasn't necessarily moved on from the body or at least is just starting to, so revivify is closer to just bringing someone back with cpr or a defibrillator, their heart has stopped but they're not 100% gone.
Regarding a setting that grapples with faith as opposed to rationality, you might check out Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magic Obscura. It's a video game, but the setting details are masterfully crafted and thoughtful. Themes of labor, class, etc. are explored in detail, and necromancy has a somewhat interesting role in the world already. Hope this helps!
This is excellent, I'm building a society where this is used to some degree, and my solution: it is *not* strictly ethical, but kept out of view, and excused as debt repayment beyond death (I am deliberately going for a generally unethical representation of a society essentially at the starting point of the industrial revolution).
I also think it's interesting to note the historical context to this question, cause I'm writing a video on the subject and these two concepts somewhat coincide. The historical zombie comes from Haitian Vodou (pronounced voh-doo), where the body and spiritual soul can be split and used for varying purposes. The physical soul (the body) is what matters to this conversation, where the body can continue living and working after the spirit is cut off. These zombies come up in cultures affected by the African slave trade, so you can probably see where these beliefs get their salience. Zombies come from a culture forced to endure the horrors of slavery, and zombies are a religious layer on top of that aspect of culture. Religion does sometimes seek to make life's more nebulous or cruel problems easier to understand, after all. So this question of zombies or indeed any undead being a cheap labor force... has historical precedence, specifically in zombies. Feel free to let me know if I'm wrong on something. Don't want to be wrong on a sensitive subject such as this.
this video is so interesting in how it parallels my thoughts while i was making my homebrew world (designed mostly w 5e mechanics in mind, but generalizable to many ttrpgs). One of the central pillars i did my worldbuilding around was a kind of dual system of necromancy. Awakening is an ancient and very common pracrice, given by the gods to the people of Voram so death needn't sever people from their communities. (basically i looked at the ability to communicate w dead people and extrapolated what that would do to culture. if you can phone up dear dead aunt doris for her bread recipie, why not ask her to make it?) It's not like SUPER common - only like 1 out of a town of 100 could be expected to be awakened in a given year - but its just generally accepted that if you have a skill that is valuable to your community you might not get laid to rest right away. Most bodies are magically preserved for a week or two after death, to give people time to guage whether an awakener needs to be called, which leads to some really interesting death and burial practices depending on how different cultures handle this period (which i should really get around to fleshing out one of these days). When somebody is awakened their body goes through the habits that they had in life, so they'll get up, go to work, go home, and crawl into bed same as they always did (which lead to the development of an entire sector of the housing market catering to people very much not wanting to stay at home with a corpse, no matter how well preserved) Nobody in-universe knows this, but on the backend awakening uses divine magic to create a conduit between a body on the material plane and wherever the soul is in the afterlife. The bodies have to be preserved because the soul has to recognize it in order for the connection to go through. The soul's consent is also required - no soul on the other end of the conduit, no actions from the body. All of this changes with the introduction of Necromancy as an arcane development a few decades back, springing from the work of a secret society that ties into some other fun lore stuff i won't get into right now but basically necromamcy emerged from enchantment and rapidly grew into its own because of how it expands on Awakening. From an in-universe perspective, Necromancy and Awakening are basically the same thing except Necromancy is just more powerful and better because you can control the necrot's actions directly, and you can raise basically anything thats dead, whether its still recognizable or not. Fantastic for a country hungry to get down to violent imperialist expansion, which the country in which necromancy was invented in my world immediately did, or if you want an infinitely recylcable slave labor workforce. As far as anybody can tell, the ethical issues that arise from necromancy are the same that arise from non-copse-powered forced labor and imperialism, because they cant see the consent issues on the back end. Where an awakened body only does anything because the soul is basically piloting it from the afterlife, a necrot is just a pile of shambling meat (or bones) puppeted by the arcane power and will of the necromancer, whether that person wants to be raised or not. And because necromancy is so new, they're still working on getting all the health and safety code caught up. Some of them have worked out that using the raised bodies of the people you're conquering in the army you're continuing to conquer with is fucked up, but they havent quite got the hang of germ theory yet. Thanks for the inspiration for some of the knock-on effects of having corpses walking around! i hadnt really thpught about the health and safety aspect of it. Sorry for kind of popping off about my homebrew, but in classic DM fashion ill take any excuse I can get to gush about my worldbuilding lmao
I've made a character (Goes by the name of Jack) who is a "moral" necromancer. His favourite way of reanimating a person is actually putting a soul back into their body (It's something which is basically unique to him). Circumventing the rather problematic side-effects of resurrection. Mainly, a whole lot of things are going to get angry, the magic (sorta half-sentient mind you) will weaken you a slight bit, and your own life will be cut shorter (similar to how saving someone works according to Reaper Man). An extremely powerful person will be able to negate most of these effects, but they are extremely rare. Therefore it's mainly clerics and other religious figures who resurrect people. Though only with the consent of their god. So it's basically useless for anybody not religious/poor/basically everyone. Jack is therefore unique in the fact he services ANYONE willing to sign a contract, while also giving (most) subjects their free-will back (until he is in need of them). He also gives anyone who requires an afterlife guidebook. Because it's best to die informed. This is also part of his regular job going around to the sick, dying and dead. Providing comfort, healing, rest and sometimes even help with getting to an afterlife. Something expected of necromancers, at least according to the guild. Most people still have these (somewhat) unfair biases towards them, only partially deserved. Religious workers hate them the most, because they compete with them. Also yes, my setting is akin to say the time of the French Revolution (But with lower tech levels because the local magic level is high enough to break things like cannons, etc.). So there are so many fractured faiths that the necromancer guild can occupy an actual role in society. If not a very limited one (very little chance of actually raising the dead, which is why Jack is such a big fan of "stitching". Creating more powerful creations from multiple different sources. Even monstrous sources, which is more legally allowed.) And finally, this dude is ethically closest aligned to the Blue and Black colour combination from MTG. He sees ethics as: "Does it have a negative effect." "Yes? What?" "Discomfort of some people? Not sufficient!" "The subject is unhappy due to the raising? They want to move on to X afterlife? Stop the raising! Guide them to their destination!". Just because someone is so utilitarian in worldview doesn't mean they are not empathetic. Jack is, I feel, the perfect representation of that.
Just a small point, not condemning your argument, but the fact that you say that the discomfort of some people is not sufficient to dissuade you, and yet follow it up immediately with talking about how being utilitarian doesn't have to make you unempathetic is pretty hilarious.
@@pwykersotz I should be clearer. The discomfort is of random people not involved in the animating. Like a random passerby. Or some distantly related uncle. Or even estranged parents/siblings. As long as it's a consensual contract between people with the sufficient mental capabilities to agree, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. What I meant with empathetic was more to stop the (white/green aligned) MTG philosophy fan from saying: "But BlACk iS eViL. IT is So sElFiSh!" and “BlUe Is inCApabLe oF EmOTIon! TheY ArE BaD!”. Something I do not agree with. But I did specifically mean between the patient/subject and the necromancer. If a person has any doubts about wanting the raising, Jack won't force it on them. Unlike, say, his master's master (As in a person who teaches an apprentice in a guild). He was a big Fnaf fan, so you can imagine who he tried to emulate with his creations. Jack's master is better because he keeps people alive, not even undead that often, just purely alive. Which is good. Apart from the part where he doesn't really ease the pain, or ask for consent when keeping someone alive. Which is not a good thing. I actually alluded to these two when I said "these (somewhat) unfair biases". The somewhat refers to his master's master. Only a small number of people realise how bad Jack's master actually is. Since he's been secluding himself more and more (Working with so many dead people, while getting rejected by most of the living, does a number on one's (fragile) psyche. Something which affects all three.). Compared to those two Jack does things perfectly. Or as much as possible. He keeps asking: "What does my patient want?" Instead of: "What do I think I need to do now?" His job is not a medical professional, it's pain alleviator. He doesn't always succeed in being empathetic. When most people you talk to are either dead, dying, reject you, or all at once, you get kinda desensitised. Lastly, this was the opinion of the character Jack. Which, although similar, is not exactly my opinion. I'm also not called Jack. Sorry if I wasn't clear. Is this sufficient information? Or do you require more information? I’ll happily provide that if it’s the case, or if I need to be more clear!
@@BasicallyBaconSandvichIVNo, you're very clear. I still think the dissonance between empathy and your system is there. Though I accept you simply dismiss it. That sort of system has been thrown around for decades. It's a lot of fun in some respects. Two huge advantages are that it allows for tremendous mechanical optimization and disruption of classic stories.
@@pwykersotz I'm sorry, but what system are we talking about here? I'm a bit lost with what we are talking about. I don't/didn't mean to simply dismiss anything. Could you please clarify where the dissonance lies?
To me this feels really similar to arguments about ethics related to robots and AI. Undead are scary because they are potent tools that are under the complete control of someone you don’t know if you can trust. All it takes is another powerful enough necromancer to come and seize control and completely undermine your undead servants. Similar to robots, a big concern being someone hacking into it and having control over it. The less physical control we have over something the greater fear is presented
@@simonholmes841 absolutely. In that way it also reminds me of animal rights. Does an undead corpse deserve the same rights as a person? Does an animal deserve the same rights as a person? Neither has the same intelligence or emotion as a human, so where is the line drawn?
I think a plausible alternative is simply a culture where becoming undead is part of funeral proceedings or ritual. When you die you get turned undead, simple as that. The Toraja in Indonesia have specific rituals for burials and will literally hold onto bodies until the right time, caring for them and keeping them in the house. I don't think it's much of a stretch to throw a little necromancy into the mix in a fantasy setting.
Mixing necromancy with divine rituals in fantasy settings is also a pretty interesting way to create a holiday where, when the veil between world of the living and the dead is close, priest summon ghosts/reanimate corpses of the fallen family members using the willing souls of the departed. Basically a fantasy version of Santa Muerte. Happy holiday where grand-grandfather can see his grand-grand-kids and spend one night in the year together. Center that holiday around a good god of death and voila! Ofcourse it can work only in setting where necromancy isn't using inherently dark energies nor destabilizes reality and such.
Tbh an undead workforce can be culturally acceptable fairly easily. A politically powerful and determined ruler could feasibly make it a social norm within a few generations, assuming existing religions do not have explicitly strong opinions on bodies post-death. Frame it as a requirement, in the same way as paying taxes. Imagine this: every major city and big village has a morgue ("mourning hall" or whatever you want to call it) and everyone's mandated to send their dead there. While the corpse is being prepared for reanimation, the family can continue their usual rites per their religion within the hall for a fixed number of days, after which the corpse will be cleaned up to remove/hide identifying features, then put to work. Set it as a fixed term, say 2 or 5 years, after which the body will be permanently laid to rest or burnt to prevent reanimation. Once you have people growing up seeing their grandparents go through the process, it's going to be just part of daily life.
i think the most ethical undead labor force i can think of are the anointed from mtg's amonkhet. granted its hard to call much of anything on that plane entirely ethical, but at least in context id say it is anything that dies on amonkhet is reanimated due to the Curse of Wandering until it no longer has any flesh. anyone who dies while being a proper member of society (ie not a dissenter) gets embalmed, mummified, and awakened as a laborer. they wear full-body wrappings that hide their identity and presumably helps with sanitation as well. these anointed then serve most menial roles which frees up the living for more deity-worship now all of this *was* actually so nicol bolas could have a plane's worth of mummified slaves/soldiers for when he tried to conquer the multiverse, but it was a pretty interesting society in itself
In one of the stories I’ve written, the undead were used by the “good nation” strictly for the purpose of cleaning up battlefields. Fallen soldiers would get up, dig their own graves and go back to sleep. There was a time long ago in the worlds history when zombies and the like were used as weapons but the practice was lost over the eons. In the modern day, biomancy (the manipulation of living flesh) is the body horror magic of dark lords and the like.
This is absolutely wild. I have a setting based on this entire concept. Some day I might sit down and write it up, but the gist is European style colonization of New world circa 1800 except the natives dove into necromancy hard for the noblest of reasons. The big undead apocalypse war happened and the undead won. On another note, thank you for reigning in the emphasized "s". Much smoother. Edit: finished the video and it's funny as hell you brought up elves. They were the progenitors of the undead apocalypse 😂😂 Re: Pandemic
Mummies are some of the most aesthetically interesting and effective means of abiding these problems. Embalming makes a corpse largely sanitary, the wraps can cover identifying features, and the ritualistic process can help make the process more peaceful and integrated into society. Hell, in the D&D 5e monster manual, mummies are explicitly pointed out as undead to be used as consultants and sources of ancestral knowledge!
This actually helps me a lot as I wanted to create an area in my homebrew where undead were publicly accepted. These ideas are more interesting than the ideas I was going to run off of. Thank you!
I ran a lawful evil city that did that. If you were a citizen in good standing and did not Whish to become a sentient undead they would actually pay 10 gold for an adult corpse which for a setting where peasants make 2 copper a day wasn't bad at all...just for clarification you could sell your own body as a loan to the state we joked about it being "death" insurance
I think we always gotta remember that a lot of our modern conceptions of the dead and their desecration is based on religion, especially Christianity. In a world without those systems of belief, there would be enturely different stigmas around the dead and how they should be treated Edit: they mentioned this in the video. Shows what i get for commenting early off the premise alone
As a US Citizen. My country has legalized slavery. It's enshrined in the constitution that prisoners ARE slaves. Also, citizens who are prisoners lose the right to vote and if it's a federal offense they lose the right to vote AFTER they have served their sentence. This is also why our police are so violent and aggressive. The more minorities that are arrested the fewer minorities who can vote remain. The entire Republican Party in my country DEFEND this as correct. One of the most important aspects of "Ethical Necromancy" is that it saves labor, but that takes jobs. So, what are all the poor people going to do when all their labor is taken care of by undead who are owned by the rich? This is also true in the USA, especially the South. Everyone who works "low end jobs" for the state. They are slaves who are paid basically nothing, this in turn reduces the value of that work as no none slave can afford pay that low. Mostly all the janitors and other such work including cleaning up the road sides, it's all prison slave labor, leaving few jobs left.
I played a character who was religious. In his religion, having your body reanimated after you've died was seen as the price to pay to go to the afterlife. Your body works whilst your spirit moves on
I think to make an ethical system of necromancy, we could ironically use an example of a real life unethical system. The concept of there being an Untouchable caste of people, like the Burakumin a feudal japan, or the actual Untouchable caste of India's past, or even the people who fulfilled some jobs in European history like Tanners and knackers These were people that were viewed as unclean, who did unclean work, who worked among the populace but had to live apart from them. I feel it would be perfectly within the realm of possibility for a society to view the unthinking and soulless reanimated dead in the same way as these unfortunate people were viewed, an unsightly aspect of day-to-day life that nevertheless does fulfill necessary functions within that society. If nothing else, it would certainly be more ethical to subject this to a skeleton that again is soulless and unthinking, then to the actual people who had to suffer such indignities in the past. And for the acquiring of these corpses, it could be an active donation, or one could sell the right to their corpse or the corpses of their loved ones to the state. It could even be a matter of old graves where it is unlikely that the exhumed corpses would have any living relatives with an emotional attachment. Which, coincidentally, would also help with the problem of what happens when you run out of graveyard space.
Commenting prior to watching to see if your analysis will change my conclusion. Ultimately the ethics comes down to whether or not the undead creature is experiencing humanity; recording information, setting goals, developing a personality, self-perceiving, etc. If it is simply an animated body, it is morally indifferent from using tools or products that come from living creatures. If there is no person or sentience to experience the labor, then it is simply a machine or tool.
A friend of mine is named Zr0, and he’s homebrewing a lot of things. One thing he’s cooked up are “Ghouls.” (No relation to preexisting things sharing the name.) They’re a society of weird, undead, shade-spirits that practices a unique form of necromancy. Its unique because the engram of a soul (the souls mind and thoughts, etc.) that once inhabited the corpse(es) of their thralls are not actually bound to their body; the soul’s energy is what is tailored to the servant. In fact, tampering with the preexisting engramatic energies of someone for personal gain is considered a crime and a sin of the highest caliber. They also believe that the soul has no right to a body once properly unbound from that body. To Ghouls, death voids the contract between the body and the soul. Though to be fair, they eat rotting corpses as much as they reanimate them.
A big thing in the worlds I have played in is that different species, particularly with incarceration, do actually have stratified/ proportional punishment. Most of the time it was set up throcratically, so a deity set up mortal punishment. Where a human might get 12 years for negligent maiming of an innocent person, an elf might end up getting 84 and a half-orc may only get 8. However we generally tried to play out rehabilitation except for particularly heinous crimes. Instead of finding the thief informant in a dark jail cell, you would likely find him doing compulsory humanitarian efforts in the local area during the day, and at strict housing arrangements at night.
So I recently read Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique" cycle, in which necromancy is an everyday reality, although there are locales where it is not appreciated and will get you in trouble. He has one story that gives us the perspective of the necromancers going about their everyday mundane lives, and then he gives us another story of necromancy through the perspective of the undead... Not a version of events we get very often! In this case, we only really get the perspective of two specific undead, who seem to have some capacity for intelligent thought and ability recall their prior lives, and they plot to free themselves from the control of their necromantic overlords. The rest of the undead, we aren't given any indication they have any awareness or internal dialog at all. They might, but we aren't told either way. Necromancy crops up in most of his Zothique stories, and it is indeed common for the undead to be used as mundane labor, especially for more dangerous tasks. There's one story where the undead are used a sailors and for marine rescue, and pearl diving, and such maritime activities that can be quite dangerous. Why risk the life of a still-living person, after all?
9:14 there is a short manga in which people could be brought back to live. the series was short and not memorable (sadly I don't even rememeber the title...), but it did touch the topic and explained that there was a law that dictated that people that are revived cannot contact their relatives and friends because it was stated for death not to lose its meaning, at least not entirely. and the conflict was that the protagonist's father wanted to have some few last moments with her. if I happen to find the series I'll edit the comment for anyone interested.
I had a similar thought, but was thinking more of levy infantry. Have an opt in option, like an organ donar deal, where your skeleton could be raised again in times of war. Every time used, you are on the pay roll, paid to your decendants/family. Even in death, serving to protect those and that which you hold dear. Now, I was going with souless raising here, and then having live officers commanding each unit, for sheild walls type purposes. Skirmishers, scouts, cavalry, and other infantry would be either soul bound undead, or straight up just alive. The punishment aspect you spoke of makes consecutive vs concurrent life sentences a HUGE deal.
This is the best source of information on a society that uses Ethical Necromancy. It's part of the societal contract that the necromancers shall protect the residents in life, but in death their bodies become property of the state and thus can/will be used to help support and defend the city.
This is an examination of something I've spent a lot of time thinking about. I have a realm in my world which makes tremendous use of an undead workforce in the agricultural and military sects. In this region, reanimation is idealogically supported, and each corpse raised as a labourer is either completely flensed into a clean skeleton, or is magically embalmed to prevent the corpse from rotting too quickly, and all are dressed in ceremonial robes which denote them as people to be respected. These robes cover one's face, and there are a *lot* of labourers, so if you aren't familiar with the local customs, you could be in for quite a shock when you realize how many undead you've seen just walking the streets. Goes a long way to explain why the common folk never go hungry, and don't suffer attacks from goblins; they hand their honoured dead a plow or a spear, and the issue is solved.
Great time to bring up this topic, because the Planescape setting has a whole philosophical faction who use undead labor (and will be hopefully making an appearance in the new books coming out next month). Kinda wish these topics were more explored, especially in-character (when encountered), but I also get that people put a lot of sentiment to the corpses of their loved ones...
Arcanum is a setting all about magic vs tech, and is sort of going through its own enlightenment. It has an old CRPG thats very good but you NEED quality of life mods lol
A lot of people are mentioning organ donation/ donating bodies for science as an alternative system on which we can base an ethical undead system. I should have touched on it in the video, but didn't. Essentially, I dismissed it early because I became immediately wary about incentives. If regular people were to get any kind of reward in a programme like this, either for themselves or their family, we would likely see a class divide rear its head immediately. The very poorest and most desperate may find themselves with no choice but to sign up.
I completely failed to consider the version of this where people donate their bodies with full knowledge of what will happen for a purely altruistic reward. I'm not certain if that works or not; it is possible that there aren't enough genuine altruists to make it work, or that burial/cremation practices are too entrenched in a culture to get any volunteers.
Sure, a society with a different conception of what to do with a corpse may find many more volunteers, but with those news stories every so often where 'bodies donated to science' are used in weapons tests instead, I fear that it may be a system prone to being killed off by even the spreading of a bad rumour. I will say, I should have discussed it regardless.
Maybe I'll make a video discussing alternate death and burial practices... stay tuned; it's spooky season after all.
-Tom.
I think you're Seeing a Good thing as though it was potentially a Bad thing there... If a System of incentives and rewards for signing a "Organ donor Card" were to be put in place, this would HELP Poor people more than Hurt them. Sure this System would Eventually Cause some people to be Effectively forced to sign it, But doing so would effectively Remove them from Poverty, or at least Reduce their poverty, while they live. Which to me seems like a pretty Good Alternative to just STAYING poor, starving and Miserable until the day they die. Remember, they'd have Been poor Regardless before signing the Card, or if such a system existed or not, But with this system in place, there's a way out of Poverty that would not be available to them if it didn't Exist (And no other Social programs to reduce poverty existed either). Plus, it's not like Signing the Blasted Card is gonna lower their standards of Living WHILE they're alive, in fact it's Nearly Assured to improve them. For all intents and purposes, this is a Social Welfare System with Extra Steps and Benefits for the state(or whoever is gonna Put the Corpse to work).
It should also be noted that if they live in a Society where they consider the Soul to be the person(Which would likely be Standard in any Setting where Souls are Tangible things Like D&D), not the body it inhabits(That Belongs to them but it IS not them), then what attachment would they have to their Body after their death? Why would they care in ANY way what gets done with their body after Death? If they get payed, while they are alive, to allow their body to be used after they've Left it behind, all the better! I Mean I guess they could be Selfish and do the equivalent of "No, you're not allowed to use my car or my house after I die! When I'm Dead you Destroy them!", but That sounds pretty Petty when put in that context eh?
There were always people in the olden days who would dig up corpses to sell for science under the guise of "donated bodies".
See Amonkhet by Magic The Gathering. Pretty much solves the hygienic and identification issues by making the undead prepared mummies
The thing about real world poverty exploitation is that the people are still alive. Plasma Centers primarily target poor people, because a hundred bucks a week is enough to probably not starve.
But with it being after death, it's less exploitation of poor people, and more an income form to provide for a family even in death. While I could see the wealthy preferring to avoid it and wanting lavish tombs to show they are special, I would expect most families, poor and middle income alike, to participate because it provides more stability over time and lifts their family upwards. Imagine if your dead grandpa got paid a normal wage to work, even in death. In a job their muscles could no longer perform due to age, but their bones can.
It moves most dangerous jobs away from the impoverished, and into an undead labor force. In addition, it's entirely possible that a kingdom could, if it held a system like this long enough, enter into a near post-scarcity economy. As more basic jobs are filled by the dead, less need for the living to fill basic roles are needed. Only a few people would be needed to direct and oversee the dead, and of course highly skilled craftsmen to produce luxury goods. And voluntary intelligent undead could also fulfill the latter as well. Eventually you hit a point where your entire primary labor force is undead, and you can simply allow the citizens a reversed tax. In life, they are paid a monthly stipend to live a modest but comfortable life, but in death they will work to provide for the nation in exchange. They can still choose to work if they desire to do so, but are otherwise free to follow their passions and interests.
The only major downside to any form of compensation would be that if desperate enough, a family might selectively unalive specific members who are unable to work due to age or cognitive impairment.
Morals and Ethics are relative to society culture...
I can think of a society where only ppl who distinguish thenselfs will be animated.
In this particular case reanimation is more of a reward them a punishment.
In my games: Undeath and necromancy are morally neutral, but it's surprisingly easy to get from "we may as well animate the dead to work our fields" to "the biggest difference between a live serf and a dead one is the amount of complaining".
Also, does it let the raised person's soul rest peacefully?
Yeah, this is a huge problem the video doesn't discuss. Especially if the undead are cheaper to maintain or easier to control than people with free will, it puts the living and the dead into competition. I think zombies are slaves, but even without the ethical considerations of the zombies, people who have to compete with slaves for their lives and livelihoods are hardly better off.
The same can be said about slavery as well. And if the people start to talk and revolt just cut off their tongues.
@@MyAramil yeah, that sure did wonders throughout history. Oh, wait, it didn’t.
@@max7971 This makes me curious about creating a world setting where the undead serfs/slaves revolt
Funny enough, I ran what I liked to call the "Friendly Neighborhood Necromancer" in a D&D campaign. He went around helping with harvests, rooting out bandits and culling monster populations. Initially, he erred on the side of justice and caution in his quest to de-vilify and normalize necromancy, first getting the permission of the townsfolk in general, then contacting each soul in question to ask for permission (You might be surprised how fast some folks are willing to crawl out of the grave to protect their kin). After much study, and in one instance directly consulting with actual divinity, he confirmed that Reanimation as applied by Animate Dead did not infringe on the rights of the soul. It was purely his own life force giving motion to the skeletons and zombies. Thanks to his efforts, the kingdom he was in adopted the practice of using skeletal draft beasts (horses, oxen ect ) for much of the kingdom's brute force labor and to allow families to animate their loved ones bones to help bring in the harvest, after which they were respectfully interred once more.
That last part sounds very fun. I'd imagine that they would have harvest festivals based around the raising of their family members, harvesting crops, then returning their loved ones to the ground.
Eldar wraithguard are often volunteers who let themselves be reinstated in a wraithguard automata to defend their craftworld. It's still gnarly and awful for them, and the living eldar don't like it when they have to. They are stirred when the gestalt spirit of the craftworld as a whole turns to martial moods.
@Embassy_of_Jupiter Only went to war once. By the end of it I had 10 Dracolichs under my command and a standing army of some 40k Skeletons, Death Knights and Wraiths (All composed of volunteers who wanted to defend their homes). Utterly steamrolled the invading country and sacked their capitol city within a month. Zero civilian casualties. Built a massive mausoleum to house the army and laid them to rest, ready to be called on again should the need arise. After that, my necromancer declined all rewards save the induction of the aforementioned use of undead draft beasts and the harvest holiday (which was themed much like the mexican day of the dead). He retired from active service to watch over the mausoleum city as a good lich, to ensure their rest wasn't disturbed without very good reason.
@Embassy_of_Jupiterconsent is key there... what's wrong with an undead army of consenting resurrected? Plus you'd need very high level magic to bring back any undead soilder a second time because their bodies would likely be destroyed in a physical battle. I don't see how this is a slippery slope at all.
Cool, how did they deal with the fact the necromancer had to recast the spell every day to regain control over the undeads, otherwise they'd turn 'feral'? Or was this just homebrew to avoid that huge issue?
I ran a RP campaign some years back where the players were moving into a region that had been plagued by the undead for thousands of years. And as the story progressed little by little the players began to realize that they were infact being the villains invading the lands of a peaceful culture following a sort of Druidic religion of life and death. "You receive in life and serve in death"
So the soulless skeleton trying to murder you was actually some old grandpa just trying to defend his family, his home and his country.
It doesnt sound too bad when you put it like that
"You will receive in life" meaning you can find reasons of purpose without the need of worry
And "Serve in death" meaning your body will help others less worry and better find their purpose
Its not like anyone can capture souls as it can lay to rest
So i see this as a win!
Also had an idea for a human faction like this for a game/world. A feudal society where in life you're allowed to enjoy it to the fullest. You can relax, eat, sleep, drink, and party till you drop. And then upon death your lord who decides by whoever is born to be a Necromancer. Revives you to work the manual Labor and fight in defending the land. And this can lead to some pretty interesting situations like what if someone wants to be a soldier? Well under the tradition of this land you would indeed have to sacrifice your life before serving in death the benefit of this being that since not many of the people take this route they die old where their body is of a less vital condition. So if you offer your life in your prime the Lord can maintain your body in a better condition. These undead soldiers are usually the champions and perform better in battle. Ofc the neighboring factions few this as sacrilegious and the people as debaucherous but at the end of the day they're enjoying their lives and paying for it in their deaths.
:(
Makes me think of a story I saw and cherish when I'm world-building for others to this day. Players come into this dark forest where undead monsters are said to reign. Our heroes show up, find the monsters in question; a family of vampires masquerading as nobility. Plans made, adventurers are off to go stake them and/or kill these creatures of the night when their villagers, up to this point thought to be thralls, show up with all their worldly possessions, begging them, take it as tribute and leave.
Turned out the vampires *do* feed on the villagers in their domain, but do their utmost *NEVER* to kill, only slake their thirst. In exchange, the villagers are asked for just enough to pay their dues to the king they live under plus just a pittance of gold for themselves. They have no need to push their bootheel down on the peasants, they are fed and *maybe* take a little off the top to furnish their home to legitimize themselves as aristocrats when other nobles come through. Otherwise a solid 80% of the villager's wealth stays in their pocket, they get to afford the nicer things in life and maybe almost live like middle-class folk as time goes on. They also slaughter any bandits that harass them and scare away any monsters that bother them.
Does it include an encounter with a little zombie girl with intact and well maintained clothing and headpiece and the villagers defending said zombie girl?
I remember watching someone doing a reading of that specific reddit post
Its always inteigued me that, as far as DnD and its derivatives go, necromancy is the subject of so much debate, when theres a whole school of wizardry that revolves around tampering with the minds of the living to get what you want. The Enchantment School is just magic roofying.
It comes from D&D's roots as a game about IRL Religions waring like countries. IN old school D&D hey had "alignment languages" that as Gary put it was like, Latin being the language of the Church.
Enchantment is a lower priority as it was being used by the "right" side, but necromancy was a symbol of "evil" while healing was a symbol of "good."
Like Cavaliers/Paladins/priests, etc. leaned heavily on the Catholic? church, while Bards were based on the Celtic Fili, with heavy handed restrictions based around depictions of the original cultures they were borrowed from. IIRC Cavaliers had to be lawful and had a code of conduct they could lose their class abilities over.
Always remember
If DnD were to merge into RL, some Incels might use Enchantment magic.
@IrvineTheHunter old-school D&D alignment also had genuine impacts on the world. Alignment, just like magic, was absolutely real, and the various planes of existence each encompassed an alignment.
The plane of negative energy, the ultimate source of magical undeath, is inherently evil in most published settings, and so raising undead and controlling them was almost always inseparably associated with evil magic-users seeking to dominate them for their own personal gain.
Someone who uses charming magic would clearly dictate it's use based on their assigned alignment and use it (to their knowledge) genuinely for good, if they were aligned so, whereas an evil caster would use it to further their personal aspirations.
@@UpToSpeedOnJaguartheres a reason the saying "God save us from men doing the lords work", and the variations thereof, exists irl. a very good chunk of the worlds atrocities have been commited in the name of some god or another and "the common good". ultimately there is no scenario where using magic to force someone to do something is a good thing. a violation of free will is a violation of free will. WHY you did it is ultimately irrelevant to that fact.
The Book of Vile Darkness from 3.5 D&D goes over why undead are ultimately evil in pretty good detail.
Glad Gale had the time to explain us the ethics of necromancy.
One easy solution I can think of for ethically sourcing corpses for reanimation is volunteers. In modern society we can donate our bodies to Institutions and they'll use our remains for scientific research.
A similar system might exist in a fantasy world regarding raising of undead by state sanctioned necromancers.
And for the aspect of the public's perception of these undead workers, traditions might begin to form where it is seen as an honour to be reanimated, and the normalisation of the undead in everyday life would desensitise the general populace to their presence. If you've grown up with skeletons harvesting the food you eat, you won't have a negative perception of them.
That's literally what happens in Planescape. Have you heard of a little organization called "the Dustmen"?
@@rainbowmothraleo I've never even heard of Planescape, let alone a faction from that setting 😅
Imagine still owing debt when you die, and in order to pay off your debt may use your corpse to mine and do other dangerous work
Sounds like another way to exploit the poor. Offer them money to turn them into an undead servant. It's why we don't let people sell their organs.
Imagine having a great king and bringing him back to rule indefinitely as a vampire or lich-type. Never have succession wars and their laws will always follow the same general line. The society will be very stable and they can gain more power as a warrior or Mage until they peak in both. They also will have decades to centuries of experience.
This is a topic I've explored at length myself, admittedly in a setting that's much different than the Forgotten Realms, so I feel like I might have some comments of use.
Here are a few more base cases of possible ethical use of undead:
- Voluntary Reanimation. The main provider for a family has died, leaving in their will that they wish to be reanimated to help their family survive. A body of volunteers which would like to contribute to an important cause, just not at the risk of their soulful lives. An artist who has left directions to how to use his animated remains to finish his yet most important works.
- Highly Dangerous or Specialized Labor. Cleaning up toxic waste, looking for survivors in a fire, playing bait to draw out a town-wrecking beast, collecting precious goods that were lost at the bottom of the sea, tirelessly guarding a depot of highly volatile material. Any job that's too dangerous or costly to perform with regular people would be more ethical or at least sensible to carry out with undead.
- Reanimating Appropriate Creatures. Brainless giant arthropods that can be easily mummified with cheap alchemy. Plants and fungi, if the magic allows it. Beasts and monsters, literal or figurative, that were killed to stop them from killing.
- Passive Labor. Irremovable ghosts used as part of a refrigeration system. Will-o-wisps kept away from civilization by also tricking them into fulminating and recharging arcane crystals. Letting obsessed but harmless spirits carry out the productive activities they would do anyway, such as teaching their craft, entertaining a public, share first hand recollections of historical events.
I do feel like I'm only scratching the surface, here. This topic becomes even more immense once we concede that "ethics" can be highly malleable no matter what philosophies are most established in a society, especially in times of war, famine, and general crisis.
This is the best response i've read so far, Well met!
I see this absolutely leading to a (more) dystopian capitalism led by the market of souls lmao. poor families having to keep working for the good of their families as only the rich are allowed eternal rest
@@arthurwkm And despite having earned their eternal rest, the rich are still tied down by their mortal desire for more wealth, causing their own families to tear themselves apart in an attempt to get an inheritance that their dead rich relatives refuse to part with.
The Voluntary Reanimation aspect is someyhing I've been intrigued by. Perhaps common people can enter into contracts with a governing body, selling the labor their animated remains provide and the proceeds going to their next of kin for a set amount of time. Criminals can be given sentences of a specific number of years, and can serve out those sentences even after death should they expire.
The most obvious problems involved on a community scale use of this includes having enough highly skilled practioners of necromancy (and possible necromantic magical enhancers) available to provide the needed reanimation, and of course the possibility of wrongful charges or draconican laws that abuse a populace to gain access to an undead workforce.
I'll be stealing this list, thank you very much lol
I have attempted to tackle this conundrum as well and my best efforts led me to a society with a strong military tradition employing military contracts including "life insurance" wherein soldiers opt to give their bodies to the state in exchange for a stipend to be paid to their next of kin for the duration of their service as an animated corpse. The dead could be honored annually in a parade under the guise of illusion magics to give the public some catharsis to offset their inherent revulsion.
This a really freakin profound way of ethically sourcing an undead army. I hope you don’t mind if I incorporate into my home games!
@@jakesol5821 Please do!
There is an anime that had something like that where they used Frankenstein’s work to reanimate corpses to do things like labor and war. The only nation in that anime that did not do it was America because they focused a lot on machinery instead.
@daswordofgork9823 there was also a movie set in an alt-history America where the mafia operated their construction crews with all zombies.
Funny thing is life insurance could also mean that for a part of your pay and depending on the plan you choose could mean a raise dead, resurrection, true resurrection, or reincarnation spell.
As soon as you mentioned hiding identifying features I thought of plague doctor clothing I wasn't thinking in terms of alternative races like elves but covering them head to toe, stuffing their skeletons with pleasant smelling hay; flowers; and grasses, and letting the necromancers make a competition out of creating the most complicated masks/headgear seems like it'll solve most of the anonymity issues
My thoughts also. And it could even help with hygiene issues slightly.
i had a necromancer a while back who learned his craft from a farming village. the way we ran things, people could donate their bodies to the town upon their death, and we made a variant of gentle repose that didn't preserve revivability but did preserve the body from disease and decay. as this was a game set in theros (the mtg greek setting), "returned" were different creatures. returned have intricate golden burial masks, and so we gave the zombie laborers smooth bronze masks, with no features. basically just elongated bowls. i really enjoyed it, though it ended up being mostly background detail and not factoring in too much
In the world of Overlord, the baharuth empire was experimenting with undead labor, but secretly and without much success trying to naturally create new skeletal undead. Ofc the op protag brings undead labor into the world at scale, mostly brute forcing a shift in views on necromancy in the world. The protag himself uses it for guards and farming, a vassal state starts using them for labor and their army to show their loyalty, and the dwarves use it bc mining is still pretty dangerous and their population was pretty low after warring with their enemies underground. Then people are just happy with how useful they are, while all the moral implications being put aside bc hey, do you want to argue with the undead king? He's the evil one for killing people and creating the undead, everyone else is just adapting and surviving this sudden change.
That's one thing Overlord always did quite well. It initially comes off as your usual OP isekai protag type story, only to reveal itself to be far less about the "power fantasy", and far more about how the world around Ainz reacts to having someone SO insanely powerful just appear out of nowhere. He, and the rest of Nazarick, are leagues beyond anything most of the residents could dream of, and that is naturally going to cause some massive shockwaves across all the various cities, kingdoms and empires, which watching how they all respond to these massive, rapid, and unstoppable changes makes the series rather special compared to most other isekai stuff out there.
So what do the old laborers do?
@@NecromancyForKids Some still do their old jobs (since there is still demand given the amount of work that needs doing) but many are hired as supervisers/controllers for undead workforces. Aka they tell the undead what to do and make sure they dont mess it up.
So a ethically ambiguous technology found itself into popular fruition due to a strong advocator. Who is also a scapegoat for the adopters who ultimately use the technology to their benefit. Adopters of the technology loath and chock their ethical responsibilities to the scapegoat.
@@daniellin1726 naa they come around to it very quickly and are happy to use it.
Sure its a pretty big culture shock (combined with him allowing nonhumans to also live there) but the next time we see the city its filled with calm and happy citizens.
(and given that the POV characters are actively distrusting of undead and loocking for wrongdoing we can fairly confidently say its mostly real as well ^^)
Remember: as long as enchantment magic exists, necromancy will always be morally okay in comparison
Why?
Upd. Please, stop answering this question. It has been replied to like 15 times at this point.
Charm person , and other mind altering spells like that. Mind control is always iffy.
@@crhoades555 ah, this type of enchantment. I'm really not used to thinking about the term in this way except for when the content is exclusively about dnd. Thanks for the clarification!;)
@@nin0fthat people see necromancy as more “inherently” evil than altering someone’s very mind really shows you how little humans truly care about reality over feelings.
This extends heavily into Star Wars and the force for example: using the Jedi mind trick isn’t frowned upon but using force lighting is soooo evil your face melts to represent how evil you are. Except using the mind trick is, literally, striping someone of free will.
Very tangible example of intent mattering and “grey Jedi” being a definable thing:
you use mind trick to not get caught by the gestapo: you’re good.
You use mind trick to kill someone to take their cool stuff: you’re evil.
You use force lighting to fight off a rampaging gundark and save grandma: you’re good
You use force lighting to torture your employees’ son to get him to be evil with you: you’re evil.
@@bitharne I always perceived the Jedi Mind Trick as altering perception, rather than stripping people of their free will. At least in the few instances I, not a Star Wars fan, have seen, it’s always been in the form of presenting a piece of information to your target, and having them perceive it as unquestionably true. The guard hunting down the droids didn’t stop trying to find them; he just “knew” that *those droids over there* weren’t the ones he was looking for.
I think it's interesting he landed on criminals as a moral source for necromancy. I remember reading a couple books from an indie fantasy series about a boy coming from a line of necromancers. Necromancy was painted as evil, while life magic was portrayed as good... except that necromancy allowed the dead to come back and serve humanity, working off karmic debts... and life magic had some hidden costs. It was an interesting way to flip the morality of traditional magic systems on its head.
That sounds interesting. Do you remember what they were called?
@@Connor_McKinnon Necromancer Awakening and Necromancer Falling were the first two. There is some roughness (I think Necromancer Awakening was a debut novel), but I enjoyed them.
What were the hidden costs of life magic?
@@fishyfish1917 Spoilers, but the costs were that they were taking life magic from the population. As the book progresses, you find that fewer and fewer babies have been born in recent years because the high priests have siphoned off the population's energies to craft a gigantic magical barrier around their kingdom.
In my DnD setting I have a City that stores special "Death Ward" corpses in the city's Walls (think like a morgue), inside of tombs marked with plaques. This is a tradition in the city of Ravencliff; the city is on the border of a swath of the world called "The Dead Lands", named so for it having been blighted by a war between the massive armies of gods and eldritch horrors. Now there are absurd number of corpses that litter these badlands.
Necromancers, adventurers, criminals on the run, bandits, slavers, monsters, and daring traders are the types that traverse this region. There are several towns and cities in the area, most of which are run by villainous sorts, Slaver Kings, necromancer cabals, mindflayer warlords, etc. There are few sanctuaries in this hostile and deadly desert of bones.
This is where Ravencliff comes into play: They specifically honor their dead in various ways; some are burned and turned into ash/bone powder to be made into bricks, others are used to feed the local Ravens in a set of bi-yearly festivals, whilst others may chose to become part of the Death Ward.
Those who become Ward Corpses are honored, their tombs are prayed over by the Wall watch, who are themselves necromantic clerics. These watchmen honor the dead, and raise them should trouble arise. If trouble does indeed show up, the dead are brought out to fight for their homeland. In the interior of the city, there are even spots in alleyways and in the ground near certain clearings where they store bodies in such a manner as well. This process significantly boosts the defensive ability of the city. Becoming a Ward Corpse is fully optional, but it is culturally acceptable and seen as a glorious way to honor the city and your family.
I would also say that, your talk of the disgust of the dead doesn't apply to all cultures on our own planet, much less in fantasy universes that could/would be much more violent and dark. People can and will get used to such things as corpses, especially if they are brought up in this system.
I'd like to learn more of this setting.
@@jasdanvm3845 I wouldn't know where to start lol. Been playing it for about 15 years or so now, and the lore goes on a ways.
I suppose a basic lore overview of general events may tickle your fancy?
In-setting (we call it Arde, named after the main planet) stars are the truly powerful deities of the universe. They usually fight against the beings of the void, Eldritch monstrosities which seek to corrupt and destroy the light of the Starborn beacons in the inky black of space. This is am eternal war that resets and recycles itself every time the universe dies and restarts. It is the way things will always be, for light is the antithesis to darkness.
Not all Starborn are good, just as not all Eldritch beings are evil.
Starborn create worlds from debris in the void, and use their divinity to create life. These divinely created beings are usually subservient to their masters, though some don't even know the Star is their Master. Often Starborn create children, or "Gods" for their little creatures to worship. Other times they only make thekr Gods and watch what they do from afar. Either way, this often separates the Stars from the little ants that unknowingly owe their existences to the starborn.
Starborn can manifest as physical shapes, outside of their stellar shell. This is a projection of their Divine souls, and usually takes on an aspect of their personality. Rasalas takes the form of a Lion, while Polaris takes the form of a Devilish guide dog (a hound with horns and a long tail ending in a lantern).
Starborn tend to form long lasting alliances with those of their kind who agree with or benefit them, and these are called Constellations. Constellations grant Boons to those Starborn within it, like a group empowering buff of sorts.
The Starborn Mirakar forms, and creates her first world: Arde. This is a peaceful planet thatbshe designs to be her own little garden. She creates dragons and other massive beasts, gifting them each with sparks of divinity of their own with which to create underlings.
Dragons create lizard folk, dragon born, kobolds, tortles, and elves.
Dwarves enter into the solar system via voidship-runecraft called Cladds, looking for places to settle and mine in the name of their Gods.
They recognize the bountiful nature of the planet Arde, and work out a peaceful deal with the natural inhabitants, though it heavily favors the Draconic servants by far, and the elves look down on the Dwarfish explorers as though they are some form of advanced vermin.
After centuries of the Dwarves typically keeping to themselves (unless the Eldritch invaded) an unnaturally massive storm breaks out the ocean, freezing any who dare sail close to it. From the tempest, the Blood of Ymir spreads, creating land as it freezes the ocean. The storms calm, but a wall of icey mist covers the interior of this newly formed frigid landmass. Arde alters it's size accordingly to account for the new landmass, seemingly not effecting the residents of the planet in any way.
Humans, Giants, and various monsters invade through the mists. Entering through them in the reverse order leads to Jötunheimr, a cold plane that is not of Arde, nor seemingly this universe.
The elves are disgusted by the emerging humans in particular, as they bring even more heathen gods to their already tainted planet. Even worse however, the Humans carry the obvious contagion of Starborn influence. The dwarves see a kindred spirit in these manlings, and begin to establishgood relations with them. The humans and Giants bring their own gods and starborn deities, even bringing the memories of The Dead Gods (the Norse Gods, Egyptian Gods, Abrahamoc God, etc) with them.
Clashes over divine rights, land ownership, and racial purity begin to swell, leading to unmanageable warfare that still, in part, lasts to the setting's current day.
@@HandOfThemisdamn
@@slippyfruit8538 A recurring primary villainous figure of sorts is a particularly gifted Elf King who sought to free Arde of it's perpetual cycles of violence: Astrom Movestil, the Frost King . He wanted to push himself and his fellow mortals far beyond the power of the Ancients, Starborn, Eldritch, and Gods to show that the creations of the Gods aren't as constrained as they seem to be. For even thinking he could make peace between the races, he was called the Mad Elf King by the majority of those who heard about his plans.
At first he thought that gaining enough power would be encouraging to his fellow mortal races, but soon he found that everyone began to distrust and fear him once he made significant ground on his own. Astrom traveled to distant realms, such as Jotunheimr, the Ethereal Sea, the Valley of Bone, The Nine Hells, etc to lkearn foreign magics and secrets. He bartered with the Dwarf Durr and gained the secrets of Rune Smithing. He swam into the Astral Sea and learned Astromancy form an insane Starborn Hiding on the dark side of the Moon named "Kest" (a place where a certain faction of elves named the Sestuthi would later be banished for trying to create a God that could devour Mirakar's light and gain Her power).
Astrom establishes a grand magic-based city along a desolate stretch of Jotunheimr, and invites the greatest minds of his era to join him in creation and research. The area is transformed from an icey desert wasteland into a thriving magical metropolis.
After hundreds of years of research The Frost King "discovers" (is shown) secrets of the Universe, and is told how to steal the powers of foreign Stars. His knowledge of this is unknowingly flawed; a trick by an Eldritch infiltrator who sought to make the mortals of Arde into servants. This eventually ended up with Astrom creating a series of powerful artifacts that had hidden side effects, the Crowning Achievement of this research was the Crowns of Control: a series of 8 Crowns that were meant to grant massive power boosts to the wearer, and allowed them to instantly communicate with one another. These were also custom tailored for each wearer, and granted them unnatural lifespans.
The reality was that the main crown that Astrom wore, (the Crown of Command) would slowly poison his mind subconsciously and as he slept. It gave him visions of great power, and ideas that would cement his downfall: Astrom would augment and tweak his creations over the decades as he was corrupted by the Outer Beings, eventually tricking those he'd given the crowns to into allowing him to augment their crowns once more. This last augmentation gave him control over them, but also twisted and cursed their forms.
Seeing his allies and friends turn into monstrous forms pulled him out of his corrupted-control, but far too late to save them. Without their leaders in their right minds, nor champions strong enough to challenge them, the nations of Mortals slipped into chaos. The Frost King was blamed for pushing the world into instant war and chaos, and was shunned by most peoples, if not outright attacked by some nations.
Most of the Horrible Ones (the mutated Lords) were unkillable, so they were banished via magic, trapped/sealed away, or were lured to other locations.
Eventually the Arde-born God of Mankind, Zarus, devises a way to seal away Astrom in order to pave the way for the future of Arde under the banner of Humanity. Zarus has 5 children, and sends these children out to go create powerful nations of Men. After centuries, these children reunite and invite The Mad Elf King over to their Great Hall for a feast in order to allegedly discuss making perpetual peace with the Draconic Races. They set for him spot at the table with a throne of Brass for him to sit, and told the Arcane master that it was a seat of honor created specifically for him.
During the feast, Zarus suddenly appeared, and tore the now emboldened Divine Sparks from all 5 of his children in order to bind Astrom to the specially designed Brass Throne. Brass is a metal of evil, and takes to cursed magics better than any other; in this case it was the magic of a powerful and hateful God who was being empowered by the belief of 5 large nations of Men. Zarus tied the curse to a powerful bloodline of Kings, and only they (when donning the correct suit of powerful gear) undo his curse if they so needed to use Astrom for some means or another in a time of great peril. Then Zarus cast the Frost King into the Ocean between the main continent of Men (Barressea) and the Landmass of Ymir's Blood (Jotunheimr). He knew this wouldn't kill him, but it would prevent him from getting in his way any longer.
Unsurprisingly this really pissed Astrom off, and he began to radiate his own curse: Astrom cursed the briny waters around him to forever know the TRUE meaning of Cold, and those who touched their waves would know the feeling of a frigid death. Thus the Ice Grave Sea was born, and mortals to this day tend to blame the shores of Jotunheimr (the blood of Ymir) due to not knowing of the truth. Monsters, spirits, and chunks of unnatural ice are found in the deathly waters of the region, and many say they hear the maddened laughter of a Dead God some days when the winds are calm and the skies are clear.
Astrom would be blamed for many, many more incidents in time as his creations and blueprints ran rampant across the planet without his guidance. He was able to project himself every now and again when the stars aligned just right, but he was never able to break free from his binds. He was in a state of mind to try and wipe the slate clean on a number of occasions, but was convinced to alter his course by a charming old-man who bore a sweet brew to quench Astrom's parched lips. Eventually, The Mad King landed on merely breaking free from his bonds, and would see what the state of Arde was before he made any rash decisions.
His Wife, an Ancient Green Dragon driven a bit mad form years of solitude, seeks to trick adventurers into helping collect the artifacts necessary to free her Husband. (This is the current Campaign's major plot-line, with a lot more detail than i care to type quickly here lol).
There are many smaller engagements and side stories with Astrom, but his role as the Mad Elf King is quite fun to me: he was/is the "good guy" in a broad sense, but he's always slipping up/being tricked just as he's about to finish something big. He was Called mad by the majority of elves of his homeland for wanting to seek peace, and by the majority of other races later on as well. The meaning of mad changes when he is corrupted, and now it has changed again as he is twisted by natural emotion in his throne at the bottom of the sea.
Are there any courpses of giants in the walls?
I've always thought of doing a dungeons & dragons run where the group is sent to kill a lich who has been raising the dead only to find out the lich is a good person who makes deals with the living to enrich their lives and in exchange they sign a contract stating that they will work as free undead labor for a set amount of years before their soul is allowed to be let go.
And the king who sent you after him is just really angry that the lich has been persuading his subjects to leave his Kingdom.
The lich can’t really be good person, especially with them from Wizard line, they can’t be form from positive energy, only negative energy, and they eat soul, good or evil soul, still a soul and eating it pure evil
An interesting case can be found in Magic: The Gathering, on the plane of Amonkhet. The inhabitants of the plane are basically obsessed with training to become the ultimate warrior, learning from and obtaining the blessings of their 5 gods. For one thing, that means that somebody other than the trainees/warriors has to perform the basic functions of society, such as growing food, janitorial duties, etc. The solution employed in Amonkhet is to use the bodies of those who die during training - i.e. those who fail to complete the process of becoming perfect / complete warriors - as a labor force.
These "Anointed" are mummified using a combination of magic and practices similar to those of ancient Egypt, such as removing the organs (i.e. most of the soft tissues that would otherwise rot), and the use of embalming agents to prevent the remainder of the body from undergoing decay. The body is then wrapped head-to-toe in clean white gauze (which, presumably, is replaced periodically with fresh wrappings), and reanimated using an enchanted cartouche. This fairly neatly addresses the hygiene and disease issues mentioned in the video. The results are shown as mute, anonymous, almost mannequin-like figures, wrapped in white and given simple clothing. The Anointed can be seen all over the place, going about their assigned tasks in the way that a more techologically-oriented society might employ robots, doing the less "glorious" jobs while the living are free to focus on other pursuits. As the Anointed are animated by magic rather than the souls that once inhabited them, these mummies do not think beyond what is necessary to accomplish their given tasks, do not rebel, and (lacking soft tissues like lungs or tongues) literally cannot complain.
The people of Amonkhet know and understand that these mummies are made from the bodies of their fellows - that any one of them might be the body of a friend or family member who failed the trials - and that, if they do not complete their own warrior training, this will be how their own corpse will be put to use. However, they accept this - while they strive for glory as warriors of their God-Pharaoh, if they falter on their path to greatness, at least they know that their bodies will be put to use as Anointed mummies, for the benefit of their community. Thus, becoming one of the Anointed in death is considered a lesser, but still significant, honor.
Of course, there is a hidden dark side to Amonkhet - particularly regarding what happens to those who DO complete their training and become "complete" warriors. Still, I thought the way the people accepted the creation and use of this undead labor force - and their acceptance of the likelihood that they might wind up as part of it - was unusual and interesting.
This is very similar to the Imperium from Warhammer 40k. Because the Imperium was build on the ruins of a great machnine rebellion, thinking machines re forbidden, and technology is worshipped religiously. Instead of robots, the Imperium uses Servitors, lobotomised cybord slaves very similar to borg drones. These can also be found everywhere where you might find robots.
It also happens to literally everything that dies on the plane. Outside the magical protections of the city, zombies roam the desert until their bodies completely fall apart. Mummies are not just a practical solution, but almost necessary to protect the living.
@@ShinyGoldSteelix Excellent point! If you're living in a world like Amonkhet (or like the world of The Walking Dead), where anyone who dies is guaranteed to rise again, one way or another, what is the best way to deal with large numbers of naturally-occurring undead? Ritual cleansing and "domestication" ala the Anointed? Burning/destroying the corpses of loved ones / community members before they have a chance to rise as mindless husks? Erecting walls or magic barriers around settlements to keep the undead away? Mass destruction of the undead via nuclear, thermobaric and other weapons?
@@heitorpedrodegodoi5646God-Pharaoh is planeswalker dragon & has a plan for massive undead army.
@@AndyDickens-n4x Right. So, in the end, it turns out to be another case of "Necromancy = Bad". I just thought that the Anointed, and the generally positive way the living inhabitants of Amonkhet regard them, was unique and interesting.
So in my DND world one of the core themes is irony. One way I implement this is there are 8 main countries on the continent representing the 8 edges of DND's alignment table but their seeming morality is only surface level. The LG faction is actually CE and so on.
So the "neutral evil" country is a barren frozen waist land ruled by vampires and necromancers. It started when the vampires wanted to create an ethical renewable food source. They would never kill anyone with the '"blood tax." Then the necromancers created a cheaper, renewable alternative to slavery with undead labor. This freedom from the undead labor and stability from the vampire government gave the mortals the time and resources to pursue other goals such as education and the arts. Not to mention live healthier lives, thus giving the vampires better quality blood further incentivizing vampires to use the system.
Interesting take. Would love to read a story set in that country (probably more immersive than an rpg, in this case).
@@kylelind6239 That's kinda one of my problems. I plan out my dnd game like an immersive world for a story ... and not as an actual game.
That's late stage development of vampires in the Witcher world. In the Addon Blood & Wine you find books on that. Because sick and stressed humans taste worse and they don't really need a lot of blood to begin with.
One of the most fun character I've ever played as and conceptualized was a Chaotic Good Necromancer, reunificating souls with bodies temporarly to grant them one final last wish. As a mean to help the soul be at ease or let them reassure their close ones.
Character was actually very friendly and chatty instead of those cliché edgelords.
@@Ugarimpty I'm not really an edge lord so much as an edge regional manager.
Efficient and business-like with my edge. None of the pageantry, but with enough free time to do some non-edgy things on the weekend.
I actually have thought about this a lot and done a LOT of research into different explanations behind necromancy and how it works, and I have to say my favorite explanation (because it makes sense) is that when a necromancer reanimates the dead, they are not reunifying the soul with the body to animate it, they are accessing the (for lack of a better term) muscle memory of the corpse (explained in the source as “remnant” in the form of an impression the soul leaves on the body). They then write instructions that use this “remnant” to make the body move filling in the missing pieces with magic that uses the bones as scaffolding. I love this explanation for 2 reasons, the first, it bypasses most of the moral quandaries about redirecting the dead while also explaining how reanimation works and 2 it provides both an explanation and incentive for necromancers to care about the quality of the corpse, because as part of this explanation they explained that since the magic operates on “remnant” or the body’s “memory” left by the soul, they cannot learn to do anything that they could not do in life. This means that if you raise a farmer they will never be a great warrior or mage, but if you raise a fallen warrior or mage they can retain the skills they had in life, making the quality of the corpses you require much more important, and explains undead experiments, combining corpses to get more out of the materials. Anyway I just thought I’d share with you guys since it seemed like a brilliant explanation for me at least
This is very similar to the "slaves are valuable merchandise" argument. LMAO ok man.
@@EricWalkerswildride how so? i'm not arguing the morality per se. just offering up my favorite explanation for why the necromancers don't see themselves as evil, and why they look for better corpses.
@@EricWalkerswildrideexcept slaves are people, this is literally just a meat robot
I have talked with my brother about this and found some things that I find interesting:
At least the lesser undead only require the body and "animating spirit" which seems to be distinct from the soul
It seems given this that normal humanoids have a body, soul, and animating spirit
When they die their soul usually goes to an outer plane, and the animating spirit is lost but both can be restored through magic
So a living person would be body, soul, and animating spirit; a ghost may be an animating spirit and a soul; and an undead would be a body and an animating spirit.
I believe that as long as you don't mess with the soul without consent, necromancy can be an interesting and fun thing
Now as far as the forgotten realms goes necromancy originates from Orcus and there I don't think it can be said that something demonic in origin is ethical but that's just the forgotten realms.
Pathfinder has a great approach to necromancy. There is an entire nation of undead named after its former powerful wizard now eternal ghost ruler, Geb. It exemplifies everything listed in this video, even to a fault, resulting in mortals being treated as second class citizens and even cattle to be farmed. If anyone who likes this video wants to play something similar, check out the pathfinder second edition adventure path, Blood Lords!
One thing that i saw someone talking that happened in their DnD campaing, was when before going into a diffcult battle, a Necromancer asked the town guards if they would be willing to be raised back to fight to defend others even after their deaths. And with some considerarion, they actually accepted and because of this selfless act, they managed to repel the invading forces while the Zombies helped them defend their loved ones.
I really love that.
You mentioned Christianity but they actually had a very different response to dead bodies. They met in necropolis for weddings and communion, they made their homes in catacombs, they venerated the corpses and bones of their saints. Heck, eventually they built churches out of those bones, like the Sedlec Ossuary. A theology developed of memento mori. Honestly, i feel the most likely place to find undead labor would be the willing monks of a Christian monastery who choose that their corpses be perpetual reminders to their brothers of a holy death.
Depends on the denomination.
@@xzilerq.5471 i mean, now. But for any amount of deep history, only catholic and orthodox matter, and this is true of both. Other denominations don't exist until after the middle ages, and for the first thousand years even these two were one thing.
Also, many miracles, including (or even especially) the ones performed by Jesus, fit the definition of necromancy quite well
Current church is just very sanitized to fit contemporary understanding of and approach towards life and death
@@Invizive current church would be unrecognizable to anyone 1000 years ago, let alone longer.
@@Invizive st. Severus literally gets a corpse to tell him who his murderer is to settle a dispute of his dispossessed widow. And another saint whose name escapes me has his corpse posthumously animated to arrest and deliver a graverobber robbing his grave to the people of the town for judgement after offering his own forgiveness; a story about how sin even if forgiven by those it is done against still has just temporal consequences. One litany of saints ive seen that includes him gives him the title, "Zombie of Justice".
We had a game where the necromancer created something like life insurance. He made a contract with people that he would pay a sum to the family after death, in exchange for the body. So it was agreed to by the person, and the family was compensated.
People "agreeing" to be a slave argument. Awesome. Libertarians out here doing it again.
I like how necromancers need to invent wage slavery to be moral.
@@EricWalkerswildrideSlavery was actually widely varied in history to be honest. A lot of it was very much for a set period of time, such as enslavement for a few years to gain citizenship into a nation, unlike American slavery which was mostly cradle to grave and had the added indignity that any children you produced where also slaves. It's all still pretty bad, but there is a question of magnitude.
@@EricWalkerswildride I feel like it being slavery really depends on how the spell works. If all the spell does is puppeteer the corpse, then it's really just paying for someone's corpse. I mean, according to the monster manual you can still resurrect a skeleton, which I assume to mean that its original soul isn't there, and "a zombie retains no vestiges of its former self, it's mind devoid of thought and imagination.". I dunno, take that how you will.
@@PhoenicopterusRyeah necromancy’s morality is very dependent on it’s mechanics. You can use the Ka and Ba model where lifeforce is separate from consciousness and memory.
But then how is lifeforce made? Is it infinite? Why do you need a body as a life force vessel when you could make a golem? Is taking lifeforce disruptive to natural order or reincarnation, or is it equivalent to using a river as power?
It’s up to DM to answer these questions, but these sorts of questions I think really affect the morality of the magic
Warbreaker has its own brand of undead referred to as Lifeless. Basically an animated corpse that's had its blood replaced with a preservative ichor. They're difficult and expensive to make and thus are pretty much only owned by the wealthy, but they also make up a majority of the military of Halondren. Their neighboring country considers Lifeless as abominations, but the Halondren just see them as expensive tools.
i've always enjoyed the headcanon that Animate Dead effectively summons a spirit/entity that takes control of the assembled bones. Animate Dead itself doesn't actually animate the dead, it's just a highly formalized ritual that allows that entity into the body and gives the caster control for a while (feeding off the spell slot/intimidated into following). that helps justify, to me at least, why the zombie persists after animate dead wears off, and why Dispel Magic can't unmake an animated corpse.
I've always thought that Animate Dead summons a spirit from the Negative Energy plane to take over the body rather than using the original soul, because there's no way in Hell (pun intended) a 3rd level spell could be that much better at trapping souls than 7th and 8th level spell alternatives, or exceedingly rare magic items.
The problem with this version of animate dead is that it takes the bite out of necromancy imo. It becomes identical to just animating objects. And if you're going to do that, you'd be better off animating suits of armour (ala Full metal Alchemist) rather than flimsy bones and rotten flesh.
@@Bazzyboss Um, good :)) a 3rd level spell shouldn't have that much bite.
BTW, you ARE canonically right, fighting with an animated armor is more effective than fighting with animated flesh and bone. Which is why you can't just make your own Alphonse Elric with a single cast of a 3rd level spell. You have to either craft it from zero, give up your bonus action to command it every single round, or perform multiple costly rituals.
@@tudornaconecinii3609 When I say bite, I more mean like how spicy and interesting it is. I just feel like necromancy being something that defiles your soul and enslaves the dead makes it really interesting. Liches commanding armies of slaves, twisted abominations. I feel like animated objects are a little too whimsical for my tastes, reminds me of the furniture from beauty and the best.
This is all just my preference though. No one's personal headcanon for their campaign is wrong.
@@Bazzyboss I think it's perfectly fine for liches to be able to force a soul back into its body and make an undead servant that way. Not only are liches rare and very powerful, but they'd have to have specialized in soulcrafting to make their phylacteries in the first place.
What I don't think is fine is for a level 5 wizard to be able to do it, without even giving the soul a chance to make a will save, when even stuff like True Resurrection allows will saves to resist.
I understand that it makes for a more interesting setting if necromancy is more horrific, but you can achieve that without making it canon that *all* undead and *all* undead-creating spells pull original souls.
Warrior : You have my sword to avenge your brother!
Dwarf : And my axe!
Elf : And my bow!
Necromancer : And your brother!
This is actually my current DnD character (reborn): he was an aspiring magic student in a high magic society, one of his experiments caused a lot of deaths. And as a punishment he had to serve as a kind of laborer zombie forever. Although not usual kind of zombie: his tissues were preserved with alchemy, he retains ability to use magic, and his own magic keeps him alive, but his memory and personality were erased and his free will bound to do what was ordered by his superiors. In this form he served on a spelljammer ship, till it got into combat with a nautiloid and crashed on a planet, where the adventure takes place. It so happens that during said combat, illithid psy weapon messed something up with his "programming" and after the crash he regained his free will and started regaining some memories.
P.S. I was inspired by adeptus mechanicus and their servitors from WH40k
If his/her memory is erased, how is it any different to 'that' person being killed?
@@avaren7660 well, it provides free labor. Also the soul is bound to this, basically undying body and cannot proceed to reincarnation.
... Have you read "All Systems Red," by any chance?
I actually have a character whos a necromancer who has the unique ability to communicate with souls of long daed bodies if the soul exists and asks for permission to use the body and if the soul wants come back can't fully heal the body but will make surrogate bodies like armor or similar vessels. They themselves are not very strong but have helped do everything from reunite families, allow trapped souls to be at peace, and even aid in funeral rights to heal pained souls that she gotta a small army of friends who want to protect them on their quest which ends with them filling a role of a reaper in helping souls even in their own death to their afterlives
Haven’t watched through yet, but a note I’ll make beforehand is the existence of the Orzhov Syndicate on Ravnica within MTG & D&D. They are the religious and banking guild of Ravnica, and you will work off your loan in death. They use spirits for manual labor, to ensure that their contracts are fulfilled: even in death. They do let the souls rest once the loans are paid off, though
The ethics of necromancy and the use of necromancy as a positive force have always fascinated me so thanks for the fantastic breakdown.
You mentioned that you would like recommendations for worlds with magic in the middle of cultural revolutions, specifically similar to the enlightenment, and I have a few suggestions.
Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett has a magic system quite similar to standard programming, except instead of a computer you program reality itself to disobey its own rules and do things like make wheels roll up hill or mimic an objects state onto another. There are a few main plot threads but a few are related to overthrowing a guild structure in favor of a more Democratic one.
Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone is a series of books all in the same world each jumping around the timeline quite a bit but broadly it’s following a cultural and Industrial Revolution. It’s magic system is most similar to contract law and does go deep into some of the weird intricacies that entails with the first book basically acting as a legal drama/investigation set in this bizarre world. It also features some interesting deep dives into concepts like a god of justice acting as the police force through citizens who have willingly given up their autonomy to join its ranks.
Merchant Prince’s by Charles Stross is a bit of a weird one for this because it’s arguably closer to Sci-Fi but it fits in a similar niche. The core mechanic that’s originally presented as magic, but slowly is revealed to be genetic tampering is a kind of timeline hopping where by looking at a specific Celtic style knot design you can switch between worlds. The alternate versions of earth also have pretty deeply realized backstories of exactly what’s different and lead to their current existences. The main one visited is called the Gruinmarkt and is effectively still feudal, except with even more separation of the upper class as they have modern amenities they have bought in our world and brought to their own. The series mostly follows feudal politics and the weird economics presented by this ability.
Finally I also have The Laundry Files also by Charles Stross, which is also a bit of a weird recommendation considering it’s modern day urban fantasy but there are some important features that make it interesting for this discussion. First of all it’s a weird mix of a spoof on the british spy genre and a dark workplace bureaucracy comedy that quickly progresses Into absurdity as the banality of filling out forms in triplicate clashes with lovecraftian Eldritch horrors. It also plays into the workplace necromancy trope quite nicely with dead agents being resurrected as parts of either the night crew or for the file room, with this just being part of the standard employment agreement. The really important part however comes from the progression of the regular world over the course of the series. Over the first few books we keep getting warned of an apocalyptic breakdown of society where magic becomes easily accessible to the common man, titled Nightmare Green. Unsurprisingly this event occurs and is the major backdrop of the middle and most recent thirds of the series, with the middle being the odd transition period only for the insane and horrifying to become the banal in the last third, such as a grocery store using Necromantic meat puppets in gimp suits as labor and a small Channel Island’s population turning their owner into a god through praise both being seen as pretty much normal.
I like the "undead radiation" theory from Libris Mortis. Even if you animate undead for purely good purposes, undead dont belong in our world, and more of them being in our world makes it more likely that uncontrolled, ravenous undead will spontaneously appear.
Kind of reminds me of this idea I had for a setting with a distinction between science and magic. While science is about using physical laws, magic is about destabilizing reality so that those laws can be subverted, which often requires the assistance of an extradimensional entity (not unlike how a warlock forms a pact with a demon). In it, the magic users are rightfully persecuted as using magic for even benevolent reasons could spell disaster for the entire universe.
In Pathfinder setting undeath is similarly inherently evil. Reanimating undead increases the amount of negative energy in existence which contributes to entropy and eventual destruction of the world. Even if you animate a corpse for the most benign purpose you are contributing to the end of the world. It also shifts your soul towards evil (in this setting good and evil are literal concrete metaphysical forces) so even if you created the undead for a noble purpose the power you used to do so will corrupt you and you'll end up using them for evil
It depends on the setting really. I can imagine some necromancer having idea to use undead in ethical way in Warhammer Fantasy but it'd end sooner or later with him becoming tainted by the magic and go with the classic "I'm an evil sorcerer" route since the magic juice that is used in the necromancy there is pure black magic that taints both the user and everything around it. In that case it'd be a matter of what will become fecked first, nature become barren and mutated from the magic or the necromancer become unhinged more and more.
@@battlesheep2552 that’s arcanum. It’s video game that you can find on steam
@chillax319 I totally agree that you could make a setting where reanimating the dead isn't evil. It doesn't seem that such a setting exists in published D&D however. (The closest is Eberron with the Aerenal elves, but they aren't truly undead.)
In my dnd games, the creation of undead (usually zombies and skeletons as those are the easiest) is generally seen as, at best, a reckless act and, at worst, a straight up evil act.
This is because, when left to their own devices (ie without the influence of their creator), these undead will seek out and try to kill living things. The usual spells for creating undead require that control over the undead be reassured every 24 hours, or else the undead breaks free and goes about doing their natural thing. So if any mage slips up and can’t perfectly keep up, their undead becomes a danger to everyone around them.
As a necromancy apologist, I'd argue that fire is a vastly more difficult force to control than undead, and it destroys all sorts of things indiscriminately, yet we view fire as a useful tool available to everyone, and necromancy as a foolish evil. "Dangerous if uncontrolled" can be a source of superstition, but an inadequate bar for evil.
To safely manage your undead without expending magic, instruct them to restrain themselves in ways that allow you to tie thier joints back and store them until you can renew your control, or even just destroy then when you are finished, just like properly extinguishing a cooking fire after use.
So, can't say about any other part of the world, but where I'm from, around 1000 years ago arson was the worst crime imaginable. You not only destroy and possibly kill somebody else, but you put whole settlement at risk. And even if you're not campaigning in a city, burning wildlife can have a similarly disastrous consequences. With that in mind, I would say that everyone's favorite fireball is way more dangerous, then resurrecting 1/4 DC skele.
When the options include animating objects without the cost to a soul or revered body why would you choose the one involving death?
@@twilightgardenspresentatio6384because typically creating undead is vastly easier than permanently animating objects. And necro-engineering should only be used with powers that create undead devoid of souls.
For existing settings with undead labor, the webcomic Unsounded has zombie labor (called Plods, if I recall correctly) who are used mostly for construction or other heavy labor, used mostly out of sight of the citizens, and who are garbed in heavy work gear that already obscures the body's former identity. I think the reanimation process also warps the body somewhat, so it'd be hard to recognize a plod even if you could see their face. Though part of the face covering is a muzzle, to prevent them going feral and trying to attack anyone. For the ethics of souls, their magic system makes it easy for a competent wright to tell the difference between someone that has a soul and something that doesn't. It's still somewhat looked down on, though, being morbid, creepy, and risky if one gets loose and goes feral.
In some iterations of the Heroes of Might and Magic franchise, the undead are treated as just other people, and of course necromancers use mindless undead as cheap labor. In one game, part of the main storyline involves an angel getting his human girlfriend resurrected as either a lich or vampire, which raises no eyebrows from anyone involved. The eyebrow raising comes from the fact that he wanted her body animated so it could be the vessel for his *real* girlfriend's long departed spirit, and he didn't care about the body's owner that he was planning to just evict from her own body, read kill, in the process.
For my own D&D setting, there's an entire country nicknamed the Land of the Dead since almost 70% of its intelligent population is undead. The ranks of mindless undead aren't counted in the same census, but outnumber intelligent inhabitants nearly thrice over.
It helps that my setting doesn't use alignment as a strict requirement for most things, so the founder, a lich of extreme power, is not at all evil. He's pragmatically altruistic, which means he does generally good things because that's the most sensible course of action for him, and he encourages people towards good behavior because that again benefits him. He's also had several centuries to help formulate laws around the creation of undead and the status of persons. In short, intelligent undead must obtain a permit to reproduce if they can do so naturally (like vampires) and a very long contract must be made if they want to retain control of their spawn (most of the time it doesn't wind up happening). Mortals can undergo any of several processes to become an intelligent undead, but that also requires significant permit red tape. Mortals can sell their body rights to either the government or private interests, and mortals who have not established such preferences before death are questioned using magic; if the questioning fails to provide a clear yes, then the mortal is assumed to not consent to the use of their body and is given to an appropriate church for burial. This is also done if an illegal mindless undead (such as one raised by a foreign necromancer or one that spontaneously arose from wild magic) is found; illegal mindless undead made from mortals who don't consent to their continued use are destroyed and given to the church.
On the subject of cleanliness or health, zombies are embalmed and enshrouded in durable wrappings (often magical) so that they do not decay or risk disease, and this also makes them impossible to identify without defacing their masking. I was partly inspired by Unsounded and Egyptian mummification, and was quite vindicated to see the same idea show up in Amonkhet a few years later.
This winds up deeply affecting the political landscape in several ways. One is that the regular apocalypses the setting suffers scale their monster spawns based on the number of minds nearby, so the large army of mindless undead laborer-soldiers gives them an enormous edge in defending themselves and thus preserving infrastructure through the disaster. Second is that their abnormally large standing army is useful for defending against the adjacent nation of xenophobic conquerors, and they can, have, and do loan out regiments to their fellow sane nations who share borders with the xenophobes. For extra irony, one of the nations with whom the undead are allied is a paladin nation; thanks to alignment detection and truth-telling magic, they are fully onboard with the nation of good-enough undead. And finally, there's a standing offer for anyone in the allied armed forces for purchase of body rights; it's again volunteer-only. Since actual resurrection magic is damaging to the subject's soul, it's generally advised against except for heroes, those who really have unfinished business, and in times of extreme need. There are also a fair few ways to resurrect someone without a complete body, so it can be done that a person's body is to have a sample removed for resurrection, have the body reanimated, and then have the person resurrected using magic that rebuilds the body, which is to say builds them a new body. There's one infamous eccentric noble who did this deliberately so he could own his own former body's zombie; rumors range from morbid to horrifying about why he wanted it.
The main problem that prevents other countries from doing anything similar is simple lack of any way to control so many undead. A few groups have adopted similar practices, but most places just don't have enough clerics or death mages to handle many. In the undead kingdom, more than two thirds of the mindless undead are under direct control of the king, which is a mind-boggling feat of magic. Still, it has caught on in the last couple centuries for churches to have some zombie staff for menial labor, though the further from the undead kingdom you get the more resistant to the idea people usually get.
Edit: I just finished the last couple minutes of the video, and I noticed something: Several of your assumptions are based entirely on our world, our history, and thus our cultural mores. Thus, for example, you seem to assume that people would automatically believe that the body is not something that ought to be used indefinitely. Assuming proper maintenance, an undead can last forever, since several kinds of magic can rebuild lost tissue. Thus, a race with a very short lifespan (kobolds, who in some settings usually expire before 60, spring to mind) could have a cultural expectation of their bodies as being basically disposable resources; this encourages them to make use of their dead just as much as their living, and becoming a long-term benefit for the community is an exponentially larger net benefit than just the few day's worth of feeding that even cannibalism could provide. At the other extreme, very long-lived people such as elves would all the more instinctively see the benefits of long-term investments, and having their body become an undead to help care for their descendents is about the best legacy they could leave. To take a leaf out of Eberron and the Arenal elves, if the zombie acted as a mobile ancestor shrine for the spirit of the departed to return and visit, then it ascends to being an oblique form of immortality and cultural oneness.
You also assume that burial rites would have evolved the same way in a magical world as in our mundane one, when they really should not have. Magic to preserve bodies can be incredibly easy, requiring only faith in a god and a little experience. Thus, caring for (or disposing of) the dead could evolve in a radically different direction. Indeed, with magic to cure diseases (such as prion diseases, which are a common fear that discourages modern capitalism) and to purify food, ritual or mortuary cannibalism could be extremely normalized the way Martians do in Stranger in a Strange Land, viewed as a form of respect, community care, and ritual closeness with the departed. This would be all the more relevant when food may have been scarce for a culture when it's young; the Netflix Sabrina reboot has a holiday based around honoring a witch who gave her life so that her companions could avoid starvation by cannibalizing her. Thus, a culture that grew in a barren land may view eating the dead as a final gift to the community, endocannibalism as a cultural norm.
There's also the fact that there are ways to produce soulless bodies in the first place, which could then be turned into artificial undead. Stone to Flesh (for editions that have it, 5e is just not good in this way) turns statues into corpses, and the Clone spell, though expensive, creates corpses too. With such methods as these, there aren't even ethical hurdles to jump through; these were never people, they're objects with simple and known provenance.
One of my friends made an encounter where you are offered to "pay" some dimensional weirdos with a clone of yourself for a magic item.
You play the clone. You are disarmed, chained up and led away. Or you are the original, and you see your clone take your place. You have no way of knowing.
The thing with ritual cannibalism reminds me of Dune, where the fremen routinely extract the water of their dead to hydrate the living.
I love your story, ideas, everything. Your comment has become a very long screenshot in my phone, and I shall reference and remember it forever.
I was thinking much the same about the expectations and assumptions he was making. It is also a point of fact that DnD worlds are FAR more dangerous than our own, and I do not find it difficult to imagine people being willing to come back to defend their homes against threats like trolls, demons, bulletes, dragons, ect ect ect
Also, since you can use Speak with Dead, it seemed strange to me he seemed to very quickly discount Consent. Sure, a "powerful enough" necromancer can surpass that, but the terms "powerful enough" show the limit. Weaker Necromancers can't.
I've always had a fascination with the machinations on necromancy. The mechanisms that actually allows it to work.
One of my favorite ideas on how it could work is this:
Injecting mana into a _fresh corpse_ that is tasked with taking hold of every muscle, nerve, and neuron in a body. Then like some sort of metaphysical computer, the mana converts itself into miniscule amounts of electricity to stimulate said muscles, nerves, and neurons to send and receive signals. All to complete caster authorized objectives. Like a biological automoton meant for mana efficiency to circumvent costly uses of mana.
•Like conjuration of entirely new entities (sometimes made of mana themselves).
•Or circumventing technological limitations of making machines that let mana do the same.
Then there's the _skeleton/decayed corpse_ version of it, which is a bit trickier, and mana intensive:
Same deal with the _fresh corpse_ version, except any missing or thoroughly decayed muscles, nerves, or neurons are replaced with mana formed versions of them (skeletons being most mana intensive due to requiring the most replacements).
•These mana muscles can be latent kinesis sub-spells for faster and stronger than natural muscle replacements (though they require a lot of mana to maintain locomotion).
•The muscles can also be mana conjurations of thread that constrict like muscles that are visible on the body for lower mana consumption.
•And finally, with some very clever enchantment work bordering on bioengineering, you can lower mana consumption to near zero for locomotion by forming physical runes on the body to designate where simple push/pull force enchantments will be activated by the "mana computer" for locomotion.
Corpse muscles cannot regenerate like living flesh so they'll cast a spell or few then rot. If a corpse wants to be undead then it will be. Just donate that mana to a Lich Transformation if you're truly dedicated to this.
@@MK_ULTRA420 That's also another way entirely to go about it, and just as interesting for different reasons. It's much simpler when the soul is involved to do all the complicated interactions for the caster.
If the cells of the muscles; slow-twitch and fast-twitch are dead, then there must be mana dedicated to preservation, restoration of ripped fiber.
But if the corpse is fresh enough, or didn't die due to any form of organ failure, many cells still live. And will continue to live a little longer if the heart is pumped, and lungs are contracted through mana. The cells will live longer still the more organs are usable/in use.
It would depend on the magic system, but the latter option seems like it would be more mana efficent; hence more decayed corpses being less mana efficent due to all the substitutes necessary.
Making the magical act of necromancy itself more or less morally neutral is a great way to explore themes of machine automation in a fantasy setting
Imagine a world where humans resurrect the lifeless husks of dead artists and give them prompts to paint images for us in their art style. Terrifying.
Undead A.I.?
Terrifying for shitty living artists you mean. Imagine the GOATs of every art form supplied with unlimited tools with unlimited time to create. It would be a never ending golden age.
@@max7971Necromancy ftw, amirite?
@@max7971Historically, long-lived "greats" often cause stagnation of development.
While great scientists are praised, when a major popular scientist dies, it opens up room to question and challenge and thus...grow in our understanding.
And beyond that you have the ethical and societal problems of Billionaire oligarchs and Corporate AI exploiting communities and peoples...
This entire thought process is hilarious and I love it. It's so absurd.
I think the real situation would be just some level of cognitive dissonance, and the undead would just be dehumanized.
It's true. people forget that for 90+% of history, slavery was considered acceptable.
If people can condone and ignore that, having zombies that weed your garden would likely be easy.
Agreed. Hide their form in robes, gloves, full helmets, etc. and most people will not care.
@@kylelind6239 I'm going to implement a character in our nex session.
A necromancer who has summoned an undead scourge. We are tasked with defeating it to free a person's family's land.
We will discover that the land was taken after a genocide. The necromancer offered undead to replace the slaves so they could be freed, and the owner instead killed all the people to make them all undead. The necromancer ran the slave owners away and has the resurrected undead practice land and water management.
We discover a child that we rescue from the undead that starts to reveal this plot.
I think it will be a great murder hobo plot.
On the cognitive dissonance note: I do wonder if the bridge between normal citizen life, inevitable death, and potential utility as undead would lead to a bizarre fetishization of the cycle. Because of course undead are the very foundations and backbone of this ever so comfortable society, so truly it's an honor to be among that class after death. But also of course, they're just tools, so don't worry about treating them well. This is just _how_ we venerate the dead, and we should be so lucky as to contribute to filling out the ranks that uplift our society, not just with our own deaths but also those of the inevitable scores of however many progeny we have. Really it's all quite simple, you see.
It also honestly depends on whether a soul is damned by animating their corpse, if it does not, it is just somewhat macabre recycling.
You inspired me, see I have this concept for an undying Roman Republic. The use of reanimated courses slots pretty well into that society:
The Necrotic Mines.
A necromancer supplies the raw ores needed for metal manufacturing at the cost of the dead plebians. The general public doesn't know what happens to the corpse, they assume they're deposited in the mines. They're correct. But also not. The bodies are reanimated and spend the rest of eternity harvesting ore. The longer they last the more their flesh rots away until they're just animated skeletons. As they decay, their strength reduces (you know less muscle) so their roles shift to less and less laborious tasks, eventually their bones break or lose magical cohesion. When that happens they're ground into powder and sold back to the society as a flux.
Any weapon forged with that necrotic flux has special features that are unique to the weapon smith's skills.
Ultimately I'm avoiding the major ethics questions you're asking, but resolving the societal problems of "what to do with our corpses" and "where/how do we get our raw goods"
The undying Republic is headed by vampiric senators, who feed off the life force of their constituents, the plebians. Who basically worship their senator like a god. (It might be inspired by modern American politics)
In my fantasy setting, the region I focus most on has a popular religion called the “Way of Glory”, which elevates 6 deities above all others as objects of worship. One deity, who is only referred to by euphemism, is the god of death and smithing.
In the south, on a strangely cool island for such a locale, they worship the God of Death above all others. While there are others that do the same, such as the Western Dwarves, this island places great importance on the God of Death, and his role as a smith-and also, to them, a god of Wealth.
These people inter their dead in places they call “Halls of Silence”, great open-air tombs that allow their dead to decompose and be eaten by carrion beasts, before they clean them and dump them into a central pit filled with warm holy water.
Following this the bones are given a final once-over and then covered in lime, before being articulated (usually, the bones are mixed up at this point, so resulting skeletons rarely belong to a single person). The bones are then painted with complex sigils, and reanimated, before being put to work.
For the people of this culture, death is not a taboo-and the working of the bones of the dead into useful things after death is a great honor, combining aspects of their most revered God.
Of course, outside cultures have varying views on this. The Western Dwarves especially, who consider the same God their creator-deity, consider this an affront to his will and call often for a holy crusade against the land of the dead’s people-which usually falls on deaf ears, as although the practice is distasteful it allows for the land to produce exceptionally high quality goods at a relatively cheap cost, which the other nations revel in.
Alongside this, it should be noted that this system is not entirely ethical-the nobility of the island often avoid this fate, instead being interred in great tombs as mummies.
Neat flavor
I have a system where you can sell your corpse while still being alive. Signing a contract with a lord(usually) and being tattooed for identification. After your death, the Lord can mummify you and use you as they see fit. The mummification significantly reduced the decay and disgust factor while preserving the worker for maximum economic gain. Similarly, if you die while in large amounts of debt, the debtor can sell your corpse to a lord to settle your debt, assuming that your corpse has not already been preemptively sold to another. The government regulates the selling of corpses, though this doesn't stop a black market from arising. Plantations not having proper documentation for their corpse workers can lead to the confiscation of said workers and hefty fines.
There's an entire setting around ethical necromancy on 1d4chan (the wiki for the site's Traditional Games board, a lot less bad than you think), where soul-bound necromancy (which is willing) is completely separate from bone/corpse golem necromancy. Undead are treated with respect by relatives/descendants, and are the labor and military force. The lich king is actually a cool guy and engages in diplomacy in international affairs. And soul-bound undead are fully conscious and willing. The culture developed artistically and literarily and such because labor is taken care of, unless a citizen really wants to do labor. And becoming undead after death is seen as a good thing, but people can be laid to rest undisturbed if they want, with the understanding that if the empire was in dire need of more troops their remains would be resurrected. By default, undead are the bone golem kind, but iirc people can request to be made soul-bound as a skeleton.
Yes I remember that. And I mean if it is possible to become a sentient undeath and do something meaningfull after death this would actually be seen as a reward. It could also be interesting to compare the drawbacks and advantages of different types of undeath. A scholar might prefer lichdom, since it gives them perfect memory and focus and they are no longer distracted by bodily needs, hedonistic nobles on the other hands prefer becoming vampires etc.
I made a lore character in my DnD world who was basically an attempt to create a heroic necromancer. This was what I came up with.
Aavard Bloodbane
male human necromancer.
Aavard never originally intended to be a hero, let alone an adventurer, content to live his life working as town coroner, dabbling in necromancy simply to assist his profession. When the lands were wracked by war, the priest he served under spent several months compiling a list of the names of all those killed in the years of pointless fighting. He wished to present the list to the warlords hoping it would convince them to stop the wars or at least try to minimize the damage. Instead, the priest was publicly tortured to death by the first warlord to grant him an audience as a lesson in "respect."
That was the last straw for Aavard who could stand idly by no longer. He devoted himself to learning all that he could about his art, determined to see the dead would have their day. That day would finally come and the land at last knew peace when the spirits of the wrongfully slain rose up and ground the cruel warlords and their armies into dust.
Aavard is a man of few words who does hold a good heart under his grim demeanor. He employs necromancy as a way to speak for the dead and give them a chance to settle scores they couldn't in life.
That’s cool as shit man!!! I’m a dm and you have given some really good inspiration for my bbeg, now more of moral grey bbeg!
The first "ethical" example of an undead labor force I've heard of is in the "Dread Isles". When a person dies their body is given to the tribe to use as benefits the tribe. It's not a punishment it's part of their lives.
Not everyone agrees of course and you actually find someone running away from the tribe so they can't be used. Though he did gladly benefit from the system he doesn't want to participate. It's a "fun" moral dilemma, that also ignores the whole germ problems :P
So, my Pathfinder group made our own setting, and we ended up with an interesting answer to this question.
We have a nation filled with ensoulled automation, who gain their souls from a magical ritual.
That same nation uses the *same* ritual on the skeletons of the races in the nation to "rekindle" their souls as well. The vast majority of those skeletons come from the Xulgath, a lizard like people who become adults at 13, but only live to 16.
Skeletons are considered full citizens in this nation, and are fiercely protected from other nations that think of them as inherent evil.
“Ethically sourced corpses” just made me think of the bring out your dead sketch by Monty python
Fantastic video! Oddly enough, I am actually writing a fantasy novel that features ethical necromancy! It is a noir fantasy murder mystery. The protagonist is an investigator by the name of William P. Graves. He has a degree in Runic Law and is a CEN (Certified Ethical Necromancer). The story is set on an alternate version of Earth in a technological era roughly equal to about 1890. It's sort of a steam and gunpowder era, where some technological innovation has been held back because of the prevalence of magical solutions.
A few different types of magic exist in this world (Alchemy, Runic Law aka "contract magic", Necromancy, and various Psychic powers) and magic is fairly common although not universally highly regarded. In fact, Necromancy, though critical to the economy, is looked down upon by several religious groups. In this world, Necromancy has had a massive effect on economics, specifically with regards to insurance, inheritance, and labor. Many people don’t have to work in an actual job. Instead they sign a magical contract that allows a company to use their body for 100 years of labor after they die. The company pays the individual a monthly income for the deferred labor. It is essentially a universal basic income, as long as you are willing to sign the dotted line.
Factories, mines, and fields are filled with the dead. Since the dead don’t feel pain, tire, or complain, they don’t need breaks or pleasant working conditions. They do however need to be recharged electrically via copper terminals that are surgically inserted at death, and must be supervised and directed by an overseer, usually someone with telepathic abilities. Also, they represent a significant investment in purely monetary terms and hence are treated more like expensive tools. They are bought and sold, re-tooled for different duties, etc. The obvious sub-text is a mirror to the slave trade.
The plot revolves around what amounts to insurance fraud by a particularly brilliant famous magical theorist (also a necromancer) who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Dr. Graves solves the mystery and in the process asks some very uncomfortable questions. He discovers that the souls of the undead don't actually pass on to the afterlife until their contract expires. In fact, it is possible to bring someone back...
Someone else mentioned the Anointed mummies from Magic the Gathering's Amonkhet plane which walk among the living doing manual labor, but I'd like to also bring up a little bit about the plane of Ravnica, and how various undead are used there.
Ravnica is a plane that is entirely a giant city. Spirits and other undead appear naturally and necromancers aren't too uncommon either. It's overall not seen as unethical for undead to be used for labor on this plane, and at least half of the guilds that run things use various undead in one way or another.
The Azorius Senate are the guild of law, and will use spirits as untiring beaurocrats or protectors of the law.
The Orzhov Syndicate is the guild of business, and also serves as a religion so they are called the church of deals. The spirits of their honored members may become part of their high council, while those in debt to the church may have their spirits pay off that debt during their death. Members dead bodies may also be animated into a living creature called a thrull, an unthinking servant.
House Dimir are secretive, often acting as spies, hitmen, or smugglers, among other things. They may use spirits as spies or to pass messages, while they may make skeletons and wights to carry out other missions due to their disposable nature and inability to answer questions.
The Golgari Swarm are the guild that provides cheap nutritional food, and cleans up any dead from the streets. They see life and death as part of a cycle. They will recycle the dead into plant zombies, and their zombies can either be mindless for labor purposes, or still thinking for important members such as the current guildmaster.
The Cult of Rakdos mainly features a macabre circus, with the main intent of keeping their founder, the demon Rakdos, entertained when he is awake, but everyone is invited to watch the shows at their own peril. Zombies are used for labor and entertainment, often adorned with spikes, given the nature of the Cult's shows.
Amonkhet's mummies were the first and last white zombies in the game so far. They are the outliers, but that in itself told a good story in the cards. Zombification is not a terrible fate decided on the whims of a mad mage, you were chosen to be an eternal champion of the gods.
@@pairot01 That first sentence is not true at all. There are several WB zombies outside of Amonkhet mummies, including Putrid Warrior all the way back in Apocalypse. Amonkhet doesn't even have exclusivity over monowhite zombies thanks to Vladimir and Godfrey from Alchemy Horizons: Baldur's Gate.
Also, I don't understand why you are bringing them up here when my comment is explicitly not focused on them. I only mentioned them to lead people to the other comment specifically talking about them.
Oh, and the mummies were not chosen to be champions. The mummies are explicitly the failed champion candidates. They are still glorified, serving the purpose of allowing others to focus on their candidacies, but they are not champions themselves.
Man, I love this channel so much. So good.
On the ethics of crime and punishment Im gonna tear you apart. There can be no true lifelong prison terms in a just society. Prison not only exists to punish, but also to reform. To dish out a punishment that takes that last aspect away denies the prisoner the possibility of reformation, or becoming better through prison. That is completely apart from the whole undead question. That prison is just punishment, or even that the punishment takes place in prison (violence etc) is a very american view. One way to circumvent this problem would be regular checks if that person has been reformed and if not keep them in mental institutions instead of prisons. In a fantasy setting, this check could be done relatively easy and reliably depending on your magic system. It also opens up this possibility of horror mental asylums were things went horribly wrong, yay.
What you describe as ethical here is actually my worst case scenario for Thay. Imagine a red wizard traveling abroad to dig up some ruins, with his undead labor force. They are all "prisoners", and as such bound and shackled with collars around their necks. And since you cannot easily identify them, of course they would need some markings, right? Things that cannot be destroyed by hard labor. Like branded or tattooed numbers, maybe on their forearms? Coding their remaining time, maybe? You know what mental image this evokes?
This is also pretty horrifying, considering a lot of actors would have interest in very long prison sentences. I know you are talking about a utopia here. But lets be real here: People who lobby for the "rights of undead" would be seen as complete lunatics as soon as the first megaprojects were completed by that work force. Or wars won. Or money earned by that cheap labor be put into propaganda by a ruling caste.
If I were you, Id think about this a bit more, because to me in the end your tries sound like dehumanizing based on the fact that they are prisoners and "of course they have done horrible things, imagine yourself what would be necessary for this punishment": And that's not really an argument. That is just leaving it up to the viewer. There is no way you could do this "more ethically", since there is no way at all to do this ethically and especially no way to make it so it would not be abused instantly or thrown in a justice system that always has flaws. Yes, even with Zone of Truth.
The comments under this video how to do this ethically are horror all the way down so far. Really think about it, in our world. How it would feel if you did that shit. How it would *really* feel.
Also, dem damn undead are takin our jerbs!
The only "ethical" way I can see necromancy happening is when you bring back your dead family members once a year in a festival of some sorts to ask them for guidance and celebrate with them. It happens in Indonesia btw (google: Indonesian Tribe Removes Dead From Their Coffins Every 3 Years To Celebrate). On that note: Happy Halloween!
Magical Medieval Society concepts are always cool with me.
He's talking about mostly pre-modern judicial systems, in which branding was used in living people as a form of punishment & the idea of corrective - not punitive - jailing wasn't yet invented.
@@jgr7487 So you think human(oid) rights are not universal? That you should apply different ethics to different eras? Because ignorance is no excuse.
@@monkeibusiness please, tell me what human(oid) rights will be unquestionable in 300 years. With which certainty can we state that gender affirming cirurgies won't be seen as barbaric as we see some crazy treatments that were the state of the art of medicine back in the late 1800s & early 1900s? We just don't know.
A lot of RPG settings are not based on "ideal potential societies" but ones with the conflict priorities, scopes of these conflicts, and what is/isn't known to be "true" shuffled around in ways that make for interesting stories and challenging play sessions. For D&D (and related games such as PF or OSR games) one question that differs would be: "Are gods real?" In the real world, we don't know. In most D&D settings the answer is "Yes, and [laundry list of what that means for the world, depending on how it's implemented.]"
The ethics argument you presented has completely different implications if asked in a world where creatures literally made of evil energy exist. However, in such settings the problem is also sidestepped (usually) by the fact that raising undead creatures is, in and of itself, an evil act as well. As most D&D settings work in a very deontological "some acts are just inherently evil no matter why you do them," you don't get to justify the act by the consequences. This does mean that people who follow consequentialist and utilitarianist systems in most D&D settings are most likely neutral, unless they consistently find that evil acts further their goals better. A big classic element of "how evil works" in fantasy settings is that of temptation, and evil can also be polite enough to where neutral farmers may not care that their blackguard lord is digging up graveyards so long as they are kept safe from bandits.
Going this in depth on a total fantasy idea is so fun! I've been looking for content like this forever. This would've been so much fun to bring up in my ethics course.
My main thought on making such a system would be less on cheap labor, more along the idea of using undead for labor that is dangerous and/or hazardous for living laborers.
What most interests me about this discussion is the fact you came up with the same solution as "Babylon 5," though they were less literal with the idea. In that series, they had something called the "death of personality," in which they'd psychically and chemically destroy the personality of the offender, implant new memories, and set the criminals to work serving the very communities they harmed. Though figurative, you could see this as "killing" the criminal and "repurposing" the body that remained.
This is how I've implemented the "ethical" use of undead.
As a last line of defense from the invaders of the underdark, great catacombs were constructed. With narrow maze-like corridors designed to bottleneck and disorient, and legions of the honored undead commanded by death priests. They stand as the unseen defenders against the dark.
Beware to the soldier who drinks with Death, deep in his cellar.
I have a fantasy setting in which everybody gets drafted after death into the militia, since the world is overrun with demonic creatures, and the last stronghold has to use everything they can to stay alive, which means the necromancers are in charge of the defences.
The Royal Reserve Army are ready, Death holds no mystery for them.
That world is already doomed, even if what few good among them survive.
@@AvangionQ True, but I love me tragic tales, and think not enough of those are done in our hobby.
I can see a druidic group or culture in a fantasy setting where there is no incentive but to help your people long after you’ve gone as an undead labourer. Where people just choose that upon their death, they either are laid to rest or join the workforce to help their fellow people and homeland prosper even after they’re gone.
I can see a culture loving this, people going to their loved ones who have passed and seeing generations of their family all doing work and them being able to talk to them the same as one would at a grave, and then hoping one day, in death, that they would all join together once again, helping their next generation get further in life.
Thanks man. This gave me some insight i can you to one of the most important characters in my universe, who started off as a restoration magic teacher in a mage college who secretly studied necromancy/vitamancy because he wanted to find a way it could be useful withing society's ethics.
He saves the college with by using the vitality of both himself, the guy attacking and the entire forest surrounding it as energy to contain an explosion but is then shunned and has to flee now half dead, with missing organs and everything.
Tho he ends up being the oldest mortal in the universe and got a job under the gods
I might be way too early posting this - only 2:31 into the video - but I want to chime in to say that whether undead have souls in D&D is complex even just looking at the rules for individual undead. ((Edit: Oh, good, he discusses undead that "are souls." End edit.))
Liches and vampires are treated more or less as the people they were in life, save (perhaps) for being dominated by a vampire lord or being twisted to evil by the nature of the curse animating them. (Liches are "simpler" to answer, because they have to willingly commit an "unspeakably evil" act in the process of making their phylacteries, so they ARE evil, by virtue of the fact that nobody who is not evil can become a lich, and anybody who becomes a lich has become evil before they did become a lich. So the soul isn't "twisted to evil.") Do these undead have souls? If not, then their state isn't much of a curse to the person who was cursed with undeath, as that person's soul is shunted to the afterlife. Similar questions arise with a number of sentient undead, like ghouls and ghasts and wights. Sure, zombies and skeletons probably _do not_ have souls, because they're mindless, and a spell that can rip the soul back AND deny it any control would be MORE powerful than a spell that rips a soul back from the afterlife and gives it control of its body, not less.
But then, we get... ghosts. Wraiths, specters, and other incorporeal undead are, lore-wise, typically _the bodiless souls of the dead_ who have not moved on to the afterlife. Helping ghosts pass on is a major trope and story archetype. So, not only must these "have" souls, they _are_ souls.
In short, undeath's relationship to the soul is often case-by-case.
Skeletons are not mindless, but they do possess no connection to their former lives. I imagine them to be like open vessels that wandering souls can choose to rest in, because it attempts to explain the habitual behaviours they perform when idle -- ghosts often have faulty memories, indicating erosion or degradation of the soul, and these souls are so weak (almost wisp-like) that they can recall nothing concretely, but still retain some habits and preferences.
EDIT: The weak, visiting soul is almost certainly not the bones' original soul, I think, but may have the same habits, causing some confusion -- a guard's bones might have the wandering spirit of a different soldier who died nearby, or the skeleton of a miner might pick up the ghost of another miner who had died years before and haunted the mine ever since (and may even have been the cause of the skeletonised miner's death), etc.
In my campaign setting I have Doctors be necromancers. I saw some old paintings of medical students in the 18th 19th century studying anatomy on cadavers and just thought they all looked like necromancers. So theres a whole legal system surrounding how the acquire bodies sort of like how donating your body for science or being a organ donor. I also have some third party books that going into democratic uses of magic and it has some medical spells in there like bonding new limbs for amputees, preserving blood for transfusions that kind of stuff.
The Pillars of Eternity game franchise (especially #2; but #1 has plenty of it too) has a lot of that spiritual/religious enlightenment themes, exploring the concepts of the afterlife, resurrection, aftermath of overt "profane" divine intervention, and moralities and ethics of "Animancy" (soul magic), that you were asking about.
In the Swedish TTRPG "Drakar och Demoner" in the 1980s there was indeed a small but rather wealthy nation run by a necromancer with this idea; how it worked was that nobody (almost) had to work manual labor because you had the option to sign a contract with the necromancer ruler that he would use your body for 10 years after your death and then give it a proper burial with all the necessities and religious rites so you would not end up damned or anything. This was more for the person as such since we were indeed talking about soulless skeletons.
Later in the Wandering Inn books you meet a necromantic kingdom, Khelt and the revenent king
wake up babe
new grungeon master video dropped
You are the first comment FYI!
So I would actually say the world of Golarion from the pathfinder games is very close to what you are describing.
Specifically I would tell you to look up the history of the nation of Geb, Nex, and alkenstar. This tiny part of the world building explorers and undedation and the beginnings of an industrial revolution. On top of that, there wasn't event recently in the world, lore, a major God of humans called arrogan, died, creating a situation where there is a deep doubting of faith.
In the setting I'm working on, Necromancy is a field of holy magic strictly controlled by the priesthood of the god of death (among other things) who is the patron god of humans in the setting. Due to reincarnation being a known fact, It's common practice in some human kingdoms to donate your body to the church to be reanimated and used as labor. As a result, much of the menial labor such as mining, logging, and farming are done by the dead under living supervision.
Please tell me that at some point a reincarnated PC has or will encounter their previous body in some capacity? The RP potential in that set up is just too tempting to not imagine it happening onscreen at least once 🤞🏽
Imagine a side story involving finding a mine with undead workers while out adventuring and having to trace it back to the owner and finding out the procurement of said corpses.
Kinda the opposite of video but use with lack of ethics for a storyline can work. One solution could be "out of sight out of mind" which is a real world solution sadly being used in current times. Cheap luxories comes at a cost somewhere.
I don’t think you will see this but still:
Amonkhet.
It’s from magic the gathering. A place where they embalm dead people to use as servants. It also has a bigger main plot but seeing a embalmed good smelling person in front of you would also probably look not that horrific
about 40 years ago my gaming group got into a long drawn out discussion on this subject we came up with *"Skeleton Crews"* of labor force to do simple menial tasks like field work, "public works" digging ditches building walls and simple structures etc. we came up with the idea that it beat slave labor your upkeep was almost nill no food or medical costs as for housing they could be stacked in warehouses when not needed and can be worked 24/7 worst case scenario is wolves and dogs stealing arm and leg bones! their were no souls extracted as they were raised like GOLOMS imbibed with rudimentary programing and sent to their work crews
The problem with undead labor force is figuring out the power source for the undead. If they have absolutely no maintenance cost then there is no downside.
But undead usually need a power source like souls, magic, or eating the living.
I'm only 50 seconds in to the video, but I always found it weird that necromancers would never talk to an allied amy and be like "Hey, if any of you die in this next battle, *do I have your permission* to raise your body for a few days, that way you can save your friends' lives? Afterwards, I will let your body rest again so you can buried properly."
Gonna steal this idea.
In Fates Worse Than Death there's a cybernetic implant developed by the german army that keeps people alive for a couple hours after death. People apparently experience a weird flashing in and out of conciousness and painful strobing but they can aim a rifle at dudes for a while.
The enemy army might not need to be asked politely. Control of the field of battle is now vital.
Planescape: Torment had an interesting faction that made use of undead labor, The Dustmen i think. been years since I played it
they would essentially buy your body from you while you are alive, you get like 1000 gold now, and whenever you eventually die, they get your body to raise and use as labor
The ultimate "that's a problem for ' future me ' " !!! Lol
@@arthurjeremypearson if i remember right it had a questline about some guy who regretted selling his future corpse and you could try to get him out of the contract
Well, unless you consider magic to juat be an perpetual energy machine, youre going to have to pay for the physical motion of the undead bodies, in which case it could be just as resource costly as normal laborers, although probably not quite as much, as they require no actual comfort, no housing, no tasty food, no entertainment, no breaks, not even sleeping. It would still be cost effective, though not free.
I'd like to see it explored how one pays for the energy to keep them in motion. Do they end up turning to sacrificing souls and living people in the end anyway? Or maybe just sacrificing animals, basically consuming food anyway, but maybe the local townsfolk still see it as wasting food since no one can actually enjoy the taste?
Now i imagine Hazmat skeletons working the rest of their undeath with in highly sanitary facilities holding them during non working hours. The suits on the insides keep the skeletons clean and cover their race for the most part. Industrial showers and sterilization whenever they enter or exit their designated holding block.
This would be an awesome thing to see in a D&D campaign or video game, tbh. I'm thinking about it. It would raise ethical questions on why the undead are kept so clean compared to living but also kept in massive storage units like animals or tools.
So much potential!
Fun fact, Revivify doesn't require the soul to be free and willing. So even if someone wanted to die, you could keep reviving them if you can get to them in under a minute.
One explanation I've heard is that since revivify has a limit of one minute, within one minute of having died, the soul hasn't necessarily moved on from the body or at least is just starting to, so revivify is closer to just bringing someone back with cpr or a defibrillator, their heart has stopped but they're not 100% gone.
@@alloran0987 That's how I usually see it as well.
Regarding a setting that grapples with faith as opposed to rationality, you might check out Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magic Obscura. It's a video game, but the setting details are masterfully crafted and thoughtful. Themes of labor, class, etc. are explored in detail, and necromancy has a somewhat interesting role in the world already. Hope this helps!
This is excellent, I'm building a society where this is used to some degree, and my solution: it is *not* strictly ethical, but kept out of view, and excused as debt repayment beyond death (I am deliberately going for a generally unethical representation of a society essentially at the starting point of the industrial revolution).
I also think it's interesting to note the historical context to this question, cause I'm writing a video on the subject and these two concepts somewhat coincide.
The historical zombie comes from Haitian Vodou (pronounced voh-doo), where the body and spiritual soul can be split and used for varying purposes. The physical soul (the body) is what matters to this conversation, where the body can continue living and working after the spirit is cut off. These zombies come up in cultures affected by the African slave trade, so you can probably see where these beliefs get their salience. Zombies come from a culture forced to endure the horrors of slavery, and zombies are a religious layer on top of that aspect of culture. Religion does sometimes seek to make life's more nebulous or cruel problems easier to understand, after all.
So this question of zombies or indeed any undead being a cheap labor force... has historical precedence, specifically in zombies.
Feel free to let me know if I'm wrong on something. Don't want to be wrong on a sensitive subject such as this.
this video is so interesting in how it parallels my thoughts while i was making my homebrew world (designed mostly w 5e mechanics in mind, but generalizable to many ttrpgs). One of the central pillars i did my worldbuilding around was a kind of dual system of necromancy. Awakening is an ancient and very common pracrice, given by the gods to the people of Voram so death needn't sever people from their communities. (basically i looked at the ability to communicate w dead people and extrapolated what that would do to culture. if you can phone up dear dead aunt doris for her bread recipie, why not ask her to make it?) It's not like SUPER common - only like 1 out of a town of 100 could be expected to be awakened in a given year - but its just generally accepted that if you have a skill that is valuable to your community you might not get laid to rest right away. Most bodies are magically preserved for a week or two after death, to give people time to guage whether an awakener needs to be called, which leads to some really interesting death and burial practices depending on how different cultures handle this period (which i should really get around to fleshing out one of these days). When somebody is awakened their body goes through the habits that they had in life, so they'll get up, go to work, go home, and crawl into bed same as they always did (which lead to the development of an entire sector of the housing market catering to people very much not wanting to stay at home with a corpse, no matter how well preserved) Nobody in-universe knows this, but on the backend awakening uses divine magic to create a conduit between a body on the material plane and wherever the soul is in the afterlife. The bodies have to be preserved because the soul has to recognize it in order for the connection to go through. The soul's consent is also required - no soul on the other end of the conduit, no actions from the body.
All of this changes with the introduction of Necromancy as an arcane development a few decades back, springing from the work of a secret society that ties into some other fun lore stuff i won't get into right now but basically necromamcy emerged from enchantment and rapidly grew into its own because of how it expands on Awakening. From an in-universe perspective, Necromancy and Awakening are basically the same thing except Necromancy is just more powerful and better because you can control the necrot's actions directly, and you can raise basically anything thats dead, whether its still recognizable or not. Fantastic for a country hungry to get down to violent imperialist expansion, which the country in which necromancy was invented in my world immediately did, or if you want an infinitely recylcable slave labor workforce. As far as anybody can tell, the ethical issues that arise from necromancy are the same that arise from non-copse-powered forced labor and imperialism, because they cant see the consent issues on the back end. Where an awakened body only does anything because the soul is basically piloting it from the afterlife, a necrot is just a pile of shambling meat (or bones) puppeted by the arcane power and will of the necromancer, whether that person wants to be raised or not. And because necromancy is so new, they're still working on getting all the health and safety code caught up. Some of them have worked out that using the raised bodies of the people you're conquering in the army you're continuing to conquer with is fucked up, but they havent quite got the hang of germ theory yet.
Thanks for the inspiration for some of the knock-on effects of having corpses walking around! i hadnt really thpught about the health and safety aspect of it. Sorry for kind of popping off about my homebrew, but in classic DM fashion ill take any excuse I can get to gush about my worldbuilding lmao
I've made a character (Goes by the name of Jack) who is a "moral" necromancer. His favourite way of reanimating a person is actually putting a soul back into their body (It's something which is basically unique to him). Circumventing the rather problematic side-effects of resurrection. Mainly, a whole lot of things are going to get angry, the magic (sorta half-sentient mind you) will weaken you a slight bit, and your own life will be cut shorter (similar to how saving someone works according to Reaper Man). An extremely powerful person will be able to negate most of these effects, but they are extremely rare. Therefore it's mainly clerics and other religious figures who resurrect people. Though only with the consent of their god. So it's basically useless for anybody not religious/poor/basically everyone. Jack is therefore unique in the fact he services ANYONE willing to sign a contract, while also giving (most) subjects their free-will back (until he is in need of them). He also gives anyone who requires an afterlife guidebook. Because it's best to die informed.
This is also part of his regular job going around to the sick, dying and dead. Providing comfort, healing, rest and sometimes even help with getting to an afterlife.
Something expected of necromancers, at least according to the guild. Most people still have these (somewhat) unfair biases towards them, only partially deserved. Religious workers hate them the most, because they compete with them.
Also yes, my setting is akin to say the time of the French Revolution (But with lower tech levels because the local magic level is high enough to break things like cannons, etc.). So there are so many fractured faiths that the necromancer guild can occupy an actual role in society. If not a very limited one (very little chance of actually raising the dead, which is why Jack is such a big fan of "stitching". Creating more powerful creations from multiple different sources. Even monstrous sources, which is more legally allowed.)
And finally, this dude is ethically closest aligned to the Blue and Black colour combination from MTG. He sees ethics as: "Does it have a negative effect." "Yes? What?" "Discomfort of some people? Not sufficient!" "The subject is unhappy due to the raising? They want to move on to X afterlife? Stop the raising! Guide them to their destination!".
Just because someone is so utilitarian in worldview doesn't mean they are not empathetic. Jack is, I feel, the perfect representation of that.
Just a small point, not condemning your argument, but the fact that you say that the discomfort of some people is not sufficient to dissuade you, and yet follow it up immediately with talking about how being utilitarian doesn't have to make you unempathetic is pretty hilarious.
@@pwykersotz I should be clearer.
The discomfort is of random people not involved in the animating. Like a random passerby. Or some distantly related uncle. Or even estranged parents/siblings. As long as it's a consensual contract between people with the sufficient mental capabilities to agree, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. What I meant with empathetic was more to stop the (white/green aligned) MTG philosophy fan from saying: "But BlACk iS eViL. IT is So sElFiSh!" and “BlUe Is inCApabLe oF EmOTIon! TheY ArE BaD!”. Something I do not agree with. But I did specifically mean between the patient/subject and the necromancer. If a person has any doubts about wanting the raising, Jack won't force it on them.
Unlike, say, his master's master (As in a person who teaches an apprentice in a guild). He was a big Fnaf fan, so you can imagine who he tried to emulate with his creations. Jack's master is better because he keeps people alive, not even undead that often, just purely alive. Which is good. Apart from the part where he doesn't really ease the pain, or ask for consent when keeping someone alive. Which is not a good thing. I actually alluded to these two when I said "these (somewhat) unfair biases". The somewhat refers to his master's master. Only a small number of people realise how bad Jack's master actually is. Since he's been secluding himself more and more (Working with so many dead people, while getting rejected by most of the living, does a number on one's (fragile) psyche. Something which affects all three.).
Compared to those two Jack does things perfectly. Or as much as possible. He keeps asking: "What does my patient want?" Instead of: "What do I think I need to do now?" His job is not a medical professional, it's pain alleviator. He doesn't always succeed in being empathetic. When most people you talk to are either dead, dying, reject you, or all at once, you get kinda desensitised.
Lastly, this was the opinion of the character Jack. Which, although similar, is not exactly my opinion. I'm also not called Jack.
Sorry if I wasn't clear.
Is this sufficient information? Or do you require more information? I’ll happily provide that if it’s the case, or if I need to be more clear!
@@BasicallyBaconSandvichIVNo, you're very clear. I still think the dissonance between empathy and your system is there. Though I accept you simply dismiss it.
That sort of system has been thrown around for decades. It's a lot of fun in some respects. Two huge advantages are that it allows for tremendous mechanical optimization and disruption of classic stories.
@@pwykersotz I'm sorry, but what system are we talking about here? I'm a bit lost with what we are talking about. I don't/didn't mean to simply dismiss anything. Could you please clarify where the dissonance lies?
To me this feels really similar to arguments about ethics related to robots and AI. Undead are scary because they are potent tools that are under the complete control of someone you don’t know if you can trust. All it takes is another powerful enough necromancer to come and seize control and completely undermine your undead servants. Similar to robots, a big concern being someone hacking into it and having control over it. The less physical control we have over something the greater fear is presented
Same with what they represent: Humans completely stripped of humanity, purposed for labor and servitude, or occasionally war.
@@simonholmes841 absolutely. In that way it also reminds me of animal rights. Does an undead corpse deserve the same rights as a person? Does an animal deserve the same rights as a person? Neither has the same intelligence or emotion as a human, so where is the line drawn?
@@Brogie_21 at living humans? It’s not that hard really.
@@max7971 what’s not that hard?
I think a plausible alternative is simply a culture where becoming undead is part of funeral proceedings or ritual. When you die you get turned undead, simple as that. The Toraja in Indonesia have specific rituals for burials and will literally hold onto bodies until the right time, caring for them and keeping them in the house. I don't think it's much of a stretch to throw a little necromancy into the mix in a fantasy setting.
Mixing necromancy with divine rituals in fantasy settings is also a pretty interesting way to create a holiday where, when the veil between world of the living and the dead is close, priest summon ghosts/reanimate corpses of the fallen family members using the willing souls of the departed. Basically a fantasy version of Santa Muerte. Happy holiday where grand-grandfather can see his grand-grand-kids and spend one night in the year together. Center that holiday around a good god of death and voila! Ofcourse it can work only in setting where necromancy isn't using inherently dark energies nor destabilizes reality and such.
Tbh an undead workforce can be culturally acceptable fairly easily. A politically powerful and determined ruler could feasibly make it a social norm within a few generations, assuming existing religions do not have explicitly strong opinions on bodies post-death. Frame it as a requirement, in the same way as paying taxes.
Imagine this: every major city and big village has a morgue ("mourning hall" or whatever you want to call it) and everyone's mandated to send their dead there. While the corpse is being prepared for reanimation, the family can continue their usual rites per their religion within the hall for a fixed number of days, after which the corpse will be cleaned up to remove/hide identifying features, then put to work. Set it as a fixed term, say 2 or 5 years, after which the body will be permanently laid to rest or burnt to prevent reanimation. Once you have people growing up seeing their grandparents go through the process, it's going to be just part of daily life.
i think the most ethical undead labor force i can think of are the anointed from mtg's amonkhet. granted its hard to call much of anything on that plane entirely ethical, but at least in context id say it is
anything that dies on amonkhet is reanimated due to the Curse of Wandering until it no longer has any flesh. anyone who dies while being a proper member of society (ie not a dissenter) gets embalmed, mummified, and awakened as a laborer. they wear full-body wrappings that hide their identity and presumably helps with sanitation as well. these anointed then serve most menial roles which frees up the living for more deity-worship
now all of this *was* actually so nicol bolas could have a plane's worth of mummified slaves/soldiers for when he tried to conquer the multiverse, but it was a pretty interesting society in itself
In one of the stories I’ve written, the undead were used by the “good nation” strictly for the purpose of cleaning up battlefields. Fallen soldiers would get up, dig their own graves and go back to sleep. There was a time long ago in the worlds history when zombies and the like were used as weapons but the practice was lost over the eons. In the modern day, biomancy (the manipulation of living flesh) is the body horror magic of dark lords and the like.
This is absolutely wild. I have a setting based on this entire concept. Some day I might sit down and write it up, but the gist is European style colonization of New world circa 1800 except the natives dove into necromancy hard for the noblest of reasons. The big undead apocalypse war happened and the undead won.
On another note, thank you for reigning in the emphasized "s". Much smoother.
Edit: finished the video and it's funny as hell you brought up elves. They were the progenitors of the undead apocalypse 😂😂
Re: Pandemic
Mummies are some of the most aesthetically interesting and effective means of abiding these problems. Embalming makes a corpse largely sanitary, the wraps can cover identifying features, and the ritualistic process can help make the process more peaceful and integrated into society.
Hell, in the D&D 5e monster manual, mummies are explicitly pointed out as undead to be used as consultants and sources of ancestral knowledge!
WotC's Magic: the Gathering setting of Amonkhet used mummies in such a manner.
This actually helps me a lot as I wanted to create an area in my homebrew where undead were publicly accepted. These ideas are more interesting than the ideas I was going to run off of. Thank you!
I ran a lawful evil city that did that. If you were a citizen in good standing and did not Whish to become a sentient undead they would actually pay 10 gold for an adult corpse which for a setting where peasants make 2 copper a day wasn't bad at all...just for clarification you could sell your own body as a loan to the state we joked about it being "death" insurance
I think we always gotta remember that a lot of our modern conceptions of the dead and their desecration is based on religion, especially Christianity. In a world without those systems of belief, there would be enturely different stigmas around the dead and how they should be treated
Edit: they mentioned this in the video. Shows what i get for commenting early off the premise alone
As a US Citizen. My country has legalized slavery. It's enshrined in the constitution that prisoners ARE slaves. Also, citizens who are prisoners lose the right to vote and if it's a federal offense they lose the right to vote AFTER they have served their sentence. This is also why our police are so violent and aggressive. The more minorities that are arrested the fewer minorities who can vote remain. The entire Republican Party in my country DEFEND this as correct.
One of the most important aspects of "Ethical Necromancy" is that it saves labor, but that takes jobs. So, what are all the poor people going to do when all their labor is taken care of by undead who are owned by the rich? This is also true in the USA, especially the South. Everyone who works "low end jobs" for the state. They are slaves who are paid basically nothing, this in turn reduces the value of that work as no none slave can afford pay that low. Mostly all the janitors and other such work including cleaning up the road sides, it's all prison slave labor, leaving few jobs left.
I played a character who was religious. In his religion, having your body reanimated after you've died was seen as the price to pay to go to the afterlife. Your body works whilst your spirit moves on
I think to make an ethical system of necromancy, we could ironically use an example of a real life unethical system. The concept of there being an Untouchable caste of people, like the Burakumin a feudal japan, or the actual Untouchable caste of India's past, or even the people who fulfilled some jobs in European history like Tanners and knackers These were people that were viewed as unclean, who did unclean work, who worked among the populace but had to live apart from them. I feel it would be perfectly within the realm of possibility for a society to view the unthinking and soulless reanimated dead in the same way as these unfortunate people were viewed, an unsightly aspect of day-to-day life that nevertheless does fulfill necessary functions within that society. If nothing else, it would certainly be more ethical to subject this to a skeleton that again is soulless and unthinking, then to the actual people who had to suffer such indignities in the past.
And for the acquiring of these corpses, it could be an active donation, or one could sell the right to their corpse or the corpses of their loved ones to the state. It could even be a matter of old graves where it is unlikely that the exhumed corpses would have any living relatives with an emotional attachment. Which, coincidentally, would also help with the problem of what happens when you run out of graveyard space.
Commenting prior to watching to see if your analysis will change my conclusion. Ultimately the ethics comes down to whether or not the undead creature is experiencing humanity; recording information, setting goals, developing a personality, self-perceiving, etc. If it is simply an animated body, it is morally indifferent from using tools or products that come from living creatures. If there is no person or sentience to experience the labor, then it is simply a machine or tool.
A friend of mine is named Zr0, and he’s homebrewing a lot of things. One thing he’s cooked up are “Ghouls.” (No relation to preexisting things sharing the name.) They’re a society of weird, undead, shade-spirits that practices a unique form of necromancy. Its unique because the engram of a soul (the souls mind and thoughts, etc.) that once inhabited the corpse(es) of their thralls are not actually bound to their body; the soul’s energy is what is tailored to the servant. In fact, tampering with the preexisting engramatic energies of someone for personal gain is considered a crime and a sin of the highest caliber. They also believe that the soul has no right to a body once properly unbound from that body. To Ghouls, death voids the contract between the body and the soul.
Though to be fair, they eat rotting corpses as much as they reanimate them.
My undead armies eat the corpses of slain brothers in arms as part of a Valhalla-esque celebration, so I totally understand.
A big thing in the worlds I have played in is that different species, particularly with incarceration, do actually have stratified/ proportional punishment. Most of the time it was set up throcratically, so a deity set up mortal punishment. Where a human might get 12 years for negligent maiming of an innocent person, an elf might end up getting 84 and a half-orc may only get 8. However we generally tried to play out rehabilitation except for particularly heinous crimes. Instead of finding the thief informant in a dark jail cell, you would likely find him doing compulsory humanitarian efforts in the local area during the day, and at strict housing arrangements at night.
So I recently read Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique" cycle, in which necromancy is an everyday reality, although there are locales where it is not appreciated and will get you in trouble. He has one story that gives us the perspective of the necromancers going about their everyday mundane lives, and then he gives us another story of necromancy through the perspective of the undead... Not a version of events we get very often! In this case, we only really get the perspective of two specific undead, who seem to have some capacity for intelligent thought and ability recall their prior lives, and they plot to free themselves from the control of their necromantic overlords. The rest of the undead, we aren't given any indication they have any awareness or internal dialog at all. They might, but we aren't told either way.
Necromancy crops up in most of his Zothique stories, and it is indeed common for the undead to be used as mundane labor, especially for more dangerous tasks. There's one story where the undead are used a sailors and for marine rescue, and pearl diving, and such maritime activities that can be quite dangerous. Why risk the life of a still-living person, after all?
9:14 there is a short manga in which people could be brought back to live. the series was short and not memorable (sadly I don't even rememeber the title...), but it did touch the topic and explained that there was a law that dictated that people that are revived cannot contact their relatives and friends because it was stated for death not to lose its meaning, at least not entirely. and the conflict was that the protagonist's father wanted to have some few last moments with her. if I happen to find the series I'll edit the comment for anyone interested.
I had a similar thought, but was thinking more of levy infantry. Have an opt in option, like an organ donar deal, where your skeleton could be raised again in times of war. Every time used, you are on the pay roll, paid to your decendants/family. Even in death, serving to protect those and that which you hold dear. Now, I was going with souless raising here, and then having live officers commanding each unit, for sheild walls type purposes. Skirmishers, scouts, cavalry, and other infantry would be either soul bound undead, or straight up just alive.
The punishment aspect you spoke of makes consecutive vs concurrent life sentences a HUGE deal.
Hollowfaust, City of Necromancers. Part of the Swords and Sorcery game line. Very cool read.
This is the best source of information on a society that uses Ethical Necromancy. It's part of the societal contract that the necromancers shall protect the residents in life, but in death their bodies become property of the state and thus can/will be used to help support and defend the city.
This is an examination of something I've spent a lot of time thinking about. I have a realm in my world which makes tremendous use of an undead workforce in the agricultural and military sects. In this region, reanimation is idealogically supported, and each corpse raised as a labourer is either completely flensed into a clean skeleton, or is magically embalmed to prevent the corpse from rotting too quickly, and all are dressed in ceremonial robes which denote them as people to be respected. These robes cover one's face, and there are a *lot* of labourers, so if you aren't familiar with the local customs, you could be in for quite a shock when you realize how many undead you've seen just walking the streets. Goes a long way to explain why the common folk never go hungry, and don't suffer attacks from goblins; they hand their honoured dead a plow or a spear, and the issue is solved.
Great time to bring up this topic, because the Planescape setting has a whole philosophical faction who use undead labor (and will be hopefully making an appearance in the new books coming out next month). Kinda wish these topics were more explored, especially in-character (when encountered), but I also get that people put a lot of sentiment to the corpses of their loved ones...
Very well thought out and well spoken. This is something I want to tie into my next campaign
Arcanum is a setting all about magic vs tech, and is sort of going through its own enlightenment. It has an old CRPG thats very good but you NEED quality of life mods lol