In the Convocation of Malqort , known to its neighbors as the necromancer kingdom and to legend as the Caliphate of...

In the Convocation of Malqort , known to its neighbors as the necromancer kingdom and to legend as the Caliphate of Azithan ...

The priests have three main forms of undead: Lifeless, ghosts, and Artifacts. Lifeless have mobility and physicality, but lack Mind. Ghosts posses mind and mobility, but lack physicality. Object spirits posses Mind and physicality, but have no mobility.

A creature with all three -- such as a lich or a vampire -- is anathema. Such a thing is a thread to the living.

Lifeless as end of life is common. Each of the conversion schemes has error and loss. About 60% of the dying wind up as lifeless, 18% as ghosts, and 2% as Object Spirits. The rest are lost, never volunteer, or are free.

With ghosts acting as force multipliers, the entire essential food production system can be done by undead.

For 10,000 people, you normally need 2,500 or more farmers.
10,000 people produces 120 lifeless per year, each with a useful lifespan of 10 years -- so there are 1,200 active. Those can work more hours per day, and more days per year than a farmer, and we get nearly four times as many hours from them in a year. ~10k hours per lifeless and 2.5k hours per farmer.

But, the lifeless is not as good at farming. Let's say this cuts this down by 25%. Instead of being worth 4 farmers, a lifeless is worth three.

1,200 lifeless, each working 4 times as much as a farmer but with a reduction in efficiency of 25%. That comes out to ~3,600 farmer equivalents.

We needed 2,500, so we can produce crops from merely Lifeless. But, we'd be using two thirds of the labor force growing crops -- constantly!

We can do better.

Ghosts. Management.

At 10 lifeless
per ghost, the ghosts can increase productive capabilities by 50% -- making lifeless more useful than farmers.

This increases the farmer equivalents from 3,600 to 5,400. You have an additional 120 ghosts managing the 1,200 Lifeless. If ghosts have the same useful timespan as Lifeless, you'd have 360 active at any one time -- meaning it takes a third of the Ghost time to manage the Lifeless.

At this point, we need less than half the lifeless time spent growing crops. The rest of the time, they can clean, fight, fetch. This is the nearly limitless labor force the Caliphate is known for, and the reason the streets are clean and the buildings well built.

Maybe a collection of a few ghosts reports to a priest. Maybe some ghosts operate independently, with legions of Lifeless under their supervision without any oversight.