Tony Lower-Basch asks: So what happens to the bodies of those who aren't becoming Lifeless?
Is there some sort of standard (quick-and-dirty) purification or incineration that needs to be done in order to keep them from catching free-floating necromantic energy and becoming weird critters the way you can (if you're patient or lucky) make sour-dough bread with wild-caught yeast just out of the air?
The world the Convocation is within have a large amount of magical background radiation. There are adventurers that can't fireballs, heal the sick, seemingly disappear and backstab, and who can take a dozen stab wounds and continue to fight.
So, short answer is: Yes.
The long answer is: Yes, absolutely. Before the convocation, the dead would rise and need to be dealt with. The Convocation reduced the number of dangerous undead dramatically. The adventurers and others could then focus on other work than dealing with these dead.
Exactly what to do to prevent the rise of the dead changes almost as a matter of fashion; burning and burial, praying and embalming have all worked at different times.
There's that magical energy laying around, and it's got to go somewhere. It is undirected and untrappable, like entropic energy.
Where's it go?
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If the zero-state of this world is that the dead don't stay dead, then something is wrong with this world.
ReplyDeleteIn a good way. That's an interesting premise for a long campaign.
So how do the other nations deal with their dead? Do they just burn them? Seems like a waste. Maybe they burn them for fuel and then harvest the dark energy which resurrected them and use it as ammo for their artillery wanna and fuel for their flying ships.
Or they could tie up their dead and take them to the next valley over and sell them to a farmer. Half a dozen zombies can do the work of one beast of burden and they don't need fed.
And if the dead all rise as standard, why is that? Was the founding act of the Convocation the imprisonment of the god(dess) of Death?
Oh, burial works too, of course. Or, rather, bury the dead under enough dirt and only the strongest dig out before the magical energies manifesting die out.
ReplyDeleteGood reason to bury folks in a church-yard, so that when there's a generalized surge, you've got a pre-existing balance (between magic that says "Get up and roam" and some that says "Rest in peace") that just gets amplified across the board.
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