Anti-necromancer culture

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Thu Dec 29, 2011 5:41 pm

Many DMs take the baseline that in the setting, necromancers are known and considered threats to all that is fluffy and sweet. It's very commonly a world where they are a known presence, their activities are reviled, and have been for some time.

Why do they inter their dead?

Cultures where funerals are performed through immolation of the corpse are well-established IRL. Burning them also removes them as options for necromancers who wish to add to their army. Yet graveyards, tombs, sepulchers and more all are assumed to always be used. This seems like a tactically stupid idea, maintaining a resource pool for dark mystics to exploit for additional power.

In a setting where necromancy is new to the area, that's understandable. But when they're a known threat, and have been for generations, culture should have adapted and changed their funeral rites to mitigate some of their damage.

Obviously this doesn't apply to incorporeal undead, or skeletons/zombies made from fresh corpses, but the graveyard necromancer you see in many adventures.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Thu Dec 29, 2011 5:56 pm

My first thought is so that perfectly legitimate clerics can use Speak With Dead to resolve disputes and find secrets and whatnot.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Thu Dec 29, 2011 6:22 pm

Burn the bodies, keep the heads in a chamber like Doctor Who's headless monks? A clattering skull is a lot less dangerous to a necromancer than the whole body.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Thu Dec 29, 2011 6:32 pm

I can think of a number of different reasons.

1. They believe that their patron god will resurrect them (see Christianity) and that their body is needed, seeing as it probably won't be a true resurrection.

2. They believe that their soul in the afterlife can be impacted by desecrating their mortal shell, and burning the body destroys the soul (see a lot of different religions).

3. It actually takes a fuck of a lot of heat/fuel to run a crematorium. It might be easier to just bury them.

4. Ego. Seriously. The same reason why grandiose tombs are erected.

5. Necromancers generally aren't particularly common. The stereotype I've encountered is actually that long abandoned graveyards of ghost towns and ancient burial grounds become necromancer haunts. Nobody's going to set up shop in a metropolis, but that 3000 year old burial ground/tomb is just fine. Nobody thinks that far down the road. I mean, you're dead. Your family is probably all dead, and the people who would give a fuck about you are all dead.

Sure occasionally you'll get a necromancer dabbling in a populated area for fresh corpses, but your life expectancy goes down pretty quickly as population goes up.

Previn · Post by **Previn** » Thu Dec 29, 2011 6:38 pm

Well, you can get a skeleton from any set of bones, so really all you're doing is insuring that it's not someone you know getting animated. You're just forcing the necromancer to go out and kill the local wildlife for their initial skeletons/zombies.

K · Post by K » Thu Dec 29, 2011 6:39 pm

I could come up with various social constructs to explain it all, but there is actually a game reason that fits better:

Necromancers who can animate the dead are super-powerful before they even get the ability to animate the dead. This means that killing a whole village of peasants for materials is actually really easy for them.

This means that a well-stocked graveyard is actually ablative necromancer protection. It's there to lure necromancers away from the village and do their animating there so that they don't need to kill off living villagers for spare parts and materials.

Neat, eh?

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Thu Dec 29, 2011 6:44 pm

Well D&D has a number of resurrection effects, most of which are easier with a mostly intact corpse so while the populace is probably down with a "we oughtta cremate everyone to prevent a zombie apocalypse " in the abstract, they probably aren't so keen about creamating their own spouse. child or parent and are hoping through their grief that some high-level cleric or incarnate deity might show up in the next few years and raise their loved one(s).

Combine that with the traditional burial on church grounds and it's kinda reasonable to thing that people count on some combination of their local cleric, consecrate, hallow and forbiddence to keep necromancers in check most of the time.

Now, of course as soon as relatives get through their grief or pass away or move on, nobody cares about that corpse anymore - so it's also kinda reasonable to assume that any sort of church hierarchy which is concerned about zombie plagues would periodically dig up and burn the bodies in graves which nobody put flowers/wreaths/flags on this year - thereby making the culture's equivalent of Memorial Day actually really important - if you don't honor your, they will not be healed when next the gods visit.

Winnah · Post by **Winnah** » Thu Dec 29, 2011 6:50 pm

Couple of random things.

Cremation requires a furnace on order to destroy remains quickly. For a less sophisticated form of cremation, you will need someone to constently tend to the remains to ensure they burn, assuming you don't have a half-tonne of fuel conveniently laying around.

Supposedly modern Aghori still steal corpses from the smaller funeral pyres in India, using the remains for various spiritual rites. Whether this is an urban legend, or based on real events is unknown to me.

Sky Burial is a practice utilised in locales where an abundant supply of fuel is not available for cremation. It involves a ritual dissembling of the remains so that they decompose faster, as well as providing nourishment for various scavenger birds and animals.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Thu Dec 29, 2011 8:10 pm

virgil wrote:Why do they inter their dead?

The Romans were big into cremation ... this is why places like Pompeii are so important ... death by suffocation and encasement in ash preserved bodies that would have normally have been cremated.

The Egyptians were big into preservation ... they believed that you could not survive in the afterlife except with a perfectly "intact" body. That meant that if you were missing fingers or toes before you died, they would put fake ones on you when you were dead to restore the balance.

The Egyptians had elaborate beliefs about death and the afterlife. They believed that humans possessed a ka, or life-force, which left the body at the point of death. In life, the ka received its sustenance from food and drink, so it was believed that, to endure after death, the ka must continue to receive offerings of food, whose spiritual essence it could still consume. Each person also had a ba, the set of spiritual characteristics unique to each individual. Unlike the ka, the ba remained attached to the body after death. Egyptian funeral rituals were intended to release the ba from the body so that it could move freely, and to rejoin it with the ka so that it could live on as an akh. However, it was also important that the body of the deceased be preserved, as the Egyptians believed that the ba returned to its body each night to receive new life, before emerging in the morning as an akh.

So I think we have the basis of an interesting general necromantic problem. With the introduction of two elements (the ka and hte ba) we see the basis for necromancy being horribly evil. The ka and the ba must ideally join to form the akh. To do this the body must be preserved. But it is also possible to trap the ba back in the body (without the life force of the ka) thus preventing the ka from becomming the akh.

This means that any nocromantic ritual is irreversable since the only way to destroy an undead is to destroy the body and that dooms the ba since it needs to be united with the preserved body every night. But it also means that cremation is just as horribad as necromancy itself, for destroying the body also condemns both the ba and therefore the ka.

Such an argument could also work even when one does not desire the perfect preservation of the body as the ba might only need to rest in the bones of the departed every night.

icyshadowlord · Post by **icyshadowlord** » Fri Dec 30, 2011 7:36 am

Jewish religion (at least from what I've heard) is strictly against any "desecration" of corpses and you're not even allowed to touch a dead body unless you just plan to bury it instead of leaving it out to rot. I think there are more detailed explanations why as with the ancient Egyptians, but I guess that's why the trend has sticked to Christianity and (probably) Islam as well.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Fri Dec 30, 2011 4:39 pm

Jewish tradition is somewhat anti-Egyptian, but not completely so. There is no embalming, no removal of organs (save for autopsies and organ donation), a simple cloth cover, and no coffin (if there is one holes are drilled into them to allow contact with the earth). Tombstones are requires to identify the graves (contrast this with the notion of preservation of the body being so important that they used to hide the actual location of the body to keep robbers from destroying it).

Thus we see a hybrid between Roman and Egyptian models:

Roman: The dead body is useless; burn it to ashes.

Jewish: The body needs to be treated with respect. It will decay but everything becomes OK at the end times.

Egyptian: The body needs to be constantly "whole" (even though organs were initially stored in sepoerate jars and later stored in jars within the mummy) constantly in order for the soul to have a proper afterlife.

Count Arioch the 28th · Fri Dec 30, 2011 11:19 pm

I have dwarves encase their dead in concrete. Although K's idea has its appeal too, never thought of it like that...

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Sat Dec 31, 2011 2:21 am

Old Warhammer Fantasy lore has Priests of Mohr performing special rites on the dead so that they cannot be used for creating undead.

However, the evil necromancers in that world have simply adapted by disguising themselves as Priests of Mohr and intentionally screwing up the ritual (the common people can't tell anyway if it worked until the local cementery spawns a zombie apocalypse).

I suspect that in any setting with anti-undead "defenses", the necromancers will simply find a way to work around them.

duo31 · Post by **duo31** » Sat Dec 31, 2011 3:11 am

Necromancy should be hailed as a means of bringing Utopia to the people.

Think, never having to engage in base work again, let the zombies and other animated corpses do the sanitation and manufacturing work. Let the undead do the farming and transporting of goods. Lets have the dead serve the living, not the other way around. Live a life of ease and luxury, and be a productive member of society in death.

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