World Building 101: Wake The Dead

If the proliferation (some might say "cosmic inflation") of comic books, novels, television shows, and movies about the Zombie Apocalypse are any indication, the undead are back in fashion as antagonists in storytelling. Whether they're an unstoppable force of nature, or an unrelenting creeping doom, the fact of the matter is that zombies, ghouls, ghosts, vampires, and their not-alive-but-not-dead ilk are making it big in the worlds of fiction and gaming.

So, with that in mind, let's talk about what it means to have the Undead in a Fantasy RPG world, and ask a few questions about how they interact with your game world in general.

As with all of my essays, I'll be tying this in to Loris as we progress. I want you to see how I approached the Undead (or, in the parlance of the world, the Unquiet Dead), how the people of the game world react to them, and what steps they take when confronted with these dark and unholy creatures.

So What Are The Undead?

This is the first question that you, as a GM, should be asking yourself before you involve the Undead in your games. What are they? Where do they come from? What drives them? What gives them their power, and what can take it away? In the real world, the background on the myths and legends surrounding the Undead are a multitude. Whether they're based in attempts to explain the unknown mysteries surrounding Human decomposition (for instance, traditional Eastern European myths about Vampires), or created as embellishments and expansions on rumors and deep-dark-forest legends ("There's a ghost in those woods that will flay your skin and drink your blood if you go near her grave!"), they're all built around one major factor: Fear.

Fear is the driving force behind the myth of the Undead in the real world, and let's face it, running into someone who is supposed to be dead but is now shambling along the street looking for some tasty motor cortex to nosh on? That's going to be pretty frightening. Be honest, now. If your dead friend Bob rose from the grave and was standing on your doorstep trying to get at your frontal lobes, you wouldn't behave like this:

"How've you been, Bob? Oh, hunting for the flesh of the living to sate your ceaseless desires and fuel your unholy return to the world of the living? Well isn't that just dandy!"

No, you'd behave thusly:

"Bob? Bob, you're dead! I know Sally and I got married just a few weeks after you died, but you that had nothing to do with it! Bob, what are you... Bob, stop! Bob, that's my skulll! AGGGGH!"

See the big difference there? Presented with the rotting corpse of someone who is supposed to be dead, fear sets in. Perhaps the viewer attempts to rationalize the fear: Bob is dead, so this must not be Bob. Perhaps the viewer attempts to negate the fear: This can't be happening, because the dead don't get up and walk around. Or maybe even they attempt to fight the fear: Holy crap, Bob has returned from the dead, where is my machete?

So the first thing you should do, as a GM who is working up the presence of Undead in their game world, is figure out what the Undead represent. Do they represent Fear with a Capital F? Are they the embodiment of unfinished business? Are they minor demons, inhabiting the bodies of the dead in an effort to cause a whole bunch of mayhem and pave the way for a bigger, badder demon? Is there a reason for them to get up and move around? Do they represent anything, or are they simply something that happens?

I've found that it's essential, if you want to keep with the rule of "you can get away with anything so long as it's consistent," to tie the Undead into the mythology and overall cosmology of the game world. In many game worlds, the Undead are an anathema to life: where there is life, they bring death. They aren't simply dead; they are a representation of unnatural, unavoidable death itself. In others, they are the manifestation of a dark presence within the cosmology: an "anti-life" if you will, that seeks to supplant the world of the living. In still others, they are merely tools to be used by those with aspirations of power. It's easy to say "I want zombies and ghouls and wraiths and vampires in my game world" and sprinkle them liberally throughout your game world, populating dungeons and towers and graveyards. It's quick, it's easy, and it's fun. But (and there's always a but), if you're building a long-running, persistent, evolving game world, you'll find that your players may eventually grow tired of the Undead Ant Hive Of The Week. If you take a few minutes to figure out why they're in those places, though – what purpose they serve (if any) in the game world – you can build yourself a much deeper, more involved level of storytelling, one that might even garner you a few plots for your players to run around in, if you're lucky.

Before moving to the next part of the topic, though, let's talk a bit about what the Undead do in Loris.

Known as the Unquiet Dead, the undead in Loris have been viewed for centuries as something that happens when someone has unfinished business to take care of. When someone dies, they travel down the Last River and are brought before Shakur The Restbringer, who then weighs the deeds and debts they've achieved in their life, and sends them on their way to the afterlife they've earned. Returning from the dead is practically unheard of, and is not something Shakur lets happen lightly. The reason they're known as the Unquiet Dead stems from the fact that they are not going peacefully to their final rest, but are instead clamoring about in a state of not-quite-life, from which their spirits are said to "call out for justice denied." Generally speaking, then, if Bob the Miller claws his way out of his grave and starts wandering the streets of town late at night, shouting out the name of his best friend, then it stands to reason that Bob has some debts to settle before the night is over. Likewise, when a spirit haunts a place, there's a darned good reason. Before the Great War, large groups of the Unquiet were unheard of. They simply did not happen. With the coming of the War, however, and the depredations of the Kolanthans, this has changed – and not for the better.

What Motivates The Undead, And What Do We Do About It?

This whole thing, however, begs the question of why the Undead are getting up and walking around. To understand what the Undead are in your game world, you need to know what is making them move about. And more to the point, what do the people of the world do about it?

So what sort of things happen in a Fantasy RPG when the dead get up and walk around? Well, the typical trope is that if they're not somehow self-motivated (vengeance spirits, vampires, magic users who defy death, and the like) someone or something is making them do it. Usually, if all the corpses in a graveyard get up and wander about, there's going to be a Necromancer (or evil priest, or demon, or whatever turns you on) pulling the strings. The idea here is that the dead are buried and off to their final fate, their bodies are in the ground, and they are supposedly at peace. And this is true and this is all well and good right up until someone with an axe to grind – that Necromancer, or Evil Priest, or Demon we were just talking about – moves in to the area and starts stirring up conflict (if they have a big enough cauldron, literally!). This is usually the point at which the Heroes come along, find out that the townsfolk are troubled by the fact that their ancestors are getting up and wandering the town at night demanding tribute for The Dark One, and set about righting this wrong.

This is a tremendously popular story plot, and it is used quite frequently. I've used it myself in games past.

There's really no problem with this if you're playing in a game world in which this sort of thing doesn't happen all the time. Because hey, if it happened all the time, then the townsfolk of this ever-growing and persistent game world you're building would figure out that this happens all the time and maybe they should do something about it, right?

So if it does happen all the time, then why don't they do something about it? Why, if the people of a typical fantasy game world know that if you bury your dead in a graveyard, eventually some shmuck with an evil spell is going to come along and raise them up and cause trouble, don't they do something about that? Why is cremation not the standard practice for any and all cultures in game worlds where the risen dead are so frequently unleashed upon the hapless townfolk? If there's a tradition of bad guys running around and raising the dead, or of the Undead beasts recruiting the recently dead to their own ranks, why even give them the ability to do this in the first place?

In other words: Why don't the villagers ever wise up and start denying the undead their raw materials?

There are bound to be any number of reasons why the various cultures of any given game world don't do this. Perhaps there's a cultural taboo about burning the dead. Perhaps legends say that if you don't bury the dead whole and inviolate, their spirit can't naturally leave the body. Perhaps the God Of Death only takes the spirit once the body has been buried beneath the dirt from which life first sprang. Whatever the reasons may be, just remember to make them consistent with the rest of your game world, and to provide a believable reason as to why, in the face of an increasing number of ways for the dead to rise up, the people of the world don't twig to the idea that maybe, just maybe, they should do something about this trend.

My personal favorite for the "why don't they just burn all the bodies?" question is this:

It could never happen here.

If you consider that truly awful villains of the type that could actually summon/create/conscript an army of the undead are few and far between, then you could easily get away with the idea that the reason the good people of your game world don't have a standing, culturally-mandated tradition of making a Zero Undeath Tolerance Zone out of their graveyards is because those things simply "don't happen" in "places like this." They happen in other places. To other people. Zarak The One Eyed Sorcerer Of Doom? He would never show his face here, because this place simply isn't important enough (or, alternately, is too important/too well guarded/too well known).

Perhaps the people of Sleepy Sheep Herding Town 5B heard, years ago, about the invasion of Zarak's forces upon the River City Of Great Renown, and said to themselves "Wow, it sure is a good thing we're so small and out of the way. Zarak and his rotting minions would never come here. Those poor people of River City Of Great Renown, now to keep Zarak from coming back, they burn all their dead right away! No more funerals, no more graveyards to leave flowers at, just ashes and urns!" Now, time has passed and Zarak is once again seeking to create an army – and so of course his first stop is somewhere small and out of the way. Somewhere they still bury their dead. Somewhere like... Sleepy Sheep Herding Town 5B.

So how does this work in Loris? How does this whole Unquiet Dead thing factor in to the daily lives of the people of the world that spins under sleeping suns? Why don't they burn their dead, or otherwise deprive the Undead of their raw materials?

Well, as mentioned above, if one of the Unquiet rises up and starts making themselves known, it's for a darned good reason. More often than not, the people who inhabit the area that the Unquiet is haunting will try to figure out what happened to cause this phenomena, and work with a Restbringer (or your average band of wandering heroes and their dog) to put it to rights. Historically and culturally speaking, this is how it's done. The concept of the physical form as the vessel for the spirit is a strong one in the Church Of The Nine, but once the spirit has left the body, that's supposed to be it for that shell. The body is buried, given back to the earth from which life grows, and that (barring any unfinished business) is supposed to be that. Excepting places in which The Howling and The Lower Dark touch The Waking World, by and large graveyards and burial grounds are safe, sacred places that the dead are interred. Families can come to visit (or not) and bear their sentiment with them, and there are tombs, mausoleums, and the like to be found in these places, as one might expect. While the precise layouts, methods, and mannerisms of the burial sites vary from culture to culture, by and large the people of Loris all generally bury their dead in orderly, respectful ways.

So, for most people, especially those within the Church Of The Nine, it is absolutely inconceivable that they would ever see one, let alone hundreds, of the Unquiet in their life time. The Restbringer's methods and unerring judgement in sending the spirits of the departed to their just rewards almost certainly preclude someone returning without good reason. Consider, then, that in the last few decades of the Great War between the Allied Nations and the Kolanthan Imperium, the Kolanthans have turned to doing the unthinkable: they have been salvaging the bodies of the dead from both sides of the conflict, and through dark and unknowable ritual, returning those corpses to the field of battle to fight against (or alongside) their former comrades. Whether the fallen are Kolanthan, Angarnian, Vetrian, it doesn't matter: whatever bodies (or parts of bodies) the Kolanthans can get their hands on after a battle is finished, they reanimate and send back into the war. More and more Allied Nations soldiers are coming home from the war lines with tales of their dead comrades advancing relentlessly upon their positions. Swords, arrows, bullets – none of these things would stop them, instead merely serving to slow their inexorable, unnerving advance. The powers of The Nine, channeled through their Priests, seem to be the only thing that truly stops these abominations, and then, only when coupled with fire do these Unquiet truly stop.

Now, standing orders for every Allied detachment are to burn any of the fallen who cannot be recovered and brought back behind friendly lines at the end of a battle. Though understood to be necessary, this is a terrible cultural blow to the Allied Nations and the Church Of The Nine. A series of sacred understandings and truths about the nature of the body and its ties to the spirit has been shaken by the actions of the Kolanthans, and already tales drift homeward of entire swaths of terrain at the war line that are now haunted by whole platoons of Unquiet spirits and phantoms. Whether these phantasms are seeking revenge for the desecration of their bodies by the Kolanthans, or seeking to fight the war all over again, is unknown. Only time will tell if the battlefield cremations will do anything to put these angry spirits to rest.