149 – Intelligent Undead

Comments

1. SunlessNick

   December 17, 2017 at 11:35 am

   iZombie was very loosely based on a comic of the same name, though almost nothing gets carried over – only the main character’s brain eating and visions. In the series, intelligent zombies that don’t eat brains devolve into the mindless shambling type over time.

   My own take on whether something is undead is whether the question “Who were they in life?” makes sense. You can ask that of a zombie or skeleton, but a bone golem is more like a new entity that happens to be made out of bones rather than mud or stone.

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   • Oren Ashkenazi

     December 17, 2017 at 1:58 pm

     That’s a good rule of thumb, but I’m afraid bone golems being undead is my hill to die on.

     Reply to Oren Ashkenazi
   • Cay Reet

     December 17, 2017 at 2:49 pm

     Good point. A zombie, a skeleton, or a revenant are still who they once were. Frankenstein’s creature on the other hand was made from dead flesh, but is no longer what it once was.

     Reply to Cay Reet
2. Julia

   December 17, 2017 at 5:22 pm

   The ground in the Himalayas is too rocky and frozen for burials, so people leave the bodies of their dead out for scavenger birds to pick clean. Now imagine a society who leave their dead out for the ghouls to strip clean and afterwards the families recover the clean bones to bury. It could work as symbiotic relationship between living and undead.

   Also, have you seen the movie Warm Bodies? It’s a post-zombie apocalypse, and one of the main characters is a zombie who slowly regains his intelligence.

   Reply to Julia
   • Cay Reet

     December 18, 2017 at 2:33 am

     I really like that idea … although in the Himalayas, many bodies are also burned, which allows for the remains to be kept in an urn which needs no burial. Leaving the body out for the animals is a Budhist tradition.

     But the idea that the humans would leave out the dead bodies for the undead to feast on is really good. You could add to world-building that a body buried might rise again, but a body stripped of flesh by the ghouls is guaranteed to stay dead. So it’s a survival strategy of sorts: the living leave the bodies of the dead out for the undead, this way minimizing their numbers.

     Reply to Cay Reet
3. Bryony

   December 23, 2017 at 6:27 am

   Hmm, so if I died and came back as a zombie, I wouldn’t be considered undead because I am an evil mofo who never had a soul to begin with!

   Reply to Bryony
4. Bryony

   December 23, 2017 at 7:22 am

   Ooh, also: fact checking from a happy little deathling!

   Dead bodies are pretty safe actually, unless they have been embalmed which is a fairly recent thing. I hadn’t heard of the Brontë graveyard thing, but it doesn’t ring true to me.

   The Victorian death photos is a myth. “Ask a Mortician” channel goes into it, but basically all those pictures are of living people held still by frames because the process was so long.

   Reply to Bryony
   • Julia

     December 23, 2017 at 2:19 pm

     Hail, fellow deathling! I love Caitlyn, and a lot of the ‘post mortem’ photos weren’t actually post mortem like you say, but people did sometimes take photos of their deceased loved ones but they’re obviously dead (lying in a coffin, partially burned, etc.)

     Reply to Julia
   • Oren Ashkenazi

     December 23, 2017 at 2:21 pm

     Ah sadness. I should have known those photos were too cool to be true!

     Reply to Oren Ashkenazi
5. Reiksson

   December 28, 2017 at 5:02 am

   In one of my games of D&D I had a player that wanted to be a necromancer but did not want to be evil. What I ended up doing was making a guild of necromancers that only create skeletons (zombies are unclean) and use them for unskilled labor. The guild was headed up by a lich that was only interested in money not ruling or undermining a civilization. He went about it by using skeletons to corner the market in unskilled labor since they were tireless and did not need to be paid. This way I could have setting with precedent that liches and necromancers did not have to use their undead for nefarious purposes.

   Reply to Reiksson
   • Kenneth

     December 28, 2017 at 2:24 pm

     Where did the ‘non-evil’ necromancers get their supply of skeletons? And what happened to all the unskilled labourers who were made redundant?
     I foresee riots!
     “Bloody undead – coming here and taking away our jobs…!” or “That’s my husband’s skeleton – why should he pay the money he earns over to some lich, just because he’s dead, instead of bringing it home to support his family!”

     Reply to Kenneth
     • Reiksson

       December 29, 2017 at 5:11 am

       The Necromancer’s Guild would pay for the recently dead from the locals and clean them up for use as functional skeletons. The skeleton supply was limited to the amount of dead that was being sold and there were laws in place to not allow purchase of dead that did not die suspiciously and such. If I remember they paid a person enough to maintain a modest lifestyle for a few months (D&D 5e). The skeletons were used as servants, militia, but most often in manual labor for construction. Unskilled laborers were left in a precarious place but it lead to more people trying to become skilled in some way or just doing something an automaton could not do. I likened it to robots being brought in to automate work.

       Reply to Reiksson
   • Oren Ashkenazi

     December 28, 2017 at 4:46 pm

     Important note to remember: In D&D at least, necromancers can raise non-human skeletons as well.

     Reply to Oren Ashkenazi
6. Kenneth

   December 29, 2017 at 8:27 am

   It sounds as though it would make an interesting story – exploring the changes to society brought about by this new ‘technology’. Carriages and wagons drawn by skeletal horses that never get tired or need feeding would revolutionise transport. Skeletons working treadmills or cranks would provide a never-ending power supply for mills and similar machinery.

   I seem to remember Larry Niven mentioning something like this having existed in the past before the events of “The Magic Goes Away”. Of course, in his world, magic is a non-renewable (and critically dwindling) resource, while I don’t think that’s the case in D&D.

   Reply to Kenneth