What would a society of sapient undead look like? How would the lack of a need for food, water, air, and sleep impact society?
>>44200037
However the writer wants.
They party all night because they don't need sleep and can't feel anything anymore
>>44200037
Are they sapient individuals or sapient hivemind? Because that would be two very different results.
>>44200037
They feel the urge to constantly do something. Wether it be attacking a nearby kingdom, building massive fortresses, or just partying. The undead are literally restless
>>44200037
There being no need to do anything you don't want to I guess they'd devote all their time to skilled crafts and passtimes because otherwise they'd get bored, but since they have no economy or labor force they'd lack the need to produce raw resources and they can't effectively establish a hierarchy because bones are hard to tell apart and have no reason for one skeleton to be better than the other because they're already running on magic bullshit, so they'd lean to venting their frustrations on foreigners and go off and steal their stuff. They also don't have to feel bad about killing because hey they'll just become skeletons and they don't care about dying because they're already dead and life gets boring real fast for them anyways. They probably adorn themselves and everything they own with art so they can forget about how dead and creepy they all are.
So raiding, indulgent, skellies covered in gold and silks and engraved bone with really nice houses that were typically small since they have no families to support but are filled to the brim with bright themes so they can forget about death.
Assuming that they have any sort of settlements, they would be very unwelcoming to the living. there would be no need for things like farms or wells, and there would probably be no houses or beds
>>44200513
They could be like the Huns or the Mongols, only without horses
>>44200037
>>44201067
They probably would build some sort of structure, so they could have privacy
Very religious.
With humans, most inhabited areas are inhabited because they have easy access to food, water and shelter.Undead could have societies practically anywhere, deserts, tundra, swamps, underwater.
>>44200037
Early in the Third Age, the Dark Lord Tyrell advanced undead-raising into the Wight phase--a being virtually identical to a human--known as Revenants.
The Wight VI Revenants were superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the necromancers who created them.
Revenants were used Off-plane as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other dimensions.
After a bloody mutiny by a Wight VI combat team in an Off-plane colony, Revenants were declared unquel on this plane--under penalty of death.
Special knight teams--Paladin Orders--had orders to smite, upon detection, any trespassing Revenant.
This was not called execution.
It was called retirement.
>>44200037
More free time to shitpost on /tg/
>>44200037
If undead have no noses, then how do they smell?
Check mate, necrofags.
>>44200037
>How would the lack of a need for food, water, air, and sleep impact society?
One word:
Rapture.
Tired of being exploited for labor that grinds their bones to dust, or being free in the wilds but exposed to the elements that would do the same to the bodies they will be stuck with for all eternity, the skelebros - who need so very little - build a hidden city where they will not labor, manufacture, or trade. Nothing that will wear out their immortal but fragile bones. Preferably a place of contemplation, where they can spend eternity bettering themselves and finding a way to improve their bodies.
A library.
Their entire city is a magical library.
>>44203552
>improve their bodies
>library
The term you're looking for is gym, bro.
>>44203406
Awful, usually.
>>44203552
A giant chatroom where they contemplate various philosophies and theories for all enternity?
>>44204293
>Undead
>In a gym
>Leaving body parts on the equipment
>Drink your milk, kids.
>>44200037
Do they retain the consciousness they had before death? Or is there some weird and sort of fucked up skeleton afterlife where your corpse 'is born' after your soul departs it?
>>44204293
should be called "The problem with level scaling"
>>44200037
I am still a fan of the Millennial King*. Undead will have come from something living so unless they are the remainder of a dead race why break off entirely from the living?
*https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Millennial_King
>>44200037
There wouldn't be a society they would all be searching for a way to die
Conversely they might band together to avoid being slain by holy forces. So without needing to rest, they would probably be constantly bolstering their defenses. They would probably hoard magical times to study. They will either aspire to knowledge, search for a way to return to life, or be a complete dick spook everyone by constantly playing wind instruments despite not having lungs.
>>44204881
The campaign I'm playing in currently has a duality thing going on with that... when a willful/heroic soul dies, the soul moves deep into the earth and is reborn as a man made of rock... while the body animates as a regenerating husk of who they once were. The body starts with all of the memories of life and personality, but gradually the soul pulls those back, leaving the body a cold empathyless monster who hates all life and operates almost solely on a wicked logic. The exception being some drive or obsession which stuck with both forms... though often twisted in the husks sense. We have two of the earthmen in out main party, one whose drive is to protect his loved ones, and the other who took her obsessive tendencies with her... I mention main party because in our secondary, I play as the first ones husk, protecting a little girl... so that he can use her as a tool. We call the bodies The Marauders as a society, and Husks as entities. Another detail is that earthmen and marauders are compulsed to destroy their counterpart... but if your counterpart dies, then you start to decay.(crumbling into dust over time or rotting like the walking corpse you are)
>>44200037
They wouldn't engage in subsistence agriculture.
>>44205216
That does however open them up for commercial and luxury agriculture... I bet their cotton business is booming, and they use the money to pursue interests and hobbies, such as previously suggested learning, but also art and the supplies therin, beautiful architecture as well as the materials needed to make it, they can farm for other societies which need it, and use the funds to get supplies for any number of time killing frivolities.
>>44200037
more boning
>>44206187
I imagine they'd have trouble picking each other apart after the mass skeleton orgies.
>>44200037
If they are still humans effectively, just undead, without the need to sleep eat or drink, their work output and research rates would likely improve
>>44204772
Wow that's actually pretty rude.
>>44200037
I'm pretty sure sapient undead like vampires or liches are already pretty integrated in the society.
Old thread relevant?
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/32199372/
>It's the far future. Far enough that humanity has forgotten where it came from.
>Human colonies scattered all over the known universe
>Something terrible happened a few millenia ago.
>All humans died.
>Artificially enhanced humans survived.
>Dead people brought back to life with serious tech (kinda like 40k servitors, but with some memories and can think on their own. pic related)
>A new civilization of undead cyborgs (need name for both cyborgs and the civilization)
>Players are cyborgs travelling the universe, looking for dead colonies.
>When finding dead humans, they get to either resurrect them (but it's costly, so it can only be used on the best), enslave them (turn them into worker slaves) or scrap them for parts.
>Lots of political agendas between internal, rivalling factions
>Quests to find the corpses of important characters from the past
>Alien races who don't want to see humans come back to power
>Explore what made humans die out from the beginning
>Coping with death
Anyone else think this is awesome?
>>44201092
Or with undead horses...
>>44200037
Constant war out of boredom.
Alternatively: they need other resources and rest too not break down.
>>44201677
I hated the heavyhandedness of politics in the game; it was very clear who was supposed to be the "evil guys" and the "good guys", only that it involved real life politics.
>>44203552
What a boring existance.
>>44203406
They don't.
Nor do they taste, feel or sense anything other than sight, ehich might be magically added so its entirely possible thats boring too.
Shit going by some books, going full skeletal robs you of emotions so only your last goal in life is the only thing making you actually act and move.
>>44200037
A few talented and driven individuals might dedicate their unlives to crafts and arts, but most of them would probably spend their time complaining about things no living race has the luxury of registering as a problem. Basically a society of SJWs that need no rest and will hound you forever.
No hormones, no gushing secretions. Perhaps their psychology is more driven, by little obsessions that give their unlife "meaning".
Obsessive counting of things, devouring the living, the pursuit of magic (for liches and such)
The key to unlife is, obsession.
>>44206739
If the magic that animates them doesn't impart emotion on them somehow, most of them would probably just stare at walls.
>>44206739
Thought you said no emotions?
How can one obsess and be curious of new things without emotions in full effect?
>>44206812
Perhaps some sort of longing for those very emotions?
>>44206806
>>44206812
It's partially from the old idea that you can stop a vampire by throwing rice at it. It's basically an obsessive compulsive disorder.
I a my point said they were curious, or felt joy or sorrow. Obsession (in this context) is the overriding need to do something.
It depends partially on what they were in life. Those who did nothing but eat, fuck and sleep with their lives might wish to do nothing more than eat. Yet in their undead state they want the flesh of the living.
Others, depending on how they were in life might have different inclinations. Scrooge might spend the rest of his days, counting piles of golden coins, again and again. When adventurers come to slay him, he might be counting the amount of adventurers over and over again till they destroy him.
The most advance might have more complicated obsessions. Someone who became a lich because he wanted to live forever and discover mighty magics might find himself in his unlife practising magic and trying to become stronger and stronger.
He feels no curiosity though, no wonder, no happiness at a new discovery. He simply does things, as if he was a machine, by rote.
The ways of the flesh are gone. The variety of sensations are deadened.
Really, they're like an obsessive compulsive guy who has to wash his hands 3 times before he leaves the house. he gains no joy from it, except perhaps a slight relief. Except they never get to leave the house. They just get to wash their hands.
Where do the bodies come from?
How do they fix damaged bodies?
>>44200037
They would mosltly shitpost on /tg/
>>44200037
>The so called plague of undeath traces it's origins back to when a wizard wanted to glimpse the afterlife and realized it was a terrible hell where souls finally outside the safety of the material realm are reduced to playthings for malevolent and alien gods and devils.
>To save everyone from an eternity of suffering, the great wizard mastered the art of keeping the soul in the material realm past the moment of death, bound to the mortal remains of the body.
>Undead are now on a crusade to turn the entire world undead in an effort to save them, and are mostly saddened and melancholic due to their thankless task of saving all living things by killing them, and longing for the day when they can stop the endless murdering and just exist, forever.
>>44206322
>The guys with the blunt weapons hide in the back and make the guy with the piercing weapon fight the skeleton.
I don't think he's the dick here.
>>44208368
i would be interested in a dnD campaign based on that idea. the players basically want to be a benevolent Nagash.
>>44208430
OR their quest is to find out if the wizard was right, maybe he looked in the wrong realm or something, so all the undead can just let go. If you want slightly less of the "lolguys look how I'm subverting the evil undead army trope!"-vibe.
How do undead move?
>>44207291
So most of us will spend our unlives compulsively browsing 4chan for eternity...
>>44200037
Autistic rant warning:
Undeath as a worldbuilding component really only works if it specifically involves the soul or equivalent acting on it's dead body in some way, be it like a puppet or inhabiting it and providing some kind of magic power that lets it function even though it should reasonably be stiff and falling apart.
As soon as someone flavours undeath/necromancy more like a wizard using dead bodies as puppets without their souls or whatever being involved, all hell breaks loose and strange questions crop up, like;
If he's just using the dead bodies as material, why would he choose dead bodies of all things? Or dead humans? Anyone can see how digging up peoples dead kids and parents and turning them into skellies or zombies would result in getting lynched by a torch-wielding mob, but would anyone really worry if you say... Reanimated their dead cow to pull a plow? Or various undead animals to use for fighting? It seems like a pretty good way to save yourself some work and grief, right? Hell, even better, if it's just magic animating them like some kind of golem made from a person, why use a person as the material? Go to the local carpenter and have him build an 8 foot mannequin of hardwood and hammer nails into it fucking everywhere. You get a guardian/soldier that will absolutely fuck people instead of some gimpy zombie that any bumbling adventurer wannabe can brain with a rock, and again without having to upset people with your tasteless practices. And if it needs to be organic matter, does it work on any dead organic matter? Because honestly, reanimating a skeleton and sending it after someone seems a lot less practical than just reanimating the pork sausage someone had for lunch to shoot back up his throat and choke him out. Or how about reanimating crude oil?
Basically, as soon as you leave the soul out of it, everything goes to shit.
>>44206833
Longing is also an emotion sempai.
>>44201769
Thats fucking bladerunner but goddamn did you make it sound awesome
>>44208977
>golem made from a person, why not go to a carpenter
It'd be much easier for a ostracized necromancer (let alone a lich) to animate a pile of bones than waltz into the nearest village and get some craftsman to build them a mannequin. Bones are everywhere.
As much as I'd like to see a half-digested sausage golem erupt from some knight, there'd need to be some heavy magic power to try and bypass a complicated chamber of living tissue for that. Same with giving solid form to a liquid golem.
That's where faith-based necromancy starts going into pure Reanimation magic.
>>44201442
It's called a conversation starter, anon.
This is how conversations happen.
>>44200037
I'm gonna be that guy and mention WoW. Cause no one has yet.
seriously, it's been done.
>>44206608
lol someone's projecting
>>44206519
They had a very elaborate plan for everything, but had their budget slashed into nothing so they ended up just making a parody of their plans.
>>44213754
Yeah the Forsaken are a pretty good example.
Perhaps even the Undying Elves from the Eberron setting
>>44206608
SHITPOSTERS THAT NEVER SLEEP
Now I know why Paladins exist.
I imagine something like this.
![dd3a4aec1763e775a1969a5920efa668[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/cMrINr5.jpg "dd3a4aec1763e775a1969a5920efa668[1].jpg")
>>44200037
>What would a society of sapient undead look like?
They're good people, but they can be a little over-the-top to outsiders and non-undead folk.
Undead don't need to eat, drink, sleep and breath and so in turn all of these activities become recreational commodities in some form of another and since Undead can only feel the most extreme of sensations they have a tendency to get outrageous with their desires if only so they can FEEL something, ANYTHING.
Smoking, Drinking, Eating & Gambling all in disgusting excess.
Horrible, Terrible, Offensive and Degenerate acts imagined by bored and demented minds to satisfy sexual gratification.
Undead can be absolute fucking freaks, but this is pretty juxtaposed by how civil, polite, courteous and gentle they can be with the living. Especially those they find an emotional attachment with or are related to; Undead move mountains and cross canyons for the opportunity for the emotional satisfaction brought about by living companions, lovers and friends.
The inclination of your chest and tone of your voice as you control your breathing to talk.
The soft, gentle, soothing beat of your heart and the intense heat your body radiates compared to their cold, dead, skin.
The way you shiver and subtly twitch and move to the gentlest touch.
Your living body is moving poetry to the dulled undead- you're an exotic, valuable, piece of art.
>>44215134
The vampires attracted to humans thing now makes way too much goddamn sense.
>>44214047
Like a fucking 10-screen cineplex on New Star Wars day.
>>44201442
I have never seen a more poignant image so quickly ruined by trigger-happy anons.
(1/1)
Depending on setting, they might be from a wide range of time periods, resulting in dead cultures and civilizations seeing the light of day again. They might be raised long after their buildings turned to ruins, resulting in jungle-riddled pyramids and sand-filled temples playing host to undead hordes that speak no known language. In a more civilized setting, these groups would likely segregate themselves from others, to keep with those they are familiar with. Like districts of today, with tighter and tighter boundaries depending on how far out-of-time their denizens are--a barrier only broken by the bold and brazen, or by scholars. A barrow like you might see in Morrowind or Skyrim (or Old Mournhold, from Morrowind as well) could serve as an Undercity, where denizens of a bygone era could reminisce and seek safety from the perils of a new age.
These undead would likely segregate themselves (or be segregated) from the living because of the uncomfortably prescient reminders of mortality they represent, and (likely false) conceptions of decay and disease they might engender. They would have to either be preserved (if fleshy bits) or would already be reduced to bone. They couldn't really carry live diseases around in this state. Regardless, they might move far from where the living live (as earlier anons have postulated) because of how little they need to survive. I especially like this guy's ideas (>>44215134) but I'd think it wouldn't be such a strong feeling...Anybody here play Soma? That part in the game where youfinally find a live human...a feeling of sorrow for what you've lost and a longing to get it back. You might vicariously enjoy a good meal or a good night's sleep...even if someone else is doing it, instead of you. So I would always expect to find a bed somewhere, along with a bite to eat and something to drink. Even if visitors only stop by rarely.
>>44200037
Play Serious Sam. You will find your answer there.
>>44220161
(2/2)
Aromatic oil and potpori are the order of the day for those who still have emaciated flesh on their bones. They'd likely smell nice (except the plebeian/ given-up-on-their-existence ones), and there'd be a...what, apothecary? Embellishment would be important for skellies, and not just what they wear. Permanent stuff that can't be taken off, like piercings, studs, carvings, metal plate, bric-a-brac, knick knacks, and other anchored-on doodles would be used to tell one from another.
I'm glad no one has mentioned a god or deity yet, as sapient beings have no reason to universally choose one god in most settings (unless one singular god created these undead). I would expect (and love to) see skelly paladins, and otherwise a wide range spanning from Mother Theresa to "alloha snackbar". Expect to see some undead cleric or other campaigning against a bad necromancer at some point.
Oh, and you could use your empty rib cage as storage space and your pelvis as a holster, 'nuff said.
>>44211610
>I've...seen things you fleshbags wouldn't believe.
>Sailboats on fire off the coast of Neverwinter.
>I watched Magic Missiles glitter in the dark near the Gygax Gates.
>All those campaigns will be lost in time. Like tears...in..rain.
>Time to die.
>>44206391
hell yeah
>>44206391
Metal.
I had a game like this once, I ended up the head of said country. You get lots of money fast when you can export 100% of your food production.
>>44206519
What game was it?
>>44200360
Underrated post.
