"Necromancy Techniques and undead types" Topic

I've been pondering the idea of starting a 15mm undead army in 15mm and it got me thinking. The possibilities and materials at a necromancers hands (and by extension Wights, Vampires, etc) are extensive. Depending on the background, nearly any organic matter or life form could be used.

Which makes me wonder why you don't see more undead designs. A necromancer with time to work would have the ability to design all sorts of functioning monstrosities. Zombies are quick and easy to raise which makes them a mainstay, but if you were to take the time to prepare skeletons or mummies, couldn't you come up with hybrid designs? I guess it also depends on the series/universe in question. Sometimes skeletons are quickly raised and fall to pieces when struck with a blunt object, in others they need rituals to prepare and are magically augmented to keep them in battle longer. Though mummies of course would take considerable time due to embalming.

How would you see a necromancer being "creative" with his "supplies"? Simple things like metal bracers, or attachments into his "subjects" might add a huge boost to their usefulness. Who would want to tango with an undead berserker with scythes bolted into its arms? Or perhaps zombies with metal bolted onto or near soft spots? Or how about a giants torso added onto an elephants body to make a giant undead centaur like creature? (I really want to try my hand at sculpting the last one!)

Though, I could see why you don't see a lot of this kind of stuff in wargaming. Since it's safer for developers to stick with classic or familiar looks. Though what about it other forms of fiction?

Thoughts?

I like that splintered light do non-human undead, so you can have dead dwarves, orcs etc. One thing I have only seen from alternative armies is an undead mass, as if the necromancer threw a raise spell over a pile of corpses and it animated as 1 melded entity. I like the elephant/centaur thing. Some forms of undead, (mummies/revanants/wights) are culture/background specific, while zombies/skellies/ghouls are more generic. You rarely see ghost type non-corporeal undead in wargames, which is a pity , as they could be fun.

Phil

I agree, I'd like to see more done with that sort of thing… more use of the dead as raw materials for bizarre constructs.

Rackham had their 'Crane Warriors' and 'Morbid Angels', created by necromancers out of ordinary skeleton warriors and bits of other creatures.
Magnificent Egos had a couple of creatures that were jumbles of bones and guts.
I've got a couple of figures on my desk that are multiple skeletons lashed together… I think they're Heartbreaker but I'm not sure.

Warhammer's undead factions seem to have the sort of thing you mention. It's most obvious with the Tomb Kings' various constructs, but the new monster thingy ridden by a Ghoul King just out for Vampire COunts is an "enhanced" thing, not just a raised corpse.

I do like the non-human skeletons and undead made by various companies and wish there were more of that around. It would be neat to build an undead army with plenty of extras so thatyou could use race specific figures when fighting different opponents.

Other than that I'm pretty much good on what they have. GW used to make chariots that were actually bones and I wasn't that fond of those. I prefer the chariots to be actual chariots.

Overall I think I'd like my undead army to look as close to just raised dead things as possible so the idea of a necromancer spending a bunch of time making some monstroscity isn't as appealing as a horde of raised corpses from a battlefield.

I can see them going somewhat out of their way to raise the corpse of some sort of monstrous creature like a dragon or giant though.

I like this falls under the "Why don't the undead rule the world" type thing. There are two basic needs to create undead:
1. Supplies – Virtually limitless. Obviously, if undead over-rule the living they would eventually run out of raw materials.

2. Energy – My take is that Necromancers need to use their energy to create their minions, which limits the size of their army.

I also see there being some sort of "time limit" on their constructs being viable (OK, three things).

So, to build something more than a "basic" skeleton would require more energy to be expended, and then they would have to re-do it with all of the
"attachments" when they needed to re-reanimate it.

That said, I've always liked the look of armored skeletons and non-human undead, like skeletal giants, Minotaurs, dragons, etc. (which is why AI have many of them in my collection, many from Grenadier it seems…)

Skeletal horse + skeletal man = undead centaur!

ya-eah!

Have a look through any DnD sourcebook.

My take on necromancy is that nothing is free. The necromancer has to get the energy from somewhere/something. This makes two possibilities: borrow from "the planes of the dead", i.e. make a pact with the powers-that-be governing such a place, or put your own energy into the animation. The latter would be limited by total energy available; you could have a very small army of animated corpses for a longer time than a larger army, before the necromancer would be exhausted and his minions collapsed back to their natural dead state. The borrowed warriors, on the other hand, could be very numerous and more or less permanently on hand for the duration of the "pact".

I tend to dislike innovations such as the OP suggests, on the basis of players getting too caught up in an "arms race" getting their kooky ideas on the gaming table….

In a 'rationalist' approach I see 3 types of 'moronic undeads':
- not dead at all, but drugged to the appearance of death and then reanimated; given the lack of oxygen when the heart beat was almost imperceptible the brain suffered irreversible damage, so the 'zombies' are very stupid and very slow, but very obedient and totally immune to fear and pain;
- very fresh corpses somehow healed, then reanimated Frankeinstein's creature fashion: same as above, but probably less durable;
- victims of a contagious disease, just like vampires according to th 'Matheson model' -but far less smart and nimble ('Resident Evil'? [Rec]1?).

Not very propitious to really freaky / weird minis, but normal figurines can easily be 'zombified'.
link

I confess to have the greatest difficulties to succumb to 'the willing suspension of disbelief' with animated skeletons, able to see without eyes, coordinate without brain and move without muscles. A possibility is to have some immaterial entity (re. the Vitons link ; an imp if you are more fantasy-inclined) somehow confined in it and compelled to animate it. The main difference with the previous types is that the death of the 'jailer' (sorcerer, necromancer or mad scientific genius) would immediately free the prisoner 'spirit', while 'zombies' would be merely bewildered (1 chance /2 catatonic unless attacked, 1 chance/2 stampeding?). But for some reason I prefer to reserve this 'mechanism of animation' for pre-scientific automatons (animated full suits of armor, basically; 'talos' in Keyes' 'Age of Unreason') and animated scarecrows.

Exalted has basically 2 kinds of undead troops, with a few nasty combinations. There's the basic zombie/skeleton (difference is in corpse freshness), and then there's the ghosts. Now, ghosts can possess something, or they can physically manifest if they're powerful enough.

The Abyssal Exalted (yes, chosen warriors of the Abyss, and powerful necromancers), make a couple siege engines. One is a corpse centipede, where dozens of torsos are stitched together into one composite organism, or there's the Corpse Strider, which is a giant-sized mass of corpses organized into an equivalent to a Warstrider (think Guymelef from Escaflowne, a Giant-sized power armor suit). Neither one lasts long, but they're nasty.

Ah, but the true zombie is animated not by the will of the necromancer, but rather by the demon who was summoned by the necromancer's spells and sacrifices. The demon, you see, provides all the necessary energies etc for the movement, vision, etc of the 'zombie', as it is his (her?)(their?) vehicle by which this mundane world is visited and, until the demon is either out of energy – in the case of the lower sorts – or is cast out and forced to return to its (his?)(her?)(their?) origin on the Other Side. If one were a powerful enough necromancer and had the parts – and they were fresh enough, perhaps? – a demon or three or six might be conjured to occupy such a construct, under the same constraints as a 'normal' zombie.

For me I keep the so-called 'summoned demon' (or elemental, imp, angel, cherub…) -'actually' an immaterial sentient being, maybe of E.T. origin, of the Viton of 'Sinister Barrier' type link coerced to "enter and animate", from a 'rationalist' Sci-Fi point of view- to animate scarecrows (& full suits of plate armor, possibly skeletons if the ligaments keeping the bones together are still in place). And I have my 'undead' alive and well -well, not that well, diseased actually .
TMP link

One would like to see some more undead types in miniature, though. Sure, there are tons in sourcebooks, but that's not much help when you're running something on the tabletop.

As for why animated skeletons? Well, the evil spirit animating them idea is one way of handling it -- like the robes of the Ringwraiths, the skeletal remains could "give shape to their shapelessness" and allow them to manipulate the material world directly. If they're not very smart, but highly malign, you'd end up with the standard fantasy skeleton. Perhaps placing them into matter which was once living gives them an advantage over, say, just animating a wet clay figure or some such. Terror advantage, at the least.

Besides that, it's strange looking and makes for a different miniature than an endless parade of zombies, which are either boring or disgusting depending on how close you make them to looking like a living person.

The inexplicable nature of a walking skeleton always seemed to me to be part of the creepiness, anyway. It's precisely BECAUSE you can't figure out how it can see without eyes -- and yet it still comes for you with rusty blade poised to strike -- that makes it sinister.

That's the whole point of "things that should not be" -- they're a violation of our expectations and make us wonder what horrors are lurking beneath the surface of reality. There's a little whiff of Lovecraftian intrigue and horror in every skeletal warrior, if you look at it the right way. ;) If you could explain it rationally, it wouldn't have the same impact.

A matter of personal taste and prejudices. For me to enjoy a game setting I need a 'willing suspension of disbelief' and (perhaps because of some 45 years of biology) I am handicapped by thick eyelids and very strong prejudices. Thus I always try to 'rationalize' -well, at least to a degree slightly above Barsoom-type Science-Fiction. 200% personal, of course