Undeath in society

Undeath is a phenomenon that affects all races of Welt. Since in some cultures the undead are all sentient, this leads to a unique social phenomenon known as undead societies appearing alongside living communities. This leads to behavioral, societal and architectural differences. The method of reanimation differs from place to place. Usually, undead are raised by necromancers and have no need for sleep or sustenance, the sentient variants of undead can retain some of their memories from when they were alive.
In the other races and in Dalmer culture as well, most families consider it to be rather shameful to have an undead relative and they are typically not welcome back home. There are exceptions of course, and sometimes love and attachment are stronger than social stigma and an undead can return to their family. Some are very well cared for and preserved, but usually it comes at a cost of social status.
Most undead need to start a new life somewhere else. Some try to pass for the living at first, and while it may work for a while, sooner or later their body deteriorates to the point where they can no longer hide their true nature. The living usually get pretty upset when deceived about the status of un-life and many undead are lynched or burned at stake when found trying to pretend to be alive. When they are open about being dead they can typically avoid lynching, though some think that throwing stones at the undead is the only way to properly welcome them to the community.
== Dalmer undead society ==
=== Activity ===
In the beginning stages of their undeath, the undead typically reach out to people in living societies, people they knew or loved.
Since they have no need for regular sleep or sustenance, they don't need to hunt or farm and they don't need to build shelters to sleep in. They may not even form towns. They probably just band together in groups and travel around, doing whatever they please and avoiding living beings. They often sit around a campfire (for comfort of course, not because they need the warmth) and tell stories of while they were alive.
After a while, they crave stability and will move to a Necropolis and begin working to pay off their Fleshdebt they contract when they reanimate to buy |flesh and brain matter.
=== Behavioral and Society ===
Undead societies are very work orientated, due to the fact that they do not get bored or tired. This makes them more and more drone-like as they “age”. The younger an undead is the more lifelike it is, going out and socializing, as they near the end of their lives they tend to be work oriented, priding themselves on their endurance and capacity for work.
=== Taboos ===
One of the taboos in undead society is to damage the body, very little fighting goes on in undead society as they know the difficulty and cost of replacing body parts. And since every undead strives for autarcie in their work, they are extremely stingy with their money. 
=== Crimes and discrimination after death ===
Maiming or violating a body is seen as a crime even if they cannot feel pain. And they will often zombify those that transgress this rule. 
Living in a zombie kingdom has many advantages such as free food and low prices. However it is understood that those living on the island must forfeit their bodies upon death to join the undead workforce. Generally this servitude is 5 years, since a zombies natural lifespan is 16 years, this is sometimes a price too steep for some, and prompts undead bounty hunters to go and find the servitude jumpers. 
Since the undead are often work oriented, they tend to look at the living with contempt of their perceived laziness. They often mock the fact that they cannot work as long hours as they can. 
=== Undead/Living relations ===
The undead have a mixed vision of the living. Since they don’t get bored of repetitive tasks and can work non stop, they see the living as lazy and undisciplined. However, they also see the living with parental kindness often, the way adults look at children. This prompts their intense sense of responsibility and duty to provide for the living. 
The undead also have respect for the dead, and mourn them just as the living do. People that actually die are sent for recycling. Some more heinous individuals wait for people to die to steal their body parts. This leads to black markets where you can probably buy an arm or two, the problem is finding a quiet surgeon to fix up new said arms.
=== Food ===
The undead have their own needs, and must partake in cannibalism and cerebrophagy to maintain their physical shape and mental faculties. This imperative forces them to earn their keep, which they do by being extraordinary farmers and factory workers, trading their wares for the supplies they need. 
=== Health ===
Regarding health, when compared to the living the undead are more or less similar to their living counterparts if they are fed regularly. However, failing to feed will invariably result in decomposition and eventual fading for the corporeal undead.
=== Government ===
The undead have a government similar to monarchies, with many undead kingdoms being under the leadership of a Vampire, Zombie or Lich king. They however are more or less under the overarching control of the Imperial Department of Missing Limbs, which represents them at the Imperial scale. 
Besides the king, the undead seldom bore themselves with titles and nobility. 
=== Architecture ===
In terms of habitations, undead cities are the aptly named Necropolises. 
The social strata of the undead are defined by their habitations, the more modest live in graves, the richer in mausoleums. City blocks are known as tombs, or tomb hamlets, themselves grouped into cemeteries or cemetery towns, the projects are known as mass graves. 
The undead have no inherent need for shelter, being exposed to freezing cold does not affect them. They are however susceptible to heat. Since undead populations tend to build their cities in unhospitable areas with cold temperatures all year round, any building owned by a private citizen only has the utilitarian value of keeping personal possessions from being damaged by the elements or stolen.
The inside of graves are quite comfortable, often fully furnished with bedrooms and kitchens. However they are often incredibly cold compared to their living counterparts. In functionality, graves are only a name change when compared to the habitations of the living. They have climate control destined to accommodate living and undead guests. 
== Other race undead societies ==
Since the other races tend to dislike the undead, they do not have an equivalent of fleshdebt and build up their own societies away from the living. These societies build themselves around methods of getting food. That is, there are hunter-gatherers, then horticulturalists, then agriculturalists. These tactics are based around getting what the undead need, which would presumably be more dead bodies. Hunter-Gatherer undead roam from town to town trying to get as many bodies as they can before getting wasted themselves. Eventually, a smarter undead would try to raise the bodies themselves.
Undead society, if unchecked, eventually forms around living societies. With the undead as farmers and living people as farm animals.
=== Feeding ===
Undead, by default, are mostly in a state whose first imperative is making sure they do not devolve into a bestial state. In order to stave off the bestial state, they must cannibalize. Vampires cannibalize the living with blood. Zombies devour brains. This is the passion of the dead, to create new ones of their kind, and to quench desire. Undead society exists on the equilibrium of that desire. 
=== Necromancers ===
Necromancer are able to heal the undead like priests. Necromancers that can heal (or raise the dead) are scarce, and in high demand. Their resurrections are expensive, have very long reset times, and always require a temple. Necromancers have several ways of bringing back the dead, or healing wounds.
=== Applied Necromancy ===
This makes Necromancers valuable to societies of the dead, and it also makes them valuable to societies of the living. Having Necromancers around is good for armies, it allows them to patch up their dead for another round of combat.
Typical necromancers are primarily interested in reanimating corpses. They use the physical remains of the deceased and have not much use for their souls. However, reverse necromancers who capture souls of warriors and bind them to empty suits of armor under the guise of enchanting are generally better accepted in living societies
=== Necromancy and other magic users ===
Shamans and Druids have a sharply conflicting paradigm with Necromancers. Necromancers tend to have spells that emphasize cities and large populations of people. Shamans and Druids emphasize rural, tribal existence.
On the far extreme of either Shaman and Druid are Witches and Warlocks. Witches can also bring back the dead, however with considerable more difficulty. Witches are like priests, however they don't worship, they make deals. They ask higher spirits to return the dead, and in return the Witches get a temporary alignment towards the spiritual force they barter with.
== Other race undead communities ==
Dead-towns are typically well maintained, albeit very stinky places. Their inhabitants are usually friendly to any passing undead, but mistrustful of the living. Still, if you can get into their good graces, holing up in their town might not be a terrible idea, especially if you are on the run.
Every once in a while children are seen living with the dead. Sometimes these are orphans that couldn’t find their place anywhere else. Other times they are relatives of one of the reanimated who is their last of kin. Most undead villages have at least one touching story about one of their own taking in a grand-grand-grand-child after its entire living family was wiped out by a plague or killed by raiders.
Those raised by the dead tend to grow up to be more tolerant and understanding of the un-death condition. Unfortunately they are few and far in between, so life of the undead is typically full of prejudice and hardship. Their villages are often raided by the living, or visited by all manner of priests who offer to “cure” their condition with cleansing fire. In the capitol there is even a dedicated think tank of priests and mages devoted to finding a way to lift the curse and banish all the existing undead in one fell swoop.
=== Necropolis ===
Necropolises also occur in the other races, built either within caves or ancient and abandoned fortresses or cities. The architecture is always very heavily inspired from the general design of mausoleums, crypts, and tombs. They have their own social systems. Usually the hierarchy is skeletons>zombies>>necromancers> vampires> liches. Rarely, living beings live there and use blood as a form of currency.
==== Relations of necropolises to the living ====
Due to the hatred the other races have for the undead, Necropolises have a very ingenious defense mechanism that few witness and even less live to tell the tale. All the roads in and out of necropolises are lined with graves. When an invading army comes in the graves spring to life, surrounding them and pulling them into the city to feast upon them.
In most cases the other races would send death row prisoners there to suffer being a zombie under the control of one of the ancients or be torn apart whichever fancied them at the time.
=== Temple Sanctioned Necromancy ===
Usually, necromancers must practice their art in secret. In some cases, necromancy is actually sanctioned by the local religion. In these forward thinking societies necromancy is somehow viewed as a benefit to society as a whole. The reanimated corpses are considered sinners given a chance to work off their karmic debt after death by allowing the priests to reanimate their remains so that they can be used for the good of the temple and the faithful.
Undead created this way are just as mindless as the regular ones, but instead of for war they are used for hard labor. Essentially they are indentured slaves who never have to rest, eat or sleep and can never complain. Since corpses are a renewable resource, the necromantic temples always have plenty of free workers they can use to get rich, or for public work projects that show their benevolence. Since the undead are mostly mindless, they typically need to be accompanied by a handler, a lower caste within the priesthood called Guides that does the dirty work such as patching up the undead when they get damaged, disposing of the ones that are no longer capable of working, etc. 
People get used to this state of affairs and consider it to be a pretty good deal. They get to sin while they are alive and then their corpse will erase all that burden and allow them safe passage to afterlife, while at the same time providing free labor for the community. Naturally, sometimes people die in such a way that renders their body useless for reanimation. Fortunately the temple allows people to volunteer to “do time” for friends and loved ones. This system was put in place to allow people in especially dangerous lines of work (like soldiers for example) to have a reliable way of erasing their sins even if their body is destroyed. Later it became possible for one to sell their own time to someone, or purchase time from someone else. This in turn caused the other temples to become wary of the necromantic temples' power. They eventually called the necromantic temples heretical and excommunicated them. 
=== Kingdom of the Dead ===
A caste driven society ruled by mummified, sentient undead. Described as liches with sewn-shut mouths, with beautiful clothes and skin like preserved leather.
The living are a minority, who are farmed like cattle. Most are slain and re-animated as non-sentient zombies to act as servants and laborers. Chosen few are adopted by the undead nobles, raised as their own children and then killed, mummified and resurrected when they come of age. There are few niche jobs that are considered below the nobles, but for which the zombies are too clumsy, and thus the undead do tolerate a small number of living in their kingdom as long as they know their place.
The only social caste lower than the living, are the vampires who are considered to be the lowest of the low. Because the population of the free living men is so small, the liches guard their “cattle” jealously. Vampires typically live in shanty-towns on the edges of the poor districts, and take to the streets begging for blood at night.
=== The Awakened ===
A land cursed by a powerful and vengeful mage. Anyone who dies within the borders of the kingdom without a proper burial will rise again the next day as a fully aware walking corpse. The proper burial of course involves burning of the body so that there is nothing left that could be awakened the next day. Most of the people choose to be cremated after death. Unfortunately, not everyone can be given a burial in time and every once in a while people wake up dead. This is especially common after battles or in places hit by a deadly plague where there is simply no time or resources to burn all the bodies in the timely manner.
This form of undeath is one of the least appealing, as the undead who return in these lands have the gift of Parasight at the cost of all the other senses. Indeed, the dead have no use for eyes, ears or taste buds. 
=== Undead workforce ===
There are few people willing to hire the dead, and if they do, they don’t pay well. On the other hand, the dead don’t really have that many expenses, seeing as how they never need to eat or sleep. As a result most of the undead workforce sooner or later gravitate towards each other and settle down in smaller or bigger communities where they can help and support each other.
Category:Undead
Category:Society
Category:Dalmer
Category:Pages with red links
Category:Civilizations