Release the Skeletons!
Dec. 12th, 2018 11:33![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aubergionThe nice thing about Dreamwidth is that none of my D&D players are here, so I can dump my half-baked setting ideas here and share them without having to worry about spoilers. If you lot do show up here - get out! This post is Not For You.
The core tenet of my D&D setting is basically "screw lost glories, the golden age is now", with a side of applied magic, humanizing the Monster Manual, and asking "why are adventurers a thing anyways?". And a touch of the logistics of actual production of goods to spice things up (if your wizards need bat guano... where are the bat guano harvesters). In general, leaning in to the core wackiness inherent in Dungeons and Dragons instead of trying to make it something boring, generic, or edgy.
Which brings me to the necrocommunists.
So as of 5e, animating dead no longer costs onyx! Which makes running a society on necromancy suddenly way way way cheaper and theoretically doable, provided you can get enough 5th level necromancers or cheap magic items of handwavium (which I can do, because I'm the DM). But where do we get corpses? Well, maybe it's just traditional? After great-grandma dies you wash her up, cut off all the nasty bits, dress her up in her best clothes, and set her up in a chair for the necromancers to come by in a few days.
Skeletons aren't too smart, but at least in my world, they'll follow the last command given them until otherwise told (this just gets to be problematic when the last command is "kill anyone who enters this room"). So you can definitely have them run (lurch) on treadmills to grind flour, dig ditches for irrigation, sweep streets, chop wood, work in mines (and as a bonus, skeletons don't breathe!). You can probably even get them to plow fields (by hand. Animals don't like them much.) and sow seeds (a little haphazardly) if you mark out the area beforehand with some lines in the dirt. They can guard gates, chase birds from fields, carry around all manner of things...
It's very practical, really. The community looks out for you as long as you live, and in return when you die, you provide for the community. Of course, there are things that living people have to do - craftsmanship, delicate work, most things involving animals and anything involving a touch of brains - but it does free up a lot of people to not worry so much about where their next meal is coming from. Throw in a touch of horizontal organization, some people to distribute the rewards of the skeleton labor, a general lack of internal monies, and a couple provisions regarding the rights of the undead, and there you go! A communist confederacy of peaceful necromancy-powered farming villages. No evil overlord, no sinister catch. A little bit of post-mortem defleshing and maybe boiling just to be on the safe side, but it's traditional so that's probably okay.
It does mean the necromancers have an outsized grasp on power since they're the ones who can command the skeletons, but that seems like a plot hook more than anything else.
The core tenet of my D&D setting is basically "screw lost glories, the golden age is now", with a side of applied magic, humanizing the Monster Manual, and asking "why are adventurers a thing anyways?". And a touch of the logistics of actual production of goods to spice things up (if your wizards need bat guano... where are the bat guano harvesters). In general, leaning in to the core wackiness inherent in Dungeons and Dragons instead of trying to make it something boring, generic, or edgy.
Which brings me to the necrocommunists.
So as of 5e, animating dead no longer costs onyx! Which makes running a society on necromancy suddenly way way way cheaper and theoretically doable, provided you can get enough 5th level necromancers or cheap magic items of handwavium (which I can do, because I'm the DM). But where do we get corpses? Well, maybe it's just traditional? After great-grandma dies you wash her up, cut off all the nasty bits, dress her up in her best clothes, and set her up in a chair for the necromancers to come by in a few days.
Skeletons aren't too smart, but at least in my world, they'll follow the last command given them until otherwise told (this just gets to be problematic when the last command is "kill anyone who enters this room"). So you can definitely have them run (lurch) on treadmills to grind flour, dig ditches for irrigation, sweep streets, chop wood, work in mines (and as a bonus, skeletons don't breathe!). You can probably even get them to plow fields (by hand. Animals don't like them much.) and sow seeds (a little haphazardly) if you mark out the area beforehand with some lines in the dirt. They can guard gates, chase birds from fields, carry around all manner of things...
It's very practical, really. The community looks out for you as long as you live, and in return when you die, you provide for the community. Of course, there are things that living people have to do - craftsmanship, delicate work, most things involving animals and anything involving a touch of brains - but it does free up a lot of people to not worry so much about where their next meal is coming from. Throw in a touch of horizontal organization, some people to distribute the rewards of the skeleton labor, a general lack of internal monies, and a couple provisions regarding the rights of the undead, and there you go! A communist confederacy of peaceful necromancy-powered farming villages. No evil overlord, no sinister catch. A little bit of post-mortem defleshing and maybe boiling just to be on the safe side, but it's traditional so that's probably okay.
It does mean the necromancers have an outsized grasp on power since they're the ones who can command the skeletons, but that seems like a plot hook more than anything else.