Druid philosophy on the death

[0bsolete]

My old group got together today and decided to try playing AD&D again. My character, a NG thief, and another character, a NN Druid, got into an argument. My character took the daggers and gold off some friendly NPC corpses who had died at the beginning of the campaign, leaving the fancy clothing and jewelry (they were nobles). The druid took offense to this considering it to be disrespecting the body. This got us onto what would be a druid philosophy on death and the treatment of the body. What would you guys say the AD&D, traditional true neutral druid's view on the treatment of the body and death would be?

 

[Voadam]

Druidism is such a mess of contradictions that it could validly go many ways.

1 corpses are meat, natural state at the end of the life cycle when civilized men are back to nature and should be respected as part of divine nature once again. Rifling them is disrespectful.

2 corpses are meat, natural state at the end of the life cycle when civilized men are back to nature and should be respected as part of divine nature once again. Their crafted possessions like daggers are not in the divine state of nature but still man made tools, do with them what you will.


3 corpses are meat, who cares what you do with them

4 depends on what needs to be done to enhance the balance

5 these people will be reincarnated one day in the natural cycle of life, do not disrespect the bodies

6 these people will be reincarnated one day in the natural cycle of life, their sprits have moved on and do not care about their old bodies.

7 Nature does not care about respect for the dead

8 do not cause any violations of the dead that might cause them to rise as undead anathema to nature

etc.

 

[WayneLigon]

Do wolves or trees care about disrespecting the dead? No. About all a druid should care about a body is if it's buried in a way that provides good nutrition to the local trees. In fact, he'd probably like it better if you took all the stuff off it since that's just going to get in the way of the putrifaction or predation process. Some wolf or rat or something could choke on all that gold, you know, and wouldn't you feel bad about that?

 

[billd91]

I don't believe there's anything particularly canonical about any approach to death and dead bodies in AD&D druidism. The campaign is free to design tenets of the faith as it sees fit.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

Do wolves or trees care about disrespecting the dead? No. About all a druid should care about a body is if it's buried in a way that provides good nutrition to the local trees. In fact, he'd probably like it better if you took all the stuff off it since that's just going to get in the way of the putrifaction or predation process. Some wolf or rat or something could choke on all that gold, you know, and wouldn't you feel bad about that?

This. Assuming that there's no cultural overlay that the druid player is pretending to be from.

Heck, clearly the rogue is a scavenger, stealing from some other predator's kill.

At most, the druid should be referring to the rogue as a vulture and moving on.

Brad

 

[Clavis]

I would say that the Druids should insist on the sanctity of friendly dead, and encourage the claiming of trophies from unfriendly dead. Historically, Celtic people took trophies (such as weapons and body parts) from defeated enemies. Celtic cultures are highly clannish, treating the "in" group in an entirely different manner than the "out" group. A view of being good to those who are good to you, and evil to those who are evil to you, is consistent with a Neutral alignment. It can easily be defended as the "natural" way.

 

[EricNoah]

Avoiding death
takes too much time, and too much care,
when at the end of all,
Death catches each one unaware.
[taken from The Druids, by Peter Berresford Ellis]