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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gardens &amp; Goblins" data-source="post: 7239912" data-attributes="member: 6846794">Always worth remembering! A savvy necro ruler should keep a stable living populace to support their legion of undead minions. Sure, the living have an annoying habit of eating, sleeping and crapping but they also make themselves, can serve as spies in enemy lands and bop that undead-turning cleric on the head before they cause trouble.Of course, if our necro ruler is aggressively expanding their territory, they'll be harvesting undead from their fallen foes, assuming of course, their foes are mostly medium-sized humanoids. Waging war through necromancy relies on the snowball effect, where the aim of the game is to keep the momentum going at all costs. Kill, harvest, replenish - rinse and repeat. Stalls - sieges, negotiations, bad weather - are costly, time, perhaps ironically, is not on the side of the immortals, because as Eltab mentions, undead are a finite resource. Even those that can create more undead through slaying the living still require a supply of living to replenish their numbers.Where are all the dead coming from?So, our necro ruler isn't constantly at war. Where are they getting the dead to replenish, let alone expand, their forces?Perhaps a supernatural event or power can be the source of the undead. A gate to an afterlife, bristling with hungry spirits eager to feast on the sould of the living. Following this thinking, our necro ruler will find the vast majority of the minions being incorporeal undead - wraiths, specters, ghosts and the like - some of which might posses the living, perhaps as spies or elite warriors.As others have mentioned, a good 'ole disease, perhaps magical in nature, is always fun. Perhaps it animates those that die to it, at least long enough for them to walk (tunnel?) to the lands of their future master. Perhaps it happens after a time when someone dies - or maybe every new moon the diseased dead all rise together, relying on their weight in numbers to blunder through any opposition on their way 'home'. Whatever you choose, we can expect a fair number of zombies to fill the ranks of our necro ruler.Or maybe you go with something more spectacular -- our necro ruler has, through some means, acquired the power to send spectral cyclones to ravage the lands beyond his realm. These foul vortexes of evil manifest in battlefields, graveyards and other places where many have died. With their distinctive scream, they whisk the dead from the very ground, carry them away through the air, delivering them to our necro ruler, ready for reanimation. With such a supernatural force in play, our necro ruler could find all manner of dead amongst their ranks, tho skeletons, zombies and even ghouls should be common.Whatever you choose, it's going to be a lovely thought exercise. Good luck!</blockquote>

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