D&D 5E Bury corpses

[Rya.Reisender]

I noticed that a lot of villages in D&D don't actually have a graveyard. How do villagers handle the corpses of deceased villagers? Would people usually just be buried wherever they died (like while traveling, next to the road)? Or is there some sort of "service" from the cities to gather the corpses and then give them a proper burial in the graveyard of a nearby city?

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

The corpses are probably buried in secret locations to prevent any passing Necromancer from animating them.

 

[jaelis]

If I lived in a dnd world, I would want all corpses burned

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

I noticed that a lot of villages in D&D don't actually have a graveyard.

How'd you notice that?

Perhaps it's just my love of the old west and things macabre, but I've always assumed that any D&D settlement shown on a map that doesn't have a cemetery/graveyard on the map has one on a nearby hill just off the edge of the map a short ways, like happened a lot in the past of the real world - though towns eventually grow, and graveyards don't move very fast, so they often end up getting run up against or surrounded,

As for the burial rites of D&D world cultures, I think it is the most fun to have people handle their dead much the way we do in the real world, which means a variety of culturally-colored funerary rites, and a mix of burial, mummification, and cremation. But that's because I think taking the line of "Well, necromancers raise the dead, so we should all burn the bodies" is going the wrong way around, since no one would know that necromancers raise the dead unless buried bodies were common enough for necromancers to have practiced their craft upon until it actually started working.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

How'd you notice that?

Not on the map and not in the description either.

 

[Jer]

I think what you're actually seeing is that the scenario developers who have come up with the map for the village don't think to put a churchyard in the village because of how religion is handled in D&D vs. how things like this were handled in the real world. In our world during the medieval time period there was a dominant religion that was very concerned with the remains of the dead, and so every village is going to have a graveyard and it may actually be in a fairly prominent place near the church. The only time I see graveyards on a D&D village map is if the scenario specifically calls for undead to rise from a graveyard or something similar.

In my own campaign worlds graveyards are blessed via special rituals and any corpses buried there are protected from being raised as undead - either spontaneously or through an act of deliberate magic. So long as the acolyte tends to the blessings on the graveyard that is. It's probably also outside of the village proper, though that's more of a judgment call and would depend on the local religious character. Why don't people just burn all of their dead? In some parts of my campaign world they do. In other parts it's a religious taboo to do anything but bury the dead in a sacred spot and if you don't do it then you risk the deceased coming back as a spirit instead of a corporeal undead. Mostly I want to keep large plots of land stuffed with corpses available for story purposes, so there's a reason for it.

 

[cmad1977]

Cannibalism.


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[AaronOfBarbaria]

Not on the map and not in the description either.

That doesn't necessarily mean more than that the graveyard is not immediately relevant to the book the map is found in or the adventure that is assumed to be happening when the map is used.

 

[Waterbizkit]

I'm with Aaron on this one, just because a map or a books description doesn't specifically call out the location of a graveyard doesn't mean there isn't one and adding it in, if you actually need it, isn't particularly difficult. All the absence of information in the book means is that the developer didn't seem to think the information was relevant to what they were trying to present.

I mean the maps don't generally point out where the towns local wainwright can be found, does that mean there's no one around to build & fix the various carts & wagons used by the towns populace? How many other seemingly important businesses and individuals to everyday life get left out of a book or aren't marked on a map because they're not deemed useful enough to the story the developer is trying to layout?

If you want a graveyard, pop one down. If you want interesting funerary rites, dream them up. If your players need their cart fixed, fabricate the towns wainwright and his or her place of business. Etc.

 

[Oofta]

Most people developing maps only put in places of relevance to the scenario. So maps don't include cemeteries unless they are pertinent to the plot any more than they show farmlands, mills, livestock yards and so on.

In my home campaign, there are certain areas where people bury their dead but in others cremation is the norm since loved ones tend to come back as rotting corpses. Other cultures use sky burials (put corpses someplace high and let the crows feast), while other mummify remains.