Proper Burials & Undead Origins

Samloyal23

Adventurer
What are the odds of a person becoming undead if they are not killed by an undead creature such as a vampire, nor animated intentionally by a spell caster? Does a proper burial help prevent this? What makes a person turn into an undead creature without intervention?
 

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Tonguez

A suffusion of yellow
Zero

The whole point of the burial ritual is to allow the deceased to 'pass on' to their 'final rest', Undead only happen if the deceased is disturbed
 

ElectricDragon

Explorer
Note: All the following is made up and does not follow any rules I know of.

Hallowed ground usually prevents animation as undead. Ground can also be un"hallowed" (not the spell, though the unhallow spell could work to dispel such an effect if the effect is magical) un"hallowing" requires defiling the ground somehow (many things come to mind but I'm not mentioning most of them here) such as humanoid sacrifices on the grounds. Deific hallowing requires more drastic methods and may not be removable without deific aid.

Hallowed ground is usually provided by the local church for the burial of its loyal worshippers. In large cities, providing hallowed ground would probably be a requirement of building the church in the city (part of their taxes, so to speak), each church is responsible for a certain part of the city graveyard and probably upkeeps its own private graveyard for those loyal supporters it deems special enough to warrant a place among the honored dead.

The odds do not really matter. A necromancer or death priest can animate dead as long as it is not on hallowed ground. Hallowed ground blocks the negative energy necessary to cast such spells and may even produce spectacular failure results for trying.
 

Celebrim

Legend
What are the odds of a person becoming undead if they are not killed by an undead creature such as a vampire, nor animated intentionally by a spell caster?

Pretty low.

Does a proper burial help prevent this?

Proper burial prevents it 100% of the time. If you put a body in properly consecrated ground ('Hallow') and or use the appropriate divine invocation the body ('Lay to Rest') will never become undead spontaneously and cannot be animated by evil magic. In fact, this is one of the major duties of the clergy in most towns.

Unfortunately, if you are using invocations to keep bodies and spirits at rest, then you are losing the opportunity to heal wounds, cure disease, and place blessings on the living. In the event of catastrophe, something has to give.

Thus most large towns have emergency measures designed to contain the problem. Maze-like catacombs and sealed vaults beyond areas of consecrated ground and wards against the undead can ensure that even if you do get an undead problem, it will be contained. If mass burials are required that overwhelm the ability of the clergy to deal with the problem, physical restraints like this can be employed. Of course, cremation could theoretically be used, but this creates its own often worse problems.

What makes a person turn into an undead creature without intervention?

Three basic problems can occur. First, if a soul dies in a particular unpleasant way, it can be so disoriented in the afterlife that it is unable to find its way to a permanent abode. These lost souls wander the border ethereal trying to relive their life, too distressed and confused to move on. Gentle counseling can sometimes heal these lost souls, as can the intervention of a psychopomp.

Secondly, the souls of particularly evil persons can often linger in the border ethereal for malicious reasons, and whether disembodied or reinhabiting their decaying form seek to perform some evil that they were denied in life. Quite often, evil spirits will help arrange for this to happen, by thwarting psychopomps from completing their duty and there by spreading ruin and chaos. More rarely, a spirit can be lured by evil spirits to remain out of a sense of misplaced justice, which normally results in psychotic episodes and the tainting of that soul in the long run.

Thirdly, and most insidiously, necromantic energy lingers and accumulates in places where it is used. Over time, evil deeds and in particular evil spells (such as 'Animate Dead') leave behind necromantic pollution. When that pollution builds up, bodies will spontaneous animate as undead creatures with no intervention involved. Pretty much anywhere someone casts 'animate dead', there is a strong chance that any other bodies buried there will eventually reanimate as uncontrolled murderous undead. If you do it repeatedly, it's dead certain. This is one of the several reasons that most necromantic magic is inherently evil and banned from most right thinking communities.

On the other hand, some communities try to harness this power, going the other direction with it to deliberately create what amounts to necromantic toxic waste dumps.

Incidentally, this is the big problem with cementation undertaken outside of the bounds of sacred funeral rights. Mass burning leads to creating clouds of necromantic waste that taints everything it touches. All that ash ends up creating incorporeal undead that is far far worse than a few zombies or ghouls, and much harder for an average community to deal with. Catacombs are much safer in the long run, even if it does mean somewhere near the town you're likely to have a reservoir of necromantic taint and an undead problem.

Undertaker is a highly skilled profession in this setting. You don't want some random dummy responsible for interring the dead. The Guild of Undertakers is usually either entirely made up of oath sworn laity of some deity responsible for the dead, or else works in very close coordination with the cult thereof.

Likewise, the problem with grave robbery isn't just the theft, but that desecrating hallowed ground can have really nasty side effects.
 

doctorbadwolf

Heretic of The Seventh Circle
To add to what others have said, I think it’s interesting to incentivize I hallowing the ground rather than stealing bodies and moving them before animating them.

In my games, this means incentivizing the protection of graveyards and making all cemeteries into graveyards (graveyards are part of church grounds). The thing is, undead created on ground that was Hallowed, and then was defiled, are more powerful.

If you want skeletal Death Knights that can plan, improvise, interpret unclear commands, and command lesser undead for you, you have to defile a church yard and raise the santified to undeath.

If you want to attain lichdom, you have to unhallow the ground, and the living faithful, and get them to defile the grounds/church in your name. You gotta pull some Charles Manson business.

But that’s my games.
 

ElectricDragon

Explorer
If such is true about negative energy building in an area, so too should positive energy in certain places; suppose if an area were subjected to multiple resurrections, could not a spontaneous resurrection also happen?
 
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doctorbadwolf

Heretic of The Seventh Circle
If such is true about negative energy building in an area, so too should positive energy in certain places; suppose if an area were subjected to multiple resurrections, could not a spontaneous resurrection also happen?

That groks, for me. But, I don't think we have to assume that what happens with negative energy also happens with positive energy. They are different.

Perhaps while negative energy festers and feeds on itself, positive energy tends to diffuse and "fill the space", unless acted upon to do otherwise. Also, perhaps positive energy is naturally annihilates negative energy, but when negative energy is present in a much greater amount than the present positive energy, it consumes the positive energy.
 

Tonguez

A suffusion of yellow
That groks, for me. But, I don't think we have to assume that what happens with negative energy also happens with positive energy. They are different.

Perhaps while negative energy festers and feeds on itself, positive energy tends to diffuse and "fill the space", unless acted upon to do otherwise. Also, perhaps positive energy is naturally annihilates negative energy, but when negative energy is present in a much greater amount than the present positive energy, it consumes the positive energy.

I’d allow for positive energy to spontaneously create “hallow ground” - maybe those places that make people ‘feel the positivity’
 

Celebrim

Legend
If such is true about negative energy building in an area, so too should positive energy in certain places; suppose if an area were subjected to multiple resurrections, could not a spontaneous resurrection also happen?

I guess in theory that could happen, but it would be a truly sacred place indeed, and I've never considered placing anything like that in the world. More likely, with just mortal levels of intervention, you just end up with spontaneously consecrated or hallowed ground.

And equivalently level of necromantic taint would just animate bodies as zombies, but would kill living beings that entered into the area. Which, come to think of it, can happen.

I should note that there is not in my campaign full equivalence between access to negative energy and access to positive energy. After the God's War, the gods of evil left access to the negative elemental plane more or less unguarded. There is such a thing as a Necromancer. Access to destructive power is comparatively easy. But, the gods of good left access to the positive elemental plane strictly guarded and warded. There is not such a thing as a Biomancer, which is why arcane casters (for the most part) can't cast healing spells. This tension is part of the backstory to my current long running campaign - the BBEG is a necromancer who wants to be a Biomancer and who believes that the gods of good are wicked for restricting access to healing power, and who is endeavoring to build a device that will harvest (and then radiate) positive elemental energy, thereby allowing arcane casters to develop their own healing magic.

The strongest positive 'pollution' on my homebrew world happens is 'sacred groves', places where the gods were active in the past and have infused with their personal power, and where they tend to be more active and responsive to mortal requests. I'd never really thought about why most of them tend to be far from civilized places before, but now that you bring this up, it's probably to prevent the power they contain from being diluted.

Similarly brainstorming, it's quite possible that before the world was polluted and broken in the God's War, places where resurrection would have spontaneously occurred would have been fairly common. Albeit, at the time, neither murder nor mortality had been invented, so there wouldn't have been much use for such places.
 

ElectricDragon

Explorer
Just a thought, but a powerful positive area created by a god could not only be hallowed ground, but also cause a spontaneous resurrection of one of the god's most powerful mortal allies in time of need. Not someone well-versed in today's problems or why he was even resurrected. But he knows he has a destiny...
 

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