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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7547024" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok, I think the theory crafting in the above is pretty decent.  I need to run some math to figure out what the actual results for a typical town of say 3000 persons would be annually, based on expected numbers of deaths and the percent that would be violent or involve suffering, alignment demographics, and so forth.  My sense is that the number of undead in a town performing due diligence would be low, and the sorts of undead most commonly appearing wouldn't overwhelm the community, but I'll gather some assumptions and see how it works out.One aspect of the current process that might be particularly disturbing is that for most communities, childhood mortality rates being what they are, a lot of the undead would be 'creepy children'.  If that bothers people, they probably will want to add a negative modifier to the above in cases of death of innocents.  However, an alternative approach would be to cremate all dead children, which is appropriate for two reasons, the first being that most child mortality would be decease related, and the second that the vast majority of children would after cremation become comparatively harmless undead such as haunts and poltergeists.  On the other hand, while rage zombie children are particularly creepy, they aren't in fact that dangerous (being size small and not of exceptional strength), probably only have unintentionally dangerous special purposes (return home, play with me, etc.) and a typical undertaker in my game could probably dispatch one with a shovel to the head and solve the problem - cynical though such an assessment might be.   Which is as much to say, I love this sort of theory crafting because mechanics as physics like this directly creates culture.UPDATE: So, after some more theory crafting using the above rules, assuming a society were most people are Neutral and evil and good people are about equally common, a body has about a 1.3% chance of returning as undead under normal conditions.   So the town of 3000 people with about 45 deaths per year will have to deal with about two new undead every three years even if it quite careful to see to it that everyone receives a proper burial. (UPDATE #2: Further theory crafting suggests my mortality rate is probably too low by about half, with a child mortality rate being much too low and the overall mortality rate simply too close to modern numbers.  In any event, even doubling the rate of new undead appearing wouldn't present a big problem.  I'll revise my notes as I get more comfortable with the results.)This is somewhat surprisingly high, but if you think about it, most deaths are not particularly nice and involve some amount of regret, trauma, and suffering.  This is particularly true in a typical D&D fantasy setting with its catastrophes and gritty semi-medieval world with inadequate sanitation, medicinal care, and roaming monsters.  The number is high enough that most people will have to deal directly or indirectly with the undead sometime in their lifetime.  Even if they don't encounter one themselves, they'll know someone who has or who came back from the dead.  On the other hand, the number is low enough that it won't tax the resources of the town to deal with the problem.As a percentage of the undead, you'd expect that the largest single percentage comes from homocides and suicides.  In my assumptions these account for about 1 in 15 deaths.  Note that this is a very high homicide rate, but I set the homicide rate that high because I'm including deaths from monsters and other "savage beasts", and high as it is, it is not implausible either from world history or from surveying parts of the world today.   However, they end up only accounting for about 1 in 8 of the undead despite the relatively high likelihood of such events leading to unlife.  The majority of the undead nearly 6 in 10 are as I predicted, children, since the majority of deaths in the premodern world are children, and the death of children almost always involves some amount of regret for a life unfinished and painful suffering (usually prolonged illness in setting).  The other significant source of undead are deaths from plague and illness, account for about 1 in 6 of the undead, with the remainder coming from any number of causes but more often and not being the death of someone of evil alignment and thus ill will toward the world.As for the sorts of undead, it depends on the exact burial practices of the society in question, but I'm going to assume a somewhat familiar practice of interning bodies by some sort of burial and sometimes cremation.  Further, I'm going to assume that the bodies of children are routinely cremated to control the spread of childhood contagions, reduce the horror of childhood zombies and ghouls of your dead child showing up to play with their still living siblings, and because its relatively cost effective in terms of the amount of fuel consumed.Working out some preliminary numbers, that means that a typical town of 3000 people over the course of 100 years has to deal with about:43 Rage Zombies4 Ghouls7 Haunts1 Poltergeist3 GhostsEverything worse is a black swan event, and only would occur in extraordinary circumstances.  Barring war, famine, pestilence, or the arrival of a necromancer, the odds of a specter occurring is about 1 in 1367 towns per century.  This is a good thing, because a Specter is for a typical town an existential threat that would probably require outside aid in the form of heroes.  Zombies are terrifying and creepy, but well within the resources of a typical town to deal with.  They'd cause talk, but anyone associated with keeping a cemetery that let one get loose is probably incompetent, and any number of resources in the town could fight one off, from the undertakers, to the city watch, to the clergy and their associated laity.   Reasonable physical barriers would probably thwart one most of the time. Ghouls are much more intelligent, and worse they spread.  Not only are they likely to evade physical barriers, but by being active for a considerable time before they are noticed they drastically would increase the rate of undead appearing.  While they are not particularly aggressive, this just makes them worse in a sense, because they end up spreading ghoul fever about which just makes more ghouls.  They are also much more lethal if encountered alone in a dark place than a zombie, and as such there is a good chance they murder an unwary undertaker before anyone figures out what is going on.  The presence of a ghoul is a town emergency, but fortunately they are at least as easy to kill as zombies and if cornered they should be speedily dispatched.Haunts are beyond the ability of a town of this size to easily deal with, but on the good side they are by far the least aggressive undead and usually don't have a malicious purpose.  It's likely that a cleric will be able to figure out what is going on and arrange to make them at peace, and even if they do end up possessing someone they probably won't do a lot of harm.  Indeed, it's not outside the realm of possibility that a haunt will be trying to accomplish something good or at least sympathetic.  Still, having a haunt around is going to temporarily cause a spike in the number of other undead appearing and will scare the beejeezus out of people even if it has the best of intentions.Poltergeists are similar to haunts in that they are almost impossible for a town to deal with on their own and fortunately aren't terribly aggressive.  They tend to be more mischievous than malicious, and even the more murderous sort tend to want to make a show of it rather than just ruthlessly slaughtering every soul they come across.  They are rare enough though that towns will probably be able to bring in outside help in the form of a higher level cleric or the more mercenary sort of hero to help out with the problem.Ghosts are even more beyond the ability of a typical town to deal with, but the 'frequency of appearance' ghost table should keep the problem under control.  Ghosts tend to be much more murderous than haunts and poltergeists, and even the ones that don't mean to be are more than capable of accidently killing people.  But since such hauntings would only occur a couple times a year, and people in the town would soon learn to avoid the times and places they occur, the overall impact on the town would not be great.  Still, a typical town that would, if it stuck around for centuries, accumulate a lot of ghosts unless something was done.  But, if a competent exorcist was only available a few times a century, the number of problems would tend to decay overtime.Everything else is an existential crisis, and would bring in outside and regional help.  You also have 'black swan' problems like vampires migrating into the town, and undead outbreaks in the wake of truly horrifying events - a pestilence that killed 450 people in a single year would probably cause a significant undead crisis in the following days that could under the circumstances overrun the town in a cascade of necromantic horror unless some heroes stepped up to face it.  The trope of a cursed town haunted by the dead is a very real possibility with these mechanics.By far the most common undead problem the townsfolk would face is actually simple Phantasms, which are in terms of Pathfinder no more than Haunts - less an undead creature than a trap of necromantic origin.   (Pathfinder uses the term differently than D&D, where in D&D a haunt refers to an incorporeal undead capable of possessing its victims that wishes to perform some task before it leaves to the outer planes.  I mention Pathfinder, because their 'Haunt' rules are one of the best things they've done and far more flexible than the older Fiend Folio equivalent of the Phantasm.  Nonetheless, I prefer the older term Phantasm, because I'm used to Haunts referring to the D&D monster.)  Normally, most Phantasms are dangerous only in that they cause (magical) fear and panic, though a small percentage might work as low CR traps.   In 100 years, a town like this would accumulate some 225 Phantasms, each of which would require an exorcist to remove.  Fortunately though, since under these rules most would work like ghosts and only appear once a year in the dead of night to replay the horror of a moment, even several hundred Phantasms could exist relatively comfortably in a town along with a living population and only rarely cause jump scares to the unfortunate that were awake or abroad at the wrong moment, or which trespassed where they shouldn't.  Still, this would give the sense to even ordinary towns that they were surrounded by the dead.  Every town would be filled with ghost stories, and the psychicly sensitive or those that trespassed beyond the veil into the ethereal would have to deal with what they found there.  If the problem got too out of hand, the town could hire an exorcist for a year once a century or so to fight back the problem.</blockquote>

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