1. Cemeteries - In the average fantasy world there are dozens of ways that corpses can come back to life, reanimate, or shed their body to become evil spirits that then prey on the living. This does not even take onto the various evil experiments performed by mad wizards.
So why are there cemeteries?
In several nations of Sartha, and a good many more that are now extinct, there are cemetaries precisely so that corpses can be stockpiled, can come back to life, will be handy to reinanimate, and will attract evil spirits. These nations view cemetaries as batteries or power plants. They are extraordinarily useful.
In other nations of Sartha, Cemetaries are places where you put the dead in one place so that you can consecrate them all at once, where you can be sure that someone has cast 'lay to rest' on the bodies, where you can ring the whole area in protective anti-necromantic wards so that anything that does wake up stays where it is at, and so forth. Quite often, the cultures of this later sort have the problem that the cemetary used to belong to a culture of the former sort, which can result in long term problems of disposing and putting down those dead that weren't happily buried. Undertaker is a highly skilled professional trade on Sartha, and there are gods that are more or less the 'god of proper burial'. I mean, you don't think that bad guys are the only ones with death gods do you?
In other nations of Sartha, you bury your loved ones in a graveyard so you can go talk to them (and occasionally even see them) on a semi-regular basis. You go build a nice bonfire in the graveyard, roast some harvest veggies and a bit of some sacred animal, maybe throw a bit of tobacco on the fire, and wait for grandma to show up. If grandma happened to get scattered to the four winds, guess what, your family is probably the only one on the block that is out of luck - no ancesteral wisdom and supernatural insight over the coming year for you.
There are actually places on my world where a consecrated cemetary has been built on top of a descrecated one and acts more or less as a lid. And there places in the world where multiple cultures exist simultaneously and are more or less in tension with each others desires.
The truth of the matter is that while most cemetaries have an undead problem of some sort, most undead aren't in cemetaries. Cemetaries have an undead problem on the basis of sheer quantity. You bury 400,000 people in one spot, you are bound to have a few mistakes. But the percentage of bodies that end up as undead in a cemetary is very small compared to the percentage of bodies that end up as undead outside the cemetary. Most undead are actually unburied people who died lonely horrifying deaths in out of the way places. There is considerable utility in finding these bodies and buring them in an actual cemetary.
One thing you generally certainly don't want to do is start spreading necomantic residue all over your community. Burning a body doesn't destroy it - it just disperses it. This is especially true if the body isn't burned in a consecrated fire as part of a internment ritual. Think of a body that used to contain a spirit as being something like low level radioactive waste. The goal is to contain it and neutralize it. Sure, if you do it wrong, burying all that waste in one location creates a heck of a toxic cesspool, but even then it beats the alternative of spreading it around. Dilution is not the solution to polution. What you end up doing there if you scatter ashes is creating nasty ash wraiths, sentient curses, widespread desecrated ground (which in turn tends to turn into undead anything buried there), haunts that occur over wide areas, possessing ghosts, hungry ghosts, and alot of things far worse than a haunted graveyard.
This is a seaside community and they have one stone pier jutting out into the bay used for funerals. The bodies of dead townspeople are wrapped in cloth, piled with wood, and burned in a pyre the day of the their or the immediate following day. The ashes are then allowed to blow into the sea.
This sounds pretty good provided that they have some deities on board with the ritual to catch the souls when they get thrown into the sea and some clerics around to make sure they get the message. Otherwise, what you just did is create one heck of a haunted harbor. On the other hand, that might actually be the goal. Them northmen are likely to have a heck of a time ambushing you in your bed in the middle of the night if they try landing quietly in the harbor. Your ancestors aren't likely to take that 'lying down'.
No dead bodies left around means less chance of the dead coming back.
Not really. The dead come back on their own when they are unhappy and unwilling or unable to undertake the difficult journey into the afterlife. Not having a body just means that they've lost a point of attachment and are more likely to be confused and angry. The corporeal undead are generally not a problem. An outbreak of rage zombies is troublesome, but not something that the town watch backed up by a few low level clerics can't handle. It's the incorporeal ones that tend to be the real problem. Exorcisms are difficult, and even compotent soldiers tend to be useless against even fairly minor spirits.
Really the idea of burying bodies when it takes a low level spell to animate them just sounds silly when you think of it.
Low to mid-level necromancers aren't really a big problem either. They have a hard time hiding and being mortal they can always be drugged, grappled, and/or killed in their sleep. You average town watch will have very effective albiet quite brutal methods for dealing with suspected spellcasters. Witches and wizards represent pretty ordinary problems. It's not like you are going to cast something obvious like Invisibility and have everyone go into a panic. Zombies are scary, but no scarier to a Sarthan than having a blowout on the interstate is to someone from our world, and animate dead is unlikely to get you very far. Body disposal represents the usual hazards, but if you know ahead of time what you are dealing with that simplifies the problem.
When I say "Conan", I refer to nothing apart from the stories written by Robert E. Howard....as written by Robert E. Howard (as opposed to pastiches and poor, but perhaps well-meaning, edits after his death).
