Why don't spawning undead take over the world?

[el-remmen]

You could easily just rule that spawned undead cannot themselves create spawn until they are no longer under the control of their master.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Admit it. Now you really are trolling, aren't you?

What Hong? Not a fan of the Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead trilogy? Good stuff there man. Heck, I've often thought that it would be interesting to use Eden's Zombie idea and run a D&D campaign with that whole concept that yea, it's basically over but there are still some spots of resistence.

 

[Bauglir]

I was watching Alien: Resurrection the other night and thought the concept would make a good D&D adventure. So I came up with this scenario:

An evil warlord wants to exploit the combat abilities of wights. Through an intermediary, he hires adventurers to scour tombs for undead. An evil cleric "Observer" travels with the parties; if a wight is found, the Cleric rebukes it and brings it back to the baron. The baron intends to use the wight in battle, where the thing's energy drain and spawn-creation (spawn rise in 6-24 seconds) will be very effective.

Of course, just like in the Aliens movies, things go horribly wrong, and soon there are dozens or hundreds of wights running amok.

I love it!

Add in the PCs waking up on slabs in the middle of the Baron's fortress, the next set of intended subjects, before everything went horribly wrong. (Maybe one of them is the original evil cleric, betrayed by the baron, but keeping his identity from the other pcs) Stir thoroughly, and you have the makings of a fun little adventure I think.

Consider it yoinged

 

[Tonguez]

I mean, whoever heard of "ghosts" and "spirits" wondering the world? Such apparitions have always been restricted to their place of death.
Quasqueton

Actually there was a recent (like past 5 yrs) report of a traditional Rarotongan Ghost who was spotted by Rarotongans in both New Zealand and the U.S.

As to the question IMC once Shadows get to a critical mass they merge and become Nightshades.

I use the idea of haunting for some of the corporeal undead (like Wights) and also have it that if the Master-creature (ie the first one that spawned the others) is killed then all the spawn are caught in the shockwave and sucked into the negative energy realm where they merge and become Dread Wraiths

The spawn of a Wraith is a shadow (and thus Wight-Wraith-Shadow-Nightshade the circle is complete)

 

[Calico_Jack73]

I think it would be safe to say that EVERY god, good or evil, would do whatever was needed to stop it and for a very simple reason... gods require worship to maintain or even increase their power. The majority of undead are either mindless or have bestial instincts, hardly able to vererate or worship a god. The fewer worshipers a god has the weaker he/she becomes until they become forgotten gods whose bodies then become real estate for the Githyanki on the Astral Plane. To be sure it might work with Vampires who maintain some semblance of intellect and would certainly be able to worship. However, with increased intellect there is even less liklihood that vampires would work together. The old adage that evil consumes itself is very true. Vampires have to compete for food and if they peopled a city with vampires it would become harder and harder for them to keep themselves fed. Survival instinct works wonders for the forces of good!

 

[Kesh]

I solved this one through my homebrew's world creation legend.

Essentially, the god of life & the god of death had an argument. The former thought mortals added a dynamic beauty to the world... the latter thought they were ruining the perfect paradise the gods had created. It almost broke out into a fight, until another god stepped in with a compromise.

Part of the condition was that mortals would be given a finite lifespan, so that no single being could wreak havok through eternity. Each would die of old age eventually, and be judged for their actions in the afterlife. In addition, for every mortal that the god of life allowed to be resurrected, the god of death would be allowed to create an undead mockery of another (rules-wise, of equal level: a level 12 character being ressed would spawn a CR 12 undead somewhere in the world).

So, at first, the god of life was reluctant to allow any resurrections. Over the centuries, however, it became clear that very few undead were actually being created, and the god became lax. At the point the campaign starts, resurrection is pretty much a given if you take someone to a high-level priest and meet their requirements.

That's when I'll spring the hordes of undead on the PCs. Turns out, the god of the undead was just keeping 'points' in reserve and chose to unleash all these undead at once rather than piecemeal.

 

[Dakkareth]

It seems logical to me, that the spawn can never be as powerful as the spawning creature. So a shadow may create a certain number of new shadows and these can also create new (weaker) shadows, but thereafter it's over - the unfortunate soul may still be damned, forced to haunt the site of its death or whatever, but it lacks the power to become a shadow.

Also it seems logical, that spawning creatures would seek to avoid creating spawn not under their control in order to avoid bein 'displaced' in the food chain. As there'd most likely be a limit on how many minions it can have we have the second limitation.

So a master-shadow could have a certain number of minions, but he'll be forever limited to this maximum barring special circumstances. As there's a limit on undead under a necromancer's control, too there's also no danger of some necromancer taking over the world with spawning undead again barring special circumstances like divine sponsorship, epic rituals or whatever vile plans the PCs have to disrupt.

In praxis I'd determine the number of 'generations' possible and the control maximum per master and derive the further numbers from that. With each generation HD, special abilities, etc would become weaker until the next step would be zero across the board. This would also be a nice explanation for scaled encounters - the shadows the party faced before were lowly minions, now they're up against the Masterwraith and his most powerful servants.

 

[MerakSpielman]

Perhaps there are only a finite number of shadows in the world - say, 4000. If another one is spawned, the oldest one fades away.

 

[Hecateus]

Anybody face this issue in their campaigns?

Lazybones

My solution is to dclare from the start that general undead types are fundamentally unstable in the Prime, without deliberate support, they go away; any permanent undead with the ability to create more of it's kind must be first a deliberate creation. Those who did create these types did so with a specific reason, and have built in controls on them to prevent wild undead expansions.

In the case of the classic level draining undead, these now tamed undead drain XP from victims, which instead of creating more undead, is then to be harvested by the Ancient Masters in their magic infrastructure...sorta like domesticated fishing ducks with rings around their necks to prevent them from swallowing the fish they catch for their human masters.

 

[pawsplay]

Many undead are powerless in daylight. Add to that the damage a single 3rd level Cleric of Pelor and a dozen peasants armed with holy water and torches can do to a few ghouls, and I don't see an undead threat in the D&D world. There may be a ghost town here and there, Black Plague style, but sooner or later some adventurer is going to come along and clean it up.

Except for the damned Wights. They mess with everything. They're not so dumb, as undead go. They're corporeal. They kill quickly with that energy drain of theirs. They can walk in daylight. And their spawn rise in 1d4 rounds. At one time, I hoped that was some kind of insane typo, but it's never been changed or updated. So a single wight wandering into a village would be ... bad.