Undead miners
What are ramifications of a necromancer buying a mine and using undead workers to work in them?
Would this upset miner guilds or unions?
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Why wouldn't it?
I guess it would depend on a person's view on necromancy labor
>A necromancer is making my dead relatives take my job and also outcompeting us
Yeah I'd be pissed off
Hire mercs to kill the evil necromancer.
Fun side campaign for them so win-win.
If you'd eaten them as a proper mourning ritual would require, that shit wouldn't happen. Don't act like you give a shit.
Ritualistic cannibalistic funerary practices must make being a necromancer a b***h.
Unless you're eating the bones too you aren't stopping shit.
Why the frick wouldn't you eat the bones? The marrow's the good shit.
you don't even need to eat them yourself, just perform a sky burial.
All the ore or gems coming out of the mine would be tainted by the necromantic energy, and anyone who died while wearing some on their person would reanimate as a mindless undead.
Clearly some party of weirdos will have to discover this and track down the problem.
>anyone who died while wearing some on their person would reanimate as a mindless undead.
more cheap labor!
I'd expect the main societies where it might be viewed favorably is those that already tended to use slave labor for mining, because mining fricking sucks.
Transitioning to undead from a guild system (where the guild has no doubt secured lucrative wages and contracts for living miners) would be difficult, but if you're already having the work done by slaves or prisoners, it doesn't make much difference.
It's also relatively low risk if you're in D&D setting where a necromancer losing control of the undead results in a large number of hostile undead that will wander around to kill other living creatures.
The mine entrance will provide good chokepoint, especially if there's any sort of elevator system to get up or down, and in the worst case scenario you can collapse the entrance.
It's still a problem, because those undead still have a bunch of mining tools and might dig their way out, but at the very least it's not like you were using them as farmhands and they're now wandering the countryside and slaughtering farmers and livestock.
Sounds like an excellent material for arrowheads
>shoot volley into an army
>anyone who dies from it turns into a zombie
>instant chaos in the ranks
Carry them around in barrels rather than quivers for extra safety
>Sounds like an excellent material for arrowheads
volley into an army
who dies from it turns into a zombie
chaos in the ranks
>Carry them around in barrels rather than quivers for extra safety
Literally the semipassive "Black Arrow" for Sylvanus and her generic equivalents in WC3. Though that was Skeletons I suppose to be technical.
Exactly what I was just thinking.
>Sounds like an excellent material for arrowheads
>shoot volley into an army
>anyone who dies from it turns into a zombie
>instant chaos in the ranks
>Carry them around in barrels rather than quivers for extra safety
There's actually mineral called Lazurite in Pathfinder 1e that does that, or actually even better by turning you into a ghoul, who are intelligent undead. You even get to keep your class levels! Fun stuff.
That's not how necromancy works in most settings and those spells that make the undead often do not have regional side effects. So your combative 'dming' is just hogwash.
Ehhh 3.55 had I think Libris Mortis or Heroes of Horror suggest downsides, but not make them truly mandatory.
VARIANT RULE: UNDEAD DENSITY
When too many undead are spawned (or gather on their own
initiative), the concentration of undead within a given area rises.
As the density increases, the influence of so many creatures suffused with negative energy can have real effects.
Undead density is expressed in terms of the total Hit Dice of
undead in a 100-foot-radius sphere (regardless of intervening
walls or other barriers). If the total Hit Dice of undead in this
area rises to 1,000 or higher, the saturation of negative energy
effectively grants all undead in the area +4 turn resistance.
An even higher undead density could grant greater turn resistance, but such density would be difficult to achieve due to space
requirements and crowding
So too many undeads would make cleric's job harder, but then they're probably already angry that someone's making undead so nothing really changes.
>nooo thats not how it works mister DM
nogames mindset
>Defending combative DM'ing
>"nogames mindset"
Imagine lol, lmao even.
if you go RAW then unintelligent undead only understand the concept of attack, don't attack and follow and command undead RAW doesn't let you give complex orders to unintelligent undead
if we just go by D&D, there's no way to turn skeletons or zombies into miners without DM fiat to begin with, so why should the only DM fiat be positive?
mining is literally "attack stone" so it works RAW
which leads the undead to scatter ore all around with no concern for anything and braining whoever you haven't explicitly excluded from being attacked with their pickaxe when they get close
their tunnels would be inherently unstable because they have no way of digging in a manner conductive to stability and don't give a crap about doing so
and course the minute anything bad happens to one of your controlling mages they immediately go nuts
Obviously the worksplace would be deadlier (for people) than early Victorian factory. But you wouldn't need to have any people going there. Skelly with a pickaxe attacks stone, skelly with plow or rake walks back and forth moving the gravel horizontally. Skelly with a bucket walks up and down moving the gravel vertically to the outside to be sorted. Simple commands, they can do it. Copy pasted times thousand and get them to work. If part of it caves or there's a tunnel gas or they break into owlbear lair or whatever who gives a frick. You lose a few, send more in. Sorting happens outside, no humans underground, you might eventually sinkhole the whole region but that's the price of progress, welcome to industrialization.
who reinforces the tunnels? that seems far to complex for a skelly to do since it involves multiple steps and requires spatial sense
corpses are also not infinite in supply and likely you would need significant monetary compensation to convince people you can use the bodies of their loved ones as throwaway unnatural labor
and even then the minute something goes wrong it's going to keep going more and more wrong since skeletons have no ability to self-correct
you're running into a primitive computer problem
>who reinforces the tunnels?
Nobody obviously, even when the skellies get caved in as long as they are not completely shattered, you're getting them back eventually.
>corpses are also not infinite in supply and likely you would need significant monetary compensation to convince people you can use the bodies of their loved ones as throwaway unnatural labor
That's a limiting factor to necromancy in general not just mining undead project - with the usual solutions - orphans, criminals, whole families, old burial sites with no ties anyone alive today.
>and even then the minute something goes wrong it's going to keep going more and more wrong since skeletons have no ability to self-correct
Altrenatively, instead of tunnel mining go for strip mining, normally not used for gems and ores because its super inefficient, but with trireless workforce, might as well. Solves the ease of access and supervision.
>the usual solutions - orphans, criminals, whole families, old burial sites with no ties anyone alive today.
Oh and battlefields, you know how there's hardly any skeletons left from Battle of Waterloo...
Or there’s a society that practices necromancy at a societal level. Every individual knows that when they die their body will be used to further serve the community, and they consider a great honor that they have the ability to do that. Think ‘even in death I still serve’ dreadnoughts from 40k
Some tribal cultures keep mummified ancestors (or choice parts of them) around to ward off evil. Keeping them around to plow garden and chop firewood wouldn't be too much of a stretch...
mining for gems would be something undead would be exceedingly poor at though, they'd shatter the gems because to them gems are just rocks
Yes and also they wouldn't know when their tools need to be repaired/changed or simply sharpened (which in some mines can happen 20 times per day).
I'm sure Skelly could prove valable for some tasks though - like turning a Wheel 24/24, no food or sleep needed, or replacing slaves on a boat, they never stop, never catch diseases. Players are devilishly clever when it comes to that kind of shit.
>if you go RAW then unintelligent undead only understand the concept of attack, don't attack and follow and command undead RAW doesn't let you give complex orders to unintelligent undead
I love when morons make shit up. The actual text is
> When you control a mindless being, you can communicate only basic commands, such as “come here,” “go there,” “fight,” “stand still,” and so on.
The "and so on" part clearly means this list of options is not exhaustive meaning basic commands such as "gather rocks", "carry rocks", and similar basic commands are also on the table. You'd know this if you actually read what the spell did instead of just making shit up.
Furthermore if you genuinely want to be rawtarded about it, Mining is a profession skill (per Races of the Dragon p.98) and you can take 10 on that. Now, whether taking 10 on a skill check with a DC of 10 qualifies as a "basic" command or not is debatable, but I'm willing to argue that it is especially given they are in effect only working at half the daily speed a true professional would be working at.
>B-but Profession is a t-trained only skill!
Yeah, but unfortunately for you that only affects how much income they are making on a given day and the Profession (Miner) rules allow for unskilled labor as well.
>gather rocks
they gather all rocks they can see, piling it continuously into 1 spot
>carry rocks
they carry the rocks around without dropping them
furthermore as a creature with INT: - they cannot use profession skills what so ever
remember, you're not having "untrained laborers" do this, you're not even having animals do this, they have INT: - it's the equivalent of asking something with cognitive abilities lower than a beetle (both zombie and skeleton specifically mention that their orders must be very basic, something which even vermin don't have )
remember you can only give 1 order at a time to an undead as such your overseeing mage would have to spend the entire day doing nothing but overseeing the undead laborers
but even assuming that the zombie miners, which move at half speed due to perma stagger and would only earn half pay, can actually do their jobs
your 7th level wizard can, through animate undead, create 14 silver per day through unskilled labor at half speed
but even if we say 28sp per day
the cost to hire a lv 7 wizard per day is, depending on what source you use either 1gp per level per day or level squared x10gp per day
either way, you're running at a net loss here, and that's assuming you make up for the 25gp in onyx per casting of the spell as such your undead would need to last 250 days of work just to break even, which given they only understand basic instructions is exceedingly unlikely
and before you bring up skeletons:
Skills: A skeleton has no skills.
it doesn't have untrained skills, it has NO skills as in it cannot use skills
This is why DnD magic can be way too crunchy. Instead of having a explicit spell list, have each type of magic have a list of effects, a list of modifications to those effects, and the ability to dump an arbitrary amount of magical power into them. Then the player combines these things to create ‘unique’ spells on the fly. There’s no reason why a ‘command undead’ spell shouldn’t work in a way that allows the entity to understand the intent of your command, because you are literally imprinting it into its brain. Pure RAW and strict adherence to specific mechanisms does not lead to satisfying magic. Also, most spells shouldn’t have monetary/material components, and should rely just on the casters skill, magical might, and a have enough willpower to bend reality to his will.
in the systems where you can do that, it generally has a prohibitively high point cost to the point it's their one thing they can do
yes, command undead already works that way
on intelligent undead
skeletons and zombies have less intelligence than a chicken, a good note regarding mindless undead in D&D is this
If teaching a chicken to do it is madness, skeletons can't do it
Also if we're moving away from D&D magic there's no reason what so ever why there shouldn't be other downsides to using undead
So we're getting again into the "skeletons blight the natural landscape" territory which is an exceedingly common fantasy trope
But if you want to make a setting where using undead is easy, cheap, with no downsides, and has no alternatives, you're free to do it, but be warned that creating easy conveniences like that is often detrimental to storytelling, and societies that would exist in such a place would be radically different compared to our own
after all you have just create a world where the upper class literally don't need a lower class and it's more effective for them to engage in mass murder and necromancy than to keep the lower class alive
>yes, command undead already works that way
on intelligent undead
skeletons and zombies have less intelligence than a chicken, a good note regarding mindless undead in D&D is this
This is my point. The command undead ability shouldn’t rely on any part of the undead targets ‘stats’ simply it’s ability to physically ‘do the thing’ you are magically commanding it to do a task, so it does the task. There is no reason for things to get more complicated than that.
>But if you want to make a setting where using undead is easy, cheap, with no downsides, and has no alternatives, you're free to do it, but be warned that creating easy conveniences like that is often detrimental to storytelling, and societies that would exist in such a place would be radically different compared to our own
Obviously. This kind of game would have to be one where you aren’t playing ‘average adventurers/dungeoning group’ but rather legendary heroes. Your wizard is Merlin, your fighter is Hercules, your cleric is Jesus. This is a setting where mythic legends and gods walk the earth. These would be settings that are higher than higher fantasy, setting where society doesn’t inexplicably stay in the medieval ages for hundreds of years despite having access to magic. Societies that largely don’t farm but rather conjure food out of thin air. Settings where using magic is as natural a part of your organism as using any of your limbs.
thing is, there would be no underclass in that setting, it would be just legendary figures, the endless hordes of undead feeding them and the monkey lifestock slaughtered when their skeletons are large enough to be animated
and honestly, outside of very specific types of adventures, that's not a fun setting for 99% of ttrpg's
You’re assuming everyone is evil and would be okay with that arrangement. I’m not talking about a setting where you can do literally anything with magic whenever you want, just ones where the upper bounds of magic and individual ability are greatly expanded. There’s always a underclass and middle class, because the only way this kind of setting makes sense is if the lower and middle classes are shifted upwards as the upper ones are shifted upwards. You’d be in a situation where even basic peasants know a bit of minor magic, like how in avatar normal peasant people can be benders, because it’s just an inherent ability people in that setting would have.
>You’re assuming everyone is evil and would be okay with that arrangement.
societies that use undead in such a manner in this setting would swiftly outcompete those that don't
it's not a matter of if everyone is okay with it, eventually the only people left will be those that are okay with it
You can’t make that assumption because you’re forgetting all the crazy other kinds of magic and physical abilities other races could use. The scourge in Warcraft didn’t roll over the whole word because everyone else is OP in their own unique ways. Stuff like, ‘sure the orcs don’t use infinite undead labor, but every single orc is an 11 foot tall ultra giga Chad that can punch boulders in half and jump 40 feet in the air from a standing start with no effort’
the scourge in warcraft actively corrupts and blights the land, was introduced long after other cultures were established and require living acolytes to manage resource generation, undead actively cannot be used to mine
>undead actively cannot be used to mine
That’s literally not true. There’s many examples in world of Warcraft. A society that uses undead like the scourge do in all ways, except for actively corrupting the land, would not inherently beat all the other societies who would have access to other equally busted things.
that's an intelligent undead though, using them for forced mining labor is slavery and evil, like even more so than regular slavery is evil because undead have their souls corrupted in the process
but in WC3 the only thing that can mine gold mines are acolytes
Yeah true. To clarify the undead I’m talking about would be ‘intelligent’ in all ways except for being able to use their will to decide what they want to do themselves. It’s like their undead brains would have all the abilities their living brains did, but the actual ability to make decisions is hijacked by the necromancer. Obviously it’s evil which is why the rest of the world would hate whatever group of nobles decided to do this to its peasants.
well that sort of undead wasn't really relevant to the discussion
the original line of questioning goes back to a post introducing consequences for using undead and why societies would be opposed to
then another anon responded by saying that any consequences are "DM fiat" and back and forth went where one anon was insisting using undead for labor was consequence free
your proposal is plausible and workable, but also comes with obvious downsides and reasons as to why people would be morally opposed to the use of undead (it's enslaving their loved ones in endless torment)
it's a fine idea, one which has good implications but not entirely relevant to the ongoing discussion
Oh it’s been me the entire time, I posted the ‘DnD is too crunchy’ post. I was never insisting it needed to be ‘consequence free’, within the context of the societies and moral systems in the setting, but more like ‘easy to do’ instead of consequence free. I was purely saying I dislike how limiting magic in DnD can be.
nah was referring to this post
>That's not how necromancy works in most settings and those spells that make the undead often do not have regional side effects. So your combative 'dming' is just hogwash.
Oh okay. I admit when I responded to your post it was solely to just talk about the DnD crunchiness thing, and I started my own discussion with you that had nothing to do with the things you were replying to.
no worries and it's an understandable stance to take, I often feel D&D style magic is too crunchy
undead should have more fluidity in what type of magic creates them or what they're capable of
apologies for any combativeness in that regard, your ideas definitely are good
it's always a good idea if necromancy is possible, for there to be a reason as to why a society might opt not to use it
>There’s many examples in world of Warcraft.
And those examples are?
Most of Wrath of tge Lich King when you think about. Stopping the mining and production if Saronite is a common theme in various questlines.
Anon, you don't need to lie, we all know you don't actually play the game.
>they gather all rocks they can see, piling it continuously into 1 spot
>they carry the rocks around without dropping them
Correct. This is why you have 1st level Clerics on hand just using Rebuke Undead to control the Undead. There you go. 1 Cleric to a team of 4 Zombie humans. They cast no spells, they are receiving daily wages as a trained hireling (3sp/day).
> furthermore as a creature with INT: - they cannot use profession skills what so ever
That isn't what the mindless quality does what so ever and you fricking know it.
>remember you can only give 1 order at a time to an undead as such your overseeing mage would have to spend the entire day doing nothing but overseeing the undead laborers
Yep. That is kind of the point behind an overseer position. You're there to make sure the employees do their job. Very glad you outed yourself as a no-job as well.
>A whole lotta bullshit about cost and overhead
Yeah, none of this is an issue if you're the Necromancer making them. I know thinking is hard for you and you've very likely never worked anywhere before, but you're going to need to understand that this is effectively all bundled up in the costs of actually starting and maintaining the business.
>25gp in onyx per casting of the spell as such your undead would need to last 250 days of work just to break even
Assuming we're still talking within the bounds of the 3.5e rules, there are a lot of ways to get around the 25gp per casting for Animate Dead. This cost thing is a joke you're trying to pull out of your ass.
>Skeletons has no skills.
Correct. We don't use Skeletons for a reason, but even then Skeletons can still execute skill checks because every creature in the game can execute skill checks regardless of whether or not they have an intelligence score or not.
(cont)
If you actually want to get into the nitty gritty of running a mining operation using undead as a labor force, you're going to need to realize their labor would be augmentative, rather than outright supplanting of living labor. After all, why risk mass unemployment when you can employ low wage, high risk workers that can be then converted into no wage, high risk workers?
There seems to be a bit of a fallacy, the same that comes up with any type of automation really, that it will absolutely reduce and replace workers and lead to mass unemployment when the reality is that this is far from the goal. The goal is improving profits and efficiency and I fully concede that Zombies cannot fully supplant living, thinking workers in the field, in any field for that matter. However countries and organizations that employ and enhance their workforce with Undead workers will outpace countries and organizations that cannot do the same. The simple fact of the matter is that in a free market society, business that can afford the service of a 7th level Necromancer (more accurately a 5th level Wizard / 2nd level Pale Master) will be able to make use of this technology while those that can't will simply be out-competed
Thread topic was asking for ramifications of undead labour and you're getting butthurt that people are offering up some. "That's not how it works in most settings" is pointless whining because the only setting that matters is the one that the DM is currently running.
But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and concede that it's possible you're butthurt not because you're a nogames but perhaps because you'd be the type of idiot to make a necromancer character who runs a mine without bothering to learn what the ramifications might be first- falling back to "That's not how it works!!" when it inevitably blows up in your character's face.
Necromancy blighting the lands around it is incredibly common in fantasy settings and a suitable downside for it's use
Why the frick are you bringing up "combative DMing" when undead labor is a setting piece only the DM would include in the first place. It's not combative to change the setting to his preferences and create a quest hook for the party.
All's well and good until they hit a fossil and it comes crawling out.
Or the necromancers forget to maintain the bindings on their undead and they start working the ore down there and emerge an army.
Grandpa took my job. Again.
Are you willing to front the cost to train a bunch of wizards to get strong enough to maintain the 3 or 4 skeletons raise dead will allow them to at a time to try and cut out a few living workers?
Ostensibly in whatever setting/game this is taking place in, spell effects aren’t limited to whatever it says in the list, the necromancer could raise as many as his power could allow him. Also, there’s no rules saying that the necromancer needs to actively maintain the raised being. It could be like Warcraft, where raised undead are self sustaining entities in their own right
if we go fully speculative then there might be several other downsides, such as necromancy only functioning through binding the soul of the deceased to their rotting corpse and slowly being consumed by the necromantic magic
in which case the argument against using them for manual labor is "it's fricking evil yo"
I prefer it more like how spells work in videogames, a La the mana bar. The necromancer simply gathers magical energies into his being, then channels amounts of it into a dead body to reanimate it. He can then refill his ‘mana bar’ to full and do this an arbitrary amount of times. The corpse remains animated until the ‘magic battery’ runs out and then can be animated again. Basically no different than how you would animate rock or water into an elemental, except it’s a body instead. Various magic systems or ‘classes’ should be differentiated from each other based on how the magic is accomplished, and not on the specific target or subject of that magic.
but here's the other moral problem
if the mage is animating a corpse is no different than them animating rock or water, why desecrate the dead instead of animating wooden puppets?
that's like saying the easiest way to create an android is by using a human skeleton as it's base
Perhaps the animation doesn’t allow him to change the subject’s form radically. There’s no rules saying elementals need to be humanoid in shape, have limbs, etc. So maybe animating bodies with limbs and hands is the most convenient way to get a body that can actually do the physical task of mining.
>So maybe animating bodies with limbs and hands is the most convenient way to get a body that can actually do the physical task of mining.
so craft a rough wooden puppet with hands?
But an earth elemental would be way better at mining than a skeleton
Why CAN'T a necromancer animate wood?
>tfw no birches
Because they need to be druids as well, or at least have learned from them how to properly channel magic through plant life.
>What are ramifications of a necromancer buying a mine and using undead workers to work in them?
Some cleric or paladin would destroy them and murder the necromancer while passing by.
>Would this upset miner guilds or unions?
Depends, would the undeads pay membership fees? If not, hell yes.
The simple reality of the situation is mining is dangerous, necromation of the process saves lives and increases output. Skeletons work longer, don't catch the many and sundry life ruining respiratory diseases and to be blunt in the event of an "EARTHQUAKE EARTHQUAKE EARTHQUAKE!" the bones can be picked up and put back together, instead of sent home to grieving families.
Necromancy saves lives.
The undead start undermining the city & gathering more undead from the cemetary to their cause
in 3.pf the limit is 4x your caster level in hit dice, meaning a single noob level 7 (minimum to cast animate dead as a wizard) necromancer can have up to 28 shitty miner skeletons
but then you consider that he needs 25 gp onyxes per skeleton
the question- is the miner going to work for 150+ days? the skeleton is cheaper then, but is much less replaceable considering the cost
and if you're not the necromancer casting the spell then it's 280 gp minimum per casting of the spell
Actually there's Lesser Animate Dead spell that's 3rd level spell for wizards and 2nd level for clerics, so 5th and 3rd level casters. You of course can only create single non-variant skeleton or zombie with each casting, but with enough time you can have 20 or 12 skeletons. I've actually thought about making an adventure where it turns out some turnip farmer got his hands on a wand containing it and accidentally caused a zombie uprising.
animate dead only lets you create zombies or skeletons and only lets you give them the following orders: attack or follow
they're useless as miners, even if you set them to "attack" the rock then that's all they'll do, they won't haul back your ore
Pretty sure at least in 3.x you could give slightly more complicated orders but they might need to be more directly overseen.
yeah, command undead is another spell (a necromancer class feature in pathfinder, too)
That was how most of the Erudite Heretic city of Paineel was built.
>Would this upset miner guilds or unions?
Miners and their owners got upset over normal automation. This is exactly the same except the rotting carcass of their possible relatives are being used to do it. If you ever have to ask
>Would X upset Y?
The answer is always unequivocally yes.
the lands get blighted in an ever increasing radius, eventually leaking into the groundwater poisoning the towns downstream
> What are ramifications of a necromancer buying a mine and using undead workers to work in them?
- If the undead are hard to control and command in the setting, it's a dumb idea and flops completely, and whatever resources and time the necromancer spends is wasted.
- If the undead can be used efficiently, the mine is very successful and this attracts attention of the local anti-necromancer faction. That faction can hire the party to investigate, or wage a straight up war with the necromancer. Or if the mine brings a lot of money to the otherwise desperate region, and the necromancer is willing to be civil - the necromancer is tolerated, which sets up interesting values-vs-money political tension.
- There is a lich tomb under the mine. The necromancer is too incompetent to detect that. While the necromancer thinks the undead are doing his bidding, in reality they have been taken over by the lich and are digging to free him. When they succeed, they turn on the necromancer.
>My father worked the minds 'till the day it took his life.
>Stole him from his only son, and it stole him from his wife.
I get why people can be a little tired of "what if good necromancer?" prompts, but it can be a useful way to explore questions surrounding industrialization and automation without having to too heavily impact a setting's technology level.
I can't believe that
>And with these hands that will not bleed
>My father's battle will be won
With his own skeletal hands.
For real though, necromantic industrilization doesn't make sense unless corpses are the most common resource you have. If you're in a subterranean environment where beasts of burden are rare, for example, then undead will be relatively sure-footed and tireless compared to imported surface animals.
>unless corpses are the most common resource you have
They're one of the few truly renewable resources we have.
Such operation would probably still need some living workers, undead would be fine for tirelessly cutting through stone, but unable to tell apart gems and ores from the chaff.
Issue I might see is that without constant magical reinforcement and such, the shock of striking the rock with pickaxes and such could eventually cause unhealing fractures in the bones leading to eventual breakage. So in the end, even the undead cannot be made to work forever against the forces of entropy.
>die
>still have to go in
>Would this upset miner guilds or unions?
is it in the clause?
I don't see the problem: if a necromancer pays you so that they gain your body after you die, it seems reasonable that they can use the body as they wish afterwards. However, the guilds and unions would likely be upset for the undeads taking their jobs.
It would upset everybody
Have you been playing/watching someone play Graveyard Keeper, by change?
I played like 1 hour of it
>isekai'd basedbeard protagonist
>wisecracking Morte knockoff
>commie donkey
three strikes and I refund
I really enjoyed the game and I think its worth the price of admission.
The writing is super cringe and the donkey is just an early on portion of the rot that infects the whole story. Its super preaching and likes to think its tongue in cheek, but really its just typical commie garbage.
The root game is very fun though. I liked the mechanics of getting the zombies and making my graveyard better. Its a shame the expansions were so bare bones, they just added on another area and mechanic rather than ever building on the base game.
Id say its worth the base game, would actively discourage people from getting the expansions.
What if the necromancer dies or is killed by disgruntled mine workers? Do the skeletons just keep minlessly digging? What if this happened thousands of years ago, will the underground be honeycombed by millions of miles of tunnels and mined treasure stockpiles?
Depends on how powerful the necromancer was, but I would say at the very least it would go on for a couple of years but then the skeletons would be too broken down by regular wear and tear to continue mining shit
The cost of raising the dead and imbuing them with the specialist knowledge of mining far outstrips the wages paid to human miners. You don't have to create humans. There will always be more.
In D&D? Not much. It's just not really that profitable without the country backing.
You need to be a level 5 cleric or level 7 wizard and could control 20 to 28 HD of undead. 5 and especially 7 level npcs don't just fall down from trees, and most of them won't be interested in sitting around a mine and micromanaging their zombies.
Now if country is backing it and turning it into an industry, probably with rituals or magical items to churn out the undead it could work. This way you just need some people who would be trained to control the dead and you don't need more than level 1-2 for that.
Though it won't be much more effective than miners as zombies and skeletons don't have any skills so they would suck at mining. They would roll something like d20+0-1 vs miners with d20+7-8. They would still win in productivity due to working around 3 times as much as humans but would have a lot of accidents during mining. Not critical but you'll need a proper supply running for the new undead to replace those crushed by rocks.
Just be a head honcho like Szass Tam. See how many would like to start shit.
What are some other places where undead labor might be particularly useful in a pre-industrial fantasy setting? I’d imagine that not many people would want to eat food harvested by an undead farmer, unless they’re completely skeletal, so that’s probably out, but guarding dangerous prisoners might work, since they can’t be bribed, and living guards don’t have to worry about being killed in a jailbreak.
>heavy repetitive labor - lumberjacking, quarrying, transportation of goods, dockyard work, cloth washing, possibly cloth-making (spinning and weaving)
>dangerous labor - anything to do with fire and chemicals - charcoal making, limestone processing, cloth dying, leatherworking, possibly smithing and smelting (with some supervision)
Plus various works around water, on cliffsides, in bogs, in heights, in harsh weather, etc.
Iunno if digging a hole, throwing wood into it, starting a fire and covering it, is particularly dangerous.
Guess it depends on the size of the hole, fire and covering.
Undead minors? Sign me up.
dunno if this point has been made but mining is a profession and usually requires a lot of expertise and knowledge, it's not something undead could do the entirety of. Sure they could move cartloads etc but they couldn't even excavate mineral veins and estimate grades of ores.
>mining is a profession and usually requires a lot of expertise and knowledge
From the overseers yes, but not from the slaves.
on an open cast mine that might be possible, for deep rock mining thats not possible and every miner needs a high degree of technical competence and expertise. There's a reason why miners were imported in their thousands during gold and oil rushes, such as all the Cornish tin miners who went to the US to mine for gold. It isn't something just anyone can do.
Having skilled miners helps primarily with two things
a) less frequent cave-ins, and overall better survival rate, because they know how to build supports, provide ventilation, and various other tricks to secure their own survival
b) more efficient ore/gem extraction because they know how to follow a vein and can read clues in structure of the stone
Both of which are very useful, but both of which can be largely compensated for by just throwing more skeletons on the job, who don't care about breathing, eating, light, crowding, isolation, and only stop for cave-ins that fall directly on top of them.
If necromancers can make superior laborers out of corpses with no drawbacks whatsoever then why do they have to be corpses? Why can't the necromancer just animate the mine itself so it shits out all the gems and gold?
This is why elementalists/shamans would be the best miners, they could simply convince the earth to bring the minerals to the surface by itself. Maybe there’s a difference between ‘low’ and ‘high’ necromancy, where low necromancy is simply animating the physical body into a meat puppet no different from other summoning/command magics. There isn’t necessarily a stigma against it, but no one really does it because there’s much better options available for that. High necromancy would involve forcing the subjects soul back into the dead body, which would allow you to utilize their skills, knowledge, etc and for the animated being to be more independent albeit still bound to your will, and this the classic necromancy that everyone hates because you’re literally ripping someone out of the afterlife to be your slave. Or, to put a different spin on it, if reincarnation is the way things work in this world then you’d be killing their new incarnation by ripping the soul out of it to put in the old body.
What I've learned from this thread is that using necromancy for mining is for evil morons, and the sensible miners would instead hire a geomancer to locate the minerals and make the tunnels safer.
Aussie here mining was actually high skilled labour
With the amount of accidents I’ve read about in historical mines if you put mindless undead to work in it it will be closed in lees than a week
Undead don't have the intellect to recognize ore or gems. They'd be good for rock quarries and creating the basic layout of a mine, but anything more complex than that requires a living humanoid who can think. Unless there were some kind of magic item that functioned as a dual headlamp and scrying source, so you could have a supervisor watching a live feed of the undead mining for whenever they found gold veins or whatever then send in the real miners.
You could probably mine an underground city as well, but dwarves typically hate undead and would autistically nitpick the lack of craftsmanship and go back over the stonework themselves. So probably limited to necromancers/liches creating their lairs.
Most societies generally frown upon undead as well. I could see some Thayan necromancer running a business building basements with undead. Or moats!
There's also the possibility of digging tunnels straight through a mountain for commerce and faster trade routes, or for surprise invasions. You could make artificial ravines. Divert rivers.
why would undead be tireless?
skeletons are bones but without the ability of living bone to heal micro-fractures
wouldn't the constant force of pickaxe on stone without being able to heal micro-fractures or without flesh to dampen the impact quickly destroy their bare bones?
It's like metal fatigue but sped up 2000 times
Men would be far quicker and better miners. Stronger and smarter workers.
It would be far cheaper just paying laborers rather than spending years learning necromancy, sourcing corpses, and still having to source all the mining equipment and knowledge anyway. Far easier just to hire qualified people who would get the job done faster and more thoroughly, and aren't highly specalised magic users.
Yeah I saw that Youtube video in my recommendations too.
What video?
The one this entire thread is about.
You probably need someone to give them clear directions, but I have an idea:
Use convicts sentenced to hard labor! Nobody gives a shit even if they die in a cave in, when they die you can use their corpses to create more undead, and even if necromancy corrupts the soul of the dead they were going to hell or something anyway, so who cares? Also, if they try to rebel you can just command the undeads to eat them.
Mindless undead labor ideas basically always fall apart once you do any research at all into risks and skills required to perform any sort of job they'd be useful with. Even "unskilled labor" needs a certain level of active decision-making and ability to adapt when things go awry. Even disregarding the distasteful aspects, setting the whole thing up would be a waste of time unless you could program the undead to work with the precision of robots (at which point why are you not just using animated puppets/golems).
Your players won't care, why should you?
They don't give a shit about undead miners, any more than how, I dunno, fricking orcs live their economically unviable lifestyles
>miner guilds or unions
mines are where you send criminals to die.
there weren't any fricking miners guilds in medieval times.
What was there then?
Rich people profiting from poor bastards who quickly died from the conditions.
Depending on where in the world he is, he is swiftly executed by the worshipers of the Pantheon for being a servant of the vampire lord. Or, if he's in the magocracy, he's seen as a fricking weirdo who's poisoning the land with his magic for less cost/benefit than just enslaving some earth elementals or making some golems with mage overseers. Probably has to have constant inspections and cleansing of the negative energy as well, and is shunned in wider society.
>What are ramifications of a necromancer buying a mine and using undead workers to work in them?
Either the mine wouldn't be as profitable as hiring employees, in which case there would be very few ramifications if any...
Or it would be more profitable than hiring employees. If this model proved to be more profitable, such a mine would encourage every other business to duplicate their model. Living workers would be driven to unsustainable workplace practices in order to compete with undead-powered workplaces enough that they could find and retain gainful employment. Necromancy would become one of the (if not THE) most profitable skill, meaning that the vast majority of the population would be given a choice between hope for a brighter future by paying for ever-increasingly expensive necromancy education or they could just focus on scraping by one day at a time and potentially save up enough money to cover the medical expenses they'd accrue from working themselves to the bone (haha.) in order to compete with the undead workplaces.
Indiscriminate murder would become profitable. People wouldn't even need to transport the corpses. They could just kill people and try to get away with it, then the businesses who paid for the murders under the table would be able to avoid scrutiny by purchasing the corpses through legal means once they've been processed by law enforcement. Even law enforcement could profit off of this, since the coroner and broader law enforcement apparatus are the ones who would be incentivized to sell the corpses to businesses, which means law enforcement would also be disincentivized from stopping murders or catching murderers. This would inevitable produce a death industrial complex that is only sustainable for the business owners and government officials who directly profit off of it (and even then, the profitability would have a time-limit, seeing as how society would crumble ).
The way I play it, necromancy (more generally communicating with the dead, but specifically raising the undead) utilizes a fundamentally evil force to do so.
It's not a situation of the act of necromancy being morally wrong--you can fall on the side of that however you'd like--it's that it is incredibly dangerous, because Necromancy is a conscious, sentient thing and it absolutely hates you, me, and everything else that exists, and its only relief from the constant anguish of existence is using whatever opportunities it can to inflict pain. It speaks all languages, it knows everything every undead knows, and thus they all know everything too. When undead fight each other it's a puppet show.
You can raise the dead and try to use them for something productive--and they will do it, for as long as The Dark One thinks it will eventually get an opportunity to cause some sort of harm, to hurt someone, to kill someone. It will change the directives of the undead in microscopic ways, plan little failures, just to accelerate the entropy of the project. Maybe it never betrays you, because by chance you always cause more harm than good--but probably not. Probably one day it saves your skin, and just never gives it back.
When you use necromancy, you are consciously collaborating with a being far, far more intelligent and powerful than you on a long project to bring about the annihilation of all life, and that is why people generally think it's a bad thing.
You'd potentially need more intelligent undead than regular zombies to do the work or at least manage the lower tier undead since I bet a regular zombie lacks the awareness not to crush itself with a rock.
Beyond that you'd think safety regulations being negligible would save money but you'd have different concerns instead like shoddy workmanship of undead creating unsafe tunnels and the undead themselves being unfit to move in certain conditions (zombies shambling being unable to scale walkways not up to code). You'd also have to replace or maintain your workforce as if they were equipment on top of this being an unethical work practice.
Basically the necromancer would be undertaking all the risk and overhead for something just as easily mistaken/intentionally misunderstood to be a generic evil wizard dungeon.
To effectively pull this off the necromancer would need to introduce this into a culture that's amenable or helpless and have production outweigh ethical disagreements.
TL;DR yes.
Using this as an excuse to post some Hollowman art from the defunk Fable Fortune game. I think they look neat and it's sad that all this art is lost to the void.
Fable undead/hollowmen annoy me because they were all the fricking game threw at you sometimes.
Yeah I can get that, especially in the path to the prison in Fable 1 and the mournwood in 3. Spots in 2 as well, they really just loved throwing hordes of them at you. And they weren't as interesting as the art here shows them to be. Just kinda flail at you with one or two attacks.
>dey tuk urr juuuuuuuuurrrrrbbbbbzzzzz!
I mean, probably?
>Undead miners
>What are ramifications of a necromancer buying a mine and using undead workers to work in them?
>Would this upset miner guilds or unions?
Okay, bad news.
Turns out sending in undead miners was a REAL BAD IDEA. We bought the mine on the cheap because it caved in decades ago, right? Well, turns out the mine is still haunted by the spirits of those miners.
And now the spirits of those miners have taken over and possessed the undead skeletal bodies we sent in. I swear to the Nine Hells Below, I tried telling everyone they've been acting weird for the past few weeks, this is why.
And now we come to our problem.
The undead miners have formed a union.
They're demanding pay and benefits, or they'll refuse to work. Or worse, they'll sell their work to somebody else.
I tried killing them all again and sending in different skeletons to replace them, but now they're possessed as well, the original skeletons formed new bone bodies from stone and were possessed by other spirits. It just got WORSE.
I tried sending in a negotiator to try and talk our way out of this, but sending in an intelligent undead was a bad idea. He had no idea what a union was, they talked for ours. I had to banish this lieutenant to the mines after he started talking to the other intelligent undead in my lair. I have no idea how far the problem has spread. This is a nightmare.
I tried talking to my master, the great Necromancer who taught me everything I know, when I realized that I was never paid for all the working hours I did for him! THEY'RE GETTING TO ME!
Assuming they buy the mine morally and legally, it would assume the necromancer isn't inherently evil as they would otherwise just take over a mine, kill the miners, and raise them.
The only issue I might find is from where are the corpses being procured? Are they making contracts with people that their corpse will work for so many years? It does raise interesting questions though. I'm not sure if I'd want my corpse working in a factory for 50 years for some defined sum, even if I'll be physically dead.