What are the downsides of being undead assuming you retain your sentience?
What are the downsides of being undead assuming you retain your sentience?
Community-driven video game blog & discussion
Community-driven video game blog & discussion
What are the downsides of being undead assuming you retain your sentience?
There are various downsides with every undead depending on the setting. Zombies still continue to rot, vampires can’t be in the sun, some ghosts can leave their hauntings and certain versions of liches need souls to feed their phylactery. While it seems like a good deal at times other versions basically have shitty conditions
What are the downsides for death knights?
You betrayed something of immense value to you.
...Was Darth Vader a death knight?
I feel onions as fuck saying that.
>high level enforcer minion of the big bad wizard that has a tragic backstory
He fills the role.
is this a prerequisite? can't you just be a normal knight who died, got ressurected, and is generally ok with the process and has no real negativity towards it?
Sure, you could strip out the tragedy, just like you could let vampires walk in the sun and not drink blood or werewolves can just control themselves and change whenever they like and not be subject to a lose of control during the full moon or take extra harm from silver.
>just like you could let vampires walk in the sun and not drink blood or werewolves can just control themselves and change whenever they like and not be subject to a lose of control during the full moon
WoD it is.
I can't speak to Vampire because it's not my cuppa but I'm 86.74% sure it's not true for them and while Werewolves can change largely whenever they like in WoD silver still causes them extra harm and while they don't suffer a complete loss of control during the full moon Luna is still magic roofies for the hippy koombyah captain planet yiff brigade.
>just like you could let vampires walk in the sun
Vampires dying to exposure to sunlight is a movie invention that's barely a century old, the original famous vampires before the Nosferatu movie could move around in sunlight with little to no difficulty. Lord Ruthven and Varney could move in sunlight with no drawbacks, while Dracula and Carmilla were weakened in sunlight but not outright destroyed. Even TTRPGs had daywalking vampires (vampire elves used to be able to walk in sunlight but died in moonlight) and still do in settings like Innistrad or Ixalan. Even in D&D, older vampires could move minutes or hours in sunlight and the millennia old ones straight up became immune to it.
I feel you've missed the forest for the trees here. The point is that, sure, you can remove the downsides that are supposed to make being a death knight a cursed existence that no one in their right mind should ever want to have, but then, 1) why wouldn't everyone want to do it; and 2) how is what you've become really a death knight anymore?
Thank you, anon. You get it. You are pic related.
A vampire's main weakness and curse is their bloodlust, some go near feral when exposed to blood and they never stop hungering for it, sunlight weakness isn't a universal trait for vampires but usually need for blood is (or at least a strong preference for it or something similar like lifeforce).
OKAY FUCKWAD THEN AMEND WHAT I SAID IN YOUR HEAD TO BE THAT. DOES THAT SATISFY YOUR PEDANTIC MICROPEEN?!
>why wouldn't everyone want to do it
This is what I'm struggling with, but also the inverse: The downsides to undeath needs to be significant enough that everyone wouldn't want to pursue it, but not so severe that no sensible person would possibly want to.
I guess the negatives are easier to convey in a role playing narrative but mechanically undead are overpowered without imposing some lazy magical mcguffin on them.
I think the thing with deathknights and dark paladins is either you have to betray something that was of immense value you to you, or you have to have been in such an awful position before that you never had a single ounce of hope or normalcy in the first place. It's not like deathknights just go down to the career assignment office and check "Badguy Warrior" and then instantly become that. They have a whole lifetime of being downtrodden and getting the shit kicked out of them behind them. The corruption is what makes them interesting.
That just sounds like an undead who happens to be a knight, rather than some Death Knight category of its own.
It is intuitive for me that for death knight to be a thing, regular knighthood should already have a magical quality. So that it can be corrupted.
Every full moon, you are filled by an irresistible compulsion to sing about the irredeemable sin you had committed which led you down the path of becoming a death knight.
>not forming a monthly death knight stage show
NGMI
You sparkle at night and might show up in nivel meant for horny overweight teenagers.
I have never seen it explicitly stated, but they can’t take their armor, ever.
No matter how much you like war it's going to get old eventually, and you can't die once it does.
>death knights
Death knights aren't mythological creatures, they're edgy DnDisms for gaywads.
So there are no downsides to being a funny boneman?
All the bones but no boner
You have no nerves, and are basically living on vibes rather than anything tangible and can’t actually enjoy life
>vibes
Sounds bussin' for real senpai no cap.
There was a game I can't remember where all undead suffer in some way and skellemen suffered maybe the worse fate because they didn't have flesh or skin all they ever felt was the constant numbing cold of their exposed bones that never relented no matter what they did.
Deadbolt.
Just turn your ribcage into a furnace my dude.
>vampires can't be in the sun
where does it say that in the folklore? 🙂
what about in a sci fi setting where the vampires and zombies are piloting mechs
can someone give me some perspective on this my undead mecha army faction is becoming a mary sue with a long list of immunities and strengths and special abilities but almost nothing negative
Loss of memories/emotions/selfhood, the condition is painful or numbing, the people who make you undead are assholes, sunlight kills you, the living want to kill you, blessed weapons/a certain metal/special radiation/fire completely fucks your shit up... it's not hard, anon.
For too long I've been parched of thirst and unable to quench it. Too long I've been starving to death and haven't died. I feel nothing. Not the wind on my face nor the spray of the sea. Nor the warmth of a woman's flesh. You best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner... you're in one!
My first thought as well
Your past. Your future. Your very light. None will have meaning, and you won't even care. By then, you'll be something other than human. A thing that feeds on souls.
stinky
Usually you loose your sapience.
It probably feels grotesque.
Is it worse to feel grotesques of feel nothing at all?
The smell.
Most forms of undead that still retain their ego suffer from an unlife cursed to either slowly but constantly break down as flesh turns to rot, feed on the living in some manner, trapped in some way (earthbound spirits for example), or doomed to descend to madness as their mind and soul break down from their inhuman existence.
The itchiness
depends on the setting
Depends on the setting.
By generic fantasy it would be some form of "horror hunger".
Some can be actual hunger/desire to eat, others less so:
Zombie - eat brains or lose their sentience
Ghoul - eat flesh or die
Skelly - i like the norse and slavic thing of bonermen still having the need to perform tasks they had as responsibilities in life or new ones given (weakest of downsides to regular individuals, but least "alive" and probably worst for those with high ambitions)
Banshee - draining the beauty and will of others as per og
Vampires - blood to not be dried husks that cant move, tons of other downsides but upsides for each as per og
Death Knight - tortured by the urge to act on the very things that doomed them to unlife, yet get to feel pain and only pain if not acted upon, aka edge incarnate easily twisted to a cool show of character
Lich - no weakness beyond immortality itself making them lose themselves and what drove them to undeath in the first place (no, the D&D 4e+ and paizo thing of having to eat souls is shit for weak failed liches at best). Also Jesus = Cleric Lich.
>no, the D&D 4e+ and paizo thing of having to eat souls is shit for weak failed liches at best
It existed in AD&D, and Lords of Darkness (1e) mentions liches have to sacrifice a fresh corpse near its phylactery every month. Lich fags got uppity in 3e, they like many other undead, sacrifice the vitality of the living to extend their undead existence.
You feel the fundamental wrongness of being in an animated body that is dead.
In Destiny 2 when they were creating the Exos (human minds in robot bodies) the early versions went insane and killed themselves because their minds couldn't process any stimuli to tell them that they are alive.
I imagine the feeling would be similar in your boring bog standard sapient magic zombie unless it's the consequence free sort of lich that is typically propogated.
i once was in hospital for a oesophagus procedure and part of the treatment was they numbed the inside of my throat and mouth
i had never realised before but you can tell you are breathing as you feel the air in your throat, you never notice it until its gone
as soon as they sprayed the anasthetic it felt like i couldnt breathe and i remeber gasping and asking for help, the doctors and nurses just held me down and got on with the procedure, it was quite traumatic
so you are entirely correct that it would feel wrong and terrible
This made me think of part of the journal
>I have had the uncanny experience of holding a long, rational conversation with an uploaded woman, only to discover she was unconscious the entire time, and in fact showed brain activity similar to deep asphyxia! The languid, ambiguous phrases that I found so intriguing were the result of a brain that had lost its neocortex.
>She was dead.
The never ending rage and hatred you feel for the living? Just look at those lazy fuckers, flaunting their smooth skin, circulatory systems and nerve endings, spending all their time eating, drinking and laying around like fat slugs in the sun. They don't even know they are born., so kill the lot of them, I say. The sooner they are dead or unliving like the rest uf us the sooner they will realise how lucky they were.
>Not being a casterchad who can just polymorph himself into a living creature whenever he wants
Goodmorning I hate D&D
watch from 3.20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqHebMWUJp8
Undead should have a specific hunger for life because that's what makes them remember or 'feel' again, hunting any living being but only getting the rush from the same creature they were when alive. Life junkies. They can also resurrect with enough kills (piecemeal hunting like brains for brainless zombies) but the experience can't be forgotten and undead encounters will target them first out of envy.
Kind of like Nonmen.
>What are the downsides of being undead assuming you retain your sentience?
Imagine the smell....
Depends on the setting.
>loss of taste
I think this one would be a big one. In order of the stick he lost the ability to taste coffee
if you are marisha ray in your husband's campaign, literally nothing
>literal who's Twitter screencap
Go back.
You have all of the same urges and compulsions to partake in sensations of the flesh, but lack the ability. After a few years of being undead, you'll be *nostalgic* for the sensation of being able to take a shit, you'll miss being able to eat and taste food, you'll miss sleep so much you could cry, except you don't have the ability to do that either.
This is why so many undead appear to be mindless. They didn't start that way, being undead simply drove them insane.
Is that why sane liches tend to be extremely autistic? They already have sensory issues and living was a ceaseless hell for them so they can adjust easier.
Forget the existential dread, most undead are slaves, raised to serve some purpose to their summoner. You get the double shit stick by virtue of being dead and a thrall to some wizard.
I like how dark souls does it, the constant unfeeling of unlike will eventually lead you to lose yourself until you are a hollow shell. You can only stave it off by finding some purpose and working at that as long as you can until the light finally fades.
Stinky and persecuted
Duane from Unsounded feels like he's constantly suffocating, has an endless hunger and is falling apart so he's had to keep himself together with wires and a clever contraption involving bellows as lungs and a moistened artificial tongue to talk. His eyes are magical prosthetics and during the night he turns into a wild beast as his soul departs his body and it gets puppeted by random mnemonic ghosts.
At least he has perfect recall since he does his thinking out of his soul but that's not much of a bonus when you have a bunch of traumatic memories waiting to ambush you.
Here he is replacing his leg with one that his nocturnal self procured for him (Note the braces)
based Unsounded poster
0/0 resurrection, would not recommend
also, bugs
This. Imagine you're not a mage and can't just spell out the bugs that flock to a rotting body naturally.
You can't enjoy coffee anymore.
>be lich
>cast imprisonment on philactery
>???
>profit
Obsession. You cling to what remains, completely unable to have anything new - like the colour on a painting or the striking pattern of a new banner, all fades with time.
The light gradually fades so imperceptibly yet so profoundly - you go from securing yourself to the past to clutching so hard at the scraps that your knuckles bleed, presuming you're even capable of that anymore. Your descendants die and their descendants are unrecognisable as having anything to do with you. The culture and ideals you loved have been replaced by something you can't comprehend. All that is left is the memory of what you had, easily distorted by your own perceptions of the past.
You're made a caricature of yourself - a jester in your own court, the greatest joke being how incapable you are of realising it. Undeath is a cruel joke, clad in the mortal's gilded vision of eternity.
poor boomers
Hatred.
The Dead hate the Living, for the joys of life are denied to them. The Living hate the Dead, for that is their inevitable destiny.
Now imagine being stuck in between those two states, so close to death but unable to experience release, so close to life but unable to experience it's pleasures. That is what it is to be undead.
your dick falls off
Being declared legally dead and your kids waltzing off with all your possessions.
you also cant earn any income
cant get healthcare
cant get a passport
pp no get hard
Destroying the land around you.
Undead do still require energy for motive power. They can even still get it, to a degree, by normal ingestion. They just also get it by draining it for their surroundings.
Given enough time, undead will turn anything into a desert. Everything crumbling to dust under their hungry void. Then, if there isn't enough local energy to sustain them, they go dormant till conditions change.
Extra fun are the "sentient" undead. The Soul is not something actually accessable, so it always leaves. Psudo-sentience is managed by building a simulacrum of the individuals mind. Accuracy is mainly based on the crafters skill... Which you then put into a thing of pure entropy. Some designs have managed to protect the mind for a time, but any crack in the protection and the entropy will start degrading the delicate circuitry. Leading to mental decay and eventually mindless hunger.
Mind, all this is not obvious. Necromancers thinking to do good exist. They are just terribly mistaken. The undead industrial revolution usually ends with a new stretch of desert and crumbling, demon haunted ruins.
Note, vampires aren't undead. They are a separate, and honestly more blasphemous thing. They refuse to gracefully die as old age degrades their body. Age degrades the souls efficiency at absorbing ingested energy sources. You can either slowly wither, or keep eating more and more. Eventually requiring higher concentration food. Blood/flesh having very high energy concentrations, with little need to be broken down. Long term this isn't even a solution. Eventually dragon sickness sets in, and the vampires endlessly growing form will need to start consuming precious metals for the power. A dragon is a walking ecological disaster, that strips the land like a locust.
some suggestions, depending on the setting of course.
>Your soul already left your body so your undead form isn't really you, it's a flesh amalgam that thinks it's you (but slowly going crazy) because it has your rotting brain and (for now) your memories.
>Being undead puts a red flag on your soul that means you will inevitably go to hell
>The only thing you can feel is constant discomfort like a young adult male outside of active deployment.
I'm fond off:
>Your soul is bound to your remains even after your remains have been destroyed.
>You will be a rotting patch of compost and still feel it, but unable to move or communicate.
Depends on the setting, but a fairly common constant is that you lose the vital spark that makes life enjoyable and fill that void with something twisted and wrong.
In your setting, or at least a setting that you like, what is the form of intelligence-retaining undeath with the fewest/least troublesome downsides compared to the upsides? And is there any way to counter or mitigate any of these downsides, like a way to protect vampires from the sun, etc.?
You are undead
Turn Undead works on you.
Healing harms you.
Rest depends on circumstances.
I like the idea that even the cleanest looking undead make the living uneasy on a deep, subconscious level. Also this
You need to eat souls. Animal souls will do, but some go for human ones...
Time has passed since you were truly alive. Imagine, maybe, people speak your language with silly accents, or with bizarre jargon, or talk in the words of your hated rivals and get mad when you tell them to use the Kings' Proper Elvish. Imagine music you once adored is now antiquated at best, completely missing from taverns or forgotten entirely at worst. Imagine being from a noble or royal line, only to come back and realize one of your branch families or some upstart servant-spawn now sits the throne. Or worse, imagine nobody even cares about lineage or The Divine Right of Rulers anymore.
Imagine losing all of your Privilege, and some half-assed peasant in ill-fitting, off-the-rack leather armor calling your garden gnomeelry "out-of-season".
THE ABSOLUTE GALL OF IT.
Don't want to burst into flames when i go to my brother's wedding
Well, you don't often have anyone to talk to, since the living want to kill you again and non-sapient undead are terrible conversationalists.
It interferes with casting certain types of magic. Not to mention having those kinds of magic cast 'on' oneself. Like healing.