Types of Undead and How they Work - [blog100] pt. 7, q. 23

This post is part of a series where I put forth a challenge for bloggers to answer all 100 questions on this table by d4 Caltrops. This week I rolled a 23.

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23. How are Skeletons Made? Ghouls? Why haven't Wraiths/Vampires taken over?

Skeletons are not just one thing. There are a variety of different undead which look like a skeleton and play the xylophone like a skeleton. Some of these are no more than a pile of bones which has been animated to look like a humanoid again. Some are the remains of a corpse with a soul still attached - either through usual ghostly means or being bound by a wizard. This variety may even be sentient or able to speak (despite the lack of requisite mouthflaps). Some are simply summoned out of the earth and nobody knows where they came from or who they were. And finally, some skeletons simply exist because of the unexplainable and magickal way the mythic underworld works. Skeletons are simply a fact of life (or death).

A variant of skeleton which does have a specific method of creation is Fleshbones, which happens when a wizard gets too big for his britches and uses spells in ways they weren't intended. It arguably isn't a skeleton?

Ghouls are cursed while they are still alive. The curse makes them unnaturally resistant to death, and they become ghouls when they are injured enough that a normal man should be killed (or simply by age). Death refusing to arrive when it should drives the curse-bearer insane. They lose most of their mental faculties, sometimes to the point of no longer feeling pain or fear. They haven't taken over because of two factors: they don't wander much and they eat most of their kills, so the curse doesn't spread far. They are ravenously hungry and will eat to the point of physically distending themselves to injury. They don't care, they are basically dead anyway.

The aforementioned ghoul-by-old-age is the most common cause of ghoul plagues - a curse-bearer surviving to insanity and then mauling their neighbours and loved ones is a sinister threat from within that is hard to predict or prevent. Towns have fallen and districts have been quarantined to ghoul plagues.

My world's vampires are based on Into the Wyrd and Wild's Vampylfs and Archade's DCC Vampires. In short, vampirism is a bastardization of a curse spread by an immortal bat-like beast, and each strain of the curse comes with unique advantages and disadvantages. A logical conclusion of this is that different vampire clans are not compatible with each other, so there is competition between them. This drives them into hiding and limits the population, as other vampire clans would surely collaborate to drive them out if one power become too great a threat. The larger a clan becomes, the harder it is to hide their secrets, including their weaknesses. In extreme cases vampire clans might rat out larger vampire clans to humanity, and they cannot win that fight on all fronts - this is the vampire's equivalent of the nuclear option.

Wraiths haven't been touched upon in my games yet, but I imagine them as spirits of decay. Decay is something with which the universe is in eternal struggle. Wraiths are a ghost that is an agent of chaos, looking to drag you down with it. One might think of them as the ghouls of the Ethereal world, with their soul damaged and unable to pass over.

Undeath is a complicated thing. I wrote a little about ghosts in a previous part of this series: What happens when you die?

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This week, Scrolls from the Toaster talked about snacks at the table and ended up with a very different, more meaningful post than my own on that topic.