... A mass of bones that break & splinter under your weight, sparing your own bones the harshness of a sudden stop on the hard stone floor of what most certainly was once a temple, the vast idol looming at the other end of the room...

Dead things make the world go round.  Killing things makes everything that lives live.  Not everything maybe but all the things that move & scamper.  There’s really so much death inhabiting our built world that it’s vaguely invisible whenever it’s not really, really overt and arresting – like when you find a dead bird tossed from its nest, or a dog or deer laying by the side of the road. 

Geez man?  Death?  Are you sure this is what you want to start on?

My friends – Yes.

Here’s the other start I had for this – a few years back I went to a salon on the topic of death.  For whatever reason a lot of religious type people showed up to talk about their interpretations of the afterworld.  I…  This didn’t do much for me.  I felt these weren’t people coming to speak on the matter of death but on something else that really, at its heart, is about attempting to make death invisible and to avoid confronting it and its presence all around us.  I thought more butchers and morticians should have been on hand to talk about it, honestly. 

So Death.  For sure you’re going there?  You’re driving off a cliff and straight toward death?

No.  My friends – this is prelude!  Today we talk about Un-Death.

Pre-history?  Who knows what stories We All Told Together about these things.  I’m fairly confident that the ghost story vastly predates written language and agriculture.  Who’s to say what those stories were?  What they mean to the people hearing & telling them. 

For my money the earliest story about a creature we could consider Un-Dead – that is, dead but still with the qualities that signify life – is the story of Osiris.  Resurrected once only to be killed again – buried and revivified only to be cut to pieces and then mostly reconstituted.  He’d been dead and close to dead so much that he was a corn-god no more, but rather the god-in-residence of the underworld.  Some scholars have seen Osiris’ story as a prelude or ur-variant of the resurrected god-redeemer once so prevalent & finally distilled in the form of Christ. 

It’s also the origin myth concerning Mummies.  As to why they matter & why you’d even do mummification.  It’s because you’ll need all your parts in the next world of death, right?  You’ll need those parts & some amount of magic to make those parts work again. 

Ancient people were just as reliant on death as we are.  Even if they were closer to it as agriculturalists. 

Oh!  I hear you protesting – there’s not that much death around us.  So I’ll come at this with a little more detail, a little persuasion.  I’m writing this now in my kitchen at my wooden table that’s made from sacrificed plants – sitting on a wooden chair with cotton coverings – more sacrificed plants.  Drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette – yet more dead plants!  The floor is made of vinyl & the computer is made of plastic – dead microorganisms, dinosaurs & trilobites.  I’m in my kitchen where there’s food – the kind carnivores like – I got meats, dead pigs & cows and on my shelf vitamins – more dead animals & plants. 

Morbid right?  And murderous and wow, wow – life is a hungry mouth eating other life forever and ever isn’t it?  Maybe.  Maybe so.

So we have to ask then.  Why isn’t being alive more monstrous than being dead?  Dead things have utility, after all, a lot if you take my kitchen as an example – seeing all these tree & plant mummies made into brooms & tables & stacks of paper & books right?  So why is death so unappealing – when you come across it by surprise? 

I don’t really care to try and answer that question at all.  Really, I’m building up a foundation to talk further about Undeath – about zombies & mummies & vampires.  When a living thing is no longer living it’s obviously not alive.  Even when preserved perfectly it’s missing its elan vital – its anima – its life.  And this, when its contextualized as being formerly something living – that’s the terror of it, most basically.  That it was alive and is no longer that it is missing those things that you need to even know what you’re looking at.  Sense, perspective, knowledge – all the things that make living things great are gone – now the corpse is just a corpse – it speaks to a terrifying physicality, an imprisoning materialism – a fear that you’re, in the end, just a Thing and that things like you only work for so long. 

How are we going to use this in The Stories We Tell Together?

I have two directions – on the Thing-Ness of death. 

First, the unnaturally occurring undead-thing.  Let us say a corpse or some amount of remains accidentally animated to life – by perhaps the overfilling of hell, or the impossible desires brought on by unwholesome love – or by the animating force of some type of parasite.  There’s a lot of ways you can make the dead walk again if you’re working with as broad a palate as fantasy fiction.  For me – I’d consider a scenario like this the foundational origin for some unnaturally occurring undead-thing. 

The Church burned, for three weeks straight & through a thunderstorm it burned.  There were gouts of refulgence, spears of white & crimson flame that darted toward the stars, that struck the clouds like lightning in reverse.  There were melting, flowing stones & relentless, indecipherable screams.  The church burned.  It was the house of a god and the god burned up inside – ancient & unmourned, it burned alive, all of its vast dimensions unfolding & consumed by the fires right alongside all those who would mourn it – all its faithful, chained up inside the church to burn alongside their blasphemies.  The soldiers made sure that it burned with all souls inside, that it burned for those weeks and that nothing escaped the conflagration.

They weren’t thorough.  They were brutal & cruel but lacked the imagination to wonder what the church was built upon – the ancient crypts & all the graves in the churchyard – those they left.  Their concern only being with destroying the living infidels – they left the buried dead alone, reasoning, with soldierish indifference, that they’d be commanded to upturn the graves if that were actually needed.

Now the molten remnants of a murdered god have seeped into these tombs, into the coffins & urns.  They’ve mingled with the remains of twenty generations’ dead.  Over a decade the scratching, ferocious accumulations of bones & canopic remains have mingled & escaped.  Now, the town is plagued by uncanny noises – something in the ground, something that stirs & rumbles, that breaks the earth open in pulsing mounds spouting fetid smoke.  Soon, soon the town will be engulfed by its ancestors, a mass of skulls & teeth & twisted withered limbs & the ashes of hearts & eyes – a cascading flow of death given movement – bursting from the ground. 

Now this can take on all kinds of shapes – you could do good-old zombie apocalypse or (better in my opinion) the solitary night of the living dead.  You could do the blob- a gross mass of gross things that congeals & grows, adding to its mass as it kills.  You could do a lich or a vampire – a focused totality of that death & power forming into the machine-like death-mind of a gestalt god formed of the shattered psyches of uncounted dead people.  Heck – you could have the worms & bugs & decaying animals in the ground come back to unlife along with a whole skeletal ecosystem of dead grass and hollow trees. 

In all these cases the reanimation of the dead don’t have a purpose.  Now that’s the other view of the undead-as-thing – that the thing is made & has a purpose. 

In this case you’ll need what we’ve come to refer to, with some fondness & a few sighs born of over-familiarity – a Necromancer.  Doesn’t romance necros – though maybe?  But does Mance the dead.  Presumably.  A necromancer, as We Who Tell These Stories is shorthand for some type of grave-robber with magical abilities who can make the dead walk again.  Old hat for some, but there’s no harm in defining our terms here.  Necromancers – who knows what their motives are?  Do they want to make an army of what amounts to robot slaves?  Do they want to connect with the ancient past?  Do they want to hold on to someone they aught let go?  Are they just weird creeps with crazy wizardly motivations? 

There’s a lot of ways you could end up a Necromancer within the bounds of These Stories We Tell.  But the result is more or less the same – you have a kind of Artisan who’s medium is death. 

In the way that my kitchen is made of dead things – the Necromancer crafts using dead things too.  Just really troubling dead things – things that rot & decay, things that reflect back upon the living all the worst facts about living.  Which isn’t very nice at all, when it comes down to it.  You’re not going to think very fondly of a fellow who wants to use great-great-grandpa’s skeleton to overthrow society.  You’re probably going to regard such a person as evil. 

In this way – the Necromancer makes a great villain.  It’s a guy who makes more guys –but the guys they make are dead and horrible & obey unconditionally!  There are tiers of difficulty, a range of power that can carry your Players up levels & through dungeons – there are McGuffins – the Necromancer’s Spellbook, the evil Cauldron & so on.  There is  a lot of easy-fun storytelling built into the Necromancer. 

And that’s nearly all, all I have to say about that character – that villain – who makes dead things into Undead-Things – who discards what’s valuable about the living to use them merely for parts.  Something there is that doesn’t trust a person – who looks at a forest and imagines what kinds of furniture it’s good for making.  Who looks at a graveyard and imagines what kinds of armies can come from it.  But I do think it’s been an alright journey – coming to this-  to consider the Necromancer as the future-looking industrialist, the profit-motivated inventor-businessman who sees in everything an exploitable resource.  That’s my gift here to Our Stories – a grim interpretation of a grim character trope. 

I decided to talk about undeath & the monsterdom of undeath because of some comments here – I have more to say concerning the dead-as-spirit – ghosts, in contrast to the dead-as-things.  Perhaps I’ll write a third time on the subject – uniting the two and thinking of the dead with agency – going on about vampires & liches.  In the meantime – I’ll work on some more monsters that are Undead Things.  These gifts, I offer you, as a Necromancer!