Creating Undead

[u/Reasonable-Ad7828]

How have you implemented undead into your setting? Have you implemented them at all? Are they classic undead, more diverse or unique? What’s your opinion on undead in a setting? I’m curious to hear! I’ve only recently come around to them in my own setting.

Image Credits:
1. VincentYau
2. Slaskia
3. Call of Duty

[u/Reasonable-Ad7828]

In my own setting, undead are a byproduct of an ancient catastrophe and all possess mechanical compounds.

Known generally as “Consumers”, they’re a merging of flesh and metal brought on by the radiation of the Silent Shroud, created by the Sundering. For reasons unknown, technology merges with flesh, creating bio-mechanical beasts that only have a desire to devour. Technology and flesh are equal parts their prey.

Despite appearing in a multitude of forms across the galaxy, all seem to be strangely linked and all possess the same driving nature. But multiple types have been observed; from mindless and horde based to intelligent and commanding.

[u/SpaceCocaine101]

Well in mine there’re two flavors of ‘undead’ so to speak. There’s a lot of details in my notes about them but I’ll abbreviate here;

Via the twin oldest sons of the Ouroboros Pantheon, Solomon and David are the gods of death, souls, afterlives & silence and the hunt, valor, rot, & rebirth respectively.

Solomon enables people with unfinished business to become ‘Dwellers’ who must wear a card (which in the mythos is what binds a soul to the mortal world) to openly announce their undead status to the world while they get their affairs in order, at which point they’ll die at last and be taken to their afterlife. If someone suffers a severe enough regret; IE their village is slaughtered, they might become a Revenant, which is a version of a Dweller which lacks a weakness in the form of their card.

Meanwhile, David is responsible for ‘the other road.’ Effectively, if someone refuses Solomon they have the other option of facing off against David in a hunt where he takes their soul to his home forest and hunts them. If they escape and reach their corpse/civilization as a soul, he lets their spirit re-enter their body, at which point it rots and regenerates into a ‘Renewed.’ Renewed are effectively dryads visually, but can rot and renew endlessly until such a time as their remains are incinerated or they choose to embrace Solomon after however long they choose to be alive. That said, if you fail to escape David you do still regenerate, but the Renewed that arises from you lacks your sense of self - it’ll retain your memories, but fundamentally understand itself as a separate entity FROM you in all cases.

[u/Either-Skirt6031]

Cyber zombies are a really cool idea, in my superhero world I do actually have a team of undead cy-zombies under the command of an evil corporation, but in my fantasy world I have them be a part of a deadly plague inspired by the Victorian concept of Miasma/bad air.

[u/TalespinnerEU]

My favourite way of implementing the Undead is as... Creatures that are no longer part of 'normal' society, no longer part of normal life. Their undeath is an existence in the shadows, on the edges, never really part of the world of the living. Usually, there's a loss of connection to their old lives. Sometimes, Undead characters might want to quest into that old life in a search to restore themselves, cleanse themselves, be 'Part of Your World' again. Usually, the theme is that... They find others who are lost, and in finding one another, they find a new existence; an... unlife.

I do love to add things like technology or biology; means of self-expression and change.

Sometimes, I'll use undeath as something monstrous. Blood suckers and plague spreaders, insatiable in their greed. Undeath would be a metaphor for the void where the human soul should be, a void that can never be filled. But I like other monstrosities for this as well.

[u/lyle_smith2]

in my setting, there was an event where the Net(Vr internet kinda like ready player one or Caprica) created a purely synthetic intelligence that basically had godlike powers inside the Net. She learned to despise humanity after a human she loved was murdered because they used her abilities to take down powerful organizations and corps in the 'waking' world. She then made it impossible for anyone who was plugged into the Net to leave, essentially trapping their consciousness inside. Their bodies withered and died in realspace, but their 'soul' remained. Most went insane, few maintained a semblance of their humanity.

in the current setting, these disconnected souls possess machines and software. They are really like ghosts in the sense that they often hijack hologram emitters to give themself a body like they once had, but cannot fully recall what they looked like so the image is strange and inhuman.

A 'Child' of that first being has taken on the motif of the grim reaper and has been forcing people to undergo this process in mass numbers to build an army of tortured human souls trapped in what is basically a terminator.

TLDR: Insane human souls trapped in war machines by an edgy post biological intelligence.

[u/Eat_the_Monolith]

they're called Corpse Machines, and essentially its a humanoid robot that uses the corpses of the dead to power itself. Essentially an endlessly fueled soldier.

The other version is called the Skaal, which is an alien virus controlled by a hivemind called the Skaal-Thane, and you're transformed into a metallic statue of yourself covered in long spikes.

[u/XVUltima]

Undead are just an efficient use of materials. Creating a golem or magical automaton with complicated joints is time consuming and expensive, while humans come with those for free.

There is a danger with magic sort of "restarting" the person, however, and controlling a lot of them is difficult without setting them on "autopilot". So less than noble necromancers who want an army of undead instead of a handful of helping hands are in danger of their undead acting on their own. This is also how "free" undead can rise in special locations, or why its hard to kill powerful wizards. Enough magic and the dead dont stay that way.

In one culture, necromancers are public servants. Every town has one, and everyone who dies gets reanimated to do public maintenence. The undead are given rubber suits to hide the smell and so people dont see grandpa sweeping the siddwalk.

[u/A-J-Zan]

Since my work takes a lot from Norse mythology, I have draugrs that are the byproduct of resurrection gone wrong.

If a person died outside of battle or they did but the valkyries didn't get to them fast enough, their soul will go straight to Helheim. If a inexperienced necromancer tries to bring them back to life by forcing their soul back to the body and fails spectacularly, they will become a draugr with corrupted memories and mind. Also their soul fuses with corpse, making it impossible to extract anymore so, killing the draugr will also completly destroy their soul.

[u/Hjuldahr]

In the Kaltova isles, there are the patchwork men, corpses that have been reanimated by physically pinning a soul into a body using shade iron nails; optionally, the soul belongs to the original body, but not optionally, the body still contains some amount of muscle tissue to animate.

There are creatures who would qualify as undead, such as the Old Hunters, men and women who fell to great beasts but were believed to possess such rage or determination that their spirits became linked to their prized quarry, unable to die until they killed it.

In some cases this quarry can include other humans, such as with the Grim Widow, Malcile, who was driven to avenge her husband. She murdered people who happened to look similar to or have a similar name to her killer as her memory is starting to degrade along with her body.

Tenously, you can consider certain dollkin as undead, if they have been nailed like a patchwork man, but since the body was a soulless homunculus, it's closer to manmade reincarnation.

[u/fluggggg]

There is a shitload of undeads in my witcher-like story, ranging from your classical "my body is dead yet I'm not" undead to the more ghostly "I'm the spirit/soul/whatever of a deceased person and I'm gonna make it everyone's problem" undead, including the classical "need braaaaaains" undead.

While the details vary the existance of all of them is related to magic, it can be necromancy, "inherited" magic such as for some vampires (I have shitloads of vampires too...), or "environmental" magic (magic pools in some place and infuse in things and peoples, including the deads, for exemple).

[u/100percentnotaqu]

I have three main varieties of undead.

First there are the Liches, powerful Natural Mages (those born with high concentrations of Soul) who's Souls were unwilling to abandon their body when they died. Rot is halted, but the magic will eventually die without a living host to draw nutrients from.

There are the Wild Necrothropes which are dead bodies that have been taken over by wild magic. They're mostly wild animal, but still have some basic 'muscle memory'. Necrothropes not only still rot, but break down faster than normal corpses as the magic that animates them eats them.

Then there are Domesticated Necrothropes, which are made by Scholared Mages with a domesticated strain of the same or similar magic behind the wild varieties. They rot slower than normal, but do still rot.

[u/Sbeve9166]

There's several Things in my setting that could Be classified in my setting as an undead, as in corpses that move. But my settings "true" undead are what im calling The Cyst, a natural process of the Planet to regulate itself after a great magical calamity caused by humanity. They started off as dumb, shambling masses that were only really a threat If you walked right into them, but after a couple centuries of continues mutation and Assimilation of Biomass they have Developed a hivemind calling itself Jormungandr.

[u/Eviles_da_demonic]

The undead or living dead are most made with magic like zombies and bone golams being made with necromancy

[u/Fit-Act-65]

I never really made any universes but I have made OC’s in universes I am dedicated in… I’ll talk about one… Mortal Kombat…

There are Revenants which are fallen Earthrealm or Outworld heroes (such as Liu Kang, Kitana, and Jax) whose corpses and souls were enslaved by sorcerers like Quan Chi using necromancy to serve evil rulers… there are also spectres like Scorpion who rise from death fuelled by rage and hellfire often hiding a skull beneath a human face… there are also Wraiths such as Noob Saibot who trade their former elemental powers (Like Bi-Han’s cryomancy) for dark shadow magic… There was also just regular zombies in the Midway timeline with Zombie Liu Kang and I don’t exactly remember how it happened that Liu became a zombie…

[u/Pleasant-Sea621]

In my world, Eden, there are the Mana, living, multicellular, microscopic, eusocial beings with a hive mind, composed of zooids. There are four main types of Mana, including the Hereditary Mana, a type that forms symbiotic bonds with other beings, including humans. 

Regarding your post, most swarms of Hereditary Mana die along with their host, but in some cases the host isn’t ready to go. Most of these cases occur due to the host’s brain death; as the host and the swarm are directly connected via the cervical spine and the nervous system. Thus, when the host dies, the Mana ends up taking on an overload of functions and reactivating parts of the brain necessary to keep the body alive, effectively taking control of the deceased host’s body and controlling movements, sensory perception, and muscle function. The host, as an entity with a personality and memories, has effectively died, but their body remains alive, feeling hunger, thirst, the need to relieve themselves, and so on, without the putrefaction and decomposition seen in zombies. They are also not necessarily aggressive or compulsively hungry, but they do need to feed and will react aggressively if necessary.  

[u/ISKARION999]

In mine one needs a high affinity with death to become a natural undead otherwise one can be made via necromancy or by someone dying in a place with high levels of deathly energy but when someone dies near some place that has high levels of deathly energy they become a natural undead but unlike with someone who becomes an undead because they died with a high affinity with death they don't retain most of their mind and become pretty mindless and with necromancy it depends on the amount of energy The necromancer is willing to expend in order to allow someone to retain their memories and skills from when they were alive