When you design Undead for a game (not just pen and paper, any RPG) do you prefer the classic undead from Earth folklore, where the soul of the original being is still present in the corpus, or the newer sort, where the corpus is animated by some outside force, and there may not be a soul present at all?I prefer soulless Undead, but I see the appeal on making them people.
>it's another "[random bullshit] in your setting" template thread
The nature of an undead character is up to the player playing it, obviously. The Mindless trait can be purchased, or not.
>>96637046>not just pen and paper, any RPG)Then go ask >>>/vrpg/ and fuck off from /tg/, you useless spammer
>>96637046Sauce for the pic?
>>96637046Both, actually.Lower undead is just corpses animated by lingering energies, with intelligence and instincts of a hungry animal. Eternally hungry, so they tend to be a self-regulating problem - either the cadaver starves and is quickly extinguished, or it overfeeds and quite literally bursts at the seams. Some lower undead guard dungeons and crypts, and in that case they have a magical "battery" hidden somewhere in the dungeon that quells their hunger and loosely directs them Higher undead are souls that refused to pass on because of some purpose or obsession. Revenants are consumed by revenge, liches are backups of magicians' souls with simulated sapience (phylactery contains the lich's original soul which "copies" itself into grows a new lich as old one is killed), spectres are pretty chill and just want to be remembered, vampires are cowardly hedonists that would do ANYTHING to stay "alive" and in their "prime"...
>>96637046I prefer evil non player character undead. They are something to be feared, second only to demons and devils.Souls are summoned up from the burning pits of hell, jammed into the rotting corpses to animate them and forced to do the bidding of their summoner. Because they have experienced the tortures of hell, they are insane and so try to inflict the same misery on those around them, even subverting in petty ways the orders given to them. They are pure evil and the only way to deal with them is to destroy their host so they go back to the hell from which they came.
>>96637748The 5th Edition D&D Monster Manual for Wight.
Undead are animated by minor evil spirits. This is a bad idea for obvious reasons, but people keep doing it because they think they've figured out how to game the system. Or they don't care.
I use a hivemind of liquid Vampires as recurring villains in a series of games I've run. Every time the world ends, it reboots in a new system, but this one faction of liquid vampires manages to survive every time. They technically have souls, but they're so absurdly old now that they have no memory of their original selves.
>>96637046>>96637112WBG is for shit like this.
