I’ve always liked the idea of hoards of undead from other dimensions, planets or planes of existence… With this the rules can be changed on how to deal with them & what powers they may possess. Like the Mindolar from the Rifts game, they are not undead but alien parasites that control corpses from within.

I found this post and I must commend you. It’s hard to find others who don’t immediately associate necromancy and the undead with evil. My fascination with the undead probably started when I read Sabriel, the first book in Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series. Nix does a wonderful job recreating Death and the Undead and pulling them just ever so slightly away from the popular views of death. If you haven’t picked up the book in the year since you’ve made this post, I highly recommend you do.

May i recomend that you check out Erikson and his work? His T’lan Imass are a great concept you may find interesting, an entire race turned undead to fight a superior enemy

I absolutely LOVE The Awakened. So much that I had a dream centered around that idea and it was so amazing. This article has inspired me so much! Thank you for sharing!

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If you’re looking for more thoughts on this, I’d recommend The Summoner by Gail Martin (first book in a trilogy). Necromancers in that series are actually good guys and fill a necessary role. In that series, they assist straggling/anguished/lost souls to the afterlife and/or maintains a legion of sentient ghosts of former soldiers to defend the kingdom but a mage decides to capture souls within the kingdom to power an artifact that will awaken an ancient god (or something, I forget the details of the bad guy’s plan).

I love these! What a great way of “recasting” a concept that is getting pretty well worn by now. While I enjoy the necromancer-flavor, you’re right–it becomes very easy to figure out how the zombies must be beaten (but pick up “Dead Beat” in the Dresden Files for one of the best iterations EVER of this).

Your post also reminds me of one of the short stories in “World’s End” Sandman by Neil Gaiman, about an air burial.

Great post, thanks!

MY GOD! You sir, are a genius! I just happened to stumble across this site via my ventures on the web, but I am glad I did. Not only would any of these settings make for a great pen and paper campaign, but I could see all of these worked into an amazing video game. Now I have to work on a back story for a living charter who grew up and got trained in the ways of a magic user in the “Awakened” world by a great and long dead wizard who used his un-life to become the greatest mind of magic unbeknown to the rest of the magic community.

in larry correia’s Grim Noir books, the undead are the souls of the recently dead, rebound by a magician to their bodies. Standard fare so far, but the dead are fully conscious and able to think and sense much like the living. Because the dead are generally dead from warfare before they are reanimated, they also tend to be in excruciating pain. This pain eventually drives them mad, and the necromancer controlling them is able to telepathically communicate to them. He generally tells them that there is a way to end their pain, and that way is to destroy whatever enemy or structure the necromancer designates for them. In truth, the only way to sever the connection between the soul and the body is the complete destruction of the body. The death of the necromancer has no effect, and, for a short time, anyone who dies near where the necromancer was raising the dead is still revived. Think of it as an area-of-effect spell. I particularly like the way this preserves the undead as a terrifying, mindless horde bent on destruction, but allows any individual undead to remain at least slightly human. There is a particularly gruesome scene in the second book that involves reanimating and interrogating an attempted presidential assassin.

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