I've been running a weekly game of Dungeons and Dragons for some months now and lately I've been thinking about the undead monsters in the game. I'm no particular fan of the undead myself. I think zombies are boring, Walking Dead the book should've ended at the prison, and the show should never have been made. This is a particularly hard line for someone who consistently throws undead monsters at his players, and it troubled me until recently.
Last session I ran Death Frost Doom for my group and after particularly disastrous run in with the fungal spores inhabiting a certain object early in the dungeon they seemed to handle it pretty well. Too well if you ask me, but hey they're not out of the woods yet. Literally, they're still in the woods I put on the mountain that holds the entrance. With the undead horde marching slowly towards town. Will they stand and fight to save the town? Probably not, they tend to leave destroyed towns in their wake.
The vampire character in DFD and the ghouls empire in Midgard are strong and compelling undead examples that redeem the undead for me. Because let's face it the undead, in spite of or because of their recent upsurge in popularity haven't been the same since Buffy. Undead are abominations, crimes against nature. And you couple that with "Heart of Gold" archetype? Please.
All that being said, undead are easy villains. They're so two dimensional that no one cares if they get destroyed, much less how they came to be. This is boring to me and I want to change this. Weiss and Hickman had a fun sort of zombie in the Death Gate Cycle that could only be raised through the death of another in the species, and I might play with that. Especially since one of my players is now playing a Necromancer just seems right that way. Maybe it's like the Dark Sun mechanic for magic on a more tragic scale. A soul for a soul.
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