What Counts as Undead?

[Richard S.]

 

28 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

"Undead as physical creatures laking soul"  seems to me a better Gloranthan  definition, it is enough clear and concise. But am I wrong ?

4 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Do Jolanti have a soul (other than those in Aggar liberated from Nida by Gonn Orta who were gifted by the Aldryami)?

The Humakti definition of undeath is "maintaining a body separate from its spirit". IMO, that implies that undead need to a) have had a spirit at one point and b) have lost that spirit but still remain physically active.

[French Desperate WindChild]

27 minutes ago, Richard S. said:

 

The Humakti definition of undeath is "maintaining a body separate from its spirit". IMO, that implies that undead need to a) have had a spirit at one point and b) have lost that spirit but still remain physically active.

is soul and spirit the same thing or not ?

what about spirit without POW (or spirit unable to restore its "power" (mp)  ? is it still a spirit or a hollow shell ? like an undead in the spirit plan ?

[Richard S.]

6 hours ago, Joerg said:

Gark is listed with the Chaos pantheon, but what is his Chaos?

Gark is another agent of deceptive Chaos, like Gbaji and Ompalam. He runs a massive scam by offering eternal life and peace, then slaughtering the poor and wretched en masse and reanimating their bodies. The souls never get to experience his eternity, and the bodies remain in perfect peace with no mind to trouble them.

[Richard S.]

2 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

is soul and spirit the same thing or not ?

what about spirit without POW (or spirit unable to restore its "power" (mp)  ? is it still a spirit or a hollow shell ? like an undead in the spirit plan ?

Without getting into the whole can of worms that is the three worlds, technically yes but nowadays it's basically semantics I think. Personally I use "spirit" to refer to something that has POW, CHA, and sometimes INT, while a soul is just POW, but that's my own Glorantha.

I don't think I've ever seen a spirit without POW, but I think shamans would definitely be weirded out by it.

[radmonger]

The red book of magic has _detect undead_ as a spirit magic spell. So presumably whether something is undead or not is an answerable question.

This is in contrast to chaos, where there, by current canon, no reliable objective procedure to determine whether something is chaotic or not.

 

 

[mfbrandi]

OK, let’s have a go. This is me improvising (on RQ2), not holy writ.

Skeletons and zombies are just corpses controlled by necromancers — “dead creatures animated by Rune magic” (RQ2 Classic, p. 97) — they have no intelligence and the magician supplies the animating POW. As such they are only a petty insult to the Lord of Death, minor undead: the person or animal has been killed, but its body is still moving around. Surely, the Humakti’s beef is with the necromancer — the skeletons and zombies are just tools to be broken.°

Vampires are different (Cults of Terror Classic) :

• The candidate dies. Vivamort then places the now-twisted spirit of the candidate back into the body … The candidate that reawakes is now a vampire … a disjointed soul in a dead body …  his soul is no longer fully tied to the material plane. — p. 48
• Vampires are not subject to disease, nor harmed by poisons or Blade Venom. — p. 49
• warped souls in dead bodies — p. 50

So as with zombies and skeletons, the body is dead — killed and not resurrected — but the same soul animates it as before death, only now it is a twisted soul — one “wrongly” connected to the POW economy of Glorantha and its old body. It is still plausible to say of the vampire that its spirit and body are maintained separately, that the two are not properly joined, but the vampire has (or is) a soul — in contrast with skeletons and zombies.

Any good?

——————————————————————————————————
° Zombies: “Dead beings animated by Rune magic. Like skeletons, the 1  point of POW they have is what motivates them and keeps them going … They are programmed or even directed by the mage who created them, but cannot motivate themselves” (RQ2 Classic, p. 102). Whether this is also true of the dupes of Gark, I couldn’t say.

Edited November 16, 2023 by mfbrandi
stray emoji

[Ian Absentia]

18 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

...the two are not properly joined...

This seems to be the real heart of the matter, the transition to a disjointed state.  The body, and possibly the mind, persist in an unnatural state where the spirit is no longer a motivating or sustaining element*.  It's as much or more of a thing as it is a person.

Regarding the Jolanti, people may have strong and resentful feelings about the naturalness of its absence of spirit, but it simply is what it was made to be, and wasn't hi-jacked to become something else.

!i!

[*Or radically altered in the case of vampires as described in RQ2.]

[Jason Farrell]

1 hour ago, radmonger said:

This is in contrast to chaos, where there, by current canon, no reliable objective procedure to determine whether something is chaotic or not.

 

 

If you have a non-zero value for the Chaos Rune, you detect as chaotic.  Unless you're Illuminated.

[metcalph]

2 hours ago, Richard S. said:

Gark is another agent of deceptive Chaos, like Gbaji and Ompalam. He runs a massive scam by offering eternal life and peace, then slaughtering the poor and wretched en masse and reanimating their bodies. The souls never get to experience his eternity, and the bodies remain in perfect peace with no mind to trouble them.

I don't agree that Gark is deceptive.  His claims of peace and eternal life could be totally legitimate and he would still be just as bad to the Cosmos. 

[French Desperate WindChild]

1 hour ago, metcalph said:

I don't agree that Gark is deceptive.  His claims of peace and eternal life could be totally legitimate and he would still be just as bad to the Cosmos. 

the question is (and I have not the answer) : Is his claims real or his "followers" are not at all in peace ? Maybe their souls, or the remaining parts, suffer a lot ?

[metcalph]

3 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

the question is (and I have not the answer) : Is his claims real or his "followers" are not at all in peace ? Maybe their souls, or the remaining parts, suffer a lot ?

Why would Gark's claims need to be false or his souls suffering?  I'm not sure I see the point.   Gark's just as environmentally destructive if his claims are true and his souls is a state of nirvana.  The only difference is that you can't use truth magics to call his priests out for being frauds. 

[French Desperate WindChild]

48 minutes ago, metcalph said:

Why would Gark's claims need to be false or his souls suffering?

why not ? 🙂

After all he is chaotic. Vivamort believed chaos was able to save himself. And we see that he lost a lot.

 

Note I don't know what happens  for those who follow Gark. I just say that is not because a god (chaotic or not) says "X" that "X" happens

[metcalph]

4 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

why not ? 🙂

After all he is chaotic.

So is the Red Goddess.  Yet what she says is true nevetheless.  This is Glorantha the last time I looked.

4 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

Vivamort believed chaos was able to save himself. And we see that he lost a lot.

Vivamort still saved himself,  no?  The difference between him and Gark is that Vivamort is only in it for himself while Gark cares about everyone.  

 

Edited November 16, 2023 by metcalph

[Akhôrahil]

3 hours ago, metcalph said:

I don't agree that Gark is deceptive.  His claims of peace and eternal life could be totally legitimate and he would still be just as bad to the Cosmos. 

I agree. For a certain subset of people, merely avoiding the afterlife and their rightful fate there would be a huge upgrade.

I believe Gark delivers on calm/oblivion.

(Thought experiment: Cthulhu merely wants to kill and eat me and then it's oblivion, after a limited moment of horror and agony. Yahweh wants to have me tortured for eternity for not believing in him. Cthulhu > Yahweh, personally. If I thought this was a real choice, I would want Cthulhu to eat me!) 

Edited November 16, 2023 by Akhôrahil

[Akhôrahil]

6 hours ago, Richard S. said:

The Humakti definition of undeath is "maintaining a body separate from its spirit". IMO, that implies that undead need to a) have had a spirit at one point and b) have lost that spirit but still remain physically active.

I think it's fair to say that the Undead must have at one point been alive. Animated statues clearly don't count. Honestly, I'm not quite sure how skeletons do - they're merely animated bones, correct? This seems like a crime against the grave, not a crime against nature.

Edited November 16, 2023 by Akhôrahil

[Akhôrahil]

5 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

OK, let’s have a go. This is me improvising (on RQ2), not holy writ.

Skeletons and zombies are just corpses controlled by necromancers — “dead creatures animated by Rune magic” (RQ2 Classic, p. 97) — they have no intelligence

RQG zombies at least have (a limited) intelligence. Skeletons are mindless constructs. Neither have a metabolism, it seems.

Glorantha clearly has two kinds of undead - mere constructs (zombies, skeletons) and beings with a stolen metabolism (ghouls, vampires). These are so different that I'm not sure they belong in the same category. The former may or may not be Chaotic depending on method of creation (which is weird in itself); the latter universally are (I think?).

(Dead spirits are a third non-undead type separate from either.)

Edited November 16, 2023 by Akhôrahil

[Joerg]

32 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

I think it's fair to say that the Undead must have at one point been alive. Animated statues clearly don't count.

Jolanti are not quite animated statues - they are re-enlivened stone in runic shape, little different from animated clay (like the first Dara Happan humans, or the Agitorani).

 

32 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

Honestly, I'm not quite sure how skeletons do - they're merely animated bones, correct? This seems like a crime against the grave, not a crime against nature.

Bundalini and his dancing skeletons somehow escape the ire of the Humakti.

Are skeletons a blasphemy against buried (or sky-exposed) remains of humans, or are they merely bone golems?

 

5 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

OK, let’s have a go. This is me improvising (on RQ2), not holy writ.

Skeletons and zombies are just corpses controlled by necromancers — “dead creatures animated by Rune magic” (RQ2 Classic, p. 97) — they have no intelligence and the magician supplies the animating POW. As such they are only a petty insult to the Lord of Death, minor undead: the person or animal has been killed, but its body is still moving around. Surely, the Humakti’s beef is with the necromancer — the skeletons and zombies are just tools to be broken.°

Skeletons may be different from Zombies, as Zombies retain a lot more of the physicality of the former living human. Fresh zombies are hard to tell apart from slightly damaged living humans.

Sure, zombies usually have a creator - e.g. a Zorak Zorani death lord offering a deceased cult member's body its post-life service to the cult. Or Delecti's stolen mass zombification of recently deceased from a Zorak Zorani heroquesting feat.

 

5 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Vampires are different (Cults of Terror Classic) :

• The candidate dies. Vivamort then places the now-twisted spirit of the candidate back into the body … The candidate that reawakes is now a vampire … a disjointed soul in a dead body …  his soul is no longer fully tied to the material plane. — p. 48
• Vampires are not subject to disease, nor harmed by poisons or Blade Venom. — p. 49
• warped souls in dead bodies — p. 50

So as with zombies and skeletons, the body is dead — killed and not resurrected — but the same soul animates it as before death, only now it is a twisted soul — one “wrongly” connected to the POW economy of Glorantha and its old body. It is still plausible to say of the vampire that its spirit and body are maintained separately, that the two are not properly joined, but the vampire has (or is) a soul — in contrast with skeletons and zombies.

Any good?

——————————————————————————————————
° Zombies: “Dead beings animated by Rune magic. Like skeletons, the 1  point of POW they have is what motivates them and keeps them going … They are programmed or even directed by the mage who created them, but cannot motivate themselves” (RQ2 Classic, p. 102). Whether this is also true of the dupes of Gark, I couldn’t say.

Vampires, revenants, mummies - the so-called "higher undead" retaining some measure of the previous personality, though not "the soul". Somewhere between zombies and vampires we find ghouls. Some are fairly mindless ravenous undead, others like King Brangbane retain their identity.

[g33k]

IIRC, there *are* some forms of zombie (at least) that Humakti find abominations (not sure about skeletons).
I'm not recalling which those are, however... 😕

There are others (looking at ZZ's undead) that AFAIK do NOT bother Humakti.

So it's a matter of figuring what the difference is, and why that matters.

Edited November 17, 2023 by g33k

[AndrewTBP]

In 13th Age Glorantha, it’s effectively the Rune of the monster. Zorak Zoran’s Zombie Minion & Troll Skeleton are Darkness. Delecti‘s are Unlife/Undead. Thanatar’s are Chaos. 

Quote

The powers of Darkness sometimes reanimate the bodies of the dead, especially skeletons and zombies. While undead are often associated with Chaos, these undead are not. 

 

[radmonger]

The Humakti definition of 'undead'  is perhaps better translated as 'not dead'. Everyone is supposed to die; those who defy death must be dealt with.

Skeletons and zombies are actually dead, so they in theory don't count. However, the vast majority of such in the Dragon Pass area are raised by Delecti the necromancer or one of his minions. As he was around in the second age, he presumably is using some form of sorcerous immortality adjacent to vampirism. So they do detect as undead because it is his magic that power them.

Corpses animated by other means (by trolls, or perhaps Esrolians) do not detect as undead because they are expressing the death rune normally. However, such practices are one minor heroquest, or sorcerous innovation, away from summoning and binding a dead soul back. So Humakti are always suspicious of them. 

As they are of Chalana Arroy healers, who have the other half of the magic required to do that, as was shown when Queen Deezola participated in the rebirth of the Red Goddess. Perhaps the seven day limit on resurrection is more of a pragmatic compromise between the two cults than an unbreakable cosmic rule.

 

 

Edited November 17, 2023 by radmonger

[Scotty]

17 hours ago, Richard S. said:

The Humakti definition of undeath is "maintaining a body separate from its spirit". IMO, that implies that undead need to a) have had a spirit at one point and b) have lost that spirit but still remain physically active.

RQG is very straightforward on this: Once alive creatures (body and soul/spirit) that continue to act once dead (body, but no soul/spirit). They have no POW, but do have magic points. They are usually maintained in this state by some kind of magic.

Jolanti are not undead as they were never alive and are artificial constructs. They too have no POW, but do have magic points.

[g33k]

15 hours ago, Scotty said:

RQG is very straightforward on this: Once alive creatures (body and soul/spirit) that continue to act once dead (body, but no soul/spirit). They have no POW, but do have magic points. They are usually maintained in this state by some kind of magic.

...

Except that (rather confusingly) the Humakti seem to have no problem with ZZ-style "undead."
Somehow ZZ is doing something different.

[metcalph]

24 minutes ago, g33k said:

Except that (rather confusingly) the Humakti seem to have no problem with ZZ-style "undead."
Somehow ZZ is doing something different.

I'm not sure that Humakti seem to have no problem with Zorak Zorani style undead since the two cults hate each other.  

[Scotty]

8 hours ago, g33k said:

Except that (rather confusingly) the Humakti seem to have no problem with ZZ-style "undead."
Somehow ZZ is doing something different.

7 hours ago, metcalph said:

I'm not sure that Humakti seem to have no problem with Zorak Zorani style undead since the two cults hate each other.  

I'd suggest that the reason that Humakt is Hostile to Zorak Zoran is that they can and do make undead... Create Revenant, Create Skeleton, Create Zombie, do make Zorak Zoran look like a corrupted Death cult in the eyes of Humakti.

[g33k]

7 hours ago, Scotty said:

I'd suggest that the reason that Humakt is Hostile to Zorak Zoran is that they can and do make undead... Create Revenant, Create Skeleton, Create Zombie, do make Zorak Zoran look like a corrupted Death cult in the eyes of Humakti.

Am I confusing some other cult which is confusingly OK with ZZ?

Maybe Storm Bull?  Does their "detect Chaos" ping on Gark-zombies & similar undead, but not ping on ZZ-zombies...?
I'm sure I recall someone being "surprisingly OK" with ZZ's undead ...

Or is this all just my own confusion from reading someone's Glorantha Varying, years ago; and thinking it sounded typically-weird & thus very-Gloranthan?

Edited November 18, 2023 by g33k