Make Me a Necropolis

[User3]

Make Me a Necropolis

Within the realm of fantasy, necromancy has a very strong tradition. Villains raising armies of the undead is a genre (and adventure) staple and vampires being gothier than thou has never stopped being a powerful source of clichéd goodness. DnD introduces some new possibilities that most fantasies settings don’t have: players (who are generally not evil) being able to raise the dead and have them do stuff inside and outside of combat. This enables the rise of the non-evil, not-stupid city of the dead and I want to explore that very concept here.

First off, some ground rules. Let’s assume the base undead (skeletons and zombies) aren’t inherently evil (I believe this is referenced in Frank’s Tome of Necromancy under the “Playing with Fire” section). Zombies are just as content hauling rocks as they are eating brains because they are automata. Really let’s think of zombies and skeletons as robots driven by negative energy (I guess that makes them necro-punk…). Secondly, all concepts of the utopia of the dead, in which the living have been purged (per Heroes of Might and Magic III’s Sandro) are flawed (more on this below) and to be ignored unless VERY convincing arguments can be brought to say otherwise. I think the living/undead union (per Heroes of Might and Magic IV’s Gauldoth the Half-Dead) is a much better setting for a viable necropolis.

Why Undead? Undead are cheap and plentiful. You can do a lot with horses, oxen and even elephants but none of them can compete with their undead counterparts. Undead are generally as strong or stronger as the base creature in terms of raw stats, are tireless and never grow weak and “die”. That unlocks a lot harness-able energy very easily and the supply of usable energy (along with the ability to manage it effectively) is what limits the potential of a society. Golems, bound elements and whacky effigy creatures would work just as well but all of them are expensive and/or hard to get en masse. While I’d much rather have an effigy black bear in a fight, I’d trade it in for a score of skeletons with pickaxes if I wanted to mine for gold.

Why not just the undead? While a single shadow or vampire can create X spawn for free, where X is the number of living sentient beings within reach, eventually there are no more living beings to feed off of and you have a big pile of sterile meanies waiting for infighting and entropy to clear them out. Stated more simply, the undead feed on the living, owe their existence to the living so any sustainable system is going to require a renewable source of living creatures, if only as “food”. Also, most of the plentiful undead are pretty stupid and most of the intelligent undead are rare or have a lot of unwanted baggage attached with them (see: Vampire the Masquerade) so having some living middlemen is probably a good idea.

A simple example: Feudalism et Mortis
Welcome to Freedmore, an enlightened kingdom of wealth and law. The peasantry can be seen tending their fields with a number of undead field hands helping out. Undead oxen have required the creation of a new plowing measurement: the uncre (an acre is defined as the area of land a single ox can plow in a day. The uncre is much the same except the ox in question can work through the night as well). Active recruitment into the Sepulture of Faith ensures there are enough clerics to keep the dead maintained, enforced and in line. With a sufficient living population, the ranks of the undead are filled simply from corpses of the people that died natural deaths or were lawfully executed. Add in a caste of experts to direct the low undead and perform the skilled labor, a leadership class to direct things on a macro scale and a military class to keep the paladins from causing too much havoc (gives new meaning to “raising” an army) and Freedmore is well on its way to producing a surplus of… well, EVERYTHING and forging a financial empire. And all of this without even resorting to a wizard-heavy economy (though that could easily be a supplement).

There are definitely problems, most notably, getting enough onyx gemstones to keep the bottom of the labor system from falling out. Also, a kingdom would have to have pretty solid diplomacy to keep the servants of Pelor from invading, “turning” the kingdom into ruin. Lastly, the monster manual is a little unclear as to how the mindless undead work outside of combat. If they can’t make any skill checks (which I believe it says they can’t) than a skeleton couldn’t pass the balance check to walk across of field, much less charge an adventurer. I have no idea what the Sage or CustServe rulings are or how to interpret the RAW. Any info to that end would be appreciated.

That’s the idea in simple format; this is where you all come in and tell me what you think…

[Cielingcat]

You can't completely discount the traditional Necropolis, but it can't exist as a sustainable setting. You can have it be a "Tomb City" where everyone is dead (and possibly a ghost) and they go about performing their duties because of some crazy curse, and that too is a staple of the genre. The other option is to have a city of the dead that gets more people the same way the Hobgoblins do, by taking them from other people-only the Necropolis doesn't need them to stay alive.

[Note to self: add Tomb City Necropolis to Magic setting]

The best way to deter the crazed Pelorian fanatics is a simple concept. You simply inform them that if they invade, you send a bunch of shadows into their city underground, and have them pop up and kill people and make more shadows until there are no more crazed Pelorian fanatics. And you can be serious about this, because if you wipe out one of their cities with shadows, that leaves you with a standing army of shadows that you can keep for the next time people attack you.

Of course, these guys are fanatics, so that might not work. In which case, you simply have to assemble a standing army of hardcore dudes to keep them away. Only you have an advantage in that you never lose troops as long as you win the battle. Plus, you don't have to lose actual people in a fight-just send skeletons and other undead, and you have a (mostly) lossless war.

The onyx problem has a couple solutions. One, you could have a single high level Wizard who chain binds Efreet to make piles of gems until the cows come home, but that's boring and doesn't make for a fun setting. So you could say that the city is built around a magic Gem of Power that allows undead to be raised without the material components (except the bodies, you still need those) within the bounds of the gem's power. You can explain this by saying that there's no one in the city powerful enough to chain bind Efreet. Or you could have them actually wage war against various peoples and/or monsters to gain control of onyx mines or whatever, which is also much more interesting than Efreet binding.

[Username17]

Certainly if you believe in the grave whistles it is apparently possible to take a pile of onyx once and make a magic item that will allow anyone to cast animate dead once per day with a different control pool for every peasant in your empire. Nonetheless, there are a lot of potential problems for the aspiring Broken Empire Ermor setting in D&D:

• The hazards of acceptance. Most people don't know the difference between a zombie and a Spawn of Kyuss, or a skeleton and a Deathknight. If your society is set up to be friendly to undead there are some really bad things that can decide to come live in your kingdom. The zealots of Pelor attack a number of things that are straight up not dangerous, but their eternal crazy vigilance does purchase a defense from some of the nastiest baby-eating monsters in D&D.
  
• The Rampage. If a lot of people are controlling a lot of undead, then you've got to worry about the fact that people die. The control you have over the undead in your kingdom is a bizarre patchwork where different living humans blew the whistle for different ox corpses and when they die their control goes away. It's a potential logistical nightmare - to make sure that all the undead were under control you'd need to make sure that every undead was controlled by someone whose existence, loyalty, and survival you could guaranty. Otherwise, you risk the possibilty of a chain reaction - undead slaying humans who control other undead and so on and so forth - your entire kingdom could plausibly be destroyed in a single night.

There are work arounds for all that. The death priests can work to curb vampire incursions almost as well as the Pelorites can, and depending upon the version of necromancy you are using the zombie oxen may simply continue plowing land when their controller passes into death himself.

But if the adjacent nations didn't believe that you weren't gearing up for a shadow assault when they saw you turning the hands of the dead to the wheels of industry - I'd understand. Simply to protect your kingdom from the preemptive strikes of neighboring kings you'd need a huge military buildup - which in turn would be even more likely to convince your neighbors that you intended to mount a conquest of the land.

-Username17

[Digestor]

^ Isolation of location? I don't think neighboring kings will be too paranoid if there are mountains/seas/oceans separating your kingdoms.

though I can't imagine anyone sleeping easy when the closest kingdom (regardless of how isolated) is literally a place of death and decay.

[Cielingcat]

The military buildup could always be done with Shadows inside the ground. That way no one knows about it and they don't take up any space that you'd actually be using.

[technomancer]

I think a more logistically sound method of forming your undead empire is to deliberatly create necromantic intelligences with the specific goal of "mine this gold" or "tend to these fields" -- allthough the perpetual mist effect would be bad for most farming ventures. You might have to create a magic item whos sole purpose is to dispel those mists.

In this method you don't have to worry about control, your pre-programed necromantic intelligence takes care of that. Plus, whenever you need to swell the ranks, just herd some criminals there to be executed or something. Another plus, once it's purpose has been fulfilled, it automatically goes away. So when the mine runs out, you don't have to worry about the skeletons going amok, they just fall apart.

I would assume that a necromantic intelligence with an unfulfillable purpose would simply fail, perhaps after a period of time. If this is the case, then the only real drawback of using necromantic intelligences is that you need to craft the goal in such a fasion that it is fulfillable, but not if your society is functioning properly.

For example, if the goal is: Fill this warehouse with crafted goods. If you continually empty out the warehouse (i.e. traders ship it to other kingdoms), then the necromantic intelligence keeps trying to fill up the warehouse, but if your society ever breaks down, then it is able to fulfil its goal, and then ceases to exist.

[User3]

Well, as with most things in D+D, the way to ensure society doesn't implode is to have a high-level character who's ultimately controlling the mass of undead through proxy. (He commands a bunch of Necropolitan Clerics, each of whom command yet more necropolitan clerics, ..., and somewhere down the line they control the laborers.) Now, if someone kills a high-ranked puppet you might have a few problems, but that's almost certainly unavoidable.

Location:
You want it inaccessible by land but easy to get to by sea. This way you can maintain an active trading hub and at the same time you can not worry your closest neighbors nearly as much.

You probably also want it on land that isn't very desirable without lots of labor, so no one decides they can just take it from you. Ie, your city is on what was a swamp until you piled the dirt high and 'created' land to farm and build on. (Think Boston) You, of course, have labor to spare, so this isn't a problem.

This also makes regulating who enters and exits the city a lot easier, because access is limited.

You probably do most of your business by shipping food, and trade for valuables and other commodities. Other labor-intensive pursuits, such as cotton growing, are also appropriate, and the processing of raw goods you can grow into finished products could also be accomplished. However, mining is probably out of the question - you'd have to fight dwarves or other races to hold any good mining location. So we're talking about a city that creates wealth by growing things and turning them into finished goods.

[Iaimeki]

Congratulations, you just proposed the undead version of Venice?

[Catharz]

You situate your metropolis on top of a great fucking onyx mine.

Then you have a Dustmen-type theocracy running the show. You don't actually need the whole 'we're already dead' viewpoint, but you do need a religious framework which allows the animation of every person who dies. You'll end up with a sort of ancestor worship ('philosophy' worship) where the theocrats do the whole "necromancy" (speaking with dead) thing.

The theocracy is absolute because, by now, the dead outnumber the living. There are no pesant uprisings, because pesants who uprise are killed by their parents and animated. Arcane spellcasters would be mistrusted because they aren't locked into the religion, and have some control over the undead. They would probably need proper documentation.

Other religions are anathema, because of what the theocracy represents: A 'choking off' the the gods' source of power (souls). Priests from other nations would only be allowed for official diplomatic missions.

None the less, the theocrats are good neighbors. They don't raid anybody for slaves, and they form a completely agrarian society. They have a hugely successful onyx mine complex, but they also consume it at such a rate that they actually import it ('black gold'). Their work force consumes very little food, and so they export a most of it.

If you wanted an absolute necropolis, it would make more sense to put it in the middle of a salt-mine filled desert (think parts of Ethiopia), on a glacier, or completely under water (a necropolitan Atlantis -- only they, their shadow army, and their Ixitxachl allies stand against the Saughins).

[User3]

From what I've read, the obstacles to overcome for a successful Necropolis are best most succinctly summed up with Frank's post: Intolerant Neighbors (Don't hate me because I'm ugly) and Control (and don't hate me because I'm potentially unstable). Some thoughts to curb those two...

1) Neighbors:
A) Geographic Isolation: this has already been suggested. The desirability of this depends on the goals and nature of the particular necropolis. If your going to use your surplus of labor for the production of goods (as most are probably going to) than you'd need a non-walkable connection to potential markets. A swamp adjacent to a navagable waterway would work, an offshore island or maybe something fantastic like an island city contained within the caldera of a flooded volcano. Another possibility is picking somewhere highly inhospitable such that no one wants to investigate/invade you (the middle of a barren wasteland, artic tundra or fetid jungle) though this will mean your supply of living stock will have to be particularly hardy (thri-keen), exotic (lizardmen) or living in some small biome of comfort (magically accomodating underground dwelling beneath the wastes of Findor where your peasants grow subsistance crops through "continual light" spells). Now, if your goal is, as a community, simply to be left alone so you can use your resources to further your studies into the arcane/divine/technological/whatever than life is much easier as the number of living and dead is greatly reduced. For the sake of this thread I'm going to try and get the former to work...
B) The city above/the city below: the city of Freedmore is under new management that doesn't particularly care for daylight or interlopers but wants to still be found on maps. The idea is to build a tunnel network below, and perhaps extending into the lands surrounding, the city and let the undead dwell there. Vampires like the underground and liches don't really care so it works for them. Add in underground sweat shops where skeletons and zombies are manning assembly lines, operating mills or performing any other labor intensive, simple tasks that can be "exported" down below. Some well secured elevators could ferry raw/finished materials up and down and the world at large need never know about what lies beneath. As long as the underground doesn't mine to heavily or expand too large then they're reasonably safe from tunneling into some less-than-friendly underdark denizen.
C) Lawfuller Than Thou: make St. Cuthbert the partron deity of the land, write up exacting treaties, defense pacts and rights of passage agreements and STICK TO THEM. Your neighbors, if they're lawful about it might leave you alone after someone gets their nose bloodied on a failed invasion attempt (something about skeletons with their chest cavities loaded with alchemical explosives and told to "hug" the enemy soldiers) and after their clerks recognize a cheap source of consumables. This version would be the most difficult but the least demanding as far as terrain.

2) Control: Ideally some sort of abstract repository of control would be ideal (all skeletons are controlled by the Temple of the Onyx Hand or are owned by the Peoples Republic of Nargath) but that just isn't supported without the material components handwavium or houseruletonium. Some sort of recursive leadership command might work (you serve me and all the masters of all the other mining skeletons) but again the rules are vague as to how complicated command the mindless undead can follow and remember (What's the standard onboard RAM for this model of skeleton? Oh, its a spellstiched! They come with 256gp standard...).
A) the black ledger: every year each member of your priesthood is required to bring their undead in for entry into the kingdom's census. Some sort of arcane mark-style brand
might denote ownership and members who are in failing health are limited in their undead capacity...
B) Underground Pyramid Scheme: rather than worry about the reliability and survivability of your clerics, make your clerics out of hardier, more loyal stuff. You have one head vampire you creates and controls X spawn who themselves control X spawn and on down the line and all spawn are required to be loyal to their master, their peers and their kingdom. Then they create and control as many low undead as they can and hand them off to task masters who put them to work elsewhere. Then your pyramid of vampirical staff go about whatever clerical work is needed (supervising, researching, drinking wine and falling into ennui while playing whitewolf, etc.). Since vampires are immortal and notoriously difficult to kill plus dominated by their chain of command, your undead should be locked into bounds of servitude are as stable as these things can be. Note this would work well with the City Above/City Below scenario since you have permadarkness underground. Granted this suffers from the usual weakness of any charm/dominate based organization but if reinforced caverns of earth beneath a fortified city and defended by legends of the undead can't keep your precious pyramid standing then you never had a shot to begin with...
C) Overlapping Coverage: all of your clerics work in pairs or threes overseeing their undead. Should a cleric ever fall then you have at least one spare to start rebuking before things get out of control. Consider this the RAID 5 of undead control: costly but fault tolerant

Lastly, what to do with your undead. Personally I like the idea of a zombie-manned grindstone and skeleton ran pumphouse but there's more we can do than replace beasts of burden. Many menial tasks can be handled by specially "programmed" undead. If a skeleton is capable of holding 2 distinct instructions (beyond the obvious "obey me and don't tear shit up") then you have a animated bit right there. Mail sorting (if the region is 1 put in this bin, if the region is 2 put in that bin) by chains of skelies can get the job done quickly and efficiently. Computation is also viable if the DM allows a certain amount of logic and/or computer science to leak into his campaign. Zombie-owl messege relays can speed up cross town communications AND provide a grim parody of the HarryPotterverse. Also, "gentle repose" can do wonders for keeping the zombie stink down and, when extended, lasts basically forever...

[Username17]

At no time is it advisable to have an army of Shadows, or allow vampires into your lands, or in any other way ally yourself or tolerate Spawn producers. As an undead raising nation you have enough prblems with the forces of Good without having individuals within your own society who have the ability to murder your people for personal military gain.

Spawn command structures are brittle and Spawn-based armies have an extremely fast growth curve that is essentially impossible to track via logistical analysis. Essentially a spawning army functions like old King's Bounty Ghosts - it grows until it exceeds the control limits of the commander and then it goes completely ape shit on everyone.

But it's worse than that, because it's not just that a Spawn army can break ranks and fight friend and foe alike in the middle of major battles, but they'll occassionally do that in time of peace! Vampire counts will periodically get too big for their pants and start making a crap tonne of vampire spawn on the down low only to attempt to overpower the nation with their Eurotrash army of the dead.

Control can only be retained if the creation of controlled undead is itself controlled by the state.

---

As to location, you want something that actually produces stuff - your skeleton oxen won't do you any good if there's nothing to plow. As I see it, you have a couple of major options:

• Dangerous Work - Zombies can sit around exposed to tanning fluids all day and it won't do them any harm. While the same could be said of Yugoloths - they aren't going to do it under any circumstances. So you could seriously get a lock on leatherworking or the like. Problem is - those types of economic activities fit in the middle of any conomic supply chain meaning that you are dependent upon imports as well as exports to get by in the world. That makes you vulnerable to diplomatic activities and embargoes.
  
• Massive Surplus Alternately, with a labor force that doesn't demand payment or food and works 24/7, you are seriously capable of exploiting any resource - mines, arable land, salt water, whatever - at a tremendous profit per living worker. Unfortunately, your total production per acre is probably not going to be all that high and any resource you happen to have will be covetted by other forces.

Either way you go, you've got a potential pitfall available. Here are some solutions:

• Vassalize a neighbor - whether you grind grain or grow it, whether you tan hides or raise cattle, whether you mine gems or purchase them, you will need to trade openly with multiple other kingdoms. Recall, however, that that "kingdoms" in this period pretty much extend to the extent of the vision of an individual badass. So just seriously go conquer one of the neighboring city states. Then leave.
  Rathr than making an empire out of the deal, just ask for trade concessions and split. You gt an exploitive trade agreement out of the deal and your other neighbors are going to be forced to do most of their trading through your middlemen in this second city run on different principles. With the other nations seeing your conspicuous lack of an army of the dead and another city sending you modest tribute every year, you ought to do OK in the diplomatic and economic arenas.
  
• Shadow Economy - Who says you have to tell anyone what you're doing? Not me! If you have industries such as "mines" or "tanning" you can jolly well just put it under ground and never let anyone see the necrolumpahs. Now, people may get jealous of your apparent wealth, but there are enough races that never ever leave the underdark that you might be able to get awayy with this for generations.
  
• Philistine Trade If you have an island, or a demiplane, or some other remote region and you do all the trading. Or at least, all the transporting. If you show up on a boat, or out of a planar portal, with a shit tonne of goods in sacks noone need ever know where you come from. Then they can pretty much stuff it if they don't like your practices.

---

Now there's lots of crazy crap you can do. From mixing in wererats to your living populace to empowering your peasants in necromancy with magic items. But shadows and vampires is right the fvck out.

-Username17

[Endovior]

I wouldn't recommend Necromantic Intelligences for economic purposes; they're too likely to turn against their makers. Consider a Necromantic Intelligence tasked to fill a warehouse with goods. The moment anyone came to empty it, the Intelligence would devote all of it's efforts to attacking and destroying them, as they'd be working directly against it's purpose. I suspect that many other applications would have similar results. Theoretically, such could possibly be contravened by a carefully-worded purpose, but given the great difficulty of creating these things in the first place, such is FAR easier said then done. Best thing would be for the ruler to be a maxed-out Lord of the Damned acting as a Necromantic Intelligence; just arrange for everyone to be murdered at the age of 50, and he controls them all in an infinite Zombie pool with none of the mess of spawn chains.





Incidentally, I actually made a Necropolis once in an actual game of D&D. It was fun. Summary follows.

I was playing a Shadow Cleric of Orcus / Lord of the Damned (~14th level IIRC), in an evil party that was working for the Demon Lords. We were tasked with converting a given city to evil. The other party members were busily considering how they would go about infiltrating the city, setting up influence, etc... I, on the other hand, spent a minute or two surveying the area by air, determined the layout of the city (enough to determine which part was the slums and which part was the high-end temple/government district), and then proceeded to attack the slums. Due to a feat I took (Enervating Touch), I was able to create both Shadows and Wights from the commoners in the area, and proceeded to do so. Indeed, I went on a rampage, killing a lot more people then I could control, leaving the uncontrolled spawn to rampage on their own (with the expectation that they'd kill to feed their own hunger, creating more spawn who would also do so, etc...)

I easily overwhelmed the Slums, and then moved on to the nearby Red-Light District. At this point, I began to encounter resistance from the local Adventurer population, but was handling it nicely for a period of time. At this point, the DM quickly consulted his notes and made a number of rolls before confronting me with a party of the highest-level characters in town, who were all mostly religious-types and were charging in against the undead. I engaged them personally, and after a short and brutal combat, took them out personally with a few high-level spells.

I would have proceeded to roll over the rest of the city, but a brief spot of Divine Intervention (Orcus ordered me to stop the rampage, finding the creation of so many free-willed undead distasteful), I withdrew my forces plus everything I could Command back into the slums, and without my presence spearheading the charge, the local Clerics Turned aside the rest. An uneasy truce soon developed... more powerful Clerics arrived in the city pretty quickly, but I spent a lot of time casting Sending, telling a bunch of my buddies from the Negative Energy Plane of my intent to create a Necropolis. I got pretty decent turnout, and over the next month populated my half of the city with an assortment of intelligent undead, including a number of reasonably powerful Vampires and Liches, who contributed to bringing the rampage under control. My fledgling Necropolis was a magnet to local necromancers and undead, and before long I had a thriving community. I quickly began the task of governing, and the first thing I did was set up a census, which got the name of all new arrivals and doubled as the tax roster. I handled the problem of the free-willed unintelligent undead by a master/slave system; anyone coherent enough to put it's name to the census was considered a citizen (and required to either pay taxes or perform public service), while anything that did not was considered unintelligent property and anyone able to establish control over those wanderers was encouraged to do so. I managed to extort the contents of the local prisons from the regular city government, and used them to feed my populace. With the money I got from taxation, I put up a number of useful amenities, including a Wondrous Architecture-type Altar of Heal; this was used to keep the 'food' in good health, and as such I was able to sustain the populace without many problems.

The other party members took their cue to set up their own little empires in town; and the mission was going pretty well, all told, before the game folded due to schedule conflicts.

[Draco_Argentum]

Programming with undead is really easy. Remember that a computer is built from on off switches. Skeletons can handle more complex stuff than that so anything with a whole bunch or repetitive tasks is open. You can do industrial revolution style stuff with skeletal factory workers and power sources.

Which would be really cool if casters weren't already completely eliminating the need for that. The necropolis is less than level 10 cool. Higher than that and having a surplus of labour is weak sauce.

[technomancer]

Good point about the necromantic intelligences.

I've got an idea for the problem use of a grave whistle and every peon has their own control pool of undead potentially killing your civilization in a single night of horror. Just make sure everyone gives their undead standing orders to attack any undead they see attacking someone living. That way, after the first few people are killed, all the skeles in the area spontanously combust and that's the end of it. No all-killing rampage. The could be bothersome if it happens in a dense area, because you'd lose alot more undead, but most people would be safe. I would imagine privacy fences are the word of the day, as that would tend to isolate control failures.

[Aktariel]

I never tried making a city out of undead... I always just raised armies and conquered, and let the people who were paying me sort out the chaos and destruction I had caused, along with getting a real goverment set up.

Without some homebrew items, I imagine it would be quite difficult or require massive ingenuity to create a working and stable necropolis...

Or a necropolis composed entirely of undead who do not need to feed and who cannot create spawn. Have a few liches running the place, with skeletons and zombies doing the menial work. [I'm short on brain space at the moment and cannot recall any more undead that don't require sustenance and don't create spawn...].

One off solution: have a massively powerful artifact similar in concept to a mythal. Let's call it the Ebon Throne. It is a great big obsidian platform 50m in diameter, with a great throne shaped bit in the middle. All corpses placed on it within five minutes of each other are reanimated as either skeletons or zombies five rounds later. The Throne is controlled by one person sitting on the throne-like object; they retain control of all undead created via the Throne and there is no maximum HD limit of controlled creatures. [You could optionally say that the controller must be a cleric or that there is a limit of... 500 HD per character level of the Ruler?].

[tzor]

A couple of years ago I whipped up a necropolis for a national novel writer’s month novel. I borrowed a few ideas from Ghostwalk, (mostly for non evil shades) but for the most part most of the stuff was a classic D&D from the viewpoint of “skeletons aren’t inherently evil” point of view.

The idea behind it was that that shades lingered around a while in the city. After they went towards their final destination, the bones were perfectly suitable for animation. Zombies were generally out because they might disturb the visitors who went to see the shades of their recently departed loved ones. Most evil undead were generally out of sight, except for one very powerful lich and one very powerful mummy who were important characters in the novel.

Map of my necropolis

[Endovior]

I'd note that controlling the undead is a lot easier if you don't use 'The Crawling Darkness'. If you're just 'Playing With Fire', then your undead will continue on, regardless of the death of the peon who gave them their orders.

[Shatner]

Sorry for the thread reanimation (though it seems fitting considering) but I have some questions that don’t really bear a thread of their own.

Putting aside the issue of societal and diplomatic organization for the moment I’d like to focus on how an aspiring dark merchant lord can get the most out of his minions. Through what means can one get more and better untrained labor out of one’s low undead? Through what means can one get trained labor out of them? It’s easy enough to tell a zombie to push a grindstone or get skellies to pick corn but is it possible to have undead artisans (that don’t drink blood or require phylacteries)? Also, how can you make your mooks more cost effective combatants?

I can think of a few possibilities but I’m shaky on what the core and supplemental materials offer beyond the animate and create undead spells.

1) Undead Assembly Line: station one cuts open the fish, station two removes the guts, station three removes the scales, station four fillets, station five loads the meat onto ice and station six boxes the whole thing up and sets it on a pallet. Instead of requiring a crew with ranks in profession: fishmonger you emulate the fish processing companies and get untrained labor to perform many small tasks that add up to one complex result
2) Undead Assembly Language: as a programmer I know that any process can be broken down into many simple tasks. Zombies and skeletons can “understand” simple tasks so you have them perform what amounts to complex and/or tedious math or elaborate sorting when properly programmed. Undead wouldn’t be especially fast but they should be reliable; which is enough for some projects. Also, the instructional capacity for a low undead is unclear but if it’s universal (mice skellies are just as programmable as hill giant skellies) than otherwise worthless creatures (mice, rabbits, cockroaches) could be used to reduce the individual cost and size of your undead “bits”.
3) Zombie Tank: make an iron box, flip it over and have it manned by four zombies. Add eye slots or telepathic control then fill the rest of the space with shock troops or explosives. Have your APC march up to its desired location and release your payload. This works for amphibious (walk along the bottom) as well as aerial (provided the zombies fly and have wing slots) approaches. Bonus points if this serves as a mobile weapon platform. Double bonus if you can make it somehow radiate cold damage, since the undead are immune.
4) Zombie Munitions: Infect a zombie with something foul (they are immune to disease but I think they can still carry it) and lob them into melee/over the city walls. The practice of hurling diseased bodies into a besieged fortress was established in medieval Europe but in DnD the bodies can dust themselves off and start accosting random guardsmen with plague-hugs. Plus, diseases are cheap to come by.

What else can be done? Is there a rule supported way of creating smart undead cheaply (without going the unsustainable spawn route)? Is there a rule supported way for creating skilled undead (mindless or otherwise) cost effectively?