1 | Mr. Greedyguts: An extensive grafted network of reanimated intestines, sphincters, and lungs used to rapidly transport small packages and creations. |
2 | Coat’a’Bones: A suit of armour crafted from several skeletons and a layer of zombified muscles. Able to move on its own or with a captured hostage inside, and be worn to enhance a necromancer’s physique. |
3 | Armaneunsis: A mummified arm with an equally mummified ear stuck on the back of its hand, often mounted on a steady stand. A speech-to-text dictation device for the discerning necromancer. May have some fingers converted to pens with ink reservoirs inside hollowed finger bones. |
4 | Rotrider: A more advanced and reusable alternative to the classic zombie. Resembles a tangle of nerves and tendons that can burrow into and puppeteer a corpse, then abandon it and find a new one when that corpse is too damaged. |
5 | Comfurter: A mass of skin, fat, and hair that can flop around and massage someone laying on it. Very comfortable, but hard to keep fresh enough that it doesn’t stink. |
6 | Brainmate: A bundle of skulls with dangling, braided spines. Within the skulls are carefully pruned and brined brains. Plug the spines into the base of your skull to augment your memory and processing ability, or have your mind overridden by an insane undead gestalt if you didn’t prune carefully enough. |
7 | Modular Dullahan: A decapitated death-knight equipped with a set of severed heads from sundry beasts, each with its own speciality. |
8 | Scratchipede: A myriapodal creation made from stitched-together fingers. Adept climbers. When it claws a living thing, their nails will break off and dig in further. |
9 | Urnguard: Cremated ashes imbued with amorphous unlife. Shine with ghastly sparks. Often kept in urns to prevent them from dispersing in strong winds or rain. Caution to the adventurer who smashes urns looking for treasure in the lair of a necromancer. |
10 | Macabre Dancers: Beautiful bodies with modified joints and muscles. Can move with grace and precision unmatched by mortals. |
11 | Unliving Oubliette: A punishment-transformation inflicted on a necromancer’s worst enemies (or just whoever if they’re petty enough). The victim’s soul is trapped in their enchantment-reinforced corpse after death, there to remain without any ability to move or communicate, tasting and feeling only their own decomposition, until the last of their bones has crumbled to dust. Maybe even after that. |
12 | Gallowsworm: Must be made from the hanged body of an innocent while they still dangle from the noose. The body droops and the neck elongates, longer than the spine should be. After a few meters the body drops off completely. The resulting serpent-like zombie can sense guilt, and if left to its own devices will hunt and eat the guilty until its throat-stomach splits open. |
13 | Stonedead: Made from someone killed by petrification. |
14 | Clotsman: Undead blood pool that can shift parts of itself between hardened, sharpened scabs and liquid form. |
15 | Boomwisp: Cloud of animated corpse-gas. Pretty much only good for self-igniting, exploding, and smelling awful. |
16 | Chimeral Ghoul: Sometimes one non-identical twin will absorb another while still in the womb. The absorbing twin will then exhibit some physiological traits of the absorbed twin. A necromancer can draw out the lost potential of the absorbed twin, creating a subtle undead servitor who shares a body with a living person. This chimeral ghoul can then at will shift between the forms of the living and the undead twin. |
17 | Trap Feast: Necromantic creation which resembles a delicious roast pig or similar meal. When consumed, it will dissolve/rend/explode its victims from their tender insides. |
18 | Shipwreck Of Theseus: The transition to an undead state can be a sudden, scary thing for a necromancer. Lichdom and vampirism are not for everyone. For these more squeamish sorts there’s a gradual method available. Replace a foot or kidney with a sturdier reanimated replacement here, swap out the pineal gland for a mummified version there, and before you know it the whole body’s undead, with no clear death in between. That’s a Shipwreck of Theseus. |
19 | Crossroads Child: Made from the spent sperm of an impotent man and the menstrual sheddings of a barren woman. The Child will grow normally, appear normal, except that it will have the power to seize control of others’ necromancy and consume the souls of the dead to increase its own power and lifespan. |
20 | Goregrinder: An almost mechanical-looking undead contraption built from the teeth, jaws, and gullets of many victims of starvation. Gnashes bodies into a fine paste, which then reanimates into its own undead slime-monster. Never satiated, becomes increasingly hard to control over time. |
21 | Failed Spawn: The dregs of the mating season, a swarm of undead larvae and tadpoles and other unsuccessful children of the wild. |
22 | Shriekwind: Crafted from a strangled scream, a shriekwind is a specialized minion, lacking a corporeal form but able to produce and dampen sound near itself. Sounds produced by a shriekwind are all invariably unpleasant. |
23 | Saproot: A severed root from a tree that survived a forest fire, a parasitic infestation, and a lightning strike. It twitches when held. When planted in the ground, it will drain the fertility from the soil for kilometres around. |
24 | Cemetery Cocktail: A mixture of spoiled beer fermented with grave mold and other unsavoury ingredients. When drunk to inebriation (a trying feat for anyone with an intact sense of taste) the drinker gains an uncanny ability to find and walk paths to and from the underworld. |
25 | Harvest’s Revenge: Hybrid necromantic work combining the dying scraps of the green seasons with the rotting waste of the harvest. Looks like a shambling mound of compost and dry leaves with a rotting gourd (or other large fruit/vegetable) for a head. Withers things with its touch. |
26 | Terminal Observer: A pickled eye and optic nerve. When plugged into a corpse’s eye socket it projects images of the last thing that corpse saw before it died. |
27 | Gembone: A chunk of fossil with a cracked jewel stuck in one end. The jewel will project a degraded, incomplete ghost of the creature the fossil came from. |
28 | False Huldra: A cheap, simple servant shaped from flensed skin and stripped bark into a rough, hollow, humanoid form. |
29 | Scarboy: Diminutive homunculus sculpted from callouses and keloids. Its touch awakens long-healed wounds, prompting scars to split and once-broken bones to splinter again. |
30 | Necrotic Fasciitis: Flesh-eating zombie bacteria. Immune to conventional antibiotics and bacteriophages. Difficult to reanimate in significant numbers. |
31 | Tumbledown Castle: A roving ruined fortress, always in the midst of collapsing and falling back up a little ways away. |
32 | Spectral Weapon: A broken sword, a headless axe, a spear with its point rusted to bluntness, or the like, restored to phantasmal wholeness and imbued with silent bloodthirst. The part of the weapon restored by necromancy will be invisible and pass through everything but living flesh. Wounds it deals will surely fester. |
33 | Fleshminted Coinage: Coins pressed from metal a mortal was melted down in the forge with. One side of the coin will bear an image of the melted person’s anguished face, regardless of what it was printed with. These coins can never be refused by the dead if offered as payment for grave goods and services. |
34 | Jericho Seed: A piece taken from a razed wall, twisted into unmaking mockery of its former purpose. Once implanted in an intact structure, a Jericho Seed will spread its stony hyphae and subvert the thing. Passages will open for the infiltration of burglars, locks will warp to refuse familiar keys, and so on. When the hyphae spread fully, after weeks or months or years, they’ll tear the structure apart. |
35 | What Rough Beast: The ghost of a war. Possesses generals, politics, and the like to respark the conflict it was when it still raged among the living. |
36 | Inkpyre: A fluttering, vaguely bat-shaped mass of charred pages and dripping ink. It eats knowledge and shits ignorance. Crafted from the cinders of a book-burning. |
37 | Iconoclastic Flow: A flood of smashed idols and statues driven to crush all graven images in its path, though it often confuses anything that resembles a graven image with one. |
38 | Deadlight: Made from a burned-down candle, or in more advanced times, a burnt-out lightbulb. Its unclean radiance can only be seen by the one holding it, and reveals the spectral. |
39 | House of Null: An abandoned temple, cathedral, or other holy site imbued with a necromantic working. It will call to those who’ve lost their faith in their dreams, demanding their devotion and giving nothing in return, leaving a death-cult of nihilistic husks. |
40 | Alghoul Bloom: The reanimated die-off of a bloom of toxic phytoplankton. Those that touch some of the stinking mass will themselves eventually be converted into more alghoul bloom. Fortunately for the world this transmutation loses potency with each “generation” removed from the original bloom it gets. |
41 | Reaniminder: Some say you die twice, once with your body, and again when the last living person forgets you. What about when you forget yourself? Necromancy can bring back this forgotten self in the vessel of the one who forgot it. Often used to restore someone whose mind’s been lost to dementia. |
42 | Revolving Revolution: A revolution’s fading embers, whether it failed or succeeded in its goals, collected and given new energy by a necromancer. Infects mobs of people with aimless violence. |
43 | Devil-Rain: A cloud that pours ectoplasmic rain on the region below. Molded from the dreams of a land dying from drought. Anything nourished by devil-rain grows brittle and twisted. |
44 | Gloamling: The shambling corpse of a freshly finished day . Only one can be created per day, so the race to be the first to claim today’s is a popular contest among necromancers. Shines weakly but widely, attracts serpents and wolves, undead in its light can’t be turned. |
45 | Erot: A reanimated romantic relationship. Goes through the motions with none of the emotions. |
46 | Seven-Years Doom: A broken mirror restored by necromancy. Anyone who looks into it will be confronted with the worst in themselves until they’re driven to self-mutilation or suicide. |
47 | Jabbertalky: Languages are a lot like living things: they spread, they mature, 1they mutate, and they die. If a necromancer attempts resurrection of a dead language, a jabbertalky is the result. A bit like contagious Tourette’s that decays your teeth and tongue. |
48 | Quantum Banshee: A ghost pulled from a person’s possible future death. It is compelled to lead its past self to the doom that will create it. |
49 | Throbbing Pumpstack: An apparatus made of hearts and lungs which processes healthy air into clouds of miasma. |
50 | Necrocosm: Some say that this world is but one in a series of them, born from the death of the last in a flood, or a rupturing earthquake, or an onslaught of star-demons. The as-yet theoretical nercocosm would be an undead being created from one of these destroyed prior worlds. Perhaps its creation will be this world’s end. |
You did one like this way waaay back in the day, like I think it was one of the first ones of yours that I'd seen or at least the one that made it click for me that you were someone I wanted to follow. As much as I enjoyed that one back then, this one is even better, and a testament to your creativity and writing. This is so wonderfully grotesque and full of original and Interesting ideas, that are all thematic and cohesive yet in many cases so outside the box. You never cease to amaze, nor cease to outdo yourself, although at this point you would be well within your discretion to underwhelm once or twice!
ReplyDeleteSweet of you to say, thanks
DeleteI don't know which of these I enjoyed more!
ReplyDeleteThe autoknapper wouldn't really get less dangerous one ground down. It would become a lung-shredding cloud of flint dust, which is just horrifying to contemplate.
ReplyDelete