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[Rhenaya]

Ghosts are undead like zombies and skelletons except for three remarkable things:
those undeads are benign, meaning they wont attack, just scare the crap out of your civilians (bad thought: haunted by a ghost recently/lately)
they can float through any constructed thing (like constructed/nonnatural walls, floodgates and closed doors)
and as they are incorporal, also they can only be hurt with silver weapons, meaning on evil biome one should have a squad equiped with silver axes and stuff.
there is a chance that your own dwarfs come back as ghosts if they are to long not in a proper tomb and so on, giving the burial job a totally new experience

[nil]

I'm not sure about all the specifics (calculating pathing through constructed vs. nonconstructed walls would be a nightmare, and I'm wary of creating another source of cancellation spam) but generally I like this.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, why differentiate between natural and non-natural walls?  Pathfinding is fairly easy and straightforward when it simply flies through any obstacle.  The answer would always be a straight line.  The only problem would be trying to make it actually decide to float around a specific depth that dwarves would likely occupy.

[Hyndis]

I'm not sure I like the ideas of ghosts.

I do however like the idea of dead creatures in an evil biome having a chance to reanimate if they are not in a tomb. Make it maybe a 10% chance per month? Something like that, the numbers can be adjusted. This means that if you have a bunch of non-butchered, non-entombed corpses somewhere they will eventually rise up as zombie or skeletal versions of themselves.

A butchered corpse is taken apart into many tiny pieces so thats not an issue. A corpse in a coffin is secured, so thats also fine. Its the things sitting around in your refuse stockpile, or perhaps you don't want to clean up after a siege, which means you'll get some undead goblins rising up from the bloody mess if you don't handle it.

You could even exploit this to create your own undead mosh pit. Toss a bunch of corpses into a pit. The corpses will have a 10% chance per month to reanimate, so eventually all of them will be active again. Toss anyone you don't like into the pit. The undead will tear them apart, and then Urist McUseless will rise from the dead to join the undead. You could even use this as an archery training range. You can't kill something thats already dead, all you can do is knock them down for a while, but the undead have a disturbing tendency to get right back up again unless the corpse is destroyed. Butchering it will do this, but simply putting some crossbow bolts into it won't.

An undead pit would make for a horrific sort of trap. Make your entrance have drawbridges over the pit of the undead. Drop a goblin siege into the pit. See how well they do against the army of the undead! They will of course eventually lose. Even if they win at first, those corpses will stand up again. And again. And again. All slain goblins will also stand up again. And again. And again.

This could be so much FUN. 

 

[Neonivek]

Well... After you pound the skeleton/zombie to dust I don't think they will be comming back anytime soon.

Though the best strategy would be to make sure you have excellent seals on those coffins.

[Ubiq]

those undeads are benign, meaning they wont attack, just scare the crap out of your civilians (bad thought: haunted by a ghost recently/lately)
they can float through any constructed thing (like constructed/nonnatural walls, floodgates and closed doors)

Besides the notion of unburied dwarves coming back and destroying them with silver weapons, couldn't this be more easily accomplished by creating a ghost vermin that teleports around its biome rather than having the ability to path through a constructed object?

[Sizik]

[FallingWhale]

I think that the ghoul pit idea needs its own topic just because it's that awesome and I want a channel system filled with ghouls and blood just so I can uncover it in a siege

[Pilsu]

So, are we taking the same old clichéd road and making decapitation kill the zombies or are zombies actually dead, shambling around without direction from their rotten or entirely absent brain, meaning that loose hands are still mildly dangerous until hacked to pieces too small to move on their own? I never saw a any reason a DEAD creature would rely on it's central nervous system.

I suppose the zombie needs to technically die when it can't move anymore, otherwise it'll mess with the hauling but it'd be nice if the game pretended that the leftovers are still alive for the purposes of decoration and whatnot. It'd likely make any of the "good" races squeamish to have to watch decor like that.

[leftycook]

perhaps have a system in which every time a zombie gets up it has X% chance to not get up again if killed, to prevent single limbless headless torsos writhing around for infinity.
but yeah, this is a good idea. and the ghosts as a vermin could work. instead of eating food, they scare the crap out of your dwarves, and you have to build some sort of anti-ghost charm around your fort, like a single-tile altar to a god, or create silver crosses and have your civ's wear them.

[Josephus]

So, are we taking the same old clichéd road and making decapitation kill the zombies or are zombies actually dead, shambling around without direction from their rotten or entirely absent brain, meaning that loose hands are still mildly dangerous until hacked to pieces too small to move on their own? I never saw a any reason a DEAD creature would rely on it's central nervous system.

Yes, a zombie powered by Evil Magic^tm would probably take a little more effort to completely kill than a pseudoscientific headshot-able zombie.

[NW_Kohaku]

Of course, when you start introducing the actual threat of undead rising from the grave like this, it does raise the question of why the cultural norms would not immediately change to all burials having to cremate the body?

In the times and cultures where they had beliefs that vampires were real and would rise up, people would prepare coffins to automatically decapitate any body that tried to struggle out of the coffin (because they did believe decapitation killed vampires).

[Neonivek]

Of course, when you start introducing the actual threat of undead rising from the grave like this, it does raise the question of why the cultural norms would not immediately change to all burials having to cremate the body?

In the times and cultures where they had beliefs that vampires were real and would rise up, people would prepare coffins to automatically decapitate any body that tried to struggle out of the coffin (because they did believe decapitation killed vampires).

Depends... Why didn't they just Cremate the bodies of the people who could become vampires? The answer though is because the person was expected to get their body back later, if they became a Vampire however then they were obviously evil and deserved their heads to be chopped off.

They are more likely to just go a bit further to keep the zombies at bay without mistreating the bodies.

They already make Stone Coffins. It would be pretty tricky for a Zombie or skeleton to excape from a stone coffin that was properly sealed. So is you use cheap poorly manifactured coffins that arn't maintained then zombies could be the least of your worried. (In fact I look forward to a time when Zombies arn't too tough, but rather their demoralizing effects and diseases make them a deadly enemy. A Single scratch from a zombie could kill you not because you turn into a zombie but because of the almost instant infection.

[Pilsu]

Admittedly there's no reason why a coffin would arbitrarily stop undeath. Cremation makes a lot of sense.

[Neonivek]

Admittedly there's no reason why a coffin would arbitrarily stop undeath. Cremation makes a lot of sense.

Except that your applying your own cultural values to the Dwarves who may not agree with cremation (In fact a few religions don't)

A Coffin would stop undeath in the sense that a zombie couldn't escape from the coffin... Especially a solid rock coffin. Especially a sealed solid rock coffin like the dwarves make.

In fact how are the undead even escaping their coffins? They should be sealed to prevent the spread of disease.