Esoteric Arcana: Death, Religion, Necromancy, And Animation In Axioms
How To Raise Skeletons, Summon Abominations, Placate The Anscestors, And Animate The Inanimate
Introduction
For the small number of you who post on the various dying webforums I frequent you may know that I am obsessed with death. Well, undeath anyways. I’m always looking for the game with the best necromancy in a subgenre. I love all summons and constructs generally but the undead are my favorite. I exclusively played Necromancers in Diablo 2, Guild Wars 1, and Grim Dawn.
Undead was my favorite faction in Warlords Battlecry 3, and in Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim I picked Krypta, and therefore Fervus, in 70% of my games. Making giant skeletal hordes to stress my kingdom by targeting enemy skeletons for cloning was so much fun.
I’ve been watching a lot of Age Of Wonders 4 streams, even if I can’t afford/don’t want to blow $50 on it and people were discussing death/cold/shadow magic options. Someone brought up that Conquest Of Eo has great and relatively unique necromancy with parts and materials.
If you’ve posted on the Codex or Bay12 for 10+ years you may even know that my original gamedev endeavor was a pure pvp/co-op full loot player economy MMO with NPC monster societies with a huge crafting focus. Much like the crafting/building/alchemy system in Axioms the Necromancy aspect draws heavily from this old idea from the late 2000s, somewhat refined when I did some work on an open source Majesty1+++-like in Glest, the super old open source RTS engine. Specifically I started with the fork Glest Advanced Engine which focused on powerful singleplayer balance ignoring features.
I’ve obviously made some modifications due to genre/subgenre but Necromancy and Death-themed content in Axioms really goes hard and draws a lot from these previous concepts.
General Magic And Crafting
Axioms is a very detailed and integrated game. As such I can’t unfortunately get straight to necromancy. I’ve got to lay out some background and info on the relevant foundational systems. Axioms has a complex multi-stage production/crafting system, as laid out in some previous design posts.
You start with raw materials which have “properties”, this is one of the things that goes all the way back to my MMO attempt which drew heavily on SWG and some “cut” features of UO, based on their origin and in the case of natural resources the world gen. For instance fire dragon bones have fire related properties, draconic properties, magical properties, and such and can be used for construction, ground up for alchemy, forged into clubs or blades and such.
Special randomly generated crystals can have massive mana conduction, storage, or generation potential but a limited and depletable supply. This is one of the examples I used in a post on my original 2014-2016 blog regarding unique playstyles and the fall of empires, and it was based on a famous episode of Star Gate SG1 where an alien race has a fancy retrovirus that made them super fast/strong but that you eventually became immune to and their society ran out of users. You can read the various posts there below if you care to.
http://axiomsofdominion.blogspot.com/
Materials are processed into new intermediate materials with specific purposes like ingots/bars spear points and shafts, sword blades, planks and bricks, and so forth. After one or more levels of processing they are used to make items. Items and construction intermediate materials can make buildings. Alchemy follows a similar process.
Death, Religion, And Social Custom
One of the most enduring, archaeologically accessible, and universal facts of humanity is the understanding of and reaction to death. The pharaohs had pyramids sure, but most cultures and classes had their own rituals and their own “grave goods” as they are called by historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Ancestor worship was one of the most common early religious beliefs that we know of.
Every character and population in Axioms has data in their “Consciousness”(a sub-class in the source code that all actors/agents have to store stuff like Personality and Ideology” which deals with religion and death. Different populations will ahve different beliefs on what happens after death and what rites must be done for the dead.
I’ve often belabored innocents people on how Axioms is supposed to provide an experience like that of a major character in a fantasy novel and that applies here, too. If you’ve ever read the Baslag, Malazan, Death Gate, and ASOIAF novels, and many more, or even watched The Chronicles Of Riddik, you’ll have run into incredibly unique and complex societies with special and powerful relationships to death and the dead. I’ve done my best to make all of those iconic undead experiences possible in Axioms.
Some societies are ruled by the dead, some use entirely undead armies or labor forces, there are societies where there are undead caste systems with the living at the bottom. There are many procedurally generated unique types of undead and undeath aside from the classics.
There are also more historical options like anscestor worship, except the blessings of the anscestors actually do something quantifiable. In the sequel, which is full of fancy cut features like realms/planes and heavens/hells, I’d really like to have whole societies that engage the prime material plane with cool stuff based on their treatment of the dead. But that’s for a far future post.
Like any aspect of Ideology or Law or Religion in Axioms nations will be hostile or friendly based on similar ideas about the treatment of the dead. Necromancy could be considered profane or divine, banned or applauded.
Necromancy
Necromancy utilizes a version of the same system as crafting whereby you collect full skeletons or corpses of various races or monsters, or you can also collect individual body parts for augmentations or straight up abominations or even golems. Non-necromantic constructs work similarly but with different materials and a different magical aspect. Some fancier undead like vampires are the result of curses or viruses and other mad science or warlock/sorcerer chicanery rather than simply animating corposes or skeletons. As is common special corpses or even living beings that you then sacrifice can be used to make fancier stuff like wights or shades. This should be pretty moddable.
And of course one can use imbuement, styled after the famous fantasy series The Rune Lords, on undead just as well as any other population or military unit. Burning undead, frosty undead, miasmic undead. All possible. Humanoid undead, beasts, horros and so forth.
The power for raising the undead can come from many sources. Sacrifice, the aura of recent battlefields and so forth. I’m working on a system that creates special locations based on large battles, that can be traveled to and where uncommon kinds of undead can be raised.
Like any other material the bones and flesh used to create undead can be enchanted. Spells can also be caste on completed undead. Some magical buffs and debuffs affect the living, the undead, and the animated differently.
Summons And Constructs
Axioms has a very detailed system for creatures and monsters on top of the system for races and spirits/deities, and of course demons/devils/eldritch and other Outsiders. Undead are essentially a mix of summons like spirits and shades and wights, constructs like skeletons and zombies, and “races” like vampires.
Summons include various elemental creatures, demons, chaos and extraplanar entities, and so forth. These are not Characters or Populations and can’t form or manage their own societies, except in very special cases. Like constructs they can be used in buildings/items, as labor, or as military or intrigue assets. These are generally procedurally generated of a “format” and differ in the details from game to game.
Constructs are the most similar thing to undead since skeletons and zombies and even abominations essentially *are* constructs if you compare the mechanics. They includes things like humanoid or bestial golems as well as more mechanic things like fantasy exo-suits and stuff. Making mithril, or rarer metal, golems with heavily enchanted parts is one path to the mid/late game combat.
You basically pick a “body plan” and fulfill the requirements and then extras can be added but they mostly provide buffs rather than core capabilities. Flight can be achieved with or without wings, and ca be boosted with lighter or hollow materials, stronger movement enchantments, or just raw force/energy. Bipedal, quadrupedal, wings, finned, tails, and so forth. Then spikes or plates or giant fists or w/e are extras. Pretty similar to a very complex item or even a building. Full items can even be used in construction like a mana engine or flame cannon or w/e.
Conclusion
Like many standout features of Axioms necromancy is empowered by a more detailed simulation and a more granular set of foundational systems. Building in support for special features at the start and getting the benefits of the more powerful code for other similar/adjacent features is vastly superior to bolting on extras deep into development. You also avoid painful stuff like preventing bugs that differ between people who buy extra content and those who don’t and running multiple builds.
I’m really invested in meaningful and interesting necromancy even without the social/political/religious aspects but thanks to the way the Axioms simulation functions we get those extras basically for free, similar to how Divination is a free rider on the detailed intrigue systems.
I’d love to hear suggestions for good existing necromancy games or fantasy stories with cool implementations in the comments or on discord and also pet features people would like to see if it was possible.