Living Graveyards

 

In a world where corpses can rise, specters haunt the night, and innumerable horrors straddle the line between life and death, is it truly so surprising that a graveyard may be just as perilous as the deepest jungle? Oh, not all of them, for certain. Not some muddy plot in a frontier town, no. But when a city, a kingdom, is immense and decrepit, swollen with history, riddled with catacombs and bloated by mausoleums, a second realm will sometimes grow up from within the lands of the living, sprawling for miles, latched on to its host. Courts of blood-drinkers, carrion-eaters, flesh-takers, their people the teeming masses of shambling rot drawn from the luckless masses dumped into its innards. No longer for peace of mind or restful repose, but as tribute. For so long as the graves are filled, their rulers have no need to leave. For where else would such a multitude of corpses, as food or as slaves, be delivered to their door? The flesh of humans provide unique nourishment, and certainly such places beget monsters, they are perhaps less powerful than if the living, each bearing the potential to recreate the legacy of the Titans, were to sup on such a bounty themselves. In this way such feral graveyards act as wardens and disposal for a most perilous charge. In a hamlet where every fellow knows his neighbor and a single death is quick-spreading news, a would-be anthropophage would be hard-pressed to conceal their crime without abandoning their life. But in metropoli, corpses can easily go missing, and everyone is a stranger to another.

With their benefits and detriments balanced carefully, these necropoli exist, typically, in a state of uneasy peace with their living reflections. Hiding during the day, skulking at night, a thin line of tradesmen, refugees, and exiles going between. Governed by a separate set of laws, absolute within its own territory and ignored elsewhere. Ever under quiet siege by living rulers who tire of such a festering wound in their kingdom, acting through disposable pawns promised burial gold and a pardon, even as those same dark courts are bribed to act in the service of the realm as mercenaries, assassins, or repositories of ancient knowledge. They were, after all, once respectable fathers, mothers, sons and daughters. Their names are known, their shames the shames of their relatives that yet live, and their wealth often discretely parceled to those same tainted clans in exchange for services in the lands of daylight.  

They often bear more comforts than their inactive counterparts, these cemeteries. Their mausoleums are furnished with rich furs and candles of corpse-wax, their doors with a lock and key. Though many tools of the living are absent, for the dead have little need of kitchens or toiletries, their victuals preferred raw or boiled in communal cauldrons during great bacchanals, for those among them which do partake in flesh. Thus it is best that mourning and visitation be done in the day, and if one is caught out at night and cannot leave, to pray an ancestor's resting place may be found, and that its inhabitant is one of the fortunate reborn and willing the share their lodgings. Even so, there is no guarantee they will be found when the sun rises.

And sometimes, of course, a city dies. It starves, or rots, or burns, and the people die or leave.

But the graveyard can remain. 

Untethered to the living, the ties that bind its denizens to mortals wither, and it may go one of two ways. It may turn inward, nursing its grudges, carrying on half-remembered rituals, gnawing on mouldering bones and preying on tomb robbers daring enough to challenge it.

Or it spreads outwards, like a mold. It sends its emissaries to villages, demanding their dead. It sends its promising subordinates to lesser mausoleums, to ward them as outposts and fend off rival scavengers. It becomes a city of corpses, a kingdom of them, their tombs growing into great monuments reaching towards the heavens, driven by an unwholesome vitality, existing as a dark echo of the people that built it. 

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I don't mind an undead faction or kingdom for the players to explore, but always thought them existing as just a group unto themselves in some distant part of the map didn't really play into the strengths of the concept. Every living corpse used to be a person, right? With ties to a particular place and time. They make more sense to me as tied to a living society, growing and shrinking with their fortunes, and if a land of the dead does exist, I imagine it forming as I have laid out. I also like the wordplay between metropolis and necropolis. They do fit as a pair, one existing alongside the other. But now with much more tension. I see these places as a perfect cross section between nuclear waste disposal site, the worst slum you've ever seen, a retirement home for old people with mental health issues, and a venue for mysterious eccentric rich people.

I like it being a very messy affair. Too difficult and emotionally fraught to reliably be exterminated by locals, too dangerous to be trusted, too powerful for the living to ignore. Meanwhile, the dead inhabitants within struggle with attachment to still-living friends and relatives vs their newfound apathy or malign hungers, the ambition of the most powerful specimens versus the knowledge that if they don't rock the boat, there will always be more food. A graveyard, at least in this setting, is important both to allow human remains to decay into uselessness before they can be consumed by other humans, and to record deaths to gain a sense of the land's mortality rates and note any deviations that might indicate corpses are going missing and unauthorized anthropophages are growing in size and number.

Population-wise, I'd reckon that a living graveyard would be, at maximum, the living population divided by ten. So a city of hundreds of thousands would at most have tens of thousands of undead, and most of those would be lesser ones, in a very extreme case. Most would be shambling, dementiac corpses of dubious coherency, specters bound to a location, and so on. A minority of those would be things more like ghouls, vampires, more mobile incorporeal spirits, the odd necromancer on the cusp of undeath himself, and so on. These are the movers and shakers most incentivized to try and control the world beyond their domain, or at least preserve their own freedom within the tombs. 

And in the middle of this are those who straddle the line between both worlds. Undead capable of passing as the living, living who have earned the trust of the dead or are otherwise bound to them, bringing news and resources back and forth, spreading a network of spies and associates across the land, growing an under-kingdom or fighting to stifle it, or just running errands for particular clients. This is where the adventuring comes in.