#(( this is even worse when you think about the weird species in the magic aquifers.... kale might technically be an undead....

[royalreef]

@biteyourcrush​ replied to your post:

Give! Me! The! Undead! Lore!

(( I still don’t have a ton of undead lore at this time, honestly? Mainly because I’ve been fussing over how I want to handle them as a group - there are so many variations of “undead” and so many different ideas of what that term means, that it’s hard to nail it down to one single concept.

For example: I already know that vampires are people who have been afflicted with a magical virus, which restructures their body and gives them a compulsion and simple biology needed to obtain and ingest blood. It’s primary host is humans, but has made zoonotic jumps to werewolves and catfolk before, with werewolves being somewhat more common than catfolk. Any species that isn’t a mammal is basically immune, hence those three, and it requires biological components and a living host, so magically constructed species like demons are also going to be immune. 

Importantly, the compulsion is what matters the most - vampires could, very much so, live off of the same diet they possessed before, but vampirism moreso makes them highly adverse and even afraid of eating anything other than blood, even when their body still might need those additional nutrients. This is made even more difficult by the changes imposed upon their bodies by the virus’ magical components, which can make it harder to eat what they used to, giving them traits more in-line with whatever type of magic the virus picked up on. 

It’s spread through blood, either whenever infected blood enters into the bloodstream, or through saliva coming in contact with blood/open wounds. Vampirism is ultimately a pretty survivable condition, so long as the proper steps are taken to accommodate for the person. Since the need for blood is more of a mental need than a physical one, things that look like blood but aren’t can address this issue with ease, or even just substituting animal blood. The only danger comes if these accommodations aren’t made, since vampires can still starve, and no one starving will be acting in their rational mind. 

But all of this comes back around to the issue of other undead. I’ve debated over making zombies a different strain of the same virus as vampires, or even just the same thing entirely, just called a different name sometimes. But I couldn’t tell you if this is a good call- I’m still fussing over it, and I’m not sure how I feel about adding to the trope of a zombie virus, even if these zombies are just... Normal people, still alive, still themselves, just with a change in needs and accommodations that have to be made for them. They might look different now, but it’s far from the end of the world.

Other types of undead get even harder. I’m pretty sure there’s still magically-constructed undead, with the full range of how much of a soul they possess? ( Albeit, in the redesign universe, a “soul” is roughly defined as the amount of magic contained within the body at any given time. Even in nonnative magic users, they still will take in universal background magic and store it within their cells, they just aren’t doing anything with it and it’s too small to create much of an effect. Think radioactive isotopes that get used for things like carbon dating. ) 

With some undead, they’re basically a bunch of bones just loosely tied together and animated to do stuff, some are more complicated and the spells that created them interact with their souls to a degree to allow them to retain their old personalities at their time of death ( since magic picks up on the things that surround it ), and then you have the undead who are basically an entirely new magically-constructed person who just so happens to be contained within a shell that used to belong to someone else, and more from there. It gets even weirder with less-intentional undead, since wild magic can result in some bizarre outcomes if there’s a lot of unused biological material around it, and none of this is even talking about ghosts, which is what happens when a person’s soul at the time of death interacts with magic in a certain way, that essentially forces that person to be reborn as a highly unstable magic construct. In the case of ghosts, they either can be tied to the body in some way or not, and the resulting spell that is their entire self now is usually messy, tangled, and unique on a case-by-case basis.

Steins are also included in the definition of undead, even if the idea gets... even messier from here. There’s no one definition of a stein, no one way to construct one, so this covers a MASSIVE variety of “I tried to make a person” and a similarly ranged variety of results. Calling them steins, or constructs, or any kind of grouping at all really, is going to be more of a cultural thing than an actual term or even a real group. I think the only thing they’d all really have in common is the mix of biological components with magical components, since you still can’t just reanimate dead tissue, but that still makes them fundamentally the same thing as just a skeletal construct, and it’s even worse when you start including the fact that not all of the parts that make up a stein might be dead when they were used. You could argue that other species having kids as they do is the making of a stein, even when it’s just normal sexual reproduction. It’s complicated.

And then you have entirely-magic magically constructed species who get called undead because they kinda vaguely look like the undead. Just to give you a hint of how wide the terms really are.

#Most secret royal advisor || OOC #biteyourcrush #(( THIS IS SO MUCH i am so sorry #(( also this might be worded weirdly but whatever im just trying to put the words down while i can #(( what is a stein? a miserable little pile of person #(( this is even worse when you think about the weird species in the magic aquifers.... kale might technically be an undead.... #(( or just the different non-undead species who have their own conceptions of death and cultural ideas of what its like to be undead #Given by Divine Right || Headcanons #(( even tho its redesign universe stuffs