marrow
1.4.1you don't raise the dead, you build them
skulls come off everything; frames only where there was a spine worth keeping; the drowned have no frame of their own and ride everyone else's. five kinds of dead and four places to hang them make fourteen parts, and two of one kind are identical — no part is a number. nothing comes off a baby, off anything with a name (those deaths are lych's), or off anything tamed, which is petkeep's law and absolute. two parts from a death at the most.
hang a skull, a frame and one pair of limbs on an armature — which has no collision at all, so you dress it by walking through it — set a plain candle in the ribs, strike it, and it walks. what you hung is what it does. parts are behaviours, never stats: one health pool, one speed, one modest bite, whatever the build, while spider limbs buy it a moment's grip on a wall, a drowned's arms let it breathe and path through water, and a horse's frame is something you can ride. rain wears the candle down and the whole thing collapses into a burning pile — get back to it inside half a minute with empty hands and it stands up again. fit a lantern in the ribcage and the rain stops mattering; it pops back off as an item when the bones go, because a lantern is hardware.
and then the long game. a candle set on a glass block, paid for with two hearts of your own blood because no item may stand in for blood, is a heart; a complete unlit armature bound to you is a vessel. die while the heart is actually burning and you go to the vessel as a flame and stand up in the bones: daylight wears at you, water cannot drown you, the undead forget you are there. you come back to flesh by sleeping beside your own remains. every doubt on that path ends in an ordinary respawn with the heart still lit, and a body carrying the flame is one lych stands well back from.
as of 1.4.0 the slab builds the totem. a husk set on it at night with eight bones is the built totem by morning: when it fires it fires hard, a longer shield and the night's things thrown back from you, and it leaves a husk for the next time.
the baton
| gesture | you get |
|---|---|
| use it on a servant | bound — one of four leashes one hand can hold |
| use it on the ground | go and hold that spot |
| use it on a living thing | take it — never a player, never another servant |
| crouch and use it | heel |
| hold use | stay, all of you — and a servant told to hold ground answers nothing until ordered off it |
