A Treatise on the Undead Theory.

[Strike Anywhere]

This is a personal tirade, to vent what has been bothering me for too long. Undead of non-human nature.

This includes clans of vampiric skaven, every second undead players fluff which includes a lizardman/dark elf/snotling being bitten by a vampire in its death throes and becoming an 'insta-get' by the next morning.

It really grinds my gears when I see the cursed company, and undead orcs and undead saurus. I understand warhammer is an avenue of creativity, but despite this I'm still going to give my two cents on this topic. I sum this up in three key points.

- The curse of vampirism is a human disease. It unleashes the dark and bestial side of humanity. No other races are afflicted by this. The only other race I can see being susceptible to this curse may be the elves, because of their similar desires and character faults.

- Thralls and gets is a long ritual process. It's like adopting a kid and raising him as your own. Vampires do not go out biting everything on the battlefield and making them all vampires. Vampirism is a coveted power amongst their kind, not shared easily. The Genevieve novels are testament to this, but not the only source (See the Inheritance etc).

- Necromancers and vampires only raise human skeletons and zombies because they see the winds of death as a sea of human souls. For whatever reason, only human undead answer the call of their masters. Dead lizardmen, skaven, orcs etc. simply do not/cannot answer. This also explains why necromancy does not summon roadkill, dead cattle or even dead plants. Simply put, humans can tap into the psychic energy and projections of other dead humans.


Well that's my opinion. For me, it clears up all the 'what if and why not' questions regarding undead.

[Hideous Loon]

But cannot Necromancers raise animals? Then, where do Dire Wolves and Fell Bats come from?

Secondly, the Cursed Company works a it differently from a regular Undead army, since it's Wosshisname's Fell Sword of Choppin' that raises the soldiers. Therefore, it's rather feasible that it should "convert" other races as well as humans.

I agree with you on the "It takes a while to make a Vampyre" part.

[ryng_sting]

Liber Necris will probably sort your concerns out. It's out soon.

[Finnblood]

The novel Necromancer spends like two chapters in preparing and reanimating a roadkill. I think stuff can be reanimated, why not? The necros summon the winds of chaos to retrieve the confused souls of the dead to possess their bodies once again. And sometimes I think they simply summon a very minor daemon or such to possess the corpse.

Anything can be reanimated, even stuff that never existed - like the Ushabti.

But Saurus Ghosts, that's disturbing! (yay, i'll paint em white and give em a swarm base! Look, they're lizard-ghosts!)

[Arnizipal]

- Necromancers and vampires only raise human skeletons and zombies because they see the winds of death as a sea of human souls. For whatever reason, only human undead answer the call of their masters. Dead lizardmen, skaven, orcs etc. simply do not/cannot answer. This also explains why necromancy does not summon roadkill, dead cattle or even dead plants. Simply put, humans can tap into the psychic energy and projections of other dead humans.

Raising zombies and skeletons has nothing to do with souls. All the spell really does is animate a dead body. It could any body really wheather human, elf dwarf or lizardman. The souls has long gone, it's just that the body is still moving.

Only wights, wraiths, banshees and such (generally the more powerful undead) have a shred of their souls remaining.

EDIT: This thread might help.

[Reabe]

The only reason we see just human skeletons is because they are the "most common" in the Old World where most of the battles happen.

It would be cool if GW released a plastic "Un-human skeleton" box kit with Skaven, Orc, Dwarf and Saurus skeleton warriors.

[Hideous Loon]

Yes, that'd be very cool indeed. Put that on your list of "awesome GW things that would raise sales obscenely but will never happen because GW are cheapskate fools". That list is rather long, as I recall.

[jansenm]

hmmm....
interesting theory
but I do think anything can be reanimated, steeds, nightmares etc. and even plants that treekin springs to my mind

I mean a vampire doesnt just bite people on their juggular viens, feed, then the victim turms into a vampire (that only works for the zombie plague)
A vampire chooses a worthy opponant and give him/her/it a blood kiss i.e give part of the vampires blood and kisses the victim (also no you can not jut steal their blood as they have very little running around their bodies.)

however vamprism changes for one book to another so who knows gw can have vampire dwarfs. but I think these are just fan made conversions anyway to stick their army from the rest of the crowd.

btw the curse company is richter kruegers curse it all has to do with wat he kills with blight (his magic weapon) but if you want to be "realistic" he shouldnt have skeletons at all they should rise as zombies

[Hideous Loon]

Well, not really Zombies, as it were. The Cursed Company blurb I've read states that Blight (thanks!) makes the flesh of its opponent blacken and wither, making it fall off. This turns the opponent, be it human, Elf or Ogre, into a skeleton. The magic of Herr Krueger keeps it moving, but does nothing to improve the situation of his minions.

[jansenm]

yeah! I couldnt really remember but its all comming back to me I read it when it first came out :P

[N0-1_H3r3]

This includes clans of vampiric skaven, every second undead players fluff which includes a lizardman/dark elf/snotling being bitten by a vampire in its death throes and becoming an 'insta-get' by the next morning.

To be honest, I can't actually see the problem with that single clan of vampiric skaven. In part because I never saw them as actual vampires - their proximity to the necromancy-blasted lands of Sylvania altered them, resulting in vampire-like traits, such as increased longevity and the need/tendancy to consume blood instead of their normal food, without them actually being part of that ancient and specific legacy started by Queen Neferata in long-dead Lahmia.

[Rathgar]

- The curse of vampirism is a human disease. It unleashes the dark and bestial side of humanity. No other races are afflicted by this. The only other race I can see being susceptible to this curse may be the elves, because of their similar desires and character faults.

Similar character traits my ****, Skaven are more like humans than elves. Elves have entirely different drives and weakness to humans. Their emotional range is much greater and they just think weird. Crazy pointy eared tree-huggers that they are. It’s hard for us humans to talk about how they think. Someone once compared humans in comparison to elves as having a mental disorder, they can relate to each other but an elf can never fully get humans (“mentally ill people”) to grasp some concepts etc. Their brains can make connections ours are incapably of. They’re alien, and therefore almost as bad as wizards, and should be burned should they come to our village, poking their noses in where its not wanted!

As to cross-race transfer of the curse, we hit the fundamental problem that Vampirism is not very well described. Except in the buffyism that Space wrote in WD a while back. That vampirism is infection by a parasitic sprit or daemon. Theoretically therefore anything with a soul can be infected… so that's the all the mortal races right there. But that just sits as wrong with me… Maybe there’s something specific to humans that opens them up to this sort of thing?

[Lord Lucifer]

My view is the Elixir of Life backfired for the poor humans
It's passed on (comparatively) commonly amongst humans

How it affects the other races I do not know, but would like it to have at least SOME different reaction, given Elves and Dwarfs are different in more than just appearance

[prince olthin]

anyone with a soul ey, how about vampire Slann that would be cheesy :cheese:

[Eldacar]

How it affects the other races I do not know, but would like it to have at least SOME different reaction, given Elves and Dwarfs are different in more than just appearance

I can certainly imagine those two races having a different reaction to the disease, since while they might be similar to humans, they are biologically different. Perhaps a human could come back to "unlife", but an elf or Dwarf would just die?

[jansenm]

anyone with a soul ey, how about vampire Slann that would be cheesy :cheese:

the thing that pops in my mind is that fat vampire in blade 1 that eats babies and in sharge of the library

[Hideous Loon]

Olthin: That wouldn't quite work. A Slann is one of the most heavily protected beings in the world, being guarded 24/7 by creatures designed to protect him, and around him is a whole city filled with yet more creatures designed to do the same thing. And around this city is league upon league with dense, savage jungle that makes the Jurassic Park look like a petting zoo. And to travel there, you need to know where it is, which is about as easy as finding a needle in a haystack the size of K2.

And to top that off, Slann and Vampires don't exactly have the same state of mind, the Slann focus on knowledge and meditation, while the Vampires focus on victory now and satisfaction of their blood hunger.

[Rathgar]

I can certainly imagine those two races having a different reaction to the disease, since while they might be similar to humans, they are biologically different. Perhaps a human could come back to "unlife", but an elf or Dwarf would just die?

Now that I like, as long as it’s a particularly gribbley death.

I agreed with Eldacar… something’s very wrong here

[The Pale Lady]

Ok, heres how it stands :::

The Elixir of Life opened up each master to infiltration by a demon. This much is cannon. Now its the most logical train of thought therefore that when a master bit and began to enthrall a victim, what that entails (or 'entrails' ) is him passing on a portion of the demon through the blood into his victim. This results in a vampire, but a less powerful one nonetheless because he has less of the demon in his blood, and it is the demon which grants the vampire his strengths and traits.
So as you go down the generations, the vampires get progessively weaker. This we know too. Now, Im sure a vampire can grow in strength, and I would imagine this is done through the repeated feeding of blood. The blood nourishes the demon within and it will perhaps grow stronger by the blood, but it is still only a smaller portion of the demon than within the vampire's sire and so its maximum power will be less.
What else needs to be covered? Hm ok, why a vampire needs to drink.
The demon within needs to be fed and nourished to remain strong and grant the vampire its powers. Without it, it will diminish and its ability to sustain the corpse it in inhabits will lessen. The vampire will appear to wither and become a decrepit shell of its former self, never dying but shrivelled and weak. By absorbing the blood again, the demon will recover and regenerate the body it lives in, plumping out the flesh and making it the immortal, beautiful vampire that we recognize most of them as.

The result of all this goes to say that the disease of vampirism revolves around the passing on of the demon, and i see no reason why this cannot be passed onto none human beings. Perhaps if the body is much larger, the demon will require alot more blood to sustain it (think vampire ogre or saurus?) and if much smaller, much less blood is needed (vampire skaven?) althjough the skaven would still feel the 'need' to feed, as vampires retain some of their former characters and the drive to eat is a strongly imbedded in the skaven psyche.

[Elannion]

To me we have to look back at what it was that made them vampires, the elixir. Now this was designed by nagash as a human to make himself immortal, now he managed this but his elixir was so inexact that it didn't work the way he wanted and backfired.

Now heres the theoretical bit, humans all have a certain chemistry in their bodys and a certain way magic works, other races are more resistant to magic, some are less in the material world than they are in the spirit world, each race has a different make up and some are inherintaly magical so their chemistry and magical chemistry would be different as they all are designed for different things, what might kill an elf might be great for an ogre. Thusly you could see that something designed to make humans immortal would react differently to the magic and chemistry of each race.