Engeneering the dead

[Lugaru]

Ok... some of you might have read some prev. posts on how imprtant the manipulation of undead resources can be in my game. Of course this is not exclusively an NPC action, and pc necromancers will be allowed to do so as well. Now since I like to think of the undead as souless reanimations, programing them makes sense to me... does this sound like a cool way to do so?

Undead memories. Cost: 3 mana. The mind of an undead creature is usually wiped by their death. This of course makes them easy to program with new memories and goals. By touching the undead creatures brow (up to 2 creatures at a time, for the same cost) while concentrating on what you wish to program into their minds any kind of information can be resurfaced or imbedded. This is how the process works with the amount of turns it requires:
- Remember a language and be able to more or less speak it: 1 turn. This allows the undead to respond to simple commands and if equipped with the necessary organs, be able to communicate in very simple phrases too.
- Remember a skill that they had in life: this will allow an undead creature to remember a skill they had in life, usually giving poor results though. Mostly useful for creating soldiers with 1 or 2 of the soldier skills they had, some sadistic Necromancers have resurrected artists and reminded them of their talent so they can go on to create strange, mindless art. Magic is a skill that cannot be recuperated, due to the amount of imagination and though required to activate it.
- Friends and enemies: Usually indicates to an undead creature what your allies look like, and excludes certain types of people from what they should attack (such as not attacking other undead creatures, or people wearing a certain crest on their armor). This tends to be an automatic addition to the undead memories which you need not spend time on.
- Raw information: You can transmit 3 or 4 things you know to an undead creature per turn spent. This information usually consists in directions to certain places, way's to carry out certain tasks (like mining or begging for money on the streets, hehe).
- In life information: Sometimes a zombie can be resurrected only to preserve certain information that was contained in its brain. With a turn worth of concentration a zombie will sometimes remember paths to places, combinations on locks or how to solve simple puzzles. Names and other information tends to stick to the brain very well too.
- Identity: an undead creature can be made to remember its past identity and even gain a certain degree of sentience (and self consciousness) but this is considered a huge taboo amongst necromancers. Undead who are aware of having once lived tend to try to destroy whatever enemies they had in life, the necromancer that spawned them and often themselves as well. Also this sort of undead are very erratic, randomly remembering other skills and information they had in life ultimately becoming a hateful and soulless mockery of who they once where. Some of these even remember how to use magic as well...

So any way's the general idea is for instance: A necro guy gets a pretty usefull corpse in good conditions, reanimates it having done whatever phisical alterations where needed and then takes a few turns to program it to perform certain actions or do certain things. Does it sound like a decent way to do this? Does some game have great undead mechanics? Does it sound too abusable on the long run?

Here's some examples of good and bad that I think can come of this:

Good: Zombie artists splattering any liquid they can find along the walls of their prison.

Bad: A half decayed, slow moving zombie that surprisingly was once a fencer and can still fence better than most pc's.

Good: "I reanimate the guard so he leads me to the enemy's cave"

Bad: "Ok... time to have another 2 hour question and answer setion with the dead guard regarding traps".

Good: Minshaft full of zombie miners looking for gold

Bad: 200 zombies locked in a room with type writers trying to write the great american novel.

I know... Its the story teller's job to increase or decrease the chances of any of this happening, but not all story tellers are made equal