BakingViking's RPG Tips and Recommendations

This is a blog to share cool and helpful stuff for anyone playing or running any tabletop role playing game.

[ladytabletop]

in the wake of the wotc OGL nightmare, I’ll post a list of games you can play as an alternative when I’m off work

[ladytabletop]

SO YOU WANNA PLAY A GAME THAT’S NOT THAT ONE

We’re mad about the new OGL, and the likelihood that it’s not going to be revised. (And maybe even if it is, we’re mad enough to move on to something new). You wanna play a tabletop game but not that one anymore. Here’s my recs!

The Wildsea RPG

Mechanically: the game uses d6s for skill rolls, and tracks for determining injuries, travel, etc. Your character build consists of an origin, bloodline, and post.

Flavorfully: You wanna sail a sea of endless trees? You want a dash of Lovecraftian horror? You want pirate vibes without the water? Try this one on for size.

Good Society

Play if: you like the social aspects of DnD, you’re a fan of Jane Austen, you loved D20′s A Court of Fae & Flowers, you like romance in your games

Monster of the Week

Mechanically: the game is driven by ‘moves’, which are like actions in combat, except they’re not usually limited to combat, and also the game is way more open-ended and rule of cool.

Flavorfully: urban fantasy monster hunters, buffy the vampire slayer or x-files or supernatural is your jam.

Coyote & Crow

Play if: you want to see a gorgeous Indigenous-designed game that focuses on a decolonized alternate history and ends up in a solarpunk future; or, you’re just bored of Shadowrun

Blades in the Dark

Mechanically: this game technically started out as Powered by the Apocalypse (aka similar to Apocalypse World) but is so distinct that it spawned a whole new genre: Forged in the Dark. Truly, you should read this even if you don’t play it because there are a ton of cool mechanics in here. My favorites are definitely Progress Clocks.

Flavorfully: you’re not a good guy. not really. you work in the shadows. you know there’s dirty work. but you’re trying, dammit. you’re really trying.

Alternatively, Spire is a similar game with somewhat lighter mechanics.

Orbital Blues

Play if: you love Cowboy Bebop, the wild west, truckers, that sort of thing. A really solid sci fi game!!

“Okay that’s cool and all, LT, but you’re not really selling me the DnD fantasy vibes.”

Hm, a tough customer. Here’s a shortlist of some fantasy alternatives I like:

Inspirisles (learn sign language while you play)

Mausritter (OSR style for the Redwall fans)

For the Dungeon! (play minions protecting their dungeon)

Icon (still in beta, by the creator of Lancer - very rules hefty)

Troika! (technically science fantasy because you’re jumping dimensions, but tomayto, tomahto)

Hungry Gnolls Eat the Rich (for no reason in particular)

now go forth and play!

[whitepeopletwitter]

[injuries-in-dust]

Fun Fact, thats, more or less, something that wealthy people in China and Japan did, they were called “musical floorboards.” Designed to squeak when stood upon. A person could make noise all the way down a corridor.

The residents and servants knew which floorboards made a sound and avoided them. But a burglar, or assassin didn’t. If you heard the creaking of floorboards, you knew danger was coming.

Even better, despite what movies may show, a lot of the old west was founded by Chinese immigrants, so there could have been carpenters around who knew how to make the musical floorboards!

[apocalypticvalraven]

They were also called Nightingale Floors, and looking up to make sure I had the right term, I found they were super clever! They were more than just ill-fit boards or whatever makes floors creak normally, they actually used little metal bars under the boards placed into small holes in the boards to cause the creak.

[swan2swan]

The best things on the internet are when someone makes a joke and then Miss Frizzle rolls up for an educational adventure.

[horizonwalkers]

Cleaned up another cantrip I made for a character I played awhile ago since it could use the update in wording. It also coincides that it works pretty well with @bakingviking's suggestion for a spell!

transcript below

Foliage Flurry Evocation Cantrip

Casting Time: 1 action Range: 60 ft. Components: V, S Duration: Instantaneous

You summon a squall of sharped leaves in a 5 ft. radius sphere centered on a point within range. Creatures within the storm must make a Dexterity saving throw. On a failed save they take 1d8 slashing damage.

This spell's damage increases by 1d8 when you reach 5th level (2d8), 11th level (3d8), and 17th level (4d8).

[keplercryptids]

combat additions to make it actually take more than a round for your players to kill your cool boss

difficult terrain. flood that cavern! oops the floor is lava! make the walls attack and grapple!

environmental effects in general. make an avalanche happen as soon as combat starts. combat during a storm is a great opportunity for lightning to strike. rain, snow, darkness, distance, fog, anything that'll impose disadvantage on their hits.

charm and fear effects. charm/fear conditions on a PC or two can totally turn the tide of an encounter.

straight up just swallow a PC or two. sometimes ingestion is the answer.

official statblock be damned, your boss should ALWAYS have additional legendary actions and/or resistances, condition and damage resistances/immunities, multiple attacks (probably more than the statblock says) and a motherfucking escape plan!

portals. seriously, just chuck some portals in there. I've never run a combat that couldn't be improved by the addition of a portal or two.

time constraints, mid-combat puzzles, a non-combat goal, anything the PCs have to do during the fight that isn't actually fighting.

in general, just get weird with it! wizards of the coast doesn't own you! no gods no masters! hit harder and have more fun!

[inkwell-attitude]

all the tips I found for drawing a fantasy map are like :) “here’s a strategy to draw the land masses! here’s how to plot islands!” :) and that’s wonderful and I love them all but ??? how? do y'all decide where to put cities/mountains/forests/towns I have my map and my land but I’m throwing darts to decide where the Main Citadel where the Action Takes Place is

[fatal-blow]

okay so i know i said most of this in the replies but it might be easier to actually reblog and say stuff instead lmao

Cities - go near water!  freshwater lakes and rivers (rivers especially) are the best places for cities because A) source of water and B) travel and trade is much easier cus you can put your boats like right there.  Basically ever relevant city ever was built on a lake or a river.

for rivers in general - because gravity, rivers run from mountains (forming from melting snow and ice (this is why they get fat in spring–more stuff melting)) to lakes/ocean where they can empty out (and even lakes will have rivers leading out that eventually get to the ocean), which can help when mapping out where those start and end.  rivers are also much thinner and faster in steeper elevations and very slow and wide when the land is flat

mountains - i like to think of what the tectonic plates look like because that’s what makes mountains!  mountains are also never standalone they’re always in mountain ranges (archipelagos are really just underwater mountain ranges babey).  a cool trick I like to do is occasionally separate mountain ranges across continents, because over time the tectonic plates shifted and literally split the range in half.  These mountains are really old tho so they’ve eroded and therefore it makes them smaller and rounder (like the appalachians) as opposed to relatively young mountain ranges like the rocky mountains which have taller and sharper peaks

Another mountain trick: if your mountains run along the ocean, the ocean side of the mountains will get a LOT of rain while the other side will be very dry–almost desert-like, in fact.  think of temperate rainforests in British Columbia vs the drier conditions in the canadian prairies

forests - depends on how warm the area might be.  coniferous forests are found further north (before you hit the tree line, and then it’s only tundra onwards) but as you head south you get leafier trees, and the leaves tend to get larger too

If you think about general elevation too, you’ll have places that might be swampy (wet + lower).  if your world has an ice age like we did, then glaciers may have carved the land, leaving piles of soil in the south that was left when the ice receded and places where the bedrock has been bared north of that (like the Canadian Shield in Canada–the reason we see that is because of the glaciers)

You might also have a land that’s dotted in a shitton of freshwater lakes as well because the meltwater filled the holes that the glaciers scraped out (this is why canada has so many goddamn lakes)

and if the ice age was more recent than it was in our world, then you might not even have the forest re-growth and it could be a lot of open plains

tl;dr i like to think of major climate events that might have also shaped the land on top of some basic rules

[possiblypedanticrpgideas]

The Artifexian has an entire series on building your world from literally the stars down and then the ground up.

Worldbuilding Videos - YouTube

All my worldbuilding videos

Though, for fantasy, you can make the world operate on entirely different principles:

With that done, the actual topic of city placement can be covered by videos like this:

Or

Once you have your places, if you want help naming them in realistic ways, this video can help:

This one is on architecture, which is definitely a subset of cities:

But for a more relevant practical guide on making settlements realistic:

Here’s a quick guide for making demographics:

[inkwell-attitude]

holy shit?

[prokopetz]

Here’s a little trick I’ve used in D&D games where the premise of your campaign calls for the party to have access to lots of Stuff, but you don’t want to do a whole bunch of bookkeeping: the Wagon.

In a nutshell, the party has a horse-drawn wagon that they use to get around between – and often during – adventures. This doesn’t come out of any individual player character’s starting budget; it’s just provided as part of the campaign premise.

Before setting out from a town or other place of rest, the party has to decide how many gold pieces they want to spend on supplies. These funds aren’t spent on anything in particular, and form a running total that represents how much Stuff is in the wagon.

Any time a player character needs something in the way of supplies during a journey or adventure, one of two things can happen:

1. If it’s something that any fool would have packed for the trip and it’s something that could reasonably have been obtained at one of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., rations, spare clothing, fifty feet of rope, etc.), then the wagon contains as much of it as they reasonably need. Just deduct the Player’s Handbook list price for the item(s) in question from the wagon’s total.

2. If it’s something where having packed it would take some explaining, or if it’s something that’s unlikely to have been available for purchase at any of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., a telescope, a barrel of fine wine, a book of dwarven erotic poetry, etc.), the player in need makes a retroactive Intelligence or Wisdom check, versus a DC set by the GM, to see if they somehow anticipated the need for the item(s) in question. Proficiency may apply to this check, depending on what’s needed. The results are read as follows:

Success: You find what you’re looking for, more or less. If the group is amenable, you can narrate a brief flashback explaining the circumstances of its acquisition. Deduct its list price (or a price set by the GM, if it’s not on the list) from the wagon’s total.

Failure by 5 points or less: You find something sort of close to what you’re looking for. The GM decides exactly what; it won’t ever be useless for the purpose at hand, but depending on her current level of whimsy, it may simply be a lesser version of what you were looking for, or it may be something creatively off the mark. Deduct and optionally flash back as above.

Failure by more than 5 points: You come up empty-handed, and can’t try again for that item or anything closely resembling it until after your next stopover.

As an incidental benefit, all the junk the wagon is carrying acts as a sort of ablative armour. If the wagon or its horses would ever take damage, instead subtract a number of gold pieces from its total equal to the number of hit points of damage it would have suffered. The GM is encouraged to describe what’s been destroyed in lurid detail.

[basalt-dnd]

This type of method makes it *way* easier to keep track of items, and… it’s pretty darn funny when the players succeed a roll to see if they backed something outrageously stupid. Trust me, the flash backs are hilarious. Never skip out on them.

[bvrpg]

Once the party has their own flying boat in my campaigns this will be how I handle supplies for it.

[everythingfox]

Onward

(via)

[prokopetz]

More inadvisable Dungeons & Dragons characters, justifying that proficiency bonus edition:

A sorcerer whose skills were inherited from their supernatural parent along with their magic; they have to carefully avoid thinking about what they’re doing, because it’s all intuitive for them, and if they try to approach it systematically they can’t do it  

A sheltered young bard who has practically no real-world experience and is constantly remarking that they “read about something like this once” before attempting some unlikely feat of skill; infuriatingly, it always works  

A traditionalist barbarian who bemoans the world’s present degenerate state and champions strict adherence to the Old Ways; some of the activities they’re willing to claim with a straight face are exercises of the Old Ways raise a number of questions  

A rogue whose suspiciously convenient talents always seem to stem from having studied something completely unrelated to the challenge at hand; if questioned, they’ll blandly remark that you can never predict which skills will turn out to be transferable  

A ranger who’s constantly tasting things. Tracking quarry? Taste the dirt. Discerning a person’s motives? Taste one of their pilfered possessions. Searching a forgotten library for information about the weaknesses of a malevolent demigod? Taste the books.  

A cleric whose holy book contains oddly specific verses about how to properly go about nearly any task, many of which are absolutely not appropriate for a priest to be dirtying their hands with; they’re keen on pointing out when others are “doing it wrong”  

A monk whose training approaches every activity as a form of combat by employing a series of esoteric (and often somewhat strained) metaphors; occasionally they need to be reminded to curb their enthusiasm and keep the violence metaphorical  

A druid who disdains the works of civilisation and claims that everything worthwhile can be learned from the beasts of the land; when it later turns out that they know how to pick locks, they insist a raccoon taught them  

A fighter who has no formal combat training, but is proficient with every weapon they encounter – no matter how unusual – because it just happens to resemble some tool or implement they used in their improbably varied pre-adventuring career

[prokopetz]

I don’t disagree that D&D players who insist on trying stupid shit like using create water to flood people’s lungs or teleport to snatch organs out of people’s bodies are a problem, but I think a lot of commentaries on why it’s a problem are missing the mark.

Like, yes, it’s true that it’s unfair to non-spellcasters, and that these sorts of exploits often rely on perverse readings that can be countered by pointing out that – for example – the human body isn’t an “open container” in the sense that the description of create water is using it, or that you don’t have line of sight to people’s internal organs, but that’s not the reason those stunts are bad for the game.

The reason this sort of thing is a problem is because doing it requires you to engage in bad faith. No set of rules can foreclose on every possible perverse reading without becoming unwieldy – just look at pro sports rulebooks to see where that gets you! Even the most rules-heavy tabletop RPGs necessarily assume that you’re reading for intent as well as for the explicit text, and most such exploits are clearly counter to that intent.

It’s like bringing a twenty-sided die that reads “20″ on every face to the table, and when you get caught, insisting that your die ought to be allowed because the rules merely specify that you should roll a twenty-sided die – they don’t specify how the faces of that die should be enumerated.

Without that presumption of good faith, the relationship between the GM and the players stops being one of creative collaboration and becomes that of a mere referee, and forcing your GM to play full time Rules Cop isn’t fun for anyone unless you’re the sort of hypercompetitive asshole who approaches every social interaction as an invitation to intellectual combat.

(Honestly, it’s a pretty poor way to win at intellectual combat, too. Respecting the spirit of the rules is by no means incompatible with creative play; if you’ve been given a spell that can conjure up to ten gallons of water into any open container within thirty feet at the flick of a wrist, and the best thing you can think of to do with it is try to drown people, if anything that reflects a lack of creativity!)

[catchymemes]

Human vs Animals

[weaselle]

Every year, in a small Welsh town, there is a race between riders on horseback and runners on foot. Evidently he above subject came under some discussion in a bar, and a bet was made, which resulted in a challenge people have recreated every year since. The race features dozens of horses versus a similar number of runners, and while a horse usually wins, it is always pretty close, and SOMEtimes, sometimes a human runner wins.

The race is 22 miles long. It is shorter than a standard human marathon. This is so that it is fair to the horses. A typical marathon is 26 miles long. A healthy distance for a horse to undertake in a single day for the purpose of travel is between 20 and 30 miles, but only if they walk at least part of the way. The years a human runner has won the race, the weather has been hot, as heat also favors human runners.

Interestingly, if the race is only ten to fifteen meters, 30 - 45 feet, a human can also win against a horse, which takes longer than a human to get up to full speed.

This fact of human capability for pursuit hunting and distance running is also part of why we have partnered with dogs for so much of our time on this planet. Dogs and wolves also engage in pursuit hunting, and sled dogs in particular can run miraculous distances due to some very interesting biological processes. 

[jenniferrpovey]

This is important if you are measuring travel time in a medieval environment.

Day by day, it is not faster to ride than to walk. It is easier, but it is not, especially in rough terrain, faster. Horses are much faster over short distances, but can’t beat a bunch of guys on a fast march for a full day travel.

And if you are in bad terrain where your horse or mule can’t actually go faster than a walk, then it takes about the same amount of time. In fact, a string of pack mules moves at about 3 miles per hour, which is the same speed or even slightly slower than a human walking.

It’s still easier on you to ride, though.

Do I speak from experience?

Quite possibly.

[dailyadventureprompts]

I’m looking for advice on playing NPCs. Stuff like how to drop hints naturally. How to make sure you’re NPCs only know and give what they should.

If you have any tips on organizing/keeping track of thoughts for different NPCs it would be appreciated.

To me there’s two different problems at work here, requiring two different skills to be sharpened. 

1) Most NPCs don’t actually have their own thoughts, and are just vessels the narrative takes while communicating what information the players need to know. While you might give the important ones motivations and backstory to color their expression, they’re still masks you as the DM use in your role as storyteller to direct the plot in different ways. 

Say you’ve got an adventure involving a particular ghost-haunted ruin you want the players to explore. What you need is a particular “story beat” to get the party where you need them to go, but this beat can take innumerable forms before your party decides to either bite on the right adventure hook or abandon it for another storyline they become more interested in. It can start as a rumor overheard in a tavern, then into a request for esoteric materials by an enchanter, finally a plea from a wealthy town elder to rescue their loved one. You don’t need to keep track of who “knows” the beat, only keep it in circulation among your other ideas until it’s needed. 

2) When and how to dole out information to your party, including deciding how many hoops they need to jump through and when to get it. 

I like to separate “hidden” information in my campaigns into three distinct categories:

A, Specialized knowledge: The kind of thing not everyone would know, necessitating the party seek out an expert. ( Ask around and have an encounter with an NPC, gain entrance to the archives etc) 

B, Privileged information: Things other people DON’T want you to know, requiring the party to make specialized contacts, or slip past the people who guard said information . 

C, Forgotten Lore: Information that is flat out a mystery, requiring the party to unravel conspiracies or go on full out adventures to gain access to.

When I make an adventure, generally the ways to avoid obstacles and get one’s bearings is only rank A, only an encounter with a single NPC away from being solved, where as true motivations and unseen factors are rank B. Information involving major story events is relegated to rank C. 

Here’s the trick, when the party progresses the story, all that information slips down one rank: That which is hidden is discovered by those in the know, who can drop hints about it while the party is seeking them out for more relevant knowledge, where as that which was previously valuable information becomes common gossip. 

Say there’s a murder plot going on that you want your party to be involved in after this campaign arc. It starts as forgotten lore, something the party stumbles on only if they happen to find a secret treasure trove of information, and then only as a hint. Later, as the party get closer to the murderplot, important npcs begin to know something about it, perhaps asking the party to check in on it in exchange for what they know.   If the party blithely ignores the plot, it’ll eventually become common gossip, something that NPCs can’t help but blab about for the party to overhear. 

Hope that helps!  Knowing just how to mete out information in a story is a difficult process to master, but if you use this as a guide, I think you’ll find it’s easier to keep your forshadowing orderly. 

[prokopetz]

Writing tip: if you need to provide a lot of worldbuilding information at once, but don’t want a bunch of characters explaining things to each other that they already know, have somebody do something terrible that’s related to the thing you want to explain, then have them morally justify themselves in a way that requires them to explain the thing.

Recognised variants:

The “it’s not what it looks like” explanation

The “I know this looks bad, but let me provide context” runaround

The “outlining the extenuating circumstances” ramble

The “really this is as much your fault as it is mine” reproach

The “it was a hard decision and you should pity me” appeal

The “here’s why I had no choice but to do what I did“ rationalisation

The “I was justified because fuck you“ rant

[dailydungeondelves]

I can only plan my games in the wrong place, at the wrong time

[theartingace]

Hi, I wanted to ask about one of your centaur worldbuilding posts. The one about capture-the-flag-wrestling-keep-away game. You mentioned "Using one of your littlest rider cousins". So centaurs have human cousins? Or at least human-appearing. Do you mean that as in literally, i.e., blood related? Or is it more spiritually, like family friends that are essentially family? Additionally, can humans be part of a centaur herd if this is the case?

Tossing these two together since they’re kinda related, thanks for asking I love talking about these guys! Riders typically have both a centaur and humanoid halves making up an extended family group. The groups consider each other family, raise their children together, often share flocks and homes, and will call each other cousin/uncle/grandmother.

So humans can definitely be part of the centaur herd! But with my Riders in particular the culture is pretty much 50/50 centaur/humanoid. It probably started with rider/runner pairs raising their families together as a result of their war-time bonds, but as the children are raised together they frequently find ready-made pairs among the other children as they grow up playing rider games together, thus deepening the bonds between the families.

Only so much "horseplay” allowed before the elders are yelling about “Get off their back! You’ll be swaybacked by 30 if you keep that up!”

As prospective warriors get older and closer to joining a war party, if they don’t have a partner already, the best way to find someone you work with well is the games! GoatPull, Racing, and Wrestling are all great informal ways to test out prospective partners and get to know how the other moves and build trust! Even for partnered pairs, they will sometimes switch riders/runners as part of the fun. Usually if the pair are raised together as siblings their bond will be pretty solid by the time they are grown. For those finding each other as adults there is typically a lot of trust-building and weapons drilling together before they actually face battle together. And even then a few pairs may dissolve after their first battle if on decides they aren’t made for the battlefield. It’s rare but happens, along with the usual death a battlefield entails. If the remaining half chooses to go on as a fighter, they will find a new partner in the same way. Usually with growing up playing games with the whole tribe, everyone knows a few Riders they would get along with reasonably well.

There’s a lot of trust when you’re putting someone on your back with a sword or bow and arrow that you wont end up with those weapons in you instead of the enemy, or if you’re standing and firing from a charging centaur’s back that you wont end up on the ground in the middle of a fight. There’s a LOT of communication, trust, and practice involved in a Rider pair to ensure that the rider doesn’t get tossed by an unexpected maneuver or put a sword in their runner’s shoulder trying to regain balance during the stress of a battle.

[marlynnofmany]

I love this worldbuilding.  At first I was wondering why they would pair up, instead of being separate fighting forces, but that does look incredibly effective.  Double the weapons!  Cavalry that can attack from multiple directions at once! 

Who do they fight against, I wonder?  A similar enemy, or someone woefully unprepared?

[theartingace]

Thank you! Initially the idea was sparked long ago by the Shadiversity video that concluded the best weapon for a centaur was someone on their back with another weapon! It’s hard to argue with a 2 for 1 murder machine.

And in my headworld they used to fight each other in big tribal battles on their great plains home turf until they found out the constantly warring petty states to the east pay good money for their high-end mercenary services. Now they often spend a lot of their time in suped up Celts vs. Romans style warfare on behalf of their benefactors.

[weaver-z]

Every DnD game that starts out with a serious “Lord of the Rings” type of tone turns into a Monty Python sketch and every DnD game that starts out like a Monty Python sketch turns into Lord of the Rings

[weaver-z]

DnD game with characters named Kua the Brave, Enoch Bluehelm, and Hallow Greaves: Our current mission is to save the kingdom from the Dark Queen Ravenbone but we fucked up a charisma roll and now Kua and Ravenbone are dating and the king of Fendale was turned into a frog

DnD game with characters named Bunny Wabbit, Ford Trukk, and Dildo Baggins: Our current mission is to find a birthday present for a spoiled prince but in the process we found a lich planning to devour the life force of everyone in the land and Dildo gave his life to stop him in a scene so moving it won the Newberry Medal

[theaustinstollhaus]

If you give your players room to do whatever they want, including be silly, they will most often choose to express themselves. And you'd be amazed how much you'll start to care about characters once people have attached little pieces if their soul to them.

If you try to enforce a "serious" tone, it just makes the gags funnier, and your players will treat you with the same casual blasphemy orangutans show to God.

[a-humble-waffle]

"the same casual blasphemy orangutans show to God" WHAT THE FUCK I'M DECEASED

[probablygoodrpgideas]

The “Necromancy is evil“ we see in most fantasy worlds stems from a christian view of having to honor the body after death in a certain way to ensure the soul’s safety in the afterlife. And while I encourage you to explore societies that don’t see necromancy as evil, I also encourage you to explore societies that see necromancy as evil for different reasons.

Drow might believe that after death, your body belongs to Lolth and must be fed to spiders. Reanimating a body means stealing from Lolth and must therefore be punished.

A Zoroastrian inspired society might believe that with death, evil starts infesting the body, so dead bodies must be kept away from the community, and reanimating them keeps them in the community and is therefore bad.

[pomrania]

Ooh, sounds fun! Let me come up with some more.

necromancy is associated with the culture’s traditional enemies, and is the same level of frowned-upon as using certain symbology or weapons or languages etc which are also linked to those enemies

once someone has died, it is severely disrespectful to look upon their corpse, so anything which is VISIBLE as being an undead is Very Bad, because it means you can see that person’s dead body

the reanimated dead have historically been used to spread plague and do other biological warfare type stuff; if you create something like that, a) gross b) unsanitary c) this is interpreted as the intent to commit war crimes

[135weirdos-deactivated20250128]

A society of druids that uses the dead to grow sacred gardens, and reanimation deprives the dead of their part in the cycle

A society where each plot in the cemetery is used to grow vegetables/herbs for community use, to ensure that everyone is fed and the dead are visited/remembered. Necromancy deprives the community of the food that person would have grown and disconnects the dead person from their community

A society obsessed with history/recordskeeping/memory, and necromancy prevents the dead from being properly catalogued

A totalitarian society wherein the citizens are property of the state and necromancy is stealing

Death is nirvana and reanimation deprives the dead of this experience

The dead are ritually eaten by friends/family to allow them to live on, and reanimation ends their time prematurely

The finest jewelry is made of the bones of the dead, so there’s a lucrative trade in grave robbing, and the bone jewelry lobby has convinced the public that necromancy is worse than the expensive jewelry made from the bones

[pomrania]

when someone dies, their death is considered a “sacrifice” to the deity who presides over their cause of death; how exactly you deal with the body, that doesn’t matter so much, but USING the body to your OWN benefit, that’s an insult to the god of warfare / disease / ocean / etc. Like stealing the offerings from a shrine.

[eclipseyeger]

~~a culture that recognizes the effort and emotional strain their people go through in life, and when someone dies they throw a huge wake and celebrate their break from life before joining their god/reincarnating/guarding something/etc.  Reanimating someone or trying to bring them back to life is seen as a huge taboo because it’s like asking someone who constantly works and finally gets a time of rest to go straight back to work before they’ve recovered.  Except it’s the hardest job/adventure ever.  For the same reason, motherhood, illness, leadership, recreation, personal growth, and winter are all highly venerated concepts/times in the culture, as times of rest or things in need of a period of rest eventually.  To honor these times as sabbats is commanded by one of their gods after a great catastrophe. The whole community is involved with these things, and so too are is the whole community involved with death and picking up the physical or emotional slack of the person who died.  If permission is given from the person who is being reanimated, then maybe maaaaaybe it’s ok, but that’s only happened once when a guardian was once needed, and it’s pretty hard to verify if it really was the person.  

[pomrania]

reanimation is seen as asserting “ownership” over that being; so while it’s okay to have an undead animal (so long as it wasn’t someone ELSE’S animal, as that would be theft), reanimating a HUMAN counts as “slavery”

necromancy is considered “lazy”; like, dude, do the work yourself, or pay/convince someone else to do it, what kind of loser has to resort to CORPSES

only the divine can raise the dead; reanimating the dead is a poor mockery of the gods’ ability, and you are liable to be punished for your hubris, and that kind of punishment tends to have a lot of collateral damage so it’s best for mortals to solve the problem before the gods take notice

[bourtange]

neato: a 13th-century number notation system created by european monks

[thechildofchristmas]

this is…. actuallly really cool? like, this is probably the shortest number notation in existence and yeah, it’s tricky to use and absolute hell for doing math with, but the ability to denote a 4-digit decimal number into a single character is just really cool as an engineer and it probably had a ton of uses back then like denoting quantities or maybe even secret code you can probably draw this on a combination lock to remember the password and people would be none the wiser