The Beast Fears Fire - The Walking Dead

From a cold, objective standpoint, the walking dead are a case of you getting less than you paid for.  They aren't terribly effective at what they do; they are slow, dead stupid, and while they are durable, they aren't that durable.  The process for creating them is only matched in the number of unpleasant ways it can go wrong with the number and unpleasantness of the ways in which it can go right.  It also requires a pretty serious supply of spiritually active crystal (miasmite and pigeon's blood seem to work the best), and once the supply gets low, the dead get a lot less reliable in all sorts of evil-plan-ruins-itself sorts of ways.  Still, they are murderous slaves who feel no pain that you can get in quantities with little comparative effort on your part (the effort comes in with keeping them) and no magical aptitude.  The process for raising the dead is tightly controlled by most societies (there's rumors that some country in the far west never got the memo that raising the dead is a taboo on the level of sibling-fucking and cannibalism... There are rumors they never got those memos, either; then again, the Dahanish and Rierdans thought the Cricks never got those memos, so who knows.) and punishments for employing the methods start at baroque and get more unpleasant and involved from there.

So the dead themselves.  They are what you would expect.  Savels and Murrens sometimes call them zombies, but Cricks know better - Zombies are something the Sea Folk remember - chemically and magically enslaved living people, spirits captured, wills enslaved by poisons and drugs.  The methods for making zombis are harder to find, even in Crickton, idiosyncratic to the evil witches and island-barghests that create them, and you can be certain that even the rumor of the methods and materials being available anywhere in Crickton is going to meet with immediate response (you can get the stuff at the back of any goblin market or in the city of the Blackthorns, if you're nasty).  Anyway, corpses animated by an activation of the crystals stuffed in their mouths.  That's pretty much it.  Destroying or removing the head is likely to dislodge the crystal, causing the corpse to return to its inert state, but massive trauma of any kind in sufficient quantities will also get them to stop.  Anyone with experience facing other monsters is likely to be steady enough to face the dead, but there is an aura of dread that surrounds them, which only gets stronger as they near the end of their service life.

The big problem with the dead from the point of view of the one who wants to raise them is that there is no particular means of controlling them.  They will not harm the on who raised them (usually; at least, not until their batteries start to run low), but beyond that, any means of directing them is something you have to work out on an ad hoc basis (and there are notes on how other people managed to herd them in one direction or another, but these don't always work even as well as the notes claimed they did.  There are also deliberately sabotaged notes full of things that it would be a VERY BAD IDEA to try, all of these are available at the local goblin market...).  Left to their own devices, the dead are drawn to the living, in a violent and unpleasant sort of way, so they work just fine as a terror weapon (especially to people who know the deceased), but let's face it; Ash trokkar are better in every way than the walking dead, including less awful environmental impact. Yeah.

A couple of other bits of curiosity; people who have seen and heard the formula often claim it's written in Abyssal, but a lot of scholars dispute that, saying it's just some magic words in some language (like Ash, for instance) foreign to Crickton.  Also, if you want to really annoy ghouls, this is a great way to do it.  Raising the dead draws ghouls from all over the place and drives them a little crazy.  In fact, it's not always a bad plan to count on the ghouls that chase the dead to do most of the damage you intended.  You know, except for the part where the ghouls want to damage you.  Eating the crystal-laced flesh of the risen dead kind of affects ghouls like vodka - a really angry, belligerent drunk comes over them, and very few ghouls can resist eating the walking dead.

Or the people who raise them.