The Beast Fears Fire - The Walking Dead, Volume 3

The Directing the Dead [Malevolence 2]
Impulse - To Further Confuse Matters

There's no prerequisite of magical experience or aptitude in order to get the dead to rise. You simply need some magically resonant crystals and an easy-to-follow formula, which, in terms of skill, is easier to follow than most bread recipes. The downside of the ease of recruiting the dead to walk is, aside from the ease itself, that no formula known to anyone in Crickton has any mention of how to control the dead once they are up and walking. Those who have survived raising the dead tend to come up with idiosyncratic methods that aren't provably more reliable than chance and lowered expectations, and those with magical ability do sometimes come up with means of directing them, or, at least repelling them. If sufficiently more powerful than the originator of the dead, it is possible for a magician to supplant the originator as the one in control of the dead.

Well, as much as anyone can control the dead. Which is not much at all.

Corpse Herding
When you want to repel or command the dead, face Malevolence.
On a Hit, the dead pause, wait and do nothing in your presence but respond to other threats. If there are dead bodies yet un-animated in the area, though not necessarily in the Scene, they animate.
On a Hard Hit, you can dictate one action that is not directly suicidal for the dead to take. Only one corpse in the area rises to join the throng.
On a Miss, all present walking dead focus in on you and attack. Act Under Fire. Also, all corpses in the area and Scene rise up to join the ones already roaming.

Some people claim that if there is a motivating intelligence behind the walking dead, it would prefer to have any authority over it divided up as much as possible, to have multiple living folk pushing as much of their will upon the dead as possible. Directing supernatural energies into a group of the dead is clearly a bad idea, but occasionally, there is nothing for it in the short term.



Skeletons [Violence 2]
Impulse - To Prowl and Fight

This is the other potential consequence of putting too much supernatural energy out when the dead are walking. Occasionally, when there is sufficient energy, whether from powerful or multiple forces vying for control of the dead, from throwing too much crystal in a corpse or having enough corpses in a throng of the dead, some of them go kind of bad. Decomposition continues until all flesh and connective tissue is gone, but instead of breaking up and falling to pieces, some crystalline residue remains and fills in the cartilage, eventually causing the marrow to crystallize itself. At this point, what was once a walking dead becomes a cunning and murderous creation with its own goals and motivations.

Harm Variable Skeletons, whoever they were in life, are warriors in death, and seek out weapons to carry out their aims. People have been able to observe skeletons practicing with the weapons they find, obsessively, without fatigue or need to eat or sleep. If deprived of better weapons, they will make use of whatever is available, gathering bags of stones or making use of tools in place of dedicated weapons. Skeletons without will still seek out weapons of war until they have found one. Skeletons are fast and skilled combatants and attack anyone they notice as soon as they notice them. Their skill at arms is usually bad enough, but the real problem with fighting skeletons is the thoroughness with which you have to destroy them. It's necessary to break all the major bones in a skeleton's body and scatter them pretty far apart within a short time before they reform and the powers that animate them knit the bones back together. Attempts to communicate with skeletons have, so far, not been successful.

Scatter those Bones
When a skeleton attacks you, face Violence
On a Hit, the skeleton rises again, but weaker, causing 1 less harm. If the Skeleton was causing 1 Harm, then it rises again, but you and your allies get +1 Hit Forward to harm it.
On a Hard Hit, you break and scatter it so that it does not rise.
On a Miss, the skeleton rises at full strength in the worst possible position for you. Suffer Harm as stated.

The bones of animate skeletons are full of miasmite.



The Land of the Dead
Impulse - To Serve as a Warning to Others

It's not impossible to imagine that, given the right conditions, a single outbreak of the walking dead could turn out to be a plague on par with the vampire epidemic of 50 years ago. Possibly worse, since spiritual intervention only seems to encourage the animating force to spread to other corpses. If such a thing has happened, history lost track of where and when. There is one last aspect to the dead that requires some discussion, and that's what remains when the remains are finished shuffling around. The flesh the decomposes in the later stages of an instance of the dead is some of the more toxic stuff you will encounter, and the dead spread it far and wide as a result of their rampages. Well, it's toxic to living things, but to ghouls, it's like booze. No, it's more like a boozey vacation in a pleasant clime full of willing sex partners - something that no ghoul can easily resist, and something that every ghoul in a pretty wide radius can smell.

People hypothesize that ghouls are the reason why there have been no continent-spanning plagues of walking dead. However, any place that has suffered attack from the walking dead ill needs a secondary incursion from drunken ghouls, and the ghouls gobbling up the dead detritus left about is actually slightly preferable to the stuff just sitting there, getting into the soil and the water.

This Tastes Funny
The first time you go about in a land that has suffered an attack from the walking dead in the last year and every time you return from being away, face Want.
On a Hit, you must Hold Steady or suffer the Peril Sick. Anything you try to purchase is more expensive than usual.
On a Hard Hit, you are fine, no worries, go about your day.
On a Miss, you get there just as ghouls start making trouble, or something else Moderator Hard Move starts happening.

Ragged they come and ragged they kill
In modern times, it's the Blackthorns who are the usual suspects for creating the walking dead. Even they use the knowledge of how to do it judiciously, usually as fire-and-forget weapons in very limited numbers before moving on.

The Greater branch of the Otterley clan are able to remake corpses into animated servants using their uncorrupted river necromancy, but this appears to be an entirely different, if related process over which they have a comparatively tight control. Creation of the Otterley's "ones" is only available to those who have the uncorrupted river necromancy, and therefore, as far as we know, only to the Greater Otterleys themselves.