There was the old Cannibal cult spirit cult, who gained power from eating their enemies.
It makes sense that they would run the risk of becoming chaotic, just as rapists run the risk of becoming broo etc, but I always figured they were more likely to become ogres than ghouls.
At 8:38 AM -0700 16/9/09, Greg Stafford wrote:
> I really,
>really dislike the pablum of just about everything that came in through D&D.
>This includes the whole idea that there is a collective category of "undead"
>that operates in a meaningful way. I best like your suggestion/insight that
>this is a byproduct of the Vivamort cult.
I think in Glorantha there are about several categories of 'undead' things that are metaphysically quite different.
There are things that aren't really undead at all, just dead and happen to be in the mundane world not the underworld - ghosts, bound to the mundane world, are an example. Some ghosts are dangerous because they want a body, some are dangerous only because they carry on performing duties they had in life.
There are animated corpses, dead things walking around by magic. From some perspectives, these are 'undead' - magic designed to work on corpses works on them. From other perspectives, these are just animated matter. Zoral Zoran zombies and skeletons are in the this category. They lack free will, and are dangerous if whatever force directs them wants them to be.
And there is a category of creatures that have a hunger of the soul. Vampires, ghouls, and wraiths all fall into this category. They are dangerous because their hunger is eternal, because they have a pit inside them that can never be filled. I am assuming that such beings are usually considered to be chaotic. In RQ2, they'd all be linked with the Hunger Rune (aka Undead Rune).
The idea of undead as a separate class is, yes, a D&Dism - and even for those on Glorantha who believe in the concept (the Humakti, presumably, with their Turn Undead spells) their idea of what is undead might not correspond to our idea, or someone else's (to the Humakti, ghosts aren't undead, just dead people who aren't in the underworld like they normally would be).
Cheers
David
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