> A spirit is not undead, even if it is the spirit of someone who died. A "ghost" is the spirit of the dead that haunts the living - it is not necessarily undead (and usually isn't, I suspect). It might be a part of the soul that refuses to take the Path of the Dead, or maybe it might be cursed by a magician or god, but probably isn't the horrible perversion of Life that is Undead.
Can we back up a minute here?
Using the term "undead" to refer to unheimliche or unheilige remainders of the dead is a relatively modern innovation in itself -- a "god learner concept." Stoker appears to have invented it, and from there it was applied to a widening range of morbid phenomena and folklore.
If maximal Gloranthan fidelity (mgf) is what we want here, we might save a lot of grief by abandoning the term entirely.
Vivamort's rune originally meant Hunger. Let's start with that. Vampires are hungry dead. Ghouls probably are, too.
Gark had a different rune. Zombies are horrible for being "quiet" or maybe "slow" dead.
Delecti would be the first to tell us he is as always sui generis.
And I always thought the old Spirit rune performed flawlessly for ancestor and hero cults, which deal with the more or less disembodied dead all the time.
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