Skelly-Bobs get to Work

Okay… nothing new but an intresting topic I think which was reminded of by ‘SnufflePox‘ at the Oldhammer forum. well, him and ‘Slave to Darkness‘ so give equal credit or equal blame if you wish ^_^

Skeletons in Fantasy, or more ‘undead’ skeletons are… weird.. while it does kinda depend on your fantasy settings of choice, what we have are magically animated mostly human (though some times non-human are allowed.. but just look at the amount of human skeletons are around compared to Dwarf, or Goblin, or Elf (which would be close to human but not quite) or any other kinda monster.. well.. Dragon, Wvyern, giant… they are pretty common but they are special cases.) and normally fight for however summoned them. Mostly they are shown as pretty brainless as they are just magically animated by a strong will, but sometimes they retain some or all of their past self.

If we look at the skeletons from a real-world way.. They are bloody stupid ideas.. In fact, lets try to look at them with some real-ism added to a fantasy world..

First, We will have to say ‘Magic’ is what keeps them together. In real life, bones don’t fit together. well.. technically I think a couple like the pelvis and the upper legs (Femur) but.. no.. they don’t.. unless you have a bone fusion problem NONE of the bones ‘clip’ together. they are only held together by ligaments. These are fibrous straps which both hold the bones together and stop them from rubbing too much and causing damage. without that, the bones cannot keep together. so.. we have to accept Skeletons have invisible ‘magic’ holding the bones together as ligaments.

But they doesn’t allow them to move.. for that we need Skeletal muscle. We have a fair degree of control over these muscles and they can only do one thing. Pull. well, I could more call it contract. So you need two types in order to do something like move your arm. you have a muscle on the ‘top’ which can be used to pull the arm up, and one on the ‘bottom’ to pull it down. one muscle can’t do both actions. They only do 1 thing. Of course, this is very simple version.. I’m not a doctor, but I think I got a basic understand of human anatomy and it’s working to the degree I need to. So.. we have to accept the SAME invisible ‘magic’ to creating muscles which allow the skeleton to move.

The skeleton can’t see or hear or anything. Skeletons would be very easy to beat in battle cause they are completely unable to see you, hear you, feel you, smell you or anything really. Atleast humans in a pitch black room have various ways to ‘sense’ or tell if something is in the room with them. Skeletons don’t. So.. do we say the force which is creating them has that much control? well.. that summoner is gonna have a problem.. they have to focus on battle themselves, even if it’s just keeping out of the way, while focusing and seeing and hearing from each skeleton they have summoned.. boy, that isn’t gonna work.. So they must have Magic eyes and ears at least. of course, you also need a degree of feeling in order to do anything. Talk to anyone who has Hypoesthesia (lack of sense of touch).. it can be a pain to learn how to hold a cup cause you don’t know if you are holding it too tight, or too loose. Oh and don’t start on them Skeletons which are shown to have working eyes.. that doesn’t really change much.. still have the same huge problem. In order for them eyes to work they need SOO much.. the brain, optic nerves, eye lids, tear ducts etc.. so… Magic eyes and ears..

Ah, we said Brain.. even if they are ‘mindless’, they need to have SOMETHING to be able to do much. like I said before, we have control (to a degree) over muscles.. that’s why you can choose to lift your arm, choose to breath, choose to blink etc.. of course, you don’t normally actively have to think “I want to blink right now, I want to breath right now” etc, but you can hold your breath etc. It’s controlled. Subconscious. But that does require a conscious of such, and that is the brain. It’s why people in a coma or just really brain dead, need help to breath and stuff. Though because it’s such a ‘core’ function, there is alot of your brain that can be destroyed before your body will stop breathing or beating your heart.. But its one reason way dementia is sooo scary and such a bugger… cause parts of your brain get destroyed and sooner or later, parts that control breathing, heart beating, etc, are also destroyed. well.. Skeletons need some kinda of brain to control their movements. They don’t need to breath of course, but they need to control their movements somehow. so,.. ‘Magic’ brain.

lets go back to the bones themselves.. bones aren’t made of stone. They are pretty light weight, fairly strong for what they are but you can still punch a guy hard enough to break a bone. even with the muscle protection over it. But Skeleton’s don’t have that protection. Just the bone. And like many things, Bones aren’t solid. They are hollow with well.. ‘stuff’ living inside, as well as tubes and holes for various bit and pieces which even this isn’t going into enough detail to go over. When they have a lack of blood, Bones will die, pretty much like most of the body of living creatures. When they die, they become Dead bones. They become much more brittle and also start to collapse. A heavy use of steroids will do this pretty nicely (why do you think alot of the stupid body builders who just want a quick ‘muscle’ don’t last that long into old age?). Skeletons by there nature, are dead. the bones are dead. They have either been speciality stripped of all muscle matter and related stuff, or have been dead for a long time. Either way, those bones aren’t gonna be very strong. If you were going into battle with a skeleton, the average person could just punch them into a powder really. so.. the ‘magic’ needs to keep the bones fairly strong… this is getting pretty complex huh?

now.. Unless you have a fantasy world created by a 5 year old, or by someone with the creative mind set of such, the ‘magic’ power to animate them needs to come from someplace. for living creatures, we eat, we drink, we breath. These things are turned by the human body (via burning pretty much) into electrical energy. It’s why the average human outputs 2.3 pounds of carbon dioxide every day. Any company that claims to be ‘Carbon neutral’ .. well, apart from the fact that is a lying conjob make to make idiots think better, should have to deal with all that carbon dioxide each member of staff puts out. and that isn’t even talking about other nasty stuff given off by humans (hell, body heat adds to green house effects, by products from the human fuel making process… and that’s just humans… people love to forget about this things.. and animals which eat only vegetable matter like cows, due to that being the diet, put out alot of methane which is a pretty nasty greenhouse gas… but anyway… that’s for another day.. and another place cause it’s not gaming related.

Where was it? yes.. Magic needs to come from someplace. Some things like to say a magic user, for one thing, has to eat alot because they use a fair degree of their own ‘life’ force or just energy to power the magic. But for more powerful spells, they need to tap into magic from other places. Well.. Skeletons are animated by magic. They don’t breath and eat.. BUT they need a steady supply of magic to keep them animated and to move etc. They don’t produce it themselves, so they get it from someplace else. Some fantasy settings like to say it’s the summoner. But that summoner is gonna really need to keep topping up his own energy to keep them going. And does magic have infinite range? What I consider some of the BEST in fantasy worlds do leave enough wiggle room but they set up rules and laws and STICK TO THEM! If we look at say, Warhammer around 3ED-4ED which is more my thing, There is mostly a rule which is stuck to. Magic does come from someplace, it takes work. It’s not some infinite power source which can do everything. though in 4Ed it was starting to go too much into ‘free energy’ side which… isn’t a good place to go. Hell, most religions don’t even go there cause they aren’t that stupid.

So.. energy needs to come from someplace and it would be alot needed. how much energy does it take for a person to move and fight on a battle field for a few hours? a fair bit.. not impossible but a fair bit. Lets say Magical energy has a fantastic conversion rate so the power to have one person do the battle can power 10 skeletons doing the same. Still, that summoner is gonna have problems. Better idea would be to magically give the skeletons lungs, stomachs, etc. They can create there OWN energy to keep them going. They would still need sources. so make it invisible but why not let them breath? they might breath.. Look at the amount of images and figures of skeletons blowing horns. they must be able to breath, and the only real function that would have is as part of their own self-generation of energy to keep them ‘undead’.

This then explains SOO well, why you CAN beat a skeleton in combat. You might not be able to see it, but they still have organs and muscles and stuff. Hey, this is like the Second version of Ghost Rider (okay.. Marvel Comics kinda ripped off a character called Ghost Rider to create their own almost the same character called Ghost Rider. This was a western character wearing white. Since the copyright has lapsed on the original 1947 character, this 1960s one was fine. For whatever reasons, they like the name and made a NEW modern day character called Ghost Rider who was unconnected and then after a while decided to stop confusion with more then one character called ‘Ghost Rider’, to rename the original Marvel one the ‘Phantom Rider’. Of course, for looks, they ripped off their own older character (well, from a company that became Marvel) called the Blazing Skull… there really wasn’t much ‘original’ with that second ghost rider).. Of course, later on, they created Third Ghost Rider, then a bunch with different names, then a fourth, and a fifth and they pretty much got a whole team of people with the same powers and looks called ‘Ghost Rider’ now cause they don’t have any ideas, just reissue the old ones). Anyway. This second Ghost Rider, who was basically shown to be a demon in the human body of stunt rider Johnny Blaze, looked like a skeleton on fire but what it was, was his skin and muscle turned invisible, so you just saw the bones. quite often, the artists or writers forgot about that major detail but that was why when wearing clothes, they ‘fit’ like he was a normal human, also why he could move, and do stuff..

sorry.. back onto point.. It does appear that Skeletons are bones with an invisible magical body keeping them together and doing stuff and really, they should need to breath or atleast something like that, in order to keep their own personal magic level up enough to animate them and stop them from becoming Dead. thus the ‘un’ part. One of the things commented in the thread which started all this on the Oldhammer forum was about them not drowning… Mm.. I could agree with that. even with all this ‘invisible’ body and all, I could easily say they wouldn’t drown. It’s very hard work but possible to get SOME oxygen out of water (oh come on, you know the O in H2O is oxygen right? It’s mostly hydrogen and it takes ALOT of energy to break the bond that keeps the two parts together but there is some) and we can say that the skeletons can get some energy from the water, but as we have said that magic energy is more efficient then they can both hold their breath or MUCH longer then a human (2 to 4 minutes is the human max on average) and also, don’t need to use the air for the ONLY source to convert to magic energy.

Now, I’m not trying to go all real-world stuff on this and pretty much strip anything ‘supernatural’ out of fantasy.. Far from it. Just trying to figure out a decent world and it’s laws that they could be in. If you are roleplaying, and you don’t have some decent frame set of a world? gonna be tricky… “You enter a room, you find a skeleton there who wants to fight you. You have no weapons, you aren’t strong, you are hungry, how are you going to beat him?” well.. you need to know how things work to know how to defeat him. With the rules I’ve said about, I think it gives options. If you didn’t have any rules how are you gonna know (either Player or DM) what is gonna work and what isn’t? I’m a much a Spike Milligan fan as the next British guy around my mind set, but playing a fantasy roleplay game in a Spike Milligan created universe might be…. fun but pretty tricky too. Inverse logic is one thing, but no logic at all but only sometimes? yikes..

Y’know.. somethings, maybe I should edit this to remove some of the more rambley nature… but hey, that’s how I work. How I think too..