Skeletons are extremely based.
>Transitioning to skeletal aspect is a tradition embraced by the wisest and most driven magi.
>Skeletons can live forever in principle, whereas a human has around a century to live at best. Destroying a skeleton against its will deprives the skeleton significantly more than the analagous human life. Additionally, humans can be brought back as a skeleton, whereas repairing a fully banished undead is nearly impossible.
>Skeletons are not motivated by fleshly concerns. They are not greedy or selfish.
>Skeleton-on-skeleton crime is astonishingly low. Left to themselves skeletons do not steal, murder or rape.
>Skeletons toil tirelessly to do the work of whomever raised them, or to guard their homes from greedy marauders.
>A world populated only by skeletons would be a peaceful, productive world.
We could all stand to learn a lot from skeletons. Their attitudes of patience, cheerful service, aesceticism, and love of wisdom for its own sake are worth aspiring to. Post and discuss good skeleton games.
Skeleton appreciation thread
Would Sandro and the story from Heroes 3 made a good plotline for an HBO show?
Skelly getting more pussy that you.
A lot has been made of Planescape: Torment's thorough narrative, but people often forget to emphasize that it is a game where you get to go on adventures with a cool skull. There's even a secret good ending where you choose a life of eternal peace as king among undead.
When GoT got bad, I developed a genuine hope that the undead really would sweep the continent and we'd get a cool parable about how personal greed could truly be the end of us. Hell, it couldn't have been worse-recieved the bad-ending they actually chose, and I think a lot more unexpected and interesting.
Anyway, I'd give a HoMM show a chance.
Divinity Original Sin 2 gives you the option of playing as a skeleton. Whether fortunately or unfortunately, it has relatively little impact on the game, but it is pretty cool. I understand Divinity Dragon commander has some pretty based interactions with the skeleton faction as well, but I haven't personally had the chance to check it out.
Tales of Maj'eyal lets you play as a skeleton or necromancer seeking lichdom. Or a ghoul if that's more your style. They're unlockable classes/races, so you can't start with them but there's enough ground-rules to learn that a few practice runs might be a good idea anyway.
Although this is true, there are a couple people you can freak out by showing em your bones. What I do find funny is when some bitch reveals herself to be a skelly and tries to kill you with poison and death fog, one of which heals you whilst the other does nothing
5500 POWER LICHES
Also I think it's a real shame Ghost Dragons are as weak as they are in HoMM3, an undead dragon that breathes time at you would be intimidating as fuck.
Imagine being summoned as a regular human soldier to go scout a town that was calling for help, only to find a big empty field because the whole town and its people were aged so fast that they were wiped out and nature overtook the area in a single devastating night, as if no town ever existed there in the first place.
"... Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
I told all my relatives that I absolutely don't want to be cremated after my death because I rally wanna be a skeleton
I can recommend Dragon Commander for the skeleton connoisseur.
The RTS turns into a slog of spamming the 3rd person action shooter dragon mode, so it's hard to appreciate it at all if you bother using the dragon form. If you do play it on the AI's terms, it's overly simplistic and just a race to out-APM the AI. The overworld map (Dark Crusade-style turn-based choices for influencing and choosing RTS fights) is cheesable and not difficult to manipulate.
The real game is the dialogue with NPCs and political decision-making. The characters are pretty much all caricatures with very little depth (with the possible exception of your generals, who have actual character arcs, and your bride, chosen from each of the non-human races. The story's moderately interesting, and the presentation is great— pretty graphics and good voice work. It's hard to take the decisions seriously because they're all yes/no answers, no nuance, just ye/nay and the opinions+reactions of your motley crew of one-per-race advisors. They're ridiculous and entertaining when they aren't overbearing.
Yorick's a parody of the (Inquisition-era?) Catholic church and probably the most entertaining of the bunch.
>I think it's a real shame Ghost Dragons are as weak as they are in HoMM3
I feel ya there, but necro was already almost too good a faction. Also the inexpensiveness of them was a major perk. I guess if you have the ghost version be on-par wth the alive version that makes the alive ones feel less special.
Still they were dope as hell. Ghost dragons and wraiths were probably the coolest ghost interpretations I've seen to date. God what an aesthetically perfect faction.
My compatriot of quality calcium.
If any of you haven't played Diablo 2 as a Necromancer, do it.
how does he bone her?
Grim from Maximo is pretty cool. He lets you come back from the dead for only a small fee.
So this is reaching way back, but a million years ago, Bungie made a series of real-time-tactics games called Myth. For the main campaign you naturally play as boring old humans, but the necromancy plots are fucking rad and often feature this badass. The undead are a very cool faction tactically and visually, and and the storytelling's pretty good. Shame their time is past.
Hell yeah.
What's a game where I can play a really powerful lich
Honestly never felt better for me than in HoMM3.
>Army planning on a scale where you actually do get conquer whole cities and raise their defenders as skeletons
>Can recruit from living cities and march them straight into the skeleton transformer.
>Turn the tide of battle by reanimating enormous numbers of troops every time they fall, casting despair or berserk on living units, while yours are immune
>Also just how fucking strong hero magic is in that game.
and
Were good too. DoS lets you take a lone-wolf perk if you don't mind missing out on party stories, that makes it viable for you to complete the campaign as a single super-mighty skeletal wizard. Actual necromancy's a little limited, but there's some. ToME is a roguelike, so you will die a fair amount, but on a successful campaign you basically can kill everybody in the world. Honestly the necromancer role's pretty fun, though I hear it got adjusted recently and haven't played since.
Based thread
Why do you hurt me user?
Is that the same comic as this? I remember reading some of it but forgot about it for years, is it good?
Many thanks.
Iratus: Lord of the Dead has you play as a recently-awoken necromancer who commands various undead, including liches.
Diablo 2's Trang-Oul set turns your character (the set's meant for the Necromancer) into a "vampire" that looks like a lich. Grim Dawn also has a necromancer class that you can combine with any other class (for a full summoner combination, you could go with the witch god-powered Cabalist or the Shaman).
Undead Horde is supposedly pretty simplistic, but you play as an undead necromancer with powerful spells and hordes of undead minions.
Kohan and Kohan 2 have undead-based factions. There's also Warcraft III, which has the lich hero for its undead Scourge faction.
Age of Wonders 3 lets you create a hero and choose a race. You can create a necromancer hero and have an undead variant of any race's units.
Lichdom: Battlemage is a first-person game about blasting mooks with spell combinations. I don't know if you're technically a lich.
Plenty of games have mods that bring in playable liches, like the Elder Scrolls. The Rimworld of Magic mod (for Rimworld, obviously) adds a bunch of magic-themed traits for your colonists that are basically a variety of different mage "classes"; lich is one of them.
People forget to mention Grim Fandango as a skeleton game. Maybe because the skeletons are too charming.
No problem homie, enjoy yourself.
>Kohan and Kohan 2 have undead-based factions.
Somehow I had not heard of Kohan. It's very difficult to get into a new old RTS at this late date, but that does look intriguing. Do you know if it's good?
Forgot to add Conquest of Elysium (4). You can play as a Necromancer who can eventually become a vampire, ghoul king, or lich (which can become a demilich).
Dominions (5) is basically the bigger brother of Conquest of Elysium. Ermor, one of the playable factions, is a nation of undead. You can spam skeletons and other undead you get for free or summon. There's a spell called "burden of time" that causes everything in the game to age rapidly and die pretty quickly if it isn't undead.
There's also multiple undead factions in Total Warhammer 2: you get to choose between classic vampires + skeletons + necromancers, undead sea monsters + pirate zombies + vampirates, or Egyptian skeletons and their stone-carved war constructs.
I played Kohan 2 first and loved it. The campaign plays out similarly to Warcraft III (plus the game kind of looks like W3), but the gameplay itself is like Dawn of War, but with fixed locations for most buildings + your units are all custom squads. You pick different basic units to fill up most of the slots, then add special units (mostly spellcasters or "captain"-like better versions of the basics) or Kohans (immortal heroes, lots of variety in appearance and role), assuming you can afford them. Gold generates over time and is used for most things, but there are other resources that are basically soft unit caps— you have flat amounts that live units subtract from, and going into the negatives decreases gold generation.
The game is specifically focused on macro over micro. You simply set your squads' formations (which change stats— combat strength, vision range, or speed), and the squads get locked into combat with the first enemy they encounter. The only thing you can do once a fight starts is choose if/when to make the squad retreat. There's morale, again like Dawn of War.
The first game uses 2d sprites and, surprisingly, has less unit variety (factions share most units, just with slightly different stat bonuses). Still worth a playthrough, but I want to say 2 is better. Might be biased. Either way, I'm very sad that there aren't more macro-based strategy games like Kohan. Would love a new (or just remastered) Kohan or Supreme Commander. I loved Company of Heroes (1), but I keep hearing negative things about Iron Harvest here, even though I like the concept. Would be nice to have a fantasy-themed Company of Heroes/Dawn of War-style RTS.
Skeletons cant be cute girls
*loudly clears throat to get attention*