Desecration
As adventurers, it’s our job to beat back the forces of undeath. Comes with the territory. But I’ve been doing some thinking lately, and there’s something that doesn’t quite add up. Generally speaking you see, when you meet an angry spirit it comes packaged with some kind of sob story. They died tragically and horribly. They died violently. There were betrayed, tortured, and are now desperately seeking vengeance. If there’s a common thread here, it’s that the dead begin getting up and haunting people when there’s strong emotion involved. Fair enough, right? That’s pretty standard ghost lore after all.
Now let me ask you something: How many orcs do you think you’ve killed? Think about it. Your typical orc is a ball of seething rage and bad temper before you’ve cut him down in his prime. That sounds like “strong emotion” to me. If that’s all it takes to rise from the grave, then all those mean green murder men ought to be prime targets for the forces of undeath. How is it, then, that all our monstrous humanoid murdering isn’t causing g-g-ghosts?
Now obviously, deliberately desecrating corpses like Fighter is a bad idea. That’s how you wake up tied to a hospital bed in Georgia. But by the same token, I’m not sure the rest of us are doing much better. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been reading through all the ghoulish backstories of certain psych ward residents, but I’m beginning to think a bottle of holy water and a few respectful prayers over the enemy dead could go a long way. It’s hard enough killing the forces of darkness the first time. I don’t want to have to give ’em the Zombieland double tap as well.
What do you say, gang? Am I being paranoid here? Or have any of you guys unwittingly created your own undead antagonists? Is there a good lore reason why standard hack ‘n slash wouldn’t create angry incorporeals? And while we’re on the subject, if you’ve got any advice for keeping the recently dead permanently dead, sound off in the comments! Chances are my Strange Aeons players will thank you for it.
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Twice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
This is why Create Bonfire is on my list of must-have cantrips for any party: it makes corpse disposal a literal snap.
I bet that works better for well-ventilated, outdoor adventures.
imagine;
a group of adventurers have a single-digit amount of hit points between them and are about to be torn to shreds by vengeful incorporeal undead
“Oi! Stop that!”
a priest of Gruumsh has shown up to save the day
“See, dis shit?! Where y’all stay here an’ deprive Gruumsh of new souls to add to his warband on Nishrek?! Not on! Dis group-a pinkskins beat ya fair and square, stop whinin’bout tha golfbag fulla magic swords they have an’ move tha eff on!“
I like your way of thinking.
Grummsh plays poker with Gork and Mork on the weekends.
Maybe… but I kind of feel like dying a violent death in battle is what orcs expect. They’d prefer the other guy dies than them, but they’re not, like, shocked and offended when they die instead. It’s not a great violation of the nature order for them, and a routine death is unlikely to generate undead.
That, or they have a Valhalla / ‘die in combat’ requirement for their afterlife. So killing them violently is doing them a favor!
OK. Reading through the day’s comments, I’m thinking orcs were a bad example.
What about goblins, bandits, kobolds, and… I dunno… dire corbies? Some of them must have a slightly less martial attitude than orcs. Shouldn’t they be rising from the dead?
Don’t be silly, goblins don’t have souls on their loot tables!
Maybe because they’re so angry to begin with, or with an evil deity, it gets flipped and their ghostly versions are just harmless, helpless sad sacks instead of angry venge-grr.
Or they go straight to the Boneyard where Asmodeus us waiting for em’.
Huh. Maybe evil critters become goodly ghosts. They oppose their formerly evil tribe and aid adventurers. That’s actually a really interesting concept.
Come to think, vengeful spirits always kinda want revenge against the folks who wronged them, or want others to share in their misery – if Kobold’s backstab one another all the damn time, wouldn’t it be plausible that at least one of them gets so salty about it, they refuse to move on and instead seeks out some adventurers to pull one great backstab for him?
Now there’s an adventure arc for murderhobos: If you put yourself through just a bit of RP first, you get to butcher an entire kobold colony, and there’s probably some treasure to boot.
Well there was this one time when we accidentally released an entity to our campaign’s world that turned out to be the avatar of Orcus, and not only used the land’s renowned (and long long dead) Local Big Hero’s image as his on form, he also turned some of our allies into vampires, raised an army of undead, and eventually took over the world so it’s now filled with death and rain of blood and stuff.
Soo I guess that counts cause something we released created a lot of undead?
You know how it’s impossible to win or lose a game of D&D? I think you lost D&D. 🙁
Technically they made a setting for the next batch of PCs to eventually prevail in. So not win, so much as ‘new game plus’.
I’ve never done a full-on “continue the story of this setting” game. It sounds crazy rewarding though.
How many IRL years did you spend on those two campaigns?
Well the first campaign took us about 3 years, and several character deaths. The new campaign just started, 300 years after the Cataclysm, the remaining survivors now live on a floating ship-town, and the DM introduced Corruption and Mutation, taking inspirations from certain Warhammer products.
So far it’s awesome, my gnome monk started with 6 extra legs, but recently turned all his feet into a snake tail instead. And we got a penguin wizard sponsoring us.
It’s all a setup by the Big Divine, maaaaan! Don’t you see? Stage one, pay some orcs or goblins or whatever to attack a few settlements, get the locals properly freaked out. Then, by a stroke of “luck”, a group of adventurers just happens to stroll by. What a coincidence. And did you notice that they always have a Cleric in tow? Another “coincidence”. Adventurers butcher some gnolls, get paid and then leave. But wait! What happened to all the dead villagers and half monsters? They all died really gruesome, right? So what happens next? They rise as undead and start murdering folks again, until that is civilians can muster the money to pay another group of “adventurers”. By the time that happens though, the next undead horde is already fermenting, ready to burst forth the moment Cleric and Co leave the area. Rinse and repeat. Sure you could have the bodies blessed and properly buried. It’ll cost extra though, and there’s always going to be a corpse or a dozen that “slips” through the cracks. It’s an infinite money scam! Wake up, sheeple!
“Well, you’ve sold me. I’ll never have another cleric in my party, I can say that for certain.”
–Last words of Arkus the Dead
Hmm, I can’t tell if those ‘desecrated’ cadavers are random / generic NPCs, or if we’ve seen them before in a previous strip – presumably still living.
No idea. I’ll give you +5 XP if you can find ’em in a past comic though.
Ah, I see you wrote that script about body desecration after all. Heh.
In my opinion, its just not a proper adventure if their early screw ups don’t come back to attempt to horribly murder them.
After nearly 400 of these things, I’ll take inspiration where I can get it. 😛
In one of my campaigns, the orcs had a very much “viking” culture, up to and including their desire to have a warrior’s death. As such, “no true orc” who was slain in combat had the necessary negative energy to raise themselves as the undead in this manner. Of course, if the orc wasn’t slain in combat, but was brutally tortured to death, then the orc would have the necessary negative energy.
On a similar note, in my own campaign setting, each sentient race has their own specific undead that they can naturally become. Most of which is incorporated into the setting lore, and creates opportunities for rituals that low-level NPC villains to use that create their undead, instead of having to wait for the PCs to be high enough level to deal with the threat.
So what does your tortured-to-death orc undead look like?
Depends on what I am playing, actually. In Exalted, my Lunar No Moon was actually prone to performing rites over the dead, cause without it that’s how you get Hungry Ghosts. Keep that in mind. The paladin in my Rise of the Runelords game actually did rites on victims after the battle.
Exalted is an excellent training ground for D&D.
More recently, solars specifically are also an excellent training ground for appreciating the latter episodes of Game of Thrones. :/
Well, as a No Moon, she was also a Shaman before she was Exalted, so it was kinda beaten into her as a child. Of course, she had a bad example of Shamaning since her chosen god before her Exaltation was Elder Oak…
Yeah, I don’t watch it myself, but one of my gaming friends has been referring to it as “it’s like every character forgot their entire seven seasons of character development”, which sounds like the Great Curse in action. He did enjoy how I actually played the history of Exalted out while pointing out how the Great Curse was actually responsible for everything.
we always make sure to despatch them with a splash of holiness in the oil to start the bonfire. of cause Rise of the Runelords is extra challenging, with all them giants, so a splash of holiness in the water before they get eaten by wildlife must do.
Gererally good advice: burry them head/face down. when they get zombified and start digging it won’t be upwards.
Well now I want an adventure in a cavern far below a graveyard.
“Damn cheap priests! How much would it have cost to sanctify corpses properly? Buggers pocketed the coins, rolled ’em over in their coffins, and called it a day. Bloody corrupt, the lot of ’em!”
and then they make more money with the holy water they sell to deal with all those undead in the dungeons.
I’m under the impression that dying in a notable way isn’t enough, the conditions need to be right, or you need to be a notable person. If the DM didn’t deign to give you a name, you don’t warrant the kind of undeath that maintains your identity.
Wait… All those zombies in random crypts were notable named dudes?
That’s not a type of undeath that maintains your identity. Zambees and skellingtons come from someone using your corpse to raise a zambee or skellington. Undead with personality have backstories attached. People who the GM didn’t name don’t get to be revenants though.
Bad Fighter, I’m ok with artists making art just for fun, but when someone explicitly want’s to commission you for it, you really should take their money.
Your art is worth it!
Also as general advise I suggest sticking to mostly honorable and fair (if a bit dirty) combat with the hordes of sentient creatures you kill rather than getting strong personal connections with betrayals and particularly horrible painful demises. Whatever you do avoid violating hospitality, if you break bread with the monster don’t kill it until the next time you meet when you are safe in the knowledge of no longer being their guest.
Normally that’s enough to avoid vengeful undead. If you want to go the extra step perhaps because you are in cursed land, then whatever passes as a proper burial (even a cheap one works if it is proper) in your local culture should do the trick.
I strongly suggest against burning the corpses through, that just mean that if your GM feels you transgressed enough against the natural order to get an undead foe with a personal connection that will just mean you get incorporal undead rather than corporal ones, and everyone knows those are the worst kind.
He sets up in artist’s alley at DesecraCon every year. He’s not too popular though, what with the low prices driving down competition.
Have you played Blades in the Dark? Vengeful spirits as consequences for your actions is baked into both the system and the setting. Also it’s one of the best RPG’s ever published, in my humble opinion.
Only once. My cohort keeps talking about getting back into it, but we’re all crazy busy during the semester. Haven’t actually met any ghosts yet, though I believe we’ve got a Whisper in the crew itching for the chance.
Well, not certain I’ve made any undead future threats but I do have something in mind for ensuring that there are no spirits around to cause any trouble.
Flesh to stone, it doesn’t kill simply permanently incapacitates.
Imagine if you will an entire prison run by a medusa giving long lasting life sentences.
Oof. I’ve had my fill of medusa dungeons. (See previous comic.) As it turns out, you’ve got to invent A LOT of denitrification plot devices if you want a group to make it through.
This is why the Holy Warrior I play in one of my games has the Perks “Rest in Pieces”.
Rest in Pieces means nothing can bring something back into Undeath once he slays it (okay, I suppose the God of Death/Undeath themselves coming down and saying “Wakey-wakey, brains and stakey” might get a corpse to jigging again).
Hmm… the Perk doesn’t specify Ghosts not returning… but they are Undead so it should stop that nonsense too… hang on, I have go ask some pointed questions of the GM.
The small print, man… That’s where incorporeal undead are at their most dangerous!
How to keep the recently dead permanently dead?
Two words: Wood Chipper
Add holy water to taste
Steve Buscemi tested, adventurer approved!
https://townsquare.media/site/341/files/2011/10/wood-chipper-fargo.jpg?w=980&q=75
In the campaign I GM’d, the leader of the ghoul band, Madrian Acheros AKA “Mother” was actually alive, but her body had a ludicrous amount of ghoul fever virus in her system that she kept in check with the spell Delay Disease. My original plan was that when the PCs killed her, if they didn’t do a basic consecration, decapitation, body-burning, feeding the body to a nearby crocodile or something similar, in a few days she’d rise up as a super-ghoul and attack the party out of nowhere. However, the PCs captured her rather than kill her, so that got put off for a while. Eventually, though, she escaped, and I could not decide between scenario ideas for fights with her living spell-caster form and feral ghoul form, so I had her attack the PCs while alive and then, after they killed her, reanimated her a few minutes later and had her ghoul form come shrieking out of nowhere for one final grudge match. It worked really well.
From the Jason Voorhees school of villainy! I dig it. 🙂
I recognise this story, but I can’t remember where from.
I told it (with additional context) earlier this month here: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/claiming-the-throne-part-1-5-active-npcs
There was also a Reddit post.
I’m gonna take a page from Battle Brothers and try to explain it.
Whether your a orc, a human, or simply a Minotaur a medusa or what have you, you have been told by someone or at least something that once you die the gods, the spirits, your ancestors, or the like will relieve you of all of your earthly desires.
And to be honest I would say its pretty easy to let go when for all of your life you’ve known nothing but hardship, war, and the troubles of your daily life.
Once you die its like suddenly realizing you can go to sleep after you’ve been awake for 36 hours.
Who cares what just happened to you, or what you did you want to go to sleep! Which is what mostly happens to a lot of people, all those orcs you kill they see their bodies, and they pass on to whatever afterlife that they have been told will await them.
Same goes for people, and when they die they realize “oh im dead I can pass on to the afterlife now” and do so.
Life sucks, for a lot of people in your generic fantasy game.
The orcs are always at war, the commoners will always be on the receiving end of that and the monsters will be monsters.
Once they or someone dies they can go the embrace of the gods, which after having endured the burden that is life seems like salvation. And many do.
The ones who stay, they are the ones who have everything or who will not forget.
They are the necromancers who wish to bend life and death to their whim, they are the paranoid nobles who don’t want to leave for they have everything, they are the angered and outraged souls who even through the bliss that is death want revenge, they are the shriekers and the horrified that even through the bliss of death and with the embrace of the gods want to stay one more waking moment in the living world.
They will bargain, they will curse, and they will fight the divine touch of the gods to stay one more waking moment.
And thats how you get your undead revenants, vampires, ghasts and etc. Or at least how I perceive it.
In other words, “naturally occurring” undead are always accompanied by some significant backstory oddity. “Normal” death isn’t enough…?
How does that jibe with intentionally-created undead, viz necromancy raising zombies?
Why when a viking dies honorably in battle he doesn’t rise from the dead to kill his killer? Because he is in Valhalla. Like HopeFox and Zarhon said the Orcs may see their demise as a fair fight and a good death, that is why you can kill them and not seeing a ghost. They are at peace with their lives and their deaths. That is what truly bind ghost, specters and the rest of the restless deaths, they are not at peace with their deaths that is why they are restless deads in the first place.
Now, while i can’t truly condene anyone for been a jerkass, my hypocrisy has its limits, still i would say Fighter to honor the dead, before giving him a good beating. Honor the dead, even when you rise them to eat their families, make war against their friends and nation or to make a musical number 🙂
Alternate explanation: https://imgix.ranker.com/user_node_img/50059/1001160163/original/funeral-ships-photo-u1?w=650&q=50&fm=pjpg&fit=crop&crop=faces
Good funeral if you are a hero, a chief, a warrior or a flammable-boat owner.
Canonically the Orcish afterlife is in Acheron, the plane of war where the Orc hordes of Gruumsh fight endlessly, so I totally see death in battle as cool for Orcs.
Exactly what i said.
Revenants.
In Pathfinder, at least, they’re probably the most-feared undead at my table. Maaaaaybe ghouls and ghasts beat them out, but they’re still super scary. They’re smart and relentless, and they tend to break the trend of “You walk into a room and see a monster”. Revenants that someone else created will appear like that, sure, but revenants that the PCs created tend to come at the party from behind. And the really clever ones stalk them a little first, and wait for the rear-guard to move forward and engage something else.
Nastiest revenant fight I’ve ever seen, I was actually a player instead of a DM for once. I was the party’s necromancer wizard, and apparently the wizard of an enemy adventuring party blamed me the most out of all of us, because of our shared wizardry. She waited until we were in a tough fight against some ghouls, and our cleric moved up from her usual position in the back line to help the brawler/kineticist and the medium.
Then she pounced. I ended up in a grapple that nearly killed me while the only not-stunned member of the party, the cleric, couldn’t rush to my rescue, because she was keeping ghouls from eating the other two (both paralyzed).
As I said, very nearly died there. Fortunately, my AC held out against a couple of the revenant’s lower rolls (didn’t have a hope of breaking a grapple, or casting a spell, so I was just taking total defence actions every turn) and I survived the grapple long enough for the cleric to finish off the ghouls, and rush in and cut the baddie down with her falchion.
Heh. No one ever thinks to go total defense in a grapple. Nice tactics right there!
Wait… You said Pathfinder, right? The only role a grappler has to make is to maintain, then they get their damage for “free.” How would total defense help in that situation? I mean, if it “missed” you at all you’d be free of the grapple, right? Or am I missing something?
Huhhh… I forgot that was the case, and I guess the GM did too. He’d just said “Okay. +4”.
Flowcharts, yo. All the time every day flowcharts.
http://www.pfsprep.com/e107_files/public/1482694608_186_FT297_grappleflowchart_1.0.pdf
Total defense would increase your CMD since it’s a dodge bonus and those applies.
So it’d help that way.
Yes it would. But dude said that it mitigated some low rolls to attack, but that it was never good enough to break the grapple. That would seem to indicate that the grapple was being held while multiple attacks were going on. Unless rakes are in play, that ain’t how it works.
Hypothetically the Grab special ability could also cause the described situation, as long as at least one attack with Grab hit each turn and succeeded on the grapple check.
Strictly speaking what would happen in that case would be a series of grapples being ended and then established “anew”, but that doesn’t seem like a distinction worth maintaining in the retelling.
Conveniently Revenants has two claw attacks with the grab special ability.
Of course it’s also very possible that the GM just misunderstood something, the grapple rules are notoriously complex.
I bet you’re right. “Catch and release” grabbing would be the best way to deal the most damage, what with the constrict procs.
Mystery solved. Curiosity satisfied. Carry on.
And here is where the story of my group’s poor swashbuckler-turned-moon-wraith is elaborated on!
He died under violent circumstances, namely, getting chomped by a giant fish whilst trying to save our monk from the same fate (it didn’t go well). Luckily we killed the fish and cut him out of its belly, but the damage was already done, and his player felt it was time for a change. Of course, this could have ended there, as we would have given him a proper burial (or rez) and he’d have little reason to become undead, but his player wanted to cash in on his unrevealed backstory and create drama out of it.
Thus, drama is introduced! As we try to get him raised at a temple, the priests tell us the attempt failed… As he was among the ranks of the damned, for acts of unforgivable wrath – familycide, parents murder! Turns out, our seemingly good natured elf had a dark past he was trying to atone on or put behind him – one that involved parents he despised… And was involved in the deaths of.
Thus, killed before earning redemption, his spirit was tormented and unable to rest peacefully, living out his wrath in an ancient ruin dedicated to it (a future dungeon for us to conveniently find him in).
Now, if you read my previous comments you know that encounter turned silly due to his odd weakness and he was forced to flee anticlimactically. So now we still have an angry PC controlled bad ghostie, stalking and/or readying an ambush or worse.
Wizard would be proud.
Well… where do you think all those undead and stuff in dungeons and the Shadowfell or wherever come from?
As for stopping your foes from rising, a quick prayer to an appropriate diety to guide their souls should do the trick most of the time I would expect. Otherwise what are gods good for?
In the same way we skip over wizards studying their spells each morning, I bet there’s a lot of general-purpose piety like this that PCs get up to when their players aren’t looking.
Maybe one day I’ll play a Cleric that goes through all the motions.
…
Then again maybe not, cuz…. effort. =P
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the
Inequities of mechanics and the tyranny of bookkeeping
This is my arguement when DM’s talk about swinging divine intervention willy-nilly around to get dead adventurers back on their feet.
What makes them special?
If some smart-mouthed player character who goes through life regularly dissing the gods gets a free pass back to the living because the god they wrote on their sheet 3 months back but haven’t offered a single prayer to in that time suddenly decides “they are worth”, then what about those hundreds of fanatically devout cultists they have been wading through? The damn things should be popping back up seconds after hitting the ground.
Didn’t Gygax give a 1% chance per level that a cleric could call on divine intervention? I could swear that I’ve read some rule along those lines, but my Google-fu is failing me.
My take is that there’s a healthy dose of “chose one” in many games. But even more than that, PCs are special by virtue of being PCs. That’s not a very satisfying lore answer, but it does have the virtue of keeping the game going in case of TPK.
Personally I find the “PCs are special by virtue of being PCs.” thing more satisfying if I mentally turn it on its head.
That is rather than the PCs being special because they are PCs, I think of it as “the PCs are PCs because they are special.”
If they weren’t special/interesting we would have picked some other people to play as instead.
Bloody ta’veren everywhere!
That’s the 5E Cleric’s Divine Intervention feature. You can try once a day at no cost, but if it succeeds it has a 1 week cooldown. At level 20 your success rate goes up to 100%.
I did a bit of googling, and was able to trace the history of that ability. Check out page 9 of Deities and Demigods:
https://www.scribd.com/document/118846206/deities-demigods
If you REALLY don’t want your enemies coming back, it’s only a soulgem and a crafting session for a magic item away. You can’t become a ghost if you’re an adventurer’s sandals.
“The Case of the Haunted Sandals.”
–An adventure for 4-5 players of 3rd level, by Colin Stricklin (forthcoming)
… Is the solution going to be selling the haunted so(u)les to a devil?
Dance with the devil, baby!
Fighter is doing it wrong, he has to drink the Sacred Water and then spinkle it over the Undead….
I played several Ravenloft Games, after that you are a little paranoid. In some realms EVERY not properly disposed Dead Body may come back. There comes a dwarven cleric handy. Especially when he has spells like “move earth.” Every dead was prepared (eq looted) and then brought under the turf with some holy water sprinkled… from his beard. And he personal brewed sacred tasted everytime. After some rounds of Ravenloft you start disposing the dead automatically. Or you have an chaotic good Nekromancer in your group. He will make sure as well, that the disposed will not be risen by others….
Along a similar line, I kept trying to figure out a script where Priest sweats into potion bottles, which Acolyte prices and sells as holy water. I could never quite make it work as a single-panel gag though. The punchline would probably be Fighter or someone drinking from the flask and remarking how it “tastes holy,” but alas, it was not to be.
We had an aspiring actor join our group, and as such, he was very good at role-playing and character development. As such, he created a character who he planned to slowly descend into evil. However, being fairly new, he neglected to mention this to me, so when he killed some goblin children for money, he quickly had a revenant problem.
I likely would have created revenants if he had told me, but the execution would have been far different.
Is there a high % chance of revenants in your world, or did it just feel like a good excuse for an interesting encounter?
I think the Pathfinder Banshee principal is the best answer to this one! In Pathfinder, a Banshee is created by an Elf who just before death betrayed a loved one or was betrayed! Now, you’d think this would mean that there would be roughly 900 bajillion Drow banshees running around, because they can’t pass their spouse the salt without betraying someone, but to the Drow, betraying and being betrayed are such a normal part of life that it simply isn’t tragic enough to create a banshee! I’d expect the same thing applies to orcs, gnolls, and the other angry fighty races that often make up the enemy cast of a campaign. Sure, a whole bunch of them fell in battle with the party, but they’ve probably spent their entire lives in battle, so they knew where their life was going! They’d probably find dying of old age to be the far more irregular event!
Solid explanation. I can dig it!
I’ve got a follow-up question though: How exactly would you create a drow banshee?
The easiest would probably be to use one of those rare non-evil drow, but barring that, it’d probably be quite difficult. Since it specifically needs to be a betrayal to create a banshee, I guess it would have to be someone that drow thought would never, ever betray them? Or someone that they really didn’t want to betray? It’s an interesting thought experiment.
At the start of my current game, my paladin was super respectful of the dead and always tried to do the right thing, by being courteous to their remains and putting them to the side (not having the time to burn them on a pyre is unfortunate, but common, and paladins do not have access to burning hands).
But the GM never rewarded such behavior. So, instead, I decided that my paladin would loot all the bodies and otherwise leave them where they lay. Except for wedding rings for demihumans, those stay on the body. If they have magical armor though, you better believe I’ll take that stuff and sell it to the highest bidder!
Oh, boy. Yeah, I’ve been in this situation. As a note: It did involve a sentient epic-level magic item. We had to ask nicely for Consula (the magic staff) to actually do things! But the DM was generous, and the staff wanted to be helpful. And that’s when the trouble started.
See, the staff could deal Positive or Negative energy damage. Being epic level, that damage wasn’t so much “shaping magic into a fragment of the appropriate essence” as “draws power straight from the core of the plane in question”. Things tended to go “pop” when the staff did things, and we started getting used to the idea that the staff could finish fights for us! Quick jolt of concentrated negative energy, as if creating a momentary rift into the deepest parts of the Plane Of Negative Energy inside of the enemy? Easy!
Then the undead started showing up. More than just Lord Patru (a kobold that survived out last campaign with this GM, and was now a vampire lord) and his minions, we were dealing with shadows and other nasties. But the staff could help! Right? Positive energy was just as easy for it as negative energy! (In case it wasn’t obvious, we missed the clues at this point.)
Seeing an enemy you killed come back once is unnerving. Seeing it happen a second time, each from overwhelming energy damage, is actually pretty scary. The second monsters were undead constructed out of twisted positive energy, with fangs made of literal crystalized negative energy. We stopped asking Consula for help at that point. We weren’t interested in seeing how far that nightmare went.
My Lizardfolk Genie Warlock has a policy of leaving no useable meat behind, so he never has to worry about his enemies’ corpses getting back up.
Thankfully, between his “Special Sauce” bottle and a policy of only “Human”ely sourcing his meat, no one asks too many questions about what’s on the grill.