Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

If you have not already, you'll want to get your hands on Pyramid #3/103. The designer's notes article contains some monster stats not suitable for the book, including the Tibetan ro-langs, a sort of zombie. Alas, I couldn't find anything like enough Sogdian or Uighur material on the subject.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

The Uighurs are originally a Turkic people, I think, and so anything from Turkic mythology would be appropriate for the region. The Epic of Koroghlu as well as the Dede Korkut are sort of key epics for this culture, you can find them in any online library.
Depending on the campaign, I'd likely throw in vanilla skeletons and zombies and put some local garb on them, and many some advantage appropriate to the terrain and campaign.
Also I think the phoenix myth is big in that region (I'm no expert! far from it), so maybe an undead Phoenix (if that's not completely impossible). Would a Phoenix be undead between the time it died and rose from it's ashes?
Rolling vs. my philosophy skill...

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Ghosts of stragglers who fell behind their caravan and got left in the desert. They are still looking for someone to latch on to.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Mostly I was curious about how undead would form in that kind of setting. I assume there are many different types of undead in each of the different cultures around the Silk Road. So I was wondering if Chinese people would turn into Chinese undead, Tibetan people turn into Tibetan undead and so on based on ancestry or would it be more of a location based thing where the location determines the type of undead. Or maybe a mixture of these.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

I'd assume a 'naturally' or spontaneously forming Undead would be based on the culture of the person it formed from, regardless of their geographic location, but if they can spawn or pass on an infection like vampires do in some stories, then the infected victims would follow the infection pattern even if it's not something that would be typical of their culture.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Chinese are ancestor venerators and so their undead-if that is the word-are more likely to be dead of the clan gone on ahead that are paying a visit to check up on their kids back in the world of the living. I would picture them as more like giving advise and occasionally meting out discipline then doing "hauntings" like your normal undead. In fact they sound rather charming fellows. Of course if they were given a miserly funeral it might be different. Someone else more up on Chinese lore might have a better picture. But it seems rather like ancestor venerators would just come up with a nicer picture.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Well, there's a scenario: "Help me -- I've turned into the wrong sort of undead! The shame! The horror!"

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Nope. Chinese mythology has all kinds of ghosts who either can't get into Heaven, or won't, along with ghoulish monsters and green- or white-furred vampires (the Chinese 'Hopping' Vampire is particularly notorious).

Romans were big on Ancestor worship, as were the Etruscans before them - specifically because if you didn't do it right, they would get angry. I understand many other cultures have the same belief.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Yeah. Most cultures develop ancestor veneration as one their first religions. It really is ubiquitous.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

My great-grandmother ruled her son's household wielding a large wooden spoon as her preferred weapon [1]. It's only a small step to continuing to live in awe/terror of her after she died.

[1] From the family's description, a Small Round Mace. I suspect it was more of a Baton in reality. :)