Paleonecromancy

[BaHalus]

I had this crazy idea some time ago and now I would like to use in a game. A paleonecromant (or paleothanatomancer) that would bring fossils back to life.

It would involve mostly taking a fossilized bone and reconstructing the creature or, if available, animating a whole reconstructed skeleton, like the tyrannosaurus in that film in the museum.

How do you hive mind suggest to do that? I want ideas like which new spells should be created, with which fatigue and time costs, and how this would be affected by the quality and of the available fossil and size of the animal. And the difference between an animated skeleton and a living animal or zombie one. And which spells should be pre requisite for these new ones.

And templates of some extinct animals would be cool too.

[Flyndaran]

Fossils might be extra fragile Skeletons with spell penalties for percentage of missing bones.
The Zombie spell has an increased price per hex of target.

[The Colonel]

A lot would depend on how necromancy/thanaturgy works in your setting - in a lot of cases, it relies on binding the soul of the deceased and is harder to work the longer the body you are trying to animate has been dead. No only would the dinosaur lack a soul (being an animal) it has also been dead for an inordinately long time and the fossil contains little or nothing of its original body. Frankly, a fossil (even assuming a complete skeleton ... which is very rare) comprises so little original material, you might as well treat it as an animated object rather than an undead creature.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

FWIW, in Pyramid #68, there's a "fossil monster" metatrait which would probably be relevant here. It could be applied to dinosaurs and other prehistoric critters from Big Lizzie, Lands Out Of Time, and the like.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by BaHalus

How do you hive mind suggest to do that? I want ideas like which new spells should be created, with which fatigue and time costs, and how this would be affected by the quality and of the available fossil and size of the animal.

You want a version of Animation (Magic p.150) with a longer duration. You could presumably use Animation to create a Zombie that required maintenance every minute, so the cost and casting time relationships for an until destroyed version would probably be similar for any spell that does a long term animation on a specific subset of objects - so a minute or two to cast, and 8 or 10 x (SM+1) energy. I don't think it really needs a prerequisite beyond Animation as a necromancy spell. If you wanted it not to involve summoning spirits from hell to animate it, Summon Earth Elemental; Create Servant; or Dancing Object and at least 8 other Movement spells; seem like reasonable alternate prerequisites.

For a fossil, the Skeleton meta-trait looks fine. And I probably wouldn't let it work at all if you didn't have enough pieces (or model replacements) so the bits were no further apart than the bones in an intact skeleton. Mind you the model replacements wouldn't need to be *correct*, just something to get the pieces close enough together. You could probably animate a collection of sticks laid out in the right general pattern if you wanted. The thing might not move at all like the real animal did, but who cares.

[Anthony]

I don't see a strong reason to not just use Zombie stats as written, just remembering that the cost of regular spells scales with the SM of the thing being animated. Probably add some Earth spells as a prerequisite, though; Stone to Flesh sounds like a good candidate.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

A lot would depend on how necromancy/thanaturgy works in your setting - in a lot of cases, it relies on binding the soul of the deceased and is harder to work the longer the body you are trying to animate has been dead. No only would the dinosaur lack a soul (being an animal) it has also been dead for an inordinately long time and the fossil contains little or nothing of its original body. Frankly, a fossil (even assuming a complete skeleton ... which is very rare) comprises so little original material, you might as well treat it as an animated object rather than an undead creature.

To make it the more so, a fossil is no longer made of bone, the bone has more-or-less been replaced by mineralization. That might matter.

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

To make it the more so, a fossil is no longer made of bone, the bone has more-or-less been replaced by mineralization. That might matter.

Although some fossils have been found with the original dino proteins (mostly collagen) in them. See, for example, http://www.livescience.com/41537-t-rex-soft-tissue.html

Luke

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

To make it the more so, a fossil is no longer made of bone, the bone has more-or-less been replaced by mineralization. That might matter.

In settings where magic exists, we can't make too many assumptions about how fossilization occurs.
Perhaps local thaumaturges scoff and tell us that such hardening of flesh and bone merely makes the tokens that much more magically potent.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

In settings where magic exists, we can't make too many assumptions about how fossilization occurs.
Perhaps local thaumaturges scoff and tell us that such hardening of flesh and bone merely makes the tokens that much more magically potent.

And in any case, stone to flesh seems like an obvious candidate for dealing with this problem.