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[Harry Baldman]

That's a good point, the fields would most logically be worked by an undead workforce, which means several things - there is likely an industry devoted to the maintenance of said undead, there is a concurrent industry in the procurement of more bodies to make undead out of (definitely out of fatally exsanguinated criminals, unregistered travelers, and likely out of cattle purchased in the city with some kind of payment arrangement to their family, whether before or after their deaths).

So if you're considering natural zombie and skeleton attrition due to being subjected to backbreaking labor as well as the elements, there'd be a constant and rising demand for the delivery of bodies to the farming operations, which would likely outpace the increase in the necropolis population, and also consequently a high demand for innovation in farming techniques to decrease said attrition rates. After all, if a famine were to occur, that would mean people don't regenerate Constitution damage as effectively which could send the necropolitan blood economy into an anemic fit.

[wierd]

Here's an ironic twist, if you want to use vivomancers as color--- You must be truly alive to use it as a requirement for that magic school. Undead cant evoke.   This would cement the living in a permanent role in the necropolis culture, as they would be indispensable for sustaining the society.

Evolution (for story color) of the school would be something like this:

Necropowers take over, high demand for blood, undead servitors displace most farm labor, mortals become chattels for producing blood.
Mortal chattels are still magically inclined, have unique properties as spell casters-- limited demand for them in niche roles sustains small numbers of magic schools devoted to training them.
Many mortals seek magical training to improve their condition, even though demand for magical mortals is low. Possible value of magically trained mortals for superior quality blood for special purposes by necropower society.
Combined with high demand for blood, magical mortals are driven to develop new sorceries. (vivomancy)
Initial research involves such unsavory practices as experimenting on pregnant women, newborn babies, small children-- et al. Gets a nasty reputation.
More refined practice gives rise to first tank abberations, produce poor quality blood, but in large quantities. Eases administration burdens of necropower hierarchy.
Necropower hierarchy becomes dependent upon supply of inexpensive (but low quality) blood produced from this industry.
Demand for mortal sorcerers increases, as more are required to make and maintain the tanks.
Mortals assume newly created indespensible role as elite vivomancer caste.

[Harry Baldman]

Oh! Animate Dead requires black onyx as an obligatory material component, 25 gps worth per HD of the undead created - this makes 1 HD skeletons about half as expensive as 2 HD (the lowest they can go) zombies. So that's a constant source of onyx required to sustain a fully undead peasant force, and quite a lot of it at that.

Oh, and wierd: this is D&D, so vivomancy isn't actually a thing for the most part (there is a fleshwarper prestige class, but that's all about grafting things to yourself and others for fun and profit). That is, unless you adhere to the Nethack interpretation of Stone to Flesh.

[Draignean]

Describing the lower caste as cattle who survive by selling their blood brings up a question from me: Does the original base of the economy (IE: most people farming I guess in a generic medieval setting) still exist and this blood tax lays on top, or has that been supplanted somehow, leaving this massive glut of unskilled labor that has no where to turn other then selling their blood?

I imagine a necropolis is like a medieval city - while it benefits very directly from the excruciating system of farming required to feed all of its living citizenry, no farming goes on within the city itself. And since serfdom was pretty horrible historically even without being run by undead monsters, you can only imagine what it'd be like in service to a necropolis.

Quite, farming is needed to bring in food to feed the cattle (and everyone who doesn't eat cattle). Thus you can think of farmers as a very extended set of tenders. Skeletons are excellent picks for a great deal of dumb labor, given their speed, durability, and simplicity, but they're still useless without direction. Since most Vampires would rather set their heads on fire than learn how to farm, that puts a substantial portion of your work force in the hands of more-mortal instruments. Talent clerics/wizard/sorcerers capable of raising and controlling undead are certainly employed, but even they usually have to be advised on the finer points of agriculture.

So, yes. There is still substantial agriculture, and while some farms are certainly run by necromancy, this is expensive and still requires someone who knows that farming is slightly more difficult that putting plant bits in the ground and waiting for a while. Thus a large number of farms are still run principally by mortals. Other manual labors, such as a mining, fall into similar traps- where the lesser undead act as supplemental labor forces.

In this hypothetical setting, would it be illegal to be a mortal wizard specializing in studying living flesh / performing horrible magical research on cultured tissues?

I ask that, because the obvious way to get rich quick is to produce an abomination in a vat that produces copious amounts of blood.  Say, cultured from the wizard's own flesh, just for this purpose.

Which is why I could definitely see a very valuable market for vivomancers. (Specifically, people who create (and maintain) a soulless husk-copy of you in a tank, fed on garbage and refuse, for the exclusively sole purpose of providing blood for the tax.)

When you can literally create something that "shits gold", it throws a big monkey wrench in the economy though-- so I also see where it would be forbidden to anyone but the elite.

It need not even be a complete copy of you to suffice either-- whole blood is produced from bone marrow. A big tank filled with twisted, gnarly-unnatural bone tissue filled with bone marrow cranking out biologically identical blood to your own would suffice.

It might be part of the glue that binds old-economy (tank abberations need foodstuffs to produce blood) with new economy (ever increasing populations of lich lords and rewarded underlings need ever increasing supplies of blood to survive). 

Ah, but the catch is that Vampires are not just carnivores. I honestly don't remember if this is my own head-canon or real D&D canon, but Vampires don't digest blood as a chemical energy the way a human digests food. Vampires feed on life, on corrupting and destroying the positive energy of a living being. The blood of a vat-grown magitech clone has little life to it- even if the blood and bone are chemically indistinguishable from that of a normal person, the soul is not.

Essentially, blood from something vat-grown would be a zero product.  It would pass the lips, but it would provide no nourishment nor have any flavor. In a very Renfield sense, Vampires need their victims to have LIVES, not just life in the strict sense.

Each experience in a person's life changes the flavor of their vintage, making a well experienced individual something akin to a complex wine. The caste of vampires dedicated to making culinary delights does take a variety of interesting methods in order to manipulate these experiences- including a method of magical sleep and controlled dreaming. The result is the closest thing a vampire meal might have to the label of 'artificial flavors added'.

Actually vat-growing people and THEN letting them experience things is the kind of powerful magic that's just more trouble than it's worth when one considers how easily most mortals predicate themselves naturally. People are rather good at breeding.

Oh! Animate Dead requires black onyx as an obligatory material component, 25 gps worth per HD of the undead created - this makes 1 HD skeletons about half as expensive as 2 HD (the lowest they can go) zombies. So that's a constant source of onyx required to sustain a fully undead peasant force, and quite a lot of it at that.

Oh, and wierd: this is D&D, so vivomancy isn't actually a thing for the most part (there is a fleshwarper prestige class, but that's all about grafting things to yourself and others for fun and profit). That is, unless you adhere to the Nethack interpretation of Stone to Flesh.

The Blood Magi at least as the ability to create a Homunculus, which would be the beginning of flesh magic.

[wierd]

Onyx can be produced synthetically. Unless there is a requirement that it be NATURAL onyx, simple mineral quartz and a few other ingredients can be used to mass manufacture it, under the right conditions.

Re: vivomancy-- it noted that I did not know what game system he was using, but that SOME systems did use it as a magic school.  Since this is a home-brewed scenario, he can homebrew that in too, since the society would naturally favor the emergence of something like it, simply due to economic pressures.

Draignean:

Easy enough-- Collect the old, who have a large reserve of life experiences, or the very young who have a high blood debt, but high vitality-- and instead of simply insanguining them, put them into the vats, and artificially sustain them.  When they can no longer be sustained, their corpses become the raw material for the farming labor industry. If you want added horror, say they are alive and conscious through this entire process.

[Criptfeind]

Ah, but the catch is that Vampires are not just carnivores. I honestly don't remember if this is my own head-canon or real D&D canon

The Libris Mortis describes vampires as being diet dependent on blood but inescapably craving life energy. Technically able to live without it but so hopelessly addicted that they'll be reduced to mindless beasts without it. So a little bit of column a, little bit of column b I guess!

That could be an interesting punishment in a vampire society (in a setting where it worked). Forced to survive on vat grown blood as you lost your mind to hunger for the real stuff.

[wierd]

Useful as a "cutting" agent, for low society undead.  Coupled with a high potency blood source (virgins, children, etc), the resulting 'grog' could sustain an administrative caste, but that filth would never cross the lips of the elite. I like it.

[Criptfeind]

It comes to mind that in a society where experiences in life age a persons tastes (which tracks pretty well to the negative level mechanic in D&D already) the whole of the campaign could be revealed to be all a set up by a consortium of bloodners to make the most aged and complex taste yet. Hum, might need to use that idea myself at some point.

[Harry Baldman]

Quite, farming is needed to bring in food to feed the cattle (and everyone who doesn't eat cattle). Thus you can think of farmers as a very extended set of tenders. Skeletons are excellent picks for a great deal of dumb labor, given their speed, durability, and simplicity, but they're still useless without direction. Since most Vampires would rather set their heads on fire than learn how to farm, that puts a substantial portion of your work force in the hands of more-mortal instruments. Talent clerics/wizard/sorcerers capable of raising and controlling undead are certainly employed, but even they usually have to be advised on the finer points of agriculture.

The great thing about wizards is that powergaming is practically an essential character trait and thus nobody wants to put any ranks in Profession (farmer). So the noble Commoner comes to the (incredibly underpaid, grueling and ultimately thanklessly fatal) rescue!

Onyx can be produced synthetically. Unless there is a requirement that it be NATURAL onyx, simple mineral quartz and a few other ingredients can be used to mass manufacture it, under the right conditions.

It could be, but not with methods that would work well on a massive scale (in medieval fantasy, pretty much exclusively magic which tends to produce small quantities of material for personal use and typically requires relatively high level spells to accomplish). Alchemy is leaning in the right direction, but ultimately lacks the sophistication required to synthesize particular minerals.

[Criptfeind]

It wouldn't matter anyway, since in D&D undead creation is tied directly to the material value of the catalyst. If you start mass producing onyx, your spells will soon need more and more of the stuff. To the point where you're jamming their skulls full of handfuls of the stuff, filling their chest cavities with rocks, and eventually having to grind up massive onyx boulders to bathe the bones in their dust!

Truely woe to the necromancer who thinks he might find a way to improve the efficiency of his craft.

[wierd]

There could be a few ways to go about it magically...

1) Time accelerated layer deposition. (Simulates natural layer formation, or even accelerates a natural mineral deposit that can potentially produce onyx, so the mineral precipitates quickly, via magical influence.)

2) brute force reconstitution (what you seem to be referring to.)

3) Pyrochemical manipulation (Similar to how you make synthetic ruby, for instance. Use a hydrogen-oxygen torch with finely powdered mineral feedstock, or in this case, a magical flame that contributes no gas impurities, and slowly melt/recrystalize the resulting substance to make synthetic onyx.)

#1 could possibly produce it in large quantities.

(AND, it gets around Criptfeind's argument, because the value of the land can be quite expensive! )

[NJW2000]

I'm sure a society like this one would have no problem raiding and pillaging for onyx. Undead hordes, vampire nobles, and I guess a few human guards as well... perhaps not the best large-scale raiders, however. Besides, if power is tied to the value, won't onyx get more valuable, and hence more powerful, as it gets scarcer?

Alternatively, trade for onyx could be carried out, perhaps by nobles who have learned crafts to impossibly masterful degrees out of boredom. Or by a skilled human class. Naturally, the latter might seek to take their goods and services directly to the buyers, other kingdoms that care about things apart from death and blood, but the heavily restricted roads would prevent them from doing so. Open country, you say? Fifty thousand semi-controlled undead beg to disagree.

[wierd]

I kinda like the use of Method#1 above though.

If you throw in some kinks-- To use a parcel of land to create artificial gemstones, you need:

1) The spell perk, obviously (House rules, so can be NPC only)
2) A parcel of land who's value is greater than the value of the mineral load you intend to create on it.
3) Refined raw materials to sew into the parcel of land, from which to precipitate the gemstones, who have a high cost value, due to the labor involved in their manufacture/purity.
4) A sum of gold to pay for administration fees, and servicing fee for the geomancer doing the dirty work.
5) Once created, the value of the load of gemstones, minus the costs of the raw material and admin fees, are permanently subtracted from the land parcel's value, in the form of ecological damage. (meaning the land's value permanently drops if you cheese it on the materials or fees paid, which means if you try again later, you cannot produce as many gems, as your land parcel's value is permanently reduced from your mismanagement)

This will invariably create a potentially infinite supply of gemstones, as long as you supply the needed cashflow, without reducing the value of the resulting products. (The resulting products are used industrially, and their demand is tied to that industrial use-- they are consumed by the process that uses them, so the market cannot become saturated. The cost naturally incorporates all prior cost centers, (admin fees, processing fees, wages, etc.), so the synthetic onyx will be more expensive than imported natural stone-- just more available in bulk.

[Draignean]

Onyx can be produced synthetically. Unless there is a requirement that it be NATURAL onyx, simple mineral quartz and a few other ingredients can be used to mass manufacture it, under the right conditions.

Re: vivomancy-- it noted that I did not know what game system he was using, but that SOME systems did use it as a magic school.  Since this is a home-brewed scenario, he can homebrew that in too, since the society would naturally favor the emergence of something like it, simply due to economic pressures.

Draignean:

Easy enough-- Collect the old, who have a large reserve of life experiences, or the very young who have a high blood debt, but high vitality-- and instead of simply insanguining them, put them into the vats, and artificially sustain them.  When they can no longer be sustained, their corpses become the raw material for the farming labor industry. If you want added horror, say they are alive and conscious through this entire process.

Craft: Flesh Bonsai would certainly be an interesting skill, but it would require a great deal of forethought.

Ah, but the old are filled with the thoughts of their own mortality: A bitter vintage indeed, and if they're kept conscious through the process... Well, that presents its own problems with the flavor. The result would be something potentially sustaining, but also very nearly unpalatable. As mentioned by a later post, perhaps useful as a method of extending the food supply for lower rungs of the necrocracy.

The culinary vampires do certainly collect the old who are interesting, and the culinary vampires are most certainly the ones running the orphanages and debtors prisons, and then you get back into suspended dream states. 

Getting the most blood out the population is not the problem the Necrocracy has been dealing with, there has never been a cataclysmically major shortage of blood during their tenure, and thus the focus of their research into blood has been one of pleasurable quality valued high above quantity.

In general, Necrocrat vampires are loathe to create more Necrocrat vampires. It means more people tugging at the pie, trying to get their own piece. It can certainly strengthen your side, particularly if you've got enough space to keep them enslaved, but then you've got to take care of the neonate in the great political machinations created by a court of vampires that have very little better to do with their time than stab each other in the back and indulge in the most succulent pleasures.

It wouldn't matter anyway, since in D&D undead creation is tied directly to the material value of the catalyst. If you start mass producing onyx, your spells will soon need more and more of the stuff. To the point where you're jamming their skulls full of handfuls of the stuff, filling their chest cavities with rocks, and eventually having to grind up massive onyx boulders to bathe the bones in their dust!

Truely woe to the necromancer who thinks he might find a way to improve the efficiency of his craft.

I'm more likely to rule that the gold-piece cost to produce onyx happens to coincidentally match (or even exceed) the GP value of current onyx at the same size. It's kind of a kludge option, but it's workable.

I honestly hadn't considered the material implications of the undead farm labor. Onyx would become the new oil.

I'm sure a society like this one would have no problem raiding and pillaging for onyx. Undead hordes, vampire nobles, and I guess a few human guards as well... perhaps not the best large-scale raiders, however. Besides, if power is tied to the value, won't onyx get more valuable, and hence more powerful, as it gets scarcer?

Alternatively, trade for onyx could be carried out, perhaps by nobles who have learned crafts to impossibly masterful degrees out of boredom. Or by a skilled human class. Naturally, the latter might seek to take their goods and services directly to the buyers, other kingdoms that care about things apart from death and blood, but the heavily restricted roads would prevent them from doing so. Open country, you say? Fifty thousand semi-controlled undead beg to disagree.

I like the GP value system of magic about as much as I like forced alignment changes. You'll still need the same amount of Onyx, regardless of what you pay for it or its value relative to the nearest adjacent economy.

As far as raiding goes, one of the very, very few things the Dracolich forbade his pet vampires was open war between eachother. The lines of the old nations now represent clan territories under the control of various bloodlords, and that's final. No bloodlord is allowed to openly steal or attack the properties of another lord.

Keyword: openly. Onyx raiding might be a job given to a group of Talents that look suspiciously like adventurers.

As far as roads: Roads are great as long as you are openly property to someone. The Necrocracy is strongly Lawful Evil, and they want their society to run like a well oiled machine, one designed to turn a mortal life into a tasty beverage, a useful asset, or an entertaining diversion.

I kinda like the use of Method#1 above though.

If you throw in some kinks-- To use a parcel of land to create artificial gemstones, you need:

1) The spell perk, obviously (House rules, so can be NPC only)
2) A parcel of land who's value is greater than the value of the mineral load you intend to create on it.
3) Refined raw materials to sew into the parcel of land, from which to precipitate the gemstones, who have a high cost value, due to the labor involved in their manufacture/purity.
4) A sum of gold to pay for administration fees, and servicing fee for the geomancer doing the dirty work.
5) Once created, the value of the load of gemstones, minus the costs of the raw material and admin fees, are permanently subtracted from the land parcel's value, in the form of ecological damage. (meaning the land's value permanently drops if you cheese it on the materials or fees paid, which means if you try again later, you cannot produce as many gems, as your land parcel's value is permanently reduced from your mismanagement)

This will invariably create a potentially infinite supply of gemstones, as long as you supply the needed cashflow, without reducing the value of the resulting products. (The resulting products are used industrially, and their demand is tied to that industrial use-- they are consumed by the process that uses them, so the market cannot become saturated. The cost naturally incorporates all prior cost centers, (admin fees, processing fees, wages, etc.), so the synthetic onyx will be more expensive than imported natural stone-- just more available in bulk.

I like this idea rather a lot. I mean, there'd have to be repercussions, but there's a fun one in the setting's wings that would be rather nice to drop in.

[Rolan7]

It wouldn't matter anyway, since in D&D undead creation is tied directly to the material value of the catalyst. If you start mass producing onyx, your spells will soon need more and more of the stuff. To the point where you're jamming their skulls full of handfuls of the stuff, filling their chest cavities with rocks, and eventually having to grind up massive onyx boulders to bathe the bones in their dust!

Truely woe to the necromancer who thinks he might find a way to improve the efficiency of his craft.

On the other hand, if onyx isn't being mined or magically created by the Necrocracy, it quickly becomes scarce and exceedingly valuable.  Which mostly solves the problem... right?  Maaaybe.  The spell does call for "a" gem for each corpse, so an ounce or two of powder might be too fragmented to work.  To my dorfy shame I'm not that good with mineral science, but I'm getting the impression that thin "wafers" of onyx wouldn't be practical either.

That's fine though, it just means there'd be a market for onyx to be mined or fabricated.  The government would probably want (or be expected) to keep the value stable, such that mass-produced gems of a standard size could be relied on to work.  I imagine this would be done by keeping a Fort Knox style bunker full of onyx.  As long as it's owned, it's keeping the scarcity down, and serves as a strategic reserve as well.

Remember that movie where the villain wanted to irradiate Fort Knox simply to increase the value of his own gold holdings?  Hmmmmmmmm.

Fakedit:  Aww, I always kinda liked the "cast by expending value" system   Maybe because in our post-undead-apocalypse survival DND campaign, we were allowed to used pre-apocalypse "treasure" to fuel XP costs for spells (and I think some material costs).  Or maybe I just liked the funky implications of currency and precious materials value-backed by magic.