Oh, hey... maybe not, but Black and White 1 had a little secret/exploit that allowed you to raise the dead.
If you took a villager's corpse and manually sent it through a teleported (there needed to be at least one other teleport set up, so it would actually travel out the other side), then the corpse would pick itself back up and slowly crawl back to its house, where it would "sleep" until it had regenerated all of its health. After that, it would go back to work as usual.
Very odd and somewhat buggy behavior, because they were still treated as a dead body, meaning the other villagers would follow it around and try to mourn their death. Either that or run away in terror.
Also, if you picked them up by hand, they'd go back to being a dead-dead body and you'd need to send them through the tunnel again, which meant you couldn't have disciple deadites.
But, left to their own devices, they would happily toil away at whatever regular jobs the village had to offer, without danger of starvation, disease, or even old age. They would still stop working at night in order to go to bed, but this seemed to be more of just a habit than fulfilling any real need.
Generally a good idea to try and separate the living from the dead, considering how disruptive just one skeleton could be in a living village, but with this you could make a little town of the dead where they would work (and worship, if you raised the totem) endlessly for your glory.
Couldn't send them to battle though, so there's that.
Aside from that, I suppose you could also count things like Right-Click to Necromance if you want something really simple, or even Sacrifice if you're open to a somewhat loose interpretation of the theme. Necromancers in Sacrifice still make their creatures the same way as anyone else (which, coincidentally, is ritually ripping the souls out of dead enemies and using them to form new bodies from the ether), but they get access to what's possibly the most overpowered spell in the game, that allows them to bring their own defeated creatures back to life with just a minor incantation. Necromancer units also don't regenerate normally, and need to rely on leeching health from enemies in order to survive. ...not that it matters much, since if they do die you can just resurrect them for less mana than it costs to cast the actual heal spell.
There's also Magic and Mayhem, an obscure little title from long ago with a curious spellcasting system and claymation graphics. Again, you're not directly raising the corpses of your enemies, but zombies could chow down on the dead whenever there was a lull in the fighting, and lots of other units could similarly interact with bodies. The undead were also notable for being immune to the plague spell, but they could still become infected by it. This meant you could create little "Typhoid Marys" of your frontliners and let them spread disease amongst the ranks of your foes.
It bears noting that YOU were not undead and could just as easily catch the plague from your own dudes as the enemy, if you weren't careful. And there was only one spell in the game that could directly cure plague, and that element could be made into other useful spells instead if you felt you could get by without the curing. So, y'know, think carefully about your strategy.
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Topic: Necromancers In Gaming - Suggestion List (Read 4814 times)