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[NW_Kohaku]

In real life, people generally want their dead relatives to pass over into the afterlife and remain peacefully dead. 

[Urist McCheeseMaker]

In real life, people generally want their dead relatives to pass over into the afterlife and remain peacefully dead.

Urist McDeadbro misses his dead brother's presence.

Or maybe just "Urist McDeadbro feels a little lonely lately".

[Girlinhat]

I'm entirely less concerned with dwarven deaths and more concerned with common creatures and invaders.  If an ambush has 35 goblins, and you get 4 every year for 140 corpses if they're all killed, then by year 10 you could easily have 700+ corpses, even at conservative estimates.  While zombies aren't very impressive, 700 of them certainly is!  A way to dispose of an invader's corpse would help greatly for any fort founded on evil terrain.

Also, I'm curious about dwarven bodies.  I would assume a body in a coffin is safe, but if not...  Well, if you have a 5 year old, poorly run fort with let's say ~60 deaths, then you have 60 filled coffins.  If you suddenly reanimate, and these don't count as buried anymore, you suddenly have 60 ghosts and you need a lot of slabs in a hurry.  If you've embarked somewhere with low stone, like an aquifer, or a shallow desert, then that's going to be a BIG problem.

[darkflagrance]

In the Silmarillion, a great battle sees so many dwarven casualties that the survivors are forced to cremate the remains on great funeral pyres. It becomes an honor in later centuries to have had a relative who was a "burned dwarf".

So the burning of even dwarves can be...dwarfy.

[Naryar]

Bah, who needs funeral pyres when you have magma on every map ?

I like to think it is the dream of every dwarf to rest with the blood of the earth, after all. Coffin, then dump the coffin in magma.

[Crioca]

Hmmm, I'd like to weigh in on this:

For one, I think it's an excellent idea, but there's a few things that haven't been mentioned that should have been:

Funeral pyre's would be a combination of a workshop and a corpse stockpile. Requires 3 wood to build, you can pile up to say, 20 corpses onto it, and then the pyre itself is set on fire and the actual structure is burned to the ground. You wouldn't be able to put dwarves into a pyre, but instead pretty much everything that attacks you.
I don't know about anyone else but I'm pretty bored at having to butcher forgotten beasts, I'd much rather mount the thing on a funeral pyre and when you set it alight, dwarves come out and treat it like a party essentially.
This would also provide great material for engravers et al, Engraved on the wall is an exceptionally designed image of Urist McHauler the dwarf and Zon McMason the dwarf by Fath McEngraver. Urist McHauler is telling a story, Zon McMason is laughing. The artwork relates to the celebration of the killing of Goblin McNolegs by the Axedwarf Tum McAxedwarf in Awesomefort in the early winter of 312 during The Attempted Abduction at Awesomefort. The story relates to severing of the left upper leg of Goblin McNolegs by the Axedwarf Tum McAxedwarf with a steel battleaxe in the early winter of 312 during The Attempted Abduction at Awesomefort.

Crematorium, this is closer to what Girlinhat originally suggested, a workshop that takes in one corpse and one coal, rather than wood, and cremates the corpse, the ashes are then put into an urn, which functions as a coffin or engraved slab.

I'd also love for dwarves to take time off from their jobs to visit the graves/slabs/urns of their loved ones, and if a gravesite is neglected for long enough, for an angry dwarf to come and start haunting their lazy son for not visiting often enough.

[Girlinhat]

No one seems to understand when I say "I don't care about dwarves.  We can bury their asses.  I want to burn goblins to prevent zombies."

[Crioca]

No one seems to understand when I say "I don't care about dwarves.  We can bury their asses.  I want to burn goblins to prevent zombies."

But... that's exactly what my funeral pyre take was about; pyre for the goblins, beasts, werewolves and so on, crematorium for the dwarves. I LOVE the idea of cutting down a goblin ambush, taking all their bodies, throwing them onto a stack of piled logs, setting it ablaze, and then all the dwarves have a MASSIVE party.

[Babylon]

I'm entirely less concerned with dwarven deaths and more concerned with common creatures and invaders.  If an ambush has 35 goblins, and you get 4 every year for 140 corpses if they're all killed, then by year 10 you could easily have 700+ corpses, even at conservative estimates.  While zombies aren't very impressive, 700 of them certainly is!  A way to dispose of an invader's corpse would help greatly for any fort founded on evil terrain.

Also, I'm curious about dwarven bodies.  I would assume a body in a coffin is safe, but if not...  Well, if you have a 5 year old, poorly run fort with let's say ~60 deaths, then you have 60 filled coffins.  If you suddenly reanimate, and these don't count as buried anymore, you suddenly have 60 ghosts and you need a lot of slabs in a hurry.  If you've embarked somewhere with low stone, like an aquifer, or a shallow desert, then that's going to be a BIG problem.

Also, of those 700 several would have decayed to the point of being skeletons, which are reasonably formidable.

[Di]

I believe, you overstate the problem, we already have drawbridges which are traditional way to give a proper burial to even alive goblins, we have magma and endless void at the bottom (two of them actually), we can drop a chunk of the ground to fill mass-grave an so on.
Besides, one log per goblin for original suggestion would be too much, they should bring wood when they siege then.

I'm actually more interested in dwarven pyres, dwarves have slight norse flavor in their concept thus it would seem appropriate for them, at least for some civilizations.

Btw, it's likely that any corpse-hauling activity will require toggling on gathering of outside refuse be it pyre, dump, or stockpile.

[Jake]

There are already plans afoot to enable dug-out spaces to be refilled with soil and set particular tiles or objects on fire, so a lot of this should already be covered. And since we're on the subject of enemy dead, why not include the option to inter them in coffins alongside your own people? I've always thought the ghosts of slain foes wandering around the battlefield might be an interesting gameplay element, and a stone coffin ought to be as good a way as any to neutralise the restless dead.

[Loud Whispers]

There are already plans afoot to enable dug-out spaces to be refilled with soil and set particular tiles or objects on fire, so a lot of this should already be covered. And since we're on the subject of enemy dead, why not include the option to inter them in coffins alongside your own people? I've always thought the ghosts of slain foes wandering around the battlefield might be an interesting gameplay element, and a stone coffin ought to be as good a way as any to neutralise the restless dead.

Enemy ghosts sounds like a terrible idea.

"If your peasants don't go out there to respect the dead and get peppered with bolts, their ghost will rip off your head regardless."

Although funeral pyres and allowing the burial of enemies would be cool. I can imagine cramming the remains of a goblin army into one receptacle, and then putting that receptacle on a raisable bridge....

"Oh yeah that's right. We take your live people, turn them into dead people, and use them as target practice!"

[peskyninja]

Maybe it could work in a similar feshion to coffins. you build a pyre and set it "burn" for example then when someone dies the body will be burned and the pyre will disappear. It could also have a "Burn only X" or "Do not burn Y".
Or it could work with long list of names with lots of dead people, animals and alive people.

[Jake]

Enemy ghosts sounds like a terrible idea.

"If your peasants don't go out there to respect the dead and get peppered with bolts, their ghost will rip off your head regardless."

There's a fairly long interval between death and the arrival of a ghost; I think the body has to start actually decomposing before it becomes a problem. If the battle's still ongoing by the time they've gone past "all stiff and purple and suchlike" and all the way to "...sort of manky and runny" in official Ankh-Morpork City Watch terminology, you're doing something wrong.

I can see a problem if there ends up being no body left to bury, however; it's one thing to raise a memorial to a lone goblin thief who put up a particularly impressive fight, but a grave marker for every unfortunate redshirt you just obliterated with a retractable bridge and a lot of menacing wooden spikes would be a lot of hassle. (Though the idea of lining the path to the main gates with them has a certain appeal.) Maybe one memorial statue for a whole siege's worth of casualties?

[IamanElfCollaborator]

Or set out a mass burial ground and dump all the corpses there. Then fill the pit with magma to stop them from becoming ghosts or zombies.