· Enes
How the dead climb out of their graves
Some of the dead do not use the road. Late in an age, graves break open across the field and skeletons come up out of them, behind your line. For a long time they did not quite come out of them. This is the story of why.
What it looked like
A body coming up from a grave used to play its death backwards: the heap of bones it collapses into when it dies gathered itself into a skeleton. On a necromancer’s corpse that is exactly right. At a grave it read wrong: the bones gathered beside the hole, not in it, and the skeleton was already walking away as it put itself together.
Why it slid
A body getting up is held in place until it stands. But the siege has another rule, older and more important: a rank of the dead that stops where nothing can reach it does not get to stand there forever, or an assault could never end. That rule looks at every stopped body, every frame, and sends it on. It could not tell a body that had stopped to shoot the wall from a body still getting off the ground, so it released the risen the very next frame. Every raised corpse in the game had been sliding for the same reason; the graves only made it easy to see.
The fix was one line in the right place: a body that is still getting up is not marching anywhere yet, so the rule leaves it alone and asks again once it is up. A second line makes sure nothing can hold a body for good if its animation is ever cut short.
Climbing out
Then the graves got their own way of getting up. The body now stands in its hole with the ground line across it. Everything below the line is cut away, so the dark of the hole is where the rest of it is, and it comes up through it: fast out of the ground, slowing at the lip, its legs walking the whole way so it climbs rather than floats. It is held until its feet are out, then it walks on.
The cards, too
The news card that opens the first time the graves break showed a plain skeleton standing on nothing, the same picture as the Skeleton’s own card. So did the Bone Levy’s, a kind that only ever comes as a block of small bodies. Now the graves’ card shows a skeleton coming up out of the field’s own grave, and the Levy’s shows it in ranks, in step, the back files dimmed with depth.
It is a small thing to watch for a second. It is also the thing a player sees every time the graves open, and it should look like what it is: the dead, coming up out of the ground.
— Enes