: I'm beginning to lean toward the following 2 new [new for
: me, anyway] hypotheses which i just began considering
: due to forrest's enlightening post: Since the dream of
: unlife is considered by most, and now me, to actually
: recreate the whole entire person, 'soul' and body, i
: believe that it is exactly what Balor used to give the
: still living Myrmidons their immortality (immortality
: in the sense that age and time do not affect them,
: only outside actions like violence).
They look a little affected by time to me. :-) Withered, dry, jaws and eyes rotted away...classified as undead in GURPS and known to be killed by healing. A fairly crappy form of immortality when compared to, say, the Heron Guards or the Avatara. So if the Dream of Unlife was used to make Myrmidons, I don't think it makes dead beings into living ones, or living ones into immortal living ones--rather, it makes living beings into unliving ones.
The way I see it, there's a basic state of "Unbeing", characterized by not aging, not needing to breathe, being killed by healing, and so forth. Low-level necromantic spells can convert corpses into this state, creating Undead. But it takes a Dream to accomplish the more difficult task of converting *living* creatures into this state without killing them first, creating Unliving beings like Myrmidons and Shades who retain their former minds more or less intact.
All this, of course, is assuming that the Dream of Unlife actually was found and used in recent eras. I once proposed that it was only used back in the Axe Age: the Trow or the Callieach used it to create the Younger Races.
See, I figured the Trow wouldn't think of humans or other Younger Races as truly alive. After all, the Trow are immortal, super-tough, and don't need to eat or drink. But humans and dwarves and deer and lizards are soft, fragile constructs that require periodic refueling and eventually break down. That's not life--that's Unlife. Or so a Trow might think, anyway--and since the Dream of Unlife was supposed to be in a Trow city, chances are it was named and used by the Trow, right?
I'm not sure I can take this particular theory seriously, but it's fun to expound. :-)
: The Summoner was using the dream of unlife to totally
: recreate the Krids. to me there is no explanation
: really as to another way he was doing that. only a
: Dream could allow him to totally "resurrect"
: (not just make puppets like undead thrall) a dead
: being to its former state.
I always viewed his magics as basically space/time-related. He's got some sort of link to the Tain, which is the Mother Of All Space/Time-Twisting Artifacts, and he defends himself via teleportation. Plus the Krids he created seem to be fairly ordinary living beings that eat and breathe and so forth--not undead or nearly-undead creatures like Myrmidons. And if the Summoner had the Dream of Unlife, than presumably Soulblighter and/or Shiver would have had it too. And they'd all be recreating a lot more beings than just the Krids--resurrected Shades, Trow, Fallen Lords, Dark Champions like Fang-Grinder and so forth would all have added greatly to the cause. Heck, they could just walk over every battlefield and raise all the dead Ghols and Brigands and Mauls. Their army could never fall.
Anyway, for these assorted reasons I think the Krids were resurrected via time magic rather than necromancy; the combination of the Tain's peculiar characteristics and the Summoner's innate talents allowed him to take a Krid skull and "turn back time" around it, reversing decomposition and recreating the original creature. Damn impressive, but not the Dream of Unlife.
--SiliconDream
