Categorizing undead

I don't know much about this new Warhammer setting, other than that it takes place in some magical place that post-dates the old Warhammer setting, which blew up and was remade.  Because Warhammer is a setting that's meant more to facilitate army games than anything else (regardless of the success Black Library has or had) this meant that some troop types were shuffled around, and some other changes here and there were made.  Also, it means that there were a lot of gratuitous name changes: I don't know why dwarves are now duardin, or elves are now aelves, or orcs are now orruks, and trolls are now troggoths or ogres are now orogs, etc.  That seems not only gratuitous, but even foolish; when they had cultural resonance that went back centuries to instead replace them with something that has none.  Warhammer had a good thing going, and they threw it away on a gamble that... I dunno.  Maybe it hasn't made a difference in their sales, or maybe it has.  Certainly it's meant that while I see a lot of ideas that I like in the new setting, overall it's still much less compelling to me than it used to be, and let's face it—those same good ideas could just have easily been implemented in the old setting.

As an example, let me show you what one of my favorite thematic factions have done.  I came into Games Workshop fandom in the early to mid 90s.  I'd been familiar with them from some early White Dwarf magazines and Citadel miniatures I'd stumbled across in the late 80s (although I was more into the Grenadier and Ral Partha D&D stuff back then—whatever happened to those companies anyway?)  At the time, Warhammer was in it's 4th edition (it got up to 8th before rebooting as Age of Sigmar).  The Undead Army book had recently come out, and back when I was fairly regularly buying White Dwarf magazines (mostly to read; my involvement in the hobby was somewhat peripheral due to the time and budget constraints of being a young, married college student and later father and grad student) the one that came out to feature the new Undead Army Book was one of the early ones I got (I guess that would have been in the mid to late 160s in terms of issue number, I think?)

Undead back then were all kinds of undead, and while thematically, they were all undead, that doesn't mean that that theme wasn't maybe a bit too broad and unfocused.  Not sure why Egyptian style mummies would fight alongside Dracula and skeleton chariots and catapults made out of bone anyway, but again; if you interpolate the Warhammer setting out of its obvious focus on wargames and try to use it as source material for fantasy roleplaying (and the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game is a cult classic) then that doesn't matter too much anyway.  But when the edition rolled around to 5th edition in 1996, things changed.  Not in terms of the rules (the big change there was reserved for 6th edition, when the pejoratively named 5th edition Herohammer put its emphasis back on troops instead of heroes and monsters so much) but with undead, the army list was split into two lists, which each then developed along separate lines: the Vampire Counts and the Tomb Kings.

The Vampire Counts was the more European undead concepts, and had very Transylvania feel to it.  Vampires (needless to say) led the armies.  Most of the old army list for Undead ended up here, because as you'd expect for a game made in Europe by Europeans and for Europeans (and to some extent, their diaspora cousins like us Americans), the largely European folklore stuff ended up in an army that had a European theme.  The Tomb Kings, which came out later, as led by Liches rather than vampires, and focused on skeletal and animated golem-like creatures.  In fact, if I remember correctly, the dry bones vs rotting corpse theme even went to the most basic of troop types, and Vampire Counts had zombies while the Tomb Kings had skeletons.

At the end of 8th edition, the End Times event created a few new army lists, including a newly consolidated Undead, led by Nagash himself, and his mortarchs, or greatest generals.  Mostly it combined the two armies, but introduced a few unique new troop types; although by troop I mostly mean big monsters and flavorful characters rather than grunts (or whatever sound Undead make.)  When Warhammer was rebooted as Age of Sigmar, this newly consolidated Undead army list came with it.  But eventually, two separate spin-off army lists with an Undead theme came to be, although they're not exactly the same two themes as Vampire Counts and Tomb Kings.  Not only that, they didn't supercede the Undead army list; they supplemented it, mostly by adding new troops rather than coopting existing troops (although some of that happened too.)

These two are the Flesh-Eater Courts and the Nighthaunts.  The former take the ghouls and vampires and combine them.  There is precious little of the urbane, suave, sexy vampire left, and none in this army list ("soulblight" vampires are still around as the more classic Dracula, I suppose.  But even Mannfred von Carstein's model is now bald and pointy-eared, for example.)  The Nighthaunt army, on the other hand, is all ghosts in their many variations.

With so many new concepts floating around for me to potentially convert, I'm tempted to go through them again, but I'll reiterate (and slightly revise) my earlier thoughts on the question: there are only a few kinds of undead, and giving them new visuals and a few unique special abilities doesn't really invalidate that.  Let me reiterate the basic "big concepts" in Undeath.

1) Corporeal Sentient: Undead who have physical bodies, and some degree of free will and sentience as we understand it.  At the top of the heap here would be vampires and liches and maybe powerful wights and mummies  Other concepts could be incorporated here too, but they are really variations on one of those existing themes, with the possible exception of something like Frankenstein's monster.

2) Incorporeal Sentient: Intelligent and free-willed, yet ethereal or incorporeal ghosts.  The real iconic example from fantasy fiction is the Ringwraiths.  I'm not 100% sure I want to keep the rules I have for them in Dark•Heritage 2 and Fantasy Hack because they may be too punitive to the players.  Then again, maybe not.  The rules I have are heavily based on the early episodes of the Supernatural TV show, but other iterations make sense too.

3) Corporeal Mindless: There's a vast throng of more or less mindless creatures like skeletons, zombies, and whatnot. They are basically automatons; golems who use a human corpse instead of a constructed statue or whatnot as the corporeal element. Some creatures, like wights or even mummies, have trended more into this territory, depending on the particular interpretation.

4) Incorporeal Mindless: There are fewer examples of this, but the ghosts of the Dresden books qualify; basically just echoes of a brief moment in time of someone that remains causing havoc, but which can only react to things in certain rather pre-scripted ways, and which don't do much else.  Haunts from my rules (adapted from Pathfinder) qualify.

5) Undead Monsters: These guys are not specifically based on human corpses or spirits, as the other four so far discussed are, but are instead strange monsters made like the undead.  Stuff like the dracolich or zombie dragon (or fell ghast from my rules) is the perfect example.  When Harry Dresden brought "Sue" the T. rex skeleton back to unlife, cloaking it in ethereal ectoplasm and riding it into battle against the necromancers, that would qualify too.

6) Associated Hangers-On: Sometimes ghouls, wolves, bats, and other vermin get lumped in here; they're not Undead themselves per se, but they are associated with them.  I'm going to go a slightly different direction with ghouls, which will reflect more the Flesh-Eating Courts manner of approaching them; i.e., they're just vampires who are more savage and ugly than those who've clawed their way past the madness of their condition to manage to imitate civilized behavior (at least sometimes)

Anyway, I might go through the lists and see what I want to specifically look at adapting in some fashion into DH5, given that Timischburg is still the seed from which DH4 migrated into DH5, and undead and supernatural horror elements are therefore a major theme in DH5.  We'll see.