Idea: Butcher's Block - or - Making Followers From Spare Parts

[Pheade]

In keeping with my necromancy ideas, I wanted to pose this one:

 

The Butcher's Block would be a new crafting station for necromancers, upon which they use body parts harvested from slain enemies, trim, crop, and stitch together an undead zombie thrall (male or female depending on the parts).

 

I'd imagined the thralls' bodies and combat efficiency to be based on the skill of the user (through MCM perhaps?) and the amount/freshness of the body parts used. I also imagine this would use some kind of chopping animation as you harvest limbs and organs, or perhaps it could be folded into the Harvest ability granted by SkyRe's necromancy traits (I have no idea if that option would even be possible - that's my ignorance poking through).

 

The undead thrall/zombie's appearance would also be based off of player skill - first attempts would be slow and clumsy, missing obvious parts - say, jaw, an arm, a head, empty or spilling body cavities. As the player's skill increases, bodies that are made are more complete, with more subtle stitching and seams connecting the disparate limbs.

 

These zombie thralls would serve as companions, followers, and sex partners (because I'm a twist).

 

(This image is Tharcion's 'Cold Zombie Babe' and is his creative and intellectual property. You can view his work at Deviantart.)

 

 

Thoughts/feedback appreciated!

Pheade

[DeepBlueFrog]

It's an interesting idea - one that I would like to work on if I didn't have my hands so full alredy.

 

I did something similar in Stories where you can craft body parts to upgrade a sex bot into a complete shape. This is done through outfits.

 

Using outfits with built-in body armors, you could have several variations of skin and even missing limbs (arms).

 

It is already possible to add a headless 'helmet'. It should be possible to create special gloves for missing hands. The rest is tricky.

 

For animations, the black sacrament animation has an NPC kneeling and hacking away at a corpse. That could be useful.

 

One idea to complete the picture would be to animate the body using a spark or lighting spell. Maybe the strength of the body could be linked to the power of your reanimation spell.

 

Another possibility could be to find a way to make a copy of the main corpse you choose for your follower, the same way polymorph mods clone the shape of an NPC. That would require to make the butcher's block a portable item.

 

It could go something like this:

 

- collect a few body parts (based on human flesh, human heart, bones found in some places)

- find a corpse (defeat an enemy or just flat out assassinate an NPC)

- drop the butcher's block next to the body

- use the butcher's block 

- animate the body with a spark spell

 

Maybe you could even use multiple recipes in the crafting station to specialize the corpse into different attack styles.

 

It doesn't have to be all human either.

 

You could do something like - combine a corpse with a daedra heart and fire salts to give the corpse access to fire spells. Or combine it with a troll fat to make it resistant to fire spells. That sort of things.

 

So many possibilities here So little time...

 

 

[ZelMarionette]

Trying to think of mods that are similar... I can think of one from a different game that had a similar thing (In Fallout: New Vegas there was a mod where you could cut up the bodies and reanimate them in this little lab, though all the bodies were exactly the same.) That sort of dissection was more of a New Vegas thing, though, since that game already had the ability to slice off limbs, and simply changed it so that when you sliced off a limb it appeared in the corpse's inventory.

 

As for dissecting them, there was also a mod called The Vile Art Of Necromancy for Skyrim that, amongst many other things, let you dissemble corpses into ingredients (pile of bones, human flesh, heart, fat, skin) which seems like a similar starting point. Perhaps do something similar and have corpses dissembled in the same way and then just have 'this much human flesh for a resurrected corpse, this heart, these bones...'

 

And similar to sky's idea above, it had certain things you could make and then use on a corpse (although these corpses were just resurrected in the regular dead thrall way) to make that corpse stronger. Also the corpse follower thing in that was buggy as hell, I mostly brought it up for the dissection thing.

 

I think my point was that this is a great idea and if I knew the foggiest on how to do it myself I would, but I don't so I'm just linking to similar things on the off-chance it would help. And I figure maybe this particular mod might be a good starting point. (The maker of it said that cannibalizing it for code and such was allowed, since he doesn't intend to update it again. So could make the mod not necessary but just base some pieces off it.)

[Pheade]

Oh my goodness! 

Those are all fantastic ideas!

(Mostly, I'm just delighted for the responses! not many of my few ideas seem super popular; ever since I started gaming some odd twenty years ago, I've been a die-hard {no pun intended} necromancer fan. Seems to be surprising rare.) 

I like the idea of being able to further customize the body before reanimation; I'm enjoying the possibilities here!

 

I've only dabbled in the modding side of Skyrim enough to put a poorly-made follower into my game (which I quickly axed as it really was terrible). If not for my ignorance and more detrimentally, my ineptitude, with 3d programs, I'd have made a more serious attempt at trying to put something like this together. 

 

But for now, I'll have to settle for just sharing my ideas, and maybe one day someone with the prerequisite skill and some time would take an interest.

Thank you both for your great ideas!