headclaw

also is the dead one just not allowed to talk

it's his dead wife's finger

Tombdog corpses don't need mouths to talk ok it is their ghosts talking

this is just so his jaw doesn't decay and set in some doofer expression

Things always become so doofy when they decay upright. Their jaw falls open and hangs all crooked. It's so bizarre and cute.

He is just way too dignified for that, ok.

I really like her face cover, very neat!

her disease is making it so her eyes are getting really weak and hyper-sensitive to light so it helps keep things dimmer

the thing on her face is just so people don't freak out and think she's going to get them sick too

which she

probably could if she sneezed in someone's mouth maybe

inside the mouth

yes

you open wide and she stuffs her nose in there and lets loose

So are there social pressures against 'doctors' going around cold mercykilling everyone who looks contagious (*poof* you get to be a ghost!) or has it just not been invented yet?

[Presumably once it was invented once the ghosts would be reminding future generations why it wasn't / was a good idea.]

She has the Milk Disease. It's called that because in the last stages you start oozing hilariously infectious puss from every part of your body non-stop and it is totally not gross at all (it is so gross). Before that it's still contagious through most body-fluids, and is communicable in the womb.

It's really really dangerous and the "polite" thing to do is to allow yourself to be killed before you kill a whole bunch of people. Especially since, if you're an adult, you probably caught it by cheating on your spouse.

Her father caught it from someone and gave it to her mother and her while she was still pregnant. When the scandal came out, her father honorably and entirely of his own free will submitted to execution; her mother died a few years after her birth.

The family wanted to kill her too, but child-ghosts don't really last long. and it was a super-delicate situation, because they're the biggest political House in the world and so everything is a potential scandal. They decided to let her mature and become an adult so her ghost would have a chance to last before killing her. In a year or two she's planning on having herself turned into an animated corpse. That is basically when life is going to start for her.

and that is her story

So how do some of these guys end up staying in their bodies while /not/ being tomb guardians, but others end up just being stuck next to some piece of their body in some crappy tomb or other stationary and uninteresting (if you are there forever) place? Cause if I were one of these guys I'd want to be like the dead guy here, able to move around and if my mate weren't also an undead, with a piece of them attached to me so their ghost comes along with me wherever.

Some things have changed, lore-wise, since I started making up this setting anyhow, but the eponymous tombdog was always kind of an exception in that she was bound to a tomb as punishment.

The tombs and crypts are usually like "corpse-safes" where you put parts of bodies that you have divided up around the family. If something happens and the parts get lost or destroyed, there's still something in the crypt as back-up so the ghost isn't lost too, or so that parts of the family or friends who didn't get any relics can still access the ghost. For dogs that no one liked, or dogs who don't want their ghosts bothered, whole corpses could be put in a crypt so other dogs have to enter in to chat with them. With bigger, more active families it doesn't really matter since the crypts are constantly being visited by the living, but in small towns (towns share single crypts and ancestors) or provincial branches of families (like eponymous-tombdog's) crypts are usually more secluded, lonely places. It had also been vogue for a while to build crypts out of the way, somewhat hidden, so they especially needed something non-living to watch after them.

So you grab a family criminal or two, cut off their head, and bind them to the tomb to take care of it. Or maybe you take some volunteers, too. You don't need to cut off their heads.

But basically at death dogs have the option of being chopped up and having the parts divided around the family--that way everyone can talk to their ghost whenever is needed, and their ghost can be temporarily bound to a living dog's body to empower the living dog; or having their body preserved so they can walk around--that way, if they had some manual skill in life, they can continue it in death. If you have a really good baker, don't chop up his corpse! Let him keep baking. After a hundred more years he's sure to get even better at it.

Make him wear gloves so bits of flesh don't get in the bread.

"Baker, there's a finger in my bread."
"That'll cost you extra."

Those guys have awesome hats. What game is it?

It's like a mix of Chinese Chess, Go and Warhammer. You try to position your pieces in formations that give them all bonuses while trying to capture enemy pieces and break up their formations. You roll little colored sticks to see who wins captures.

I haven't, like, actually thought of anything more than that because I have literally no idea how to make games that actually work

Well at from a superficial point of view it seems perfectly legitimate.

I suggest a new strategy:
Let the wookie win.

Okay look I think he's cheating because I think the finger is totally giving him pro strats on the side.

That finger is the finger of his wife and she is no cheater ok she is faithful ok don't you even dare

Okay look I would never suggest that I am just saying I don't see any helpful artifacts on the other side of the table.