A loosely DnD-based storygame for a campaign I had in mind, but never got to writing.

It's a Hesbollah house party, for sure.

A

At behest of Mizal

Impressed I was to scrawl in here

An odd poem; how queer

That among many peers I should

Write a rhyme in short time

While being 'yond my prime.  God, why?

WMT250117C145 

Either go bankrupt or make a fuckton of money off of this option, God help me.

tl;dr yeah it's mostly fine if you're there as an exchange / expat to accrue experience, but eating imported ingredients, following local customs, and taking health risks with a surge in specific kinds of cardiovascular diseases similar to COVID does leave you in more danger if you're not taking extra precautions to watch what you say, eat, and simply be at.  culturally, the south of china is more cosmopolitan than the north and most of the inland, but the CCP pushes han superiority about as strongly as Europe pushes diversity: hard enough to create a loud minority, with the added benefit of having gov't-controlled speech to always push things in favor of their vision.

societally you're not going to see much of what's real and what's a facade until you head into the countryside.  whereas the US has a stock market propped up on inflated numbers, China has a housing market propped up on inflated numbers.  You can see entire shell cities with less than a proper skeleton crew doing less than basic maintenance, and there's constant and dramatic floods and droughts due to the excess of dams built along its rivers.  Food and water security are also affected greatly by this, and when combined with the often-mandatory lockdowns that literally lets the authorities weld people shut inside their own homes, it means that a country that shouldn't have issues of famine ends up having famine in major metropolitan zones.  Real estate is a nightmare and you're going to be confined to relatively expensive housing (not like Taiwan is so much different, being an island, but either way if your local gov't is sponsoring the trip it shouldn't be terrible).  If you youtube video something like "china weld lockdown" you should see plenty of videos discussing this sort of stuff in greater detail.

So yeah, when you're in the CCP's home turf, your gov't has relatively little in the way of giving you extra protections / leniency as it does in Taiwan, which is much more diplomatically proficient than mainland China.  You can at least say stupid shit while you're learning Mandarin, but the Taiwanese dialect may be less spoken abroad.  I have no idea if they even teach Cantonese in Taiwan to foreigners.

Personally, I think going to Taiwan might be a safer bet, particularly because of how much more competitive it is as a nation to try and train competent people -- even foreign students -- to keep its leverage in the larger scheme of things.  They're strong in the STEM field and have TSMC and UMC to prove it, as well as a competent public education system to ensure Taiwanese-born engineers are fed into those foundries.  Also because -- while it isn't as absolutely free as the US is in speech -- it beats Singapore and mainland China in being able to discuss any and all topics as needed in the region.  Being able to ask all kinds of questions, however smart or stupid, helps in that regard.  And you'lll still have internet access beyond the Great Firewall that China has, which means you'll still get to use Youtube, Google, etc. instead of CCP-sponsored websites.

China, being that much bigger of a country, can have a lot of opportunities to have hits and misses with its level of education that it may provide to you, on top of all the other non-academic related topics mentioned above.

Is #46 open?

It'll be a case-by-case basis, with particular undead becoming close friends with the protagonist's original self (while you aren't behind the wheel making decisions for the necromancer), while others signal time and again they're actively tortured being brought back.  It's not like the undead themselves in this story are static personalities, so I do want some of them to switch attitudes over the course of the story.  Some may adjust to being in the physical world once more, others might go insane pursuing a certain regret in their past lives, and still others just regress and become empty puppets.  A lot of these consequences are by happenstance and conversation, rather than necromancy being an exact science with predictable outcomes.

Which brings me to another point I forgot to address: I do want there to be another plot wrinkle (#4 or 5?) involving the disillusionment with magic in general.  Just like how necromancy is a spotty practice with variable results, resurrection isn't always going to be a good decision if the wrong person gets brought back.  Like an old advisor to many kings being brought back for the nth time?  He'll probably just off himself or douse the entire audience hall in flames before running for the hills.  Maybe I can marry this with the costs plot wrinkle (resurrection becomes cheap; necromancy becomes expensive and/or vice versa or both become cheap / expensive), but I'm leaning on the idea that this is a phenomena that happens later in the story to signal the beginning of the end, or early on as a way to pique interest on the necromancy's polar opposite.

1. Yes to the first question.

2. It really depends on the life of the person.  People who are religious obviously get sucked into heaven / hell, and those who commit themselves to specific gods generally can't be recalled in any capacity (not even through true resurrection; the god has claimed that person's spirit).  Then after spirituality comes people with strong impressions from life (so someone who is politically rigorous, someone who has seen a lot of war, someone who was a doctor, a master tradesman, etc.) who feel satisfied; they tend to go sooner.

3. A day or two doesn't really matter in the beginning, but if you're trying to recall a soul at the very cusp of an afterlife, then that day or two makes all the difference.  There's no clear timer, though, so necromancers usually try to be as expedient as possible with their pulls while they're still cheap.  It just gets way more difficult to pull people who have no attachment to the physical world and you have to end up placating yourself to gods to let them loan you one of their flock.

It's more like a general lobby of purgatory, and necromancy pulls spirits out of that lobby and ground them to the mortal plane. Most spirits who didn't make much of themselves in their past life are curious to see the going-on's of the physical world, but aren't exactly as interested or self-aware as the living are...initially.  They'll become more aware as they spend more time in the physical world, for better and worse.

Spirits who spend long enough in that purgatory go to their respective afterlives (think other planes of existence like Sovnguard or the Nine Hells from Forgotten Realms), so pulling those spirits from those other planes will produce varying results.  After all, wouldn't you be pissed off if you were ripped out of Heaven to help some mopey-ass loner get their ass off the ground?  Or, if you were pulled out of Hell, wouldn't you be scrambling to find a way to bind yourself on the material plane for as long as possible?  Self-awareness and memories tied to the physical plane will lose their grasp the longer a spirit spends in that afterlife, and after forging a new identity in that respective heaven / hell, there eventually will be no way to recall that spirit back from the dead.  After all, that old self has been discarded for the new self.

There's also some differences between forms of undead, with zombies and flesh golems becoming the most aware due to all the flesh involved (think of them like interfaces for spirits to feel, eat, sense, etc.) vs. skeletons (which are controlled like puppets by their respective spirits).  And the more gruesome amalgamations and monstrosities (which our protagonist probably would only create along the "worse" routes where complete selfishness overrides any sense of empathy for the spirits) will end up being abominations from a personality standpoint.

Immaterial necromancy is always temporary, so there may be lapses of memory between conversations with the dead that way.  This also is going to create a plot wrinkle where a particularly long-time servant of the necromancer loses their original body and ends up passing on with the added accomplishments of servitude, which brings that particular person much closer to an afterlife than purgatory.  From what I've already written, there'll be a subplot regarding spirits' consent to being pulled back into the material plane.

Note to self: "Tug the rope if you're there."