What to do with the dead (Split from Cemeteries in T2K)
 

(given the original post was about agriculture in Cemeteries I consider this enough drift to split -kato13)

I vividly remember one of the concepts in "Threads" was the millions of corpses. Fuel would be too valuable to use for burning, and by hand was also not an immediate option... too many calories burnt vs the limited food supply/rations.

As Marc said respect would be a luxury. Moreover, afterall, the people burried there are for the most part strangers. Why would you care for them anyway.

burials
 

Burying corpses and cadavers would be a priority beacuse of the dangers of deseases.

As for T2k - when the law is disappearing , I guess people would bury their loved ones wher eever they liked .If they were to stay put they could bury them close to the house .

If they were to move about , burying them near a landmark like a rock or a cliff or somewhere easily re-found would be a good idea .All depending on time and circumstances of course .

As for bad guys and strangers - I guess that all depends on the circumstances too.The rapist who you just removed form the genepool right before he caught up to your daughter will fit nicley in a ditch covered with branches a few hundred meters away so the stench doesnt ruin the afternoon rest from toiling in your vegetable plot .

The unfortunate stranger ,dead from exposure,hunger or violence found by chance in a simple grave with wooden cross the nearest convenient place you could haul his body to with the rope-noose on a stick you use not to touch his possibly desease festering corpse.

The strangers that are far away from your area that you encounter on the road to a trade meet or whatever - pass by .

all imho -of course .

HQ I think that you oversaw what could be the most common type of burial in T2K.

That would be mass grave and I would expect most people to end up in something like that.

Then, as you say, it will be up to individual good will.

If food is an issue, nobody is going to be digging any holes.

so I did
 

yes an over sight there .

Of course ,if you live in a town or larger population a mass grave would be more likely -maybe you would be forced to bury in a designated spot .But if you have a sizeable plot you could use it too-if you had the strength to dig it yourself .

People are forgetting the kinda gross but nonetheless productive options.

Making soap
Turing into compost.
Feeding to pigs.

Agree. I would like to clarify my previous post. Once the worst times had passed by, the value of human live will start to raise after the (1998-2000) period. Some new communities will have born; some old communities will have managed to survive... New bonds between people will have developed and old bonds will have got stronger. Ceremonial burial or any equivalents will have their place, then. And some ways to remember those who are left behind in some uncivilized way (by our standards) in the worst times would be created.

Not at all. I just let some else point that out.:D

I agree but, saddly, people would equally want to forget about the worse they have done. Expect, to find as many burial places as mass graves.

Soap making? Well you need lye or the equivalent to make. The old method was wood ashes. If you have wood for fire, you could cremate the cadaver? But I'd go for that one probabley in theroy if not in practice. At least not in the current mind set.

Compost.. Meat does NOT compost well and takes a relative long time compared to plants. The large bones would have to be fired to turn into the useable minerals too I think. A very LONG term solution as well as smelly. You're in theroy still burying them.

NO on feeding the pigs. Hogs are suseptable to many/most of the disease and parasites humans are. IF you contaminate the food source it WILL come back and bite you. Now IF the community is that depraved, I can see them eating 'long pork' directly, and instead of making soap they make soup.

Theres a problem with mass graves.
They take a hell of a lot of manpower, fuel and or time to dig.

In areas of higher death toll, bodies may be simply hauled away into the nearby forest and left. If near a river or the ocean, tossing them in might be a common disposal method.

Only where food, fuel and labour are in relatively good supply would proper burials (mass or individual) actually take place. Cremation is an option that might also see more use as you only need a pile of wood, actual size of the pile varied by number of "burials".

One method would be to place the bodies in a building your going to demolish anyway and burn them there with combustables. Or placed in cellars and burn the building on top of them. This would be for mass burials though as I feel most individual deaths within a family/group would be still dug out of respect for the group. (or burned, what ever their custom at the time is)

Absolutely. It's a technique often used in games I play in - when we bother to do anything beyond leave them laying where they fall (after they've been stripped of course).

:)

I always assumed that an effort would be made to get rid of corpses to prevent the spread of disease.

Always thought the easiest way to achieve this would be mass burnings?

It takes some motivated people, a hell of a time, and some kind of motivation for the guys doing the job: either higher pay or threat of their own death. I think that the higher pay would be the best way to achieve that. Mass Graves were used to burry corps during the great plague

However, I found something interesting that we entirely forgot. That was a common way of getting rid of the corps during the great epidemics of the Middle Ages, and I'm sure that this will be used again: You let the raven do the job for you. Then, I never thought of this but raven's population might be growing tremendously in T2K.

A creative idea for mass graves...

Why not use them to mark your outer perimeter...a 20 foot wide ditch filled with decaying bodies is sure to make the average refugee or marauder question is this is such a good idea.

My group came up with this last night....they will use a ditch line across parts of Jersey to keep people from crossing and on any bridge they dont want access to.

Walking across a 1000m bridge stacked 3 deep with bodies will have a similar effect.

Of course, smell is an issue. How far can you smell a pile of dead bodies?

You can smell dead bodies pretty far in warmer weather. And you are going to dig a trench? Mass grave.


I suggested in the cemetary string,

Abandoned mine shafts or caves or holes, even abandoned wells. Basements and cellars of old demolished buildings, sewers, turning them into a sort of crypt. As Grae said buildings that are ruined and then just burn them, a small gully or depression is good, all you have to do is cover it.

At sea or at lake if its a LARGE body of water, just make sure you put them in a proper container and weight. This was done after the Super Huricane that devestated Galveston in the 1920s. They took the bodies out to sea and dumped them. However, they were not tied to weights, so many came back on the tide.

If you have a large enough flowing river, send them down stream and let someone else worry about it. Although this could contaminate your water supply.

Those are the only quick and easy options I can think of.

Where it is practical to dig a mass trench style grave in my view would be in a sandy desert where the digging is easy, or in a arctic enviroment where it never melts, although this could be difficult as well. Another fairly easy way is to burry them in rocks, it is easier than digging and a bit quicker.


Or, build a wooden platform and leave them like the early native american custom and as they do in india. Just wrap them and put them on a platform exposed to the elements.

Burning could be easier if you had a good supply of say grass or reeds you could make bundles and continuously place bundles of them for fuel. When you have the platform filled with people you light it and have a mass burning. The downside, will it be enough to burn the remains?

Your kinda missing my point...

If people dont want to exert the energy for mass graves...just stack them up on a bridge or across some county line to deter people from crossing into your territory. Two birds..one body. :)

As for the actual need for mass graves, I dont see much of a need normally. You wont find hundreds of people dead in the same spot often. Maybe a large group of refugees?

But they would most likely be strung out over a few miles...so unless its across your pasture, who cares?

In a more urban environment, if people start dieing off, most likely from lack of food, most people will move to another location rather then just sitting down and dieing. Again, another location means who cares?

Okay Vlad the Impaler ;)

One problem with that is disease, as well as the wicked smell that will make you wretch. And imagine the clouds of flies and of course attracting vermin and predators that will develope a taste for human flesh. That is what is dangerous when animals start to look at people as a food source rather than looking at them with fear. Alot of dangers doing it that way.

Just had a thought of what to do with several marauder bodies if you only have a few AP mines. You plant the mines and drop the bodies on top of them using ropes from a distance. Then you put up a few "Danger Minefield" signs. If people see mine damaged bodies next to little explosive craters, that is going to go a lot further than a few signs alone would, if you wanted to create a fake minefield.

Military units will still have some kind of Graves Registration (even if it's only a few people in the unit), so they will treat their own dead with care and respect, but they won't share that concern for enemy dead. Units in cantonment will most likely have their own cemetery, and outside the cantonment, there will be a mass grave (dug with POW labor) for enemy KIAs. Captured marauders can also be put to such tasks, saving some room for themselves (if they're not used as "indentured laborers"), as it's very likely that they'll be either hanged or shot for their many misdeeds, if not now, once their labor usefulness is ended.

Plus the use of humans as food could open up another can of worms,
the human equivalent of "Mad Cow Disease" or it is sometimes known as Crutzfield-Jakob's Syndome, IIRC.

I think you'd most likely see mass graves and if there is fuel to run them, mostly likely steam shovels, backhoes and bulldozers would be used.

Chuck

There is no such risk. You are right that a similar disease existed among canibals in Papua New Guinea (it is named "Kuru") but that was never due to eating human flesh. It was the result of populations eating human brains and viscera: warriors eating brains and women eating viscera (actually women developped it more often than men).

From what I know it was studied by an Australian scientist (If the Australians around can give him the proper credit please, I don't recall his name) who actually warned the western world about Creutzfeld-Jacobs long before the disease induce by cow appeared.

That's true, I forgot about the brain matter being the harbor of Mad Cow/CJ.

Chuck

Damn Mo! I thought I was the only one who used Kuru over Jabob Crutchfields disease! For the same reason you stated.

I would also note that, it is not just brain matter but ALL nerve tissue, but mostly brains and spinal tissue.

But that also brings up another issue.

Not just mad cow disease, but also any number of other other livestock diseases that could either be passed to humans.


And of course we could have,

SOILENT GREEN!!!!!!

I came across it a few years ago because of a TV report on it. Then, I became curious.:D

Oh, we studied it in anthropology class in college. One woman an older one even discussed how they used to skin and dress their meals.

It's a Bug's Life (or Death)
 

Along the same path as the Towers of Silence, anyone who can breed enough beetles of the appropriate kind, put the body (bodies) in a large impermeable container, bathtub with a metal screen covering, burial vault, and let the beetles do their thing. Maggots are also handy for this but not as effective and will become flies eventually. One option open to our Southron brethren, are fire ants. A buckskinning associate of mine tells me he cleans deer skulls and other game skeletons by placing the object on/near a fire ant mound, then coming back in a day or so. (see, they're good for _something_).

When all the feasting has been completed, remove the polished bones from the container, dry and pulverize for garden bone meal.

Shoot 'em in the head and burn the bodies. Oh, wait that's the UNdead, wrong thread, sorry.

Nom nom nom....

Don't forget the second jar of relish...
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/in...1144716AAm0NMl

I'd like to say cremation (it has the virtue of the bodies not taking up room and putting a stop to most diseases), it's too labor-intensive and takes up too many resources. So mass graves will probably become the rule, unless you resort to dumping bodies in whatever body of water is near (then the GM can have an epidemic pop up!).

Spread out the bodies enough (or if you really have a lot of them), and you will, after 3 years or so, have rich farmland!

In my last campaign when Major Po's "Target Zero" doctrine was in full swing the PC party was adding bodies to the corpse population generously and regularly. Both burial and cremation tended to be problematic options in T2K New York City so quite often Po would get creative and mix corpse management with psy ops. He'd often have his men string up, pose, and/or mutilate the recently dead with the aim of demoralizing his enemies, spreading terror and letting the people know that someone or something dark and wicked had arrived in the domain.

Unfortunately these behaviors had some fairly negative consequences for the morale of some of his own, less de-humanised personnel but no one spoke up against it. I guess due to varying degrees of fear of Po, Stockholm syndrome and the ingrained tendency of many soldiers to follow orders, even distasteful and immoral ones. Hey, one man's atrocity is another's avant garde street art, right?

Why not build a wall out of them, work for the 300

I was thinking once the bodies had decayed down to the bones, they could be used as field boundaries and walls.... :sawink2:

sicko
 

that major Po was a real sicko wasnt he?
Still - gMing a campaign where the opfor are the "heroes" and the PCs are the "villains" is fun and helps creativity. General Pain ( the character) used corpses to spread illness in watersources etc - old style germ warfare if you will. Other uses can be mentioned also - som e involving a makeshift refurbished vcannery - but another time...:)

sicko
 

that major Po was a real sicko wasnt he?
Still - gMing a campaign where the opfor are the "heroes" and the PCs are the "villains" is fun and helps creativity. General Pain ( the character) used corpses to spread illness in watersources etc - old style germ warfare if you will. Other uses can be mentioned also - som e involving a makeshift refurbished vcannery - but another time...:)

In the book The Green Beretshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gre...ets_%28book%29 there's a story of a raid undertaken by a A-Team and some of their native troops that they were leading in country. One of the objectives was blowing a bridge but the Team Leadership was having a problem planning loads to be carried. They didn't have enough troops to carry all their equipment, including enough explosives to blow the bridge and carry full sandbags to pack the explosives on the bridge. They didn't want to carry empty sandbags and fill them on site because that would have taken too long. Then one of their native troops suggested that they use the dead bodies of the bridge guard force that they had already planned on killing before they could blow the bridge.

So, they did it. They shot the guard company and then used the bodies to pack the three lines of explosives they laid across the top of the bridge. Compared to other methods of blowing it, it was fairly quick to lay out and it worked. Also, the enemy never really figured out where their entire company of guards went to...