Question about Hallow - interred vs. died

[Fenrick Talon]

How would you rule this. I have an area that was Hallowed, and many dead were 'interred' there. Later, some graverobbers were exploring and died in the hallowed area.
The party shows up. Since the graverobbers died in a Hallowed place, would animate dead work on them?

I'm trying to decide if the spell differentiates between 'intent' and 'mishap' in regard to dead bodies, and just want some other opinions.

Thanks,
Don

[Azothath]

Hallow:K5 comp:$1000{min} dur:inst. The spell effect is limited to a geographical area or Area of Effect(AoE) as the target is a point that the caster touches then the effect spreads out (emanates) in a radius. Line of effect is important but the description kinda glosses over that. Non-Evil Creatures or PCs would have to use Detect Magic or similar spells or magic to figure out exactly where the Hallow AoE is. See Protection from Evil and Magic Circle against Evil spells.

interred means buried or stored there. That's different than died there, so the place a creature dies is not important for the spell.

If a squirrel managed to expire within the Hallow AoE and no one removed it, so long as it is in the AoE it cannot be raised as an undead squirrel. Being in the AoE is key. If the corpse is moved outside of the AoE it could then be animated.

Compare to Gentle Repose:N2 which targets a corpse and thus moves with the object.

[Sir Longears]

I believe the text is pretty clear: "any dead body interred in a hallowed site cannot be turned into an undead creature".

If the effect was supposed to apply to every corpse inside the area no matter what, there would be absolutely no point in including the word "interred" in the description.

I honestly can't say that RAW the spell affects the graverobbers in your example.

[Fenrick Talon]

I think it comes down to what the spell is doing. "Inter" means to "place (a corpse) in a grave or tomb". Based on Azothath's response, if you have a mausoleum with Hallow on it, you could just drag the corpses out of the hallowed area and raise them. That "feels" wrong. Like, I imagine the intent is keep certain bodies from being desecrated in that way - especially royals. But if you can bypass that, and the effect has nothing to do with an alteration to the corpses, but it's just an area of effect, then it stands to reason any dead body in the hallow couldn't be raised - because the spell wouldn't have a way to tell the difference, would it? Either way it doesn't matter. You just drag the bodies out though and voila. Any other thoughts?

[Pizza Lord]

When hallow is cast, that area becomes a holy site. Any bodies interred within it cannot become undead (possibly a ghost of the creature might be able to exist, whether because it already does or because your GM rules the spirit different than the body, but that's GM's call or plot dependent, but I probably wouldn't myself.)

While it's a holy site (which is forever unless somehow defiled, since the spell is instantaneous, any body buried there, cannot become undead. Whether the body was there at the time the site became hallowed or was buried there later. If a body is dug up and moved off the site, it still can't be turned into an undead.

It's like a desecrate spell. Undead within the area get +1 profane bonuses to attack, damage, and saving throws whether they were there the whole time, wandered in later, or were created there afterwards. Those bonuses go away when they leave. Undead created within the desecrated area, also have +1 hit points per hit die. Those don't go away when they leave.

If you bury a body in a hallowed site, it is considered blessed (not as the spell) or otherwise warded or protected from being turned into an undead creature (without some good plot reason, ie. GM fiat), whether you dig up the body and move it elsewhere or not. It likely wouldn't protect squirrels or graverobbers that died in the area unless they died in such a way that their bodies were considered entombed or buried (like inside a mausoleum or inside a collapsed grave or beneath the soil. Even if a ghoul wandered in (it might be uncomfortable there) and lurked beneath the soil, then popped up, killed someone and dragged their body down beneath the grave (possibly to eat later). The body wouldn't become a ghoul (assuming the ghoul didn't consume it first). Some cultures might place their dead on biers or elevated platforms, like native American tribes of the plains, and that might also count in some way or situations as being interred for this purpose on the site, even though the word technically means buried.

[Fenrick Talon]

Ok, that interpretation seems to be close to how I envisioned it. My conundrum was, in the case of a large mausoleum, the graverobbers basically were trapped and starved to death inside. They are 'entombed' inside the mausoleum technically.

[Diego Rossi]

First, let's look at what the spell says:

Hallow: "Hallow makes a particular site, building, or structure a holy site."

The spell makes the site holy, not the bodies in it.

"Third, any dead body interred in a hallowed site cannot be turned into an undead creature."

Being interred in the hallowed holy site changes the bodies so that they can be tuned into undead.

I agree with Pizza Lord, the site changes the bodies of the dead so that they can't be turned into undead, but that happens only if the bodies are purposefully interred in the site (so the guy killed by a ghoul and dragged into its lairs tunnels will raise as a ghoul).

Essentially, to be forever resistant to being animated as an undead you need the proper funeral rites, simply dining in the place isn't enough.

[Sir Longears]

I agree with Diego that the site is the target and that you need to be properly interred in it to gain the benefits.

I'm not convinced, however, that once you are removed from said site you are forever protected. The description is ambiguous in the matter, so I believe both interpretations are valid.

I personally feel the protection is only valid for as long as the body remains interred, specially because the building is the target.

If you could inter a corpse, gain the protection, and then remove it with no consequence, then you turned your mausoleum in a "hallowing factory". Consider the following scenario:

"You live in a small town with problems with undead. You, as the priest, collect the offerings from the population to the hallowing of a tiny chapel on the public graveyard. The chapel is pretty small, but that doesn't matter, because when someone dies, they are interred in the chapel's crypt... for about an hour until the proper farewells are said and the funeral is done. As soon as it finishes, the grave-keeper digs a common grave on the graveyard and transfers the corpse to a wooden coffin to be buried in there.

Everyone is happy and the problem is solved. The nearby villages, hearing about your success begin to travel to use the sacred chapel as well before they return the hallowed corpse back to their town to bury in their cemetery."

Does it feels right? Doesn't it feel that, for 1,000gp, every single town in any fantasy world would do this and have no undead anywhere anymore aside from those who die in the wilds?

[Fenrick Talon]

Ooof, yeah that's a really good point. I do believe that you have convinced me the bodies have to stay interred to keep the benefit. I suppose if the necromancer keeps hauling bodies out of hallowed areas Pharasma may have something to say about it.

Thanks everyone!

Sir Longears wrote:

I agree with Diego that the site is the target and that you need to be properly interred in it to gain the benefits.

I'm not convinced, however, that once you are removed from said site you are forever protected. The description is ambiguous in the matter, so I believe both interpretations are valid.

I personally feel the protection is only valid for as long as the body remains interred, specially because the building is the target.

If you could inter a corpse, gain the protection, and then remove it with no consequence, then you turned your mausoleum in a "hallowing factory". Consider the following scenario:

"You live in a small town with problems with undead. You, as the priest, collect the offerings from the population to the hallowing of a tiny chapel on the public graveyard. The chapel is pretty small, but that doesn't matter, because when someone dies, they are interred in the chapel's crypt... for about an hour until the proper farewells are said and the funeral is done. As soon as it finishes, the grave-keeper digs a common grave on the graveyard and transfers the corpse to a wooden coffin to be buried in there.

Everyone is happy and the problem is solved. The nearby villages, hearing about your success begin to travel to use the sacred chapel as well before they return the hallowed corpse back to their town to bury in their cemetery."

Does it feels right? Doesn't it feel that, for 1,000gp, every single town in any fantasy world would do this and have no undead anywhere anymore aside from those who die in the wilds?

[Diego Rossi]

@Sir Longears

Pathfinder/D&D lacks plenty of spells that, while uninteresting for adventurers, would be extremely interesting for followers of a religion.

AD&D1 Unearthen Arcana had a spell, Ceremony. It had several effects, depending on the caster level, but they were mostly fluff meant to represent the RL religious ceremonies.

A way to bless a departing soul so that he won't risk becoming undead is something that almost all non-evil religious will want.

About Hallow, my opinion is that the effect will protect the soul while it travels to the beyond.

I hadn't made this digression before to avoid writing one of my usual walls of text, I think that the mere body, if brought outside the hallowed area, could be animate, but only as a skeleton or zombie (or other similar undead that don't retain even a vestige of the original deceased soul or mind).
Pathfinder, with the changes made to skeleton and zombies, that have become evil creatures instead of neutral necromantic automatons like in previous versions of the game had made the difference between "merely animated bodies" and "corrupted souls undead" a bit more complicated.

Personally, while the needed combustibles could be a problem in some regions, I don't see why cremation isn't widespread.
Alternatively, to conserve combustibles, it is possible to use Excarnation. (Sandman had a nice story about that.)

If there isn't a body, most undead will not form.

[Pizza Lord]

Sir Longears wrote:

I personally feel the protection is only valid for as long as the body remains interred, specially because the building is the target.

You can try and make that ruling based on the wording 'interred there' to be read as a constant condition, but it can also be read as a conditional check for if the corpse ever was buried there. You can do that in fairness, but when you try and use influence with negative connotation to sway it, I disagree. Your assumption is that just because something can be done, that turns a place into a 'factory' and that a 'factory' is something that doesn't or shouldn't exist? Or that a church or religion or something couldn't have an effect that can be beneficial beyond its own walls or boundaries?

Faith Factories:

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Sire Longears wrote:

If you could inter a corpse, gain the protection, and then remove it with no consequence, then you turned your mausoleum in a "hallowing factory".

And? First, I can imagine plenty of real world people and cultures that have their dead interred or placed in state or otherwise ritually or traditionally prepared and located or displayed in a certain location only to be ultimately placed somewhere else (whether it's their belief that it would stop undead or merely to make sure their souls pass on or are honored might vary), but in a lot of places, proper burial rituals or even rites performed can be viewed as allowing a soul or spirit to pass on, such as on a battlefield or prior to burial, without the burial site itself being blessed or holy ultimately.

I see nothing wrong with there being a holy site, where you can inter a corpse that will hinder its rise as undead. You say 'as soon as it finishes' but in cultures there are undead that rise after 1 minute, or an hour, or the next night, or whatever. It's possible that a hallowed site that prevents it from happening stops the event, just like if you're killed by an undead with create spawn that would cause you to rise in one hour as that undead, but were raised before that time. You don't suddenly turn undead at the 60 minute mark or even turn undead the next time you die (unless that was a similar situation to the first). It could be that if you don't turn, the opportunity passes.

No one is saying or advocating that the game would be better if there's some crypt-keeper just chucking your corpse into a hallowed mausoleum while looking at his stopwatch and then going "Aaaand... 6 seconds! That's a round! Pull 'em out, boys!"
That wouldn't be right.

I have no in-game or lore issues with a culture or tradition being that a recently deceased is interred for a week or a month and then being able to be exhumed or taken from the holy mausoleum or crypt and moved to elsewhere, even a private family plot. It doesn't make it into a 'factory' any more than consecrating or blessing a church site turns the church into a factory for faith.

Sir Longears wrote:

Consider the following scenario:

"You live in a small town with problems with undead. You, as the priest, collect the offerings from the population to the hallowing of a tiny chapel on the public graveyard. The chapel is pretty small, but that doesn't matter, because when someone dies, they are interred in the chapel's crypt... for about an hour until the proper farewells are said and the funeral is done. As soon as it finishes, the grave-keeper digs a common grave on the graveyard and transfers the corpse to a wooden coffin to be buried in there.

Using the word 'factory' to make the hallowed site seem somehow cheap or tawdry does not affect what it does nor is it persuasive. You're just trying to make it sound like holy sites or churches couldn't charge money (not that they have too, but they still sell holy water at cost, they don't give it away) and that somehow contradicts or nullifies that a site is 'holy' or 'consecrated' or 'blessed by divine energy'.

With that logic, you could then say that dispel magic magic can't be linked to the hallow because that turns the site into a "magical spell removing factory for one year! Those dispelled effects should pop back on if people leave!"
"Does it feel right that this hallowed site, with resist energy or protection from energy on it, could basically be turned into an energy resisting factory for a year?! If someone leaves the site, all the burn damage they resisted should suddenly affect them!
No, the time for that passed.

Sir Longears wrote:

Everyone is happy and the problem is solved. The nearby villages, hearing about your success begin to travel to use the sacred chapel as well before they return the hallowed corpse back to their town to bury in their cemetery."

That seems perfectly fine. There are plenty of holy places that a family or even the deceased, would likely prefer to be interred in, for a number of reasons, even in the real world. If a family wishes to travel to a holy site, have their loved on basically blessed or consecrated or warded or protective (pick your word choice) or otherwise be noticed by a divine source by being placed there for [some reasonable] time, and then moved elsewhere and still be considered protected, that's fine.

There's ample real world examples of people being buried in a spot for a set period of time, and then later exhumed and placed into other spots that might be less prestigious. Usually it's after enough time to become bones and be put in catacombs or other locations to free up more grave space for more dead to be placed in them. In some cases, ordinary people are coated in quicklime or other substances to make that happen faster, while royalty or priests would be allowed to stay in the grave plots longer and naturally decay, but that's neither here nor there. Only that it is perfectly reasonable.
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How it feels?:

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Sir Longears wrote:

Does it feels right? Doesn't it feel that, for 1,000gp, every single town in any fantasy world would do this and have no undead anywhere anymore aside from those who die in the wilds?

It feels perfectly reasonable. It feels like it makes both religious and cultural sense and shows respect. If a small village, with no such hallowed location (and bear in mind that not every hallowed location is suited or built for interring people), they would just do other things, like burn the bodies and stop most undead, other than ones that might come back as ghosts or incorporeal spirits (which may or may not be stopped by hallow since that might not be considered 'the body' being turned undead, since the spirit likely did that when it died, whether it manifested then or not). They wouldn't have to bother with making a pilgrimage or effort or church donations for burial at the site, then exhumation, then carting the body back, then reburying it.

A holy or hallowed site that does something 'miraculous' or prevents something 'profane' does not feel wrong to me, just because you try and use the word 'factory'. I don't feel 'icky' if an evil church uses unhallow and links bless to it (for a year or forever if they upkeep it) and have that blessing affect everyone who visits, maybe they want good PR, maybe it was a deal they made with the city or kingdom to be allowed to have the site for a church or whatever. I'm not gonna be like, "That shouldn't be allowed because that's beneficial and not necessarily eeeevvilll!"
There could be a reasonable and believable explanation or reason.

Sir Longears wrote:

Does it feels right? Doesn't it feel that, for 1,000gp, every single town in any fantasy world would do this and have no undead anywhere anymore aside from those who die in the wilds

It's not about how it 'feels'. Yeah, if every single village in the entire world, had 1,000gp to spend to have one site blessed or consecrated (not the spell) then I have no doubt that undead around those villages would be less common, because that's common sense, but that still involves people making an effort to inter their dead in those locations in a timely manner. There will still be plenty of undead out, not just in the wilds, but everywhere else (even invading those hallowed sites, since they won't stop you from being turned undead if you're killed there unless interred) and there will still be plenty of necromancers out there bringing bodies back to life if they have to kill them themselves. Your attempt to instill fear or confusion in gamers that somehow every village is going to bury every single corpse in a 10 mile radius, including snakes, cows, horses, and household pets, so there won't be any more skeletal wolves or zombie bears for PCs to fight is not persuasive.

"Does it feel right that every village in the entire fantasy world with 50,000 gp can have a castle!? Villagers would be living in castles! There'd be castles everywhere! What kind of fantasy world would that be?!"

You may as well be saying that wall of stone shouldn't make permanent (the word, not the duration) stone walls, because then every village that has a 9th-level+ cleric living in it [You know, all those settlements...], the same level needed to cast hallow, shouldn't be able to just create walls and structures for free!
"That's not right! Think of the stonemasons and quarrymen and builders and teamsters hauling the materials that would out of work! That isn't right! And they don't even need to spend 1,000 gp to cast the spell!"
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TL;DR

Sir Longears wrote:

I personally feel the protection is only valid for as long as the body remains interred, specially because the building is the target.

That's fine. If you had just stuck with this, I could have accepted your reasoning. The wording can be interpreted in either way. Either the body can't become an undead while interred or if it was ever interred. That can be read by different people in different ways.

However, you would also have to answer if it 'feels right' that you bury a person in a hallowed spot, like a graveyard, paying 1,000 gp for such a location (if not specifically for that express purpose, at least one of the reasons), and then all a person has to do is walk over to the grave, dig to the coffin and then go,
"I animate dead because the corpse isn't buried anymore,"
"Oh... I push the sarcophagus lid off and take the body out of it, now it's not interred here."
With your interpretation, they don't need to move it off-site, just dig to the body, which, guess what, they have to do anyway. Does that feel right after paying 1,000 gp to consecrate a gravesite specifically to stop that from happening?

[Sir Longears]

@Diego: Take a look HERE at this post from James Jacobs where he answers this question about the mindless undead. The are not corrupted souls and the evil comes from the ritual that raised them.

@Pizza Lord: I've mentioned very clearly in my post that both interpretations were equally possible. You are allowed to have a different opinion then mine. I'd only ask, of possible, for you to refrain in the future to try to put words in my mouth, as you are twisting my interpretation to prove yours. Good gaming anyway.

[Diego Rossi]

Besides the usual JJ isn't a rule guys, there is this:

James Jacobs wrote:

2) Mindless undead only use a tiny fragment of the soul. That's enough to prevent a creature from being resurrected, but not enough to prevent them from being judged.

The post states that being raised as a mindless undead corrupts a fragment of the soul.

About the "factory": how long does a body stay in a mortician's office?
It is very reasonable for it to be blessed by Hallow and shaped so that storing the bodies counts as "interred" if the mortician doesn't want to be devoured by an undead.

[Mysterious Stranger]

The spell is not actually changing the bodies; it is preventing whatever turns the bodies into undead from functioning in the area of the spell.

The duration of the spell is instantaneous. That means once the spell is complete there is no further magic involved. Any effect the spell creates continues to function until destroyed. Instantaneous spells cannot be dispelled because there is no longer any magic to dispel. If the spell made changes to the bodies, it would have there would be some sort of ongoing magic effect and the duration would be permanent, not instantaneous.

[Mysterious Stranger]

Another thing to consider is that in the Middle Ages most cemeteries where actually located on the church property. Usually most of them were next to or behind the church. They also grouped the graves very close, so they were not actually that large. If you have ever visited England and toured any of the local churches of that age, they have a cemetery next to them. They also often had catacomb below the church where people were buried. Other than the cathedrals most local churches were actually fairly small. A 40-foot radius would probably cover a small chapel and cemetery.

Modern Americans are used to much larger structures than those of the Middle Ages in Europe.