So. Let's talk the armies of the Dead.
(yes, I know, very melodramatic way of starting things)
I was thinking about what the armies of the Dead consist of and the sort of forces an Abyssal might lead after writing the ghoul thing, and I kept on running into the same problem. I don't think Exalted has ever really managed to make them... evocative. Oh, certainly, you get some quirky things in the 2e comics and some lol-shock things in the necrotech section [1], but there's nothing all that coherent. Despite the fact that they're largely made up of the same stuff as the Vampire Counts and Tomb Kings of Warhammer, there's never the same sense of a unified aesthetic, or indeed feel.
There's an additional problem, too, because once again demons are looking smug at another thing they do better - namely, how a PC-level sorcerer can use them to supplement an existing force. It's easy for a player to realise that they can have an agata squadron to work as fast aerial scouts, and realise how that's an amazing advantage on an Iron Age battlefield. It's just as easy for a player to realise that a single demon pack can be used as expendable line-breaking troops to save your mortal troops - a pack of blood apes can be thrown into an enemy formation to demoralise them (and Blood Apes and their Bane Weapon are good at killing mortals) and soften them up for the human soldiers. But the more potent necrotech stuff requires a lot more player specialisation and focus to do.
I'll probably have some more thoughts about this over the next few days [2], but I open the floor here to the discussion of the armies of the Dead, how to make them more alluring to players, and generally work on how to make necromancy more attractive to players at the strategic scale.
[1] "It shoots babies at you that then explode!"
[2] Certainly, "I animate several graveyards using a ritual at the new moon to bind ghosts into corpses produce an army from nowhere" is what I'd want necrotic sorcery to do as a seasonal-scale project, allowing a necromancer to create an army from "nowhere" without taking their farmers and the like off the field. Players should be tempted to dabble in animating the dead to allow them to campaign during harvest season and during the winter months.
This is, frankly, bizarre to me on both an aesthetic and mechanical levels.
Demons are at their best when they operate in small groups which take only a few days of preparation to raise. A pack of a half-dozen blood apes swinging from trees or jumping down rooftops as they bear down on their targets? Scary. A handful of agatae carrying an Exalted circle? Really drives home the terrible majesty of the Princes of the Earth. A squad of tomescu suddenly jumping from the mists to butcher some surprised mortals? Effective. Three luminatas hunting down one man through the forests on a moonless night? Terrifying.
But blow it up to strategic scales and it all starts looking kinda dumb. Actual
armies of demons are just goofy. A few hundred crimson baboon-gorillas trying to march in rank are hard to take seriously. A swarm of hundreds of Agatae, each one a philosopher whose carapace is so beautiful mortals weep at their sight, carrying banal soldiers and crates of supplies? It's going to convey the message "whoever put this together is a really big deal" once, and then no one who's seen that scene will ever see Agatae as more than a horse++. Luminata as light cavalry harassing your opponent's army makes sense in terms of what powers they have, but it's just kind of... Silly.
Now I know, the above is mostly a matter of taste. But mechanically it doesn't make sense either. You can't have demon armies. Any given sorcerer can have about 400 demons at any time provided they are suffering no attrition whatsoever, can spend several hours summoning every day, and can afford the constantly-renewed sorcerous supplies. Try to bring several sorcerers together, and these costs stack up while you find yourself with clusters of 200-400 demons each magically loyal to a different person. Oh, and some of them are perpetually hungry for blood and with unmanageable tempers that prevent good formation work, some of them scream in unison at the same time each day, and the ones you're using for engineering are stealing babies everywhere you go (and that's a lot of babies, because armies are hugely reliant on human settlements - "foraging" mostly means "steal shit from the local peasants.")
Creation doesn't have Hellmouths. It has gates to Cecelyne, but it doesn't have festering holes in the world that blood life-killing pus and disgorge monsters that hunger for prayers and blood.
That's what Shadowlands are, though.
Necromancers don't build armies by dedicating hours every night summoning soldiers one at a time. Indeed, they mostly don't even spend months and resources on necropunk horrors. Those are setpieces and distractions.
Necromancers show up and just hire entire regiments of lost souls who have forgotten the face of their father but remember the smell of the blood of the first man they killed. Or, "hire." They play on their ghostly nature to bind them, whether it's placating them into service with promises of blood and worship, cursing their opponent's city so that they will get up and spill out of their shadowlands to attack it on their own, use large-scale workings to bind them all into service, whatever. The ghosts are
there. Lords of the dead exist who will lend you these armies, already trained and organized, for some terrible fee. Battlefields and charnel houses abound where a bunch of useless corpses only await you to turn them into cheap, plentiful soldiers.
And visually it's much more coherent. You have a thousand shambling undead in the front, behind which march a few hundred translucent shades, visages caught in masks of pain and anger, still wearing their lamellar and helm sporting the damage of the wounds that killed them. Next to those you have some number of pale riders on skeletal steeds, taut skin over raw bone and fire for eyes, and some hundred-strong guard made up of suits of gothic plate empty but for two points of cold light in their helm.
And next to this army, aesthetically coherent, supernatural enough to be fearsome but subdued enough to not look ridiculous, you put in a handful of more unique touches of freakier things: three giant snakes made out of the bones of hundreds of mortal, a small group of bloated plague-dead ready to burst and spill contagion in enemy ranks, a few carriages transporting black iron cages where squirm wolf-like hungry ghosts to be released at the last moment before battle, five Abyssals cosplaying the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (they couldn't decide whether to have Conquest or Pestilence so they took both).
Demons exist as a terrible addition to normal armies, small groups of freakish monsters whose spiritual power and unique capabilities vastly expand the toolkit of an otherwise mortal army. When you go to war with demons you go to war with a human army and you bring a few dozens blood apes and you use them as a single wedge to break enemy ranks with their superior prowess and mortal-slaying powers, and you hope you lose no more than one per day on average for your whole campaign. When you go to war with undead you bring a thousand war-ghosts and they
are the army, no mortal necessary, and they slowly grind through all opposition because they literally cannot die, mortal blows simply disrupting their link to their armor until they possess a new one, and every soldier that dies is a new recruit.
You can't have demon armies. You can have undead armies. And your undead armies don't look like Bogleech tried to draw the Battle at Helm's Deep.
