OPig's heartne of our text MUDs/MMOs - Aetolia, the Midnight Age - recently implemented a system that I wanted to mention purely because I think it’s cool. Aetolia has a number of different divisions within its playerbase, but one major one is undead vs. living. (Any race/class can be undead, but some classes do not function while undead, which is reversible with some effort, and vice-versa.) The undead have living players who have chosen to ally with them, but for the most part, the living players oppose the undead players.

Typically, players heal using a variety of concoctions that are made by players whose class contains the Concoctions skill. They need to go out, pick plants, and then make salves and elixirs out of them, as well as smoke them in pipes, to cure the various afflictions you’ll get in combat. The production team on Aetolia, however, decided that the undead should have a unique method of curing, and recently introduced the Reanimation system.

Briefly, the way it works is that instead of going out and harvesting flowers, and mosses, and roots and such, the undead with the proper skill (the Necromancers) need to slay something and then harvest an organ from it. Organs range from hearts to ovaries to livers, and so on. Each individual type of NPC has a different organ (or two organs in the case of ovaries, as there are less female NPCs) that may be harvested, forcing players to mix it up some.

Once harvested, the organs must be dessicated and ground into a poultice, or prepared into a serum which is then mixed with blood, and injected. Corpses themselves have turned into a kind of mini-economy in Aetolia now, given that anyone can produce them (by killing things), but only Necromancers may harvest organs from them. There’s nothing profound about the system, but I enjoy the delicious morbidity of it. I revel in game experiences that verge towards socially inappropriate I suppose.