Few speak of the farms outside the city. No
one would choose to live outside the walls, and yet the foodstuffs grown within
the city are not sufficient to support those living within its protection,
requiring the land outside to be cultivated.
And so a necromancer from Shelzar, Miroi, developed a process by which zombie
farmers could be created from the corpses of those with the appropriate skills.
By finding an appropriate corpse, that of a skilled farmer, and bathing the
bones in an essence of certain narcotic and hallucinatory mushroom and floral
distillates, before summoning its spirit to infuse said drug-riddled corpse,
the necromancer can trick the befuddled spirit into believing that it has
been restored to an idyllic existence mirroring it's most perfect living days.
Random other zombies are dressed in the funereal clothing of the former farmers
living relations and a homestead and crops provided. The undead farmer goes
through it's days surrounded by 'loved ones,' that it sees in the prime of
their youth and vigor, with wife mysteriously young and unbent by the years,
yet children fully-grown and hale. At his direction the lesser zombies re-enact
their lives in a macabre play, working the fields, overseeing a dozen or more
faceless 'farmhands' (also zombies, or skeletal dead) working endlessly to
till the fields and feed the living of Hollowfaust.
Every few years the spells or drugs fail and the illusions are seen through,
with a maddened 'farmer' going violently insane as he realizes that his loved
ones are rotting corpses and his idyllic afterlife is one of infernal deception.
Often such mad creatures destroy their supposed families (never quite realizing
their own undead state), and despite attempts to re-train them with drugs
and spells, it is simpler to simply destroy them and start again with another
deceased farmer and 'family.'
Once a crop grows to harvest time, the goods are loaded into wagons and Miroi,
or one of his apprentices, comes from the city come to claim them, paying
the farmer in illusory coin, which it then apparently forgets about as it
returns to its paradisial afterlife. None wishes to know what goes on in the
'life' of the farmer and his decaying family in the off-seasons, but it is
known that on occasion one of them will wander into town, make a few 'purchases'
(which the vendors generally just hand them with shaking hands and wait for
them to walk away) that it then appears to award to its 'loved ones' (as zombies
on that farmers homestead are often seen wearing clothing or using items that
it has 'bought' for them). The farmers occasionally gather, for unknown reasons,
and Miroi has begun to coordinate a social gathering place for them, as well
as to collect seperate items for a form of 'market' for them. The undead never
seem to notice certain details, such as their own decaying state, that they
do not eat or sleep, or that their beloved families are rotting where they
stand and unable to speak, but otherwise appear to be able to function fully,
directing the work of their farmsteads, and even futiley attempting to defend
them against the occasional attack on outlying areas by titanspawn or other
marauders.
When asked about this procedure, infusing a corpse with drugs to befuddle
its spirit, Miroi said only it is a process used in the formation of undead
courtesans in a select specialty brothel in Shelzar, at which point the curious
researcher lost interest in further details...