I tried to go all high-tech this year. What a disaster! First, let me tell you that when the manual for the revivification table says it needs a bolt of lightning, you can't just substitute wall current. You need real lightning or you don't jump-start the corpse, you just end up charring the internal organs. Right away that puts a requirement on the weather and limits you to working during thunderstorms. And you don't want to deal with a thunderstorm on Halloween night. That keeps all the trick-or-treaters home. It's getting harder and harder these days to lure kids into your basement. Halloween's the one time of year when kids are *supposed* to accept candy from creepy guys in poorly-lit houses! You don't want a little thing like the weather screwing up that chance or you might not harvest enough test subjects to last through the year.
Next year I'm going back to good old-fashioned necromancy, just like we did when I was a kid. Sure, it takes a little longer and the entrails really make a mess, but you know you're going to get an unliving minion out of it instead of just a charred corpse that's too burned even to bother to eat. With necromancy, even if the ritual goes wrong the worst that could happen is you'll end up with an unholy abomination that will try to turn on its creator. Anyone who can't handle that once in a while doesn't deserve to call himself "mad".
Stick with low-tech (Score:3)
I tried to go all high-tech this year. What a disaster! First, let me tell you that when the manual for the revivification table says it needs a bolt of lightning, you can't just substitute wall current. You need real lightning or you don't jump-start the corpse, you just end up charring the internal organs. Right away that puts a requirement on the weather and limits you to working during thunderstorms. And you don't want to deal with a thunderstorm on Halloween night. That keeps all the trick-or-treaters home. It's getting harder and harder these days to lure kids into your basement. Halloween's the one time of year when kids are *supposed* to accept candy from creepy guys in poorly-lit houses! You don't want a little thing like the weather screwing up that chance or you might not harvest enough test subjects to last through the year.
Next year I'm going back to good old-fashioned necromancy, just like we did when I was a kid. Sure, it takes a little longer and the entrails really make a mess, but you know you're going to get an unliving minion out of it instead of just a charred corpse that's too burned even to bother to eat. With necromancy, even if the ritual goes wrong the worst that could happen is you'll end up with an unholy abomination that will try to turn on its creator. Anyone who can't handle that once in a while doesn't deserve to call himself "mad".