Necromancers are always the bad guy. Raising skeletal armies and zombie hordes, they wipe out villages and countries in their desire for power. Inevitably the rise of evil, monstrous king causes the rise of an opposing hero. The valiant swordsman, the powerful archmage, the caring druid or the kind cleric. These bastions of justice help people wherever they roam in their journey to defeat evil. But what happens when the armies of the dead and paragons of virtue class? What happens to the bystanders, the peasants and workers, the backbone of any nation?
The clang of weapons rang out amongst screams, explosions boomed, and the world shifted around the combatants. The lumberjack scrambled and ran, he had been chopping down trees further out than the rest of his team, looking for older and more magical woods deeper within the forest. With him being so far out he had not been warned of the hidden party of undead attacking the village. As the band of heroes were currently resting within his village, they had rushed out to combat the walking corpses. He could hear them fighting the bulk of the force further out as he fled from the five skeletal warriors and archers that had split off to pursue him. The magically hardened bones were nigh unbreakable to his woodsman’s axe and mortal strength.
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He snapped back to the present has a bone arrow thudded into the back of his shoulder and he fell, as he fell his head clipped a tree trunk and he turned to fall upon his back he cried out again as the barbed arrow pushed through the flesh of his shoulder. His darkened vision caught the demonic visage of the grinning skull of a skeletal warrior as its steel sword flashed down at his neck. Time seemed to slow down as the sword swung down, his vision focused on a gleaming black gem set in the middle of the cross guard of the sword just above the clenched white bone of the clenched hand. Then he felt the bite of the blade into his neck and felt massive pain as something ripped from him. Then everything went dark and he knew no more.