Most historians trace the skeleton war back to Dril, who once said, “if your grave doesnt say ‘rest in peace’ on it you are automatically drafted into the skeleton war”. Now there’s a Total War: Warhammer 3 mod that seems based on this very prophecy. It’s called Necromancy, and it allows several factions in the strategy game’s Immortal Empires campaign to recruit units they’ve killed in battle into their armies as skeletons.
This isn’t just regular human-shaped skeletons, mind you. Using the Necromancy mod, all undead factions can resurrect and recruit skeletons from elves, dwarves, or orcs, and there are even skeleton versions of carnosaurs, dragons, hydras, and giants.
Modder All is Dust says the new recruitment mechanic works like this: when you kill a unit in battle, the bones of that unit are added to a resource pool. Then, in the Mortuary Cult, you can spend that pool of bones to resurrect the corresponding unit type – so dragon bones let you resurrect dragons, orc bones let you resurrect orcs. Once the units have been skeletonised in this way, you can recruit them into your armies from the Regiments of Renown pool.
You don’t have to do all your bone collecting in battle, however – there’s a new stance called ‘dig for skeletons’ included in the mod, and when your army enters this stance, you have a chance every turn of digging up some precious bones.
All is Dust says they still have quite a few creatures yet to add to the mod – they still need to create models for gnoblars, boars, bears, saurians, bats, fimirs, skaven, and various other Warhammer denizens. But there’s an impressive selection included already, and they’re all more than happy to go to war (again) as a chittering host of skeletons.
Head to the Steam Workshop to subscribe to the Necromancy mod, and check out our list of the best Total War: Warhammer 3 mods for more creative goodness.