I felt like giving this a try. The first bump I ran into was the difference between reanimation and ressurection.
In one case, we're talking about literally bringing the dead back to life: Re-inserting the soul into the body and restoring the body to a state in which it can survive. This would be a full-fledged ressurection. This would be the act made by someone considered a healer, or a miracle, where deceased family members could be returned ( or like the Advent from Sins of a Solar Empire who like to bring their commanders back from dead to serve once more on the front line so their expertise is not lost ) This ressurection is usually a spiritual event or a scientific breakthrough, or the power of healing.
Then there's the zombie / necromancy reanimation. This one is not a ressurection because you are not actually bringing the dead back to life, rather you're turning the deceased body into a soul-less puppet that will do your bidding ( in the case of necromancy ) or a soul-less husk that will roam around aimlessly, without any sense of who it once was, eating people at will ( zombies, obviously ). This reanimation is usually done through "black" magic or science gone wrong.
Finally, there's the..uhm... well let's just call it the Strogg, from Quake, who strap machine parts to dead bodies to get them to move, which could be part of the science gone wrong part of the above paragraph.
I felt like any attempt at ressurection I could do would eventually just end up looking like Advent so I decided to go for reanimation. Then what? Magic or science? Fuck it, let's do both, and some lore to go with it:
Necromancers of ages past would reanimate the bodies of the recently deceased as ghouls to do their bidding. However, to to such a thing, they had to put a part of their own life force into the body to allow it to move. Because of this cost, even the best necromancers could only command a dozen ghouls at once, at the experience left them drained and ill for months.
Several thousand years later, science has progressed to a point where necromancers can support their failing bodies with machinery, allowing them to pour massive amounts of their own life force into the dead. Their bodies rot and decay and the missing parts are replaced and reinforced until the necromancer is nothing but death and metal himself. This allows them to summon not dozens, but hundreds of undead minions at any one time.
Here be the concept sketch and sorry for the wall of text.
![ChOW #53 Re-animator]()
