Editing Discworld (section)

===The Undead===
There's a fair number of the Undead in Discworld.
* [[Vampire]]s: You know the broad strokes of vampire lore (pointy teeth, burns to dust in the sunlight, repelled by Garlic and holy symbols, vulnerable to staking, we're walking). Pterry said that he used Hammer Horror films as a starting point. Where they break the mold is with fixation. Vampires need blood, but any mammal will do just fine. As a default they crave blood, but it is possible for that Craving to be transferred onto something else: Iconography, Coffee, history and geneology and political dealings.
* Zombies: Not the Zombie Apocalypse type. Occasionally the living dead animate themselves for various reasons. Sometimes a Voodoo type person brings back someone with unfinished business. Sometimes you get shamblers which stir from the grave with some fragment of their old memories driving them that wander about crypts. Sometimes there's a surplus of Life Force sloshing about. Occasionally someone just stays in their body after conventional life ceases and keeps it going. Usually people which get highly fixated on things.
* Ghosts: spirits of the dead with unfinished business, especially in areas of high background magic. Generally harmless and a transience more than anything.
* Animated skeletons: Show up occasionally. Why are they here? A: the same broad reasons as other undead and B: why not? Death may look the part, but is distinct as he was never alive.

Werewolves are technically not Undead, but tend to get lumped in with them. They are not Immortal, but they are hard to kill save by fire or silver. There's some variation in werewolves: you have the classic bimorph which can alternate between human and wolf, but you also have Yennorks (children of werewolves who are either wolf or human all the time, but carry the Werewolf gene) and a spectrum of individuals ranging from people which get a bit more hairy on the full moon and wolves that turn into half-wolf creatures once a month. Classic Bimorphs can mostly change at will, save for full moon. Some werewolves have a combination of feral aggression tempered by malign intelligence. Most are just people who occasionally wake up and find that they've stolen a chicken.