The Bone Tithe Synod

Necromantic Syndicate — Catacomb Foundries and Battlefield Ossuaries#

"They have a licensed charter. The city council reviewed it. I am assured the labor pool is sourced ethically. I intend to think about this as infrequently as possible." — alderman, Crestavar, 114 AR

The Bone Tithe Synod operates within a legal gray area it has spent thirty years carefully widening. Beginning as a licensed plague-burial service in the years following a catastrophic outbreak in the central Reach, the Synod secured contracts with a dozen municipalities for corpse reclamation, mass interment management, and battlefield ossuary maintenance. This infrastructure gave it access to the raw material for something considerably more ambitious: a systematic program of undead labor licensing, developed in jurisdictions desperate enough for labor that they declined to ask where the workers were sourced.

Synod catacomb foundries now operate in six cities, producing construction labor, mine crews, and agricultural gangs composed of animated dead working under the supervision of licensed Synod necromancers. The Synod pays municipal labor taxes on these crews, files regular safety-compliance documents, and maintains a public advocacy arm that presents undead labor as an equitable solution to post-collapse depopulation. In parallel, its research divisions pursue memory extraction from recently deceased subjects — a practice with obvious intelligence applications that the Synod's public charter conspicuously fails to mention.

The Synod's political power derives from its position as the only institution capable of managing plague outbreaks and battlefield corpse disposal at scale in the affected region. When a city considers revoking its license, the Synod simply stops collecting. The resulting sanitation crisis generally produces a revised and more favorable contract within a season. Adventurers hired to investigate missing persons near Synod facilities occasionally discover that the missing have entered the labor pool. The Synod's lawyers maintain, with considerable technical precision, that the relevant employment contract was not signed by the individual in question but by their estate.