Bare Bones Survey of Skeletons
Beneath each of us, under skin and sinew, is a temple of marble-white columns and archways that speak to something ancient: our skeletons. And I am a big skeleton guy. By which I mean not only that I have a skeleton within me (despite the assertions by my many enemies and assorted haters to the contrary) but also that I am a big fan of the trope of walking, talking skeletons in fantasy games. Skeletons are kitschy, more silly than outright scary, but are also a deep second fiddle to their undead cousins, the zombie. It is perhaps because of their kitsch that skeletons are relegated to generic medieval fantasy slop (i.e., the default aesthetic of D&D) and to the front lawns of October suburbia while zombies regularly appear in top horror movies and acclaimed television shows, fitting in just as well in a science-fiction setting as they do in fantasy. The Last of Us and Game of Thrones couldn’t be more different (other than, y’know, the Pedro Pascal and HBO aspects) but zombies, not skeletons, are the big threat in both. I am not advocating in this post that HBO needs to greenlight my skeleton-centric television scripts (Buried... with Children, Game of Bones, and Better Call Skull). I merely want to sing the praises of the silly monster and talk about how I like to use them in my games.
Skeletons have been with TTRPGs since the beginning, as long as you consider the medium essentially beginning with Dungeons & Dragons, but the trope predates it. While walking skeletons were imagined by humans centuries before anyone even considered pretending to be an elf, the skeletons that Gygax et Arneson envisioned likely resembled the mindless skeletal warriors that were stop-motion animated in Jason and the Argonauts (1963), wielding swords and shields. However, the silliness of skeletons was already too engrained by much older media: Walt Disney’s “The Skeleton Dance” (1929), which may be the most important piece of spooky skeleton media in history. This is why no moderns can ever take seriously the same skeletons that our medieval counterparts viewed as the embodiment of death–I can’t be scared of a creature that might, at any moment, begin playing itself like a xylophone. Even if G. Gygax listed Skeletons and Zombies as one interchangeable entry in the original Monsters & Treasure booklet, the two monsters were destined to diverge with time.
My own skeletal media touchstone is a bit more recent than The Skeleton Dance, Jason and the Argonauts, or even Dungeons & Dragons (but just barely): The Last Unicorn (1982). It featured a goofy, chortling, talking skeleton that taunted the protagonists and begged for a taste of wine that it lacked the capacity to taste. It is the definition of a Weird Little Freak that makes for the best dungeon denizens, and far more interesting than an unspeaking, unthinking bag of bones grasping a sword. It has personality, it has flaws, and it has something the characters (or players) want. It can be manipulated with creative thinking by the players. More often than not, this is the type of skeleton I like to use in my games. It delighted me as a child renting the movie from Blockbuster (to make some of you feel young, yes, my youth featured Blockbuster; but to make others of you feel old, I think it was a DVD we rented, not a VHS), and it still delights me today. And it harkens back more to the dancing skeletons than to the warrior skeletons that are assumed by Original D&D’s statement that skeletons “will always attack until totally wiped out”.
A recent example of the silly skeleton done well in recent tabletop games resides in the OSR masterpiece, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast. Rag-And-Bones is a slapstick pseudo-villain (more in the Team Rocket mode of villany than in the Dracula mode) who is a talking skeleton that is always employing flimsy disguises and enacting nefarious plots (and has a pet rat that only ever says “Rats!”). Yes, Rag-And-Bones can trigger the end of the world itself if things ever go according to his plans, but because anyone can cause him to clear his progress track at any moment, he is frequently thwarted like a children’s television show villain. Rag-And-Bones was obviously designed for a game like Yazeba’s, but if you put him in any given D&D dungeon, I can guarantee that your players will spend half a session or more laughing their asses off interacting with this Weird Little Freak.
Despite my own skeleton predilections, the mindless warrior trope is likely on the rise but with a bit of twist: they are now all archers. The Jason and the Argonauts skeletons were all melee combatants, but if you asked a random person on the street what weapon a skeleton is most likely to use (a normal question people get asked all the time), they are likely to say bow and arrows. Why? Minecraft. I saw (or perhaps imagined because I have completely failed to relocate) a post to the effect that people who found my story of watching DVDs as a child unrelatable most associated monstrous skeletons with reassembly while those who found my story of going to Blockbuster unrelatable associated skeletons with archery and the reason cited was the rise of Minecraft, which features skeletal archers as a frequent enemy, as inarguably the most popular video game of all time. Why are skeletons archers? Unfortunately, it is unlikely because the fact that archery causes the skeletons of its practitioners to grow extra bone mass. No, it comes down once again to the eternal rival of the skeleton: zombies. Zombies also feature heavily in Minecraft but are only threatening in close combat. Skeletons, forced to differentiate themselves, picked up the bow to be a ranged threat to the players. It is for this same reason that I suggest you eschew skeletons as mindless mooks in your games. Zombies already occupy the trope of unthinking undead that you have no option but to fight or flee from. No one is negotiating with zombies. Let skeletons be silly. Let them be the undead you can have a beer with, the weird little guys that lie around dungeons waiting to draw the player-characters into their schemes. Maybe they can also have a bow and arrows.
