Outside
The wise traveler will only ever see the roads into the Bone Palace, and even then, only from a safe distance. Patrols don’t go out as they did when The Vizier still lived and commanded his troops, but even a work-crew of three-dozen undead laborers is dangerous to a group of unprepared travelers.
There are no farms outside the Bone Palace, only huge plantations, each one crewed by throngs of bleached skeletons. The plantations produce grain which is then milled in building-sized grinding wheels turned by yet more skeletons. You can feel the ground rumble as the grinding houses are rotated from near on a half-mile away.
The Walls
The city is surrounded by a high wall made of earth and bone. The wall is nearly 150 feet tall and almost as thick. Before the Forbiddance was created the Bone Palace had the highest wall in Shurima. If you believe the tales the wall itself is honeycombed with secret tunnels, armories, sepulchers, and catacombs. It’s said that the right spell will make the wall exhume itself and march off to war.
As you walk through one of the long passageways into the Palace you can hear the shuffling of dead, watching you as you pass, ensuring that the leader of your party is wearing a merchant’s medallion.
The City
The city inside the walls is clean and well-patrolled. It marches in place waiting for a rightful leader to return. Supposedly, the undead will respond to the rightful ruler of the Bone Palace, and signify this by kneeling. Then the whole war machine will be there for the scion to claim.
Food from the plantations is delivered to every house daily, and older food is swept away and thrown into the canal, which is choked with rot. The smell permeates the whole city.
At the ocean end of the canal is a harbor filled with barnacle-encrusted skeletons. There are thousands of them down there, clad in lead boots for marching underwater. Ships are allowed to dock for a short while. Certain strange shaped skeletons will pay a bounty for every corpse left on the dock. They will firmly insist that no one disembark
The Palace
The Bone Palace itself stands at the center of it all. It is constructed of perfectly white bones from animals and sentient races rendered extinct during the Vizier’s purge. Skeletons and mummies peer out from every window and battlement. Your merchant’s medallion will not gain you entry.
A single tall tower rises from the palace like the broken rib of some forgotten God. If there are any answers to be found in the city they would probably be there.
DM NOTES: Undead Strategy
“Feeding a normal army is a problem of logistics. With undead, it is an asset. Feeding is why zombies fight and skeletons don’t eat at all.”
Shuriman Strategist, discussing battle plans
The greatest strengths of an undead army is in logistics, and in sieges.
Not needing food is a tremendous advantage in long campaigns, far from home. The need for a supply line is minimal. This resilience is even more useful during sieges. Undead armies can encircle a town forever. The undead have all the time in the world.
Skeletons are also resistant to arrows and burning oil, two common methods of repelling a siege. In fact, skeletal armies are so good at sieges that an opposing commander will often make great sacrifices to force a pitched battle elsewhere.
The greatest weakness of an undead army is the intellect of the soldiers, and their magical prohibitions.
An undead battalion must be led by a living soldier, capable of formulating plans and enacting them. If this soldier is killed, the battalion becomes headless. Multiple commanding officers offer redundancy, but also erode the unique advantages of the undead.
Another flaw of the undead is their limited ability to differentiate. An enemy order will be obeyed if they are wearing the proper armor and giving the proper code words. An enemy skeleton will be welcomed if they just… try to blend in a little bit.
DM NOTES: Undead Tactics
Skeletons are typically iron-shod, like horses. Their feet erode during long marches, and then they become incapable of walking. They can continue to crawl, of course, but this is slow and somewhat less fearsome.
Skeletal armies are also capable of startling ambushes, with their combatants buried in sand, shallow swamp, or surf. Lead-shod skeletal marines can also invade a city through any deep body of water by walking on the bottom. This can devastate an unprepared city, and campaigns are often kicked off with this kind of sneak attack.
The most visible icon of a skeletal army are the gas wagons. Huge things loaded up with burning arsenic, or possibly a mixture of bitumen and sulfur. If you ever fight a skeletal army, you will do so in smoke. In many battles, the smoke claims more lives than the skeletons do.
Paranoid D&D 