For years and years, I've been developing a fantasy realm in my head. Actually, a couple, but let's just talk about one for now. Rather than having one big story, I treat it as a great big setting with lots of history which I can turn into countless smaller stories. It's got your elves and dwarfs and such, but one of the more developed ideas I've had for my little world is this ragtag group of mischievous wizards who manage to create all the worst monsters and magical weapons that plague the land for centuries to come. Because they're dicks. Some of my most fleshed-out ideas come to me when I am bored. Lately, I had trouble getting to sleep, so I started thinking about skeletons. It turned into this:
So, this bunch of traveling wizards decide they want to make a skeleton army, because that's something that wizards do. They dig a crypt deep underground and fill it with skeletons they got from cemeteries/random people. Quickly, they realize it isn't worth the effort. It's tedious to put the bones together and the finished product isn't as sturdy as they thought. Turns out having muscles and skin is really good for defense. They abandon the project to cause trouble elsewhere, leaving the dozen or so mindless skeletons to just hang out in the dark.
After a while (decades), the skeletons start to gain more sentience. Bits and pieces of their previous lives come to them. They remember how to talk, though without tongues and such, they have to communicate with synthetic magic voices that make their lower jaws appear to be on fire. Cuz magic! The skeletons get bored and start assembling more skeletons. Before long, there's nearly a thousand of them. It wasn't a precise science. Memories, personality traits, talents, and just about anything related to identity is magically stored in the bones themselves and all those bones got mixed up, so there are plenty of composite people. Not that it matters. To most of them, their "lives" began when they were assembled. Over the course of the next few millennia, the skeletons dig out the walls of their crypt and make a pretty sweet village. Using what remained of their mostly forgotten pasts, they start developing a culture with art and magic and government. They started wearing clothes, because it seemed like the right thing to do. No racial or sexual differences to speak of, though some insisted they were still male or female. Instead of marriage, loving skeleton couples would trade a few bones to incorporate more of each other's personality traits and memories. Heheh. Trading bones. Some of them would occasionally venture out, but would either get killed as a monster or ran back to the safety of the crypt, leading to a societal fear of the outside world. Still, the braver of them would sometimes go on scavenging missions to bring in tools and cloth. Luckily, the entrance to their village was in the plagiest of plaguelands with few surrounding human settlements, so keeping their underground society a secret wasn't hard as long as they didn't provide a threat.
The first big problem occurred a couple thousand years in when their old bones started to wear out and they ran low on replacement parts. Armor became a fashionable way to delay further deterioration, but that wouldn't last long. Public debates were held to decide on a solution. A few thought collecting animal bones might supply the necessary parts, but that seemed icky. Others suggested killing people and taking their bones. After all, the murder victims would eventually thank them for the potentially eternal afterlife. The leadership vetoed this for fear of attracting unnecessary attention (and being really creepy). A vocal minority thought they shouldn't do anything and let the civilization die out. Adding new bones to the mix would introduce all sorts of weird foreign ideas and memories. Despite these suggestions, the leadership decided that raiding the nearby villages' cemeteries was the best option. Since sending a skeletal government representative to ask permission to disturb their burial sites would probably have bad results, they'd just disguise themselves and nick a few bodies every couple of nights.
During their forays, some of the skeletons heard a bit of recent history. Apparently, a big war between two kingdoms had occurred on the surface world about a century earlier. Rumor had it that one huge battle went down so deep in the plaguelands that neither kingdom even bothered to recover the hundreds of bodies. Jackpot. With this knowledge, the bravest of skeletons volunteered to investigate the rumor and find the lost battlefield. At great personal risk and after much adventure, they succeeded in finding the battlefield and the now decayed corpses. Thus started a great effort to move as many as possible to the crypt village. Soon, they had more bones than they knew what to do with. They replaced all their worn out parts (slowly, lest they be overwhelmed by new identities) and had so many left over that a growing number of citizens thought it might be nice to see some new faces. Assembling new skeletons after so many years sounded risky and the more cautious among them warned of unintended consequences, but the idea was just too much fun not to pursue. What's the worst that could happen?
Well, it turns out most of the skeletons recovered from the battlefield came from soldiers. Who'd have thunk it? They couldn't remember the names of the kingdoms they fought for or why their kingdoms fought, but they remembered being really pissed off at each other. Worse yet, plenty of the new arrivals were assembled from soldiers representing both sides of the conflict. Not a few recalled being involved in a brutal rivalry, but were conflicted as to which side they wanted to win. Oh, and they remembered hearing at some point that expansionism is a great idea. So now the village is filled with battle-hardened, deeply confused skeletal warriors who hate each other, but agree that conquest is a worthy goal. And then some stuff happened.
I'm not entirely sure where to go with this. A novel might work, but I'm also fond of short stories. One story idea I had was about a guy who takes thrill seekers on tours of this mysterious battlefield in the plaguelands. He gets hired by a couple of foreigners in strangely covering garb and masks who desperately want to see where it all happened. Or maybe it would be more fun from the skeletons' perspective. I'm sure their journey to the battlefield would provide lots of exciting adventures, comic misunderstandings, boners to pull.