I was talking with people yesterday when I offhand talked about what I would like to see in a mortuary science skill. I was told it was a good idea and to suggest it somewhere, so here goes:



Mortuary Science

Mortuary science would be a trade skill, likely requiring some minimum level in both compassion and dying. You could paint it in-game as being an application of what you've learned from burying things and being dead.

I'm thinking that one constant that advances with your skill would be the chance to get a small number of councils when performing mortuary science skills on mobs. This would incentivize people learning it/would add flavor to think that you got paid by the family of the ranalon that you killed for you to bury him, though you would have to keep the number of councils you get extremely low to keep people from turning it into an easy money farm. Maybe humanoid mobs have a chance of giving you an extra 2-5 councils?

Early levels would involve low level cremation, where you can burn a body for a chance to get bone meal (the closest in-game equivalent I can think of to cremains). Alternatively, you burn a body to get bones and then use a cremulator item to turn bones into bone meal, with a chance of consuming the cremulator each time you do the recipe. This would of course be duplicate to the current alchemy recipes for making bone meal, so this might be extraneous (or maybe the alchemy recipes would be deprecated in favor of this?)

I'm thinking cremating non-bone animal parts (such as spider leg) could give a small chance to create strange dirt. That would be something like a level 2 or 3 recipe.

Mid level you could learn how to do a proper burial (gain bonus compassion +mortuary, make enemies respawn even faster than regular burial) or you could learn to embalm bodies (corpse stays on the ground for longer, prevents respawn). This would make mortuary science a useful skill when either grinding if you're burying things with a faster respawn rate, or when going through a dungeon because then you could embalm the bodies and not have to worry about getting tag teamed by 20 spiders on your way out the door.

Higher level, I think it could synergize with necromancy pretty well. Maybe you could buff necromancy skills, or you could give a defense bonus to ally skeletons.

I also think it would be fun for someone with the mortuary science skill to be able to hold services at a player gravestone. You would get experience for each player properly mourned and memorialized, and any players close by would get a buff from attending. That would be similar to the buffs you get from listening to music, watching a dance performance or engaging with poetry.



Alright, that's about the most of an idea that I have for a mortuary science skill at the moment. Once upon a time a couple years ago I was in school to eventually be a funeral director, so this is just something I think about sometimes. Let me know what you think!