It can be the manifestation of three things, only one of which is bad.
Post whoring, for pure xp and sub recognition, is the bad, and should be discouraged with brutal mockery. However, it could also be simply a major enthusiasm for the flow of ideas, as well as the simply outpouring of ideas in an attempt to stimulate more, both amongst the author and the commenters. As I said, only the first is bad. The second two are commendable. Go to Comment
It's definitely a worse-than-death sentence; not only what you mention, but rumors likely exist about how the poor sod's mind sin't really frozen, but trapped, forced to watch the world constantly but totally unable to do anything. It's like the stories of immortality gone awry, in that respect.
And you have part of the idea down pat; the skeleton makes for an excellent framework. Skeletons also tend to creep out people, particularly ones walking around, if the world's undead are proscribed (Kuramen only having the Hollow Ones as true undead, for example). And hey, they can be enhanced if you really want... Thaumatechnology is prone to cramming extra runes, glyphs, and scripts into too small a space, after all.
...Even if you solved the problems of bipedal balance for the thing, which would likely require slightly different programming on each skeleton-construct, it's a bit too disturbing a concept for the real world. People would be up in arms over the desecration of the dead, regardless of their origins. As for the resistance fighters - the main thing that'd do would be give them more targets to blow up and likely turn the Iraqi people who are ambivalent about the USA solidly against them. It'd be solidly living up to the label you occasionally hear about the States being devils, Shaitan's minions, and so on.
That's assuming you could get a computer brain for them capable of handling everything necessary, or convince someone to teleoperate what amounts to some guy's corpse.
I'm happy leaving them in the steampunk realms, honestly. Go to Comment
Kuramen, which these things belong in, used to be a high-fantasy world. Then I had a conversation with siren and it turned steampunk. Now it gets better described as a world of heroic fantasy where all the heroes have already gone off into legend, and only the normal people are left to try and deal with it.
I can help counterbalance that. I don't trust any authority at all. Go to Comment
They work best, naturally, on foggy nights, or other misty locations; your first clue there is of a faint red glow in the vapor, which abruptly resolves into the Steamwalker itself, eyes blazing like windows into the fiery pits of damnation. Go to Comment
Glad to have been of inspiration to you. The world needs more steampunk, in my opinion.
Yes; the storytelling bit at the beginning is meant entirely to show how these things behave in practice. When they first show up... Players will expect them to behave like the undead in some fashion. When it suddenly moves in and tears into the guy holding a stolen item, or who was picking a lock, it'll undoubtedly startle them, even more so when it just shrugs off any holy effects. Of course, if the party hasn't actively attacked it by the time it finishes off the criminal, it just turns and walks off... It can be really compelling if it they catch it tearing into a NPC criminal in the middle of the night, outside their bedroom window. Go to Comment
Lets keep the undead, and things that look like them, in the realm of fantasy. Is there even one movie where at the end of the story, the protagonist says Thank Goodness we had these Robot-Zombies? Go to Comment
I like it. The creep factor could probably be turned up a bit more for extra effect when actually used. I also like the explicit inclusion of, "These are not undead, they merely have similarities." Go to Comment