Let me expand upon this to say I'm talking about the kind of zombie and skeleton hordes found in fantasy, undead tropes. Not Haitian zombies and not real-life skeletons (buried in the ground, or hanging on frames in medical labs, or living unassuming lives hidden inside someone's body).
No, I'm talking about the flesh-eating zombies of the horror genre and the re-animated skeletons of films like Jason and the Argonauts.
Strangely, the answer to this question, although immediately obvious for any casual fan of this kind of thing, doesn't really stand up to any kind of scrutiny.
Zombies tend to be wild, mindless beasts, incapable of wielding any kind of tool or weapon, yet driven to horrific acts of violence by an insatiable hunger for human beings, whereas skeletons are usually clinical echoes of their former selves, re-animated to perform certain acts from their previous lives, often with great skill.
But does that really make sense? Surely the difference should merely be one of decomposition? The skin on a skeleton has mostly rotted away, whereas zombies still have some of theirs.
Of course this can probably be argued, ad infinitum, to be dependent upon the process and act of re-animation. Have zombies come back to life because of some strange virus? Are the skeletons held in thrall by the magical mind of a necromancer? That kind of thing.
For me, one of the best, most rational* descriptions of zombies and skeletons comes from a book I only finished reading a couple of months ago. It was Dan Abnett's The Magos (which I mentioned here too). In it the re-animated dead come in various forms, but those with no muscle or sinew are slower and more cumbersome, because magic has to do all the work, whereas, the more recently dead are still held together quite well, so the magic can concentrate on getting the other jobs done.
At least, that was my take on it.
I think for the purposes of my gaming collection I have fallen somewhere in the middle. Zombies and skeletons are very similar, at different stages of decomposition, but it is not necessarily this that determines their level of awareness. I like the idea that one skeleton might be little more that a shambling pile of bones, whereas the next could be a right dangerous creep, running at you with axes swinging. I guess the slower ones would naturally fall behind and form a unit of 'zombies', whereas the more warrior-like characters would likely form up to create a unit of, er, well, warriors.
And that leads me neatly on to why I'm going on about this in the first place.
It's because of my kitbasher's love of blurring the lines between unit types in Warhammer and Warhamer 40,000. The whole thing can be summed up, simply by saying I wanted some of the skeletons in my Undead force to have the odd remnant of flesh and occasional scrap of clothing clinging to their otherwise bare bones.
I tried to achieve this by starting with Citadel's original skeleton plastics and mixing in a hoard of parts from the Chaos Warriors, Zombie Regiment, and Beastmen sprues (plus any other one-off bits 'n' pieces, that looked vaguely right, that happened to be in my line of sight at the time).
One of the biggest problems with this approach turned out to be the scale. The plastic skeletons seemed visibly smaller than most of the other parts I was planning on using, and this prevented me from freely mixing and matching. Everything had to be carefully considered, with lots of parts needing to be shaved or cut down. I don't mind if one or two characters are bigger than the others – you see this in life too – but a tiny person with giant arms hanging below his knees can look a little silly.
Another unexpected issue was to do with their skulls. I had planned to use a few Zombie heads, but the scale thing really scuppered this, and I found myself a little short of the requisite numbers. I ended up having to repurpose one or two skulls from other places, where the level of detail probably wasn't quite high enough.
And finally, the eagle-eyed will notice there are three miniatures above that didn't start life (or undeath) as Citadel plastics. The first was a really old metal skeleton reaper. Its pose was very static, and its robes pristine, so I used Green Stuff in an attempt to add a little movement and deterioration to it. The second was the final Deadman of Dunharrow miniature with a head swap (see my previous entry), and the third was a plastic Mantic Ghoul, with an arm swap.
All that's left now is to paint them. With a little luck (and a lot of commitment) there'll be more on that next month.
*If you're thinking what I'm thinking, then I agree. Rational is not a word that has much place when you're playing make-believe. However, that said, any story should always have its underlying logic stand up to a little gentle probing. If it all comes crashing down at the slightest provocation, then it's no better than a liquid metal robot being able to use a time travel machine that's only supposed to work on organic matter. Or a landing party of cutting-edge research scientists taking off their helmets on a hostile planet, simply because they detect some oxygen. Or alien invaders who are fatally allergic to water, attacking a planet that is predominantly water, and deciding the best way to do it would be if they were naked**.
**I can feel a whole new article coming on.
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