Group seed: Aglet Solutions.

Pardon the joke.

Aglet Solutions – Google Docs

Aglet Solutions

A variant of this group can exist at any point of a particular society’s technological or social development.  Provided, of course, that the society has access to resurrection or general necromantic magic.  Aglet Solutions exists to counter such magic, for the noblest of reasons: people will pay them extremely well to do so.

The pay is good because this is actually a surprisingly popular service, particularly in worlds where the resurrection process can or does have extremely nasty side effects.  There is a lot that necromancy can do with a person’s corpse, and some of it can be only be prevented or reversed by people who are effectively necromancers themselves, if only theoretical ones. Magicians who discover that they simultaneously have a talent for death-related magic and a basic ethical sense are Aglet Solution’s preferred candidates for employment, as the group gives them an opportunity to practice their art in a non-corrupting manner.

How Aglet Solutions goes about doing this will depend on the campaign. At the bare minimum, if there are spells that guarantee that a corpse cannot be made Undead, or a ghost be bound to an item or a corpse, then Aglet Solutions casts it routinely. They also maintain an extensive library on necromantic lore and theory.  When they’re not on extremely expensive field calls, the group routinely tests out any and all anti-Undead or ghost rituals that they discover, keeps track of the most important and/or infamous necromancers operating at any given time, and constantly has its staff do charity work in curse removals and apotropaic rituals.

This kind of emphasis on constantly generating positive PR is necessary because, by necessity, a good bit of Aglet Solutions’ work is at best a bit unsettling.  To give just one example: the fastest way to make sure that a dead corpse never ‘wakes up’ again is to feed it to carrion eaters.  In worlds where ghouls exist, can consume a corpse’s memory along with its brains, and — most importantly — can be reasoned with, Aglet Solutions has been known to use this ability to help rival claimants in lawsuits determine exactly what the intent of a will or contract was.  Assuming that the deceased had authorized that sort of thing prior to death, of course. The group does all sorts of other jobs that are technically legal, and even not really ethically sketchy, but they operate in a problematical magical discipline and that will have an effect on their reputation.
Note, again, that this group can exist in modern or even futuristic game worlds.  In fact, after a certain point — and depending on the ‘official’ nature of mind and spirit in a campaign — an ultra-tech society might be able to practically recreate necromantic effects without ever using ‘magic’ at all.  And, of course, if there’s a zombie apocalypse going on at the moment, it’s probably not going on in the immediate vicinity of Aglet Solutions’ various corporate holdings.