Are there good Necros out there?

[Jack Simth]

Sentient undead are, in my mind, unquestionably evil. They're either someone trapped in a rotting shell. their souls chipped away at by the Negative energy which sustains them, or an evil spirit making a mockery of the original person whose corpse it inhabits. Either way, bad news for the living.

Okay... so what's the ghost of the Old King that clings to the edges of life until he can get the tyrranical despot that killed him and is now running the country into the ground off the throne?

Granted, Ghosts aren't the most common undead, and the making of Ghosts was removed in the 3.0 -> 3.5 transition from the PHB spell, but of those undead in the SRD, only the ghost has "Alignment: Any" in the entry....

Not so much for mindless undead, except for the aforementioned ecological hazard. Unless ordered to, skeletons and zombies won't do anything. You could have them serve soup at the homeless shelter or help old ladies cross the street. These would be good acts, if rather disturbing ones.

Campaign dependant, that; it's the DM's call what the behavior of mindless undead is (well, the Skeleton entry specifies they do nothing unless told to do something, but the Zombie entry doesn't use that language....). What happens after the controller dies - okay, so the Farmer made this Zombie Horse to pull his plow, but eventually, the farmer who used the clerical Oil of Animate Dead (person applying the Oil is treated as the Caster - that Zombie-Horse is HIS, using the caster level imbued in the Oil) dies of old age, and the zombie horse is now operating under it's alignment of neutral-evil, mindlessly....

 

[Aeric]

Campaign dependant, that; it's the DM's call what the behavior of mindless undead is (well, the Skeleton entry specifies they do nothing unless told to do something, but the Zombie entry doesn't use that language....). What happens after the controller dies - okay, so the Farmer made this Zombie Horse to pull his plow, but eventually, the farmer who used the clerical Oil of Animate Dead (person applying the Oil is treated as the Caster - that Zombie-Horse is HIS, using the caster level imbued in the Oil) dies of old age, and the zombie horse is now operating under it's alignment of neutral-evil, mindlessly....

Well, the MM doesn't specifically say that a zombie does nothing unless ordered to, but it does describe both the skeleton and the zombie as "mindless automatons" doing the bidding of their master; the leap of logic would be that since they are both the same classification of undead, created by the same spell, they operate in the same fashion. Skeletons are also listed as being neutral evil, even though they are also mindless. AFAIK, this is for the purpose of determining which spells and spell-like effects work against them (Smite Evil, Protection From Evil, etc.), not as a way to determine their behavior. Animated dead without any orders don't do anything, they just stand around. They are considered to be evil because the magic which creates them (Animate Dead) is evil. But not all necromancy spells have the evil descriptor, so it can't simply be a result of the negative energy used. There must be more to zombies and skeletons than their function as low-powered constructs. I could HR it, natch, but I was hoping for more of a canonical explanation. Not even LM offers such an answer. :\

 

[Jack Simth]

I suspect it's left unspecified deliberately; creating undead is defined as evil, but it's not specified whether it's because:

1) You're entrapping the soul of the dead in a prison of rotting flesh,
2) You're bringing in an evil spirit from elsewhere to control the body,
3) You're making a mockary of the Creator,
4) The thing is evil, and hurts people once it's no longer actively controlled,
5) Something Else, or
6) Some combination of the above

to avoid pinning down a campaign on exactly why.

 

[Cabral]

Well, considering that someone can't be resurected, even by true ressurection, if they are Undead, even just a skeleton, some part of the soul must be tied into creating even mindless undead. If you want to make creating mindless undead little more than animating a construct, I would either:
a) change mindless undead from the Undead type to the Construct type, which change how they interact with negative/positive energy.
b) change Raise Dead, Reincarnate, Ressurection, and True Ressurection. Raise Dead would be able to raise someone who was turned into an undead and then destroyed, and the others would be able to raise or reincarnate someone even if they are currently a mindless undead (If they are undead but not mindless, you have to destroy them first - No destroying Vecna by trying to resurect him)

Personally, I'm just adapting the Deathless for non-evil Undead. I just need to create a Sorcerer/Wizard version of the "Create Deathless" spells (From Eberron)