Character Idea: Necromancer who wants to convince slaving cultures undead are more effecient

[Mallus]

Abolitionist necromancers advocating the 'exceptionally peculiar institution' of undead labor?

I love this so much! And I'm somewhat surprised no one in my group of miscreants -- myself included -- thought of this.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Yeah. And that brings up a real question. You turn up telling slave owners, "Hey, you don't need slaves! You don't need to give food or decent housing to undead!"

What keeps them from going... "You know, you are right!" and slaughtering all their slaves to turn them into undead?

That was actually my first thought, not just for the owners, but the traders as well.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Abolitionist necromancers advocating the 'exceptionally peculiar institution' of undead labor?

I love this so much! And I'm somewhat surprised no one in my group of miscreants -- myself included -- thought of this.

Different spin on “Underground Railroad” & “Strange Fruit” sn’t it?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

It is not so good when considering building a large body of undead to do work. Nor does it work if you only want a couple of house servants - you still need a living person there to control the undead. In general, it looks like the undead servants need more, and more highly trained, oversight than human slaves do. Does the guy who can throw fireballs (or cast whatever other impressive 3rd level spells) really want to stand there overseeing grunt labor every day?

Note also that if your overseer doesn't case Animate Dead every day, you have uncontrolled undead walking around.

So, this all isn't an argument against the character concept. It is an argument that the character's desired scheme... probably won't work. You need too many 5th level wizards with nothing better to do with their time than oversee mindless labor for this to function.

Eventually, someone will have too much mead and not enough sense. That someone will hit upon the “solution” of animating undead-creating undead as a force multiplier, creating and controlling more undead than by merely direct casting of the spells in question. Of course, in short order, that means we’ll go from
to

in pretty short order. Maybe...28 Days?

 

[Blue]

I just had this idea of creating a necromancer character skilled in diplomacy who hates slavery (yeah, raising armies of the undead is just slavery with more steps), and wants to convince slaving cultures the benefits of using undead instead of slaves. Of course, one of this character's obvious arguments would be the lower upkeep cost: you don't have to feed skeletons. What other points would be valuable to this character's arguments?

I'd go full out - commoners can leave their bodies to their family after they die. This way they can be animated* and work forever to help feed the family.

*Animated at the state region's temple's, where much like serfs they work the lord's farms three days a week as payment for the animation.

Royalty and the rich don't need it, their bodies can be properl;y entombed, underscoring another difference with the lower classes.

Everyone buy into it.

 

[Salthorae]

You have to be a fifth level wizard to animate dead, you only get a couple per casting, and your control only lasts so long.

This reminds me of the necromacers in Fire Sea, the third book of the Death's Gate Cycle. They had people who's job it was to maintain the undead.

I could see something like this where you create two and maintain 4 per wizard. It would probably make undead actually more costly as a resource because you've got to have 5th level wizards casting multiple 3rd level spells a day...

Though a 6th level necromancer gets an additional body to animate... so that's nice.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

I just had this idea of creating a necromancer character skilled in diplomacy who hates slavery (yeah, raising armies of the undead is just slavery with more steps), and wants to convince slaving cultures the benefits of using undead instead of slaves. Of course, one of this character's obvious arguments would be the lower upkeep cost: you don't have to feed skeletons. What other points would be valuable to this character's arguments?

It woupd work best in 3rd edition due to tye funky things you can do with undead. Thay (the nation not the mispelling) actually capitalized on this as im sure you are aware. Thayan red wizards even had a guild with a spell tax that required a certain number of maintainable undead created and donated on a monthly or annual basis for certain federal licences and priviledges essentially. Thay had specialized employees of the state for the mainenance of undead and zass tam (i always spell that name wrong) was basically the ceo of undead inc (this is an extreme simplification of the situation but pretty much the case) in a corperatocracy run by plutocrats.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

The idea isn't new at all. The charonti, one of the two faction in the mini-setting Jakandor was a civilitation too used to necromancy and undead slaves.

In some fantasy cultures undead slavery could be an afterlife punishment for sinners, as penance.

 

[Zhaleskra]

Despite ENWorld being D&D-centric, I wasn't thinking specifically of D&D. You do still have the level limiter in say, HARP, as Create Undead requires 15 PP to even cast, which means the caster would have to be at least 4th level due to how HARP max skill ranks work. In HARP, both Animate Dead and Create Undead have a limiter on how long the corpse can have been dead (1 day for the first, and a week for the second). I'm sure there are scaling rules to affect that as well.

Then there's also Control Undead, and Undead Mastery, the second of which basically being "the undead will follow the orders the were given until given new ones without you having to concentrate on controlling them". The limiter on that last spell is how many undead you can have mastered at once.

I'm vaguely familiar with FR, which I avoid for a sense of a setting being overdeveloped. Still might be a good place to yoink ideas from.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

Despite ENWorld being D&D-centric, I wasn't thinking specifically of D&D. You do still have the level limiter in say, HARP, as Create Undead requires 15 PP to even cast, which means the caster would have to be at least 4th level due to how HARP max skill ranks work. In HARP, both Animate Dead and Create Undead have a limiter on how long the corpse can have been dead (1 day for the first, and a week for the second). I'm sure there are scaling rules to affect that as well.

Then there's also Control Undead, and Undead Mastery, the second of which basically being "the undead will follow the orders the were given until given new ones without you having to concentrate on controlling them". The limiter on that last spell is how many undead you can have mastered at once.

I'm vaguely familiar with FR, which I avoid for a sense of a setting being overdeveloped. Still might be a good place to yoink ideas from.

Its true faerun is over developed but thay (a region within faerun) is probably one of the best developed region in faerun as it is not in itself overdeveloped. Plenty of stuff was kept oit of thay because it didnt seem to "fit". So thay is tasteful.

Have a look at it sometime. Its very internally consistant.