Yaarel
🇮🇱 🇺🇦 He-Mage
Necromancy is one of the things that I find genuinely creepy. Creepiness is different from Evil. A Necromancer option can focus on the unsettling aspects, like unwhole ghostliness and exhumed bodyparts.
The darker themes of the Warlock class feel like a better fit for necromantic themes. The Warlock already has deathly subclasses, and these can develop further, or a new Shadowfell Patron can add. Patrons include a specific ghost, vampire, lich, or other undead, or a ruler of a Shadow Domain, or a spirit community, or "I see ghosts" generally.
Necromancy includes becoming undead, "awakening" undead, and communing with undead. Almost every spell effect can be understood as summoning a ghost to do that effect.
A Necromancer subclass can include the options for a go-to for a "Vampire class", sotospeak, as well as a Riddick "Necromonger" culture, using the energy of souls for magical technology (albeit this might slide into Evil).
Ethically, when a creature dies, the soul of the creature can linger in the Shadowfell − and Shadow Crossings into the Material Plane − because of "unfinished business". But eventually and normally the soul moves on into the Astral Plane, where the mindscape has an objectifying affinity with the ethical decisions that the soul made while alive − for better or worse. For a soul in a Celestial dominion, for example, a Necromancer might use magic to manipulate the deathly residue of the soul permeating the corpse, or even awaken a Shadow echo of a soul. But the consciousness of the soul is safe and secure within the Celestial. The soul knows personally and immediately what a Necromancer is doing to the body and the part of the soul that continues to entangle the body, but within the Celestial dominion the soul is in no way harmed by it.
The darker themes of the Warlock class feel like a better fit for necromantic themes. The Warlock already has deathly subclasses, and these can develop further, or a new Shadowfell Patron can add. Patrons include a specific ghost, vampire, lich, or other undead, or a ruler of a Shadow Domain, or a spirit community, or "I see ghosts" generally.
Necromancy includes becoming undead, "awakening" undead, and communing with undead. Almost every spell effect can be understood as summoning a ghost to do that effect.
A Necromancer subclass can include the options for a go-to for a "Vampire class", sotospeak, as well as a Riddick "Necromonger" culture, using the energy of souls for magical technology (albeit this might slide into Evil).
Ethically, when a creature dies, the soul of the creature can linger in the Shadowfell − and Shadow Crossings into the Material Plane − because of "unfinished business". But eventually and normally the soul moves on into the Astral Plane, where the mindscape has an objectifying affinity with the ethical decisions that the soul made while alive − for better or worse. For a soul in a Celestial dominion, for example, a Necromancer might use magic to manipulate the deathly residue of the soul permeating the corpse, or even awaken a Shadow echo of a soul. But the consciousness of the soul is safe and secure within the Celestial. The soul knows personally and immediately what a Necromancer is doing to the body and the part of the soul that continues to entangle the body, but within the Celestial dominion the soul is in no way harmed by it.
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