D&D 5E Druids + necromancy: Help me make it make sense!

[neobolts]

Want to run villains that combine twisted druidic tradition (a cruel predator-or-prey view of the world) with necromancy (as the Paladin PC has crafted a "hunter of evil necromancers" background). Not all of the druids in the circle would be necromancers, but a cool necromancer druid in the group of baddies would be fun. I'm just having trouble making it not sound really forced. How would you rationalize a necromancer druid?

 

[iserith]

See Eberron's Children of Winter.

 

[Ketser]

Do you want to have a undead minions master necromancer-druid or a death magic semi-blighter necromancer-druid?

Undead Master: "The Hunter has the absolute mastery over his pray." If he kills something he has the right to use its corpse or spirit how long he wishes, before returning it to the cycle. Also Nature wastes nothing: animating dead trees as some kind of dark treants. Or finding that this corpse is not yet so broken to be useless, the maggots can eat it while it mauls teh circles enemies. Add some carrion crawlers and swarms of crows under his control and voila.

Death Magic: That druid concentrates on the fact that in the end everything dies. Disease, poison, necrotic forces are all part of this. Perhaos less "fancy" as the undead master, but think of life draining insect swarms, clouds of toxic mists and dead entangling roots that attempt to wither his opponents. What his to weak to avoid becoming his prey deserves death, he calls upon the end of life to serve nature in his twisted way.

 

[Capn Charlie]

The Shadow Druids come instantly to mind, but for your situation it sounds like you want an Anti-Druid. In the same manner that fallen paladins appeal to the evil powers and they take glee from granting them new and terrifying abilities (all the better for evil-ing) traditional powers interested in undeath, corruption and blight would be thrilled to count fallen druids as their thralls.

Say, for instance, you have your average happy hippie tree hugging druid, and their friends, family and colleagues all get killed by the kingdom who is clear cutting a forest (for the greater good, of course, we need fleets to fight tyranny), they might snap. All of a sudden the natural balance seems like BS, and it's vengeance time for civilization. That's a dark place, mentally, so when oak-daddy, patron of the unwashed, stops granting spells and all of a sudden the god of pestilence and destruction starts whispering in their ears, boom, that's one fallen druid.

Add in some warped worldview, predator and prey mentality, cycle of life and death stuff, what have you. But make them good and crazy. "Humans have upset the balance with civilization, my army of undead squirrels are just going to set it right!" Plague carrier corpse creatures descend, and all of a sudden it's black death 2.0, now with an evil druid coven assassinating the clergy able to cast remove disease using their troupes of awakened racoon assassins.

 

[The Grassy Gnoll]

Druids are into recycling. Seems legit.

Seriously though, Druids are supposed to be about balance, so an evil Druid doesn't fit too well for me personally, but he could be an outlier, with a twisted logic that as life and death are part of the cycle of nature, death should be no barrier. Upon death, the personality leaves the body, and the body becomes just a bunch of organic material much as rocks and trees are. So, necromancy and Druidism could work, but evil and Druidism is for me, a bit more difficult to square (but then I'm an old school AD&D head so true neutral Druids = the norm for me).

 

[phantomK9]

All things must decay.
In a world where healing spells, regeneration, resurrection are common place, what is a Druid who believes in the great cycle of life and death supposed to do when all around him/her are thumbing their noses at the proper, natural flow.

This land has become too stagnant. Things are not allowed to die and decay as they are meant to, thus ensuring the next generation is properly nourished. These short-sighted people all around have no idea what calamity they are bringing on themselves by not letting nature take its proper course. But they will soon see. They will understand that all must be brought low, all must crumble, all must decay. Only then will new life be able to flourish. Only then will the Great Wheel be put in balance.


A Druid like this would have basically gone off the rails and believes that he or she must take a more active hand in ensuring that things take a "proper course". Death is not a bad thing, death is necessary. He/she would believe that those not of the same mind are doing far too much to preserve those things that naturally should die and decay. This type would not believe in summoning/raising undead, in fact undead would be anathema to his/her world view*. Rather the person would concentrate on spells that cause necrotic damage and withering/decaying effects. The ultimate plan would be to bring everything, including the people and places that the PCs love, down. Crumbling to decaying matter. Only then, in this Druid's eyes, could new life spring up and hopefully create a better world than what currently is here.

The Druid and his/her adherents would probably start by attacking houses of healing or cleric-led outposts. Attempting to spread rot and decay as far and as wide as possible.

* Although I just got an image of shambling zombies covered in mushrooms, dripping rotting ichor and flesh on the ground while spores sporadically puff off from them. I'm sure there is something like that in a supplement somewhere.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Seriously though, Druids are supposed to be about balance.

Balance has two sides. If other druids are out there helping animals and purging undeath, there have to be druids purging animals and helping undeath!

 

[The Grassy Gnoll]

Balance is the absence of sides.
To explain, FWIW, in my view, Druids stand on the centre of the alignment see-saw, with one foot on each 'arm', their role a constant balancing act, weight shifting from one side to the other to keep the see-saw from tipping too far.
It's almost as if Druid is a calling within a calling - whether taking nature cleric to the nth degree or nature wizard to the nth degree, it's the very fact of their taking it to the nth degree in and of itself that sets them apart from others and gives them their quintessential druidocity. But while 'taking it to the nth degree' may suggest an image of the extreme end of a scale (the seat on either end of the see-saw 'arm'), Druidism is the opposite, a search for the centre of things rather than the edge.
So, too much chaos/wilderness needs balancing with a dose of law/civilisation. Too much of a good thing for the one could be seen as a bad/evil thing for the many, and vice versa. They need to see with equanimity both sides of the coin at once. This is why I feel true neutral is correct. If a Druid moved too far along one 'arm' or the other permanently (I stress permanently as by this thinking there is a certain amount of toing and froing as part of the balancing dance), they would cease to act as counterweights, the see-saw would tip in favour of one side and in allowing it to touch the ground they would be effectively 'choosing sides' - law or chaos, good or evil. They would become in essence just wizards with a nature focus in their spell choice.
In my view, anyway. It actually makes Druids scary as, on any given day, they may choose to act to save the villager from getting eaten by the bear, or to kneecap the villager to help the bear eat, or sit and watch and get the popcorn. But, hey. That's just me.

 

[Paraxis]

These druids just take recycling to its logical conclusion. Those are not undead bears and wolves guarding the druid grove those are recycled bears and wolves. Undead shambling mound in the compost heap, skeletal minions of former lumberjacks armed with axes, all kinds of evil druidic things to set the stage in the area. For inspiration look no further than real life fanatic extremist eco terrorists and how the view things, the world would be better off with fewer humans and stuff like that.

 

[Dausuul]

If nature can be corrupted by undeath, so can druids.

In this view, druidcraft is not about serving nature; nature has no interest in servants. Nor is it about protecting nature; this is a world with stuff like dire bears and treants and the Tarrasque, the idea that nature needs protecting is laughable. Druidcraft is simply about attuning yourself to the world around you, learning to become one with its forces. That's why druids master shapeshifting so much earlier than other classes.

But there are places in the world that are poisoned by the touch of the Abyss. Druids who attune themselves to those places become masters of disease, parasitism, and corruption. They create undead that are crawling with vermin and pestilence. Everything they touch rots.

If you play Magic: The Gathering, think of the Golgari Swarm (the black/green guild). Imagine a lair of undead that isn't blasted barren, but bursting with feverish, diseased life. Yellow musk creepers, blights, shambling mounds... pretty much any sort of gnarly nasty plant monster you can imagine, along with swarms of zombies. By the time your PCs fight their way through to the heart of the poisoned land, they won't have any trouble accepting that the druid circle here is buddy-buddy with a necromancer.