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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Voadam" data-source="post: 8446804" data-attributes="member: 2209">In 1e to 3.0 skeletons and zombies were neutral and basically corpse robots only doing their commands.However you also separately had mindless wandering monster skeletons through lots of D&D that actively tried to kill anything alive they encountered instead of just being animate but doing nothing without commands or following old commands. There were also various ways that skeletons could be created besides the standard animate dead.I thought that 3.5 making them evil for naturally going after all life was a good representation of that latter baseline. They could be commanded by their animator under animate dead to do specific things, but without specific commands, and if the animator lost control of them, they reverted to their base of being actively life-destroying hostile monsters. Tapping into Supernatural cosmic [EVIL] as a power source for D&D undead and their creation made sense to me and was consistent with detect evil detecting all undead as evil even though 3e ghosts could be any alignment.Similar to the alignment subtype issue, undead were powered by [EVIL]. My house rule was to make all undead actually subtype [Evil] so that this was explicit and not just implicit.</blockquote>