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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5622699" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's a good deal worse than that.  If that's all it was, it would be a rather depraved but perhaps minor foible.In the real world, we have prohibitions against disturbing the dead primarily for the practical reasons of avoiding the spread of disease.  The dead are buried or burned to avoid polluting water supplies or serving as a refuge for vermin and disease vectors.  But the dead thing itself is harmless.  Additionally we may have some social reasons for respecting the dead, because they were or are fellow members of the community of humanity.  But, even the most religious believe that the person themselves are not there and have left.In D&D, the situation is much much more serious.  In the real world we have things like the bubonic plague, cholera, and small pox and these are terrible things capable of ravaging millions of people.  But the pus filled blood vomiting worst cases of the plague are rather petty and unhorendous compared to the worst sorts of plagues that can be inflicted on people in a D&D world.  Ebola is not so lethal or fast acting.  Small pox is not so virilent.  D&D worlds are regularly plagued by the sort of diseases of world ending apocalyptic fiction.  Plagues that turn you into zombies are hardly serious on a D&D world; just run of the mill daily horror.  Plus its worse than that, because their are sentient manifestations and agents of disease.  All the horrors that the supertious medieval mind imagined to describe his fear are real in the D&D world.But its even worse than that.  Because D&D worlds are explicitly Manichean in nature.  It's merely that death is the absence of life, but rather a thing of real substance in and of itself.  Hense, life has a counterpart in unlife that is something beyond death.  Darkness isn't merely the absence of light, but a force of its own having its own substance and particle (if you will).  Evil isn't merely the absense of good, but a tangible thing that can be touched and can touch you.  So what does a necromancer do in a world like this?  He brings more of the bad stuff - death, evil, darkness - into it.  His every act taints and pollutes the world around him.  Things get darker, more decayed, more malevolent.  The world starts acting like its the movie Final Destination, only out to get everyone.  He upsets the balance and literally drives good from the world.  No matter how good his motives, he's a spewing fountain of filth.  No matter what good deeds he does, he's offsetting them by literally assisting evil and death's conquest of the world.  That's why spells in D&D can be marked 'evil' as if the intent, purpose, and even outcome of using them didn't matter; because it doesn't. And its even worse than that.  Because in the D&D world, the dead person doesn't necessarily just vacate and leave.  They often stick around a while, and some of the less savory sorts tend to stick around a long time.  So he isn't just polluting the world with evil, darkness, and death, but he's polluting it with souls most of whom are evil and even the better sorts likely to be drowning in pain, confusion, and anger.  When he disrepects the bodies of the dead, he's literally disrespecting the dead themselves because they are probably still around here somewhere.It's really important to remember that regardless of what you think the shape of this world is, we know alot more about the shape of the D&D world and its probably (or almost certainly) not like this one.   That difference makes a real difference in the D&D world.  If you have a D&D world where people have outlooks that basically could belong to this world, then you could learn much I think by stopping a bit and going, "Well, what if all this D&D fluff was really true."</blockquote>

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