Is necromancy evil or only as harmless as talking to your dead grandmother?

[Aran Thule]

There is no such thing as innocent power.

Having power means having power over someone or something. Power is the ability to take away other people's choices... for various values of "people".

Is the school of Enchantment inherently evil?

Are handcuffs inherently evil?

Cheers, -- N

I personally find a lot of the enchantment school suspect.
Charms and other mind control effects seem to breach the targets free will so i see them in some sense as evil.
On the same note i see casting charm on someone is as much an attack on them as using a fireball or sword, one of the reasons i dont like seeing them being used on PC's by other PC's.
Then again i really just dont like in party conflict do to bad experiances when i was younger.
A lot comes down to how it is used which could be said about most things(including handcuffs).

 

[Barastrondo]

If roasting enemies alive in a ball of fire isn't evil, I am not sure why snuffing out someone's life spark with a word is.

Certain applications and methodologies? Wonderfully evil. But it seems awfully hypocritical to assume that an entire special effect of magic must be by default evil at the same time you're romanticizing swords.

 

[TarionzCousin]

What if my dead grandmother was evil?

 

[Herschel]

Real necromancy is evil. Manipulating the 'eternal soul' is just bad mojo. Having a seance with Zaphod the fourth may be a disruption but forcing him to do something, especiually against his nature, is inherently evil.

Any corpse animator is just a posuer.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I use my baby-powered gun only for good purpose. Sure, one baby has to die every time I fire it, but that doesn't mean it's inherently evil.

 

[Rechan]

Depends on the system and campaign. 3e for instance, any use of certain spells had the [Evil] descriptor, and so spells like Raise Dead effect your alignment. If you read the 4e fluff, there are three components of undead: The Body, the Animus (life infusing the body) and the Soul. Most undead are either the Body or the Animus, but only a few undead have the soul intact (Vampires, Ghosts and Liches). Hence why your wights, wraiths, shadows and ghouls rarely have any similarity to their living selves: the Soul is gone. And that Necromancy is probably tapping into the Shadowfell, which is just the plane of the dead.

And the use. I mean, your premise is that Necromancy is doing something to someone else. What about, for instance, a lich? He did that to himself. He's playing with his own soul. At worst it's magical suicide.

Then you have necromantic things which don't play with the dead per se. To some extent, necromancy is just moving negative energy - basically harnessing Decay and Entropy, just as healing magic is harnessing growth and renewal. Thus this sort of use is just tapping into a natural destructive force, just like fire.

And of course there is the use of necromancy to fight undead.

But I anticipate this thread will spiral into an Alignment fight.

 

[Rechan]

Necromancy is the magic of death. Death, in and of itself, is not evil. It's part of life.

You know, there is always the talk of how Undeath is not in the cycle of life. But, in a fantasy world, who's to say that the balance of life is just like the Real World? Undeath may be part of it. Or at least, it might be a fluke of the cycle, rather than a violation of it. Granted, that's a philosophical question that would probably depend on your campaign setting's structure, but we can think outside the box here.

I wonder though why folks are so afraid of playing evil characters?

Because the most likely common experience gamers have with evil characters can be summed up with "Someone was being a jerk and used his alignment as an excuse".

 

[Jhaelen]

The original meaning of necromancy is just summoning ghosts to communicate with them. There's surely nothing inherently evil in that. Actually, it has a lot of potential for 'goodness' since the information you get from the ghosts can often be used to lay them to rest.

 

[Ahnehnois]

IMC (and in some versions of the rules I think) the Cure spells were necromantic. In any case it's a good example. Is healing magic inherently good? It seems to change the natural order of things for the better. Yet it can be used in evil ways. Ultimately, healing magic is not good. Thus, I echo the statements that the general school of necromancy, like other forms of magic, is simply a tool in the D&D world that can be used for good or evil.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

(Note: 3.5 rules assumed in this post.)

D&D is a little odd when it comes to alignment issues, because of the existence of absolute, measurable, morality. Whether something is evil in D&D often comes down to "yes, because the gods (or the cosmos) says it is." The normal old-hat routine of "X is a tool, and whether it's evil or not depends on how it's used" just doesn't work all the time.

So in D&D it often comes down to justifying why something is evil from the starting position that it is evil, which is disconcerting for a lot of people.

In D&D, if something has the [evil] descriptor or alignment, it's evil. (There are other weird cases beyond the [evil] descriptor or alignment. For example, at least a couple of rulebooks unequivocally say that the use of poison is evil. At that point you can either ignore what the book says, or you can accept that "if" isn't in question, and only "why" is. (And in some cases, there's no "why" that can be logically reverse-engineered, so it comes down to a shrug and, "Because the gods say so."))

As far as I'm aware, there've been no rules pronouncements that necromancy is evil. As far as descriptors go, some necromancy spells have it (including some WTF ones, like deathwatch) and some don't. So my conclusion is that necromancy, in and of itself, isn't evil.