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

[Tallifer]

It has been very interesting reading all of your replies.

1. I think there needs to be more balance between post-modern ethics (which are maintained to make players comfortable at the table: eg. no raping your defeated foes like the ancient Assyrians did) and mediaeval ethics (which should be acknowledged in order to roleplay people who live with pre-modern technology and whose explanations for the universe are supernatural).

In order to maintain that balance, I would probably allow for example female paladins in my world (a crime for which even Joan of Arc got burnt) and arcane classes ( sometimes a tolerated eccentricity and sometimes a horrible crime in the Middle Ages) to accomodate twenty first century players.

On the other hand, I would disallow player character necromancy as offensive to every pre-modern moral system (which all took care of their dead in some manner), and I would normalize slavery or serfdom as it was universally accepted in olden times. (Obviously, no wants to be a slave, so a story can still make sense to rescue your relatives or countrymen from slavery: however the law would never be supportive of vigilante emancipation.)

 

[grufflehead]

I mean everyday I see threads about paladins using poison

Links please!

There is an argument (yes, it is an argument, whereas this is a debate) going on over at the Paizo boards right now on pretty much this topic.

paizo.com - Paizo / Messageboards / Paizo Publishing / Pathfinder® / Pathfinder RPG / General Discussion / Animate Dead is evil? why?


As regards our question the answer is option B. You, as GM are perfectly free to interpret it however you want. The responders who say the answer is A are simply saying 'in my game, I am telling the players that using Necromancy is evil; it is part of the fabric of my campaign, and so you will be judged accordingly if you choose to do so'. For the others, they *may* also choose to say it is evil, but they may not. There are plenty of Arcanis players round these parts - go ask them how they feel about undead, evil and necromancy.

What irks me is that the 3.5 (and PF) rules put this descriptor on certain spells - so I'll invoke Rule 0 to throw them into the bin. I'll interpret it however I want, thanks. If using 'real world' pseudo-historical examples to justify it works for you, be my guest, but last time I looked this was a fantasy game, so don't assume we are all going to look at cultures through history and equate messing with the dead as evil because that's how Earth cultures have always behaved. If Guttenberg had hired a party of adventurers to stop a giant crushing his first press, or the Great Fire of London was started by a wizard using Burning Hands to kill a group of plague-ridden rats I'd be more willing to play along with that school of thought.

On the subject of why some spells have certain descriptors, it's an artifact of the evolution of D&D. 1st Ed healing was necromantic, because 'necromantic' spells all dealt with death, the body, flesh etc in those days. TSR/WotC made a small rod for their own back by allowing specialist wizards. To do that, game balance dictates they must have choices, and that those choices must be vaguely balanced - after all, you wouldn't play a conjurer if you only had access to 2 spells at a level when your evoker had 5. I can only assume - although this is clerical magic - this was why Healing became conjuration amongst other changes.

On the 'Speak with Dead' question, I (and many others) could write you a RP from pretty much any alignment you care to mention on how they might use SwD. LG City Guard investigator finds murder victim and wants to get a lead on who did it? The body is treated respectfully, and according to due process, being properly interred on conclusion. CG Life Priestess is performing the death ceremony on one of the tribal elders and part of it involves saying last farewells to loved ones? She weeps with sorrow as she performs the ritual, then inters the body with infinite kindness. LE Anti-Paladin has killed a group of rebels who have attacked his master's palace and wants to find out who their allies are? He delights in their screams as their shattered bodies are wracked with the very fires of Hell. Same spell, different flavour.

I don't play evil characters full stop. I have used Animate Dead once in nearly 30 years of D&D. An old 1st adventure called Dwellers of the Forbidden City. We went through PCs like socks, until the 3 of us who survived decided to cut our losses and run. We were weeks away from civilisation, in a hostile environment, too low level to Teleport home, no storage devices, with reason to believe that if we buried our comrades they may well be animated by some of the other denizens of the place. So, after great soul searching, my cleric animated every last one of them, dressed them in robes and marched them back through the jungle so they could be given proper burials, returned to their loved ones, or raised if they wished (as we sold every piece of treasure we found to make a fund to do it). Evil act...?

 

[Barastrondo]

I did, however, think the concept of Hallowfaust (or Hollowfaust; which was it, anyway?) was a very intriguing one, and that had neutral or even good necromancers.

Awesome. Glad you enjoyed it. (It was "Hollowfaust"; the reference was to the carved tunnels and chambers beneath the volcano, or "Faust".)

Actually, I'm kind of delighted to see that D&D has, with 3e or 4e, adopted the idea that the soul and the animus are separate things. It's a cosmological idea that complements animism — a tree might not have a soul, per se, but it might have a spirit. It allows more room for multiple interpretations of what necromancy can be: stuff that affects the soul is clearly evil, so you have your more-dire-than-dire necromancy, but stuff that affects the animus might be more gray. And, of course, it allows for even more careful taxonomy of the undead: an animated skeleton has no animus and no soul, for instance, and is just a questionably tasteful construct. For intelligent undead to be largely possessed of their animus but without a soul, it makes perfect sense that they wind up with corrupted versions of their living personalities. And a lich has a soul, still — it took out its own soul and sealed it away in a box, which makes them really intimidating.

I think it also provides an interestingly reasonable scale of power to necromancy: calling back a soul from the Netherworld should be hard, but speaking to the animus of a corpse, like tracking the footprints of someone who recently passed, is more on the level of power that Speak with Dead usually occupies. So all in all, I'm all for any theory of necromancy that has that animus/soul differentiation. It has a lot of advantages that I prefer.

 

[steenan]

It's impossible to answer this question without context. It varies by game and setting.

In a D&D campaign I ran a few years ago I had necromancy (creating undead, not the whole school of magic) evil, as it is a corruption of natural cycle of life. Sentient undead were not always evil from the beginning, but all became evil sooner or later. There was a lot of fun roleplaying with one of my players who started the campaign as an undead (having been killed and changed in her backstory), then was killed and resurrected as a living human, which caused a drastic change in her attitude.

On the other hand, in my homebrew necromancy is often scary and disturbing, but not inherently evil. You may still get killed by some people for using it, but until then you may be a nice, moral guy. And in some places it is even taught at universities, along with demonology, to a great distress of people in another countries.

One of my friends even run a game where necromancy and healing was the same type of magic. There was no D&D-like resurrection, but creating undead was a natural next step from healing wounds and illnesses. And nobody in the setting (save for one group that opposed all magic) saw anything wrong in it.

 

[Tallifer]

As an aside, a world where necromancy is widely accepted can lead to great roleplaying possibilities if the players are more insistent that their characters reflect traditional morality.

In the now almost dead MMORPG Dark Age of Camelot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAoC , there came an exciting new expansion about a year after release. In said expansion (Shrouded Isles), the Arthurian realm (realms function as alliances do in WoW) got a new class, the necromancer.

Many players in DAoC were simply computer gamers who enjoyed new and more powerful classes and items. But there were also a great many roleplayers on the Roleplaying Servers: some of them began to take a roleplayign stand against necromancy.

On the server Guinevere, this resulted in a renaissanc eof roleplaying, because a flourishing new guild began with the realization that the horror of necromancy had resulted from the social degeneracy of Albion:

In roleplaying terms, society had become so uncouth and blasphemous, that defiling the dead was accepted. Out of character, gamers were able to accept that Lancelot and Guinevere would befirend necromancers, because only mechanics and cool mattered.

The Idylls of the King blossomed for a year and inspired much roleplayign and respect and no little controversy through their stance against fellow realm members who used necromancy. (At the same time the guildmaster of the Idylls, a friar named Cosmas, was a famous warrior in the realm war.) Who says there is no roleplaying in MMORPGs?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

On the other hand, I would disallow player character necromancy as offensive to every pre-modern moral system (which all took care of their dead in some manner)...

African, Asian and New World faiths were generally not as hung up about the bodies of the dead as the Europeans...(see the aforementioned Voodoun, for instance, or AmerIndian or Tibetan sky burials).

And bodies were not always sacrosanct in the European traditions, either.

The Skull Cathedral of Otranto: Where the Bones of 800 Martyrs Adorn the Walls
Humour Cafe: Bone Church In Czech Republic
The Bone Sculptor | Curious Expeditions

And those examples are from Western civilizations that, historically speaking, put a higher emphasis on the value of human remains than most other cultures.

 

[JoeGKushner]

The Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells

Excellent book that covers this topic with a 'speaker of the dead' in the fashion that Necromancers were often portrayed back in the old days.

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

Emphasis mine.

Were this poll generalizable to games in general, then "Most" wouldn't be an accurate assumption.

Ravenloft
Vampire the Masquerade (because the vampires themselves HAVE lost something precious, what has happened to them is not "sleek, sexy and cool")
from games/settigns I've played

the isle of jakandor was a unique D&D settign where necromancy was part of the culture of the Charonti (but I can't recall the detials)

Please remember, there's a difference between talking to the spirts of the dead (which is a direct interpretation of "necromancy"), mummification or even arguably letting the souls return to guard the tombs/living when NEEDED...and raising the undead, destorying souls etc

the zombie horde is a classic of fiction now, but, in D&D such sure ain't caused by virsuses (and couldn't be in RL either, jeesh, hate that trope', only ""28 days Later" made sense as a premise in that genre, as they died from thirst etc)
so D&D zombies and skeletons hate the living..doesn't sound like a construct does it? they don't hate.
So even the most basic undead are horrors.


Ever read Clark Ashton Smith? Zothique etc, necromancy there is not "grey" it's always got a very dark price....
Salem's Lot, They Thirst (again they don't portray vampires as sleek/sexy/stupid, lol, but as something very damned ugly indeed, a maleavolent force is working through them)
"The Keep" and the Nightworld Cycle, now that is necromancy/cthonian horror!
And so on.

if you make necromancy/undead "Oh they are just misunderstood!" you ruin it.
One of the joys of playing Wolfenstein, is the SS/nazi monsters are outright bad guys deluxe, slaughtering them is FUN!

If you make every orc, drow, necormancer "just a misunderstood loveable dude underneath"...blech...! Who you gonna fight, and why?
I don't want ot play "Papers & Paychecks" You can go way too far and ruin the game by making it to much like RL, which is what we play to get away from.

So in general keep necromancy as evil as messing with the Far Realm stuff but worse, as necromancy involves snuffing life/souls out completely not just warping flesh and mind.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

The choice [] It Really Depends on the Setting was conspicuously missing.

And is the choice that I would make.

The Auld Grump

 

[Lanefan]

There's one obvious much-broader question that's been touched on once or twice here, so let's drag it out into the open.

We're pretty much all agreed that Necromancy in and of itself is to some extent evil, depending how far you take it. Fair enough. But, the corollary question becomes: are Necromancers playable? And this leads straight to the 800-pound-gorilla-in-the-room question:

Are players in your game allowed to play evil characters?

Only by answering that can you determine whether Necro's (and Assassins) are playable in your game.

Personally, I allow both, and would likely avoid a game that did not allow them.

Lan-"putting the Evil in rat-bastard DMmery"-efan