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Is necromancy evil or only as harmless as talking to your dead grandmother?
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<blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5190064" data-attributes="member: 3820"><p>Awesome. Glad you enjoyed it. (It was "Hollowfaust"; the reference was to the carved tunnels and chambers beneath the volcano, or "Faust".)</p><p></p><p>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 <em>really</em> intimidating.</p><p></p><p>I think it also provides an interestingly reasonable scale of power to necromancy: calling back a soul from the Netherworld should be <em>hard</em>, 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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Barastrondo, post: 5190064, member: 3820"] 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 [I]really[/I] intimidating. I think it also provides an interestingly reasonable scale of power to necromancy: calling back a soul from the Netherworld should be [I]hard[/I], 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. [/QUOTE]
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Is necromancy evil or only as harmless as talking to your dead grandmother?
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