Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5190976" data-attributes="member: 3820">Odysseus calls up the shade of his own father for advice. And enough heroes descended into the underworld to deal with the dead (often peaceably) that Joseph Campbell wrote it into the monomyth. My personal interest in necromancy as something other than pure evil came from doing some of that reading before I got into D&D. It never has to be an all-or-nothing thing. Take the Scarred Lands. You have a city where the necromancers are a force of cold and impersonal, but fair, law. They actually protect the people in their care. There is also a civilization of vilest necromancy in the woods nearby, a bunch of evil necromantic dwarves, and an entire nation with "evil necromancy" as a theme a ways to the west. Not only do you get a greater variety of necromantic styles showcased, but you get plot-starting blood rivalries between them to boot. Fun!In a great deal of pre-D&D folklore and fantasy, that's not actually a theme, though. There are a lot of ghost stories and old ballads where ghosts appear as neutral, even benevolent figures. If you've ever read any Manly Wade Wellman, he even has a story where an evil curse is broken by temporarily summoning the shade of George Washington. Chinese folklore in particular (and probably that of a lot of other Asian cultures) is thick with the idea of ghosts having a wide range of personalities, in particular a desire to help their living relatives. It doesn't negate the existence of stories where there are hateful, jealous or vengeful undead, thankfully. We still get those. But folks like me like to use the whole body of death-lore. I like to add some Garth Nix to my Clark Ashton Smith, some Dia de los Muertos to my superstitious European burial traditions. I'd call it more like "having your medieval Europe-inspired fantasy and your Arabian Nights-inspired fantasy too"; most D&D worlds are big enough to support both.</blockquote>

Verification