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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 6330079" data-attributes="member: 18">The 2E Necromancer's Handbook explicitly states that it is not. In general in 2E products, there's a lot of back-and-forth as to whether it's evil, usually hinging on the mechanism of animation. Specifically, if Skeletons and Zombies are essentially "Magical Puppets", animated by a magical force created by the caster, not drawing from the soul of the dead or whatever, they're not explicitly evil. Whereas if they are somehow binding or recalling the soul of the dead person in order to animate the Skeleton or Zombie, it is evil.Higher undead pretty much all involve the soul, so creating those tends to be evil.I think it's a pretty easy case to make once you get past people being all "EW DEAD BODIES ICK!" and so on.The whole notion that it was definitely, always capital-e Evil is a post-3E revision.I think it's pretty easy to argue that using magic to force/coerce information out of people (especially when you don't know the quality of the information, or whether it's really relevant, which is often the situation with Speak with Dead) is very easy to argue as a step on the road to Evil, because you're saying "My desire for this information is more important than your choice in the matter!". Speak with Dead doesn't force truthful answers but it does force answers, so it's kind of an edge-case.If you don't think invading people's privacy can ever be a clearly malicious and selfish act in and of itself, well, I respectfully suggest that you need to think about it a bit harder. There are imo obviously times when it is, and when it isn't.</blockquote>

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