Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="FoxWander" data-source="post: 1086921" data-attributes="member: 1356">There are two parts to this post, the "evilness" of necromancy and a call for help in creating more useful undead things. First the philosophy part. If you don't like that stuff, skip ahead to the twisted ideas.So my new favorite character is a practical necromancer. What I mean is he's not evil, he just has some loose morals and the pragmatic point of view that simple undead (skele-bones and zombies) can be really useful tools. As in- why haul all the treasure out yourself when you can animate the monsters who were guarding it to haul it out for you. That kind of thing. He doesn't have any agenda of raising an undead army or even pursuing immortality thru undeath himself. He's just using the creatures that were mostly trying to kill him to make his life easier. With all of this I could justify that he wasn't evil in that simple undead were mindless, neutral creatures and he didn't really use them for evil purposes himself. But now in 3.5 simple undead are neutral evil. What I want to know is- why? They are mindless- they have NO intelligence score. How can something that is mindless technically even HAVE an alignment? The word, by definition, means you're thinking is aligned a certain way- good, evil, law, chaos. If you do not think, how can you have tendencies one way or another? Let's put it this way- if I animate the bodies of the dead orcs that razed a village and have the zombies rebuild the houses of the survivors- is that evil? If zombies are inherently "evil" somehow, then it would be. But if I were to animate a skeleton and give it no commands whatsoever, it would simply stand there until it eventually crumbled to dust. If it's supposed to be "always neutral evil", as in the new MM, then shouldn't it go on a murderous rampage for lack of anything better to do? But it won't- it's mindless. It won't do anything unless I command it to. What are your thoughts on the new "evilness" of simple undead? Notice I'm not getting into whether it is evil to animate dead bodies in the first place, that would be a whole other post (maybe I'll do that later)- I'm just concerned with what I consider to be the stupid "evil alignment" as of the new D&D.Now unto the twisted ideas. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Like I said, my necro is a pragmatic guy- and maybe a little lazy. So I'm trying to think of ways to make undead critters more useful in everyday life. One of my first thoughts was on a mundane disguise for them. I figured skeletons are best cause they don't stink. But walking around with a skeletal valet tends to make the town guards nervous. I can throw a robe over him but that doesn’t hide the skeletal look really. So my necro learned tailoring and taxidermy. Then I made kind of a padded muscle suit to go over the bones. I painted and dyed it to look like a large marionette and gave it a silly leather mask. Now it just looks like I’ve got a big walking puppet- no hassles from the guards. That started a trend of disguising the undead to look like animated stuffed animals or large toys. I’ve got what looks like a toy baboon as a backpack. It’s a baboon skeleton with a backpack inside its ribcage. I reach down its throat to get my stuff. Now I don’t have to wear a heavy pack either, it just walks beside me. And by attaching a ring to it’s reinforced skeleton I can tie a rope to it and have a never miss “grappling hook”. He’s learned the “Attune Gem” feat and combined it with a “Shrink Item” spell to fire a pack of skeletons into a fight with his crossbow. Use Shrink Item (cloth option) on a pack of skeletons, wrap the cloth around an Attuned Gem “arrowhead” with Animate dead, fire the bolt at the feet of your enemies, watch the mayhem. Squirrel skeletons with bells make good intruder alarms around your campsite at night. I’ve got several more ideas along this line, but I was wondering what kinds of stuff the brilliant folks on this board could come up with. Come on- share your evilness with the world. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

Verification