Positive and Negative Energy

[Tinker Gnome]

Is negative energy evil in your games? Is positive energy good? Or are they just neutral forces in the world?

If negative energy is evil in your world, and this is the reason why most corporeal undead are evil, would that mean that undead created by positive energy (if this is even possible in your game world) can be good?

 

[Crothian]

In my homebrew positive is good, and negative is evil. All undead powered by negative energy are evil. I haven't had any powered by positive energy but it was hinted at in one campaign about a decade ago.

 

[Snoweel]

It's a bit of a tangent, but what's the appeal for you, of the concept of positive and negative energy?

 

[I'm A Banana]

Just forces.

Undead become "evil" because the necromancy creating them requires the use and perversion of the person's soul.

Usually, when you die, you pass onto whatever afterlife awaits.

When someone uses your corpse to create an undead creature, it wrenches your soul from the afterlife, warps it, and binds it to the corpse.

So undead are constructed of wounded souls.

Death itself (i.e.: negative energy) is not inherently evil. Though, of course, it appeals to evil, what with its finality and all.

 

[Umbran]

I've run it several different ways, and it hasn't made a whole lot of difference.

But then, I've never made it into a plot point - in general, I've found the metaphysics don't matter a whole lot unless some important decisions the PCs need to make, or actions they need to take, hinge upon it.

 

[jaerdaph]

On a related note, in Mongoose Publishing's Slayer's Guide to the Undead by Gary Gygax, Gary mentions in a side bar that the mummy's association with positive rather than negative energy was a mistake that managed to get carried though the first two editions of the game.

 

[Shemeska]

Both of them completely neutral, entirely divorced from Good or Evil. If they had any association with alignment, they would be part of the upper planes, not the inner/elemental ones.

It's just that the vast majority of life is empowered by positive energy, thus making negative energy harmful to it, that provides the false suggestion that negative energy is wrong or evil. Not at all. It's harmful yes, but to a creature empowered by negative energy (trillochs, scaeduinar, etc) the exact opposite would in their mind be true - positive energy is harmful or possibly evil.

Positive and negative energy are as good or evil as water, or fire, or a hurricane, or anything else. Their use or abuse by someone is the -only- thing that might gain some association with good or evil. Fire isn't evil, but burning someone to cinders would be. Likewise using positive energy to heal someone isn't evil, but pumping them full of it till their soul immolates certainly is. Searing a scaeduinar's body with positive energy to direly harm it would be evil, and so would using negative energy to energy drain a child: both of them equally evil.

If you're going to use one or the other as good or evil, best be associating them with some cosmological Good or Evil, and altering the flavor of the energies and their effects to match. Because at least with core, baseline D&D through most of its history, neither + or - energy has been evil in and of itself (nor their respective energy planes).

 

[Stormonu]

I've replaced the terminology positive and negative in my own campaign with radiant and necrotic (much like in 4e). Positive & Negative sound like scholarly terms and poor "day-to-day" terms to me.

They are generally just forces, though necrotic tends to corrupt the mind as well as the body - often warping the mind and resulting in a hosts of insanities, most of which would probably be described as "evil". Radiant's healing powers can likewise cure ailments of the mind as well as the body and while its use doesn't make someone good, if they've been committing foul acts due to a mental defect, it may open their eyes to what they've really been doing (of course, some habits die hard...).

In my world undead are generally evil because the necrotic energies that keep them "alive" are torturous and mind-warping. That, and in my planar structure those who return to the world of their own volition (this means undead) do so by circumnavigating from the waiting rooms of Hades into the screaming halls of Pandemonium to return back to the land of the living. (Raised dead skip the journey through Pandemonium).

 

[Starfox]

To me its like the Far Realm. Very little is known of the Far realm or the source of negative energy. In their home domains, they might be neutral, even beneficial energies. But when the come into contact with our world, they cause destruction. This does not make them inherently evil, but it does make them effectively evil in our conceptual domain.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I run them as neutral forces, which really gets one of my players as he seems to think all celestials live in the positive material plane

He really got blasted by a bunch of positive creatures one time.

And him a cleric of Pelor.

It was funny.