Every time I sat down to write about undeath, I got sidetracked into the scholarly side of it. Which no one I know ever wants to read. This is also a topic that I know just a
leetle too much about, and that tends to push its way into my writing. In an attempt to satisfy both urges, I've written a few paragraphs of academia at the very end (titled 'Academia'), on the source of the word necromancer and how it influenced my addition of it to this setting, so it's out of the way of the flavor text. Feel free to skip it - it has less to do with Theralis and more to do with 'Thomas can't keep his mouth shut'.
I know I don't have to say it but... the following is all Out Of Character knowledge. What is known In Character is that necromancers are evil, evil, evil. Burn their books, burn their bodies, burn their towers. Necromancers violate the dead, defy the gods, and will get the afterlife they deserve.
Necromancy
Necromancy is an extension of the arts of ESP and healing, and uses facets of both. At its heart, necromancy is the art of working with the spirits of the dead and, to some extent, living and extradimensional spirits. To this end, the necromancer must be able to work with the spirit world (ESP) and life energies (healing).
What Necromancers Do
They summon the spirits of the dead, and can converse with them or compel them to answer questions by force of will and ritual. They can open gates into the spiritual realm, and step through it or allow another to do the same. They also do many things similar to espers, and can commune with higher and lower Powers.
They bind the dead back into corpses, and compel the spirits to service. They bind spirits into arms and armor, as a kind of enchantment. They bind spirits into towers, or feed them sufficient life energy to manifest incorporeally and haunt/serve the necromancer. They unbind souls from living bodies.
They use corpses to draw energy from the spirit who once lived in it, or to summon or compel it. They raid funeral urns, tombs and graveyards. They sacrifice living creatures to provide energy to the dead. Blood, as the primary vessel of life energy, is a common element to most necromantic rituals.
The most powerful may bind their own spirit into their own corpse, to achieve a kind of immortality.
Are Necromancers Evil?
Sometimes.
When a person dies, they go on to their final reward, usually a particular diety's celestial realm, based on the person's life. The necromancer pulls the spirit, however temporarily, from that realm. Not always willingly. However, the priests of the gods do many of the things that a proper necromancer does (esp. summoning and compelling spirits). They just do so with the stamp of approval of this or that god.
Certainly, the powers of the necromancer are ripe for abuse, and it is easy to see why the common people (who will eventually be at the mercy of such folk) would prefer that these powers be available only to those with the approval of a higher power than "me". And in the Theralis region, there was a very powerful necromancer who fought with the temples of Allas for several years before falling to the forces of the sun... and Allas has spent the intervening centuries since then spreading anti-necromancer propaganda.
The Oracle of the Dead
North and west of the Theralis Valleys lies a mountain with a series of caves which are said to lead to the spirit worlds, and the dead. A militant order of monastic devotees, bound to no single god, guard its entrance and make a small profit by intervening on the behalf of mortals who wish to see their loved ones.
Or rather, make an obscene profit, purely with the intent of preventing people from constantly making the pilgrimage.
The Oracle of the Dead is well known to Theralis, although the people of Theralis, in general, view it as distasteful and hateful, and no good citizen of Theralis would work with the monsters who run it. Their business comes primarily from the north, where people are more lax about issues of morality such as bothering the dead.
Miscellaneous
An undead zombie or skeleton is a corpse, into which the necromancer has bound the original person's soul, and then compelled it to his bidding. The spirits of the dead are
vastly easier to manipulate in the corporeal realm than living spirits, and a necromancer can typically dominate a sizable number of undead by sheer force of will. Of course, as noted above, so can priests. A person's soul can not be abused in this manner more than once; undead who have been freed of their mortal coil can not normally be reainimate again.
Necromancers often become who they are due to an immense thirst for knowledge. The dead know, collectively, more than any library, and many necromancers use them primarily as a resource for knowledge of the past. Some have even established strong relationships with ancient scholars, prophets and other reliquaries of knowledge who are more than happy to pass along their accumulated wisdom. Such necromancers also tend to have immense libraries of their own, and be obsessed with antiquity.
Academia
The word 'necromancer' in English has a lot of odd connotations. The word stems from the greek 'nekromanteia' (literally,
corpse divination), but passed through the Old French 'nigremancie' (black divination) along the way before returning to its 'necro' roots, and has historically been associated with all manner of ills and evils associated with corpses.
Society often confuses pure necromancy with diabolism and other forms of consorting with fiends. Conversely, in late French Arthurian legends, literature treated the word as a romantic system of divination... a possible source of the modern (20th century) seance, where speaking to spirits doesn't seem quite as horrific as it might have in the dim origins of necromancy.
Biblical (English translation) usage is even more twisted. The word 'necromancy' is used as the translation for the art of forcefully interrogating the dead, in the hopes of gaining insight into the future. Since those spirits who go to heaven can not be forced to return by any means, and will not reveal aught of God's plan even when they do return, that means speaking to the damned. And if you think you're getting a good deal by speaking with one of the damned, just remember that they're getting a good deal from their masters by speaking with you.
As has been pointed out before, Theralis is strongly influenced by the Greeks, so I tried to return a bit to the roots of 'corpse divination' and at least make a nod to the hellenic idea of speaking with the dead. I also wanted to draw on some of the Greek words used in necromantic papyri - 'skênos' means 'corpse', but it also means 'tent'; 'skyphos' means 'skull' and also 'drinking cup'.
I also wanted to include something like the
nekromanteio oracle, only without trickery. In Greek history/mythology, this is where Herakles and Orpheus both travelled to to enter Hades. That meant that necromancy had to be something ambiguous (rather than simply evil as it is in D&D), that priests used (under a different name) as well as the vile and socially outcast necromancers.
And I wanted to tie in a few bits and pieces of necromantic lore (like the roman and medieval belief that spirits were attracted to spilled blood, and that spilling blood in a pit made it easier to attract them up from the depths of the earth, because it was closer to them). And I still wanted to keep some of the conventions of the fantasy necromancer, from animated corpses (which may have originally stemmed from fanciful paintings of sorcerors speaking to spirits) to lichdom.
I've had magic that allowed occasional speaking with the dead, or magikinetically animating corpses, but this is the first setting that I've really had
necromancers, and I wanted to do them right.
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