D&D General Socially Acceptable Necromancers?

[Fauchard1520]

Necromancers are cool. How do you play one without getting drummed out of town by peasants with torches and paladins with pitchforks?

Comic for illustrative purposes.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Necromancers are cool. How do you play one without getting drummed out of town by peasants with torches and paladins with pitchforks?

Comic for illustrative purposes.

Um... you don't?

Most "good folk" aren't going to look kindly on necromancers. However, I suppose a lot would depend on the campaign, etc. We had a player trying to play one once, using animated enemies as a way for them to atone for their evil ways, etc. It never worked out well IMO.

 

[Umbran]

How people deal with death and the dead is a social construct, significantly influenced by the human psychology of loss. In an RPG, that construct probably depends in large part upon the metaphysics of magic and necromancy in the setting.

If you have a setting in which undead don't kill/eat/drain life from the living, and aren't stinky decaying horrors... maybe then necromancy can be socially acceptable.

 

[Charlaquin]

It depends what you mean by “necromancer.” If you just mean a person who practices the Necromancy school of magic, well there are plenty of spells that fall under that school that are perfectly harmless, even beneficial. A “necromancer” could act as a medium for communicating with lost loved ones, and can even invite their souls back to the material plane, given access to the proper components. I think it’s even possible to construct a society in which the creation of undead is viewed as acceptable, or even plays an important role in their relationship to death - see, for example, the Mortalitasi of the Dragon Age setting.

If by “necromancer” you mean someone who exploits the bodies of the dead to serve their own ends, no, I don’t see any way that would be socially acceptable in any non-evil society.

 

[bulletmeat]

I'd say you need a culture change!
Think of ancient Egypt, or the Toraja of Sulawesi in Indonesia. If we're looking outside the modern western mindset, death was kind of a normal day thing (minus plagues, famine, or the like coming around) and dead bodies would not necessarily be cleaned up. There is a picture from the early 1900s of New York kids playing in the street next a rotting dead horse. Imagine the local necromancer came by to raise Ol' Besty back up so she could faithfully serve the family that took care of her for so long.
Or the necromancer brings long past family members back to life on the Day of the Dead so kin and revisit them. Of course, being raised from the dead isn't cheap and those that past will need to work off that debt if the peasant family can't pay. Remember, if the necromancer raised you on a good faith agreement, it would be unlawful to renege on that debt. But time once again with the kids, grand-kids, great grand-kids, great-great-great grand-kids is always worth it!
Anyway, you might also look at Scarred Land's Hollowfaust book. That might give you some further ideas.

 

[iserith]

Necromancers are cool. How do you play one without getting drummed out of town by peasants with torches and paladins with pitchforks?

Ask your DM if your character is going to have to deal with this problem on the regular and, if you are, you either come up with a solution (e.g. leaving the undead horde in a ditch outside of town) or you don't play a necromancer.

For my part, I generally try not to make it too big a deal and maybe in order to throw a wrench into things from time to time I make an issue of it. At that point it's just another intermittent challenge to overcome instead of a constant problem. To be honest, I don't really like doing much town/city stuff. The adventure in my games is found outside of these places, generally speaking. So it just won't come up much.

My main concern with necromancer characters is the same with summoners - how quickly can you resolve your minions? Because if a player slows down the game, it's going to be a problem and I let them all now this before they commit to such a character build.

 

[Dausuul]

Get proficiency with an herbalism kit. Embalm all your zombies so they don't stink, then dress them up in long robes and masks.

Alternatively, pick up the mold earth cantrip and bury your zombies in the woods before you enter any town or city.

 

[mortwatcher]

Honestly, that depends on how your world views death and corpses in general. Maybe necromancy is common or not all that weird. After all, the corpse doesn't really serve any purpose once the spirit leaves it, so why waste a good skeleton that can work without having to be fed or complaining about how hard/tedious/repetitive the work is.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I think animating only the dead monsters and enemies of the town would go over better than stopping by the graveyard to do some "recruiting." But depending on the locale and culture, there's probably going to be something unsavory about necromancy.

Hollowfaust is a setting where necromancy is normalized and not necessarily evil. As I've said before, it's one of my favorite city sourcebooks.

Ultimately, if a player wants a necromancer character, I'm going to try to make that work as best I can as a DM. I don't want to invalidate their character idea, and as long as they're not engaging in disruptive behavior (like digging up the mayor's dead spouse and animating them "for the lulz"), I'm going to try to make it work with the world we're crafting and be fun for them.

 

[RSIxidor]

Significant reflavoring of necromancy would be needed in many fantasy worlds for it to not be so bad, or as some have mentioned above, the view of undead by the society in that world would need to be different than what we're currently used to.

I could see a world where necromancers first speak with the dead, gain their consent in helping with some task, and then raising them to help with the task on a sort of contractual basis. Perhaps in this world, the dead are still anchored to their remains in some way, even if they are actually in some sort of afterlife realm.

On a vaguely related note, I dislike the "army of the dead" style necromancer. A third-party made a playbook for Dungeon World that instead of raising armies and being limited to skeletons and zombies and other named undead, could raise whatever dead things they came across but could only have one undead servant, usually. I actually really like that flavor and feel it's somehow more palatable than the mass raising variety. I could see this is a reworked subclass for Wizard in 5E that gets this ability outside of spell-casting.

EDIT: Maybe just also never take the undead into towns and only utilize them in fights outside of civilized society, such as in dungeons.