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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 6183175" data-attributes="member: 6686357">Assuming the body  is still thousands of years later, the petitioner has long since become  some kind of celestial or fiend. So if you assume that Create Undead  calls the original soul back into the body, you are using that spell to  summon an outsider and then stick it in a corpse. So now you have a  precedent for using Create Undead to summon outsiders (which is a  completely different school of magic). And said outsider is probably  going to rip its way out of said corpse and kill you for the  embarrassment.Actually, according the to MM they don't need  food (e.g. undead do not eat, breathe or sleep). They just kill and eat  people because they're evil jerks.Oh, I'm all for the rights of the  deceased. But they only own the body while they are alive, and can sell  rights to their corpse. After they're dead, the body belongs to any  surviving family. If there is no surviving family, the corpse isn't  owned by anyone.But those various beliefs about the afterlife are quantifiably wrong. Anyone who dies immediately gos to the afterlife that fits their alignment. Their funereal is irrelevant to that.People believe reanimating corpses is wrong  because of social taboo. One could easily have a society where this  isn't the case, where necromancy is a recognized as a legal profession  and most people have zombie butlers and look forward to existence as a  undying soldier that will defend the homes and liberty of their  descendants. In such a society, dangerous undead would be seen as no  different from, say, any other extremely dangerous man-eating monster  like mindflayers, and you might even have people campaigning for zombie  rights and zombie marriage.Or you could sidestep all these moral  issues completely by only reanimating evil people, because being  EEEVIIL automatically negates all rights to life, liberty, property and  the pursuit if happiness according to D&D's warped system of  morality. I doubt the villagers would complain if everyone one of them  had a zombified goblin slave-butler that had absolutely no purpose in  unlife other than following their orders (and no, D&D zombies don't  eat people, they just follow orders, like in voodoo).That isn't actually stated anywhere in the  rules. Even the text of true resurrection does not actually state that  being undead prevents resurrection (you can cast the spell on an undead  to cure them), it only states that undead creatures that have been  destroyed are valid targets for resurrection, not that the undead must  be destroyed before the original person can be resurrected.  Hypothetically you could use the spell to repeatedly resurrect yourself  and animate your previous corpses as ghouls or whatever. Which brings up  the question of what soul they are using if your soul is in your own  body.I would fault the vampire. He  doesn't actually need to feed on humans in particular (or at all, barring the sustenance rules in Libris Mortis), and can  just feed on animals or evil humanoids or use magic to create substitute  blood that tastes better. Humans are equal mentally to vampires because  both are capable of philosophy. Any vampire that feeds on humans is  just being a jerk.That is very good reasoning for why undead would be inherently evil. Sadly it's not supported by the RAW.</blockquote>

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