Why does Undead=Evil

[FreeTheSlaves]

That was a pretty coherant and well done piece of deduction there, Raven Crowking.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The golem tangent

Looking at the golem entry, they are crafted and an unwilling elemental spirit is bound to the automaton.

By the RAW doing so is not an evil act, likewise the calling of elementals is not an evil spell. This implies that elemental spirits are not like mortal spirits and are so alien that they are outside alignment issues.

That's pretty satisfactory to me.

Overall, an ironic post coming from someone going by the handle "FreeTheSlaves."

To the point, even elemental outsiders have alignments, free will, etc.- how can they be outside of alignment issues? How can involuntary, open-ended servitude until death/dissolution not be evil?

Plus, if raiding the graves for animation is bad, how can doing the same for golem parts be thought of any differently?

For the record, part of the Flesh Golem entry reads "Note that creating a flesh golem requires casting a spell with the evil descriptor," namely, animate dead. (I don't know if there are 3Ed/3.5Ed stats for Bone or Blood Golems.)

I guess that answers that.

As an interesting side note, however, note that creating a Clay golem (and only the Clay golem) requires both commune (to talk to the elemental spirit?) and resurrection despite being used on a body that was never alive. An interesting nod to the original golem legends...

PS: Nice bit of reasoning there, Crowking.

 

[FreeTheSlaves]

I think the point differentiating between undead and golems is that D&D takes an approach where the spirits of mortals are more important than elementals. Elementals are a sentient force of nature similar in spiritual status to animals. I.e not much.

Where are the elemental planes? They are the inner planes, building blocks of the prime.

Where is the adventure set? Prime.

Where do the souls of dead mortals go? Outer planes to their afterlife. Where gods reside.

Where do the dead elementals go? Nowhere, their remains become what they are made of.

 

[Voadam]

Luckily, there is another spell that can animate mindless corpse, and it might provide us some clues.

The 3rd level cleric spell, speak with dead, grants "the semblance of life and intellect to a corpse, allowing it to answer several questions that you put to it." This spell allows the body to understand language, and to make reasonably complex responses to spoken questions. We also know that this is a partial animation, and that the body is nevertheless relatively mindless:

This spell does not let you actually speak to the person (whose soul has departed). It instead draws on the imprinted knowledge stored in the corpse. The partially animated body retains the imprint of the soul that once inhabited it, and thus it can speak with all the knowledge that the creature had while alive. ​

Although speak with dead is language-dependent, and animate dead is not, it is probably reasonable to assume that something similar is happening to the dead creatures in question. We may assume that, as the higher level animate dead spell allows animation for a much wider range of applications that speak with dead, the higher-level magic also ignores the language-dependent barrier in communicating commands while otherwise being similar in principle.

Luckily for us, speak with dead does tell us where the knowledge and information comes from:

This spell does not let you actually speak to the person (whose soul has departed). It instead draws on the imprinted knowledge stored in the corpse. The partially animated body retains the imprint of the soul that once inhabited it, and thus it can speak with all the knowledge that the creature had while alive. The corpse, however, cannot learn new information.

Indeed, it can’t even remember being questioned.​

[SNIP]

We can further conclude that, even if the creature volunteered for it prior to (or after) death, animation is probably not the most pleasant experience possible for the remaining imprint. It would probably not be untoward to consider it a form of torture.


RC

The corpse is not aware of anything happening to it. Speak with dead only gets reactions based on the imprint of the soul, not a conscious soul itself, the imprint can only react, not decide autonomously whether to answer or not, it is a purely instinctual non voluntary action based on alignment and strength of will of the former soul. The soul imprint has no experience, positive or negative from being talked to (it is not even aware of it) and by your connecting this to the animate dead spell the animate dead therefore have no consciousness to be tortured, just mindless imprints that allow the animated corpse to react to complex stimuli such as questions or commands.

With the speak with dead spell you do not interact back and forth with the imprint of the soul "It instead draws on the imprinted knowledge stored in the corpse."

 

[Voadam]

Reincarnation

So long as some small portion of the creature’s body still exists, it can be reincarnated, but the portion receiving the spell must have been part of the creature’s body at the time of death. The magic of the spell creates an entirely new young adult body for the soul to inhabit from the natural elements at hand.

* * *

A creature that has been turned into an undead creature or killed by a death effect can’t be returned to life by this spell. Constructs, elementals, outsiders, and undead creatures can’t be reincarnated. The spell cannot bring back a creature who has died of old age

So you can't be reincarnated if your body is undead. But you can be reincarnated from only a portion of the body leaving the rest. So then there is this left over body. Which can be talked to with a speak with dead, after all it has the imprint of the departed soul. This will not take your soul out of your new body. And under the RAW the old body could even be animated. This would not take your soul out of your new body unless, of course, the DM house rules it to be so.

 

[Voadam]

Alignment Descriptor =/ morality of action

The alignment descriptor does not indicate the morality of an action in D&D.

They can coincide but it need not be so under the RAW.

For example, a wizard of any alignment can summon anything on the summon monster lists regardless of the alignment descriptors and command them to fight anybody they choose to designate as a target, and the summoned thing cannot refuse.

An evil wizard can summon an angel and have it attack paladins and innocent orphans. The spell will detect as good, even though it is an immoral action. I think few people will say that this is an inherently good act just because it has the good descriptor in the spell and summoned creature.

The evil descriptor for creating undead indicates that the spell will detect as evil with a detect evil spell, and a few other minor effects regarding evil spells.

All undead detect as evil under detect evil as written, regardless of their actual alignment.

So the evil descriptor means that animating corpse with animate dead detects as evil, while using animate object does not.

The morality of the actions are a separate matter.

 

[Voadam]

But they could do so only once, on the day of Ragnarök.
Like the christian armageddon or similar scenarios, I'll make exceptions for when your whole campaign world comes crashing down in big ole apocalypse.
Point is, they come back for battle and not for the unnatural extended long unlife of the undead, and even with that, I would find it tempting to classify ghostly norse ravagers as evil as they go if eyed throught the lense of classical D&D.

Incorrect. Backwards actually.

In Valhalla the dead Einherjar fight each other and die everyday only to be reborn each night for carousing and to do it again the next day. Ragnarok is the only day they don't come back after being killed. And that is when the nine worlds are destroyed.

 

[Voadam]

To clarify my own posts- I'm not saying that the warriors of Valhalla are undead, but that of all the beings in the norse mythology, they come closest to meeting that description. Personally, I don't know what to call them in particular, but aknowledge the fact that their post-death existence is a glaring oddity in the context of the teutonic mythos- they have attributes that not even their gods have.

I think the dead in hell, who rise up on Loki's ship at Ragnarok to fight the Gods, are pretty good candidates for norse undead. As are descriptions of draugr.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

A big thank you, busy Voadam!

Your version of the norse legends about the Einherjar (couldn't recall the name) conforms to the mythology I'm familiar with.

I just checked my encyclopedia of mythology-couldn't find draugr. I'm not familiar with the term. Could there be an alternate name or spelling?

As for Loki's force, one could argue that they were spirits in their natural form and not truly undead.

FreeTheSlaves wrote-

Where do the souls of dead mortals go? Outer planes to their afterlife. Where gods reside.

Where do the dead elementals go? Nowhere, their remains become what they are made of.

You're comparing apples and oranges.

The spirits of dead mortals go to their designated afterlives, and their bodies decay and are reduced to their component minerals- ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Dead elementals' bodies consist of their component elements as well. As for their spirits? Destroyed? Returned to their home plane? I don't know.

 

[Voadam]

In one of my books on norse myths, Odin actually dies when he hangs on Yggdrasil with the spear through him. In death he learns the runes and brings himself back to life.

The einherjar are Odin's (and Freya's) servitors, dieing and being brought back each day until Ragnarok where the first casualty is Odin himself.

The myths don't connect Odin to their resurrecting each day but it is a plausible inference, and explains why they don't come back after Ragnarok. It could also be the fields of Valhalla where they fall that resurrects them, and when Surt burns the worlds the fields are no longer there. Odin could even have plausibly put a big resurrection rune under the field.

Norse Mythos speculation and extrapolation can be fun.