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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8571389" data-attributes="member: 6988941">Much of the "evilness" of necromancy has to do with the history of necromancy in fantasy literature and myth as well as the history of D&D. Raising a horde of undead to do his bidding is standard fantasy villain stuff. For many people it's more a matter of tradition than anything intrinsic to the 5e version of the spell.But there is a big reason even in the morally laissez-faire, go-ahead-and-be-an-evil-paladin-or-whatever world of 5e, where the mechanics don't generally enforce alignments and such very much at all, why we should still consider animate dead an inherently evil spell, and that is that it permanently creates a number of evil creatures while only giving temporary control of them to the creator. It's easy to forget, because they so rarely last more than a few days in actual games, but the evil undead created by Animate Dead theoretically continue on forever, menacing the living until they are put down.Casting Animate Dead is the fantasy equivalent of laying landmines; whatever the creator's intention, whatever their cause, they have introduced a thing into the world that if they for any reason fail to defuse it will inherently go from being a neutral tool, and endure on as an evil menacing anyone who happens upon it.Note that I don't call them "evil undead" because of something is says in the statblock, I call them evil undead because at every table I've ever played at they attack the living on sight, and I have a pro-living creature bias. If you have a table that doesn't play undead this way, or if you have houserules that make responsible handling of the animated dead less problematic things might be different. In my most recent game with a necromancer character the DM let him just end their unlife with a thought whenever he was done with them. I objected a little bit that this undermined the lore of the spell, but it was pretty straightforwardly a metagame decision to streamline his resource management so I didn't complain too hard.</blockquote>

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