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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bran Blackbyrd" data-source="post: 1645293" data-attributes="member: 1710">Like the Addams family, deathless aren't evil, but they are altogether ooky.Says who?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Never mind that. A better question would be; if people create their own classes, items, worlds, gods, cosmologies, etc. then why can't undead be animated in a way that doesn't even remotely jeopardize the soul of the body's former inhabitant?There are even T-shirts that espouse the idea that, "We are not these bodies.", but most D&D players don't seem to get that; possibly because they are too attached to pre-3E ideas. Geeks of all people should remember what Yoda said, "Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter."Not this crude matter indeed.Anakin Skywalker's corpse was still ablaze when his spirit visited Luke, but you didn't hear him screaming, "It burns! It burns!".If you kick a corpse, does some innocent schmuck on Mount Celestia feel it? If he was buried at sea, does his soul drown for eternity? If not, then why should animating his corpse with energy from the negative energy plane affect his soul? Because I said so? Because it's magic?If that's all, then make it whatever you want, there's no good reason not to.I know creatures that feed on the flesh of the dead, sounds evil right? They're called plants. It's called fertilizer. Any druid will tell you that it's all natural. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Maybe when an evil necromancer/cleric animates a body, he binds the tormented soul of the body's former inhabitant because it's quicker and dirtier than animating it in a more humane way, or because torturing souls is the way he gets his jollies. But that doesn't mean there isn't another way to do things.It's perfectly reasonable to believe that once a character's soul is free of his earthly body that he is no longer bound to it in any way.Just some thoughts... Call me crazy, but I find it hard to fathom that people can accept that in one campaign world there's an afterlife split up among all the outer planes (but you aren't obligated to believe in a darn thing) and in another you're forced to worship at least one deity or be tormented for eternity, but they can't imagine a world where souls aren't eternally bound to their spent carcasses.When a child asks you whether or not an amputee gets their limb back in heaven, what do you tell them?  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":]" title="Devious    :]" data-shortname=":]" /></blockquote>

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