I personally have a few issues with how Necromancy and the Undead are treated in what seems to be all of the official materials, and the Fantasy genre in general. My biggest problem is how Necromancy is treated as "Evil" magic and how the undead, especially the kind with practically no Intelligence, are some kind of "Evil" by default. Good and Evil are culturally, and often personally, subjective, and Necromancy has quite a few spells that lean more towards the "Good" side of the moral spectrum, Resurrection spells and the Speak with Dead spell are two such examples of this, but because the flashiest spells from the school raise the dead without actually reviving them the school is listed as the default "Evil" school of magic, never the mind the fact that Enchantment has a larger spell list and spells that can literally alter the mind of the intended target. Last I checked, Necromancy seems to have the fewest spells over all the spellcasting classes, meanwhile, Evocation seems to have 3, possibly 4, times as many spells by the same metric. On a slightly related note, Divination and Illusion seem to barely have a few more spells than Necromancy, they seem to be practically tied with Necromancy for the fewest number of official spells.
At some point, I would like to see an official culture in D&D, even if it's just lore, that treats the Undead as more like a valuable or essential part of their labor force, and I would like to see non-evil undead. Personally, I think skeletons and zombies should be Unaligned/Neutral due to their lack of Intelligence. Why so much hate on Necromancy? I can understand that quite a bit has been carried over from prior editions, but it still feels like there's a prejudice against Necromancy that isn't really needed.
Necromancy, historically, either enslaves the souls of the deceased and forces them to reanimate their own corpses under the necromancer's will, essentially turning a person into a prisoner in their own dead, rotting body and forced to commit horrible acts upon the living, or summons minor fiendish/shadowy spirits to reanimate the corpses of the dead instead and thus brings evil into the world to drive those bodies. Even Intelligence 1 undead are generally considered to be driven by an unquenchable urge/instinct to seek out and feast upon the living, or at least do them fatal harm in the case of skellingbros.
As well, the Evil Necromancer is one of the most widely known and pervasive Bad Guy tropes - a dark wizard performing blasphemous rites to create horrible servants and enact his wicked will upon those who scorned his art, or drove him from society, or got his Starbucks order wrong. Even simply saying 'The Necromancer' as a title can often tell a D&D party all they need to know about some distant threat to the north (and it's always the north, isn't it?) It's often held up as lazy, but it's also a classic because it works. You need villains somehow in most campaigns, and grave-robbing, civilian-murdering necromancers trying to raise an undead army are an easy and convenient choice.
It's certainly possible to create a setting where undead are neutral and seen as tools rather than monsters - see Eberron and the nation of Karrnath for exactly the canonical example of "Undead are part of society" thing you're looking for, though Karrnath's decision to use undead as labor and military units is recent enough that the nation's still a little unsettled over it. But it's the sort of thing you have to explain to players either ahead of time during Session Zero, or right away when they encounter these neutral undead. Elsewise the tropes of Evil Undead are so ingrained that they're liable to make a mistake through not understanding your setting.
At some point, I would like to see an official culture in D&D, even if it's just lore, that treats the Undead as more like a valuable or essential part of their labor force, and I would like to see non-evil undead.
Take a look at Karnath in Eberron
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Conflating every spell that's classified as necromancy with the practice of creating the undead is a mistake. Yes creating undead is a popular association IRL and many game worlds with what necromancy is, but Life Domain clerics using resurrection aren't thought to be necromancers. There's no "moral weight" to any of the schools of magic, so necromancy isn't being deprived out of some sort of moral policing of the game design.
"Good and Evil are culturally, and often personally, subjective.." "well, that's just your opinion, man" as Walter would say, and it's all your left with if you adhere to that proposition. But I kid. Literally sophomoric assertions of morality aside, (everyone stops with Nietzsche at the title and chapter headings and no one reads the century of subsequent philosophy, anthropology, theology etc, the actual thoughts beyond quips that acknowledge human social moral constructs and personal myth making but also doesn't ever fully discount that wickedness and benevolence are a bit more than flavors of cultural or individual tastes), in game seriousness, the morality of a game world is arbitrated by the DM and ideally the contributions of the players ... but really you are playing a game where good and evil are de facto elemental forces. Like if you look at how the cosmology works, the physical elements are contained inside the structure of good and evil and law and chaos. But you're right, the cosmology is only one way to organize a game universe and you can do what you want.
So yeah, you can use "cultural relativism" to pretty much rewrite any "moral" aspect of the D&D default. Karnath is a published example. Utility necromancy isn't a heavy lift in that there's nothing mechanical preventing a DM or player from going that route if the world allows it. It's just so much of the lore or D&D mythos (Vecna, Orcus, etc.) are so tied into the "reanimation of corpses or remains = bad" thing, probably because so many IRL cultures have a taboo against desecration of human remains, even things like organ harvesting or cadaver donation strike some cultural and personal comfort zone nerves, or at least gives pause (I'm not in that camp but I'm nevertheless aware it exists).
Last I checked, Necromancy seems to have the fewest spells over all the spellcasting classes, meanwhile, Evocation seems to have 3, possibly 4, times as many spells by the same metric. On a slightly related note, Divination and Illusion seem to barely have a few more spells than Necromancy, they seem to be practically tied with Necromancy for the fewest number of official spells.
I think you're looking at this from the wrong direction. If you list out every spell you can think of and then apply schools to them, you're not going to get equal numbers of spells in each school. Evocation has so many because there are many spells with the same purpose - dealing damage - that vary slightly in damage type and dice. Necromancy is fairly focused in scope and purpose and the spell list reflects that.
If you had a bunch of ideas for Necromancy/Divination/Illusion spells that brought something new to the game, that's a valid complaint. But inflating spell counts in order to prevent any appearance of developer bias is probably not a great design choice.
I think prepared modules are going to tend to play towards popular tropes like the evil necromancer, but purely as a character option I think necromancy is presented fairly neutrally. It certainly doesn't require you to be evil.
Necromancy IRL pertains mostly to communicating with the dead, but for the fantasy genre in general and D&D in particular necromancy deals with creating and controlling undead as well as manipulating negative energy. Resurrection magic is life-aspected, not death (or undeath),so shouldn't be considered necromancy IMO. As such, necromancy does have a fairly strong connotation of evil (and a lesser one of chaos). You could certainly reflavor certain types of necromancy if you wanted to, scrub the things that make them evil, but as is? Definitely justifiable to label the whole practice evil.
Circle of Spores druid also has a strong necromantic theme to it, including an animate dead feature (Fungal Infestation) at 6th level, and there's nothing inherently "evil" about it
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Well, Necromancy IRL does technically pertain to those, but not quite the way most of us have been lead to believe. Extra Credits did a great video on the Zombie recently which covers 3 different approaches IRL the Zombie has been taken, all in the context of the region the term is mostly believed to have originated from. Also IRL, in Chinese culture the practice of Geomancy was used as a way to commune with the recently deceased and find the place their spirit felt would be the best place to be buried before it officially passed on to the next world. Come to think of it, why aren't Geomancers a thing in D&D? You could break them up into a few different subclasses in 5E. Probably the best fit for a Chinese Geomancer would be the Grave Cleric, but only if there was a way to give Clerics more earth-based spells. There are a surprisingly low number of earth-based spells in the current game, and most of them go to arcane spellcasters, Clerics and Druids and have annoyingly/surprisingly very few earth-based spells, even though they probably have the most reason to have them within the confines of certain archetypes and subclasses.
D&D's history with Necromancy has been subject to a lot of back and forth. Prior to 3rd Edition, Necromancy was the magic of both life and death energy and thus all healing and resurrection spells fell into the Necromancy sphere. Until 4th Edition, when the rules for creatures with ability scores of zero got removed, zombies and skeletons were completely mindless beings that just obeyed their creator and otherwise didn't do much. For all that Animate Dead was "evil", there were less ethical concerns about animating a zombie than about creating a golem.
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"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
My main problem is a 150 GP opal to create each undead. So unless you have a Monty Haul DM, you not going to field an army of undead. Maybe a good size platoon. And a dm can ALWAYS change the culture/alignment of undead, so why bother wanting it changed offically?
Well, Necromancy IRL does technically pertain to those, but not quite the way most of us have been lead to believe. Extra Credits did a great video on the Zombie recently which covers 3 different approaches IRL the Zombie has been taken, all in the context of the region the term is mostly believed to have originated from. Also IRL, in Chinese culture the practice of Geomancy was used as a way to commune with the recently deceased and find the place their spirit felt would be the best place to be buried before it officially passed on to the next world. Come to think of it, why aren't Geomancers a thing in D&D? You could break them up into a few different subclasses in 5E. Probably the best fit for a Chinese Geomancer would be the Grave Cleric, but only if there was a way to give Clerics more earth-based spells. There are a surprisingly low number of earth-based spells in the current game, and most of them go to arcane spellcasters, Clerics and Druids and have annoyingly/surprisingly very few earth-based spells, even though they probably have the most reason to have them within the confines of certain archetypes and subclasses.
That is a good idea for a homebrew subclass, actually... I could even see bringing in Galder's Tower and/or Tiny Hut (with a feng shui flavor) in addition to the earth spells
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NPC: Who will help me avenge the death of my brother? Fighter: You have my sword, Archer: And my bow, Necromancer: And your brother!
One of the biggest potential issues here can be consent and ownership. Consent, certainly where a soul is/is considered to be involved, could be an issue. Ownership, if it's not your 'brother', similarly.
Other evocative issues might arise at the idea of seeing the body of old Mr Gibbons degrade gradually while its performing duties of while it's hacked to bits. Some, depending on values, may find this distasteful and this may be especially true if there was some sort of spiritual consequence to raising the dead or that, at least, people believed in this consequence. In other situations people might find raising the dead to be entirely positive and to be a good use of resources.
Eberon fandom says that "a series of plagues and famines left Karrnath short on troops, forcing Karrnath to turn to creating undead soldiers". Others may know more than me about any implications or otherwise of these actions.
Even if a DMs world had a background where 'souls' were generally affected by necromancy, it might still be possible for phenomena to develop in areas to buck this trend. Perhaps a necromancer developed an artefact that permitted the bodies of the dead to be raised without souls being affected. Perhaps souls could participate by choice and by consent.
Generally D&D liches are evil while vampires drink blood. One High Rollers storyline had a lich doctor and Buffy had Angel. The Addams family weren't so terrible. There might be a range of possibilities.
Eberon fandom says that "a series of plagues and famines left Karrnath short on troops, forcing Karrnath to turn to creating undead soldiers". Others may know more than me about any implications or otherwise of these actions.
One abundantly clear implication is that they wouldn't have done this if they hadn't felt they had no other options left. That does inform us about how this was perceived, and "it's fine really, nothing wrong with this in any way" isn't that.
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The book also states, however, that many of Karrnath's citizens are proud of their nation and their way of life for being hard and pragmatic enough top make a difficult decision like that. They see Karrnath's undead soldiery as proof of the nation's resolve and the superiority of the Karrnathi way of life. So while it's not a perfect example, it's also not a terrible one.
If someone is convicted of a crime they could be sentenced to death and their assets could be seized. In d&d those assets can extend to body and soul. In lotr a curse remained with the army of the dead until they sided with Aragorn. Yes, in some contexts, it might be considered unjust to bring some people into undeath. In other instances, it might be considered an eloquent route to justice.
Community service is unpaid work performed by a person or group of people for the benefit and betterment of their community without any form of compensation.[1] Community service can be distinct from volunteering, since it is not always performed on a voluntary basis and may be compulsory per situation. ...
Reanimation of a body that does something to it without returning full mental control to the body's owner and/or without the intention of the body's owner being undeniably glad of the outcome within all possible consideration = doing something to someone's body without their consent, and is thereby irrevocably an evil act. There's a reason you have to register as an organ donor, and doctors will still check with your family if your organs can be used. Societally, saying "you cannot use somebody else's body for your own purposes without their explicit consent" is something that is typically viewed as strictly not OK.
Anything that dominates the mind of an intelligent, non-hostile humanoid being and involves giving them commands outside of a combat situation = slavery. Slavery = evil. Using Dominate Person to control an NPC's mind so that they give you things for free, or forcing them to do things they wouldn't choose, should be considered evil.
You have a point about skeletons, and zombies that don't hunger for flesh. A skeleton is a sad, mind-controlled slave. If the skeleton can think, then the one that created it is evil. The zombie, if it's trying to eat brains, will be considered evil but is more like an animal. Creating them would be considered evil.
Necromancy is often considered evil because undeath is a perversion of life, and the classic methods of achieving it involve taking things - blood, a soul, flesh - from another living being. There are few paths leading to unlife that don't involve the darkest of practices.
If you want to reshape morality where consent doesn't matter when it comes to the dead then that's for you to go with, but I wouldn't expect it from an official source.
The book also states, however, that many of Karrnath's citizens are proud of their nation and their way of life for being hard and pragmatic enough top make a difficult decision like that. They see Karrnath's undead soldiery as proof of the nation's resolve and the superiority of the Karrnathi way of life. So while it's not a perfect example, it's also not a terrible one.
This is true. I'm just saying though, the end justifying the means doesn't really make the means not evil/chaotic/frowned upon.
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A skeleton is not sentient and is no more a "slave" than an animated (not awakened) mannequin or toy, no matter how much it might vaguely look like a person
For that matter, the issue of 'consent' with regard to dead bodies, at least in the real world, has very little to do with morality and a lot more to do with societal customs and taboos. Dead people can't give or withhold consent. If you want to develop some fantasy philosophy where the possibility of resurrection extends concepts like consent past death, though, then knock yourself out. Have your adventurers carry around DNR (Do Not Revivify) cards or something
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A skeleton is not sentient and is no more a "slave" than an animated (not awakened) mannequin or toy, no matter how much it might vaguely look like a person
For that matter, the issue of 'consent' with regard to dead bodies, at least in the real world, has very little to do with morality and a lot more to do with societal customs and taboos. Dead people can't give or withhold consent. If you want to develop some fantasy philosophy where the possibility of resurrection extends concepts like consent past death, though, then knock yourself out. Have your adventurers carry around DNR (Do Not Revivify) cards or something
Lol. No, not if you don't ask. Different world systems may develop different systems of lore regarding potential associations between body and, if there is such a thing, soul.
edit: RAW, "An animated skeleton retains no connection to its past"
A skeleton is not sentient and is no more a "slave" than an animated (not awakened) mannequin or toy, no matter how much it might vaguely look like a person
For that matter, the issue of 'consent' with regard to dead bodies, at least in the real world, has very little to do with morality and a lot more to do with societal customs and taboos. Dead people can't give or withhold consent. If you want to develop some fantasy philosophy where the possibility of resurrection extends concepts like consent past death, though, then knock yourself out. Have your adventurers carry around DNR (Do Not Revivify) cards or something
Consent is automatically withheld if not given. That has nothing to do with taboo or custom, it's just a fact. If you think otherwise, then you think there's a grey area, and there isn't. It's cut and dried, black and white, fact.
Someone is asleep? Unconscious? Dead? They can't consent. This is a fact. This is why we have organ donor cards. This is why we have wills, because once we're dead, we do not give consent to anything.
In a fantasy society where necromancy was common knowledge, I can imagine a fascistic society where people proudly carried "I consent to be raised as a skeleton, for the glory of Dark Lord Necrothi." The spell Resurrection specifically includes a caveat that the resurrected creature has to be willing, presumably because the game devs understand consent. As a default, we'd all assume that nobody consents to their body being used for necromantic purposes beyond death unless they're some underling saying "please master, raise me in your dark image..."
I personally have a few issues with how Necromancy and the Undead are treated in what seems to be all of the official materials, and the Fantasy genre in general. My biggest problem is how Necromancy is treated as "Evil" magic and how the undead, especially the kind with practically no Intelligence, are some kind of "Evil" by default. Good and Evil are culturally, and often personally, subjective, and Necromancy has quite a few spells that lean more towards the "Good" side of the moral spectrum, Resurrection spells and the Speak with Dead spell are two such examples of this, but because the flashiest spells from the school raise the dead without actually reviving them the school is listed as the default "Evil" school of magic, never the mind the fact that Enchantment has a larger spell list and spells that can literally alter the mind of the intended target. Last I checked, Necromancy seems to have the fewest spells over all the spellcasting classes, meanwhile, Evocation seems to have 3, possibly 4, times as many spells by the same metric. On a slightly related note, Divination and Illusion seem to barely have a few more spells than Necromancy, they seem to be practically tied with Necromancy for the fewest number of official spells.
At some point, I would like to see an official culture in D&D, even if it's just lore, that treats the Undead as more like a valuable or essential part of their labor force, and I would like to see non-evil undead. Personally, I think skeletons and zombies should be Unaligned/Neutral due to their lack of Intelligence. Why so much hate on Necromancy? I can understand that quite a bit has been carried over from prior editions, but it still feels like there's a prejudice against Necromancy that isn't really needed.
Necromancy, historically, either enslaves the souls of the deceased and forces them to reanimate their own corpses under the necromancer's will, essentially turning a person into a prisoner in their own dead, rotting body and forced to commit horrible acts upon the living, or summons minor fiendish/shadowy spirits to reanimate the corpses of the dead instead and thus brings evil into the world to drive those bodies. Even Intelligence 1 undead are generally considered to be driven by an unquenchable urge/instinct to seek out and feast upon the living, or at least do them fatal harm in the case of skellingbros.
As well, the Evil Necromancer is one of the most widely known and pervasive Bad Guy tropes - a dark wizard performing blasphemous rites to create horrible servants and enact his wicked will upon those who scorned his art, or drove him from society, or got his Starbucks order wrong. Even simply saying 'The Necromancer' as a title can often tell a D&D party all they need to know about some distant threat to the north (and it's always the north, isn't it?) It's often held up as lazy, but it's also a classic because it works. You need villains somehow in most campaigns, and grave-robbing, civilian-murdering necromancers trying to raise an undead army are an easy and convenient choice.
It's certainly possible to create a setting where undead are neutral and seen as tools rather than monsters - see Eberron and the nation of Karrnath for exactly the canonical example of "Undead are part of society" thing you're looking for, though Karrnath's decision to use undead as labor and military units is recent enough that the nation's still a little unsettled over it. But it's the sort of thing you have to explain to players either ahead of time during Session Zero, or right away when they encounter these neutral undead. Elsewise the tropes of Evil Undead are so ingrained that they're liable to make a mistake through not understanding your setting.
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Take a look at Karnath in Eberron
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Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Conflating every spell that's classified as necromancy with the practice of creating the undead is a mistake. Yes creating undead is a popular association IRL and many game worlds with what necromancy is, but Life Domain clerics using resurrection aren't thought to be necromancers. There's no "moral weight" to any of the schools of magic, so necromancy isn't being deprived out of some sort of moral policing of the game design.
"Good and Evil are culturally, and often personally, subjective.." "well, that's just your opinion, man" as Walter would say, and it's all your left with if you adhere to that proposition. But I kid. Literally sophomoric assertions of morality aside, (everyone stops with Nietzsche at the title and chapter headings and no one reads the century of subsequent philosophy, anthropology, theology etc, the actual thoughts beyond quips that acknowledge human social moral constructs and personal myth making but also doesn't ever fully discount that wickedness and benevolence are a bit more than flavors of cultural or individual tastes), in game seriousness, the morality of a game world is arbitrated by the DM and ideally the contributions of the players ... but really you are playing a game where good and evil are de facto elemental forces. Like if you look at how the cosmology works, the physical elements are contained inside the structure of good and evil and law and chaos. But you're right, the cosmology is only one way to organize a game universe and you can do what you want.
So yeah, you can use "cultural relativism" to pretty much rewrite any "moral" aspect of the D&D default. Karnath is a published example. Utility necromancy isn't a heavy lift in that there's nothing mechanical preventing a DM or player from going that route if the world allows it. It's just so much of the lore or D&D mythos (Vecna, Orcus, etc.) are so tied into the "reanimation of corpses or remains = bad" thing, probably because so many IRL cultures have a taboo against desecration of human remains, even things like organ harvesting or cadaver donation strike some cultural and personal comfort zone nerves, or at least gives pause (I'm not in that camp but I'm nevertheless aware it exists).
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I think you're looking at this from the wrong direction. If you list out every spell you can think of and then apply schools to them, you're not going to get equal numbers of spells in each school. Evocation has so many because there are many spells with the same purpose - dealing damage - that vary slightly in damage type and dice. Necromancy is fairly focused in scope and purpose and the spell list reflects that.
If you had a bunch of ideas for Necromancy/Divination/Illusion spells that brought something new to the game, that's a valid complaint. But inflating spell counts in order to prevent any appearance of developer bias is probably not a great design choice.
I think prepared modules are going to tend to play towards popular tropes like the evil necromancer, but purely as a character option I think necromancy is presented fairly neutrally. It certainly doesn't require you to be evil.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Necromancy IRL pertains mostly to communicating with the dead, but for the fantasy genre in general and D&D in particular necromancy deals with creating and controlling undead as well as manipulating negative energy. Resurrection magic is life-aspected, not death (or undeath),so shouldn't be considered necromancy IMO. As such, necromancy does have a fairly strong connotation of evil (and a lesser one of chaos). You could certainly reflavor certain types of necromancy if you wanted to, scrub the things that make them evil, but as is? Definitely justifiable to label the whole practice evil.
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Circle of Spores druid also has a strong necromantic theme to it, including an animate dead feature (Fungal Infestation) at 6th level, and there's nothing inherently "evil" about it
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Well, Necromancy IRL does technically pertain to those, but not quite the way most of us have been lead to believe. Extra Credits did a great video on the Zombie recently which covers 3 different approaches IRL the Zombie has been taken, all in the context of the region the term is mostly believed to have originated from. Also IRL, in Chinese culture the practice of Geomancy was used as a way to commune with the recently deceased and find the place their spirit felt would be the best place to be buried before it officially passed on to the next world. Come to think of it, why aren't Geomancers a thing in D&D? You could break them up into a few different subclasses in 5E. Probably the best fit for a Chinese Geomancer would be the Grave Cleric, but only if there was a way to give Clerics more earth-based spells. There are a surprisingly low number of earth-based spells in the current game, and most of them go to arcane spellcasters, Clerics and Druids and have annoyingly/surprisingly very few earth-based spells, even though they probably have the most reason to have them within the confines of certain archetypes and subclasses.
D&D's history with Necromancy has been subject to a lot of back and forth. Prior to 3rd Edition, Necromancy was the magic of both life and death energy and thus all healing and resurrection spells fell into the Necromancy sphere. Until 4th Edition, when the rules for creatures with ability scores of zero got removed, zombies and skeletons were completely mindless beings that just obeyed their creator and otherwise didn't do much. For all that Animate Dead was "evil", there were less ethical concerns about animating a zombie than about creating a golem.
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"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
My main problem is a 150 GP opal to create each undead. So unless you have a Monty Haul DM, you not going to field an army of undead. Maybe a good size platoon. And a dm can ALWAYS change the culture/alignment of undead, so why bother wanting it changed offically?
No Gaming is Better than Bad Gaming.
That is a good idea for a homebrew subclass, actually... I could even see bringing in Galder's Tower and/or Tiny Hut (with a feng shui flavor) in addition to the earth spells
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
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Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
NPC: Who will help me avenge the death of my brother?
Fighter: You have my sword,
Archer: And my bow,
Necromancer: And your brother!
One of the biggest potential issues here can be consent and ownership. Consent, certainly where a soul is/is considered to be involved, could be an issue. Ownership, if it's not your 'brother', similarly.
Other evocative issues might arise at the idea of seeing the body of old Mr Gibbons degrade gradually while its performing duties of while it's hacked to bits. Some, depending on values, may find this distasteful and this may be especially true if there was some sort of spiritual consequence to raising the dead or that, at least, people believed in this consequence. In other situations people might find raising the dead to be entirely positive and to be a good use of resources.
Eberon fandom says that "a series of plagues and famines left Karrnath short on troops, forcing Karrnath to turn to creating undead soldiers". Others may know more than me about any implications or otherwise of these actions.
Even if a DMs world had a background where 'souls' were generally affected by necromancy, it might still be possible for phenomena to develop in areas to buck this trend. Perhaps a necromancer developed an artefact that permitted the bodies of the dead to be raised without souls being affected. Perhaps souls could participate by choice and by consent.
Generally D&D liches are evil while vampires drink blood. One High Rollers storyline had a lich doctor and Buffy had Angel. The Addams family weren't so terrible. There might be a range of possibilities.
One abundantly clear implication is that they wouldn't have done this if they hadn't felt they had no other options left. That does inform us about how this was perceived, and "it's fine really, nothing wrong with this in any way" isn't that.
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The book also states, however, that many of Karrnath's citizens are proud of their nation and their way of life for being hard and pragmatic enough top make a difficult decision like that. They see Karrnath's undead soldiery as proof of the nation's resolve and the superiority of the Karrnathi way of life. So while it's not a perfect example, it's also not a terrible one.
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If someone is convicted of a crime they could be sentenced to death and their assets could be seized.
In d&d those assets can extend to body and soul.
In lotr a curse remained with the army of the dead until they sided with Aragorn.
Yes, in some contexts, it might be considered unjust to bring some people into undeath.
In other instances, it might be considered an eloquent route to justice.
Community service is unpaid work performed by a person or group of people for the benefit and betterment of their community without any form of compensation.[1] Community service can be distinct from volunteering, since it is not always performed on a voluntary basis and may be compulsory per situation. ...
I could easily see undeath fitting with this! :D
Reanimation of a body that does something to it without returning full mental control to the body's owner and/or without the intention of the body's owner being undeniably glad of the outcome within all possible consideration = doing something to someone's body without their consent, and is thereby irrevocably an evil act. There's a reason you have to register as an organ donor, and doctors will still check with your family if your organs can be used. Societally, saying "you cannot use somebody else's body for your own purposes without their explicit consent" is something that is typically viewed as strictly not OK.
Anything that dominates the mind of an intelligent, non-hostile humanoid being and involves giving them commands outside of a combat situation = slavery. Slavery = evil. Using Dominate Person to control an NPC's mind so that they give you things for free, or forcing them to do things they wouldn't choose, should be considered evil.
You have a point about skeletons, and zombies that don't hunger for flesh. A skeleton is a sad, mind-controlled slave. If the skeleton can think, then the one that created it is evil. The zombie, if it's trying to eat brains, will be considered evil but is more like an animal. Creating them would be considered evil.
Necromancy is often considered evil because undeath is a perversion of life, and the classic methods of achieving it involve taking things - blood, a soul, flesh - from another living being. There are few paths leading to unlife that don't involve the darkest of practices.
If you want to reshape morality where consent doesn't matter when it comes to the dead then that's for you to go with, but I wouldn't expect it from an official source.
This is true. I'm just saying though, the end justifying the means doesn't really make the means not evil/chaotic/frowned upon.
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A skeleton is not sentient and is no more a "slave" than an animated (not awakened) mannequin or toy, no matter how much it might vaguely look like a person
For that matter, the issue of 'consent' with regard to dead bodies, at least in the real world, has very little to do with morality and a lot more to do with societal customs and taboos. Dead people can't give or withhold consent. If you want to develop some fantasy philosophy where the possibility of resurrection extends concepts like consent past death, though, then knock yourself out. Have your adventurers carry around DNR (Do Not Revivify) cards or something
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Lol. No, not if you don't ask. Different world systems may develop different systems of lore regarding potential associations between body and, if there is such a thing, soul.
edit: RAW, "An animated skeleton retains no connection to its past"
Consent is automatically withheld if not given. That has nothing to do with taboo or custom, it's just a fact. If you think otherwise, then you think there's a grey area, and there isn't. It's cut and dried, black and white, fact.
Someone is asleep? Unconscious? Dead? They can't consent. This is a fact. This is why we have organ donor cards. This is why we have wills, because once we're dead, we do not give consent to anything.
In a fantasy society where necromancy was common knowledge, I can imagine a fascistic society where people proudly carried "I consent to be raised as a skeleton, for the glory of Dark Lord Necrothi." The spell Resurrection specifically includes a caveat that the resurrected creature has to be willing, presumably because the game devs understand consent. As a default, we'd all assume that nobody consents to their body being used for necromantic purposes beyond death unless they're some underling saying "please master, raise me in your dark image..."