(Although when running Ravenloft, I do enforce powers checks for it because there any spells messing with the borders of life and death in such a fashion are inherently dangerous to use in that world).
My personal opinion is, that using necromantic spells is OK. Creating undead is /never/ OK.
The Charonti would disagree with you.
They'e allowed to be wrong.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
I once heard that ghosts come from being vindictive...
Say you're the kinda individual that's mostly good, in fact, lawful good. You've never hurt a fly.
Then, you come across a vendor whose giving you a particularly low deal on a very expensive item. You tell him that, while you'd love to, you just can't do it.
He tells you that its all he's got but he could really use that sword and you don't even want it. You tell him something to the tune of, "then pay what its worth and you can have it!"
While you weren't being unreasonable, He walks off angry that "all you value is money." Well, later that night he ends up getting robbed and hurt pretty badly for that meager amount. As he lie there, life flowing from his wound, he curses your name, though you are nowhere around. He shouts at how unfair the world is, and screams into silence, alone in the cold. As you hear the news the next day, you feel terrible, but, you do lead on to live a great life and raise a wonderful family. Years go by, and eventually, you pass into legend as well.
Twenty years later, a whole new road that had been built over the site where the man died sits in the warm sun. A band of adventurers are coming joyfully down it. One of them looks kind of like you and is play fighting with this ancient and powerful sword his father's father gave him in a will. He jokes about how a loser tried to buy his it off him for such a low price, he later got robbed for suggesting something so laughable! The youths giggle and joke about vendors and their often comedic lack of gold.
Suddenly, a powerful, malevolent wind is felt, and there is evil all around them. An ethereal voice calls out, "He didn't even need the money!!"
A moment later, the only thing on the road is a beautiful antique sword, and the feeling that you shouldn't cross here alone...or at all.
If you had sold the sword, maybe he would have won the duel. Maybe he wouldn't have been robbed at all. Maybe, he would have been robbed and died anyway but at least he died thinking about the thief who had taken his first real break in the world instead of the adventurer who just wanted more money.
In that situation, you aren't evil, but you did technically create a ghost.
Is that a form of non-evil creating undead necromancy?
I still type that the ethical necromancers have to be extremely cautious with their abilities and be fully aware that the majority will not accept their abilities as anything but evil. Anyone wanting to RP as an ethical necromancer will have to weigh every action carefully as necromancy is full of hidden, Wishmaster pitfalls, and a short-sighted necromancer with the best intentions will accomplish great evils regardless. Anyone wanting to RP as an ethical necromancer will have to face people - NPCs and even party members - who will refuse to accept the necromantic arts as anything but evil.
The ethical necromancer will be a hard road. If someone's willing to put in the extra effort against all the risks and negativity, it can be rewarding, but I prefer hot-headed brawler characters for a reason. I spend too much real-world time considering all angles before taking action that I just want to act without thought in-game. I'd be a terrible and unwelcomed ethical necromancer.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
Circle of spores shows a good example of this, as in, “necromancy is simply a part of the cycle, not unlike life or death”.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
All hail the great and mighty platypus.
Resisting is simply standing in front of the tide and pushing at it. Even if you endure at first, you will eventually break down. Adapting, by contrast, is turning into a fish.
-me
Rangers are not underpowered. They’re just exploration-oriented.
Actually, I had an Idea for this recently. Imagine a death cleric or necromancy wizard with the same ideals as a redemption paladin. Using the gifts you have been given by *Insert god here* you are offering evildoers one final chance at redemption before they pass on to be judged by your god. Your magic is a way to try and help them, not to rob them of their will and steal their body, but to give them a choice- Try to change their ways one final time before death, or be forever tormented by the knowledge of their previous actions...
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
Actually, I had an Idea for this recently. Imagine a death cleric or necromancy wizard with the same ideals as a redemption paladin. Using the gifts you have been given by *Insert god here* you are offering evildoers one final chance at redemption before they pass on to be judged by your god. Your magic is a way to try and help them, not to rob them of their will and steal their body, but to give them a choice- Try to change their ways one final time before death, or be forever tormented by the knowledge of their previous actions...
Like from the Elder Scrolls: the Khajiit priests of Azurah (aka Azura or, rather, a variant of Azura) in ancient Ne Quin-al (later known as Anequina, still later known as the northern part of Elsweyr). For the innocents, they would simply usher them onward into the afterlife. For the rest, they would bind spirits in undeath to pay penance for their crimes in life before allowing them to cross the Veil into the Sands beyond the Stars - Khajiiti heaven. The spirits were allowed to refuse, but they would be stuck in pitiful undeath. Their penance had to be by choice. Of course as it happens when dealing with the dead, an acolyte became corrupted by another deity's influence and destroyed the entire religion, dooming it to an unsavory reputation rather than its original holy rites. Even after the redemption of the Dark Acolyte - a feat thought to be impossible even in the ancient traditions, the reputation remained permanently tarnished.
So, it still doesn't matter if one is ethical or not. Necromancy will be faced with fear and hatred ,and the player should expect such harsh and cold welcomes once it is discovered that the player has any dealings with the dead. It is so engrained into the common cultures that few will even entertain the thought of a different kind of necromancy. Expect knee-jerk reactions without any opportunity to sway sentiments.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
Using an animated body (with the soul/spirit/consciousness/whatever completely gone and moved on properly) to fight, do labor, or really anything else is completely ethical (what you're using them for might be another matter entirely, obviously.) It isn't ethically any different than transplanting organs, in my opinion*. As for whether you need consent, I say no, because the dead person - the soul/consciousness/whatever - is gone and not using the body anymore, so it's no longer a person in any meaningful way, just material that can be put to either good, evil, or neutral use, just like any other tool or material.
Obviously anything involving enslaving souls, killing and transforming them (turning into a vampire, for example), or keeping them from moving on without their consent would be evil in nearly circumstance (literal the world will end if we don't situations notwithstanding.)
Causing necromantic damage - sucking lifeforce out of enemies in combat, for instance - I think would be exactly as ethical or unethical as causing other types of damage, depending on context and situation, assuming it's not permanent. If it is permanent, I'd lean toward unethical, but again, the situation and context would matter.
But what really interests me is how so many players see necromancy involving bodies but not souls as evil but have no ethical issues at all with spells like "charm person" or "friends" or mind reading spells or any of the other myriad spells in the game that explicitly involve violations of consent.
It feels less like players (and writers/world developers, to be honest) are working from any actual thought-out ethical framework and more like they're squicked out by the idea of necromancy due to cultural bias, their own real-world religious beliefs, or instinctual disgust, (or a combination of the three) and assume based on those feelings that it must be unethical or evil.
*I am 100% uninterested in arguing the ethics of organ donation here. This is not the place.
Nothing says your Necromancer has to actually ANIMATE bodies. They could be effective Undead Slayers, going about the lands making sure to put down Unquiet Dead. If you're playing in The World of Greyhawk, the Lawful Neutral Suel greater goddess Wee Jas has a Death aspect that would be a good fit for a mutliclass Cleric/Wizard who focuses on Necromancy.
We're running into the issue of semantics and definition in 5e.
Some assume that there's no spirit involved in reanimation. Are we certain of that? What do we know of reanimation magics?
Where's the distinction between grave-robbing valuables and taking a corpse? Who owns an expired body? The family? The estate? The local municipality? Nature? The expired person's deities? Unilateral claims of ownership of something that someone else owned prior is most often associated with theft rather than discovery. (IRL sidebar: There's a whole international, constantly-debated legal and commerce system involved with the recovery of artifacts - not remotely unilateral.)
It is not common for people to consider one who puts down undead to be a necromancer. If it was, then a fighter could be a necromancer. While it's a technicality of suppressing undead magic as a facet of necromancy, we need to define what we're considering to be necromancy. The basic definition is the manipulation of spirits and dead flesh, but given the arguments, it seems that it's far more nuanced than that.
All this, again, is excluding that how the populace views Necromancy. All arguments and reasons why an individual thinks Necromancy is ethical means nothing if the communities abhor it. Is it possible to have ethical Necromancy? Probably. Does it matter effectively? Not really.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I'm playing a character who is deeply connected to the forest. Necromancy is considered a major threat, a major evil, because it unbalances nature in significant ways and brings death to the living forest. Necromancy is the kind of plague that turns green wilderness into vast deserts of death. My character hates necromancy and necromancers with an overboard kind of passion
That's nice and all, but we're trying to figure out how one could do necromancy in an ethical way and what deities would be applicable.
We're getting caught up in what is necromancy exactly and what ethics apply toward and against it. Once that is defined, the rest should be far easier to answer.
We already know that many people will never accept it as ethical. So, we're putting that aside for now. Regardless how the rest plays out, we are well aware that this fear of necromancy will always be the end result in the 5e lore.
Another spanner in the gears is how people view ethics differently. That's unfortunately a deeper discussion than any one forum can handle. So, we're going to have to just pick something and go with it.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I think I would base ethical necromancy on real world Voudou (Voodoo, link to the britannica listing here if you want to read it: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Vodou), the TLDR of it is: Vodou is a worldview encompassing philosophy, medicine, justice, and religion. Its fundamental principle is that everything is spirit. Humans are spirits who inhabit the visible world.
Based on that you could assume that pactioners of Necromancy, regardless of Arcane or Divine magic, are part of some greater mythology. Maybe the Divine casters serve as more spiritual teachers and communers with the spirit realm. In that way the Divine casters recieve their powers from spirits or maybe a pantheon of gods related to Justice (which Voodoo is related to) and they deal out advice and govern in the name of the spirits/gods. Arcane casters serve more of a militant or judiciary wing, once the Divine casters have revealed their teaching or communications with the spirits, the Arcane casters create the laws and settle disputes. In essence, Divine Casters are the spiritual side of Necromancy, Arcane casters are the practical side.
Spells then become part of the frame work they use as governance. Animate Dead and related spells can either be used as punitive measure where by the corpse of a criminal is put to work serving the wider community in some menial capacity to show ongoing generations that justice does exist, maybe creating a "whose who" gallery of criminals raised as zombies like a museum experience. Alternatively Animate dead and related spells maybe something akin to "buying" your way into the afterlife by allowing your body to be raised as a zombie or skeleton to serve the community or army it cleanses your spirit to enable it to pass through the divine gates to the spirit realm.
Necromancy based damaging spells become more of a method of punishment, maybe using them as a test in the vein of "you have been found gulty of (insert crime), you punishment will be Sickness" A caster then casters the Ray of Sickness spell, if the criminal survives they have undergone their punishment are are free to go, if they die then it was meant to be. The more severe the crime the higher the level spell the criminal is subjected to, for instance, if someone is found guilty of attempted murder, they may be subjected to a cycle of spells where the caster uses Life Transference to heal the victim and then Vampiric touch on the convicted person to heal themselves, the cycle continues until either the victim is fully restored or convict dies.
Raise Dead, Resurrection and True Resurrection (lest we forget they are Necromancy spells) are reserved for important people, community leaders and potentially adventurers, but this is seen as a great honour and those granted such a boon can be expected to feel they owe a huge debt to those that brought them back.
A side quirk of spells is that healing spells, aside from Vampiric Touch and Life Transference, all seem to be in the Evocation school of magic, which is odd given they deal with life forces which is Necromancy's perview. Reincarnation is also outside of Necromancy being Transmutation based but this would enable Druidic practioners, notably the Circle of Spores, to be used as part of the same structure of belief so you unite the Clerical/Druidic/Wizardly casters into a more unified front, each with its own part to play. Although this does only focus on the Cleric/Druid/Wizard classess, any caster could work as long as they can use some form of Necromancy magic, they just a slightly mor niche role to play.
If your character believes that souls passed on to the afterlife leaving an empty shell behind, then why not? To them, a corpse would be no more sacred than a wardrobe.
If we're only talking the Necromancy school as a whole, the question isn't an issue. Spells have effects, good or evil depends on how you use them. The big exceptions to this, imo, are Animate Dead and Create Undead. The PHB itself notes that raising undead is not a Good act, and the descriptions for the various creatures you can create make it very clear they have an innate drive to destroy the living. They are not neutral tools, they're actively malicious forces you're holding the leash to, and if that leash slips they'll go on a spree without a moment's hesitation.
I saw people equating the dead as empty vessels. So... what's filling them?
That question ignores who owns the corpse, though it could easily traumatize family members seeing dear old dad walking around under someone else's control.
Who can explain what is inhabiting the puppet?
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Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
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Agreed about the powers checks.
You decided to stick around. Cool 😊.
Ignore that unnecessary 'there'. Editing snarl!
They'e allowed to be wrong.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
The Knorr would agree with you.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
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Content Troubleshooting
I once heard that ghosts come from being vindictive...
Say you're the kinda individual that's mostly good, in fact, lawful good. You've never hurt a fly.
Then, you come across a vendor whose giving you a particularly low deal on a very expensive item. You tell him that, while you'd love to, you just can't do it.
He tells you that its all he's got but he could really use that sword and you don't even want it. You tell him something to the tune of, "then pay what its worth and you can have it!"
While you weren't being unreasonable, He walks off angry that "all you value is money." Well, later that night he ends up getting robbed and hurt pretty badly for that meager amount. As he lie there, life flowing from his wound, he curses your name, though you are nowhere around. He shouts at how unfair the world is, and screams into silence, alone in the cold. As you hear the news the next day, you feel terrible, but, you do lead on to live a great life and raise a wonderful family. Years go by, and eventually, you pass into legend as well.
Twenty years later, a whole new road that had been built over the site where the man died sits in the warm sun. A band of adventurers are coming joyfully down it. One of them looks kind of like you and is play fighting with this ancient and powerful sword his father's father gave him in a will. He jokes about how a loser tried to buy his it off him for such a low price, he later got robbed for suggesting something so laughable! The youths giggle and joke about vendors and their often comedic lack of gold.
Suddenly, a powerful, malevolent wind is felt, and there is evil all around them. An ethereal voice calls out, "He didn't even need the money!!"
A moment later, the only thing on the road is a beautiful antique sword, and the feeling that you shouldn't cross here alone...or at all.
If you had sold the sword, maybe he would have won the duel. Maybe he wouldn't have been robbed at all. Maybe, he would have been robbed and died anyway but at least he died thinking about the thief who had taken his first real break in the world instead of the adventurer who just wanted more money.
In that situation, you aren't evil, but you did technically create a ghost.
Is that a form of non-evil creating undead necromancy?
I still type that the ethical necromancers have to be extremely cautious with their abilities and be fully aware that the majority will not accept their abilities as anything but evil. Anyone wanting to RP as an ethical necromancer will have to weigh every action carefully as necromancy is full of hidden, Wishmaster pitfalls, and a short-sighted necromancer with the best intentions will accomplish great evils regardless. Anyone wanting to RP as an ethical necromancer will have to face people - NPCs and even party members - who will refuse to accept the necromantic arts as anything but evil.
The ethical necromancer will be a hard road. If someone's willing to put in the extra effort against all the risks and negativity, it can be rewarding, but I prefer hot-headed brawler characters for a reason. I spend too much real-world time considering all angles before taking action that I just want to act without thought in-game. I'd be a terrible and unwelcomed ethical necromancer.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
Circle of spores shows a good example of this, as in, “necromancy is simply a part of the cycle, not unlike life or death”.
All hail the great and mighty platypus.
Resisting is simply standing in front of the tide and pushing at it. Even if you endure at first, you will eventually break down. Adapting, by contrast, is turning into a fish.
-me
Rangers are not underpowered. They’re just exploration-oriented.
My homebrew setting: https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/story-lore/94809-wakai-a-setting-inspired-by-japanese-folklore-and
This account is kinda old and I haven’t used it in a while
Yep. In some D&D worlds/cultures, the 3 stages of life are equal and natural (i.e. life, death, undeath).
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Actually, I had an Idea for this recently. Imagine a death cleric or necromancy wizard with the same ideals as a redemption paladin. Using the gifts you have been given by *Insert god here* you are offering evildoers one final chance at redemption before they pass on to be judged by your god. Your magic is a way to try and help them, not to rob them of their will and steal their body, but to give them a choice- Try to change their ways one final time before death, or be forever tormented by the knowledge of their previous actions...
“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
Like from the Elder Scrolls: the Khajiit priests of Azurah (aka Azura or, rather, a variant of Azura) in ancient Ne Quin-al (later known as Anequina, still later known as the northern part of Elsweyr). For the innocents, they would simply usher them onward into the afterlife. For the rest, they would bind spirits in undeath to pay penance for their crimes in life before allowing them to cross the Veil into the Sands beyond the Stars - Khajiiti heaven. The spirits were allowed to refuse, but they would be stuck in pitiful undeath. Their penance had to be by choice. Of course as it happens when dealing with the dead, an acolyte became corrupted by another deity's influence and destroyed the entire religion, dooming it to an unsavory reputation rather than its original holy rites. Even after the redemption of the Dark Acolyte - a feat thought to be impossible even in the ancient traditions, the reputation remained permanently tarnished.
So, it still doesn't matter if one is ethical or not. Necromancy will be faced with fear and hatred ,and the player should expect such harsh and cold welcomes once it is discovered that the player has any dealings with the dead. It is so engrained into the common cultures that few will even entertain the thought of a different kind of necromancy. Expect knee-jerk reactions without any opportunity to sway sentiments.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I think of it like this:
Using an animated body (with the soul/spirit/consciousness/whatever completely gone and moved on properly) to fight, do labor, or really anything else is completely ethical (what you're using them for might be another matter entirely, obviously.) It isn't ethically any different than transplanting organs, in my opinion*. As for whether you need consent, I say no, because the dead person - the soul/consciousness/whatever - is gone and not using the body anymore, so it's no longer a person in any meaningful way, just material that can be put to either good, evil, or neutral use, just like any other tool or material.
Obviously anything involving enslaving souls, killing and transforming them (turning into a vampire, for example), or keeping them from moving on without their consent would be evil in nearly circumstance (literal the world will end if we don't situations notwithstanding.)
Causing necromantic damage - sucking lifeforce out of enemies in combat, for instance - I think would be exactly as ethical or unethical as causing other types of damage, depending on context and situation, assuming it's not permanent. If it is permanent, I'd lean toward unethical, but again, the situation and context would matter.
But what really interests me is how so many players see necromancy involving bodies but not souls as evil but have no ethical issues at all with spells like "charm person" or "friends" or mind reading spells or any of the other myriad spells in the game that explicitly involve violations of consent.
It feels less like players (and writers/world developers, to be honest) are working from any actual thought-out ethical framework and more like they're squicked out by the idea of necromancy due to cultural bias, their own real-world religious beliefs, or instinctual disgust, (or a combination of the three) and assume based on those feelings that it must be unethical or evil.
*I am 100% uninterested in arguing the ethics of organ donation here. This is not the place.
Nothing says your Necromancer has to actually ANIMATE bodies. They could be effective Undead Slayers, going about the lands making sure to put down Unquiet Dead. If you're playing in The World of Greyhawk, the Lawful Neutral Suel greater goddess Wee Jas has a Death aspect that would be a good fit for a mutliclass Cleric/Wizard who focuses on Necromancy.
We're running into the issue of semantics and definition in 5e.
Some assume that there's no spirit involved in reanimation. Are we certain of that? What do we know of reanimation magics?
Where's the distinction between grave-robbing valuables and taking a corpse? Who owns an expired body? The family? The estate? The local municipality? Nature? The expired person's deities? Unilateral claims of ownership of something that someone else owned prior is most often associated with theft rather than discovery.
(IRL sidebar: There's a whole international, constantly-debated legal and commerce system involved with the recovery of artifacts - not remotely unilateral.)
It is not common for people to consider one who puts down undead to be a necromancer. If it was, then a fighter could be a necromancer. While it's a technicality of suppressing undead magic as a facet of necromancy, we need to define what we're considering to be necromancy. The basic definition is the manipulation of spirits and dead flesh, but given the arguments, it seems that it's far more nuanced than that.
All this, again, is excluding that how the populace views Necromancy. All arguments and reasons why an individual thinks Necromancy is ethical means nothing if the communities abhor it. Is it possible to have ethical Necromancy? Probably. Does it matter effectively? Not really.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I'm playing a character who is deeply connected to the forest. Necromancy is considered a major threat, a major evil, because it unbalances nature in significant ways and brings death to the living forest. Necromancy is the kind of plague that turns green wilderness into vast deserts of death. My character hates necromancy and necromancers with an overboard kind of passion
That's nice and all, but we're trying to figure out how one could do necromancy in an ethical way and what deities would be applicable.
We're getting caught up in what is necromancy exactly and what ethics apply toward and against it. Once that is defined, the rest should be far easier to answer.
We already know that many people will never accept it as ethical. So, we're putting that aside for now. Regardless how the rest plays out, we are well aware that this fear of necromancy will always be the end result in the 5e lore.
Another spanner in the gears is how people view ethics differently. That's unfortunately a deeper discussion than any one forum can handle. So, we're going to have to just pick something and go with it.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I think I would base ethical necromancy on real world Voudou (Voodoo, link to the britannica listing here if you want to read it: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Vodou), the TLDR of it is: Vodou is a worldview encompassing philosophy, medicine, justice, and religion. Its fundamental principle is that everything is spirit. Humans are spirits who inhabit the visible world.
Based on that you could assume that pactioners of Necromancy, regardless of Arcane or Divine magic, are part of some greater mythology. Maybe the Divine casters serve as more spiritual teachers and communers with the spirit realm. In that way the Divine casters recieve their powers from spirits or maybe a pantheon of gods related to Justice (which Voodoo is related to) and they deal out advice and govern in the name of the spirits/gods. Arcane casters serve more of a militant or judiciary wing, once the Divine casters have revealed their teaching or communications with the spirits, the Arcane casters create the laws and settle disputes. In essence, Divine Casters are the spiritual side of Necromancy, Arcane casters are the practical side.
Spells then become part of the frame work they use as governance. Animate Dead and related spells can either be used as punitive measure where by the corpse of a criminal is put to work serving the wider community in some menial capacity to show ongoing generations that justice does exist, maybe creating a "whose who" gallery of criminals raised as zombies like a museum experience. Alternatively Animate dead and related spells maybe something akin to "buying" your way into the afterlife by allowing your body to be raised as a zombie or skeleton to serve the community or army it cleanses your spirit to enable it to pass through the divine gates to the spirit realm.
Necromancy based damaging spells become more of a method of punishment, maybe using them as a test in the vein of "you have been found gulty of (insert crime), you punishment will be Sickness" A caster then casters the Ray of Sickness spell, if the criminal survives they have undergone their punishment are are free to go, if they die then it was meant to be. The more severe the crime the higher the level spell the criminal is subjected to, for instance, if someone is found guilty of attempted murder, they may be subjected to a cycle of spells where the caster uses Life Transference to heal the victim and then Vampiric touch on the convicted person to heal themselves, the cycle continues until either the victim is fully restored or convict dies.
Raise Dead, Resurrection and True Resurrection (lest we forget they are Necromancy spells) are reserved for important people, community leaders and potentially adventurers, but this is seen as a great honour and those granted such a boon can be expected to feel they owe a huge debt to those that brought them back.
A side quirk of spells is that healing spells, aside from Vampiric Touch and Life Transference, all seem to be in the Evocation school of magic, which is odd given they deal with life forces which is Necromancy's perview. Reincarnation is also outside of Necromancy being Transmutation based but this would enable Druidic practioners, notably the Circle of Spores, to be used as part of the same structure of belief so you unite the Clerical/Druidic/Wizardly casters into a more unified front, each with its own part to play. Although this does only focus on the Cleric/Druid/Wizard classess, any caster could work as long as they can use some form of Necromancy magic, they just a slightly mor niche role to play.
To close...my apologies for waflfing on a bit.
If your character believes that souls passed on to the afterlife leaving an empty shell behind, then why not? To them, a corpse would be no more sacred than a wardrobe.
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If we're only talking the Necromancy school as a whole, the question isn't an issue. Spells have effects, good or evil depends on how you use them. The big exceptions to this, imo, are Animate Dead and Create Undead. The PHB itself notes that raising undead is not a Good act, and the descriptions for the various creatures you can create make it very clear they have an innate drive to destroy the living. They are not neutral tools, they're actively malicious forces you're holding the leash to, and if that leash slips they'll go on a spree without a moment's hesitation.
I saw people equating the dead as empty vessels. So... what's filling them?
That question ignores who owns the corpse, though it could easily traumatize family members seeing dear old dad walking around under someone else's control.
Who can explain what is inhabiting the puppet?
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