Hello, so one of the obstacles everyone making a (good guy) necromancer has to deal with is how their character will function in a campaign where the practice is banned or seen as evil. So I got to thinking, what if the character had the folk hero background. Would it give the character more freedom to use necromancy where and whenever they wanted? Since he would be viewed a hero of sorts. Here is what I have so far.

Folk Hero Background - Character and other necromancers find several people beaten and bloodied by some monsters. After the monsters are dealt with the wounded are taken to their town and fully healed. Character offers to accompany group to their homes. They then proceed to spread the word about a town of benevolent necromancers.

To add flavor, the tale could include how they used their "dark art" to raise the fell monsters bodies and send them against their former allies.  Have the story say that people saw the dark magic, but being bent and used toward more noble causes than they would expect.  Embellish further and have the character refuse to raise skeletons or zombies from certain corpses (Human or Elf, or maybe a limit on only evil corpses that he/she will use)  Manipulating and bending the powers of death and undeath sounds evil but can just as easily be turned toward a good cause.

If nothing else, you can have your necromancer save bones from dinner to make their skeletons. It doesn't have to be humanoid bones.

Sorry, the first two words that popped into my head when you suggested if the Folk Hero background would give them a pass in the necromancy department was: Bill Cosby. 

No matter how great a folk hero you are, you raise Granny from the grave and townsfolk will not take it too kindly. The torches and pitchfork kind of not too kindly. 

Anyway, as others have suggested  as well as you, OP, depending on how you angle it, it might work if the DM is willing to work with you on this. 

I was thinking of having my character only animate the bodies of those who actively caused harm to himself or others. Not preforming necromancy in populated areas unless given approval. And only using it to help others. Would all of that also work? Anyways thanks for all the feedback.

Quote from alwaysmageftw >>

Folk Hero Background - Character and other necromancers find several people beaten and bloodied by some monsters. After the monsters are dealt with the wounded are taken to their town and fully healed. Character offers to accompany group to their homes. They then proceed to spread the word about a town of benevolent necromancers.

Putting on my DM's hat here... this doesn't really seem like the backstory for a Folk Hero. This just sounds more like the initial adventure for a 1st-level PC

The important part of Folk Hero is the first word, not the second. You aren't someone born into nobility or money or a powerful wizarding family or anything. You're just some lowly peasant whose heart and sense of justice led them to do the right thing when they were needed most

As such, I'd focus on two things: 1) how you got your necromantic powers , and 2) what your necromancer has in common with regular folks, and why they feel such kinship toward you

For 1), I'm guessing the character is pure School of Necromancy wizard, and not a warlock or something? If so, how did you, from a poor and undistinguished family, wind up learning magic? Did a traveling wizard spot your potential and pay your way through a fancy academy, only for you to get bullied by your rich classmates and quit in disgust, taking what you'd learned back home? Did you apprentice to some hedge wizard in the canyons near your farm? Did you mysteriously stumble upon a spellbook and discover you could understand the arcane formulae within?

For 2), think of ways you could have used your abilities to help people beyond simply "kill monster, raise monster to kill next monster, rinse and repeat". Did a curse or illness wipe out all the oxen in the village, but you were able to raise enough of them back up to allow the farmers to plow their fields and not starve? Maybe you were able to use spare the dying to help stabilize people after some natural disaster, and keep them alive long enough for someone with healing ability to arrive. Maybe the spirits of those unjustly slain told you the secrets that enabled you to overthrow the local despotic lord and allow your village to form an autonomous collective

Heck, maybe your great act(s) of heroism predate your magic and are what led you to becoming a necromancer, creating a conflict in the heads of those who looked up to you between the Hero they knew, and the slinger of "evil" magicks you have become -- even though, at heart, you are exactly the same person

First of all, thanks for the lengthy feedback. Looks like its back to the old drawing board. I'll definitely take all of this into consideration.

The first thing to remember is the following:

1. There is no official ruling that necromancy is evil.  That is merely prejudice based on non-cannon fictious tales from the real world. 
2. All the Resurrections spells from Revivify to True Resurrection are Necromancy (with the exception of Reincarnation)
3. Gentle Repose, Life Transference, Spare the Dying and False life are all clearly 'good' necromancy spells.  Vampiric Touch and Wither and Bloom are at worst neutral.

The reason why some think necro is evil is based mostly on disgust, combined with unsupported questions and suppositions about stopping souls from reaching heaven.   But those are unanswered questions in cannon.   Even in games where the DM decides to outlaw necromancy they typically do NOT do this for 'good' clerics, allowing the raise dead type spells.   This is basically the DM being prejudiced, not logical.

There is nothing in game preventing the Necro's to be the acclaimed good guys. 

Go for it.  Make it a huge city, not just a small town.

Note, if you want to go all in, think it through a bit.   Have wills and such that grant permission for animate dead, with lots of conditions.  Perhaps have low taxes on skeletons, high taxes on zombies.   Have a typical skeleton wear a specific cloth outfit with a wooden mask inscribed with certain legal information.  This lets players have the Dr. Who discovery moment when they realize all the manual labor around them is undead.   Maybe even go for the joke and have the mask look like a Cyberman.

Have the necromancers be known for the kindness.  The Great Undead University could have strict standards for admission.  Perhaps with several food undead professors (Mummies are traditionally good undead, but no reason for specters and other types not to be good.  You can even have one lone lich that is secretly evil hidden away trying to control all.

Quote from alwaysmageftw >>

First of all, thanks for the lengthy feedback. Looks like its back to the old drawing board. I'll definitely take all of this into consideration.

I do think what you had was an interesting starting point. The idea of an isolated village where necromancy is considered normal has some real possibilities in terms of how a character from there might have to adjust to the outside world

Quote from alwaysmageftw >>

Hello, so one of the obstacles everyone making a (good guy) necromancer has to deal with is how their character will function in a campaign where the practice is banned or seen as evil. So I got to thinking, what if the character had the folk hero background. Would it give the character more freedom to use necromancy where and whenever they wanted?

 That's in the category of "ask the DM" but in general no. If the DM has declared that common belief is that Necromancy=Evil, most likely it just means he won't let you take Folk Hero, because to be a folk hero there need to be a large number of common people who believe what you do is good.

This whole thing is really a 'talk to your DM' situation; depending on what his intent with setting is, your character concept might simply not be viable.

Quote from AntonSirius >> 

 

Heck, maybe your great act(s) of heroism predate your magic and are what led you to becoming a necromancer, creating a conflict in the heads of those who looked up to you between the Hero they knew, and the slinger of "evil" magicks you have become -- even though, at heart, you are exactly the same person

 *Yoink* 

A fair few of the Folk Hero personality traits suggest a character who's capable of doing some darker things. Maybe you turned to necromancy in secret, and nobody knows how you managed to win the day. Maybe you defeated an up and coming necromancer and decided you could do it better.

If you want "good necromancy in a world that only knows evil necromancy," there's other options. Maybe you discovered a forgotten formula that lets you do it in a non evil way. Maybe there's nothing evil about it anyway, just superstition. Maybe it's only circumstantially evil, like for example it's evil to raise someone who was good, or it's evil to have undead minions that aren't carefully sanitized, or it's evil to let your minions act freely because they're evil themselves. But if you avoid the bad thing, it's actually fine. Maybe there's a god who has enabled good necromancy out of necessity or something.

You really just gotta talk to your DM. There are a number of reasons necromancy might be evil, and some of them are easier to overcome than others.

If I was going to do it, I would consider something like, there are souls whose lives didn't result in a clear decision of afterlives, and you use these souls to create your undead. Evil necromancers make their minions do evil stuff and damn the souls to bad afterlives. Good necromancers do the opposite. Idk.

Okay, okay, quick idea along another path.

You are the resident hedge wizard/witch of your village, making and selling potions and small spells that help the villagers with day to day tasks. During a particularly hard year (Late frost, drought, floods etc.) many of your village were struck down by a plague , so you turned to the dark arts and resurrected the dead to help farm to feed those who survived and care for the rest who were sick and delirious. After the village recovered and realized what you had done, they chased you out of the village calling you (and rightly so) a black magician. 

If it were me, I would play such a character as a folk hero to start, but as they continue using the black magic it starts to take over. Perhaps they start convincing themselves that using it is necessary, maybe even creating situations where it is. All the while telling themselves that they really are doing the right thing raising the dead, robbing that graveyard, using evil that evil artifact, killing those people to use as wea- making sacrifices for the greater good of those you protect...

Remember that your character's background is what they did *before* they were an adventurer. So, at the time your character became a folk hero, they were not a wizard.

The question becomes, "why did a folk hero take up wizardry, and why did they choose the school of necromancy?"

And possibly, "Has becoming a necromancer changed the opinion of the folk?"

Quote from Greenstone_Walker >>

Remember that your character's background is what they did *before* they were an adventurer. So, at the time your character became a folk hero, they were not a wizard.

 It's unspecified what they were before the campaign started. Nothing says you weren't an apprentice wizard.

Quote from Greenstone_Walker >>

Remember that your character's background is what they did *before* they were an adventurer. So, at the time your character became a folk hero, they were not a wizard.

There is such a thing as a non-adventuring wizard

For that matter, there's also no discrete moment in the current rules at which one becomes a "wizard"

Quote from Mog_Dracov >>

The first thing to remember is the following:

1. There is no official ruling that necromancy is evil.  That is merely prejudice based on non-cannon fictious [sic] tales from the real world. 
2. All the Resurrections spells from Revivify to True Resurrection are Necromancy (with the exception of Reincarnation)
3. Gentle Repose, Life Transference, Spare the Dying and False life are all clearly 'good' necromancy spells.  Vampiric Touch and Wither and Bloom are at worst neutral.

The reason why some think necro is evil is based mostly on disgust, combined with unsupported questions and suppositions about stopping souls from reaching heaven.   But those are unanswered questions in cannon.   Even in games where the DM decides to outlaw necromancy they typically do NOT do this for 'good' clerics, allowing the raise dead type spells.   This is basically the DM being prejudiced, not logical.

There is nothing in game preventing the Necro's to be the acclaimed good guys. 

Go for it.  Make it a huge city, not just a small town.

Note, if you want to go all in, think it through a bit.   Have wills and such that grant permission for animate dead, with lots of conditions.  Perhaps have low taxes on skeletons, high taxes on zombies.   Have a typical skeleton wear a specific cloth outfit with a wooden mask inscribed with certain legal information.  This lets players have the Dr. Who discovery moment when they realize all the manual labor around them is undead.   Maybe even go for the joke and have the mask look like a Cyberman.

Have the necromancers be known for the kindness.  The Great Undead University could have strict standards for admission.  Perhaps with several food undead professors (Mummies are traditionally good undead, but no reason for specters and other types not to be good.  You can even have one lone lich that is secretly evil hidden away trying to control all.

(Emphasis added) 

I’d like to address your first point, for it is very misleading at best and wrong at worst. While the magical School of Necromancy is not evil in 5e, when people say “Necromancer” as a character concept, they generally mean a character that uses magic to animate and command undead, and the Player’s Handbook does in fact have something to say on that matter: in Chapter 10, “Spellcasting”, on Page 203, in the sidebar “The Schools of Magic”, under the Necromancy subheading, the second paragraph reads:

Creating undead through the use of necromancy spells such as animate dead is not a good act, and only evil casters use such spells frequently.

Therefore, it is very difficult at best to have a non-evil necromancer in 5e that captures the standard fantasy of a Necromancer player character.

Additionally, your ascription of Necromancy receiving the pitchforks-and-torches treatment as resulting from “the DM being prejudiced, not logical”, is also misleading at best. In 3.5e, the Book of Bad Latin Libris Mortis explained that animating undead through necromancy spells increased an area’s background levels of negative energy, which causes more cases of spontaneously-arising, uncontrolled, malicious undead. Meanwhile, in 5e proper, if you look at the two main Undead-making spells in the PHB, animate dead and create undead, both require the recasting of the spells on the undead under your control periodically to maintain control, and once control is lost, the spells cannot be used to regain it. There is therefore a large amount of risk in making Undead as a player character in 5e, as all that needs to happen is one slip-up or incapacitation at the wrong time, and you have created a menace to the public.

Regarding the second portion I bolded, while non-evil mummies probably is a more accurate take in terms of hewing back to ancient Egyptian practices, the Mummy and Mummy Lord in the 5e Monster Manual hew more to the Universal Studios horror movie mummies, especially those of the 1930s, and thus have a listed alignment as Lawful Evil.

There are some tropes you can reference which are necromancy related

• Ancestor worship 
• Shamans and spirit guides
• Mediums and occultists 
• Older editions also had good undead which were fueled by things like nature, willingly given energy from a town or the divine will of a good god.
• Some 5e classes also have a none evil necromancy vibe like the spirits bard and grave cleric

As for if necromancy is generally evil;  in dnd cosmology there is a metaphysical essentially evil energy called negative energy ( basically death energy) that fuels most undead as well as a general metaphysical force of  essential evil  and essentially evil factions like demons. These things are evil basically because they are the opposite of good and that is all, negative energy is the opposite of positive ect...  In other words good and evil aren't really moral positions so much as they are energy sources people tap into and teams people join.  Necromancers draw on evil energies in 5e and side with evil beings but like I said earlier in older editions there were undead who drew on different energy sources. 

Its not a very in depth idea and is very easy to work around.  Think of it like 4 elements logic, you have the fire force, the water force ect... then the life force and the death force just use a different force. 

If I had to create a good necromancer, I think I'd go the same route as Mog_Dracov suggests. Make a big deal out of having consent from those you reanimate. I'd ask the DM for access to the Speak with Dead spell and use it frequently. Always have a bunch of skeletons bundled up on your backpack. Maybe they're some of your previous companions who want to continue to fight the creatures that killed them. Maybe you've promised them to fully restore them to life one day.

Being a Folk Hero is all about reputation. If you have only ever animated corpses that gave their consent (while living or dead), and everyone knows this, their opinion of you might very well be a favourable one. Especially if you only do it to protect people, and maybe throw a quick chat with a deceased family member into the mix.

Remember that a characters class and level is not written on his forehead for all to see.

An old man wanking down the road with a staff is just an old man walking down the road with a staff. Until he does something that gives him away as something more. He could be anything from a young rogue in disguise, a fighter, a wizard of unimaginable powers or even a God looking for a good dead to reward.

Change your name and look and you can walk into a new town as someone all new. Unless your world has photo realistic wanted posters and printed ID's.

So your Necromancer could just as easily impersonate a lower level wizard by just not using necro spells in view of others. Unless someone from his past recognizes him and tells others.

You could disguise yourself pretty well without magic. Change your hair style and lighten or darken it. Change your cloths and visible equipment. Change your name. Boom all new man without any magic. If someone notices your hair is dyed just claim vanity.