Apologies in advance as threads like tend to degenerate fairly quickly.
However I've got a different slant to discuss about Necromancy and animating the dead.
Now for the sake of this discussion, animating corpses of sentient humanoids is evil. you wouldn't want someone digging up your dead grandmother and turning her into a killing machine, its just poor form.
As far as the rules go Necromancy as a school of magic is not evil, BUT some spells in it are RAW.
Where I think there is some grey area is in what exactly your animating with negative energy. Because at the end of the day your simply charging an empty vessel with negative energy to make it go.
And lets be clear negative energy is not evil by the rules, otherwise inflict light wounds, or enervation for example would have the evil descriptor.
I think the EVIL comes from the perversion of a sentient creature into a mindless slave. esp since free will is such a big part of sentient culture.
But would a paladin really go out of thier way to cut your head off for animating a dead rat ?
Is an undead rat any more perverse to your average townfolk than a rat ?
Is animating an undead horse to ride across the country evil ?
Is there some grey area that a Necromancer could live where he might not be accepted by the wider society but is tolerated because he's not abusing any creature any more than regular people to thier living equivalents
riding a horse across the country is no more against the animals will than riding an undead horse.
a pack of undead hunting dogs vs living hunting dogs, used for the same purpose ?
Just some examples where I'm thinking you might be able to play on the edge of the darker side of Necromancy without falling into being hunted by your local paladin.
Apologies in advance as threads like tend to degenerate fairly quickly.
However I've got a different slant to discuss about Necromancy and animating the dead.
Now for the sake of this discussion, animating corpses of sentient humanoids is evil. you wouldn't want someone digging up your dead grandmother and turning her into a killing machine, its just poor form.
As far as the rules go Necromancy as a school of magic is not evil, BUT some spells in it are RAW.
Where I think there is some grey area is in what exactly your animating with negative energy. Because at the end of the day your simply charging an empty vessel with negative energy to make it go.
And lets be clear negative energy is not evil by the rules, otherwise inflict light wounds, or enervation for example would have the evil descriptor.
I think the EVIL comes from the perversion of a sentient creature into a mindless slave. esp since free will is such a big part of sentient culture.
But would a paladin really go out of thier way to cut your head off for animating a dead rat ?
Is an undead rat any more perverse to your average townfolk than a rat ?
Is animating an undead horse to ride across the country evil ?Is there some grey area that a Necromancer could live where he might not be accepted by the wider society but is tolerated because he's not abusing any creature any more than regular people to thier living equivalents
riding a horse across the country is no more against the animals will than riding an undead horse.
a pack of undead hunting dogs vs living hunting dogs, used for the same purpose ?
Just some examples where I'm thinking you might be able to play on the edge of the darker side of Necromancy without falling into being hunted by your local paladin.
I think the best spell you could possibly use for your argument is Sands of Time. Sands of Time is a necromancy spell from Ultimate Magic that functions by aging the target creature ever so slightly, causing it to take penalties as if it were older then it actually wear. That spell (as well as several other spells) bring Necromancy to its true roots, beyond all of this animate the dead nonsense; the manipulation of life energy. Imbuing the dead with false life is only one aspect of the magic, but as you pointed out, it's definitely the part that is focused on whenever people think of necormancers.
Perosnally, I have a slew of homebrewed necromancy spells that all deal with the "age altering" thing that Ultimate Magic has unleashed upon the world :O.
If it were my game:
Did you kill the animals or just dig up the corpses? If the later, not evil. Creepy? yes. Bit odd? yes. Evil? nosir. And in terms of getting beat up by a paladin, I make my NPC paladins detect evil before they kill ANYTHING. I think a slightly nutty good aligned Necromancer surrounded by dead beasts could be a lot of fun.
If it were my game:
Did you kill the animals or just dig up the corpses? If the later, not evil. Creepy? yes. Bit odd? yes. Evil? nosir. And in terms of getting beat up by a paladin, I make my NPC paladins detect evil before they kill ANYTHING. I think a slightly nutty good aligned Necromancer surrounded by dead beasts could be a lot of fun.
What If I killed a cow, ate its tasty cooked flesh for dinner and then animated its skeleton ?
In my games, I wouldn't be opposed to a good-aligned Necromancer using the corpses of evil enemies to help him defeat future evil enemies, so long as he didn't kill with the sole intention of using the corpse. Somewhat akin to fighting fire with fire. I think it would be within flavor for said Necromancer to use Planar Binding to enslave demons for the sake of doing good. In using animals though, that might raise questions as whether the bodies of the dead creatures deserve to be defiled and used for service even after death. It could get you into a lot of trouble with Druids.
I really like your idea though. It makes for a morally ambiguous and incredibly flavorful wizard.
In using animals though, that might raise questions as whether the bodies of the dead creatures deserve to be defiled and used for service even after death. It could get you into a lot of trouble with Druids.
I really like your idea though. It makes for a morally ambiguous and incredibly flavorful wizard.
Now this is the other part of the equation.
are undead less offensive or less evil to you if they're not of your race or even from your plane ?
sure to the same race they're going to take offense
for example you animate a dead dragon, if a living dragon catches you doing it your in trouble. for everyone else the threat of an undead dragon vs living dragons are about the same and they probably have little issue with morality of it vs the sheer terror of facing down a dragon in any form
If you want the very best published 'template' for a Necromancer led society with many great ideas about Necromancers who are not evil - then take a long look at 'Hollowfaust - City of Necromancers' from Swords and Sorcery.
I like the Scarred Lands Campaign World anyway, but this was one of the jewels in the crown - kind of Hogwarts meets Dark City with some unique ideas thrown in (such as Necromancers being the only judges and advocates allowed in the city....)
An excerpt from my last campaign;
"So Master Callum - I see from your statement that you deny slaying Brox of Darakeene in that tavern brawl. Having spoken to Brox since his demise, I would have to refute that comment...."
Check it out - it's pure gold.
From a neutral point of view, i think that if you paid the departed spirit its proper dues and respect, there might be no problem in animating a corpse (sentient or otherwise) to do your bidding. They have passed on to whatever afterlife is appropriate to them and the corpse is nothing more than a tool to be used. Almost a ready made golem.
It depends on the animating force. If it were an evil necromancer then i'd imagine it were a conduit to the negative elemental plane allowing evil incorporeal spirits to come thru and unleash havoc. A neutral necromancer could bring thru neutral spirits to inhabit the corpse to further the agenda of whatever neutral deities they serve.
Sure people may not like seeing their great aunt margret up and walking about, but if the necromancer had spoken to said margret's spirit and she was willing (ie. no saving throw, it either works with willing spirits or not) then no problem. They would also know that margret has gone one to her next destination and doesnt want to be revived/resurrected/reincarnated either
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Does it harm the soul or enslave it? Evil.
Does it not do anything to the soul at all? Neutral.
Does it involve working with a willing soul? Good, Neutral, or Evil depending on what's being done and why.
A good Juju oracle making wendo-spirit ghouls is less evil than a good wizard making a golem. One involves enlavement of another being, one doesn't.
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If you want the very best published 'template' for a Necromancer led society with many great ideas about Necromancers who are not evil - then take a long look at 'Hollowfaust - City of Necromancers' from Swords and Sorcery.
I like the Scarred Lands Campaign World anyway, but this was one of the jewels in the crown - kind of Hogwarts meets Dark City with some unique ideas thrown in (such as Necromancers being the only judges and advocates allowed in the city....)
An excerpt from my last campaign;
"So Master Callum - I see from your statement that you deny slaying Brox of Darakeene in that tavern brawl. Having spoken to Brox since his demise, I would have to refute that comment...."
Check it out - it's pure gold.
Jakandor is worth a look as well. It's also been lamented that Jakandor is a setting that is impossible to not ruin by running them strictly by the rules in 3rd Edition, because of the changes made to animate dead.
I like to use this analogy.
Consider your self to be a driver, and your body is a car. You drive it about and all is well. Now you sometime you dont need your car, either because you have become a pedestrian (free soul) or got your self a boat maybe. Do you let your car rot where its no use to anyone? Or do you let someone else use it? Sure if its stolen and used against your will thats an evil act. But putting it up for sale or letting a friend of a friend use it, that's no problem. After all you're on a g#@~##n boat!
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I like to use this analogy.
Consider your self to be a driver, and your body is a car. You drive it about and all is well. Now you sometime you dont need your car, either because you have become a pedestrian (free soul) or got your self a boat maybe. Do you let your car rot where its no use to anyone? Or do you let someone else use it? Sure if its stolen and used against your will thats an evil act. But putting it up for sale or letting a friend of a friend use it, that's no problem. After all you're on a g@+$+#n boat!
Angel: *elbows farmer* I got laid for the first time in that old thing.
Does it harm the soul or enslave it? Evil.
Does it not do anything to the soul at all? Neutral.
Does it involve working with a willing soul? Good, Neutral, or Evil depending on what's being done and why.
A good Juju oracle making wendo-spirit ghouls is less evil than a good wizard making a golem. One involves enlavement of another being, one doesn't.
Do animals have souls ?
if reanimating a creature without a soul does good/evil even apply ?
Do animals have souls ?
According to standard rules assumptions, yep. So do plants!
Things may vary according to homebrew settings of course.
souls or spirits ? there's a difference
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From a neutral point of view, i think that if you paid the departed spirit its proper dues and respect, there might be no problem in animating a corpse (sentient or otherwise) to do your bidding. They have passed on to whatever afterlife is appropriate to them and the corpse is nothing more than a tool to be used. Almost a ready made golem.
It depends on the animating force. If it were an evil necromancer then i'd imagine it were a conduit to the negative elemental plane allowing evil incorporeal spirits to come thru and unleash havoc. A neutral necromancer could bring thru neutral spirits to inhabit the corpse to further the agenda of whatever neutral deities they serve.
Sure people may not like seeing their great aunt margret up and walking about, but if the necromancer had spoken to said margret's spirit and she was willing (ie. no saving throw, it either works with willing spirits or not) then no problem. They would also know that margret has gone one to her next destination and doesnt want to be revived/resurrected/reincarnated either
There is a new Pathfinder base class in the up-coming Fall issue (#19) of Kobold Quarterly that might be of particular interest to this conversation ... :)
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There is a new Pathfinder base class in the up-coming Fall issue of Kobold Quarterly that might be of particular interest to this conversation ... :)From a neutral point of view, i think that if you paid the departed spirit its proper dues and respect, there might be no problem in animating a corpse (sentient or otherwise) to do your bidding. They have passed on to whatever afterlife is appropriate to them and the corpse is nothing more than a tool to be used. Almost a ready made golem.
It depends on the animating force. If it were an evil necromancer then i'd imagine it were a conduit to the negative elemental plane allowing evil incorporeal spirits to come thru and unleash havoc. A neutral necromancer could bring thru neutral spirits to inhabit the corpse to further the agenda of whatever neutral deities they serve.
Sure people may not like seeing their great aunt margret up and walking about, but if the necromancer had spoken to said margret's spirit and she was willing (ie. no saving throw, it either works with willing spirits or not) then no problem. They would also know that margret has gone one to her next destination and doesnt want to be revived/resurrected/reincarnated either
...a "white necromancer" that actually works with the dead?
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souls or spirits ? there's a differenceDo animals have souls ?
According to standard rules assumptions, yep. So do plants!
Things may vary according to homebrew settings of course.
Don't think a real distinction is made AFAIK. Plant creatures and whatnot get raised as easily as any other, and animals have a canonical afterlife in Planescape.
Look, its negative energy. Doesn't matter WHAT you do with it, its evil. Its got the big old evil descriptor written right there in brackets.
But would a paladin really go out of thier way to cut your head off for animating a dead rat ?
Depends on the paladin. Some might try to redeem you and some might decide to nip your evil in the bud before you're raising grandma.
Is an undead rat any more perverse to your average townfolk than a rat ?
YES. They see rats all the time. A walking corpose rat is just doublebad.
Is animating an undead horse to ride across the country evil ?
Yes. You added negative energy, pure, undiluted evil, into the world.
Is there some grey area that a Necromancer could live where he might not be accepted by the wider society but is tolerated because he's not abusing any creature any more than regular people to thier living equivalents
Depends on the neighbors. In geb raising a dead peasant to do your laundry is "Tuesday"
Just some examples where I'm thinking you might be able to play on the edge of the darker side of Necromancy without falling into being hunted by your local paladin.
Even IF your undead mockeries of life are just jogging through the woods minding their own business, all one peasant has to do is THINK they're being chased and the story of the wild undead hunt will have paladins lining up to smite your rear. And if you've been using enough animate dead spells they'll work.
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There is a new Pathfinder base class in the up-coming Fall issue of Kobold Quarterly that might be of particular interest to this conversation ... :)...a "white necromancer" that actually works with the dead?
Indeed! I'm really happy with the class and I'm REALLY stoked to see what folks think of it once the new issue come out!
Personally, I apply a basic rule: If you're trying to justify why a given action isn't evil, then it's evil.
Paladin fights off orcs trying to attack an orphanage. Someone says it's evil. Paladin tries to justify fighting off orcs. Paladins must be evil. O.o
I eat a hamburger. Someone implies that I'm evil. I try to justify the hamburger. I must be evil! D:
Robber breaks into the house waving a gun around, homeowner shoots the robber. Family of the robber says the homeowner is evil. Homeowner tries to justify it. Homeowner must be evil. -__-
The truth is that objective alignment is lazy and only truly works when the players are lazy and don't want to think about it. Any time you give it deep thought and try to be subjective with it, it breaks and then posters all around will flock in and ask, "Why you even playing this game!?"
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Now for the sake of this discussion, animating corpses of sentient humanoids is evil. you wouldn't want someone digging up your dead grandmother and turning her into a killing machine, its just poor form.
Worse than evil. It's stupid. Have you see the stats on a venerable human commoner? Ugh. Anyone able to cast animate dead should have a high enough Intelligence or Wisdom score to know better than to animate people. It's offensive to their relatives and mechanically suboptimal and a waste of perfectly good onyx.
Animate a riding dog. *Vastly* better stats.
If you want mechanical energy, animate oxen or warhorses. Let them die of natural causes, if you want to feel better about it. Give the meat to the hospice or the church of Sarenrae. Donate the leather to orphans and beggars. And then set those old bones to turning the millwheel for the next century, and reap the benefit of free mechanical energy, or use them to pull carriages, or even 'walk' boats along the canals (underwater, walking on the bottom of the canal, since they don't have to breath).
And lets be clear negative energy is not evil by the rules, otherwise inflict light wounds, or enervation for example would have the evil descriptor.
I think the EVIL comes from the perversion of a sentient creature into a mindless slave. esp since free will is such a big part of sentient culture.
And yet dominate person (or various other effects that violate your free will, like confusion and fear), which does *exactly* that, isn't evil.
Animate dead doesn't really do that, 'though. The sentient creature left for Heaven (or Hell) when that person became a corpse. The lights are out. Nobody's home. What happens to the meat and bones and blood has zero effect on the disposition of the soul, and maggots and bacteria and fungi 'defile' human (and other sentient) corpses *all the time,* and it doesn't yank people out of Heaven (or rescue them from Hell). The animated skeleton / zombie remains mindless, and has no trace of the alignment, memories or personality of the person that once wore that meat-suit. (As evidenced by the animated body of an Int 10 Paladin being mindless and no longer detecting as Good or Lawful, because *the Paladin isn't in there.*)
According to WotC itself, skeletons and zombies were made evil in the switch from 3.0 to 3.5 *so that Paladins could smite them.* It wasn't a decision made for balance reasons, because skeletons or zombies were so incredibly uber or overpowered. It wasn't because stuffing non-evil energy into a non-evil corpse some allows a mindless thing to become capable of malice aforethought.
*Some* settings (and individual GMs) assume that animate dead can rip souls out of heaven (or hell), and that makes it evil (apparently even if one is using it to rescue people from Hell or the Abyss, or to destroy a demon or devil or god! that was once an evil human, by causing their fiendish spirit to be torn apart and trapped in their bones, on the material plane...), but that's not what happens in Greyhawk, the Realms, Eberron, Dark Sun, Golarion, the Scarred Lands, Spelljammer, Planescape, Ghostwalk, Kalamar/Tellene or most of the other settings I've played in.
*If* that rule is the case, *and* there was some universal law or natural order that mandated that souls must remain in their final resting place undisturbed, then, logically, animating dead (and disrupting this natural order / universal law) would be a *chaotic* act, not necessarily an *evil* one.
'Cause it's not 'evil' to violate a law. It's chaotic.
Can one do great evil with necromancy? Sure. One *could* run around digging up graveyards and animating grandmothers for no sensible or effective reason. One could also run around fireballing nunneries and conjuring hound archons and making them eat succulent babies. That doesn't make evocation evil or the conjuring of good outsiders evil, just because one can do obnoxious and irrelevant things with them.
Guns don't kill people. Some people kill people, and some of them use guns.
Necromancy isn't evil. Some people are evil, and some of them use necromancy.
Look, its negative energy. Doesn't matter WHAT you do with it, its evil. Its got the big old evil descriptor written right there in brackets.Negative energy is not evil, last I heard.
But Animate Dead is.
A corpse is not simply a tool. That meat used to be a living thing before you decided to use it as a guard, beast of burden, or whatever. There seems to be something inherently evil about using someone's (or something's) corpse for your own ends.
If you animate my dead mother, my old dog, the hamster that ran away and we found under the stove, etc. - that seems kind of evil to me.
If I were a paladin I might not feel your deserved to die for it, but I woud definitely keep an eye on you.
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But Animate Dead is.Look, its negative energy. Doesn't matter WHAT you do with it, its evil. Its got the big old evil descriptor written right there in brackets.Negative energy is not evil, last I heard.
It wasn't until 3rd Edition, for silly and faulty reasons explained in Set's post above yours. Hence why that gets thrown out by a lot of folks in favor of something more reasonable and doesn't lock out a lot of character/story/setting concepts. As mentioned above, the 3rd Edition change absolutely ruins one entire setting if you shackle yourself to the rules as written.
Round 1: Circular Reasoning wins the Argument
Looks like I got to this one before Ashiel got to it.
The only thing worth adding is that it differs between settings and GM's. Personally I consider it jsut enough of a grey area (like nuclear power) that all but the most hidebound good aligned cities might make use of undead labor. Under strict regulation. With licensed necromancers.
As to what makes negative energy so bad? Primarily because you have to have skewed morals or none to begin with to use it. And it hates you. It dislikes the fact that you are alive. It wishes to fix that.
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Indeed! I'm really happy with the class and I'm REALLY stoked to see what folks think of it once the new issue come out!I think it's going to be greatly appreciated by a number of folks on the boards.
I hope so!
Like I mentioned, a LOT of work and effort and thought went into the class (and the new feats and the new spells ... :)
Good stuff. But mainly last sentence.
You mean like every other thread where there is an ancient nerd argument? :)