Raising the dead is eeevil! Bad necromancer, bad!
So I've been told over and over.
I had the awesome idea of making a necromancer that calls for the bodies of the slain to find glory once more in battle! Nope... still evil. :sadface:
There's a feat that let's you add skeletons to your summon monster (or animal?) list, is that still evil?
I would love to find a way to make a character that isn't evil but still falls along that theme of summoning the spirits of fallen warriors to fight once again for glory. Or for battle... or whatever gets their rocks off.
Any ideas?
There is the spirit walker mesmerist, he gets the ability to potentially control someone for a few rounds if they die under his stare.
Mostly third party options, or Skeleton Summoner. Summon Monster isn't an evil spell, but skeleton is still automatically evil.
What you want, if you're limited to paizo only, is either a Medium, a Speaker for the Past Shaman, Spiritualist, or Ancestors Oracle.
There's always Spiritual Weapon and Spiritual Ally to "summon" animate forces that wield weapons and fight. Easily flavored as spirits of warriors returned to fight again in a more... less corpse-y way.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Check out this feat. It lets you cast evil spells but remove the evilness. However, you do have to do some kind of evil stuff to get it.
The Dirge Bard let's you temporarily animate the dead with the power of music (or other performance), and it's not evil.
The Pathfinder Chronicler let's you "call down the legends."
We are only eligible for Paizo material.
Reading up on all the stuff linked so far, thanks everyone. :D
Would your GM be unwilling to do away with the silly "evil" element of animate dead, or are you completely locked into rules? You could consider the spiritualist or death druid.
Would your GM be unwilling to do away with the silly "evil" element of animate dead, or are you completely locked into rules? You could consider the spiritualist or death druid.
The comment was made to "Be careful lest you become hunted by the Society." So I'm thinking it's all evil.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Raising the dead is eeevil! Bad necromancer, bad!
So I've been told over and over.
I had the awesome idea of making a necromancer that calls for the bodies of the slain to find glory once more in battle! Nope... still evil. :sadface:
There's a feat that let's you add skeletons to your summon monster (or animal?) list, is that still evil?
I would love to find a way to make a character that isn't evil but still falls along that theme of summoning the spirits of fallen warriors to fight once again for glory. Or for battle... or whatever gets their rocks off.
Any ideas?
Use the Juju Oracle Mystery from City of Seven Spears and never tell your GM it got errata? (OK, tell them, but ask to use it anyway.) Originally, the Spirit Vessels ability explicitly removed the evil descriptor from spells that create undead, made mindless undead neutral and thinking undead match your alignment.
What's the "Society"? The occultist's necromantic servant focus power does not explicitly state that it evil but it might not matter if this Society would hunt you regardless. I'd suggest finding as much as you can about the "Society" as well as broader cultural attitudes towards undead, necromancy, spirits etc.
If I was your GM I'd say necromancy and animating the undead is not inherently evil so ignore anything in the rules that says otherwise. However, there would be cultures, religions, factions and individuals who would condemn what you do, potentially going as far as to hunt you.
Of course the there would be those who support you and perhaps some who initially oppose you could be convinced otherwise. I would also think it's reasonable that your character would have some idea as to what the attitudes of various factions and places would be as well as make explicit what steps you could take to conceal your minions when it's necessary.
He likely is referencing the Pathfinder Society. If he's playing on Golarion then creating undead is out-and-out evil, there's pretty much no way around it.
Possibly, though even if it is the Galorion setting the GM can still change parts of it. Rules are only suggestions after all.
I think thematically it desecrates someone's corpse. It might also trap their soul in some cases.
GM is of course welcome to change that, but that's the main issue.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
What MageHunter said.
The baseline assumption of the Golarion campaign world is that animating the corpses of the dead is an evil act, regardless of the intent of the caster.
In Golarion lore, the animation process traps a fragment of the dead person's soul into the corpse being animated. It's not enough to prevent the soul from being judged, but that soul is then incomplete on its journey through the Great Beyond. Diminishing someone else's soul in this way is evil. Animating corpses is also considered to be desecration of the dead, which is itself an evil act.
In Golarion, even mindless undead (skeletons and zombies) are hatefully jealous of the living. When not under direct command of a necromancer or evil cleric, they will seek out and attack living creatures to rend and consume their flesh, even though undead have no physical need of such sustinence. This is why even mindless undead in the game are listed as being neutral evil in alignment.
If your GM wishes to change the baseline assumptions and in-game lore of her version of the Golarion game world, then that's up to her. But if she's playing it base-line, then animating the corpses of the dead is an evil act.
That said, the necromancy school of magic is not inherently evil. There are plenty of ways to be a good necromancer in the canonical Golarion, but those ways would not include creating undead.
Check out this feat. It lets you cast evil spells but remove the evilness. However, you do have to do some kind of evil stuff to get it.
Please note that's a Story Feat, which requires GM permission and also requires the GM to write the story feat into the campaign as a whole. Many GMs don't use or allow story feats. (In general, I'm one of those.)
Also... I don't think that feat does what you think it does. Reading the feat description, the feat seems to hide the evilness from other magical effects that work on the [Evil] spell descriptor, not remove the evilness. Honestly, I would see using this feat as being more evil than not using it.
Use the Juju Oracle Mystery from City of Seven Spears and never tell your GM it got errata? (OK, tell them, but ask to use it anyway.) Originally, the Spirit Vessels ability explicitly removed the evil descriptor from spells that create undead, made mindless undead neutral and thinking undead match your alignment.
That's actually why it got errata'd: The mechanics didn't jibe with established campaign lore, and it should not have been published in its original form to begin with.
A "summoner" of "spirits" based on tossing out multiple renditions of Spiritual Weapon and then later Spiritual Ally could really be a lot of fun, especially with a 'souls of champions' flavor. The weapons and allies created by the spell are typically based on your deity, so you've got choices as to what kind of weapons and beings appear.
Spiritual Ally moves with a swift action, and Spiritual Weapon hangs on targets until you use a move action to redirect it, so you could easily have multiple "souls" in the form of allies and weapons buzzing around a battle. With metamagic, your 'spirit-warriors' can do all kinds of fun stuff - like Dazing and Toppling...