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"Dad, we did something very bad!"
"Did you wreck the car?"
"No."
"Did you raise the dead?"
"Yes!"
"But the car's okay?"
"Uh-huh."
"All right then."
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There's no "scientific explanation"
Nor is one necessary.
Zombies and Skeletons are mindless, so I always wondered how they could be evil.
Then I realized that insects are also mindless, yet insects have behavior.
So it would make sense if Skeletons and Zombies had behavior too... evil behavior, which one could observe just by the animator not controlling (or losing control of) their animated undead.
What behavior would that be?
Up to you, really.
I personally have my zombies fulfill ye olde "shamble and kill and eat brains" trope.
My skeletons function as silent, almost robotic, serial-killer versions of their old selves; soldiers wear soldier gear and go on murderous missions against the living. Horse trainers hunt & kill horses and their owners and riders, and "train" the horse corpses. Flower shop owners break into a flower shop and use it as their slaughterhouse, making bouquet arrangements of their victims' parts.
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Look at how 95% of undead come into being. Something awfully @$&#ed up happens to someone angry/greedy/sadistic......And viola......life hating corruption of the natural order.
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Pathfinder is not 100% setting neutral.
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It's developer fiat, but I think it's potentially elucidating to explore why the developers feel that way.
The first thing that comes to mind is that there are plenty of games out there where you ponder the morality of being a vampire, or similar. Those sorts of games are invariably going to do a better job at asking interesting ethical questions about the nature of being a monster (since that's what they're about), than Pathfinder or its kin can (as these games are more focused on combat and adventure), so I don't think much is to be gained by introducing "Maybe this mummy is not a bad person" to the equation. Whatever small segment of the player base who's going to want morally complex mummies can just house rule that.
The other reason that relates to this is that things like zombies and skeletons are classic enemies in this sort of game (as an aside, I much prefer fighting the undead at low levels than conventional animals, which is something I see a lot more than I'd like). The "you hit the skeleton with your mace and it crumbles to dust" is a classic, and you want these monsters to be like popcorn: satisfying and easy to consume. At the other end of the spectrum, something like a Lich or a Vampire is supposed to be a scary archvillain, not someone who it's safe to take tea with so you can share your perspective.
I think the third reason is that by setting undead as evil, you will reduce the number of undead PCs, which a lot of people will want to play simply for cheesy reasons (you have only five attributes and tons of immunities!) which is probably for the best. Undead PCs are a strong spice, and you don't really want this to be something you can expect in any random game.
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Also, it's important to remember that not all undead are evil, just the vast majority. Off the top of my head I can think of a handful of ghosts and a Mummy who are intelligent and good/neutral aligned in published adventures.
Yep, there are exceptions to the rule :3
But they are exceptions, not the norm.
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Nnnnnooorrrrrrrmmmmmmm...
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Racism. They say undead are evil because it allows you to go full murderhobo on them without consequences.
You steal from them? Well, they are not alive, so not civil rights for them.
Torture? Who cares? They are not even sentient, right?
Murder? What? They are not even alive!
They say undead are evil because it's convenient.
RACISM!
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"Because they run on negative energy, which hurts living people."Because God says so. Think of it as a law of God, not to be questioned, not to be changed.
You seem to have forgotten that gods are fallible. Suppose you were in the distant past, and a servant of Dou-Bral. Perhaps even a Paladin. Would you question your master when he became the entity now known as Zon-Kuthon, or be corrupted alongside him?
In any case, I see little reasoning beyond bias for precluding the fate of sentients. Negative energy is provably more stable than it's counterpart, rendering all arguments pertaining to destruction moot. Using a fragment of a soul is likewise incorrect reasoning, since constructs exist that derive power from souls yet remain Neutral. Few good deities govern aspects of conventional nature, implying that if the exceptions, unnatural beings, if you will, were inherently aligned, it would be against those that exclude them. In other words, unnatural implies a predilection to Law and dare I say Good and is a label I wear proudly.
One could make an exception for mindless undead, due to a flaw in their instruction. If a necromatic process was developed to allow a skeleton or zombie inaction when confronted with a positive-affinity being instead of a compulsion to kill, I have no doubt that their alignments would match constructs in their neutrality.
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Because the devs say so is the best reason, but there are a lot of helpful side effects to undead being evil.
It makes hordes easier to deal with when the situation doesn't have a moral grey area. Killing all of the orcs is genocide because orcs are sentient, thinking, and can be reasoned with and redeemed. Orcs have culture and civilization and their own living souls. Killing all of the zombies is simply good taste as they are mindless evil meat marionettes some malevolent, Machiavellian madman made to fight for him/her.
It also helps PCs justify murdering killing villains because showing them using objectively evil practices (raising the dead) paints a big red target on their chest. Even more so if they are a lich (and killed people to become such) or a very old vampire (whose probably killed thousands over the years).
And it serves as a story deterrent for using undead, which can be a very powerful play style. Minionmancing with undead fills the field with more enemies than summoning, and it means a G! might have to consider every fight for the possibility that whatever monster is used will join the PCs as a zombie/skeleton/etc. And adding a template to a PC opens up a lot of room for imbalance. But if you mix in a strong cultural stigma backed up by objective proof that what the PC is doing is objectively wrong, carrying a miniarmy of monsters as a lich PC becomes less practical.
That said, beyond the realm of PFS play there is no reason you can't decide some, most, or all undead aren't evil. Heck, I ignore alignment almost completely for most of my home games. See The White Necromancer for ideas and possible characters dealing with good undead.
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So, let's say you want to use corpses. Recycling. A green necromancer. Well, you have two options. There is "Animate Object" and "Animate Dead". One creates a a neutral automaton, the other an evil undead.
This is a distinction in actual game mechanics. Zombies are much more than a simple animated corpse. They are a hungry corpse. They are made with anti-life.
This is why I find this discussion a bit silly. There is a lot more than implication that necromancy is more than just animating the dead. There is clearly an extra component. An extra evil component.
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Frustration and grief is another. It's how most ghosts come about. And ghosts, specifically, aren't inherently evil, despite being undead.
Honestly, the animate object method is pretty funny to use against players. What they think to be zombies are, surprise, actually constructs!
But seriously don't do that unless you can avoid the almost certain barrage of thrown dice, pencils and chips.
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I wish I could find this webcomic from many years ago (which went defunct while I was reading it, so maybe it has just disappeared) in which a really weird party forms of some characters including a non-Evil Mind Flayer, a Halfling with a serious gas problem, and a REALLY DUMB Paladin. Part way through they break into a Lich's tower, and find that the worst thing that the Lich does is reading trashy romance novels. The Paladin insists on killing the Lich, but instead accidentally removes himself from the scene (although you later seem him crawling out of the moat around the tower). The party then convinces the Lich to join them; the Lich later has a brief flashback to his murderhobo past and then remarks that he has become more moral in undeath.
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Tammy must be destroyed.Tammy can't be destroyed.
Wait til we find her phylactery... wait, the World of Golarion is her phylactery, ain't it,
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"Somebody please fill me in on what is Paizo's logic here in making all undead evil.
No.
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Pharasma doesn't like the undead, and she's the final arbiter of all morality in the Golarion universe. It's pretty much entirely due to her (sometimes unreasonable) prejudice.
That's the in-setting reason anyway. The out-of-game reason is because James Jacobs likes his undead to be near-universally evil.
That is something I have been wondering about, Pharesma is against undead because it interrupts the journey of the soul, but being the goddess of fate/prophecy she would know that it was that person's fate to become undead so there is no interruption. Plus she knows that eventually they will be destroyed and things go on as planned.
Hmm... Pharesma=Tzeneech?
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Because most of the game's themes are based on fantasy tropes, and in most media undead are evil if they are intelligent and/or the result of evil/dark/forbidden magic so they are evil in the game. Outside of Casper, and Slimer(from Ghostbusters) you won't find too many(a high percentage of) undead good guys.
That is the same reason why summoning evil outsider is evil even if you use them for a good purpose. Generally when someone calls an outsider the outsidr(demon/devil) outwits the human and makes things a lot works. That is how the "deal with devil" in media is transferred to the game by having devils be the masters of "fine print" contracts.
Because mankind has always vilified what it doesn't understand. But a few more examples, Ghost Dad (Bill Cosby), Ghost (Patrick Swayze), Frankenstein (Frankenstein's Monster), Twilight (The whole clan of Vampires the story centers around), Ghost Rider, A Christmas Carol (Marley, or multiple examples if you accept the "spirits" as actual ghosts)... I'm sure the list continues.
But as Frankenstein portrays, if you make something out to be a monster, it is very likely to become monstrous.
I won't get into the whole outsider/demon, as those are not undead...
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Note how the OP never returned to this thread.
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Note how the OP never returned to this thread.
Nothing new here, unfortunately.
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Pharasma doesn't like the undead, and she's the final arbiter of all morality in the Golarion universe. It's pretty much entirely due to her (sometimes unreasonable) prejudice.
That's the in-setting reason anyway. The out-of-game reason is because James Jacobs likes his undead to be near-universally evil.
That is something I have been wondering about, Pharesma is against undead because it interrupts the journey of the soul, but being the goddess of fate/prophecy she would know that it was that person's fate to become undead so there is no interruption. Plus she knows that eventually they will be destroyed and things go on as planned.
Hmm... Pharesma=Tzeneech?
Apparently, Urgathoa, the first undead creature ever (so much so that she became goddess of undeath) became undead by escaping from Pharasma's Boneyard.
So there's the implication that actually, becoming undead is a way of escaping fate. And going off of that idea, that each person who is devoured by a zombie or vampire should not have been and thus their normal fate was altered by undeath.
It's an interesting way of looking at it, I think.
Note how the OP never returned to this thread.
It had to be a troll. It was a useless question.
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Pharasma doesn't like the undead, and she's the final arbiter of all morality in the Golarion universe. It's pretty much entirely due to her (sometimes unreasonable) prejudice.
That's the in-setting reason anyway. The out-of-game reason is because James Jacobs likes his undead to be near-universally evil.
That is something I have been wondering about, Pharesma is against undead because it interrupts the journey of the soul, but being the goddess of fate/prophecy she would know that it was that person's fate to become undead so there is no interruption. Plus she knows that eventually they will be destroyed and things go on as planned.
Hmm... Pharesma=Tzeneech?
Apparently, Urgathoa, the first undead creature ever (so much so that she became goddess of undeath) became undead by escaping from Pharasma's Boneyard.
So there's the implication that actually, becoming undead is a way of escaping fate. And going off of that idea, that each person who is devoured by a zombie or vampire should not have been and thus their normal fate was altered by undeath.
It's an interesting way of looking at it, I think.
Pharesma: I wanted her to escape, all according to plan.
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B&~*& can't catch me, I'm off the grid!
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...their name is Albert Wesker backwards. I thought the implications were pretty clear.Note how the OP never returned to this thread.It had to be a troll. It was a useless question.
Thanks to google I now know that Albert Wesker is a character in a series of video games that I have not played.
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And isn't screwing with the laws of destiny Chaotic, not Evil?Pharasma doesn't like the undead, and she's the final arbiter of all morality in the Golarion universe. It's pretty much entirely due to her (sometimes unreasonable) prejudice.
That's the in-setting reason anyway. The out-of-game reason is because James Jacobs likes his undead to be near-universally evil.
That is something I have been wondering about, Pharesma is against undead because it interrupts the journey of the soul, but being the goddess of fate/prophecy she would know that it was that person's fate to become undead so there is no interruption. Plus she knows that eventually they will be destroyed and things go on as planned.
Hmm... Pharesma=Tzeneech?
Apparently, Urgathoa, the first undead creature ever (so much so that she became goddess of undeath) became undead by escaping from Pharasma's Boneyard.
So there's the implication that actually, becoming undead is a way of escaping fate. And going off of that idea, that each person who is devoured by a zombie or vampire should not have been and thus their normal fate was altered by undeath.
It's an interesting way of looking at it, I think.
If doing so involves murdering people to become undead and/or to keep your undeath gig going, then it probably becomes more evil than chaotic,
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Ah, I assumed it was maybe his real name.
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Heck, even intelligent undead are usually biologically incapable of coexisting with living creatures, mostly because Vampires and the like HAVE to prey upon living things to survive
Most people don't consider that evil... considering that's true of all non-autotrophic life.
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depends on which culture there is some that would tell you to starve instead if it required you to hurt a living creature. let along an intelligent creature but that is kind of moot really. This thread has just been trying to muddy the waters and throw enough sophistry to say that Evil is relative (which it is in real life argueably) but in PF its established as pretty set in stone.
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Vampires being able to nonlethally feed on animals is usually only a thing if the setting specifically allows it to be. Most of the time it's dragging someone into a dark place and then cracking them open like a red bull, which is kind of different from you and the orc family down the street both enjoying bacon for breakfast.
I have revised the Vampire template and I don't see any rule that states they have to kill anybody. Quite the opposite, their feeding just deals 1d4 CON damage. That would hardly be able to kill someone. Plus:
A vampire who refuses to feed on intelligent beings is relegated to the dull taste of animal blood out of necessity.
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
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I see it this way: unintelligent undead are preprogrammed with "kill the living" in the absence of other orders; in fact, they tend to append "kill the living" onto their other orders unless carefully monitored. So if you try to use a zombie ox to plow your fields it might end up eating the neighbor's kids while it's plowing.
Intelligent undead can be more nuanced - their alignment entry is the typical for their type, and there are likely severe instinctual pressures helping them act that way. But a determined individual can overcome it - like a vampire in Buffy or Supernatural who has learned not to drink humans to death. But those characters are one or two in the entire world, and major plot events by themselves. Average vampires are still murder machines that can be killed without remorse.
Liches are a special case because the ritual to create a phylactery is implied to be so reprehensible that they've had to cross a moral event horizon. A lich would be looking at likely centuries or millennia of atonement to try and make up for its evil.
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Racism. They say undead are evil because it allows you to go full murderhobo on them without consequences.
You steal from them? Well, they are not alive, so not civil rights for them.
Torture? Who cares? They are not even sentient, right?
Murder? What? They are not even alive!
They say undead are evil because it's convenient.
RACISM!
Undead aren't a race, per se. They're just vitally disadvantaged.
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Most people consider that extremely evil when the living things preyed upon are sapient as vampire victims tend to be, so your point only stands if you're willing to be highly pedantic about it. Vampires being able to nonlethally feed on animals is usually only a thing if the setting specifically allows it to be. Most of the time it's dragging someone into a dark place and then cracking them open like a red bull, which is kind of different from you and the orc family down the street both enjoying bacon for breakfast.Heck, even intelligent undead are usually biologically incapable of coexisting with living creatures, mostly because Vampires and the like HAVE to prey upon living things to surviveMost people don't consider that evil... considering that's true of all non-autotrophic life.
You mean because the Vampire feeds in the dark, and the pig is killed in the light? The living and the Dead are neither good nor evil, yet the Un-Living/Un-Dead are inherently Evil?
If fighting evil means that you qualify as good, then if you have an entire region inhabited solely by evil creatures. Then you introduced undead into that region, since the entire argument on undead being evil is the things they do to living creatures. Would that mean since the undead are now doing those things solely to evil creatures they become an anti-evil evil, and thus could be considered good?
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no they don't unless you are using the optional variant rules, by raw no undead needs to feed to surviveHeck, even intelligent undead are usually biologically incapable of coexisting with living creatures, mostly because Vampires and the like HAVE to prey upon living things to surviveMost people don't consider that evil... considering that's true of all non-autotrophic life.
by "RAW" nothing needs to eat to survive.