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Revengeancer wrote:

One of the most common mistakes I hear from DMs is their vision of "Necromancy isn't evil it's misunderstood." Back in 3.5 Book of Vile Darkness it emphasized that creating undead is an evil action. Another one of the most common mistakes I see with DMs is that they think character alignment depends on morality rather than polarity.

Book of Vile Darkness isn't even vaguely relevant to this conversation. It isn't even the correct system.

And it's not really a "mistake" the DM is making if they're the one choosing to run necromancy or alignment that way. DMs can run these things however they like. I know for a fact a lot of DMs on these very boards (myself included) run neither necromancy nor alignment the way you're insisting is correct.

Setting canon is one thing, DM and group preference is quite another.

If you're using all the books of Pathfinder, it becomes quite obvious that alignment is an indication of polarity rather than morality. This is why the outer planes exist as they do, the cosmic extremes of each polarity. A few of the Pathfinder books have guides for point values earned by good and evil actions that can shift your polarity along the axis, and Pathfinder is a continuation of the lore from Forgotten Realms. I was citing book of Vile Darkness as being the first and most true explanation of why it's inherently evil. The spell has the evil descriptor so as per the rules you are committing an evil action by casting the spell unless you cast an atonement spell immediately after. DMs are allowed to make up whatever homebrew they want, but if you read about the nature of heaven, you'll understand why a person's individual morals are only somewhat relevant to the polarity of their soul, and it was really their actions during mortal life that mattered.

One of the most common mistakes I hear from DMs is their vision of "Necromancy isn't evil it's misunderstood." Back in 3.5 Book of Vile Darkness it emphasized that creating undead is an evil action. Another one of the most common mistakes I see with DMs is that they think character alignment depends on morality rather than polarity. Doesn't matter if you're a good person at heart, every time you animate a corpse your soul is further tainted by evil and you're polarized towards the negative energy plane. So I would imagine in most places it's illegal or at least taboo. I really like that detail about black onyx being confiscated in some cities, it would make a cool city event where adventurers are unknowingly trying to sell necromancy materials and it ends up being a clue to a local necromancer. I would also like to say that the spell animate dead is drastically OP, and if the spell is not taboo or illegal, there is no excuse for any wizard not to have a zombie dragon or 5.

There's two builds for Vader that I could imagine.

One of them is urban barbarian mixed with an aether kineticist with the "kinetic knight" archetype.

2 levels in urban barbarian for uncanny dodge, a rage power of your choosing, and the archetype's crowd control and controlled rage. The controlled rage could be used to enhance AC, stacked with crowd control for a bit of extra AC when fighting multiple enemies, or else the rage could be used to enhance CON for more damage and HP

Aether kinetic knight could get force choke with the "suffocate" wild talent, throw and lift objects with telekinesis, and absolutely dominate with a kinetic blade, which you could consider to be a lightsaber. The real icing on the cake is that kinetic knight gets a samurai's resolve.

The other build would just be a mix of barbarian and psychic. There's a lot of psychic spells that have an immediate action casting time, such as a spell that immediately grants +8 to AC, as well as the spells shield, jump, and other things that could be considered force powers.

Personally, I think the kinetic knight build is perfect. Controlled rage, crowd control, whirlwind kinetic blade with blade rush, force choke, telekinesis, samurai resolve, and to top it all off, psychic sensitivity could allow you to predict the future with a linguistics check lol.