This has always been a huge pet peeve of mine with the D&D system:
Why must evil clerics be forced to be negative plane focused -- in essence infusing them with necromantic energy? Evil clerics can't spontaneously cast cure spells because they are "infused" with negative planar energy? That's silly.
Surely there are evil beings that abhore the use of anything necromantic / undead? Could not a whole tribe of some evil race follow a more natural order of life, and despise anything that upsets the natural order? Does this mean that evil is assumed to be against the natural order of things -- does this imply that being good is the natural order of things?
On that note, what about "necromantic" spells. There is nothing about these spell's effects that would seem to infer that a good aligned character would ever use them. They are vile in their nature and should only be castable by evil creatures.
Changes Requested:
#1 - Please don't pidgeon-hole those evily aligned into being "negatively plane touched". Allow an evil cleric to channel positive energy. (Evil clerics still won't have access to spells with a "good" desciptor though.)
#2 - Take all access to necromancy spells away from those clerics that channel positive energy. (Assign all necromancy spells with the "evil" descriptor).
Steven Erikson's very good series The Malazan Books of the Fallen has plenty of non-evil (or at least not automatically evil) undead. Certainly Basic D&D featured some non-evil aligned liches. Overall, I'm not a big fan of alignments to begin with and have run plenty of D&D campaigns that did not use them. In such campaigns paladins used their detect heretic and smite Church enemy powers to interesting effect.
CJ
I and a few others tried convincing everyone that necromancy itself should be neutral back when Alpha 1 was released; all you need to do is flip through the current document to see how that turned out.
:P
Yet 3.5 still created the Deathless. Essentially, undead powered by positive energy.
Back in 1e, the mummy got its power from the positive energy plane. In 3.0, all undead gained power from the negative energy plane and mindless undead were typically neutral. In 3.5, most undead were made evil.
I personally like the idea of neutral undead. I do not mind that the power source is negative energy. That is fine, but not all necromancers are evil. In fact, I would love to see some new necromancy spells designed to fight undead. This would leave nercomancers in a morally grey area, which works for so many types of stories.
Back in 2e, there was a book of mini-adventures for the Forgotten Realms called Lords of Darkness. I beileve it is in the forward that the book mentions that not all undead are evil, recounting a tale of a paladin that in dead of night rode through town shouting an alarm that a warband of orcs were marching on the town. The paladin then rode out to meet the orcs as the town readied its defenses. When dawn rose and the battle was over, the townsfolk were horrorfied to see the paladin sported ancient death wounds. The paladin, seeing their horror, silently mounted his ghostly steed and rode away.
My guess is that it is linked to Judeo-Christian mysticism, particularly as it pertains to the Kabbalah and the "Tree of Life". After having read Fiendish Codex I & II, either James and company used this as a model or just happened to tap into a similar vein of inspiration.
To use one possible cosmology as an example...
Lucifer falls after trying to sieze The Throne. Cut off from divine power, the fallen angels must instead try to sieze what power they can thru corruption or theft. If the Tree of Life represents the upper/inner planes then they are a conduit for transfering energy from The Source to the material plane. Thus, if You were a fallen angel, You'd either try to steal or divert some of that power for Yourself (probably while it is enroute) and store it away for when You need it.
Since mono-poles don't exist in physics, it's not a stretch to imagine that this mirrors metaphysics. Much like magnetic poles have a positive and negative pole, the Multiverse has positive and negative energy planes. If the benevolent Creator is at the positive pole, then the deposed evil-doers would be at the negative. It would not make sense for the good deities that control positive energy to allow the evil ones to use it anymore than they would condone their good followers from trying to use negative energy.
Of course, if someone had access to an artifact that was a direct conduit to divine power (like Gandalf or Saruman's staves) then it's merely a Use Magic Device check to fake the alignment restriction to activate it...
On that note, what about "necromantic" spells. There is nothing about these spell's effects that would seem to infer that a good aligned character would ever use them. They are vile in their nature and should only be castable by evil creatures.
My two cents: there's nothing inherently wrong with many necromantic spells, but animating the dead (i.e. performing an indignity upon a corpse) ranks somewhere between necrophilia and cannibalism in terms of social acceptance.
I agree that negative energy should not be seen as inherriantly evil even ifthe energies of death and entropy are more useful to evil characters than to good. Also, and I may be wrong on this, didn't the 3e manual of the planes state that the negative and positive planes where neutral? I thought the idea was that they where like the elemental planes neither inherriantly good or evil just a source of energy. I kind of like that approach to the whole positive/negative energy issue.
It's linked to evil because that is part of the D&D cosmology. There are absolutes of "good" and "evil" - they are not (wholly) philosopical concepts. And so the positive plane/energy exemplifies "good" while the negative plane/energy exemplifies "evil". A lot of abilites and game concepts are built on this foundation; e.g. Turning Undead. If the undead wouldn't be aligned to a specific energy then there could not exist an energy that is in opposition to achieve the "turning effect".
No, the Positive Energy Plane is not "Good"-aligned, just as the Negative Energy Plane isn't "Evil"-aligned. Just like the Elemental Planes, neither one is even weakly aligned to an alignment.
Positive energy is life and growth, and too much of it is bad (cancer, for instance). Negative energy is death and decay, but is necessary to clear out organic things from the world that no longer need to be there.
I much prefer AD&D 2e's depiction of Necromancy over the 3E version. Necromancy wasn't inherently Evil, just unpleasant and often icky for people. All the Cure Wounds spells were Necromancy spells, and you could actually have an undead-hating, Good-aligned Necromancer without gimping yourself in Necromancy school spells.
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There's a city in the Scarred Lands controlled by neutral necromancers. Works beautifully.Hollowfaust: City of Necromancers, by Sword and Sorcery. Available as pdf.
I own this book and loved it and have to heartily recommend it. The city "recruits" its armies from the dead and uses them to protect its vast library and living residents. Basically the concept that protect the living, the dead have more use than just "taking up space."
I'm seeing two topics of discussion here, one is about positive/negative energy, the other is about necromancy.
Now, should necromancy be evil? Not especially, if necromancy is basically manipulating the powers of life and death. Erm... however, there are certain necromatic acts that *are* evil. Bringing more undead into the world is an evil use of your necromancy. There are evil uses for enchantment; Casting Dominate Person on a low level commoner and having them be your personal slave, or walk in front of you in the dungeon to set off traps, is unquestionably evil. Killing with your sword is not evil, murdering innocents is evil. Like these examples, necromancy itself is not evil, it is what you do with necromancy. Necromancy spells do tend to toe the line a bit more though, and some things (like creating undead) are so evil as to be generally unjustifiable as good, even when it is intended for good consequences; such spells typically have the [Evil] descriptor.
But about positive/negative energy, I guess I'll defend the current system. You are correct in saying that positive energy is not Good alligned, and negative energy is not necessarily evil alligned. If I am facing off agaisnst an evil lord, casting Harm on him is no more evil than the fighter hitting him with a sword, just two different ways of dealing damage to bring him down. Again, *however*, some uses of negative energy are unforgiveable from the Good allignment standpoint. Creating undead is bringing evil into the world willingly. This is evil.
Negative energy is kind of like the preferred tool of evil, where positive energy is the preferred tool of good. By themselves, they're each just tools of course... And of course you have the guys in each allignment who try to use each other's tools, but they're the exception rather than the rule, and there's got to be a rule for those guys to stand out and be cool for it.
Now I want a positive-energy using Necromancer who uses a positive-energy fueled versions of the Necrotic Cyst and related spells to give people cancer and malevolent tumors. *insert evil grin here*
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Now I want a positive-energy using Necromancer who uses a positive-energy fueled versions of the Necrotic Cyst and related spells to give people cancer and malevolent tumors. *insert evil grin here*
You would love Ragnorra from the Elder Evils sourcebook.
There has to be a "make people overload and explode with positive energy" spell out there somewhere though.
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Inner planes have nothing to do with alignment. They can't. You can't even access the outer planes from the inner planes directly.
So what about the Demiplane of Dread? It's not in the Outer Planes and it's all about Evil. The ethereal isn't aligned in and of itself but that doesn't mean alignment plays no part in it's confines. How about the battle betweeen the Princes of Elemental Good and Evil? The City of Brass is most assuredly an evil place ruled by the Lawful Evil Efreet.
Undead 99% of the time should be evil. They're icky and want to destroy life... that puts them in the Bad column by my reckoning. Negative energy in a D&D setting is linked to evil creatures and gods. The worldview of the typical denizen of a fantasy setting isn't so cosmopolitan as our modern worldviews. You start throwing out negative channeling and the villagers will want to bust out the torches and pitchforks.
It's linked to evil because that is part of the D&D cosmology. There are absolutes of "good" and "evil" - they are not (wholly) philosopical concepts. And so the positive plane/energy exemplifies "good" while the negative plane/energy exemplifies "evil".
I must step in here.
Negative and Positive energy, and their associated energy planes, are not in any way associated with Good or Evil. They're natural forces as cosmologically divorced from the concepts of manifest Alignment as you can get. Frankly the positive energy plane is more hostile than the negative energy plane (negative certainly has more population amid the devouring sterility, as opposed to positive's soul-incinerating furnace).
The -only- reason that positive is portrayed as 'good' and negative as 'bad' is perspective. An intelligent creature "living" via negative energy would certainly reverse the tags and be just as correct in their own particular bias. Xeg-Yi and Xag-Ya are both living beings composed of their respective energy types, and guess what? Neither of them has a good or evil alignment. The evil undead that dwell in the negative energy plane aren't even native to that plane, they're immigrants by design or accident. The natives of the plane that I can think of like the energons, trillochs, etc they're all true neutral.
Add my voice to those who want a more nuanced view of necromancy and undead in D&D (as well as moving the healing spells to necromancy from blasted conjuration) Undead exist as part of the D & D world and there are normally occurring creatures in the world and the Inner Planes are not linked to alignment within the great wheel cosmology. 3.0 wisely made mindless undead, like mindless constructs and vermin neutral. Now the lemure devils are mindless and LE but they were spawned directly from an aligned plane and carry the residual taint of that planes inherent alignment. Also a ghost, lich, mummy, swordwraith, or many other sorts of undead would be pefectly willing to live as hermits potentially even acting as paragons of virtue and should not have any alignment restrictions placed on them. Energy draining undead might need to feed on the living so it would be unlikely they could maintain a good alignment for long but neutral would remain possible. As always however, TETO
Negative energy is only mostly associated with evil gods. Undead, being more susceptible to control and command than the living by way of negative energy, make useful pawns against the living, and so the evil gods utilize that fact.
I have never been of the perspective that all undead are evil, and the fact that it is impossible to approach necromancy in Pathfinder with a reverence for life and a respect for the dead does bother me greatly. Mediums are literal necromancers, I would note ("necromancy", as a term, technically means communication with the dead and/or divination by way of the dead). Ghosts are undead. Neither are painted as evil. Indeed, many revenants in mythology and in D&D are righteous persons who happen to be dead.
And in core D&D, it's entirely possible to play a good cleric and rebuke undead (channel negative). Wasn't it Wee Jas who was a Lawful Neutral god who granted her worshippers Rebuke, regardless of their alignment? There's definite case history to prove the good/positive evil/negative dichotomy is not absolute.
Fixed it for you and I agree with your comments
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Inner planes have nothing to do with alignment. They can't. You can't even access the outer planes from the inner planes directly.So what about the Demiplane of Dread? It's not in the Outer Planes and it's all about Evil. The ethereal isn't aligned in and of itself but that doesn't mean alignment plays no part in it's confines. How about the battle betweeen the Princes of Elemental Good and Evil? The City of Brass is most assuredly an evil place ruled by the Lawful Evil Efreet.
Undead 99% of the time should be evil. They're icky and want to destroy life... that puts them in the Bad column by my reckoning. Negative energy in a D&D setting is linked to evil creatures and gods. The worldview of the typical denizen of a fantasy setting isn't so cosmopolitan as our modern worldviews. You start throwing out negative channeling and the villagers will want to bust out the torches and pitchforks.
Demiplanes don't fall strictly into the inner/outer dichotomy and are often found on transitive planes AND specifically note alignment characteristics associated with them. Energy and elemental planes don't have alignment affinities by the written text.
Actually the genies alignment range always bugged me a little. Efreet LE, Marids CN, Djinn CG, Dao NE? It should move the Efreet to LN and Djinn to NG or make all genies N, but that's my view, since genies don't seem to have reasons for strong alignment ties. YMMV
The city of Brass has LE traits due to the pervasiveness of the presence of LE from the Efreet, but again see genie alignment thought above. YMMV, TETO
Creatinbg undead would not necessarily be an evil act depending on the material used, agreements related to that material and intentions regarding the purpose of the undead. Save the true evil for fiends.
I actually like the idea of deathless as well due to the equal but opposite nature of positive/negative and both seem capable of providing animation.
Actually, one other point: the positive enrgy plane is MAJOR positive dominant mostly which will literally rip a living being to shreds with the infusion of positive energy it is receiving. Certainly not good even by the game designers perspectives.
However, as always YMMV and TETO
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By default undead are seen as evil and really most of them should be. Ghosts, certain mummies, and the rare guardian undead could well be neutral. However from the point of view of most humans (who are the majority default race in most settings) skeletons and zombies are evil. The mindless undead may just be tools to the apathetic but those corpses were once someone's mother or father, spouse or child. The act of reanimating a corpse should always be evil. The same should be said of creating a Flesh Golem though.
I think that mindless undead should be neutral and their actions swayed by thier controller.
As far as evil necromancy? I think that anyone who creates undead against their will is evil. (I.E. a wight, a ghoul, a vampire that creates a spawn from an unwilling victim.) but I don't think that turning yourself into a lich should be an automatic evil act. I think motivation is important in free will undead.
I'm not saying that some people (or even most people) in a campaign world won't think undead are 'an evil menace that must be destroyed', but this has nothing to do with Evil. Evil and evil are different. One is an objective truth, and stuff in the outer planes is *made* out of it. The other is the bias of some ultimately subjective moral code.
Speak for yourself. There's no moral relativism in my campaign (although individual PCs and NPCs might think so); there are supernatural forces judging their every move. And there's nothing in the Core rules that suggests that that shouldn't be the case, AFAIK.
In my campaign, desecrating a corpse is an evil act and that's why Animate Dead is an [Evil] spell. Again in my campaign, zombies and skeletons are evilly aligned since they'll go around killing things if they're uncontrolled (as opposed to a flesh golem).
Now having said that, I'm not sure why Inflict Light Wounds and Bestow Curse don't have the [Evil] descriptor but Contagion and Eyebite do (for instance).
I think that mindless undead should be neutral and their actions swayed by thier controller.
And I agree with you completely on that.
Intelligent undead would be evil or not on a case by case basis. A lot of them would be, but many others would not depending on the circumstances of their creation and subsequent motivations and actions. Painting them with too broad a brush, making them evil because they're icky or different regardless of anything else, is a bit too narrow for my tastes. Plus, their animating force has nothing to do with their being evil or not. Lots of orcs kill humans and worship an evil pantheon, and they're all animated by positive energy: yet that doesn't mean that positive energy is evil.
Necromany as a whole is very much a subject of circumstance and motivation. Stealing a body against the will of the dead person or their relatives, desecrating it, and raising it as a zombie to kill people... yeah that's evil. But a corpse in a culture where the dead are just inanimate meat, giving to the state for animating and public service for the common good, or a person allowing their body to be put to use after death by necromany... that's neutral or even good. It's too simplistic and fueled by cultural (or campaign specific) bias to slap an Evil tag on the entire school of magic when gobs of exceptions exist.
It's very relative. To a creature made of ice, fire is evil and cannot be used for anything but causing pain or death. That doesn't make fire Evil in a non-relative, objective sense. It's the same thing with how negative energy (or necromancy) is viewed by the living (as in beings powered by positive energy).
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In my campaign, desecrating a corpse is an evil act and that's why Animate Dead is an [Evil] spell. Again in my campaign, zombies and skeletons are evilly aligned since they'll go around killing things if they're uncontrolled (as opposed to a flesh golem).
So animating a corpse is evil, but cutting up a dozen corpses, stitching them together and enslaving an elemental to make it move isn't. And you say there's no oral relativism in your game. ;-)
[EDIT:] Actually, the thought that there's no moral relativism in a game where the heroes kill things and take their stuff because they're from an evil race is rather fanciful to start with, IMHO.
So animating a corpse is evil, but cutting up a dozen corpses, stitching them together and enslaving an elemental to make it move isn't. And you say there's no oral relativism in your game. ;-)
I didn't say that at all. Creating a flesh golem is an evil act, because (a) you're desecrating a bunch of corpses and (b) it requires casting an [Evil] spell to create. The end result (the golem itself) isn't evil, though.
[EDIT:] Actually, the thought that there's no moral relativism in a game where the heroes kill things and take their stuff because they're from an evil race is rather fanciful to start with, IMHO.
Killing and looting for personal gain is evil, naturally, whether you call it "heroism" or "a fun Saturday night". ;-)
I agree with the initial post.
In 3P specialist wizards don't dabble in a specific school anymore... they make a choose for their life... which isn't necessarly an issue of the system...I love it. except for necromancy, which is blatantly EVIL.
Why the Hell can't I play a good necromancer who uses its power against evil without being nerfed by NOT using his really really EVIL specialist wizard powers?
Please reduce the alignment weight in core classes flavour... ;)
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My only issue is that a game with present and active dieties and strongly enforced alignments should go one way or the other, clearly and consistently.
In 3.X, the Negative and Positive Energy Planes aren't even *a little bit* alignment-directed (and yes, they even have rules for that, and neither Energy Plane is listed as 'tilted' in either direction), and the natives of those planes, the Xag-ya and Xeg-yi Energons are also completely neutral, neither good nor evil.
Channeling Negative Energy is generally limited to evil priests (or some Neutral ones, like those of Wee Jas), and channeling Positive Energy is generally associated with good (again, barring some, like St. Cuthbert). Some neutral gods don't seem to have any limit at all, and it's not clear whether or not a priest of Obad-Hai is prohibited from channeling either force.
*Some* negative energy spells are [Evil]. Others aren't. Some basically harmless spells, like Deathwatch, which would be amazingly useful in a war/triage situation for a healer, are [Evil]. Other spells that have no use other than to make people's organs explode in a shower of gore are unaligned. Fireballing a cart full of nuns and orphans is evil, but not [Evil]. Casting Deathwatch to figure out who you have to save NOW and who can wait a few minutes, thus saving lives, is gonna send you straight to hell.
Worse, there are implications that casting [Evil] spells somehow turns a neutral (or good, if a non-Divine good-aligned caster who can prepare them in the first place) evil over time. If this is the case, then, logically, [Good] spells should turn one good over time. So my neutral Necromancer who doesn't want to become susceptible to Protection from Evil or Bane (evil) effects would have to keep track.
"I cast Animate Dead today, which is 4 pts of [Evil]. I have to cast Protection from Evil four times, or Summon two Celestial Bees, for a total of 4 pts of [Good] spells to balance out... Luckily, I spent two weeks casting Protection from Evil thrice daily, so I've got forty-two pts of [Good] banked up! Well. Thirty-eight, now."
"Oh, I also used a Shout spell to start a stampede that killed a bunch of lepers, which I thought was funny, but that's just mean and I don't need to do anything to offset that, 'cause it's just [Sonic]."
Personally, I don't like alignment descriptors. If the game has enforced alignment with consequences, then the doer of naughty deeds will get whatever commeuppance fits the setting. I don't need a rule telling me that a bard who casts Protection from Chaos too many times is going to start turning lawful and lose his ability to sing, 'cause that's just silly, IMO.
But either way, it needs to be consistent. If Negative Energy is badwrongfun, then the Negative Energy Plane needs to be evil-dominant, and the Positive Energy spell needs to be good-dominant. If Negative Energy spells are [Evil], then Positive Energy spells need to be [Good], even if that means that evil clerics suddenly need all new evil-specific forms of healing magic (stealing life from other people, for instance), because they'll lose their connection to the negative energy [Evil] if they keep casting healing spells that channel positive energy [Good] through them. (Or possibly some sort of matter / antimatter thing will happen, which sounds painful...)
Either Skeletons and Zombies are mindless Int 0 critters, incapable of malice, and thus Neutral by definition (and quite capable of being ordered to do evil, or good, by whomever controls them, just as a Scorching Ray can be used to start a campfire or burn someone's face off), or they are life-hating creatures who, if not otherwise controlled, will shamble around killing people, in which case they are *not* Int 0, and they are evil to the bone (pun intended).
2e (TSR) had a very good mini-setting spread across three books called Jakandor, which featured an island-nation of 'good' Necromacers. The entire society found nothing wrong with animating the dead, and EVERYONE was re-animated after death to further serve the community (helping to do most of the manual labor). It was a strange, yet not-evil society.
Opposing them were a bunch of interlopers - a group of Norse-like barabarians who were blown off course and their ships landed upon the other side of the (very large) Island. The Barabarians had their own set of beliefs, and thought descrating the dead was one of the worst taboos.
Thats the basis for the entire campaign - the juxtaposition of those two very different peoples.
I've gone over this one a lot of times, especially back on the WotC boards. I for one have to agree with the Positive / Negative neutrality. You cannot, period, logically say one or the other is good or evil, or even that Undead or the act of creating them is inherently evil, because ultimately there is always far too many exceptions.
Even in real life, doctors of old had to rob graves to learn more about anatomy to help the living, but had to do it secretly because of the taboos of dealing with dead people. In fact, throughout history and culture things like autopsies, embalming, mummification, burial, or cremation would have offended countless people and be seen as a desecration of the body (and most of these taboos are religious based).
As positive and negative energies are just that, energies, and do not have an alignment (even their planes composed of, and the source of, their energies do not have even a faint alignment - and at least the negative energy plane is the perfect vacation sight for the beings powered by negative energy, unlike the positive plane which could actually cause you to explode like a bright star), I believe the whole positive/negative/good/evil thing should really be stopped (especially in Pathfinder). As many others have pointed out, it not only is totally screwed up in many places; and it seems that what everyone knows on the subject in "core" 3E is based on dynamically opposed views of different writers who all contributed to writing it.
I said back on the WotC boards (and noticed someone else mentioned it here), that 3.0 had it right with mindless = neutral, and if you NEEDED something to be inherently evil, then toss on the [Evil] subtype, and the [Good] subtype for the inherently good. This makes lemures have no choice-based alignment, for example, but they're still affected by things like Detect/Protection From/Smite Evil.
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In addition...
Such things totally mess up campaigns if you follow the rules (and the rules are there for a reason, and to help you, and should be respected in general). Lawful Good Paladin ghosts register as horribly evil, because the "detect evil" spell says undead are evil, for example. It makes it difficult to have "gray area" in a campaign going by the standard rules, because there is no gray area.
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For example, let's say a group of people (the majority probably) have a distaste for undead, and arson. So a cleric of fire decides to pass judgment on some poor slob and burns his barn to the ground. However, the death cleric's skeletonal servants (mindless automations), are commanded to pull people and animals from the burning building (since, well, skeletons don't have to worry about the smoke and are expendable if something falls on them). However, while each cleric has just preformed an evil and good act (harming / protecting), the death cleric cannot make a case for his beliefs because a simple "detect/smite evil" proves his methods evil regardless of intention, while [Fire] used for evil is just fire.
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In truth, mechanically there should not be any biasness towards necromancy, undead, positive, or negative energies. Stuff like that should be within the campaign, not within the system. One campaign might have a goddess of life and unlife whose followers consist of well doers who are animated by positive (living) and negative (unliving) who protect their people with animated undead (no wasting materials!); while another campaign may have countless numbers of people, churches, paladins, and clerics working to exterminate everything undead, as it is seen as abominable in their eyes.
More fun, would be to put these two in the same campaign world, which could cause a lot of interesting things to happen (especially if the two are more or less Good aligned, with differing opinions).
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My Suggestion
Give clerics the ability to CHOOSE whether they can spontaneously cast cure or inflict spells, and the type of energy they use with their channel energy ability, regardless of alignment. Why? Well, since Pathfinder has already taken some wonderful steps to make the whole "turning" thing make much more sense by making simply channel the appropriate energies, and affect living and unliving creatures appropriately, it would just allow a character to choose if they were a healer or a warrior.
Channeling negative energy for example would be great for a combat crusader-type cleric whose job was to punish the wicked, destroy the heretic, and harm their enemies, or to heal the undead (which would be perfectly righteous to do for some undead); while those who were more used to healing would be able to make use of it to healing their comrades in battle, stave off death, exalt the fallen, and destroy the heretical undead abominations (so undead-hunting warrior clerics would choose this as well).
I would even go so far as to suggest adding a feat which allowed you to channel both energy types, with the same amount of energy channels per day. That way the cleric could take a feat to give the other option for channeling energy, but it would burn through their uses just as fast or faster (for example, if you burn 3 energy channels harming your foes in combat, that's 3 energy channels not usable for healing the party).
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My two coppers.
Peace out, Game on.
I'm not saying that some people (or even most people) in a campaign world won't think undead are 'an evil menace that must be destroyed', but this has nothing to do with Evil. Evil and evil are different. One is an objective truth, and stuff in the outer planes is *made* out of it. The other is the bias of some ultimately subjective moral code.Speak for yourself. There's no moral relativism in my campaign (although individual PCs and NPCs might think so); there are supernatural forces judging their every move. And there's nothing in the Core rules that suggests that that shouldn't be the case, AFAIK.
In my campaign, desecrating a corpse is an evil act and that's why Animate Dead is an [Evil] spell. Again in my campaign, zombies and skeletons are evilly aligned since they'll go around killing things if they're uncontrolled (as opposed to a flesh golem).
Now having said that, I'm not sure why Inflict Light Wounds and Bestow Curse don't have the [Evil] descriptor but Contagion and Eyebite do (for instance).
The desecration of a corpse is relative to both the corpse and the society surrounding it. There are many social norms for treating a dead body though our world...take that ritual out of time and place and you have the desecration of a corpse. In a world where the dead can walk, the gods are visibly known, and magic is abound they could be very very different.
Also, it depends very much on the corpse as I have said...doing something disturbing to a human body is deemed as evil. Taking an animal corpse and making it into a hat and a pair of boots to wear around town has been quite acceptable for quite some time.
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I have to add my 2 coppers here and say that I never did like alignment descriptions on spells. While I love the alignment system, even if it isn't exactly true to real life (in my opinion), moral questions make the game more interesting, in my opinion. If a hero could save a town from an onslaught of orcs by raising an army of zombies from the local graveyard, should they? By automatically calling a spell "good" or "evil", so many interesting situations are simplified. I love necromancy being this icky and unpleasant "art" that is commonly used for evil, but is not evil in and of itself. Kind of like politics. :D
Um. That last comment was probably uncalled for. I apologize to any politicians on this forum.
Sadly, unless you start with the underlying physics of your game world - which can be a lot of fun, and gives a lot of structure and information for players to research and learn about, but is a great deal of work - questions like this are simply going to wind up as endless debates.
Now, the players researching the subcellular structures of a dragon and its metabolism, determining where the energy game from, and how it interacted with, and was channeled by, their physical structure to give rise to their various abilities and weaknesses, life cycle, and various other details, was a lot of fun for everyone - but that group was rather heavy on engineers and scientists. They learned a lot which helped them in many other projects later on - but the vast majority of groups will never get into that kind of detail.
If you want to analyze negative energy, and whether or not its use is necessarily evil, you need a clear definition of what negative energy is, what good and evil are, and how all of the interact with the other forces and quantities which define the structure of your game world. Just as importantly, if you want a firm answer that everyone will accept, once you have all this worked out, you’ll have to convince everyone else on the boards and on the design team that your theory is correct and covers everything.
Unfortunately, I suspect that that is not going to happen.
Which is precisely why I said it should be fixed from a mechanical standpoint to be as neutral as possible, since campaigns differ from game to game, which means the idea of something being morally sound also changes from game to game.
To make positive/negative innately neutral as an energy type, and make it so that undead and everything associated with them aren't inherently evil would in fact benefit the game as a system, and suite the widest range of people. For example, vampires might have the [Evil] subtype, as well as Ghouls, or perhaps Wights, but a Mummy or Ghost doesn't and just have standard alignments. Mindless undead could come in two forms, the standard mindless undead, and the [Evil] variety who preform murder/death/kill when uncontrolled, but may have perks (such as DR 5/Good, or +1 profane to attack and damage, for example).
This way, the morality of it is innately ambiguous within the system, but the individual campaign setting can alter the flavor of the game through campaign specific things ("hey, in this setting LIVING people are the evil ones!" - "In this setting, the undead stalk the night and devour the flesh of babies" - "Yeah, in this world there are forces of great evil, and forces of great righteousness, and some are more alive than others, either way, and some just don't care...").
Just sayin', it makes for more OPTIONS and less badwrongfun.
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Wasn't it Wee Jas who was a Lawful Neutral god who granted her worshippers Rebuke, regardless of their alignment?
It's on p 33 of the 3.5 PHB, and Wee Jas requires her Lawful Neutral worshippers to Rebuke Undead. If she has good worshippers, they would Turn Undead normally. St Cuthbert and Obad-Hai also have specific requirements (Neutral Clerics of St Cuthbert can only choose to Turn, not Rebuke and Neutral Clerics of Obad-Hai Turn, not Rebuke, although one could be an *evil* Cleric of Obad-Hai, and therefore Rebuke instead of Turn, which, combined with the Earth and Air Domains would allow a 5th level evil Cleric of Obad-Hai to have a pair of 5 HD Undead, a pair of 5 HD Air Elementals *and* a pair of 5 HD Earth Elementals under his Command! Attack, my faithful entourage!).
As for basic question, my only wish would be that whatever the choice, it be *consistent.*
*If* the use of Negative Energy is evil, the Negative Energy Plane and it's inhabitants should be evil. 'Mindless' undead could have an Int score of 1 or 2, and be malign life-hating creatures, who, in the absence of specific orders from a controlling entity, would roam around killing people indiscriminately. Even in these cases, the Deathwatch spell shouldn't be [Evil]. It isn't bringing Negative Energy into the world, defiling the dead or doing anything nasty.
*If*, on the other hand, the Negative Energy Plane and it's Xeg-Yi (or other) inhabitants is to remain an unaligned neutral plane of utterly hostile force (like the Elemental Plane of Fire, or the equally deadly *Positive Energy Plane,* for that matter), then most Negative Energy based spells should lose the [Evil] tag, and mindless undead, animated by negative energy, should be as neutral as golems, animated by elemental forces. Some spells, involving human sacrifice or whatever, could remain [Evil], but that designation would have nothing to do with what sort of energy you are throwing around, and more to do with what sort of use you are putting those energies towards.
As it currently stands, a Cleric who draws upon the completely un-aligned Negative Energy plane to use Deathwatch in a triage situation to save the most amount of people in a disaster / war situation by concentrating healing on those in most dire need of assistance first, is commiting an evil act and headed for the Pit, while a Cleric who uses Sound Burst to stampede some horses during a parade and trample a bunch of nuns and orphans is just a jerk. That's silly.
Pick one and stick with it.
If the Negative Plane is a malign place that loathes all life and corrupts everything it touches like a skein of greasy malice, that's a change to the game, but it's totally cool and would make for an interesting setting, since, logically, that means that the Positive Energy Plane is a *good* place, and that no evil Cleric will be able to tap it's forces for Healing magics, having to resort to other means to heal themselves and their allies (perhaps Necromantic 'healing' spells that draw life-energy from one target and bequeath it to another could be invented, for a game setting where Negative Energy was evil and Positive Energy was therefore equally opposed and good).
If Negative Energy is to remain unaligned and just dangerous, like Elemental Fire, as it is as of 3rd edition D&D, then mindless undead in particular need to be no more 'evil' than elementally-powered golems and the [Evil] descriptor needs to be dropped from most Negative Energy-based spells.
Either sounds cool, but either is going to require work, either to drop a bunch of [Evil] descriptors and change the alignment of Skeletons and Zombies, or to create a Necromantic / Negative Energy based set of healing spells for Evil Clerics, who will no longer be able to use [Good] Positive Energy-based healing spells.
Or you could try some strange half-breed system, where the Negative Energy Plane is [Evil], but the Positive Energy Plane remains unaligned and evil Clerics can tap all that Positive Energy they want, 'cause Positive Energy is easy like that and just rolls over for the evil Negative-Energy channelin' dudes. A 'god is dead' sort of setting where evil has won the day, the planes are tilted towards darkness and decay (perhaps the Seven Heavens are still burning...) and the lucky people escaped to places where there is still hope, like Ravenloft.