Why do you disagree? Negative energy + applied to living things or corpses = evil. It isn't a hard formula to follow. As it has been already stated negative/positive energy on their own are not inherently evil But when they come into contact with living (or dead) things the consequences are usually pretty bad. As with everything there are varying degrees
Easy formula, sure. But it's clearly not followed. Cause Critical Wounds infuses negative energy into a living creature. It can only be used to destroy life. But it's no more evil, and certainly no more [Evil] than the Fireball or the sword which can also only be used to destroy life.
It's immoral to provide animating energy with a wholly neutral, albeit volatile force, but moral to provide animating energy by enslaving and imprisoning a sentient being?
And no one advocating for 'good undead master' is suggesting digging up your mother and forcibly conscripting her bones. We're talking about animating the bones of corpses thousands of years dead in ancient tombs, or the evil, destructive monster we just killed. Hell, even the vilest necromancers out there are far more likely to animate hydras than Joe Dead Commoner.
I merely point out that death = horrific, and the only reason to animate the dead rather than, say, a wooden object is the intention to inflict horror or to be horrific.(that and the wooden object requires a 6th level spell slot and isn't permanent but sufficently talented wizards won't be worried).
Batts
You can animate a rope with a 1st level spell slot. The caster level requirements are wonky in D&D even after all these years and don't get me started on other systems. I mean, in 1st edition Mage, you needed to be a master mage to light a candle (yes, really) because all fire, no matter how small, was a Forces 5 effect, but you could make a starting character who could blow up a city via creating a Rube Goldberg device that conjured plutonium spheres or conjure deadly textile cone shell snails because your life magics could only create invertebrates but you could create any of those you desired.
But that said, there are many reasons for necromancers to be creating zombies and skeletons simply beyond being ooky and freaking the peasantry. Yes, that's certainly a motivation for some, but the fact is that human corpses are things that pile up in any civilization, especially in wartime, and it's a lot quicker and for that matter cheaper to rob a grave than to have Gepetto carve you a sufficiently intricate wooden doll with moving joints and all the rest.
And that's just the convenience factor. So far as metaphysics go, it makes a lot more sense from the standpoint of sympathetic magic to have a formerly moving body start moving again rather than trying to get a an effigy that never moved before to start moving around.
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Seriously guys, if you can't see what's wrong with laminating the bodies of the dead, I just don't know where to start with you.
SOME THINGS ARE SIMPLY NOT DONE.
Start by explaining what is Evil about animating a corpse. 'Tradition' and 'it is not proper' are not logical reasons.
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Damn internets ate my post!
at least if you follow the same logic that says Death=Evil.
I was going to refrain from commenting but I think you are perpetuating some misconceptions here KAM that you are attaching with what you quoted from me earlier.
No one said Death was evil, not in any of the posts I read.
What people were saying is that Undeath as a general concept is evil. Creating undead is evil. Perpetuating or dooming a body or soul to an existence of Undeath or seeking an state of Undeath is evil.
These are three different things, three perfectly valid motivations for monsters, but you can't dodge and say "That's up for the DM to decide" without also granting the DM the ability to decide something else: that an uncontrolled skeleton will lie inert until commanded or attacked, that an uncontrolled zombie hooker retains phantom memories of her life (cf. "Speak With Dead") and without any other direction will wander back to her old red light district, stand under her customary lamp post, beckon "enticingly" to prospective johns, and if anyone too drunk to notice that the hooker is a zombie wanders up, probably sleepwalk through a few other actions best left undescribed.
I don't agree - at least with your entire interpretation here. A DM can decide to allow a skeleton to remain inert until it turns to dust. That doesn't change the fact that the original act of creating that Undead was evil.
I think it is possible for the zombie hooker to wander back to her old red light district based on some past life memory. But she isn't just going to go through the old routine with no variation - I could see that if she was a ghost, didn't know she was dead, etc. That zombie hooker is going to start doing the deed with her drunk john and will also probably start eating him in the process - and not in a good way.
I don't have a problem with a DM saying that "right at this moment" the zombie is not causing mayhem but that doesn't change two things:
A) Making the damn thing is still evil, even if it's compelled by a player or adjudicated by the DM to just "stand around" or do some repetitive non-violent action.
B) It's gotta kill eventually. I think too many players here want the zombie/skeleton to be a baggage-free construct and innovative tool for abuse. No one here is saying that you can't undead, but deal with the consequences for the action. You should also hope when it decides to kill it doesn't kill your friends or allies during the most inappropriate time.
Seems like people here want the stats & robot use of the monster without the karmic baggage or any of the zombie lore that goes along with it - which is where the creature concept comes from.
Zombie lore: You can't control it and if somehow you do it will always turn on you. If not you (compelled by magic) it will do something inappropriate like kill the wrong person, friend, etc, because at their base they are evil undead abominations and that's what undead abominations do. They F%$^ things up.
You can re-write these tropes to remove the "creating undead is evil" aspect but it seems like that need is arising more out of a gamist convenience then anything else.
I wonder why no one who is complaining about Animate Dead being evil is bringing up anything about Unholy Blight? Oh yeah Unholy Blight sucks by comparison to Animate Dead in sheer potential or game breaking power and uses.
I think this is just another disguised Chaotic Neutral "I can be good and bad" argument. Players want to redline the rules, making whole moral justifications as to why Animate Dead is not evil is just more of the same tightrope walking.
It's immoral to provide animating energy with a wholly neutral, albeit volatile force, but moral to provide animating energy by enslaving and imprisoning a sentient being?
You are omitting the animating rotting body part. Also in the case of lesser undead and the creation of the Flesh Golem both use Animate Dead, so both are evil. I can't speak to the justification of the creation of other Golems, but I do not subscribe to logic that since those are okay/overlooked then Animate Dead should work the same way. I hear horror stories about about misuse of summoned monsters all the time. Doesn't mean that there are no moral ramifications to summoning a celestial owl and placing it in a microwave since that is not clearly delineated in the rules.
Cause critical wounds should be an evil spell, in earlier editions of D&D the reverse was only available to evil clerics and that actually made more sense. Again though, just because that is lacking the evil tag it isn't going to make me all of a sudden think that infusing a corpse with negative energy and reanimating the dead is even on the same level.
Start by explaining what is Evil about animating a corpse. 'Tradition' and 'it is not proper' are not logical reasons.
Sorry, can't ascribe logic to what amounts to both a metaphysical and moral argument.
Omg,
seems I opened Pandora's Box. :)
My intention was only to get a few opinions about a neutral/good variant of "Animate dead" ("ask your good to sent the fallen back to help you" or similar") and now it's a debate on the principles of why undeads are evil...
From my point of view: Mindless undeads are evil, undeads are evil.
Why? someone bring up the analogy with animals, which also kill and are neutral.
But Animals kill other livings not for the killing, but for various reasons (e.g. protecting their turf, children or simply food).
Mindless undead simply kill, because their inherent impulse to kill all living. And THAT IS why they are EVIL.
If an necromancer controls them and gave them orders, it's the same as with a mind-controlled human. If you're mind-controlled and wipe out a whole village, your not evil, because you didn't do it by yourself.
If you encounter a animal, you can withdrawn without a fight.
If you encounter a (mindless) undead, which isn't controlled by anyone, it will attack on sight. Why? because it's their "nature".
But back to my main reason for this post, any sugggestions/ideas for such a "good animate dead" (call it whatever you want), I find the concept of a "army of the fallen sent by your good to fight by your side" interesting.
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note spelling ;)
Yeah, I'm totally with Mikaze on this one.
Never laminate corpses. It may seem like a useful preservative measure, but it leaves them stiff, brittle and inflexible, useless for any 'animated' purpose, other than to stand in one place forever, holding cloaks or serving as a horrible conversation piece.
Use aromatic oils instead, to create both a pleasant fragrance (I'm partial to vanilla, coffee or tobacco infused scents), and keep them supple and flexible, just as you would when attempting to restore a cherished leather garment that has gotten dried out and worn.
Shellac and paint are right out.
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But back to my main reason for this post, any sugggestions/ideas for such a "good animate dead" (call it whatever you want), I find the concept of a "army of the fallen sent by your good to fight by your side" interesting.
A Horn of Valhalla, calling up einherjar or 'the souls of dead warriors,' is one example. The angels dance on the pin about calling them petitioners or souls, but they are dead people, called to earth, to fight for the living. Indeed, such celestial assistance from your diety is *more* of an 'undead' than an animated corpse, since it doesn't just use mindless energy from another plane, but is actually calling down a real, honest-to-Odin, *soul.*
Shamanistic cultures revere their ancestors, and would call upon them for advice, guidance and even assistance in the material world all the time. Some naughty people would call upon them to work mischief on others, but the spirit of Aunt Mergatroid is a *dead persons spirit,* regardless of whether you called her up to help Cousin Neaner have a healthy and safe childbirth, to bless the occasion of your marriage to Willy the Turnip Farmer, or to visit a hex upon mean old Farmer Nebbins across the way.
Ignoring real world applications of contacting and beseeching the favors of the dead, a necromancer, in D&D, is all about manipulating life-energies. While it's generally considered naughty to manipulate other people's life energies in nasty mean ways, there's no admonition about using one's own life energies.
One could develop an empathic healing spell, drawing upon their own life-energy to help another heal.
One could develop a spell that allows the necromancer to place some of their life-energies within another temporarily, giving them a boost of extra life-energy, either to act similar to false life, or to boost their strength, to stave off fatigue, etc.
To animate an object, you could project your own life-energy into the object, like a variation on magic jar, but using only a fraction of your life-energy (perhaps costing you some hit points, or even temporary Con points), and 'animating' the object.
Stuff from a previous thread on this topic;
Your best bet for an effective good necromancer is to research some necromancy spells of your own.
Necromantic energies are great at killin' stuff. Some stuff *needs* killin', such as hostile organisms, contagions and parasites. A Necromancer makes a *perfect* source of arcane cure disease, by sending a tiny flood of negative energy washing through a living person’s body, sickening them and inflicting a point of ability damage to Con, but kill all of those pesky less-than-one-hit-point diseases and parasites. (The sickness and ability damage? Well, some of the stuff killed might have been helpful gut bacteria. We takes the good with the bad...)
The same feature makes negative energy useful for sterilizing an area, for purifying tainted water, for purging foodstuffs of contagion, etc. in a magical medieval version of shooting radiation into food to kill bacteria. And there are people who will pay good money to be 'sterilized' for a short time, such as high-priced prostitutes, noble brats who want to party with the hoi-polloi without 'consequences,' etc. If you want to go with science, a flood of negative energy to kill reproductive cells would render a woman infertile until her next cycle (which, if that time is uncertain, would be in the next 2d8 days), and a man infertile for a day or two (6d8 hours?). Alternately, we can toss science out the window and have it last 30 days, regardless of gender, 'cause it's magic, and the spell is actually leaving a charge of negative energy in the person's body throughout the duration, making it a reliable and affordable form of magical birth control.
Contacting spirits of the dead, the actual original role of the 'necromancer,' could allow for a wide array of benefits. The spirits could be consulted for lore, allowing for bonuses to knowledge checks, they could be consulted for assistance in skills they have mastered, allowing a spirit-caller to possibly 'Aid Other' on skill checks of all sorts, by contacting the appropriate 'spiritual advisor,' and they could even, if made manifest, however weakly, be called upon to provide other benefits, aiding a particular target as if using the Aid Other combat action, as the young warrior feels the spirit of a grizzled veteran flow over him like water, lending skill to his sword-arm, or pushing his shield up in the way of an oncoming blow. This sort of thing would be a fine low level buff, since it's only giving the recipient a +2 to attack rolls or AC, switchable round by round, as the spirit of the deceased soldier provides tactical advice from within the beneficiary, temporarily 'possessing' him.
Spirits of the dead also make superior scouts, perhaps having only a single hit point and being easily dispelled back to the spirit world, but being able to pass incorporeally through surrounding walls and doors to observe what is on the other side. At low levels, the necromancer has to find (and bargain with!) a local spirit, so that he might only be able to use this spell if he can find a suitable corpse. At higher levels, he might be able to bind such a scout to him, perhaps as an Improved familiar, using Shadow stats (but not evil and with no Create Spawn ability, resembling a translucent black and white image of the person from whose body it was conjured), and have it follow him around (and return in 24 hours, like a ghost, if 'dispelled' by damage or turning or whatever). The spirit *might* be a very weak ghost, of someone who refused to pass on, for whatever reason, but, more likely, would be one of those spiritual echoes that get left behind in a corpse, with which one speaks when casting Speak with Dead, and while the necromancer has a 'fetch' of the person, their actual soul is off in Nirvana, counting turtles or whatever. At higher levels, a necromancer can barter with and bind one of these 'fetches' into a spirit jar or something, and bring them around with him, opening the jar when he needs their services, instead of having to find a convenient body at the target location. These jars would usually be one-use items, with the spiritual fragment free to return to its resting place when the service is over, but higher level versions would be re-usable, perhaps containing the ashes of the deceased (or even being crafted from their skull!) as an 'anchor' for the echo.
One step beyond conjuring souls, or these 'echoes' used by the Speak With Dead spell, a necromancer could use *his own spirit* for such things, sitting down cross-legged on the ground and shaking and rolling his eyes back as his own spirit travels forth with Shadow-like stats, to scout an area, or even to attack people. If his own spirit is 'slain' or dispelled, he suffers some traumatic result (dropped straight to -1 and Dying, for instance), so he's ill-advised to send his *soul* out to kill people...
He could also project a fraction of his own life-energy, necromantically, into unliving matter, allowing him to animate objects, similar to the Animate Objects spell, but one item at a time, and with the HD limit dependent upon his own power (the 'strength of his soul'). The low level version of this spell would, again, require him to send his soul out of his body, to 'possess' the object, but at higher levels, he could cast a spell that infuses an object with a fraction of his life-force, and allow him to animate it while remaining active himself (albeit at reduced hit points, as some of his life-energy is animating the object). If the object animated is destroyed, he loses the hit points he sent over to animate it (instead of flat hit points, I'd make it cost Con points, 1 for a smaller item, 2 for an item of his own size, etc.), and would have to recover the lost life-energy through healing, either over time, or through magic. Perhaps he can project life-force into anything, and animate it, or perhaps only into substances that were formerly alive (things made of bone, wood, leather, etc.). Perhaps the item needs an association with death (graveyard soil, animated by the necromancer with the stats of an earth elemental of appropriate size, or a weapon, functioning as a dancing weapon while he's 'possessing' it). Whatever seems thematically appropriate.
By projecting his life-force like this into another person, he could heal them, starting at a one for one ratio, and, at higher levels, learning to more precisely control the healing effects, and healing another of 2 hit points for every 1 that he takes, or something similar, doing a kind of magical transfusion, where he floods the wounded person with his own magical life-energy, to reinforce their body's own healing rate.
Less benevolent applications could allow him to project a fraction of his spirit into another, like a weak version of Magic Jar, allowing him to spy upon them as they go about their business, peering through their eyes, and hearing with their ears. At higher levels of this effect, he might be able to influence their actions, to a limited extent, or even totally seize control of them, lurching their body around like a puppet, if his soul can overpower their own. In a less sinister vein, he could perhaps perform the same 'buffing' service of the lesser spirits he used to call up, 'back in the day,' and from within an ally's body, warn them of danger, inform them of knowledges that he possesses, or even guide their limbs in battle, giving them the benefits of Aid Other. This more benevolent 'Rider Within' spell wouldn't allow him to seize control, or to perform actions like spellcasting through his 'host,' and his own body would remain in a death-like trance during the spell, as his animus is out to lunch.
Earlier editions made decent use of Feign Death type spells, another necromantic staple, and while not a 'cure' spell by any means, it can help someone survive poison or the effects of starvation or bleeding to death, by putting them into a deathless trance until they can be gotten to a safe place, or to someone who does have the cure needed to prevent their death.
The majority of a good necromancer's effects should work similarly, using *his own* life-energy to animate things or heal people, using his own spirit to scout places or inhabit things, and perhaps using his mastery of life and death to help others resist effects, by giving them immunities similar to those of undead (infusing someone with extra life-energy to make them resistant to environmental cold / heat effects, for instance, or suppressing their bodies need for air, so that they can go without breath for a short time, or making them incapable of bleeding, etc.). When he does call up spirits, they should be bargained with, or represent the 'echoes' that one contacts via Speak with Dead, not souls dragged screaming out of Heaven (or Hell), which should be way, way beyond the beginning Necromancer's purview (and terribly unsafe, since Asmodeus, for one, takes a very dim view of people taking things that belong to him!).
This 'bargaining' should occasionally include it's own Side-Trek, as the spirit you wish to interrogate about information promises to tell you everything, so long as you go make sure her family is safe, or that the bastard who killed him is punished. Unlike a divination spell, which 'just works,' negotiating for the services of a spiritual scout or advisor may occasionally require some extra effort.’
For a more shamanistic take, a 'primitive' necromancer may even learn spells that call up the spirits of animals, infusing them into the spirits of his tribe's warriors, who streak their faces with blood and ash and wear the skins of the animals whose abilities they seek, so that when they go to the hunt, they have the keen senses of their 'benefactor,' or the savage nature of the bear, etc. Yet more 'necromancy buffs,' only, in this case, using the life-force and spiritual residue of animals to empower allies.
The only limit is your imagination, and the willingness of your GM to say, 'hey, using *your own* life energy, especially to heal people, doesn't sound all that evil!'
Good luck with that last part. Imagination is easy.
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I think it is possible for the zombie hooker to wander back to her old red light district based on some past life memory. But she isn't just going to go through the old routine with no variation - I could see that if she was a ghost, didn't know she was dead, etc. That zombie hooker is going to start doing the deed with her drunk john and will also probably start eating him in the process - and not in a good way.
I don't have a problem with a DM saying that "right at this moment" the zombie is not causing mayhem but that doesn't change two things:A) Making the damn thing is still evil, even if it's compelled by a player or adjudicated by the DM to just "stand around" or do some repetitive non-violent action.
B) It's gotta kill eventually. I think too many players here want the zombie/skeleton to be a baggage-free construct and innovative tool for abuse. No one here is saying that you can't undead, but deal with the consequences for the action. You should also hope when it decides to kill it doesn't kill your friends or allies during the most inappropriate time.
This, I think, is my problem right here: Why does it "gotta kill eventually" if I, as DM, say that's not the metaphysics I'm using? If it's up to me what it does, then it's up to me what it does. If I say that in my world I follow the metaphysics of The Sixth Sense and the dead people don't know they're dead, well then, that's the way it is. Ghosts do the same things that they did when they were alive, and I can also say that skeletons and zombies operate on fragments of phantom memories and if they wouldn't have tried to kill someone in life they probably won't do it in death either.
Seems like people here want the stats & robot use of the monster without the karmic baggage or any of the zombie lore that goes along with it - which is where the creature concept comes from.
Zombie lore: You can't control it and if somehow you do it will always turn on you. If not you (compelled by magic) it will do something inappropriate like kill the wrong person, friend, etc, because at their base they are evil undead abominations and that's what undead abominations do. They F%$^ things up.
You can re-write these tropes to remove the "creating undead is evil" aspect but it seems like that need is arising more out of a gamist convenience then anything else.
Hogwash. The "Zombie Lore" you're citing is mostly stuff that's been invented by the Italian splatter-and-gore film movement and film and literature that's sprung from that, and while that's a perfectly valid for many worlds and many games, it's not the entirety of folklore or literature by any stretch.
One of the more interesting zombie legends is the one of the plantation owner's new bride who came back with him only to find that his workers were all zombies, dug from their grave and forced to work after death. She took pity on them and gave them some peanut brittle she'd made. On tasting the salt in the peanut brittle (salt being a very traditional curse-breaker), the zombies realized they were dead, and in horror ran off to the graveyard, frantically trying to dig themselves back into their graves.
Now, the story I just related is a good-old southern ghost story. You'd probably call it "gamist" and say that the storyteller was wrong, and the moment the woman took pity on the undead slaves and accidentally broke the spell via the combination of salt and human compassion they would have ripped her apart, eaten her like she was more peanut brittle, and gone off to recreate some Italian splatter-fest.
Me? I find the story far more haunting and charming with the original ending, and in fact I find zombies far more horrific if they are in fact hollow mockeries and echoes of the people they once were, rather than just rabid mooks that paladins can smite with no moral qualms.
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This, I think, is my problem right here: Why does it "gotta kill eventually" if I, as DM, say that's not the metaphysics I'm using? If it's up to me what it does, then it's up to me what it does. If I say that in my world I follow the metaphysics of The Sixth Sense and the dead people don't know they're dead, well then, that's the way it is. Ghosts do the same things that they did when they were alive, and I can also say that skeletons and zombies operate on fragments of phantom memories and if they wouldn't have tried to kill someone in life they probably won't do it in death either.
That's fine - just not PF as it is currently written and structured. That's the whole point of the OPs question. Why is Animate Dead an evil spell?
That opens up a whole can of worms as far as D&D goes -involving alignment, absolute evil/good, etc.You can argue all you want about how you think it should be, with spontaneous ghosts or using a design structured out of the metaphysics in Sixth Sense but that isn't the RAW for Pathfinder.
The "they gotta kill something eventually" wasn't my invention, that is what the designers wanted based upon their perception of how undead work in their games core generic mythology. That plus issues with backwards compatibility with 3.5.
Also this whole argument has expanded into an alignment issue. If you want to run your game without alignments, or change how certain actions and spells interact in that fashion that is fine - but you are ignoring the structure of the game. This Game. We are not talking about horror gaming in general, or a generic fantasy roleplaying game or great ideas and interpretations of supernatural lore as defined by any source other than what these game designers wanted in their game.
Some people here were against the concept of Evil being tagged onto Animate Dead because it would cause issues with Pathfinder Society structured play if they used that spell.
Nothing you have stated so far would change any of that. So you can discuss how you want to run your game - maybe following the Sixth Sense milieu with regard to ghosts or whatever, it doesn't really apply to the issue at hand. You've sort of hand waved why it isn't evil in your game for your own personal preferences without citing one game design or theory related reason why they would make it (animated the dead) evil in theirs. I've heard arguments for and against the spell being evil, I side with the structure as detailed in the rules and find plenty of reasonable points why it would be evil based upon AD&d/D&D mythology and history.
Now, the story I just related is a good-old southern ghost story. You'd probably call it "gamist" and say that the storyteller was wrong, and the moment the woman took pity on the undead slaves and accidentally broke the spell via the combination of salt and human compassion they would have ripped her apart, eaten her like she was more peanut brittle, and gone off to recreate some Italian splatter-fest.
Whoa, relax! I am versed in the origins of "real" zombie folklore and familiar with many similar stories out of that culture/religion. Couple of things though -
1)The Bokor who animates the dead in the traditional voudou lore is not by their culture committing a "good" act. So to the original issue its still an evil act.
2)For all intents and purposes the zombies in D&D are not based off of Haitian/Voudou lore. They just are not set up the same way.
I have run various horror games for over 30 years and none of them had an alignment system and they were far more detailed about the nature and types of undead and the lore associated with them. Unfortunately we are not talking about Chill or Call of Cthulhu, we are discussing D&D/PF and those zombies are modeled after the Fulci/Romero types - not the ones out of Haiti or Africa. Animated Skeletons - straight Ray Harryhausen.
The zombies out of Haiti don't eat people, they are closer to living zombies which had to have certain things removed from their presence (salt) so they would not remember their old lives and be freed. You can do whatever you want as a DM, but if you explained a zombie encounter from your game it in casual conversation on these boards you would have to add some context as most people wouldn't know what you were talking about - at least not right away.
So again, veiled insults aside - we are talking about two different things here. D&D/PF are not systems that are alignment free - there ARE absolutes in the game; I didn't make them up that's just the game. What you are talking about is something better suited to a dedicated horror rpg. That or convert D&D, but that doesn't help all the players bemoaning why one given power or act is evil as written in the current rules or how to deal with alignment related powers or drawbacks and so on. You are just stating your own rules and interpretations - which are not wrong, they just haven't (in my opinion) satisfied the argument why animating dead shouldn't be an evil act.
So I wouldn't say the storyteller was "wrong", I would just say that the current game just doesn't follow those metaphysics and rules for those creatures as they are written. Anything you would do to change your game would be a home rule modification, which is fine. Again, that doesn't help players coming here and complaining as to why Animate Dead is an evil spell in Pathfinder.
To restate, I am not saying your ideas are wrong nor am I attacking you. I am just saying they don't apply here to this argument. How you choose to run creatures and the methodology behind them in your game is fine, but unless you are going to convince the designers here to dump alignment or change some of the core mechanics your arguments for the most part just aren't applicable.
I still haven't seen one good argument to support why Animate Dead isn't an evil act.
I'm confused. You can't give a logical reason for creating undead being Evil?
Maybe you can come up with a logical reason why they shouldn't be evil, since you are making the argument against.
Animate Dead is in my opinion evil for several reasons :
- Being mindless in D&D really just means it doesn't possess rational intelligence I personally think zombies and skeletons do however 'hate' all living things. Willingly creating a creature that can only hate would be an evil act. You could argue it should have an int score of 1 maybe, but I think the unnatural nature of it's intelligence would not compare well to a creature with 'animal intelligence' since it doesn't really have a capability to learn.
- Secondly it is taboo, assuming there is a balance of good and evil, in the typical D&D games there is, the good guys / gods are generally revolted by the use of such a spell and even people using the spell should have a sense of wrongness when using a spell such as this, wether they care or not.
- Negative energy as a whole while not evil is by it's very nature opposed to life and regulary using such energies does, in my opinion, show a certain disrespect for life. Most spells using negative energy might just be considered distasteful like cause wounds or enervation, animate dead takes this a step further by actually creating a mockery of anything that was once alive.
I think evil skeletons and zombies work better for any campaign where good vs evil plays an important role, which is I think the standard.
By the way I think Animate Object spell SHOULD be a wizard / sorceror spell and seems in my opinion more fitting for wizards and sorcerors than it is for bards and priests, tempted to make it a 5th lvl spell for them though I do not like the idea of 'fake' undead much.
Remember that WotC's D&D answer to the "hey, what about non-evil undead ?" question was the Deathless concept. And Pathfinder doesn't have those, so no fig leaf to weave and explain where the tree-hugging liches went.
Deathless. Ugg.
If I wanted non-evil undead in baseline D&D, I'll just have non-evil undead. And there was plenty of non-evil undead out there (ghosts, archliches, baelnorn, etc) prior to needing to come up with positive = Good and icky and negative = Evil.
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- Being mindless in D&D really just means it doesn't possess rational intelligence I personally think zombies and skeletons do however 'hate' all living things. Willingly creating a creature that can only hate would be an evil act. You could argue it should have an int score of 1 maybe, but I think the unnatural nature of it's intelligence would not compare well to a creature with 'animal intelligence' since it doesn't really have a capability to learn.
Hey now! No need to be stereotyping. You know, not all zombies are "mindless".
Seriously though, my 2 copper pieces - negative energy has always been shown to be the antithesis of positive energy, or life. At the same time, creating undead is said to go against the natural order. Both of these things are, more often than not, interpreted as being "evil" rule-wise.
Personally, I go with the rules and say that it's an evil act, but if someone wants a more nuanced view, I don't see why it couldn't be interpreted as a neutral act, and the evil comes in how you use them.
Long answer short, let individual gaming groups decide.
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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I can live (ha!) with the 'negative material plane = plutonium' concept as I understood it earlier. Though to me it means that the intelligent undead feed to prevent the negative energy in them from corrupting them completely. So Shadows/Wraiths/Spectres/Liches/Vampires/etc. feed to keep from becoming mindless versions of their undead selves. In some ways I think this is more evil. In trying to keep their intellect and personality (what's left of it) they're sparing others from a worse fate.
It also explains Demi-liches in some ways. With the undead/radiation/cancer consuming their mortal forms, they've ascended (sorry Kevin!) into something that is beyond the need for the negative energy animating them. Maybe that's why the skull is so hard to damage, it's depleted uranium. :-)
That's fine - just not PF as it is currently written and structured. That's the whole point of the OPs question. Why is Animate Dead an evil spell?
That opens up a whole can of worms as far as D&D goes -involving alignment, absolute evil/good, etc.
You can argue all you want about how you think it should be, with spontaneous ghosts or using a design structured out of the metaphysics in Sixth Sense but that isn't the RAW for Pathfinder.
The "they gotta kill something eventually" wasn't my invention, that is what the designers wanted based upon their perception of how undead work in their games core generic mythology. That plus issues with backwards compatibility with 3.5.Also this whole argument has expanded into an alignment issue. If you want to run your game without alignments, or change how certain actions and spells interact in that fashion that is fine - but you are ignoring the structure of the game. This Game. We are not talking about horror gaming in general, or a generic fantasy roleplaying game or great ideas and interpretations of supernatural lore as defined by any source other than what these game designers wanted in their game.
Some people here were against the concept of Evil being tagged onto Animate Dead because it would cause issues with Pathfinder Society structured play if they used that spell.
Actually, I believe the OP was saying that Animate Dead as written is an Evil spell but was wondering if there couldn't be a non-evil variant for PFS and play in general, following the model of the non-evil Speak With Dead spell which by the RAW grants a "semblance of life" to a corpse--which even retains its original alignment--without making it a hand puppet of Eeeevil.
I will also grant that the zombies in the Pathfinder Bestiary are the Romero type who, when left unattended, "tend to mill about in search of living creatures to slaughter and devour." But I will also note that the Bestiary listing says "Such zombies are always of the standard type, unless the creator also casts haste or remove paralysis to create fast zombies, or contagion to create plague zombies."
Now what would happen if the necromancer added protection from evil to the mix instead? Could you get a zombie that ran on its phantom memories from life, as with the corpses granted the "semblance of life" from Speak With Dead? If you look at the RAW of Speak With Dead you'll see the bodies animated in this fashion even retain their original alignments.
If you then look at the Bestiary listing for Skeletons, it notes that while "most skeletons are mindless automatons, they still possess an evil cunning imparted to them by their animating force--a cunning that allows them to wield weapons and wear armor." Which means that if the necromancer gets the corpse of the old washerwoman who never held a sword a day in her life, he can still have her skeleton get up, strap on weapons and armor he has handy (likely cross-dressing in the process) and go at it like something from a Harryhausen flick.
Fine, granted, but if you look further in the listing it goes on to describe skeletal champions and says that "these potent undead only arise under rare conditions similar to those that cause the manifestation of ghosts or via rare and highly evil rituals."
This indicates, by the RAW, that there can be and likely are other rituals than those listed in the RAW and other types of undead and even other subtypes of zombies and skeletons.
Let's say that a necromancer wants to create another skeleton variant not listed in the RAW but with plenty of appearances in folklore and artwork, a Danse Macabre. As DM I could say that normally such creatures only arise when there's been the death of a large number of bards (such as "They ate Sir Robin's minstrels and there was great rejoicing") but the necromancer doesn't want to bother with killing a bunch of bards or even doing enough research with cemetery records to find where the bards are buried. He just thinks that if the force of Eeeevil can grant the skeleton of the old washerwoman weapon and armor proficiency, it could also give her a few ranks of Perform (Stringed Instrument) and Perform (Dance).
So I say fine and declare that to create a Danse Macabre, the necromancer needs to cast Animate Dead along with Summon Instrument and Irresistible Dance. This will create dancing skeletons with musical instruments with a special sonic attack which causes those who fail their save to be compelled to join the dance until they dance themselves to death (at which point they become a new skeleton and automatically get a new musical instrument) while those who make their save are just affected by some minor fear effect. Oh, and for every skeleton in the band, the saving throw difficulty increases by one, though there should be some upper ceiling on the number who can work together before the band splits up and they go off as two different bands.
Now admittedly this is creating another Eeevil skeleton variant puppeted by the same force of Eeevil that gives skeletons their weapon and armor proficiency and zombies their desire to eat brains and/or plain flesh, depending on which zombie flick the force of Eeevil is watching this week. That said, does it break the world for a necromancer to create a skeleton or zombie disconnected from the force of Eeevil but instead animated by the "semblance of life" granted by Speak With Dead? I mean, if there's enough magic to make a corpse's jaws work for speaking purposes, there should be enough magic to make it stand up and do stuff.
Moreover, if you look at the RAW for Unseen Servant which is not necromancy at all it says you get a "mindless, shapeless force" that's a certain variety of "mindless" that can nonetheless do all sorts of tasks including "clean and mend." That's a pretty smart mindless force if you ask me, but more than that, it's not Eeeevil.
So, following that logic, I'll declare that there should be a new type of zombie and a new skeleton too. Let's call them "servitor zombie" and "servitor skeleton" and they're made by casting Animate Dead in combo with Speak with Dead or Unseen Servant so they're available to both divine and arcane casters. Servitor Zombies can speak and answer questions as per Speak with Dead, but their brains are so rotted they can only answer one or two questions a day, and as with Speak with Dead, they retain their original alignment so can lie to those of other alignments or who they otherwise don't like. Being disconnected from the force of Eeeevil, they can't attack but on the plus side they don't crave brains/flesh either. Otherwise, they can perform tasks like an Unseen Servant albeit more slowly (they're zombies) but they're also stronger than Unseen Servants and can lift heavier weights, making them useful as porters. Servitor Skeletons follow the same pattern except they can't talk and move at normal speed. As with ghosts, they can be any alignment, but otherwise follow the same rules as for other undead.
There. Fairly easy solution and it follows the guidelines in the RAW.
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Maybe you can come up with a logical reason why they shouldn't be evil, since you are making the argument against.
I take that as no, you can't come up with a reason why they are.
And I think I have actually done as you suggest previously in the thread. I'll go reread and post an answer when I get the time.
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Now what would happen if the necromancer added protection from evil to the mix instead? Could you get a zombie that ran on its phantom memories from life, as with the corpses granted the "semblance of life" from Speak With Dead? If you look at the RAW of Speak With Dead you'll see the bodies animated in this fashion even retain their original alignments.
Look, I know you are phrasing evil as Eeevil to be cute or snide but I didn't write the damn rules for the game. I don't know who you are getting angry at – I am just supporting the rules as the define reanimating a corpse as an evil act.
I don't see anything wrong with house-ruling all the ideas you have presented in your post - I will address your issues as they interact with RAW. Your protection from evil zombies would not have their instincts suppressed nor would they regain any memories. There is nothing to indicate anywhere in the zombie write-up that zombies retain any memories of their previous life or that their memories are suppressed due to the negative energy which animates them. I will address Speak with Dead later.
Fine, granted, but if you look further in the listing it goes on to describe skeletal champions and says that "these potent undead only arise under rare conditions similar to those that cause the manifestation of ghosts or via rare and highly evil rituals."
This indicates, by the RAW, that there can be and likely are other rituals than those listed in the RAW and other types of undead and even other subtypes of zombies and skeletons.
OK, no argument on the varying zombie or skeleton types, plus I am sure there are a ton of rituals to create new or variant undead. I agree with you.
The key phrase in the description of the Skeleton Champion - "A skeletal champion cannot be created with animate dead" and "via rare and highly evil rituals."
So back to the original point - it can't be created by Animate Dead, and if it is a similar ritual, then that ritual is "highly evil". Or as you would say “Highly Eeeevil”.
Let's say that a necromancer wants to create another skeleton variant not listed in the RAW but with plenty of appearances in folklore and artwork, a Danse Macabre. As DM I could say that normally such creatures only arise when there's been the death of a large number of bards (such as "They ate Sir Robin's minstrels and there was great rejoicing") but the necromancer doesn't want to bother with killing a bunch of bards or even doing enough research with cemetery records to find where the bards are buried. He just thinks that if the force of Eeeevil can grant the skeleton of the old washerwoman weapon and armor proficiency, it could also give her a few ranks of Perform (Stringed Instrument) and Perform (Dance).
Why would he think that, because he wants it to be? Why would a destructive force which imparts rudimentary skills in killing also impart Perform (Stringed Instrument) and Perform (Dance)? It would actually make more sense (though still unsupported) to raid a bardic burial ground for the corpses.
So I say fine and declare that to create a Danse Macabre, the necromancer needs to cast Animate Dead along with Summon Instrument and Irresistible Dance. This will create dancing skeletons with musical instruments with a special sonic attack which causes those who fail their save to be compelled to join the dance until they dance themselves to death (at which point they become a new skeleton and automatically get a new musical instrument) while those who make their save are just affected by some minor fear effect. Oh, and for every skeleton in the band, the saving throw difficulty increases by one, though there should be some upper ceiling on the number who can work together before the band splits up and they go off as two different bands.
Excellent idea, it’s very evocative artwork depicting the Black Plague. So you created a variant spell and a good idea for Necromancers - still doesn't address the issue of Eeeevil/Not Evil use of Animate Dead.
Now admittedly this is creating another Eeevil skeleton variant puppeted by the same force of Eeevil that gives skeletons their weapon and armor proficiency and zombies their desire to eat brains and/or plain flesh, depending on which zombie flick the force of Eeevil is watching this week. That said, does it break the world for a necromancer to create a skeleton or zombie disconnected from the force of Eeevil but instead animated by the "semblance of life" granted by Speak With Dead? I mean, if there's enough magic to make a corpse's jaws work for speaking purposes, there should be enough magic to make it stand up and do stuff.
The only problem with this is that Speak with Dead is incompatible with Animate Dead -
"This spell does not affect a corpse that has been turned into an undead creature."So the writers took it upon themselves to stress an incompatibility with the two spells. I'm sure there can be some form of combination of these cast during a creatures creation but the rules and spell descriptions don't support it as they are written. Maybe with Create Undead - but those undead can already speak and have free will. Again, houserule territory.
Moreover, if you look at the RAW for Unseen Servant which is not necromancy at all it says you get a "mindless, shapeless force" that's a certain variety of "mindless" that can nonetheless do all sorts of tasks including "clean and mend." That's a pretty smart mindless force if you ask me, but more than that, it's not Eeeevil.
Then why would a good caster need a zombie? Why not just use an unseen servant, since it isn't Eeevil?
So, following that logic, I'll declare that there should be a new type of zombie and a new skeleton too. Let's call them "servitor zombie" and "servitor skeleton" and they're made by casting Animate Dead in combo with Speak with Dead or Unseen Servant so they're available to both divine and arcane casters. Servitor Zombies can speak and answer questions as per Speak with Dead, but their brains are so rotted they can only answer one or two questions a day, and as with Speak with Dead, they retain their original alignment so can lie to those of other alignments or who they otherwise don't like. Being disconnected from the force of Eeeevil, they can't attack but on the plus side they don't crave brains/flesh either. Otherwise, they can perform tasks like an Unseen Servant albeit more slowly (they're zombies) but they're also stronger than Unseen Servants and can lift heavier weights, making them useful as porters. Servitor Skeletons follow the same pattern except they can't talk and move at normal speed. As with ghosts, they can be any alignment, but otherwise follow the same rules as for other undead.
There. Fairly easy solution and it follows the guidelines in the RAW.
I doesn't follow the guidelines in RAW.
You have some fun and interesting ideas but unfortunately the rules as written don't support them and in some cases such as with your Speak with Dead example actually work counter the application of the spells. Personally I would be more inclined to see an Animated Dead infused with little more depth via Unseen Servant, at least those two spells are not at cross points in their by their description. Again, this is all houserule territory.But none of this, nothing you have posted here goes towards answered why creating an undead being wouldn't be an evil act? You've provided variants, suggested supplemental power sources, but not hit on the point of why it isn't an evil act.
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Maybe you can come up with a logical reason why they shouldn't be evil, since you are making the argument against.I take that as no, you can't come up with a reason why they are.
I shouldn't have to since I’m not the one arguing against the current structure - you are. Go ahead and lay out your "logical" argument as to why animating dead isn't evil in a game filled with both abstracts and absolutes and we'll see if we can actually get anywhere in that discussion.
And I think I have actually done as you suggest previously in the thread.
I'll go reread and post an answer when I get the time.
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Huh.
Neutral. The popular, modern notion is that necromancers are just filling the tanks of these unoccupied bodies with various flavors of metaphysical fuel. It's the flavor of the fuel that determines the nature and depth of the sin, if any. What is dead is just flesh and bone, nothing more. This sort of necromancer operates with a scientific trust in magic and sees taboo as a mere matter of tradition. Not my favorite interpretation.
Evil. The older idea is that necromancers animate what once was alive (and not rocks or mud) because the soul is crucial, and it can be cajoled back into its host (or at least a portion of it). The walking dead are in some small way who they were in life, which is what frightens those who respect the taboo; they are tortured souls who need to put to rest. That a necromancer can animate a fleshless skeleton but not a scarecrow is a distinction that's inherently sinister.
If you prefer the former, you probably have a tidy view of the progress of the D&D soul. If you like the latter, you probably like the idea of necromancy (and magic in general) as a fickle fire that can damn as well as burn you.
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But none of this, nothing you have posted here goes towards answered why creating an undead being wouldn't be an evil act?
Unintelligent (or as they are called now, mindless) undead have not been evil since the '70's. Neither have mindless rocks, trees or golems.
In 2003, when WotC released 3.5, skeletons and zombies were made evil *specifically so that Paladins could smite them.*
The developer(s) who made this design choice did not think it through, as the 3rd edition rules required that a mindless vermin with the fiendish template, or an Int 2 animal with the fiendish template, be raised up to Int 3 before it could qualify for an alignment.
Additionally, the channeling of negative energy, even to destroy life, via Inflict spells, remained a non-aligned act. The negative energy plane remained an un-aligned plane. The natives of the negative energy plane, life-draining monsters that they were, remained neutral in alignment.
The ruling was arbitary, ill-conceived and contradicted both setting flavor (a neutral negative energy plane), and rules (fiendish template creatures having to be raised to Int 3 before they could be evil).
If I set an orphanage on fire with a fireball, it's an evil act, but the fireball spell does not gain the [Evil] descriptor. If I cast deathwatch to find injured Mendevian crusaders on the battlefield so that I can staunch their wounds and save their lives, it's a good act, despite the [Evil] descriptor, and I can *turn evil* by saving a Paladin's life in this manner.
If a Neutral caster summons a hound archon and orders it to eat a nun, it's an evil act *with the [Good] descriptor,* and by the 'logic' of casting [Good] or [Evil] spells, the summoner is at risk of turning good, if he does it too often!
Alignment descriptors are borked, and cheapen the whole concept of alignment (as well as turning any mature or thoughtful exploration of topics of morality or ethics into absurdities).
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2010 Top 8
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Here's a thought:
Corpses have an imprint of the soul that previously resided in them, right? Thats how speak with dead works.
Turning a corpse into an undead creature destroys that imprint (as indicated by the fact that speak with dead doesn't work anymore).
That could be seen as Evil. The soul is generally considered sacred, and while destroying an imprint is certainly not as bad as destroying the actual soul, it would still be quite blasphemous.
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Unintelligent (or as they are called now, mindless) undead have not been evil since the '70's. Neither have mindless rocks, trees or golems.But Animating the dead has been evil since the beginning.
I remember it as an annoyance in 1st Ed.
Whether the undead thelselves have been evil or not, the act of creating them has always been evil.
If anything, the 3.0 shift actually made MORE sense than the older version.
Yeah Mirror Mirror is correct, from the 1st ed rules:
PHB
"The act of animating dead is not basically a good one, and it must be used with careful consideration and good reason by clerics of good alignment."
Some other good stuff -
"The Negative Material Plane is the place of anti-matter and negative force, the source of power for undead, the energy area from which evil grows."
Monster Manual
"Zombies are magically animated corpses, undead creatures under the command of the evil magic-users or clerics who animated them"
And while they were neutral in alignment in 1st ed -
"Holy water vials score 2-8 hit points of damage for each one which strikes."
DMG
Undead -A class of malevolent, soulless monsters which are neither truly dead nor alive, including skeletons, vampires, ghosts, zombies, ghouls, et al.
On inanimate objects, places and holy water - the last being a tool that affects neutral undead.
Likewise, items which are not magical but which have powerful effects will probably not give any evil or good aura. Poison is a prime example. It is perfectly neutral and has no aura whatsoever. Unholy water will emanate evil, just as holy water will radiate good. Places sanctified to some deity of evil or good will certainly give off an appropriate aura.
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But none of this, nothing you have posted here goes towards answered why creating an undead being wouldn't be an evil act?Unintelligent (or as they are called now, mindless) undead have not been evil since the '70's. Neither have mindless rocks, trees or golems.
In 2003, when WotC released 3.5, skeletons and zombies were made evil *specifically so that Paladins could smite them.*
The developer(s) who made this design choice did not think it through, as the 3rd edition rules required that a mindless vermin with the fiendish template, or an Int 2 animal with the fiendish template, be raised up to Int 3 before it could qualify for an alignment.
Additionally, the channeling of negative energy, even to destroy life, via Inflict spells, remained a non-aligned act. The negative energy plane remained an un-aligned plane. The natives of the negative energy plane, life-draining monsters that they were, remained neutral in alignment.
The ruling was arbitary, ill-conceived and contradicted both setting flavor (a neutral negative energy plane), and rules (fiendish template creatures having to be raised to Int 3 before they could be evil).
If I set an orphanage on fire with a fireball, it's an evil act, but the fireball spell does not gain the [Evil] descriptor. If I cast deathwatch to find injured Mendevian crusaders on the battlefield so that I can staunch their wounds and save their lives, it's a good act, despite the [Evil] descriptor, and I can *turn evil* by saving a Paladin's life in this manner.
If a Neutral caster summons a hound archon and orders it to eat a nun, it's an evil act *with the [Good] descriptor,* and by the 'logic' of casting [Good] or [Evil] spells, the summoner is at risk of turning good, if he does it too often!
Alignment descriptors are borked, and cheapen the whole concept of alignment (as well as turning any mature or thoughtful exploration of topics of morality or ethics into absurdities).
Set, if good and evil exist as fundamental energies and not just consequences of sentience, then perhaps people can be made good or evil through the magic they use regardless of their intentions. Summoning an archon hound to kill a nun produces a new and profound sense of regret? ;)
It's odd, but maybe D&D magic just favors a hypocrital and truly medieval mindset. Every good spell carries the forgiveness of confession and every bad spell the taint of sin, relativism be damned.
It would answer the question 'Why is Animate Dead evil?' Because it is.
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It's odd, but maybe D&D magic just favors a hypocrital and truly medieval mindset. Every good spell carries the forgiveness of confession and every bad spell the taint of sin, relativism be damned.
It's an interesting concept, indeed, and one that could be fun to explore, in a setting that uses the concept consistently.
The psychological root of behaviorism is that *all* behavior is 'corrosive,' and that if one is conditioned / positively reinforced by doing bad things, one is more likely to do bad things without said reinforcement, in essence, 'becoming bad.' And the reverse is true for 'good things.' If the dog / child / sinner is positively reinforced when it does 'good,' it will be more prone to 'doing good' and 'being good,' even in absence of tangible reward or reinforcement.
All through our media, there are examples of good characters getting onto a 'slippery slope' and being dragged into greater and great acts of evil, and, in the reverse, examples of 'bad-guys' who end up doing a single good deed, and their world-view begins to shift around them, until they end up using their 'bad-guy' skillset to help people or to save people or to do an otherwise 'good' deed. (Kind of the premise of some Clint Eastwood movies, where the amoral killer lone gun ends up developing a feeling, and then, when the person he ends up having his first spark of empathy for gets hurt or killed, turns his skills at being a 'bad-guy' into protecting or rescuing that person or their family and / or community. Movies like Sin City or Pitch Black, TV shows like the Human Target or White Collar, or comics like the Thunderbolts, are also predicated on the concepts of bad guys being drawn into fighting evil and protecting the innocent, and ending up fighting the good fight, despite coming from a less-than-virtuous place, and sometimes dying heroic deaths in the process.)
Having [Evil] spells infect one with evil, and [Good] spells infuse one with good, no matter how you use them, is an interesting notion, although I've seen few (well, none, that I can think of...) examples in D&D of [Good], [Law] or [Chaos] spells working in this manner, as the text always seem to focus on Evil spells being the transformative life-changing spells.
It does lead to the bizarre situations where one could summon an angel to torture or rape people, and 'turn good,' or animate a village graveyard to save their descendents from a slaver raid, and 'turn evil,' but if that's the way the universe works, that's the way the universe works.
But none of this, nothing you have posted here goes towards answered why creating an undead being wouldn't be an evil act? You've provided variants, suggested supplemental power sources, but not hit on the point of why it isn't an evil act.
The trouble is, whether or not anything is evil is highly subjective based on accepted standards, definitions and so forth, action and intent and result and method and so on.
I used the term Eeeevil not just to be mocking but to hearken back to the oft-quoted line from Time Bandits: "Don't touch it! It's Eeevil!" That is to say, a force of Evil that is actually sentient and sometimes comes in discrete physical chunks.
The idea around since 3.5 and likely earlier that the Negative Material Plane is an actual malevolent entity? I should probably use Frank and K's term and call it "The Crawling Darkness" instead, as opposed to the "Playing with Fire" model where the negative material plane is analogous to the Plane of Fire: Not a sentient entity in and of itself and morally neutral, home to entities which can qualify for the Evil, Neutral and occasionally Good tags on their own.
As for whether any spell should get the Evil descriptor, that's a question a lot like whether any spell should get the Necromancy descriptor, especially since this is a question of whether you can have a Good Necromancer.
Take Deathwatch, for example. In 3.0, it had a lot of silly verbiage about "the foul sight granted by the powers of unlife" but no Evil tag. In 3.5 it kept the verbiage but gained the Evil tag. In Pathfinder, it lost the Evil tag along with the silly verbiage.
If you go back to 1st edition, all of the healing spells were Necromancy rather than Conjuration (Healing), and I know plenty of DMs, including some who were born after 1st edition, who find the change silly and define all healing spells as Necromancy rather than Conjuration. I do this myself.
Now as for why creating an undead doesn't necessarily have to be evil, let's go back to Speak with Dead. This spell creates a talking corpse but for some reason this is not only not evil, the corpse isn't undead either. You would think that a talking corpse is sort of the definition of undead, but it isn't. Frankly, it would seem that Speak with Dead should have the same relation to Animate Dead as Speak with Plants does to Animate Plants but it doesn't. Animated Plants, Animated Objects, Animated Ropes and even Unseen Servants get animated by some nebulous unseen force that is supposed to be mindless but is nonetheless competent enough to wash out coffee stains and darn socks. What is it?
About the only clue comes from the Ravid, an obscure 3.X creature that's listed here:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/ravid.htm
The ravid is a neutral creature from the positive material plane (yes, you read that right) that wanders around animating objects to protect it.
If we're going to have to believe in "The Crawling Darkness" as the animating force of the negative material plane, it's only reasonable to assume that the converse is true of the positive material plane and we have "The Bumbling Light" which animates objects via the ravid or by means of clerical spells, since animated objects are...neutral constructs? Even when infused by the energy of the positive material plane, the source of all purity and goodness? Huh?
I think we've now gotten to the point where we admit, if we take all the RAW at face value, that the D&D cosmology doesn't make perfect sense. And even Pathfinder, in trying to be backwards compatible with what came before, has a few discrepancies.
After all, if Animate Dead gets an Evil descriptor, then Animate Objects should get a Good descriptor by the same logic. And just as "mindless" zombies and skeletons go around looking for people to maim and destroy if uncontrolled, just the same uncontrolled "mindless" animated objects should be able to roam the countryside like escapees from a Disney film looking for people to nurture and comfort--though if you look at the illustration in the Bestiary, I think the torture cage with the old skeleton in it is going to be getting a really bad circumstance penalty to its attempts to nurture and comfort relative to a comfy chair or an overstuffed ottoman.
Or we can postulate a more neutral motivating force and put skeletons and zombies back to neutral as the were in the 3.0 MM and correspondingly make Animate Dead a Neutral spell as well, as Animate Objects and Animate Plants currently are. We can also decide that Animate Dead bears some relation to Speak with Dead and a zombie's ability to walk is based on phantom memories left in the corpse after the soul departs, rather than hand-puppeting by The Crawling Darkness.
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After all, if Animate Dead gets an Evil descriptor, then Animate Objects should get a Good descriptor by the same logic. And just as "mindless" zombies and skeletons go around looking for people to maim and destroy if uncontrolled, just the same uncontrolled "mindless" animated objects should be able to roam the countryside like escapees from a Disney film looking for people to nurture and comfort-
Animate Objects aren't supposed to be flirtatious candelabras, dancing plates and stuffy timepieces?
+1 for making D&D more morally complex than a Disney cartoon. (or, in this case, returning it to the more mature exploration of good and evil, positive and negative, that it had before the 3.5 update)
I don't care for perfect sense too much personally -- after all the world we are in makes much less than perfect sense, so the fact that a fantasy world designed by us is much the same in that regard doesn't bother me too much.
In fact maybe that's Chaos's influence on reality in the pathfinder. This happens this way and it doesn't make sense but then with chaos in the universe somethings simply aren't going to: It's almost there but eludes complete classification.
The trouble is, whether or not anything is evil is highly subjective based on accepted standards, definitions and so forth, action and intent and result and method and so on.
Except that it isn't. Not in any game that has an alignment system like DnD/PF. It's not designed for moral ambiguity. It simply isn't. Evil is real and definable. And provable. It's not subjective in the slightest. There can be no moral relativism where good and evil are tangible forces.
Whether or not the LE ruler of the LE kingdom is willing to admit it or not, whether anyone in the entire kingdom will admit it or not, his and their evil is provable and demonstrable. There is no moral ambiguity in Evil. It really is Eeeevil.
Now that doesn't mean that you can't create a setting with moral ambiguity. You certainly can. But the game makes the assumption that you are on board with "bright line" differences between Eeeevil and Not Eeeeeevil. Animating the dead falls on the wrong side of that line.
The trouble is, whether or not anything is evil is highly subjective based on accepted standards, definitions and so forth, action and intent and result and method and so on.
Except that it isn't. Not in any game that has an alignment system like DnD/PF. It's not designed for moral ambiguity. It simply isn't. Evil is real and definable. And provable. It's not subjective in the slightest. There can be no moral relativism where good and evil are tangible forces.
Whether or not the LE ruler of the LE kingdom is willing to admit it or not, whether anyone in the entire kingdom will admit it or not, his and their evil is provable and demonstrable. There is no moral ambiguity in Evil. It really is Eeeevil.
Now that doesn't mean that you can't create a setting with moral ambiguity. You certainly can. But the game makes the assumption that you are on board with "bright line" differences between Eeeevil and Not Eeeeeevil. Animating the dead falls on the wrong side of that line.
I'm not saying that in the world of DnD/PF that Evil (and for that matter Good, Law and Chaos) aren't quantifiable things, able to be measured by paladin eyeballs and clerical and magely spells. Heck, I'll even grant that Evil can be concentrated into solid form and "pure concentrated Evil" can be not only a statement of fact but a useful measurement for dark alchemy.
What I'm saying is that what's counted as Evil, Good, Neutral, Lawful or Chaotic is up to the DM, including the question of whether using Evil means to accomplish a greater Good is weighed in the sum or the parts. If you, say, are trying to take medicine to the town to save everyone from a horrible plague and you know that hours or even minutes will save lives and you come across a scroll of Animate Dead and a convenient dead horse, well, what do you do? And what does the sin-o'-meter at the local temple say? When you can detect Evil like blood glucose levels (or maybe that's Good, since it's sugary) you can bet that people will do exactly that.
But even beyond the question of whether animating the dead is evil, what about eating porkchops? Is it a sin? Will I go to Hell for eating porkchops?
In the real world, this is a serious question for theology. In the DnD/PF world, you can bet the clerics are going to hook up the sin-o'-meter to judge the sinfulness of eating porkchops relative to eating blueberry pie and see whether they're just getting a false positive from the sin of gluttony, assuming gluttony is also a sin. (In Pathfinder, after RotR, we can be pretty sure it is, but it's still a question that needs to be answered.)
What about liquor? Is drunkenness a sin on its own or just a subset of gluttony? Is alcoholism a disease or a moral failing? Is Carrie Nation a paladin crusading against the Demon Rum or just a crazy spinster with an ax? There's wine listed in the Goods & Equipment section. Shouldn't there be an Evil tag next to it?
Now, these can all be for the DM to decide, and honestly, I'm quite fine with that. What I'm not fine with is the idea that even once using an Evil spell (assuming I don't even have the choice as DM of deciding for myself what is and isn't an Evil spell) irrevocably taints the caster with sin and moreover immediately institutes a bender of dissolution and depravity that looks like Night of the Living Dead meet Caligula. And even if it doesn't, the concept that the reclusive old wizard who lives on the hill suddenly outweighs eighty years of overall Neutrality and tips the balance to Evil because his old dog Fifi died and he couldn't bear to bury her so he brought her back as a zombie instead. I mean, she moved slowly before, and smelled bad, and snarled and snapped at everyone who came near her. Who's going to know the difference?
Okay, a paladin might, assuming we go with the 3.5/PF zombie=Evil. But if one rides up on his high horse, smites the zombie into oblivion, and proceeds to lecture the wizard, he's going to get a fireball in the face. And if the wizard turns evil because of this? Well, that sin should probably weigh on the paladin, because doing a "Good" deed caused a greater Evil to occur. At least the way I judge things as DM, because I still do get to judge that portion of the scenario.
Other DMs can decide as they like.
Several points
@ Pork Chops: First, you seem to be wanting the answers to questions like this to apply both to The Real World and to a fantasy setting. That seems like an awfully high bar to measure a gaming system against, especially since in TRW the answers haven't been agreed upon yet.
Second, in a reality where Eeevil exists, where demons can manifest on the street and drag people kicking and screaming to Hell, arguments over pork chops would probably seem a little...petty. Technicalities are the province of the safe, not the threatened.
Finally, have dietary restrictions ever been an issue in any game? There are dragons to slay, demons to defeat, and evil armies to crush. Has anyone's gameplay experience ever been enhanced by enforcing dietary restrictions and their effects on a character's alignment?
@ Alcohol: Seriously, the questions you raise are still debated in TRW. I think you're expecting too much from an FRPG.
@ Gluttony: You say that the Good/Eeevil of Gluttony is a question that needs to be answered. But would you really accept an answer? Animating the dead is declared Eeeevil, but immediately you start trying to find exceptions. Wouldn't the same happen with gluttony? Is a little gluttony eeeevil? What if a character performs gluttony in service of a greater good? What if gluttony saves lives?
@ Night of the Living Dead meets Caligula: Where are you getting that from? Good clerics can't do it at all, and everybody else risks alignment change if they do so repeatedly. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. A single act of evil does not damn a character for all eternity. Repeating such acts may. Consistently performing such acts will. The details are left up to the DM. I just don't see the problem.
@ Fido: The wizard crossed a very bright line for very selfish reasons. The paladin did what paladins are supposed to do. He destroyed an undead abomination that posed a threat to innocents. The wizard then commits a second evil act out of a base motivation for revenge, or simple arrogance. The state of the wizard's soul is his own responsibility, not the paladin's. The wizard set his feet upon a dark path that led to greater evil, which is, IMHO, why one doesn't start down that particular path in the first place. If you do, you don't get to blame those who are merely reacting to your bad behavior.
@ Dead Horse: Getting good people to do evil things using the "greater good" justification is what demons and devils do to cause the downfall of good people. Short cuts are the province of dark forces. You take them at your peril.
A Final Thought: Being good is supposed to be harder than being evil. It sometimes requires difficult choices and sacrifice. If it didn't, everybody would do it.
A Final, Final Thought: Sword and Sorcery rpgs are games of adventure and excitement, not metaphysical explorations of the meaning and purpose of existence. There are certainly places for that discussion, but in between swings of a great axe doesn't seem to me to be one of them.
I'd say the wizard's motivation for both acts was grief: grief at the death of his dog, and a second rush of grief at the destruction of Fifi's remains, mixed with anger at receiving priggish moralizing and lecturing rather than compassion. Fireballing the paladin would be wrong, of course, but any decent lawyer would be able to argue that it was a crime of passion, done in the heat of the moment, not a crime with malice of forethought. And a more compassionate soul, or just a better judge of human nature, would have realized that the better course would have been to talk the old wizard through his grief and convinced him to deanimate the undead dog himself or at least allow someone else to do it for him.
FWIW, I'd also say the greatest sinner in the scenario was the paladin, because he was embodying the sin of hubris, which is a far greater sin than just creating one undead poodle.
As for the dead horse, yes, devils go out of their way to pose moral dilemmas and temptations. So do DMs but for that matter, so does random chance. But it's still a reasonable question in regards to morality: Is it better to look for the greatest good for the greatest number, or is it better to be lily white in one's personal morality and the rest of the world be damned?
I like to deal with such questions in a FRPG because the alternative is something I find extremely tedious and boring, like basing your FRPG on a Calvinist morality play.
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Unintelligent (or as they are called now, mindless) undead have not been evil since the '70's. Neither have mindless rocks, trees or golems.But Animating the dead has been evil since the beginning.
I remember it as an annoyance in 1st Ed.
Whether the undead thelselves have been evil or not, the act of creating them has always been evil.
If anything, the 3.0 shift actually made MORE sense than the older version.
Wrong. 2E necromancer handbook betails the creation of mindless undead and golems as nuetral, a tool that follows the creators wishes and no more. Creating freewilled inteligent undead is evil because it creates a threat to the living, ect.
One of my favorite characters was a good necromancer that retired in a deal with a village to use there dead as a civilian defence force, all encased in armor rivited together so they never had to see the dead reletive hacked apart or shambling around doing slavelabor. They prospered very well, and it hurt no one but he grave digger ( who was hired by the character so even he benifited)
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I'll be sure and show up at your loved ones funeral with my skinning knife. And I could use her leg to fix my broken lamp. Maybe mount her head on my wall, ass well.
Might want to edit the threats against people's family members.
There's 'over the top rhetoric' and then there's 'strapping a rocket to your ass and headed for Mars.'
You're passing Mars.
It's not a threat against anyone. They're dead, right? passed on, it's just an object, you shouldn't care what is done with it. Right? But my pont is made, you wouldn't like it anymore than you'd like to see their corpse walking around, doing anything, whether it's fighting terrorism or washing dishes. It debases you and dishonors the deceased. That makes it evil.I'll be sure and show up at your loved ones funeral with my skinning knife. And I could use her leg to fix my broken lamp. Maybe mount her head on my wall, ass well.Might want to edit the threats against people's family members.
There's 'over the top rhetoric' and then there's 'strapping a rocket to your ass and headed for Mars.'
You're passing Mars.
Not liking something makes it evil. Ok. All kender are evil, and can be smited, because SOMEONE doesn't like them. Or do you just mean actions that you don't like is evil. I really hate it when people say "mute point" because its nonsensical. Those people are evil and I guess I am justified in murdering them to death.
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Evil: Evil characters and creatures debase or destroy innocent life, whether for fun or profit. Evil implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master.
The closest I could see creating undead being Evil is hurting the relatives of the dead by forcing them to see their loved ones bodies turned into puppets. The problem being, that's a very subjective thing. Why is animating the body of a sociopathic murderer with no relatives Evil, when there is no one to be hurt by it?
