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What the...! I have written it in spanish!!! Sorry ^_^
PNJ = Personaje No Jugador (Spanish) = Non Player Character (English) = NPC
^_^
So, I'll repeat my post (correctly):
Hello, everyone!
I'm a big fun of undeads and I wonder if there is any non-evil undead cities or NPCs in Pathfinder Setting.
Thanks for your answers!
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and I wonder if there is any non-evil undead cities or NPCs in Pathfinder Setting.
While undead crop up in other areas, such as Ustalav, the only nation that makes extensive use of undead (and is, indeed, pretty much dominated by undead) would be Geb, which is pretty firmly evil, to a degree that makes the 'evil' of Cheliax look pretty tame.
Unlike some other settings, which have some non-evil death dieties that aren't completley opposed to necromancy / undead (such as Wee Jas, in Greyhawk, or Nemorga, in the Scarred Lands), Golarion's undead-friendly dieties are evil through and through, with Urgathoa being the main diety of that sort of thing, and demon lords Kabriri, Orcus and Zura covering other aspects.
As a result, the setting doesn't really flow too well with the concept of a non-evil undead-friendly city, such as Hollowfaust (from the Scarred Lands) or Manifest (from Ghostwalk), and the developer comments suggest that, in Golarion, any form of undead either are, or quickly become, evil. The process of not 'going quietly into that good night,' even if for the best of intentions (to protect one's family or honor some obligation, a common cause of ghost stories, and the occasional bad Patrick Swayze movie), while seeming like an un-lawful or chaotic act, defying 'the natural order,' as it were, is interpreteted in Golarion as an evil act instead.
If you want to tweak the setting to include that sort of potential, introducing a city like Hollowfaust or Manifest, it might be useful to introduce a non-evil minor local god supportive of such practices, and plant said city out of the way, since their are several churches that will strongly oppose such a philosophy (keeping them away from Sarenrae-dominated Qadira, or Iomedae-dominated Mendev and Lastwall seem like good ideas!). Cultures that revere their ancestors, or even attempt to communicate with them for guidance in their daily lives, instead of reviling anyone who has died as unclean (in body) or an abomination (in spirit), would be ideal for this sort of thing, and, if real-world parallels are in play, African, Indian and Asian-inspired groups from the Mwangi Expanse, Vudra and / or the Tien lands might be appropriate settings for such cultures, as they may be more inclined to kindly remembering those who have come before, and to actively entreat their attentions, than to regard the spirits of their ancestors with fear or contempt.
You can always add one to your homebrew, but I assume any such city would be a highly regulated secret. Especially since it would be openly destroyed by one anti-undead church or another AND evil undead/necromancers who either resent the undead coop or want to subjugate the populous. Basically they'd be hated by everyone else. I recommend putting this city underground in some cavern that would be uninhabitable by the living using toxic gas or what not.
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So, this is a fact in Golarion: undead = always evil
Is this right?
It's not quite that severe. There's still neutral and good undead in the setting. But the setting does seem to roll with the concept of undeath being an evil thing in itself.
While there have been good and neutralish undead, there hasn't been much in the way of support for a community of them. I'd go with Set's suggestion to place on in the Mwangi Expanse or Osirion though. A necropolis of good or neutral mummies protecting their culture's history and dead just seems right to me.
Had hopes for Walkena especially because the Mwangi in that area need some kind of break considering all the abuse coming their way from the colonists, but then he went and turned out to be LE.
Having the city be evil overall doesn't mean that everyone in it is evil, or even that all the undead are evil either. Geb's a rather good case in point. There are probably many perfectly nice vampires and ghouls there, and while the whole business with chattel slavery is morally icky, if you've got an afterlife, you could probably salve your conscience by burning hell money to send stuff to your victims in the afterlife or just hoping they get reincarnated as something nice.
Alternately, the most morally nice thing a vampire or ghoul could do would be to specifically buy people as food, offering Reincarnation as a bennie in exchange. Get a whole bunch of people who are old, maimed, or anything else where the prospect of being reincarnated in a new young healthy body is exactly what they'd want. The only extra price you're asking is that you get to eat their old body. Either the blood or the flesh. Sensible vampires and ghouls will team up on this and do the Jack Sprat and his wife routine with the vampires getting the blood and the ghouls getting the flesh. Yes, it costs 1000 GP worth of incense and oils, but it's pretty well worth it for that, especially if someone's almost dead already or just hates life in their current body.
If the price becomes prohibitive, just do it as a lottery. You'll have a lot less slave revolts if you have the prospect of renewal through "Carousel" a la Logan's Run.
Would this make it good? Probably not. Would it make it at least more morally gray? Almost certainly yes.
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Alternately, the most morally nice thing a vampire or ghoul could do would be to specifically buy people as food, offering Reincarnation as a bennie in exchange.
Probably cheaper and less 'morally grey' to just raise cattle (or, even cheaper and more efficient use of resources, goats and chickens) and devour them, the same as living humans do. Vampires and Ghouls, like humans, dwarves, elves, etc. just need to kill the living to survive, not specifically eat *people.* (Vampires can go that extra step and feed off of animals, or people, without actually killing them, if they are so inclined, making them even less 'evil' than human meat-eaters, like me, who have chosen to kill living animals to sustain their existence, when they could subsist off of plants. And when science provides us with a tree that grows bacon, I'll probably go vegetarian, too. :))
Liches, mummies, ghosts and other undead that don't require any sort of sustenance, and have no specific need or drive to kill people, would likely be the easiest to justify having a strong presence of in a non-evil undead community. Indeed, the 'feeders,' (ghouls and vampires) might be looked upon with contempt, since they still have to engage in the mortal pursuit of consuming the tissues of other creatures to sustain their existence, just like a living creature, which the liches, ghosts, etc. might consider as vulgar and primitive as excretion or flatulence or other fleshly mortal things that they have left far, far behind.
Geb (and the Ghoul city of Nemret Noktoria, obviously) seem to have quite a lot of 'feeders,' and so would be poorly suited for a non-evil undead culture. Given a sufficient concentration of ghouls and / or vampires, it seems unlikely that an attempt to convince them to 'go vegan' and only feed off of animal tissue, or craft up some Ring of Sustenance type work-around to put off feeding altogether (perhaps even designing it as a spell effect that can be tied to an Unhallow spell and maintained over the entire 'blood palace,' so that *no* vampire in the courts needs to feed). I would suspect that a primarily CE ghoul / vampire court would be more prone to indulging their appetites than restraining them, leaving these sorts of measures more appropriate to an undead community dominated by non-feeders, like a powerful lich (who, unlike the Harlot-Queen, actually cares about such matters), or coalition of Osirioni mummies.
Geb *could* have been suitable for such an arrangement, led first by a ghost (with no use for living flesh or blood) and latter by a lich (also with no use for a bunch of smelly fleshy cattle, or the farms, wells, irrigation, infrastructure, etc., etc. necessary to maintain them tying up significant resources that could be devoted to buying the undead elite new toys), but, as written, it's crawling with ghouls and vampires, many of them 'nobles' and 'aristocrats,' and a large living population is kept as 'cattle' to sustain their hungers, so that's a path not taken.
Hello, everyone!
I'm a big fun of undeads and I wonder if there is any non-evil undead cities or PNJs in Pathfinder Setting.
Thanks for your answers!
As a slight but relevant digression from your main question, Pathfinder #39 (I think) has the Juju Mystery for the Oracle Class. One specific revelation allows you to create non-evil undead. So, yes, lawful good ghasts.
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As a slight but relevant digression from your main question, Pathfinder #39 (I think) has the Juju Mystery for the Oracle Class. One specific revelation allows you to create non-evil undead. So, yes, lawful good ghasts.
To join the potentially good shadows that might accompany some Shadowdancers, I suppose, or the non-evil spirits of dead dwarves that dwarven priests can summon with that spell in Dwarves of Golarion. Whackiness abounds.
Still, the general rule is, 'Undead are evil. Except when they aren't.'
The Great Beyond has a passage about a non-evil Lich active in former domain of Aroden.
I think the number of non-evil liches is understated due to paladins being more interested in going after searing beacons of wickedness intent on destroying the world than pestering cranky old retired people who've stuffed their underground bunkers with knick-knacks of personal significance and generally don't bother the living.
The Great Beyond has a passage about a non-evil Lich active in former domain of Aroden.
There's another non-evil lich in the same book, Xegirius Malikar (CN) dwelling in the negative energy plane, within the remains of a city torn from the material plane (though if he did this or was a casualty is up in the air).
I like non-evil greater undead -a lot- just because they make for wonderful characters with complex motivations, having discarded their humanity, their proper afterlife, and likely the respect of their own people in order to commit themselves to something greater that outstripped their ability to complete as mortals. But given the default assumptions for undeath (though not the energy powering them) in Pathfinder, it's a constant struggle for them over the ages to retain their original motivations and avoid slipping into the apathy and malice that can come so easily after such a transition. That actually makes for more powerful stories IMO. :)
Geb is a wizard's ghost who was formerly the living wizard Geb who has ruled the nation of Geb both before and after his death.
As for official non-evil undead, Arduga the ghoul from J. C. Hay's web fiction "Blood Crimes" is mostly craven and cowardly and a lot like Peter Lorre's character from Casablanca. And while that could also be argued to be evil, part of the point of the story is that in undeath he acted about the same as he had during life, so his degree of evil is relatively negligible, at least in a kingdom like Geb where a ghoul is not automatically hunted and desperate.
IIRC, Deathwebs, from RotRL's Fortress of the Stone Giants, had an alignment of neutral. But as they attacked everyone, and as they were in a PRE Pathfinder suppliment, I am pretty sure they are not what you are looking for.
That's really interesting, Kevin.
But... it seems that the "non-evil" factor is only an interpretation of his behavior.
So, I can understand that there isn't any undead doing good in Golarion.
Well, I think the point of it is that, while a ghoul may be driven to feast on the flesh of the living, once you've done that, what are you going to do with the rest of your unlife? You're hardly going to want to do it 24/7. At some point the necrophagous craving is going to be sated, and barring any evidence to the contrary, you'd think a ghoul would want to eat about as much as a human does, and wandering around gnawing on an arm is analogous to a human nibbling on a snack.
In Geb, where being a ghoul is not illegal and even considered desirable in some circles, were someone like, say, a librarian to rise as a ghoul, after he took care of having lunch, he'd probably want to go back to shelving books, doing research, helping the public and so on. One assumes that the same things that make life meaningful should make unlife meaningful.
You could also be a vegan ghoul in a city like Geb fairly easily. There are likely lots of bodies that die of natural causes there, and it really seems a waste to put someone in the ground to feed the worms when there's a hungry librarian who needs food now.
Which does not mean that Geb isn't an evil nation, but the vegan ghoul would probably be the first to admit that. Then again, philosophically, very few things are all one thing or another. There would be plenty of enlightened policies in place, and for purposes of scholarship, having certain individuals become undead is a sensible and cost-effective way of preserving knowledge. Alchemical immortality via the sun orchid elixir? Yes, that's certainly nicer, but it's not cost effective. The librarian ghoul would love it if you gave him a free True Resurrection, an immortal lifetime's supply of sun orchid elixir, a solid gold desk and a talking pony, but since that's not likely to happen, let's be practical.
So let's say Geb has a free public library staffed with undead scholars, some of them rescued from lands where they were persecuted and hunted. Is this a good thing? I think it could be reasonably argued to be so, though as with all things, it would not be totally good either.
2- Is there any OFFICIAL non-evil undead in the setting? (I mean, a non-evil undead character or NPC in an official Pathfinder product)
There's another non-evil lich in the same book, Xegirius Malikar (CN) dwelling in the negative energy plane, within the remains of a city torn from the material plane (though if he did this or was a casualty is up in the air).wrote:
The Great Beyond has a passage about a non-evil Lich active in former domain of Aroden.
2- Is there any OFFICIAL non-evil undead in the setting? (I mean, a non-evil undead character or NPC in an official Pathfinder product)There's another non-evil lich in the same book, Xegirius Malikar (CN) dwelling in the negative energy plane, within the remains of a city torn from the material plane (though if he did this or was a casualty is up in the air).wrote:
The Great Beyond has a passage about a non-evil Lich active in former domain of Aroden.
Note that The Great Beyond is technically 3.5e, not Pathfinder. The Pathfinder Lich template requires "any Evil", and there's been nothing like the "Good Lich" template to change that. However, nobody has to stick to the letter of the alignment, I know I don't, as I agree with Todd that having non-Evil undead makes for interesting material.
Probably a more accurate statement is "by default, all undead are Evil." And that's not even that accurate, probably, as the Undead type says absolutely zero about alignment, and after all, there are exceptions to all rules:
Alignment, Size, and Type: ... alignment is far more fluid. The alignments listed for the monsters in this book represent the norm for those monsters — they can vary as you require them to in order to serve the needs of your campaign. Only in the case of relatively unintelligent monsters (creatures with an Intelligence of 2 or lower are almost never anything other than neutral) and planar monsters (outsiders with alignments other than those listed are unusual and typically outcasts from their kind) is the listed alignment relatively unchangeable.
So, according to the actual RAW for alignment, any creature can have any alignment - the only issue is how unusual it is. This doesn't affect the default alignment, but nor does it preclude other, more interesting alignments.
PNJ = Personaje No Jugador (Spanish) = Non Player Character (English) = NPC
PNJ = Personage Non-Joueur (French)... I wonder what Italian and Latin would be...
Dot topic for interest. (non evil undeads)
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If you are interested in some ideas for some non evil undead and some possible good variants I know Mikaze had started up a thread about it where we posted some ideas about it. Although we were disabused pretty quickly of the notion that there are good undead in golarion. although the thread its self was a lot of fun to post in :) Here is the link