Creative Director
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So if you create body doubles of yourself via the Clone spell and then animate the spare flesh with Animate Dead, how many of these still apply?
Seems a lot more moral than hiring some poor lookalike to catch the assassin's crossbow bolt for you.
Seems like a lot of work to get a CR 1/2 minion also. But I'd still say it was an evil act—casting animate dead on a clone doesn't magically remove the [evil] bit from animate dead.
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Seems like a lot of work to get a CR 1/2 minion also. But I'd still say it was an evil act—casting animate dead on a clone doesn't magically remove the [evil] bit from animate dead.So if you create body doubles of yourself via the Clone spell and then animate the spare flesh with Animate Dead, how many of these still apply?
Seems a lot more moral than hiring some poor lookalike to catch the assassin's crossbow bolt for you.
That begs the question, is a clone actually considered dead, for the purposes of this spell? Would Animate Dead (should somebody actually try to do that, for whatever reason) actually work on it? The spell calls it "inert" and says that the inert form can rot if not preserved somehow, but the same could be said for a living, breathing quadraplegic who isn't cared for properly (rot = gangrene).
Seems like a lot of work to get a CR 1/2 minion also. But I'd still say it was an evil act—casting animate dead on a clone doesn't magically remove the [evil] bit from animate dead.So if you create body doubles of yourself via the Clone spell and then animate the spare flesh with Animate Dead, how many of these still apply?
Seems a lot more moral than hiring some poor lookalike to catch the assassin's crossbow bolt for you.
Yes, but it begs the question of why the [evil] tag is there. If negative energy is not evil, then it's not from that. The business about violating the remains of the dead and so forth seems similarly irrelevant, since it can be done with cloned flesh or even presumably a body created by means of Fabricate + Stone to Flesh, and moreover creating a flesh golem doesn't seem to have the [evil] descriptor either. The only reason seems to be that skeletons and zombies are automatically evil despite being mindless.
The question then comes whether this applies to everything. I don't have it handy, but I remember glancing in Classic Horrors Revisited and seeing some business about a Magus Zombie who could cast spells, with the example being some incompetent spellcasting noblewoman who wanted to turn herself into a lich but ended up a Magus Zombie instead.
The question then comes up as to whether Magus Zombies have free will. If they do, then they're not necessarily evil, and logically then Animate Dead (magus zombie variant) should not have the [evil] descriptor either.
On a different note, animating your own cloned flesh could be a way to examine the theological claims that animating the remains of a person traps and torments their spirit. If you do it to your own clone, you should be able to answer the question of whether you feel trapped and tormented or not.
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Undead = negative energy = evil. Pretty much the official rule.
I understand that. What I am saying is, in this circumstance, I don't understand why. A LG character gets drained to death by a vampire, the vampire then dies because his party saves the undead character before he is controlled into doing harm to anyone. Now the LG fighter who is a vampire is under his own free will. Does he become evil and want to kill people just because he's a vampire? What if he wants to use his new found strength to stop evil, or the common stereotype of hunting undead? If he does need blood to survive why can't he just pull a Twilight (twitches due to referencing it) and eat animals?
A Dhampir reacts in the same way that a vampire does to Negative Energy, and is in part because he has Negative Energy flowing through him. But he is not evil, from what I understand, do to the fact that it wasn't his choice and has free will.
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Actually in my book, the creation of even mindless undead, save maybe skeletons, prevents the soul from progression to it's afterlife. The soul is essentially locked in as a helpless witness to everything it's body does in undeath, it's essence used to animate the creature, but it's will totally locked out of it.
This makes it more powerful than trap the soul and soul bind, as it can actually drag a soul kicking and screaming out of heaven (even if it's already progresed from Lantern Archon all the way up to Solar, allowing a 5th level evil cleric to kill an epic Solar *by accident*) or from the clutches of Asmodeus (even if the dude sold his soul for power, making it a great way to escape the contract) or from the belly of a daemon that devoured it as a light snack, and now has a strange empty feeling in its belly as the soul was un-devoured, re-constituted, and dragged back to the mortal plane (and becomes re-ressurectable, by killing the skeleton and then casting ressurection on the remains, now that the awesome gods-defying power of animate dead has rebuilt it's formerly destroyed soul).
It also means that anyone who finds the mortal remains of Urgathoa, Irori, Nethys or any of the other ascended-from-mortal dieties can cast animate dead and suck their souls out and shove them into their ages-dead bones as helpless insensate passengers in a CR 1/2 body.
Pretty freaking epic interpretation of what one can do with a 3rd level spell.
The assumptions of a setting in which this was possible would be that *all* bodies are to be cremated, immediately, upon death, since the casting of animate dead would allow demons, devils, angels, even some gods, to be destroyed, and would tear even the non-ascended souls (larvae, petitioners, etc.) away from the demons, devils, angels and gods, weakening them.
There'd be no tombs or graveyards in such a setting, that's for sure. Humanoids in climates where building a fire might not be practical for every dead goblin would have strict instructions to devour every scrap of their dead tribesmates, to make sure that the souls aren't later snatched away from their monster-gods.
I'd be leery of making such a setting-changing epic-rules-busting change to the animate dead spell (and it would be a change, because if it did work that way, the spell would state that it didn't work on the bodies of those whose spirits are magic jarred, soul bound, have been eaten by daemons, have been ascended into celestials or devils, etc., etc.).
Allright i'll say it. . .
We are all makeing a large assumption here, the assumption that positive energy is the energy that permiates and anamates all living things.
I propose that this is not the case. I propose that the energy used to anamate all living things is PRIME energy, a compelation of all the prime energy sources and further that the ammount and either balance or imbalance of that anamateing force is defined by sentience and Experince.
Undead = negative energy = evil. Pretty much the official rule.I understand that. What I am saying is, in this circumstance, I don't understand why. A LG character gets drained to death by a vampire, the vampire then dies because his party saves the undead character before he is controlled into doing harm to anyone. Now the LG fighter who is a vampire is under his own free will. Does he become evil and want to kill people just because he's a vampire? What if he wants to use his new found strength to stop evil, or the common stereotype of hunting undead? If he does need blood to survive why can't he just pull a Twilight (twitches due to referencing it) and eat animals?
A Dhampir reacts in the same way that a vampire does to Negative Energy, and is in part because he has Negative Energy flowing through him. But he is not evil, from what I understand, do to the fact that it wasn't his choice and has free will.
I think the trouble here is that "free will" gets subverted by the needs of the genre and the tone the worldbuider and by extension the GM is going for.
While it may be theoretically possible to have noble vampires and jolly geeky liches, if you're going for Sturm und Drang high gothicness, it's not going to happen. All the vampires are going to be evil but occasionally tortured by pangs of human conscience, because that's more tragic than all-evil-all-the-time, and the liches will be cackling and glorying in their beautiful wickedness if they're not being utterly cold and emotionless creatures who regard the living as bugs.
Basically, Animate Dead gets the [evil] tag for Golarion because James wants/needs it to have the [evil] tag to fit with the mood that's wanted/needed for the world. The logic of why it gets the [evil] tag is mostly justification after the fact, because there are always examples which will break the justifications. Use Craft Wondrous Item + Animate Dead to create a Robe of Bones. Look! You've got a magic bathrobe with patches you can pull off to turn into zombies and skeletons! Where the hell did they come from? Are you desecrating the remains of the...um, cotton? Are you torturing the soul of the...um, cotton dryad? Making it so that she can't be resurrected into what's an annual plant anyway, which died of old age and thus couldn't be resurrected, so...? Am I confused yet?
Then there's stuff like the question of, if you use Polymorph Any Object to turn a bone into a ghoul, does the spell gain the [evil] descriptor? If you use it to turn a ghoul back into a good little girl, does it get the [good] descriptor? What if you ghoulify the child the usual way with your pet ghouls, then turn her back into a regular child with no memory of that unpleasant episode so she'll strongly radiate magic, and when one of those busybody paladins or clerics decide to remove your [good] spell, they suddenly have an evil ghoul on their hands? Won't that be fun?
Of course, that will never happen because all the [evil] and [good] tags lie very close to the 4th wall, and while in a realistic world geeky wizards and crazed oracles who wish to test the boundaries of reality and discover the ultimate truth would examine evil and good and measure it down to the last micron, in a world where the world builder wants to have a certain mood, the geeky wizards and crazed oracles will all have incredible lapses in judgement that keep them away from that 4th wall and answering any of the important philosophical questions people would actually have.
Skeletons are evil because they are evil. Why are they evil? Insert one: "It is a great mystery" "We do not know why, only that it is so" "We do not ask this question, for that way lies madness"
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I think it's actually the ever popular skeleton/zombie horror stories and films. Where the zombies are coming to eat everyone, or a supposedly harmless skeleton is getting up and swinging weapons at you. They should be dead, and they're up and moving, and how are you supposed to kill them? Quite apart from them likely being someone's loved ones, so destroying them is desecrating the bodies. And your friends that are killed are going to get up and attack you too. The whole idea (if it was for real) is horrible. So it has to be evil because it's "Ugh".