What are the ramifications of declaring that mindless undead have no alignment (and are therefore neutral)? I got the PCs in an ambush in my last session because I could've sworn mindless undead didn't have an alignment, being mindless, but when I looked up the Beastiary I seems I am mistaken. To me they shouldn't have an alignment because mindless beings can't have morality. But I'm concerned it will really mess up certain mechanics I haven't thought about.
Am I opening a can of worms if I stick with my precident?
I'd stick with RAW unless you want a mutiny on your hands. To me all undead are evil unless stated otherwise in the bestiary. Usually they are created using evil magical spells/rituals and they hunger for human flesh.
Mindless Undeads are generally created with evil spells so they have a faint aura of evil on them (or stronger with high enough HD). Changing the mindless Undeads to neutral will screw the party Paladin out of his/her detect evil and Smite Evil, Inquisitor of detect alignement and anyone wielding holy weapon from inflicting additional damage.
Think of this the following way: they are neutral ethically as incapable of thoughts, emotions and own intents but they are infused with unholy energy and evil intent of their creator (or just raw evil intent of unholy powers that animated them spontaneously).
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Skeletons and zombies are evil because at some point in time, Wizards of the Coast decided that negative energy = evil, so therefore anything that uses negative energy is evil (positive energy, however, is neutral.)
Before 3rd edition, skeletons and zombies were neutral, and they should of stayed neutral.
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I personally don't see all undead as evil. I ran a campaign once myself in which willing worshippers of a god of death (who just so happened to run the city) would "donate" their bodies after death to become mindless undead. These undead, mostly skeletons, would then do manual labour tasks such as simple farming, digging, ect to make peoples lived easier. How is it evil to abide by someone's wishes when they pass away and then use the results to help others who are still alive? The soul has gone to it's resting place and what's left is a husk, so why not put it to good use through magic?
I feel negative energy shouldn't itself be inherently evil either, no more so than fire, water, or positive energy, it's just easier to manipulate it for evil purposes. Fire spells aren't evil, but I can certainly burn down an orphanage with one right? It's not the source of your power it's what you do with it. Some spells are evil spells, I don't dispute that, but creating mindless undead and negative energy shouldn't be.
I personally don't see all undead as evil. I ran a campaign once myself in which willing worshippers of a god of death (who just so happened to run the city) would "donate" their bodies after death to become mindless undead. These undead, mostly skeletons, would then do manual labour tasks such as simple farming, digging, ect to make peoples lived easier. How is it evil to abide by someone's wishes when they pass away and then use the results to help others who are still alive? The soul has gone to it's resting place and what's left is a husk, so why not put it to good use through magic?
I feel negative energy shouldn't itself be inherently evil either, no more so than fire, water, or positive energy, it's just easier to manipulate it for evil purposes. Fire spells aren't evil, but I can certainly burn down an orphanage with one right? It's not the source of your power it's what you do with it. Some spells are evil spells, I don't dispute that, but crating mindless undead and negative energy shouldn't be.
It's really setting dependent.
On Golarion there is an eternal godess of death, fate and birth that decreed that any form of undeath is unnatural and abomination in her eyes, the first undead was voracious women that clinged to life against the natural order to eternally fulfill her hedonistic appetites of all sorts.On Faerun there were sequence of evil, scheming, power hungry deities of death (alien and tyrannical Jergal prior to getting borred by the whole Death, Strife and Tyranny schtick, then Myrkul, who might or might not be a necromancer in life, certainly he was focused evil like his companions when they ascended, then psychopatic murderer Cyric hold tenure for ten years until Kelemvor took mantle of the death god who is strictly anti-undead). Still, Faerun is one of worlds where good undeads are explicitly known to exist - but only sentient Undeads qualify to be good.
On Krynn all undeads are province of Chemosh, who sees them as his personal slaves and is willing to lie, cheat and threaten others into submission (with a minority being subjects of Morgion who is as cruel and ruthless). The very concept of undeads seems to be created by entities that oppose free will and want to enslave souls.
Other settings can have different philosophical and cosmological background for undeads.
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Skeletons and zombies are evil because at some point in time, Wizards of the Coast decided that negative energy = evil, so therefore anything that uses negative energy is evil (positive energy, however, is neutral.)
Yeah, and also changing all the healing spells from Necromany to Conjuration, because Necromancy = bad. I try not to think about this too much because I don't need high blood pressure. Stupid WotC...
Don't have a handy link to the post where he said it, but I remember James Jacobs posting that Paizo made the skeletons, zombies, and other mindless undead evil for many reasons, most of which rhyme with "backwards compatibility." That said, in the Serpent's Skull AP, the Juju magic mystery for Oracles is presented which has the option of taking the "Spirit Vessels" power which uses the neutral Wendo spirits instead of whatever evil icky things presumably hang out in the plane of shadow. So there is a by-the-RAW way to have a neutral zombie that doesn't run off to eat the nearest human the moment whoever's controlling it loses control.
Personally, I house rule that both options are possible, since I want the option to run adventures with crazed hordes of hungry zombies and other adventures with poor pathetic corpses standing blankly in the cane fields.
Mindless Undeads are generally created with evil spells so they have a faint aura of evil on them (or stronger with high enough HD). Changing the mindless Undeads to neutral will screw the party Paladin out of his/her detect evil and Smite Evil, Inquisitor of detect alignement and anyone wielding holy weapon from inflicting additional damage.
Think of this the following way: they are neutral ethically as incapable of thoughts, emotions and own intents but they are infused with unholy energy and evil intent of their creator (or just raw evil intent of unholy powers that animated them spontaneously).
This pretty much close to what happened: The inquisitor was using Detect Evil in an area with concealed skeletons and I told the player he didn't detect any evil because I was going by my old edition memory of mindless undead = neutral. I think I'm going to stick with RAW and make the distinction between the resonance of evil acts (which raising undead certainly qualifies as) and actual moral evil. So while the skeletons themselves aren't evil, the act of raising them is, and the resonance of that evil act remains on them, making them detect as evil (and being subject to smite evil, and so forth...).
Skeletons and zombies are evil because at some point in time, Wizards of the Coast decided that negative energy = evil, so therefore anything that uses negative energy is evil (positive energy, however, is neutral.)Yeah, and also changing all the healing spells from Necromany to Conjuration, because Necromancy = bad. I try not to think about this too much because I don't need high blood pressure. Stupid WotC...
Yeah, and spell that determines if someone is alive, wounded, dying, dead or undead is evil... Thankfully Pathfinder dropped evil descriptor.
The whole idea of Conjuration (healing) school is problematic at beast - if it uses direct positive energy it should be Evocation subschool. But I would prefer removal of the whole positive/negative energy duality anyway.
Weren't I ranting about that a few times in various threads before?
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Don't have a handy link to the post where he said it, but I remember James Jacobs posting that Paizo made the skeletons, zombies, and other mindless undead evil for many reasons, most of which rhyme with "backwards compatibility." That said, in the Serpent's Skull AP, the Juju magic mystery for Oracles is presented which has the option of taking the "Spirit Vessels" power which uses the neutral Wendo spirits instead of whatever evil icky things presumably hang out in the plane of shadow. So there is a by-the-RAW way to have a neutral zombie that doesn't run off to eat the nearest human the moment whoever's controlling it loses control.
Personally, I house rule that both options are possible, since I want the option to run adventures with crazed hordes of hungry zombies and other adventures with poor pathetic corpses standing blankly in the cane fields.
Actually as I understand it the Oracle Mystery is a typo, they're not supposed to be neutral. Still I think it would be a neat ability and I'd keep it the way it is for my games ^^
I feel that unless there is some form of divine intervention (like those given in Drejk excellent examples) the creation of mindless undead from soulless bodies isn't evil. Even if it is culturally taboo is most cultures it's not a flat out evil act.
I feel that unless there is some form of divine intervention (like those given in Drejk excellent examples) the creation of mindless undead from soulless bodies isn't evil. Even if it is culturally taboo is most cultures it's not a flat out evil act.
It is considered cultural taboo mostly because it is considered evil or unclean act, similar to torture, except after death.
From the fact that animating dead is evil it could be reasoned that animating the corpse does disturb the spirit in its afterlife, even if not outrightly forcing it back to its body.
Skeletons and zombies are evil because at some point in time, Wizards of the Coast decided that negative energy = evil, so therefore anything that uses negative energy is evil (positive energy, however, is neutral.)Before 3rd edition, skeletons and zombies were neutral, and they should of stayed neutral.
Iirc, the alignment of Skeletons and Zombies was never outlined in the original D&D rules (1974) but they were described in terms that evoked "evil". They "act only under the instructions of their motivator, be it a magic user or cleric (chaos)" (D&D Monsters and Treasure page 9). It also said they were "usually only found near graveyards, forsaken places, and dungeons" and that "they will always attack until totally wiped out". Mindless, malevolent and originating with chaos (read "evil" in the original game).
The original rules required interpretation; RAW was impossible and not really expected. I think most of us considered them "evil" / chaotic. All the more so because they were undead and could be turned / destroyed by a Lawful ("good") cleric. They were always described as being created by evil even when they were listed as "neutral" (in 1E and 2E).
Making them "evil" in 3E just brought them into line with other undead, explained their attacking, and allowed certain spells and abilities to effect them. You can always "rule 0" their alignment but there are a number of consequences (as others have noted) related to that.
The default cultural mileu of D&D has always been western / European. The undead (until recently) have always been seen as "evil" / yucky. Ymmv. And your intrpretation of course.
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Why do uncontrolled skeletons and zombies attempt to kill every living thing they encounter? In my book, that kind of inherent nihilism = 'evil'.
Yes, most creatures need to be sentient (i.e. Intelligence 3 or higher) in order to understand the concepts involved and 'choose' to be 'evil'. But it is also possible for non-sentient things to be inherently evil without choice... whether that be an unholy weapon, a 'book of vile darkness', or a mindless undead.
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I feel that unless there is some form of divine intervention (like those given in Drejk excellent examples) the creation of mindless undead from soulless bodies isn't evil. Even if it is culturally taboo is most cultures it's not a flat out evil act.It is considered cultural taboo mostly because it is considered evil or unclean act, similar to torture, except after death.
From the fact that animating dead is evil it could be reasoned that animating the corpse does disturb the spirit in its afterlife, even if not outrightly forcing it back to its body.
Again it is situational though. What if the person who has died willingly allows their body to be raised, they don't just accept it legally they wish it to be done due to religious beliefs. Perhaps even to the point that they know their immortal soul will be disturbed for some time, but after a set period of time their undead body is put to rest so the soul can be freed entirely.
So the act of raising the body from the dead is not an evil act, unless defined as such by a religious organization other than the one the person follows. It may be unpopular, considered disturbing and bizarre to many, but that act alone should not brand someone as evil or (in game terms) shift their alignment towards evil.
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Don't have a handy link to the post where he said it, but I remember James Jacobs posting that Paizo made the skeletons, zombies, and other mindless undead evil for many reasons, most of which rhyme with "backwards compatibility." That said, in the Serpent's Skull AP, the Juju magic mystery for Oracles is presented which has the option of taking the "Spirit Vessels" power which uses the neutral Wendo spirits instead of whatever evil icky things presumably hang out in the plane of shadow. So there is a by-the-RAW way to have a neutral zombie that doesn't run off to eat the nearest human the moment whoever's controlling it loses control.
Personally, I house rule that both options are possible, since I want the option to run adventures with crazed hordes of hungry zombies and other adventures with poor pathetic corpses standing blankly in the cane fields.
Actually as I understand it the Oracle Mystery is a typo, they're not supposed to be neutral. Still I think it would be a neat ability and I'd keep it the way it is for my games ^^
I feel that unless there is some form of divine intervention (like those given in Drejk excellent examples) the creation of mindless undead from soulless bodies isn't evil. Even if it is culturally taboo is most cultures it's not a flat out evil act.
I'm looking at the book right now. It's definitely not a typo:
Spirit Vessels(Su): You can channel wendo spirits into lifeless bodies, reanimating them to aid you. Necromancy spells that create undead lose the evil descriptor when you cast them. Mindless undead created by your magics are of neutral alignment, while thinking undead possess your alignment.
That's from Serpent's Skull III: City of Seven Spears. It may be that such oracle mysteries and undead are not PFS legal, or possibly that they were retconned like the Asmodean paladins, but it's definitely there in the text. And personally I like it because it allows you to say that both sorts of zombies are correct, or even have no-evil vampires if you feel like it.
But not sparkly ones. I don't think anyone wants sparkly vampires.
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Where does it say that an undead creature has to be evil to be affected by negative energy? I thought it just said undead creatures are affected a certain way by negative energy.
It's generally understood that all undead posses their animated qualities due to negative energy. It's not that they have to be evil to be affected by it, it's just part of them, just as positive energy is part of all living things.
It is also thought by some (many) that negative energy itself is in some respects evil, and so all undead are evil, though I personally disagree in this case it seems to be more of a balance/backward compatibility issue as others have stated above.
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Don't have a handy link to the post where he said it, but I remember James Jacobs posting that Paizo made the skeletons, zombies, and other mindless undead evil for many reasons, most of which rhyme with "backwards compatibility." That said, in the Serpent's Skull AP, the Juju magic mystery for Oracles is presented which has the option of taking the "Spirit Vessels" power which uses the neutral Wendo spirits instead of whatever evil icky things presumably hang out in the plane of shadow. So there is a by-the-RAW way to have a neutral zombie that doesn't run off to eat the nearest human the moment whoever's controlling it loses control.
Personally, I house rule that both options are possible, since I want the option to run adventures with crazed hordes of hungry zombies and other adventures with poor pathetic corpses standing blankly in the cane fields.
Actually as I understand it the Oracle Mystery is a typo, they're not supposed to be neutral. Still I think it would be a neat ability and I'd keep it the way it is for my games ^^
I feel that unless there is some form of divine intervention (like those given in Drejk excellent examples) the creation of mindless undead from soulless bodies isn't evil. Even if it is culturally taboo is most cultures it's not a flat out evil act.
I'm looking at the book right now. It's definitely not a typo:
Spirit Vessels(Su): You can channel wendo spirits into lifeless bodies, reanimating them to aid you. Necromancy spells that create undead lose the evil descriptor when you cast them. Mindless undead created by your magics are of neutral alignment, while thinking undead possess your alignment.
That's from Serpent's Skull III: City of Seven Spears. It may be that such oracle mysteries and undead are not PFS legal, or possibly that they were retconned like the Asmodean paladins, but it's definitely there in the text. And personally I like it because it allows you to say that both sorts...
No it's a typo, the fact that it's in the book but was printed incorrectly makes it a typo. It's all explained here from James Jacob himself
http://paizo.com/forums/dmtz51rj?Juju-Oracles-White-Necromancers-and-nonevi l#25
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No it's a typo, the fact that it's in the book but was printed incorrectly makes it a typo. It's all explained here from James Jacob himself
http://paizo.com/forums/dmtz51rj?Juju-Oracles-White-Necromancers-and-nonevi l#25
You say typo, I say godsend for groups that are absolutely starved for flavorful support for non-evil undead.
I'm sticking with the original writer's intent on this one.
No it's a typo, the fact that it's in the book but was printed incorrectly makes it a typo. It's all explained here from James Jacob himself
http://paizo.com/forums/dmtz51rj?Juju-Oracles-White-Necromancers-and-nonevi l#25
You say typo, I say godsend for groups that are absolutely starved for flavorful support for non-evil undead.
I'm sticking with the original writer's intent on this one.
In your game you can do w/e you want, but it isn't Jorda75 saying it's a typo, it's James Jacob saying it. So I'd have to argue that the original intent is as James states and that the typo was errata'd and explained away. Even James says in that thread that it's your campaign and you can do what you want, but it was still a typo.
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Mindless undead are evil in Golarion because Urgathoa flipped the non-good goddess of death the bird and broke one of her non-lawful rules, which makes her chao.... uh, evil!
Walking away with your hand in the air while Pharasma is talking is an act of such significance that it upset the natural order, introduced disease to the world, and made the line-cutter into a god.
Clearly someone had spent too much time waiting in the queue at the DMV and fantasizing about apocalyptic rampages. :)
Still, different GMs can work it different ways. You can dig into one of the Monsters Revisited books (Horrors or Undead, I don't recall which) and find a sidebar that states that skeletons and zombies *contain the trapped souls of their former hosts,* and that's why they are evil, because an animate dead spell can tear a soul out of the afterlife and trap it in it's rotting corpse for all eternity, in defiance of infernal contracts, celestial paradises and all the foot-stomping tantrums Pharasma can muster. Since the spell has no provisions for failing if the soul is otherwise occupied, this can even happen to corpses that have been dead long enough that the souls have gone on to become angels or pit fiends or *been devoured by daemons* or been trapped in gems by 9th level spells, and, perhaps souls that have gone on to become *gods.* (Ooh, I found a bone from Irori, when he was just an ascended master! Let's cast animate dead and *kill a god!*)
That's been suggested to be 'not-canon,' too, but, hey, you can find text supporting all sorts of whacky stuff.
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Mindless undead are evil in Golarion because Urgathoa flipped the non-good goddess of death the bird and broke one of her non-lawful rules, which makes her chao.... uh, evil!
Walking away with your hand in the air while Pharasma is talking is an act of such significance that it upset the natural order, introduced disease to the world, and made the line-cutter into a god.
Clearly someone had spent too much time waiting in the queue at the DMV and fantasizing about apocalyptic rampages. :)
Still, different GMs can work it different ways. You can dig into one of the Monsters Revisited books (Horrors or Undead, I don't recall which) and find a sidebar that states that skeletons and zombies *contain the trapped souls of their former hosts,* and that's why they are evil, because an animate dead spell can tear a soul out of the afterlife and trap it in it's rotting corpse for all eternity, in defiance of infernal contracts, celestial paradises and all the foot-stomping tantrums Pharasma can muster. Since the spell has no provisions for failing if the soul is otherwise occupied, this can even happen to corpses that have been dead long enough that the souls have gone on to become angels or pit fiends or *been devoured by daemons* or been trapped in gems by 9th level spells, and, perhaps souls that have gone on to become *gods.* (Ooh, I found a bone from Irori, when he was just an ascended master! Let's cast animate dead and *kill a god!*)
That's been suggested to be 'not-canon,' too, but, hey, you can find text supporting all sorts of whacky stuff.
I remember that side bar actually but it always struck me as kind of odd. Animate Dead is a level three (or 4 for wiz/sorc) spell, and yet it has the power to yank a soul from the afterlife and jam it back inside the corpse, no matter who owns it or where it is? Even the goddess of death can't stop it? Doesn't sit right with me, ha ha ha :)
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I'm currently working on a setting with a couple of my players in which positive and negative energy are both completely neutral. The only reason that undead are generally created with negative energy is so that they naturally kill bacteria that would feast on the flesh (because the immune system can't fight them off). This makes them last longer (they DO eventually decay, even with proper maintenance).
Undead are treated like other mindless creatures: they have basic programmed behaviors only. If they were created for the fields, they do not attack unless made to believe you are the wheat that they are attempting to harvest. If they were created to stack crates, that's all they can do and they will stand around confused if there is nothing to stack. Importantly, they do NOT contain any scrap of the soul of the original owner for that body.
This, in effect, forces undead into the "neutral" slot. Intelligent undead (int 3+) can still have an alignment (of course).
It is kind-of boring that they are solidly "always evil" by RAW, but them's the breaks.
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I remember that side bar actually but it always struck me as kind of odd. Animate Dead is a level three (or 4 for wiz/sorc) spell, and yet it has the power to yank a soul from the afterlife and jam it back inside the corpse, no matter who owns it or where it is? Even the goddess of death can't stop it? Doesn't sit right with me, ha ha ha :)
There had been round-and-round discussion about necromancy/negative energy/undead before that book was out here on the boards, and the 'but they trap souls!' argument was a powerful one thrown about, and the 'confirmation' of it in Classic Whatever was a bitter pill for me.
I asked about it, probably in the 'Ask James Jacobs' thread and he said, 'No. That's not how it works.' so that was a comfort.
I very much don't like the idea that Pharasma, a goddess whom I don't like much anyway, can be trumped at her terribly important job, a job so important that when she gets defied, the defier *becomes a god,* by a mere 3rd level spell, and that a neutral cleric could wander around Cheliax or Mendev by night and steal souls directly from Asmodeus or Iomedae (and unmake angels and devils) by casting animate dead.
As for 'mindless evil,' and the association with negative energy and evil, a setting that embraced those assumptions, and followed that logic and associated positive energy with good (making demons, ebola, serial killers and Cthulhu 'default good' since they are all positive energy creatures!) and allowed random rocks and trees to be 'mindless good' would be amusing, in an absurd sort of way.
...Don't have a handy link to the post where he said it, but I remember James Jacobs posting that Paizo made the skeletons, zombies, and other mindless undead evil for many reasons, most of which rhyme with "backwards compatibility." That said, in the Serpent's Skull AP, the Juju magic mystery for Oracles is presented which has the option of taking the "Spirit Vessels" power which uses the neutral Wendo spirits instead of whatever evil icky things presumably hang out in the plane of shadow. So there is a by-the-RAW way to have a neutral zombie that doesn't run off to eat the nearest human the moment whoever's controlling it loses control.
Personally, I house rule that both options are possible, since I want the option to run adventures with crazed hordes of hungry zombies and other adventures with poor pathetic corpses standing blankly in the cane fields.
Actually as I understand it the Oracle Mystery is a typo, they're not supposed to be neutral. Still I think it would be a neat ability and I'd keep it the way it is for my games ^^
I feel that unless there is some form of divine intervention (like those given in Drejk excellent examples) the creation of mindless undead from soulless bodies isn't evil. Even if it is culturally taboo is most cultures it's not a flat out evil act.
I'm looking at the book right now. It's definitely not a typo:
Spirit Vessels(Su): You can channel wendo spirits into lifeless bodies, reanimating them to aid you. Necromancy spells that create undead lose the evil descriptor when you cast them. Mindless undead created by your magics are of neutral alignment, while thinking undead possess your alignment.
That's from Serpent's Skull III: City of Seven Spears. It may be that such oracle mysteries and undead are not PFS legal, or possibly that they were retconned like the Asmodean paladins, but it's definitely there in the text. And personally I like it because it
Ah, thanks for the link. Not a "typo" in my book since I reserve that term for actual typographical errors, as opposed to an editorial "oversight" which is a different beast.
But, in any case, everyone has the option to house rule their own world and that even includes their own take on Golarion. The evilness of mindless undead, and the non-evilness of paladin patrons, are both cases of these.
Personally I like a lot more greyness in my worlds so I can think of several ways to have non-evil undead as well as paladins of Asmodeus. With the second, all you'd need is some Saint of the Asmodean church who's Lawful Neutral and have the paladin then worshiping that saint. Be even more amusing if this saint were someone very up on legalities who legally got the Prince of Law over a barrel because that's what the contract says. Would such a saint be non-canon? I'd say yes. I'd have a hell of a time selling him to James, and frankly I'm not enamored enough with him to bother. Would such a saint be allowed in my own games? Probably yes, because I find the idea interesting, and quite honestly the more Byzantine you can make the church of Asmodeus, the better in my book.
As for non-evil undead, I like having both options so it's a simple application of a house rule.
^ said was I was saying, but better and with less snarkiness. Thank you Mr Murphy.
I so generally find any alignment based mechanics to be frustrating. The alignment system has always been my pet peeve in D&D based games.
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This pretty much close to what happened: The inquisitor was using Detect Evil in an area with concealed skeletons and I told the player he didn't detect any evil because I was going by my old edition memory of mindless undead = neutral. I think I'm going to stick with RAW and make the distinction between the resonance of evil acts (which raising undead certainly qualifies as) and actual moral evil. So while the skeletons themselves aren't evil, the act of raising them is, and the resonance of that evil act remains on them, making them detect as evil (and being subject to smite evil, and so forth...).Mindless Undeads are generally created with evil spells so they have a faint aura of evil on them (or stronger with high enough HD). Changing the mindless Undeads to neutral will screw the party Paladin out of his/her detect evil and Smite Evil, Inquisitor of detect alignement and anyone wielding holy weapon from inflicting additional damage.
Think of this the following way: they are neutral ethically as incapable of thoughts, emotions and own intents but they are infused with unholy energy and evil intent of their creator (or just raw evil intent of unholy powers that animated them spontaneously).
Just a little note here. Detect anything doesn't go through walls nor does it go around corners.
What are the ramifications of declaring that mindless undead have no alignment (and are therefore neutral)? I got the PCs in an ambush in my last session because I could've sworn mindless undead didn't have an alignment, being mindless, but when I looked up the Beastiary I seems I am mistaken. To me they shouldn't have an alignment because mindless beings can't have morality. But I'm concerned it will really mess up certain mechanics I haven't thought about.
Am I opening a can of worms if I stick with my precident?
There is virtually no repercussions for doing so. There is no need to change anything CR. The only thing is they aren't affected by holy weapons or smite evil but Paladins wasting their smites on the mindless mooks is pretty questionable anyway, since mindless undead are generally pretty weak foes (as is reflected in their low CRs).
Given that the vast majority of creatures in Pathfinder are evil (going by the Bestiaries), making mindless undead is definitely not going to poop on the Paladin's parade. Especially since Paladins still get tons of spells that affect undead regardless of their alignment (as well as lay on hands, channel energy, turn undead, and so forth).
Positive energy still hurts them, and since there are weapon enhancements like disruption and undead bane, losing the ability to whack a skeleton or zombie with a holy weapon is pretty "meh".
As another poster pointed out, mindless undead were Neutral dating back to 1st Edition, and were Neutral until Hasbro bought out Wizards of the Coast and made all undead evil; whereas the original stance on D&D is that creatures have to have the ability to reason to have a moral alignment.
If you have to have a creature that is mindless but is also innately evil, then it should have the Evil creature subtype, like the 3.0 Lemure devils did. They were mindless, and thus Neutral, but possessed the Law, Evil, and Baatezu subtypes so they were made of so much smite-fodder.
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EDIT: Incidentally, in pre-3E D&D, clerics of any alignment can cast animate dead, but the spell notes that good clerics do not cast it without a good reason for doing so, and that it generally results in problems if you begin animating dead bodies in the middle of civilization.
In other words, a Good cleric might cast animate dead to save a village from a goblin warparty arriving the next day, but not simply because it would be awfully convenient to have undead to spring traps in dungeons. A neutral cleric wouldn't care, but probably won't because there is a social stigma that may draw unwanted attention. An evil cleric animates them to further his goals and achieve his evil ends, and probably wouldn't hesitate to create fresh corpses (read: kill people) to add them to his forces.
Incidentally, in my copy of OSRIC (1E reprint, basically) mindless undead are actually the only undead who aren't typically evil. In fact, they are "always neutral".
Finally, all the planar lore suggests mindless undead should be Neutral. They are neutral objects (corpses) that are empowered by a neutral energy (negative energy) and directed and controlled by magic. They have no soul or will of their own. They do not suck souls out of heaven or hell, trap the soul of the person you animate, and so forth. They don't enslave anything. The only thing that makes it questionable is that you're using a dead body.
Incidentally, most tools and even many shelters have been made of dead bodies, and many adventurers wear dead bodies for warmth and armor. If it's a problem with using dead humanoid bodies, then it becomes purely a cultural thing as to how sacred the humanoid (or sentient creature's) biological remains are. That's cultural and has nothing to do with good and evil. Then again, you can make undead out of animals as well. If you slaughter an ox to feed a family with its meat, you can animate the skeleton to ploy their fields.
Every argument against mindless undead being mindless is weaksauce, because for every official source they can cite that suggests mindless undead should be evil, there has been around 2 official sources to prove otherwise. If you want to know why mindless undead are evil, it's because Hasbro the toy company said so.
Incidentally WotC had no problem printing good undead before being bought out by Hasbro. Their Monsters of Faerun book includes good liches, the Archlich and Baelnorn. They even have the ability to animate mindless undead with animate dead as a spell-like ability. However, Hasbro later bought them out and made all undead Evil, and then they had to create the "Deathless" which are undead that aren't evil to fill the same role that good undead previous filled.
So yeah, mindless undead have been evil for about as long as a toy company has owned D&D.
EDIT 2: Also, I would suggest taking notice of a certain trend that has been getting more and more apparent with Hasbro-owned Wizards over the years. Black and white morality, but not just morality, stereotypes. In 3.0, there were plenty of non-evil things that were kinda gross or ugly, and plenty of evil things that weren't, and so forth. However, post-Hasbro, ugly = evil, pretty = good.
In 4E - Hasbro's D&D for a younger generation - my PHB says that evil alignments aren't for PCs, and it's an entirely optional thing as to whether or not you can play an evil character at all. This hedges out undead from being a player option at all, taken further by the fact there is no player-accessible necromancy in the 4E core rulebooks, and that the Bestiary has plenty of undead (mindless and otherwise) that are said to be created with rituals that are not contained in the PHB (or the Bestiary either) making them purely within the realm of the GM.
Incidentally, as a GM, I found this to be a pain, because party members wanted to learn the rituals for creating undead, and there weren't any, requiring me to homebrew a really basic thing. Thanks Hasbro, thanks a lot.
Deathless from the Eberron campaign setting were explicitly positive-energy undead; it should be possible to adapt something similar to your campaign if you want to have some sort of good/evil duality among undead.
But if you think that it makes sense in your campaign to have undead be neutral with good/evil decided by whomever is controlling them, then I can see that as a perfectly legitimate way to construct a time-space continuum.
Personally, I like the "necromancers are some shady folks" vibe, so I go with the undead=evil in my own games.
Incidentally WotC had no problem printing good undead before being bought out by Hasbro. Their Monsters of Faerun book includes good liches, the Archlich and Baelnorn. They even have the ability to animate mindless undead with animate dead as a spell-like ability. However, Hasbro later bought them out and made all undead Evil, and then they had to create the "Deathless" which are undead that aren't evil to fill the same role that good undead previous filled.
Later? Monsters Of Faerun, like all 3rd edition was published after Hasbro bought WotC.
In 4E - Hasbro's D&D for a younger generation - my PHB says that evil alignments aren't for PCs, and it's an entirely optional thing as to whether or not you can play an evil character at all. This hedges out undead from being a player option at all, taken further by the fact there is no player-accessible necromancy in the 4E core rulebooks, and that the Bestiary has plenty of undead (mindless and otherwise) that are said to be created with rituals that are not contained in the PHB (or the Bestiary either) making them purely within the realm of the GM.
Incidentally, as a GM, I found this to be a pain, because party members wanted to learn the rituals for creating undead, and there weren't any, requiring me to homebrew a really basic thing. Thanks Hasbro, thanks a lot.
Lots of RPGs does both, assumes that certain alignments or character types are for NPCs and not for PCs, only sometimes resorting to providing the rules for certain areas of activity, especially in case of magic, reserving lots of activities to NPCs.
What about this PrC ability from the core rule book.
Summon Shadow (Su)
At 3rd level, a shadowdancer can summon a shadow, an undead shade. Unlike a normal shadow, this shadow's alignment matches that of the shadowdancer, and the creature cannot create spawn....
Non-evil undead have been with Pathfinder from the core book. If in very special circumstances.
Later? Monsters Of Faerun, like all 3rd edition was published after Hasbro bought WotC.
Hmm, seems they did. How very odd. One of the 3E web articles I had read on the Wizards website long ago mentioned the Hasbro merger as it if was coming; and the only other time I had seen Hasbro mentioned during anything related was concerning the Bo*Ds.
Thank you Drejk for pointing that out; I stand corrected.
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I miss my LG necromancer in 2E, retired after making a deal with a town that he gets their dead to make a armed force that protects the town.
I have a player who professes the purchasing of corpses. Similar to how bodies are donated to science. He allows people to volunteer their bodies when they die (worked out in a will or other legal contract), and he gives them a one time appreciation gift of about 50 gp. Since that's about 2 months worth of living expenses that you get for basically nothing (you use your body up until you die, then you don't care), plenty of folks would be willing to do so.
Ha! This reminds me of an argument I was having with a dm. He made his own world, fey were the great natural regenerating force, undead were the reverse, he removed alignment but undead were the big evil (yep lol), vile, tainted, entropy beings. He would always push how evil and anti-life they were, but death and decay is a part of life too.
Let us just say the dm was not a Buddhist, or interested in Asian philosophies at all. Death was evil for him, and utterly!
I miss my LG necromancer in 2E, retired after making a deal with a town that he gets their dead to make a armed force that protects the town.
The town needs YOU!
Said problematic dm was also quite unwilling to recognise necromancy could be used for good. I did have a good guy necromancer Greg character ready to go if mine snuffed it.
@StabbittyDoom - Sounds very similar to a game I ran years ago, I love the concept myself and agree completely that mindless undead who must be given commands to act are no more evil than golems and other mindless constructs. :)
The zombie has no beliefs and is not malicious. In fact you can put them to public works and they won't protest.
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The unintentional weirdness of making undead evil because they feed off of death is that all of us positive-energy-empowered living things do that too. We kill animals and plants and mash them up in our mouths and dissolve them in the concentrated entropy-juice roiling around in our tummies, to extract precious life-giving nutrients that used to be keeping them alive, until we killed them.
The only living creatures that *don't* murder and devour other living creatures to survive are creatures like mayflies, that spend their entire three day life-cycles starving to death.
Meanwhile, skeletons, zombies, wights, wraiths, shadows, spectres, liches, mummies, etc. just keep on trucking. Only ghouls and vampires typically feed on the living, and it's not entirely clear that they *have* to feed to survive, as neither suffers any mechanical effects for not doing so. There are no official 'starvation rules' for undead, although you can find non-OGL stuff in Libris Mortis.
Further, ghouls can subsist on the bones of the long-dead, unlike humans, meaning that they can get through life without killing anyone, and vampires, again, unlike humans, can feed entirely off of blood drawn from living donors, thus allowing them to exist without killing. (What does make the vast majority of them evil, is that so few of them care to pursue such routes...)
So icky unnatural life-defiling negative energy is, paradoxically, *better at supporting life* than positive energy, as a positive energy empowered creature has to murder and devour other living creatures every single day of it's existence to remain alive, and is in a constant state of degeneration (through aging), while negative energy, which, in theory, is supposed to be all unnatural and antithetical to the material world, is stable, reliable, and not at all dependent upon destroying other living creatures. A lich or mummy or skeleton can spend centuries free of the ravages of hunger or age or disease.
It's as if, mechanically, the living world *hates* living creatures, as if *they* were the unnatural ones, constantly struggling to survive against the entropic effects of a world that is unnatural and inherently hostile to them.
An undead is like ceramic or plastic, a re-organization of natural materials into something that doesn't decay or rot like wood or bone.
Plus there's the whole question of whether or not something that is an inherent part of the planar cosmology could ever be 'unnatural.' Negative energy exists, and if it's 'unnatural,' then so to must be positive energy, because it's just as much an alien energy source from another dimension that can be infused into meat and bone to cause it to lurch about. In the D&D/PF cosmology, meat puppets animated by extraplanar positive energy are not unnatural. They're just people. And so to, should it be, with meat puppets who have found an alternative energy source *that works even better, and is less hostile to the material plane than positive energy.* (Demonstrated by how the material plane isn't constantly eroding away at creatures animated by negative energy, unlike the constant war it fights with creatures animated by positive energy, a war it always wins, in the end, as they age and die, burned away by the corrosive effects of the material plane on all 'natural' living things.)
Yeah, the undead are a part of all that is too. They are not unnatural just because they are negative.
I would say part of the reason the were always treated as evil is just from bad movies, books, etc...
The hoard of shuffling zombies moaning, "brains ... brains ... brains ... "
Also, some of the older material is kind of schizo on the subject.
Mindless, do nothing unless ordered, like fragile robots.
OR
If not directed otherwise will kill anything they encounter and fight until destroyed.
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To the OP, I don't think it will make a huge deal either way, but the players should know what your call is for their world.
Yeah, the undead are a part of all that is too. They are not unnatural just because they are negative.
Physicists don't call antimatter unnatural. In fact, they believe that in the beginning of time there was a near equal amount of both matter and antimatter, but that matter and antimatter cancel each other out, and that matter basically "won" the fight by having the tiniest bit more in existence than antimatter.
Positive and negative are like that. They have almost the same properties, but are opposed to one-another.
How did mindless undead set up an ambush?
They were lightly buried in shallow holes in the ground in the yard around the evil cleric's house. Their command was to attack anything in the yard if a little bell was wrong. The PCs went up to the door and knocked several times at which point the cleric rang the bell.
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Yeah, the undead are a part of all that is too. They are not unnatural just because they are negative.Undead created through Animate Dead and such are made by intelligent creatures and are thus synthetic. Unless you think a trebuchet is natural as well.
Well I don't think a trebuchet is evil. It's as natural as the wood it's made out of. It's just a natural resource that has been modified, like virtually every other tool. Forging steel is as natural as rust on iron. It's a natural result of certain conditions being correct for doing so. To get those conditions, humans typically turned to controlled environments and engineering.
In the same way, a teepee made by native americans is natural in the sense it is made of dead things. It is made of killed trees that are cut and placed together to form the bone structure, then covered in the skins of dead animals, and sewn together with the cord sinew from those same dead animals. Plants and Animals do not usually become teepees upon their death, but they reach that point through entirely natural processes where they are exposed to certain elemental conditions (boiling and tanning, for example, or being torn with a knife, etc) that are began by a human running them through the conditions.
Undead are the same way. In fact, everything that is used to create a teepee and native tools are used in the creation of a single skeleton, minus the death of plant life. A tribal shaman (read: cleric or oracle) might take a bull that has been killed, and cast animate dead upon it. What occurs here? Well, the flesh is separated from the bones, which his tribesmen can eat and turn into clothing. He applies an elemental condition, by subjecting the corpse to the neutral aligned negative energy, which causes it to reanimate, and then uses his magic to control the now animate but mindless husk.
This is similar to subjecting the corpse to other neutral elements. The fire used to cook or tan the corpse to turn it into something usable is also a neutral element that. Positive and Negative energy are naturally as much a part of the material plane as Fire and Water. You need both. I don't see anyone saying that wizards conjuring fire is somehow amazingly evil, when fire and negative energy are both amazingly similar in that they are both capable of incredible destructive power, and incredible feats of engineering and utility; depending on how they are used.