Why does negative energy re-animate dead things?

[FrankManic]

I mean, I know the OOG reason is that the Negative Energy Plane has always done that and there needs to be some explanation for how necromancy works, but seriously - What?

Why the heck does the magical black-hole at the bottom of reality cause dead stuff to get up and dance around? That seems like sort of exactly the opposite of its thing.

And it leads to other questions. Like does it have to be dead animals? Could it be, say, a dead plant? Does it even have to be dead stuff? What happens if you pump a bunch of negative planar energy into a doll or a statue or something?

Is it some kind of sympathetic magic thing where the skeleton gets up and behaves like a person because the bones remember being a person? Or does anything pumped full of negative energy become animate?

Basically - Is there any fluffy reason why the energy from the plane of ultimate entropy would be able to animate dead creatures? Fluff-wise it seems like positive energy should do that, energizing them to a semblance of life, while negative energy should sap that false life and destroy the undead creature. But in practice it's the opposite.

What gives? What would a level 15 sage in Absolom tell me if I paid him enough to put up with my annoying questions?

[agnelcow]

My answer for that has always been "it doesn't", which seems contradictory to the rules so I should explain. What follows is all based on my own wild speculation and homebrew cosmological answers.

Positive Energy is, in a weird abstract way, life force. All living things have it, and adding more to one can help repair "broken" vital functions, which is more or less how healing works. Over time, your reserves of it naturally dwindle until there is no spark of life inside you.

Negative Energy is not merely the absence of Positive Energy, but its functional opposite; imagine that there is not only darkness, but rather a sort of anti-light that obliterates it to create darkness— that's how the two interact. Similarly, when Negative Energy interacts with living things it doesn't just "darken" part of your life force but actively obliterates a portion of it.

Now, this isn't an absolute truth; there are planes of existence and alternate realities where Positive Energy brings harm and Negative Energy heals. But that's pretty much an academic point, because if we lived in one of those realities we would refer to them by the opposite moniker, and not actually answer the question. "Positive" and "Negative" are shorthands for describing the effect on living things on the Prime Material Plane. The "undoing" of PE by NE is merely the first half of its own form of creation, which are cannot see as we are destroyed by the process; the distinction of "Entropic NE" versus "Creative PE" is based purely on our position in the process's cycle, and PE does quite the same to NE in universes where the dominance is reversed.

Animating dead is more than just infusing a corpse with Negative Energy because, at least in our version of existence, Negative Energy can't grant vitality; that's Positive Energy's job (again, in other realities, the roles of these two energies might be reversed, as the "anti-light" of NE could presumably illuminate in other universes). Instead, animating dead flesh uses the onyx in the spell as a focus that opens a sort of connection to the Negative Energy Plane that is focused through the corpse. Ambient PE is pulled through this connection into the NEPlane, where it is negated and destroyed. It is the Positive Energy flowing through the corpse that powers Undead, not the Negative Energy itself, as the process is sort of a gross mockery of the natural attrition of life force in living creatures. Animation only persists because the PE being drawn through the corpse is obliterated as it contacts the metaphysical connection to the NEPLane, causing a constant flow of life force through the dead tissue in attempt to create equilibrium.

As the undead is damaged, its connection to the NEPlane weakens until it closes and cannot draw any PE into itself to maintain animation. NE "heals" the undead because it strengthens the connection and allows more PE to be drawn through it, prolonging its unlife. PE harms the undead by altering the balance of NE and PE "pressures" around the portal to the NEPlane and causing the tide briefly flow the other way, drawing NE from its plane to be obliterated in ours. Equilibrium is restored quickly thereafter, but the connection is already weakened by the sudden reversal of energy flow.

TL;DR: Positive Energy actually animates the corpses, but doing so requires a connection to the Negative Energy Plane that forces Positive Energy to flow through tissue that normally does not contain it.

[LazarX]

FrankManic wrote:

I mean, I know the OOG reason is that the Negative Energy Plane has always done that and there needs to be some explanation for how necromancy works, but seriously - What?

Why the heck does the magical black-hole at the bottom of reality cause dead stuff to get up and dance around? That seems like sort of exactly the opposite of its thing.

And it leads to other questions. Like does it have to be dead animals? Could it be, say, a dead plant? Does it even have to be dead stuff? What happens if you pump a bunch of negative planar energy into a doll or a statue or something?

Is it some kind of sympathetic magic thing where the skeleton gets up and behaves like a person because the bones remember being a person? Or does anything pumped full of negative energy become animate?

Because it fits the horror genre of making the dead come back as monsters. The negative energy is so prevalent a trope that even Transformers Prime uses it.

[FrankManic]

agnelcow wrote:

Awesome metaphysics

That is a brilliant explanation. I'm going to hold on to that, thank you.

[Ross Byers]

Nicely done, agnelcow.

That also explains why things that thrive on negative energy also often need to consume the living (ghouls, vampires, wights).

The Secundar would be the 'alternate reality' version where they view the two as reversed. Heck, it explains why they hate undead (because undead all all fundamentally portals that dump positive energy (poison to the secundar) into their home plane.

[KtA]

I've wondered about this same thing -- it does seem inconsistent.

My speculation is that the "void" description of the Negative Energy plane is incorrect, a description of how living beings tend to see it since it is completely devoid of familiar things like life and light. It does indeed destroy life and light, but not as a void/vacuum sucking it out; instead it's more of a matter/antimatter thing.

Negative energy isn't "a negative quantity of positive energy", it's an opposite polarity. Matter/antimatter, positive/negative electric charge, north and south poles of a magnet.

The Positive and Negative Energy planes are the dipole of the multiverse...

[Terokai]

so could we say then agnelcow that when a player casts resurrection or any of the bring back to life spells that they are using the diamond as a focus to force positive and negative energy (using your theory) into the dead body. Using the positive energy like Dr. Frankenstein uses lightning to give the spark of life to his creation and the negative energy to act as a dense point in all of that positive energy to draw the soul back into the proper place and then essentially pinning it to the physical body (essentially like in peter pan (the disney version) where they sew his shadow back on using the negative energy to sew the soul back in)