One thing I noticed is that animating undead is no longer an evil act in Starfinder. As best I can tell, no spell except Planar Binding has the "Evil" or "Good" descriptor.
I want this explained, I want the exact reason written down so that it can be understood what changed. What in the world is so different about necromancy?
Is it powered differently? Did we discover that it didn't work the way we thought it did? Did morals lax during the passing of time?
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Not a clue. And I've been asking that question a lot and would like an explanation as well.
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From the Q &A on Reddit a few days ago:
Me:Is necromancy (specifically, creating zombies, skeletons, or other forms of undead) still an evil act in Starfinder?
Owen Stephens: Not automatically. It certainly can be, and lots and lots of undead are evil. But it's not universal, and there might well be gray-area cases where there's a non-evil justification for creating undead. It's just not the way to place your bets.
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He also mentioned something in another thread that there can be non evil undead, but that most of them are evil.
Instead of viewing this as a case of morals being lazed or what how you, this is how I view it. This is all my oppinion, so take it with a grain of salt.
Is killing another intelligent being always evil? According to pathfinder, absolutely not. Paladins kill intelegent things, but are still good aligned.
Is killing another intelegent being a good action by default? Absolutely not. Killing another human being without (proper) justification is nursed, and that's very, very, evil for obvious reasons.
Animate dead is the same way, but perhaps with those justifications being significantly less easy to find. There may be some cases where reanimating the dead is moral. Just like there may be cases where killing an intelegent creature is moral. But these cases Sre the exceptions to the general rule of "don't kill intelegent creatures" and "don't reanimate the dead with necromancy".
As for undead not always being evil, I like that, and also like that it's a rare thing. I find it interesting and good story potential for a creature who's been twisted by dark magic to resist the new temptations he faces and try to walk the path of virtue. Just because they were created by evil doesn't mean that they must be evil themselves. I also like that these characters are the exception to the rule.
Just my two cents.
It's just making robots out of meat. What is there to be evil about?
That's not accurate at all. Undead are for one thing, monsters , and secondly For the Golarion Universe Undeath f~~$s with the soul, which is bad. Very bad.
But apparently something in-universe has changed.
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From the Q &A on Reddit a few days ago:
Me:Is necromancy (specifically, creating zombies, skeletons, or other forms of undead) still an evil act in Starfinder?
Owen Stephens: Not automatically. It certainly can be, and lots and lots of undead are evil. But it's not universal, and there might well be gray-area cases where there's a non-evil justification for creating undead. It's just not the way to place your bets.
-----------He also mentioned something in another thread that there can be non evil undead, but that most of them are evil.
Instead of viewing this as a case of morals being lazed or what how you, this is how I view it. This is all my oppinion, so take it with a grain of salt.
Is killing another intelligent being always evil? According to pathfinder, absolutely not. Paladins kill intelegent things, but are still good aligned.
Is killing another intelegent being a good action by default? Absolutely not. Killing another human being without (proper) justification is nursed, and that's very, very, evil for obvious reasons.
Animate dead is the same way, but perhaps with those justifications being significantly less easy to find. There may be some cases where reanimating the dead is moral. Just like there may be cases where killing an intelegent creature is moral. But these cases Sre the exceptions to the general rule of "don't kill intelegent creatures" and "don't reanimate the dead with necromancy".
As for undead not always being evil, I like that, and also like that it's a rare thing. I find it interesting and good story potential for a creature who's been twisted by dark magic to resist the new temptations he faces and try to walk the path of virtue. Just because they were created by evil doesn't mean that they must be evil themselves. I also like that these characters are the exception to the rule.
Just my two cents.
Most people will be happy with that reasoning but it doesn't jive with what lore has been with the universe (and I thought this was the same one) that mucking around with undead is canonically bad evil juju. Lore wise there has been no shortage of making this clear for years and now it suddenly not so bad.
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It's just making robots out of meat. What is there to be evil about?
If that were true, the resulting creatures would be constructs (like flesh golems or animated objects), and not undead.
What do you mean by "monsters"?
Something for the players to beat to death? Plenty of robots for that.
Anyway, we know that at least some artificial beings have souls (androids). Therefore constructing one involves the manipulation of souls. Ergo, constructing a robot with partial AI may require the use of a partial soul.
Androids are made in ways that don't cross ethical and moral reasons, from what I remember the Android body is made and a soul decides to inhabit it, which is completely different than creating Undead.
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Most people will be happy with that reasoning but it doesn't jive with what lore has been with the universe (and I thought this was the same one) that mucking around with undead is canonically bad evil juju. Lore wise there has been no shortage of making this clear for years and now it suddenly not so bad.
From what Creative Director Sutter and Moreland have said when I've asked them, repeatedly, about it possibly 2 things happened.
1) something in the universe changed on a metaphysical level, in which case we would like an explanation on that since that's not mechanics like BAB and classes, that's a fundamental way in which the universe functions that has completely changed.
2) something more and more brought, and kinda danced around, is that Starfinder is not an alternate future to Pathfinder, but a future to an alternate Pathfindee where things have always been this way, which raises so many more questions and implications...
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Belief systems have changed. On Pathfinder Golarion, people believed the creation of undead was an evil act, but that was not always the case (1st and 2nd edition AD&D). Good and evil are what people believe them to be.
Alignment doesn't work that way in Pathfinder nor Starfinder. Not even in the slightest.
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Belief systems have changed. On Pathfinder Golarion, people believed the creation of undead was an evil act, but that was not always the case (1st and 2nd edition AD&D). Good and evil are what people believe them to be.
The pathfinder setting (to the best of my knowledge) has never operated on the assumption of morality being relative- which is something I really appreciate about the setting. People can believe whatever the hell they want- that doesn't change whether or not their actions are objectively good or evil.
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Well it's not really the same universe, basically Starfinder is the same setting but an alternate universe where everything worked differently from the very beginning. There are no continuity errors because in this version of the Golarion galaxy undead were never inherently evil. This is what one of the devs said on another thread:Most people will be happy with that reasoning but it doesn't jive with what lore has been with...From the Q &A on Reddit a few days ago:
Me:Is necromancy (specifically, creating zombies, skeletons, or other forms of undead) still an evil act in Starfinder?
Owen Stephens: Not automatically. It certainly can be, and lots and lots of undead are evil. But it's not universal, and there might well be gray-area cases where there's a non-evil justification for creating undead. It's just not the way to place your bets.
-----------He also mentioned something in another thread that there can be non evil undead, but that most of them are evil.
Instead of viewing this as a case of morals being lazed or what how you, this is how I view it. This is all my oppinion, so take it with a grain of salt.
Is killing another intelligent being always evil? According to pathfinder, absolutely not. Paladins kill intelegent things, but are still good aligned.
Is killing another intelegent being a good action by default? Absolutely not. Killing another human being without (proper) justification is nursed, and that's very, very, evil for obvious reasons.
Animate dead is the same way, but perhaps with those justifications being significantly less easy to find. There may be some cases where reanimating the dead is moral. Just like there may be cases where killing an intelegent creature is moral. But these cases Sre the exceptions to the general rule of "don't kill intelegent creatures" and "don't reanimate the dead with necromancy".
As for undead not always being evil, I like that, and also like that it's a rare thing. I find it interesting and good story potential for a creature who's been twisted by dark magic to resist the new temptations he faces and try to walk the path of virtue. Just because they were created by evil doesn't mean that they must be evil themselves. I also like that these characters are the exception to the rule.
Just my two cents.
At first, I really struggled with meshing the two games' continuities in my own head, and I'm the in-house continuity wonk. Eventually, I was able to get over small (and some larger) differences between the two by recognizing that they're different games. There's Pathfinder continuity and Starfinder continuity, and while some elements are the same in both, they're a Venn diagram, not a continuum.
SO yeah basically anything that carries over from PF is not because they're the same but because they're similar universes but with different rules.
That wasn't always the case. The first androids where originally constructed by humans as mechanical servants. Putting a soul into a non-living body is necromancy. Androids came into being via necromancy.Androids are made in ways that don't cross ethical and moral reasons, from what I remember the Android body is made and a soul decides to inhabit it, which is completely different than creating Undead.What do you mean by "monsters"?
Something for the players to beat to death? Plenty of robots for that.
Anyway, we know that at least some artificial beings have souls (androids). Therefore constructing one involves the manipulation of souls. Ergo, constructing a robot with partial AI may require the use of a partial soul.
No it's not. It could be Conjuration since you're summoning the soul. We don't have exact rules for creating Androids so it's a moot point.
Androids =/= Undead
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Or 3) What people believed on Golarion before the gap was wrong.Most people will be happy with that reasoning but it doesn't jive with what lore has been with the universe (and I thought this was the same one) that mucking around with undead is canonically bad evil juju. Lore wise there has been no shortage of making this clear for years and now it suddenly not so bad.From what Creative Director Sutter and Moreland have said when I've asked them, repeatedly, about it possibly 2 things happened.
1) something in the universe changed on a metaphysical level, in which case we would like an explanation on that since that's not mechanics like BAB and classes, that's a fundamental way in which the universe functions that has completely changed.
2) something more and more brought, and kinda danced around, is that Starfinder is not an alternate future to Pathfinder, but a future to an alternate Pathfindee where things have always been this way, which raises so many more questions and implications...
Alignemnt does not work the way you are insinuating it does.
@Luke, except Starfinder is in the same universe until we're told otherwise. Mark said it isn't the same game nor continuity but stopped shy of saying it was a completely different universe.
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Belief systems have changed. On Pathfinder Golarion, people believed the creation of undead was an evil act, but that was not always the case (1st and 2nd edition AD&D). Good and evil are what people believe them to be.The pathfinder setting (to the best of my knowledge) has never operated on the assumption of morality being relative- which is something I really appreciate about the setting. People can believe whatever the hell they want- that doesn't change whether or not their actions are objectively good or evil.The people living on Golarion pre-gap believed that good and evil where absolutes. Like anything people believe, it could be wrong.
In the Starfinder universe people have become more flexible and less certain and dogmatic in their beliefs, which is why alignment plays a diminished role.
Excet it doesn't work like that in either setting.
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But the point is that in the Starfinder canon continuity undead are not inherently evil. Whether or not most of them were is a different point, they don't HAVE to be. Sure that opens a whole new can of worms but it tells us why necromancy and undead aren't evil, because in this version of the galaxy they never were.
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Belief systems have changed. On Pathfinder Golarion, people believed the creation of undead was an evil act, but that was not always the case (1st and 2nd edition AD&D). Good and evil are what people believe them to be.The pathfinder setting (to the best of my knowledge) has never operated on the assumption of morality being relative- which is something I really appreciate about the setting. People can believe whatever the hell they want- that doesn't change whether or not their actions are objectively good or evil.The people living on Golarion pre-gap believed that good and evil where absolutes. Like anything people believe, it could be wrong.
In the Starfinder universe people have become more flexible and less certain and dogmatic in their beliefs, which is why alignment plays a diminished role.
Which shouldn't affect fundamentals like whether or not ripping up souls to make controllable puppets, thereby affecting the souls natural cycle are evil.
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But the point is that in the Starfinder canon continuity undead are not inherently evil. Whether or not most of them were is a different point, they don't HAVE to be. Sure that opens a whole new can of worms but it tells us why necromancy and undead aren't evil, because in this version of the galaxy they never were.
The spell isn't evil because what it created was viewed as evil. The spell and the undead are canonically evil because they are messing around with forces and practices that are evil. Look at some PF that are basically torture without any other purpose those aren't even evil and they only have a bad use. You can use undead that you raise for good things all day but the spell is always evil.
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I think we should clarify that fixed alignments like good and evil still exist in Starfinder. The parameters for good and evil have changed but there are still things that are black and white in the setting, so that has nothing to do with the undead issue. For some reason undead aren't evil anymore, I get the impression it's just because that's how the team wanted it and I don't think we'll ever get an in universe explanation for it, but you never know!
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Android bodies where not alive before they gained a soul. Something that is not alive is, by definition, dead. Putting a soul into a dead body is, by definition, necromancy. This necromantic act may have occurred by accident, or at the volition of the soul itself, rather than have been done deliberately by the creator of the body, but it is still necromancy.That wasn't always the case. The first androids where originally constructed by humans as mechanical servants. Putting a soul into a non-living body is necromancy. Androids came into being via necromancy.Androids are made in ways that don't cross ethical and moral reasons, from what I remember the Android body is made and a soul decides to inhabit it, which is completely different than creating Undead.What do you mean by "monsters"?
Something for the players to beat to death? Plenty of robots for that.
Anyway, we know that at least some artificial beings have souls (androids). Therefore constructing one involves the manipulation of souls. Ergo, constructing a robot with partial AI may require the use of a partial soul.
No it's not. It could be Conjuration since you're summoning the soul. We don't have exact rules for creating Androids so it's a moot point.
Androids =/= Undead
What? No.
That logic is nonsense. Minerals aren't dead just for starters. No, just, no.
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But the point is that in the Starfinder canon continuity undead are not inherently evil. Whether or not most of them were is a different point, they don't HAVE to be. Sure that opens a whole new can of worms but it tells us why necromancy and undead aren't evil, because in this version of the galaxy they never were.The spell isn't evil because what it created was viewed as evil. The spell and the undead are canonically evil because they are messing around with forces and practices that are evil. Look at some PF that are basically torture without any other purpose those aren't even evil and they only have a bad use. You can use undead that you raise for good things all day but the spell is always evil.
In Pathfinder that's true but what I'm trying to get across is that in the version of the setting where Starfinder is based that was never the case, because the two are separate things. there are gonna be things in Starfinder's past that never happened in Pathfinder's canon because the two are not on the same timeline, just very similar ones.
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It affects whether or not people believe souls are harmed during the process. If you do not believe a soul is being harmed, then you are not setting out to do deliberate harm, therefore you are not doing anything evil. In order for an act to be evil it requires intentional harm. Plenty of good people do harm through ignorance.Which shouldn't affect fundamentals like whether or not ripping up souls to make controllable puppets, thereby affecting the souls natural cycle are evil.Belief systems have changed. On Pathfinder Golarion, people believed the creation of undead was an evil act, but that was not always the case (1st and 2nd edition AD&D). Good and evil are what people believe them to be.The pathfinder setting (to the best of my knowledge) has never operated on the assumption of morality being relative- which is something I really appreciate about the setting. People can believe whatever the hell they want- that doesn't change whether or not their actions are objectively good or evil.The people living on Golarion pre-gap believed that good and evil where absolutes. Like anything people believe, it could be wrong.
In the Starfinder universe people have become more flexible and less certain and dogmatic in their beliefs, which is why alignment plays a diminished role.
No, certain spells were Evil by their very nature. It didn't matter what you were casting it for.
A bunch of people deciding that something isn't Evil doesn't mean it's not Evil. Alignment does not work that way.
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Which is what inquiring minds want to know. They how and the why.
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This is what the creative director had to say about the issue in the thread that Michael7123 referenced.
Just dropping in to add fuel to this particular fire...
Yes, undead are almost always evil in Pathfinder. James Jacobs is the Creative Director of Pathfinder, and he likes it that way.
Starfinder is a different game, with a different Creative Director. And while I totally respect James's opinion and see where he's coming from, I've always wanted to play more with undead that aren't necessarily evil. So in Starfinder there have been some fundamental shifts to make that more feasible. (Exactly what prompted those shifts in-world hasn't been addressed in print yet, but a lot can happen in thousands of years.)
If you want Eox's undead population to be 100% all-bad, all the time... cool, go for it, there's certainly plenty of support for that. But if you want to play a more ambiguous game where undead Eoxians aren't necessarily evil, that's where I'm interested in heading. I want Eox to be the Cheliax of Starfinder—yeah, folks generally understand that their government is pretty twisted, but they're a big economic power and generally law-abiding, so it's in everybody's interest to play nice. As in the real world, good and evil matters way less to the Pact Worlds legal system than whether you obey the rules and honor your contracts, and the Bone Sages are both smart enough and smooth enough to convince everyone that they can all just get along.
Does Pharasma's church like that? Hell no! But just as you and I aren't allowed to go around being murderous vigilantes every time we object to someone's morality or religion, neither can citizens of the Pact Worlds (at least not when there are witnesses). Does that mean that there are Pharasmin terrorists conducting guerrilla strikes on Eox, publicly condemned by all the Pact Worlds even if some of them quietly approve? I hope so! To me, that's way more interesting.
Again, your mileage may vary, and I encourage you to tweak the setting to your heart's content. But for me, the more moral quandaries and shades of gray we can pack into the game, the better!
So it seems its a intentional design choice to make the universe a bit more gray and a lot less black and white. That and the removal of the Evil Descriptor from the spell and the lack of evil detecting magic was purposeful to reinforce this.
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Which is what inquiring minds want to know. They how and the why.
The how is that in Starfinder canon, necromancy was never evil. That descriptor was never part of the spell, it just was never a thing. The why is because the creative team wanted to play with a more morally ambiguous situation than 'this is a planet where everyone is evil and you should hate them.'
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Both of the quotes from the Creative Director in this thread are about whether or not undead are evil and how many of them aren't evil. They're very interesting points, but they don't address why the spells would have lost their evil descriptors. Since the "shift" hasn't been explained in-game, it seems we won't get the answer yet.
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Pathfinder's categorization of good and evil spells had problems. See Protection From X for the most extreme example.
Pathfinder had to go to lengths to justify all undead being evil, putting phantoms into a different category, glossing over some ghosts, and treating some things as constructs.
Pathfinder didn't really consider more ethical uses of necromancy, such as informed, uncoerced pre-death consent.
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Which is what inquiring minds want to know. They how and the why.The how is that in Starfinder canon, necromancy was never evil. That descriptor was never part of the spell, it just was never a thing. The why is because the creative team wanted to play with a more morally ambiguous situation than 'this is a planet where everyone is evil and you should hate them.'
Eox is more of a case of a planet where most of the inhabitants are evil, but the Eoxians have been reliably on the side of the non-evil peoples of the Pact Worlds longer than the Vesk have. "Evil trusted allies" is a concept that I don't recall seeing much of in Pathfinder, but it is rather central to Starfinder.
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Er, yes, minerals are dead...Android bodies where not alive before they gained a soul. Something that is not alive is, by definition, dead. Putting a soul into a dead body is, by definition, necromancy. This necromantic act may have occurred by accident, or at the volition of the soul itself, rather than have been done deliberately by the creator of the body, but it is still necromancy.That wasn't always the case. The first androids where originally constructed by humans as mechanical servants. Putting a soul into a non-living body is necromancy. Androids came into being via necromancy.Androids are made in ways that don't cross ethical and moral reasons, from what I remember the Android body is made and a soul decides to inhabit it, which is completely different than creating Undead.What do you mean by "monsters"?
Something for the players to beat to death? Plenty of robots for that.
Anyway, we know that at least some artificial beings have souls (androids). Therefore constructing one involves the manipulation of souls. Ergo, constructing a robot with partial AI may require the use of a partial soul.
No it's not. It could be Conjuration since you're summoning the soul. We don't have exact rules for creating Androids so it's a moot point.
Androids =/= Undead
What? No.
That logic is nonsense. Minerals aren't dead just for starters. No, just, no.
*continues dragging railroad track back to nest to feed babies*
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I'm almost certain that one of the developers said that in Starfinder canon necromancy was never evil but I cannot for the life of me find the quote. If there is an in-universe shift we're almost certainly never gonna know, but it doesn't seem like a problem to me. It just makes interesting RP situations.
Which is what inquiring minds want to know. They how and the why.The how is that in Starfinder canon, necromancy was never evil. That descriptor was never part of the spell, it just was never a thing. The why is because the creative team wanted to play with a more morally ambiguous situation than 'this is a planet where everyone is evil and you should hate them.'Eox is more of a case of a planet where most of the inhabitants are evil, but the Eoxians have been reliably on the side of the non-evil peoples of the Pact Worlds longer than the Vesk have. "Evil trusted allies" is a concept that I don't recall seeing much of in Pathfinder, but it is rather central to Starfinder.
Just to point out the Eoxians were trying to kill everyone before the Vesk showed up.
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The spell is no longer evil because the dev team decided to reduce the mechanical impact of alignment. This is most likely due to a desire to simplify the system.
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The spell is no longer evil because the dev team decided to reduce the mechanical impact of alignment. This is most likely due to a desire to simplify the system.
But what changed in-universe is what we're asking.
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Good and Evil/Death and life are things that are objective, but objectively decided by the positions of the gods. We know that the gods exist and have the capability of impacting each other and society. In the amount of time, the shift might not have been in morality, but rather the relations of the gods.
Perhaps the shift wasn't with the people but with the gods. The invention of a new form of necromancy, separate from Urgathoa and Orcus that isn't inherently evil.
I think its important to understand why Necromancy was deemed inherently evil, and if there would be ways around that. Perhaps a scientist who wants to reanimate ancient fossils to study them, and Calistria: closely related to Urgathoa, dedicated to knowledge, but not inherently evil, granted the ability.
Good and Evil/Death and life are things that are objective, but objectively decided by the positions of the gods. We know that the gods exist and have the capability of impacting each other and society. In the amount of time, the shift might not have been in morality, but rather the relations of the gods.Not even the Gods decide how Alignment works, it goes beyond them.
Perhaps the shift wasn't with the people but with the gods. The invention of a new form of necromancy, separate from Urgathoa and Orcus that isn't inherently evil.The spells weren't Evil for being used by Evil Gods. Those are Gods of Undeath but Undeath is not Evil because of them.
I think its important to understand why Necromancy was deemed inherently evil, and if there would be ways around that. Perhaps a scientist who wants to reanimate ancient fossils to study them, and Calistria: closely related to Urgathoa, dedicated to knowledge, but not inherently evil, granted the ability.
What?
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Good and Evil/Death and life are things that are objective, but objectively decided by the positions of the gods. We know that the gods exist and have the capability of impacting each other and society. In the amount of time, the shift might not have been in morality, but rather the relations of the gods.Not even the Gods decide how Alignment works, it goes beyond them.Perhaps the shift wasn't with the people but with the gods. The invention of a new form of necromancy, separate from Urgathoa and Orcus that isn't inherently evil.The spells weren't Evil for being used by Evil Gods. Those are Gods of Undeath but Undeath is not Evil because of them.I think its important to understand why Necromancy was deemed inherently evil, and if there would be ways around that. Perhaps a scientist who wants to reanimate ancient fossils to study them, and Calistria: closely related to Urgathoa, dedicated to knowledge, but not inherently evil, granted the ability.What?
I'm pretty new and not super caught up on lore, but we know it was inherently bad and now its not so its up to the story tellers amongst us to create an instance that makes it true.
What power decides the alignments?
The Calistria/Urgathoa connection I got from Pathfiner wiki: "Calistria in particular is more of a friendly rival [with Urgathoa] than an enemy, as she represents lust while Urgathoa champions carnal excess, and the two often fight over potential followers."
Welcome! ^w^
Yes until we're told why we're free to come up with reasons.
The universe decides, basically, in that it is just how the universe works.
The actual text is "She also has an ongoing feud", nothing really friendly about it.
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Well, in that case I'm blaming the drift for shifting the nature of quintessence.
