I assume Void would be to go to trait since like isn't The negative energy from The Void is the life force of the undead
This is the case, though I don't think undead will have the void trait, since they currently don't have the negative trait (just negative healing). The void trait is more likely to be saved for beings such as sceaduinar, who are the native of the Void.
In any case, undead are definitely considered unholy of a kind given the preview above, but I'm not sure they'll automatically be tagged as unholy (since the main effects of that would be just special weakness to holy and possibly doing extra damage celestials) which doesn't feel entirely right. We have undead player options and I feel like it would be strange if becoming undead mandated unholy sanctification, for example.
But also I don't expect activities like murder and torture to be given the unholy trait either. We will have to see what, if any mechanical impact there is for creating undead or if it's going to be purely narrative.
It comes down to whether everything associated with undead creation gets the Unholy trait dropped on it. If it doesn't, then there is a gap. There is a big difference between mostly evil and always evil.As a concept? No, the planes still exist and there's no indication the whole element of your morality determines which plane your petitioner is sent to is going either. The only thing going is the ability for you to precisely detect / target it. Which means, yes, it could be argued that without that there's no objective upper case E Evil anymore but, given the amount of stuff in setting which'd still point the creation of undead as lower case e evil.Necromancy and the creation of undead is such a fundamentally evil thing on Golarion.Isn't Evil gone as a concept now?
It's unholy now. The unholy forces of unholiness.
I would think every spell, ritual, feat, whatever that involves "creating undead" would at the very least carry the "Unholy" tag.
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I would love to see a necromancer class! Honestly to try to have it be a minion master class is a bit short in scope and kind of antithesis to PF2e designs. I propose something like the inventors inventions where you could choose a undead minion like they have a clock work one, or go in a different path! Keep in mind not everyone's idea of a necromancer is minion swarm. I could see an AOE path with necromantic or bone attacks. Or a path with a special ray or touch attack!
But we already have all that. You can have a single undead animal companion equivalent, or an undead eidolon, and you can use undead themed spells in like a million different ways. Necromancy spells even cover all three saves.
What we don't have is a way to make the minion swarm work, or generally pivot between a lot of undead that's more effective than summoning spells. And that's a design space worth filling, IMO, but one that probably calls for necromancer as a sub path instead of the only path. (I'm thinking nature spirits for primal, constructs for arcane, and aberrations or oozes for occult.)
You could go for a broader take on the necromancer like the kineticist did for elements, though. A lot of impulses could be reflavored into some combination of necromantic effects, actually. They even have several ways of generating minions or "turrets" that could easily be animating some bones instead of making hands come out of the earth or an animal made of fire.
There is no requirement for every Necromancer to be a minionmancer. Given the extremely wide field of inspiration (I’ll never forget the death master NPC class in my first purchased Dragon magazine #76 in….1983) from our own world to various pop culture tropes the Necromancer class could be so many things. Buffer. Minion-keeper. Debuffer. Blaster. Healer/damage dealer. Controller. AoE. Skills. Face. If you need to charm a zombie…princess.
Given the breadth shown by the Kineticist, it shows that it can be done.
And now that Book of the Dead has well and truly blown the anti-undead gang firmly into bone shards and smithereens of gobbets of flesh, the unhallowed grounds are….ripe with putrescent rot. Rise and descend holy and unholy necromancers. Stake….your claim!
Or just make a necrotic element for kineticists….wait…what am I saying. Noooooooooooooooo!!!!
New class. New class. New class……..
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I feel like the best way to do a necromancer is to find ways to flavor abilities to minimize mechanical impact.
I'd like to see magical abilities that kind of conceptually mirror incarnate spells, invoking undead and spirits for specific effects with short term durations.
Along with a core permanent minion that can either represent a single powerful undead or a troop.
Having 10 individual minions might be a thing Paizo wants to avoid, but there are ways to make the class feel like it has 10 or 20 minions even if it doesn't that might be fun.
Yeah, having a dozen minions tromping along behind you, all taking their own actions, is a time waster anyway, given how weak said minions tended to be in earlier editions. But having an attack that does X damage and it represents a swarm of flying skulls or summoned spirits attacking en masse, or various afflictions (or buffs!) representing spirits attacking (or possessing and assisting!) people, would be a decent way to get around the problem of 'okay, zombies 1 through 4 shuffle at the mobs, but don't make it there this round. skeleton archers 5 through 8 fire arrows, and miss, miss, miss and hit for 3 pts of damage...'
I played a few necromancer types, and generally, the hordes of minions were just an enormous pain in the butt, more than anything, and not terribly useful, unless you could make an undead dragon or hydra or something (or command a horde of shadows, which, yikes, great way to accidentally kill your entire party, when they Create Spawn a dozen more shadows that you *don't* control, that immediately turn on your party...)
Or just make a necrotic element for kineticists….wait…what am I saying. Noooooooooooooooo!!!!
New class. New class. New class……..
Void Kineticist was a thing in P1E.
Void could be Occult. Vitality Divine. Force Arcane.
Or just make a necrotic element for kineticists….wait…what am I saying. Noooooooooooooooo!!!!
New class. New class. New class……..
Void Kineticist was a thing in P1E.
Void could be Occult. Vitality Divine. Force Arcane.
with void being negative energy (now?) It could easily be divine
Necromancy as a 5th tradition sounds interesting but not sure how that would be implemented but I'd be all for new necromantic spells to fill a 5th tradition of magic.Instead of calling it necromancy, how about soul or spirit magic. That way it could also open up more less-than-savory options.
It shouldn’t be a matter of savory or not unless you are a ghoul necromancer, or possibly a vampire necromancer. I’m not sure many beings actually taste…sweet. Some types of fruit-conversant leshy types perhaps…
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Aside from the Holy/Unholy thing, the lowercase e evil part of it is that necromancy in Golarian does not nice things to souls and the fabric of reality that make it a very jerkass thing to do, regardless of your damage resistances, and so it immediately puts one in conflict with most other people. It's the classic problem of most players wanting to play Anthony Bourdain and one player wanting to play Henry Kissinger - the other players can't be Anthony Bourdain anymore because they're not actually Anthony Bourdain if they do not beat Henry Kissinger to death with their bare hands. If you're playing Henry Kissinger, everyone else has to make characters that would tolerate the presence of Henry Kissinger.
Which, as Captain Morgan said, is a big showstopper for something as complicated as an entire class. Their approach of making a troop summoner class that has necromancy as an option sounds like the most viable way to go about it, it's easier to have niche options that can't work in every party or campaign if they're not by themselves taking up pages and pages of rules that took months of design and playtesting to create.
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If there were a necromancer class written (and I dearly want one), no way is it getting sanctification. That is, as people say, reserved for clerics/champions.
In general sanctification seems reserved for them + undead + outer plane creatures. You can kick puppies and drown kittens just fine without taking bonus damage from sanctified divine immolation . That's why they cut alignment from the game - so that a sort of greedy merchant and an irredeemable serial killer weren't treated exactly the same, and so that you could have shades of grey precisely like is being described here with the necromancer ("I use my zombies to help the poor! Now stop stabbing me, Sir Knight!")
In general, I expect actions to not be sanctified at all. People and creatures can be. Not the things you do. That would be way too close to alignment for comfort.
Clerics and Champions are the ones most likely to be sanctified, since some deities actually require it.
I do not remember reading that sanctification would be reserved for these 2 classes though.
Also, a sanctified (to Unholy) greedy merchant would likely feel the wrath of Holy far more than an unsanctified irredeemable serial killer.
I am more and more convinced that one of the new classes is going to be the “seneschal” and it is going to be a leadership/mob class. I am not really sure what the mechanics of this class are going to be, but I am imagining a class that has a/+ companion/s and does a lot of aura buffing of allies. My favorite theory for the companion is that it will be a troop to start off with. I think it is entirely possible that one subclass could be “necromancer” and the troup/ally is undead. My personal vision for this class is that the main stat is constitution, and that it does class DC aura effects based on constitution, but it’s secondary attribute would be cha or INT, and I could see the necromancer being an INT subclass that even possibly gets MC spell casting like an eldritch trickster.
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What we don't have is a way to make the minion swarm work, or generally pivot between a lot of undead that's more effective than summoning spells. And that's a design space worth filling, IMO,There's a couple 'mob' monsters in PF2E. See Ghostly Mob and Hadi Mob in AoN. Also rules for swarms. So the precedent and rules are there, even if they're not a perfect fit. You make the skeleton army act in combat as a single entity, you give it vulnerabilty to AoE attacks, the "troop movement" ability, and maybe (per the "mob" critters but not all the "swarm" critters) the option to make their attack stronger by increasing the number of actions (a single action strike does X, a double action strike does more than X, etc.).
Having said that, does PF2E have mob or swarm construction rules? i.e. any way to change a group entity's statistics as you summon more or lose some? If not, I agree with you, that's a design space work filling and would be very useful for a Necromancer class.
I do however suspect that this approach would not please everyone. At least some of the folks pulling for 'skeleton army necromancer' are probably doing so precisely because of the coolness and utility of having multiple independent minions. The idea of their skeleton army being a single stat block swarm entity would miss their entire motivation for building that PC.
Well those people are going to be out of luck because having that level of utility would undercut the versatility cost of building a specialist class, and we aren't going to see PF1 style turns with multiple minions.
I am more and more convinced that one of the new classes is going to be the “seneschal” and it is going to be a leadership/mob class. I am not really sure what the mechanics of this class are going to be, but I am imagining a class that has a/+ companion/s and does a lot of aura buffing of allies. My favorite theory for the companion is that it will be a troop to start off with. I think it is entirely possible that one subclass could be “necromancer” and the troup/ally is undead. My personal vision for this class is that the main stat is constitution, and that it does class DC aura effects based on constitution, but it’s secondary attribute would be cha or INT, and I could see the necromancer being an INT subclass that even possibly gets MC spell casting like an eldritch trickster.
I really like the idea of being just a dude with an army. Just regular ass soldiers you commamd who collectively are about on par with a single other member of your party. Just a guy with his homies at all times. Or hell, not even being the guy but just playing as this collective, leaderless mob, going into dungeons and just overwhelming anything inside with sheer numbers.