How do you play a capital-G Good necromancer?

There's a LN kingdom ruled by an undead elite (necrocracy? tanatocracy?) in which necromancers are an aspect of everyday life. Sure,the reanimate the dead (and because of that reason most religions reprove this place),but they only reanimate criminals and their own people (who are cool with it because most of the labour force is formed by undead,and they see as giving back to their homeland what it gave them in their lives); war criminals are respected until their fairly judged,and there are graveyards for the foreigners in the biggest cities,which are respected by all law-abbiding citizens.

So,a Good aligned necromancer is who uses his necromantic powers for good,not selfish or trivial reasons. Rising a bunch of skeletons to defend a village is a good reason; doing the same to kill and plunder said village,isn't. In the end,I see it as self-sacrifice,generous character, who uses the power of undeath to help people around him,no matter the cost and even if that can damn his soul forever in certain Afterlives.

To quote the Tome of Necromancy, you have two options, and the core rules are sort of ambivalent which is the case, leading to confusion on the matter.

> Moral Option 1: The Crawling Darkness
> Many DMs will choose to have Negative Energy in general, and undead in particular, be inherently Evil. So much so that we can capitalize it: Evil. And say it again for emphasis: Evil. That means that when you cast a negative energy wave you are physically unleashing Evil onto the world. When you animate a corpse, you are creating a being whose singular purpose is to make moral choices which are objectionable on every level. That’s a big commitment. It means that anyone using Inflict Wounds is an awful person, at least while they are doing it. The Plane of Negative Energy is in this model the source of all Evil, more so than the Abyss or Hell. It’s Evil without an opinion, immorality in its purest most undiluted form.

> Moral Option 2: Playing with Fire
> Many DMs will choose to have Negative Energy be a base physical property of the magical universe that the D&D characters live in – like extremes of Cold or Fire it is inimical to life, and it is ultimately no more mysterious than that. An animate skeleton is more disgusting and frightening to the average man than is a stone golem, but it’s actually a less despicable act in the grand scheme of things because a golem requires the enslavement of an elemental spirit and a skeleton has no spirit at all. The Plane of Negative Energy in this model is precisely the same as all the other elemental planes: a dangerous environment that an unprotected human has no business going to.

Depends on the setting

So step one is to get your DM on board with the "Playing with Fire" interpretation, and step two is to go ahead and make a necromancer. You can even do so as a non-Death Cleric, under that interpretation, without violating your Good alignment.

You only animate the dead who have given you explicit permission to do so, either before they died or through use of a Speak with Dead spell. This permission has to be freely given because they believe in your cause and not the result of any threats or material compensation, which would unfairly pressure the poorest and most desperate people into selling their bodies.

1. Reanimation is voluntary.
2. The Necromancer sees reanimation, having your soul returned to the mortal world, as a last chance for sinners to repent and avoid eternal damnation.
3. The undead are free to quit being undead at any given time.
4. The undead are exclusively, or at least to the best of our ability, doing good actions like caring for the needy, doing hard labour, or serving the Faith.

I now really want to play a 'Necromancer' who has a crazy twist on necromancy magic where every spell is basically a reversed version of the normal necromantic spells.

>Rather than making opponents flee in Fear / Terror he instead leaves them defenseless in a state of Bliss / Ecstasy
>Rather than Raise Dead his spells instead Bury Living creatures.
>Rather than Speak with Corpses he Mutes the Living.
>All of his drain life spells instead infuse people with death energy.
>Rather than Sapping someones Strength he causes a form of Empowerment that makes others to become dramatically strong and tear themselves apart.

When you think about this all of a sudden he's actually become more terrifying than regular necromancers are.

That sounds quite nice. A character like that could wander from village to village, looking for volunteers or the dying.

You could even build a campaign where two warring families reanimated many previous generations to help build their castles and now want to use the undead to destroy each others castles.
It would give adventurers and interesting angle: Side with House A, Side with House B, or side with the Undead and destroy both for ruining all the work of the previous generations.

You just described a bunch of bard spells user

Ezekiel connected dem dry bones,
Ezekiel connected dem dry bones,
Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones,
Now hear the word of the Lord.

The core problem would be down to each game and the source of the magic the reanimates life.

Usually its some nebulously pool of dark energy that is by default evil and corrupt. Or it rips someones soul from the afterlife to perform some shit task like soak up a fireball or guard a tomb for eternity.

So its either naivety or greater good element which wouldnt make you LG.

However if your setting has some freedom, you could base your necromancer as someone who asks willing participants to become undead for a limited purpose. A society full of skeleton miners, builders and farmers could provide a great deal of added free labour for everyone. The energy thing should be left up to the air whether its good or evil and certainly dont touch upon the idea that the reanimated are still the same people.

In his vision, the Ezekiel actually rezzed them. They weren't undead.

It depends on the setting.

Perhaps they could create mutual pacts; a sentient soul who lives again, who wants to enjoy life again, and agrees to serve the necromancer on certain terms.

Maybe it's a fanatical culture whose necromancers reincarnate heathens so their souls can attain entry to heaven through acts of, forced, service.

Maybe the dead naturally rise anyway, and necromancy at-least checks them to some kind of service.

1. Have bad taste and ignore thematics.
And I think that's about it.

i'm presently playing a not!egyptian necromancer as a reincarnated queen who brought her entourage along with her to the next life. She just has their souls jump into nearby uninhabited corpses to fight for her.

He animated the dead once to try and bring back a loved one with terrible results. Now he's devoted his knowledge of necromancy to destroying undead and evil necromancers.

Raising undead is a last resort in case he's heavily outnumbered and would protect a lot more innocents by getting a small squad of skeletons to hold the line, but he always pays proper penance afterwards and does his best to sanctify any dead he used.

On a sort of related note, I've often seen talk about society where undead are used for free manual labour or military, as if they were sort of general purpose robots to take care of cities. How would this work in practice? I can't help but imagine all of the diseases that would spread from all the shambling corpses and all of the jobs that would be displaced, necessitating that everyone have some sort of higher education because all of the unskilled labour is done by zombies. Not to mention, wouldn't people object to their dearly beloved family member being made into a automaton? Maybe we can gloss over that just to say that the society in question has already accepted it.

Necromancy is always evil, and you're gonna catch fines from the union if they catch you using zombies to better mankind. They have an image to maintain.

A necromancer who worships a god of "The Dead" rather than "Death". He slays tomb robbers, takes the departed to a worthy grave, and lets a dying warrior's body rise up one last time for his beloved country, goes to disaster zones and uses skeletons to save people from horribly-flooded areas.

Also destroys wrongly used undead because they´re an affront to his god.

There's that one Veeky Forums storytime about a player in a solo campaign over IRC whose Necromancer raised the dead to work the fields, etc. so the peasants could do more like study, etc. Same Necromancer then started taking on apprentices, passing down techniques and policies on using undead for good.

Unbeknowst to the Necro's player, his DM was running a campaign with another bunch of players who are basically hunting this legendary 'evil lich' who had populated the countryside with zombies and skellingtons. They scoured the land, one town at a time, killing undead and eventually, the 'evil' necromancers commanding the undead. Elsewhere, at the end of his campaign, the solo player's Necromancer is old and ready to enter into the afterlife, but checks on his legacy one final time. He is aghast to discover that all his apprenta are dead, his work undone, the people he liberated from ignorance returned to it. The other players' party eventually finds his lair, ready for the confrontation of their lives, only to find an old, miserable man, weeping in lamentation at what they had done for the sake of 'good.'

Pic is in my computer, so couldnt post. Sorry.

The Necromancers of Thay, in the FR setting, actually do this. They have something like legally acquirable corpses such as executed prisoners which they can, once raised, basically use as servitors/slaves/etc.

Technically, their king ordered them to act with Aragorn requesting their king to act. Both points are kind of moot since they were kept animated by the curse of Aragorn's ancestor.

Haven't we had a thread about this before? Wasn't there some writefaggotry about a necromancer that uses his own family's ghosts to empower his necromacy?
And his family kept complaining about everything?

Name a system or setting where necromancy that involves raising the dead and shit isn't evil by default. Just because something is a problem in DnD doesn't mean it isn't a wider problem.

I actually use this model in my 5e setting. The main overarching plot is that there is a prophecy of a sleeping/banished evil entity returning to bring ruin to the world and rule over the burning rubble, going about this by 'uniting' several powerful lich/necromancer overlords and the undead armies they command. Main char is a relatively young wizard who becomes involved in that obscure prophecy that practically no one even acknowledges exists, and takes it upon himself to become a master Necromancer because his fallback plan is to assume/usurp command of the undead armies himself and turn it against the doombringer.

really just wanted to make an Ainz-type LG character

Oh yeah, I remember that.

Didn't he 'give them life' instead of 'returning life' into them?

Undead > Robots
How would you use robots to improve life?

I've considered this as well for settings. So far in the city I am thinking of, not as much of the menial labor is done by the undead, but the majority of their standing army and their guards are while officers are all living.

In this city, by merit of choosing to live there as a citizen under the protection of the city-state you give the government the right to use your corpse/remains in times of war/emergency by default. You can volunteer your corpse for immediate use upon death in order to give a one time stipend/reward for your family; this can be done immediately or after you've lived your natural life, provided your body can be brought to the necromancers if you die outside of the city.

Also, in order to avoid disease, all bodies are "cleaned" and essentially only skeletons are used as the fighting force. Zombies are used as a kind of "break in case of emergency" plan as decoys/meatsheilds/tarpits for huge battles or city-wide evacuation due to disaster.

And in order to make it seem more "normal", the skeleton army are clothed head-to-toe with full face masks like in this pic.

>I'M NOT SUFFERING DADDY

Oh God, right in the feels.

I played mine as a tactical squad commander, using small groups of powerful undead to accomplish tasks too dangerous to ask of the living. He had simply seen too much death, and decided to borrow the corpses of fallen comrades to defend the ones that were still living.

But with undead doing all of the menial, unskilled labour, won't that cause unemployment to go up? You'd need to seriously invest in Education to get skilled workers and mitigate poverty.

Brings back the dead to give them a chance to resolve any unfinished business they had, or right any wrongs that they did.

Asia was also pretty big into keeping the dead non-moving, tbf.

Holy shit how have I not seen that screencap before

I would say that the undead in question has to have some say in the action. If you want to bring there body back from the dead or use there spirit to do something you have to get there approval before hand and if there not available then whatever god that is in charge of the body or soul.

Why does Veeky Forums have such a fetish for good necromancers?

Because breaking stereotypes and looking at new ways to play something that hasn't been done and dusted into the cold hard ground a thousand times is something Veeky Forums likes.

do good things

>something that hasn't been done and dusted into the cold hard ground a thousand times
Ironically, this is exactly what Veeky Forums does to everything it likes

The curse of creation, I suppose.

An order of men and women dedicated to bolstering the kingdom's army during the last great war. These Necromancers would frequently walk the battlefield and raise the loyal soldiers of the kingdom. While a morbid task, many scholars attribute the mages and clerics of the order in securing the victory against the Orc Lords who feared the corpse soldiers.
The undead were relieved of service after the war was over, but the order continues to aid the military and other civilian affairs by raising the dead.
>tl;dr Make raising the dead less "FOR MY EVIL DEEDS" and more "FOR MY GOOD DEEDS"

If you could do a good Necromancer, could you do a good Lich?

Archlich says Hello

a simple learned man, who studies the mysteries of life and death, a broad topic ranging from human anatomy, to medicine, and even biology. the knowledge he has learned has allowed him to break down organic matter into its constituents or even imbue it with a crude simulacrum of life.
however, he knows just how dangerous this power is, and has taken an oath to only use these powers in the pursuit of knowledge, and never to cause harm
when threatened he will reluctantly set his skeletons to attack, and throw necrotic energy beams, he will refuse to kill the attacker unless there was no choice, and his high intelligence means that there rarely is no other choice
he is constantly sharing his knowledge, writing it down in books and teaching students, and will readily jump on any chance to help his fellowman
a good man is not determined by what powers he wields, but how it is used

Necromancer raises an Order of Undying "Holy" Paladins to spread peace and prosperity in the name of the lord.

That's because Asian vampires make the vampires everyone else thinks of look like sparklepires.

Asian vampires are rotting corpses that leap around and can see you breathing, and they suck the life force out of your body through your mouth, possibly your blood and organs too if you're really unlucky.

There is NOTHING redeeming about Asian vampires. And we haven't even gotten into penangalan territory.

It's a specific couple of posters. Kind of like the shotafoxboicunt posters.

why is this a hard question?
just dont be an asshole, always help those in need , and always strive to be a better person

it doesnt matter if you are a paladin, barbarian, necromancer, or death cleric
as long as you are not bringing pain and suffering, conspiring to bring suffering, or overdoing it and becoming overzealous smitebot 9000, it is entirely possible for a person to be good, regardless of class or background

NO.

the answer to the question: "can i play this?" should never be a straight "no", since this completely locks you out of trying to develop a concept and make it interesting
a better answer is "yes, and..." since this encourages discussion, allows you to examine how to make it work, instead of dismissing it out of hand, and importantly it lets the other person have fun

I once played a not-Egyptian priest in a homebrew setting. The man came from a not-Millennial King nation, where the high priests were frequently undead mummies, and death was just seen as another aspect of life. He got around the 'desecrating the dead' thing by treating vanquished assholes relatively respectfully and only creating spectres/ghosts from them, so there wasn't a ton of rotting flesh falling all over the place, and they were also out of sight beneath the ground 95% of the time.

It also helped that he was a healer on top of speaking with spirits and animating dead guys. He didn't parade around the later, so everyone mostly saw him as a strange, friendly priest from a far-off land. Was a blast to play.

No.

Catholic priest cleric.

Reincarnation is a pervasive theme throughout catholicism. They could see it as emulating their god. At the end of the world, everybody comes back from the dead. The avatar of their god brought back the dead, a secular cult of magicians who believe bringing someone back from the dead is the closest you can get to emulating your ideal.

It's also sacrilege

true resurrection is a necromancy spell, and nobody would be particularly against that

Every religion promises eternal life. Delivering on that promise, filling the world with walking corpses and liches, is just what your god's going to do anyway. Angel Gabriel will literally reincarnate everyone who has ever died, ever. Why not do his work in coming for that great day? Eternal life is a blessing, death is a curable affliction.

Is there a lore aspect of Animate Dead? Like, does it say in the spell description that animating the dead is inherently evil?

A war cleric who doesn't balk at the idea of returning dead comrades to life. Only when their duty is done can his comrades lay down their arms and find a well-deserved peace.

It's tagged [Evil], yes.

You're returning them as zombies or skeletons, both of which are evil creatures.

>which has plenty of Christian undertones and the dead are supposed to stay dead.

That's not really an exclusively Christian thing, almost all human cultures fear the return of the dead and consider them to be monsters, along with anyone who disturbs them.

Hell, even Babylonian myth has passages about a goddess threatening to breach the gates of the underworld and release the endless numbers of the dead to consume the living so it's not a new idea either.

Humans are innately phobic of dead things. Being able to raise and command them but still being 'good' would be a hard sell in most religions, not just Abrahammic ones.

So commanding legions of undead is cool as long as you're not the one who animated them?

Enter LG Necromancer, plundering ancient tombs not of their riches, but of their bountiful stores of wandering zombos and skellies.

>Halt foul necromancer! The Paladins of Light have questions.
>Certainly m'lord, how can I help?
>These unholy undead abominations that you command, did you raise them from their rest yourself?
>Ah, no m'lord, I actually inherited them from my great-uncle, who inherited them from his father, they've been in the family for generations.
>Oh well that's ok then, carry on about your business good sir, sorry to have bothered you.
>Not at all! Good day.

All of the various spells that create undead are tagged with the [Evil] descriptor. What this means is that casting the spell is an evil act (this has never been adequately said whether it actually does or not, so we err in the direction of being an evil act), and its restricted to evil characters on the divine caster lists.

In addition, the creatures created are Evil themselves, and should they get loose or stop being controlled, will go on a rampage of killing and destruction to further suffering.

They were ghosts under a curse, as such they are can be any alignment and Aragorn had only as much control as a general has of his army. You're making some seriously bad faith arguments in trying to support your attempts to paint Aragorn as a necromancer or that necromancy could be good.

Have necromancy be a charisma based system, the necromancer does not animate and 'command' the dead to fight for him, he convincing them into doing so. So a good necromancer would have to convince animated heroes of old that his cause is worth fighting for

he literally said most of the menial labor is done by the living. Its just that the grunts in the military are undead and probably as intelligent as golems.

at most they'd use undead for dangerous labor.

Nope, they very blatantly rose from the dead as their former selves in the prime of their life.

I guess it really depends on the setting, as with all things. In D&D it might not work, but in the ES universe it all depends on cultural practices and taboos. (I use ES as an example because I know it well; it's not a traditional PnP setting).

uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Necromancy

I don't give half a shit about your stupid "Aragorn being a necromancer or not" argument. That was against another user. All I care about is the actual topic of discussion, that being how I can use my powers to command the dead for virtuous ends.

>implying the sacred service of the honored ancestors is foul necromancy
Fucking filthy s'wit get out GET OUT.

This makes me feel. Sad old men always hit me in the feels. Prolly because I'll be in that position eventually.

you are like little babby

watch this

REDUCE STR

Fucking GOLD

Duct taping 11 skeletons together does not make it divine magic you ashy incest elf.

He comes from a country where necromancy isn't simply normal, but it's supported and taught by the state. Necromancers handle all the healing, the risen do manual labour, and families regularly request seances from the state to ease their feelings or request advice from ancestors.

In his country he's an average dude, but now that he's on the road he's confused about why people take issue with him mending their flesh.

SKREEEEEEEEEE

Artifice-focus, treating the bones of those who gave consent to use prior to death, or post death via commune with spirits, animated through arcane forces rather than spiritual forces as normal people treat wood constructs. Probably painted gold or decorated for glory, and adorned with the names of those that willing gave their remains to remain a productive member of their communities, even after their time had come. Just because their spirit must depart for another world does not mean their bodies shouldn't help the world grow, and though they may give their flesh to the soil for the trees and the small creatures that need them, their bones can continue to aid in helping people prosper.
Probably a desert-themed culture for the individual, where trees are scarce and the process of making effective mining equipment is just as hard or harder than dabbling in skeleton animation.

Surprised this hasn't been posted yet

Become the Abhorsen.

>implying the scientific art of reanimating dead animals like crabs, silt striders and khajiit is foul
If it ain't Mer, it ain't people muthsera
Telvanni WW@

A medic who doesnt let "they are no longer alive" stop them from saving lives, he couls also make contracts with people to use their now worthless bodies after they die to reanimate as soldiers against evil. its not like they are using the body anymore.

A good person does good things. What's so hard about that?

people on Veeky Forums believe that no matter what you do, what you believe in, or your reasoning, one you pick up a certain class you are evil

This

It's very common for necromancy to be fueled by the screaming souls of the dead and/or negative energy which is the antithesis of all life, that's kinda what sets it apart. That doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room.

>where does my energy come from? magic i guess
>time to go fight evil using the power of skellymans and flesh melting energy
>after that, i will go make the world a better place

And why is that?