Is it possible to play a good undead?

Good? I dunno. Non-evil? If your DM is cool with it, why not? I've done something kind of similar before.

I once had a character who was a mercenary commander employed by the BBEG before he was left twisting in the wind by said BBEG. The company was stationed at a fortress built into a relatively narrow canyon to prevent the military of the nearby kingdom from encroaching upon BBEG's territory. Aside from minor skirmishes, there hadn't really been much action there because fighting in the canyon was a really shitty experience for larger groups. After about a year and a half of BBEG doing typical "turning evil up to 11 to conquer the world" shit, the ruler of Nearby Kingdom decided to mount an assault on BBEG and had the bulk of his army head for the main border into BBEGland, but split off a sizable division to take the canyon fort so that it couldn't be used to funnel enemy troops into the back of his advancing forces. Obviously, they had to deal with the mercenaries stationed there, but there really weren't all that many of them. A few dozen men, tops. So the plan was just to overwhelm the fortress with numbers they simply couldn't withstand if they couldn't convince the mercs to surrender outright in the face of a siege.

The mercenary commander sent a message to BBEG informing him of the situation and asking for assistance, then sealed the fortress and informed the commander from Nearby Kingdom that they had no intent to surrender. They had some food and water, but not a huge amount and were banking hard on timely reinforcements from BBEGland, as BBEG's lair wasn't more than a couple weeks' march from Canyon Fort. Retreat wasn't an option, since it would leave the fort and its relatively quick route into the heart of BBEGland free and clear for Nearby Kingdom to exploit. So the sieging army settled in a bit back toward the mouth of the canyon and began building siege towers, ladders, and battering rams using whatever timber they could cut, and had them ready rather quickly owing to marked experience in siege warfare. As soon as they were in position, surrender was offered and declined one more time before the battle began in earnest.

The fort was a very solidly defensible position, and even against a superior force the mercenaries were able to hold their own well enough for a bit, but defeat was an inevitability without reinforcements. As the sieging forces pressed forward to finish the beleaguered mercs, howling erupted from the ridges at the top of the canyon as a massive horde of beasts and undead from BBEGland swarmed down from above onto the canyon floor and into the fortress. They slaughtered everything and everyone in their path, forcing what was left of the men from Nearby Kingdom to scatter and retreat before turning on the mercenary company and killing them to the last man. BBEG's reasoning, other than being an evil prick, was that you don't have to pay mercs if they're all dead. So just like that, Canyon Fort is left to rot: filled with undead and bestial horrors. No further attempts are made to take the canyon as the main invasion force from Nearby Kingdom has become bogged down in an all-out war not far beyond the border to BBEGland. The only solution the King could commit to was to form a cordon as near the entrance of the canyon as possible to minimize monster incursions into the surrounding plains and forests.

Another year passes and the war rages on, with the fighting mostly a bloody stalemate. Not one to waste valuable resources (read corpses), BBEG sends one of his chief necromancers to the infested ruins of Canyon Fort to cobble together whatever intact bodies still remain and raise them as fresh meat for the grinder. He sets to work raising an army of skeletal rabble by assembling remains and binding the tormented souls still lingering on the battlefield to them. They were nearly mindless, little more than raging automata fueled by the anguished souls of the men they had been in life. Being the busy man he was, Chief Necro decides he needs a leader for his newly raised army because fucked if he was gonna deign to do it himself. Scouring the stock of corpses, he finds the perfect candidate: the old mercenary commander. Needing a more intelligent sort than the skeleton dregs, Cheif Necro creates a periapt of intelligence and grafts it into the hollow of the commander's skull before wrenching his soul from it's tormented wandering and fusing it with his new creation. Hubris would be Chief Necro's downfall, as creating an intelligent undead from the body and soul of a man betrayed by BBEG turned out to be an incredibly stupid idea and Chief Necro was immediately butchered by the now animate and hate-fueled skeleton of Merc Commander, who then collected a tattered banner and tabard of his former company before disappearing into the surrounding countryside.

A month or so went by and the King of Nearby Kingdom, slowly losing the war with BBEGland and desperate for a way to turn the tide, puts out a call for adenturers to infiltrate BBEGland and assassinate BBEG. A small party of exceedingly brave or foolhardy individuals answered, lured for various reasons: A dwarf, concerned primarily with the chance for phat lewt and a good scrap(Fighter), a young human man who'd grown up in the gutter and wanted to be elevated to nobility as a reward(Rogue), A human woman in her mid thirties, sent by the church to serve as God's hand in BBEGland(Cleric), a very eccentric gnome who saw an opportunity to use the rest of the party as bodyguards so he could sample rare alchemic ingredients from BBEGland(Sorcerer), and a large man in full plate armor, a surcoat, and a full-face helm who wore a ragged tabard with a faded symbol on the front(Fighter).

Backstory/setup aside, nobody had any idea my character wasn't human for almost the entire campaign other than the DM. Character was CN with a laser focus on a single objective: Get revenge on the BBEG for fucking him over. He never removed his armor or helmet, and rarely spoke. Since he always took evening watch, none of the other characters noticed that he didn't eat or drink. When it wasn't his turn for watch, he'd retire to his tent and silently stew over his endgame, which the other characters mistook for sleep. The only person who was even remotely suspicious of him was the cleric, who knew enough history to be aware of what merc company he was from and that they'd been at Canyon Fort when it was overrun, but not enough to know that there hadn't been any survivors. She ended up calming down on the stink eye after a while because he never did anything overtly dickish. There were a few good stories from that campaign, if anyone's interested.

There's no such thing as a "good" skeleton.
Only a skeleton pointed in the right direction.

In DnD's cosmology, sentient undead and reanimated corpses are created by bringing large amounts of negative energy into the material plane, an act which is inherently evil.

Actually bringing people back to life isn't evil.

Why there's no way to reanimate undead by bringing energy from, say, plane of fire?

One game played an undead ancient hero who was lawful good. He "woke up" in the magical forest one day after many centuries to find himself overgrown, and after struggling to break free he continued his "life" as if it were the next day.

Kind of a Don Quixote thing going but instead of going under the delusion that he was a knight, he went under the delusion that he was still alive and nothing could persuade him otherwise.

Short answer: yes.
Long answer: There are always exceptions. Despite the guy making "redeemed succubus" threads being a fag, there are so many fucking planes with so many fucking strange things going on, that sometimes you'll get a Fall-from-Grace instead of the Celestial going Evil. With undead, you don't even have to fetch that far. Revenants can be good, and I'm sure old editions had plenty of good undead, though I can only think of Baelnorns off the top of my head. Undead Paladin is one of my favourite archetypes, a warrior so holy and righteous that being reanimated as an unliving abomination didn't stop him from Deus Vulting in the name of Good.

I once RP'd as an undead knight brought back to life by a faulty spell from the BBEG after my previous pc died to him.

I was ugther the slightly racist skeleton. It was amazing to be convinced, utterly, i was alive and well, and that those dirty fucking elves were trying to mess with my head with their hippy tree fucker magics.

No, all undead are evil. No exceptions.

>No, all undead are evil. No exceptions.
Except the ones in the Monster Manual that are stated to be Lawful Good.

Of which there are none.

>Of which there are none.
Whatever you say, pumpkin.

Your special snowflake obscure homebrew expansion doesn't count, you hipster.

>noble paladin, in service of the god of the afterlife and souls, dies in battle
>god of afterlife, knowing bbeg threatens its plane, makes a deal with the god of life to allow paladin to return to life
>returns soul to the paladin's body
>unfortunately, deal took a while
>paladin is now a semi-decayed corpse, but fully sentient
>returned to this world to slay bbeg
>retains old alignment due to still having old soul

>implying I have the money to pay Tony D for a commission

That was a good joke

It sure as hell isn't the monster manual, dingus.

Its the monstrous manual, you disgusting pleb child.

Which isn't the monster manual. Y'know, the specific book cited by So you're still fucking wrong.

Storytim

>when user throws a temper-tantrum even though he's technically correct the best kind of correct

I was wondering if someone was going to get worked up over the Monster/Monstrous discrepancy

The baelnorn wasn't even published in the Monstrous Manual, stupid.

You're right, it was the Monstrous Compendium Annual Volume 1.

I hope the new year goes better for you user. Don't do anything rash.

That's why you come back as a skelebro. No such thing as an ugly skelebro.

Played something similar but a bit different.

He was a knight of a kingdom that was being invaded by a tyrannical empire. Got sealed in a magical void for 500 years by some wizards of the evil empire. Held onto life long after his body should have ceased functioning purely by his hatred and rage at the invaders and his sorrow of not being able to save his people. He was eventually broke free by archeologists who were excavating the ruins of his fallen kingdom.

Learned both his own kingdom and the empire had crumbled to time. Heartbroken, he rededicated his "life" to fighting tyranny in all forms and freeing the oppressed.

He had no idea he was (un)dead for a while. He started realizing he wasn't hungry or thirsty often, and so barely ate, but he shrugged it off. Only really started to get the picture when the party Cleric tried to cast Cure Wounds on him and it didn't do shit, and when he accidentally got affected by said Cleric's Turn Undead.

That's true.

>he doesn't give skellys a racial bonus on riding checks

Richter and his Cursed Company

PUT SOME PANTS ON YA BEATNIK

The Wizards of Aus proved that even a baby skeleton just needs love, and 5 blood salad, and larger bones from someone else

Not evil in the slightest

Good undead are just too cliched.

what if a skeleton dresses up like santa, and tried to give gifts to little kids, for the purpose of bringing happiness, and out of its own free will?

would it still be evil?

Worked in overlord. Why not

>be DM'ing 5e
>ancient protectors of the land have long since lost flesh but remain "undead"
>they've mostly forgotten all about their former selves and are just giant skele bros
>party loves them

Always remember to get the sorcerer to shrink you down and put you in her pocket.

I had a PDF about playing undead characters but I lost it.

Anyone know what I'm talking about? It had rules for like skeletons, poltergeists, wraiths, and revenants

This one?
archive.4plebs.org/tg/search/filename/awakened undead pdf/

Skeletons don't have free will, only spookiness

No dick tho.

Is storytim now yes

that's a plus
no need to cater to your own lowly desires

Yeah that's exactly it.

Sorry for the delay. The one from earliest in the campaign that springs to mind was the trip through Canyon Fort. DM had given us a map of the area of the continent the campaign took place on. Dwarf and Rogue insisted on passing through the fort because it was the fastest route and they were hoping valuables would still be left there. Cleric and Merc Commander both tried multiple times to dissuade them, knowing full well what happened there. Gnome didn't give a shit one way or the other as long as we eventually got to his coveted alchemy supplies. Unable to sway Dwarf and Rogue, they head for the canyon. It takes about a week or so of walking to get to the cordon line, where they spend another couple days resting and preparing. Commander gets a lot of shit from the NPCs who remember that his company used to garrison the fort, but Cleric surprisingly had his back and got them to shut the fuck up, citing that Commander had clearly seen God's light and had made the choice to repent for what he'd done.

After a final night of drinking and food, the party left the cordon and headed into the canyon proper. The place was fucked beyond belief. The ground was littered with decayed corpses to the point where they had trouble walking without kicking discarded equipment or dried bone crunching underfoot. Through what was probably a generous DM handwave, we made it to the gate of the fortress without any real trouble. Inside the fort was a whole different story. It was a shitfest from start to finish, and it it hadn't been for Cleric, Dwarf and Rogue would've bit the dust a couple times each. Luckily, though, almost all of Chief Necro's skeletons had been herded off to fight on the main front away from Canyon Fort. After being badgered constantly, Commander used his knowledge of the fort from before his death to guide Dwarf and Rogue to the various stockpiles left behind, but nothing of note cropped up until they found Chief Necro's old laboratory.

Gnome immediately flipped his shit and began stealing any magical baubles that weren't nailed down, Rogue found himself a shiny enchanted dagger, and Dwarf managed to find a bit of money. Cleric did her best to purify everything and Commander waited outside the room because RAGE. When the looting was finally done, Commander showed the group through the back gate of the fort, and they headed into the even shittier wilderness on the back end of the canyon. At this point, Commander is already starting to be more than a little done with the shit of Dwarf, Rogue, and Gnome. He's got a fever and the only cure is his boot so far up BBEG's ass he's tasting the metal plating. It was almost dark once they were outside and they ended up being set upon by a pack of flying monsters that were essentially huge bats with an extra set of limbs tipped with eagle-like talons and had to make a run for a nearby cave to shelter themselves. Dwarf and Commander held the entrance of the cave while Gnome worked a spell to create a barrier, but he botched the cast when a monster bat got past the others and clipped him on the shoulder before Cleric crushed its skull with her warhammer. He managed to partially cast the spell, but instead of creating a mystic seal over the entrance, he caused a cave-in and the mouth of the cave collapsed, trapping the party inside. There was a boatload of bickering after that and the party probably would've turned on itself if it hadn't been for Cleric stepping in and getting everyone to take a chill pill. She was literally the only reason this campaign ever had any hope of success for sure.

It took two fucking sessions of being lost underground before we actually managed to get back to the surface. I'll cover a couple of the highlights later on, but for now I need to tidy the house and cook some breakfast.

Thanks for sharing man, can't wait for more

Do it like this.

Now I want to play a skeleton bard whose primary motivation is getting his flesh restored so he can observe his bardly duties

>Is it possible to play a good undead?

Yes.

They just have to try a little harder to prove themselves.

>I'd turn the question upside down and ask "How do you explain bringing people back to life being evil?"

Objectively, absent concerns specific to particular settings, it's not.

However, in real life, myths and legends in most cultures have generally presented coming back from the dead as some sort of violation or transgression. This is because in the real world we have to learn with death as something final, and we need stories that teach us to mourn properly and let go rather than clinging to what we can no longer have.

Conversely, preoccupation with the dead to the detriment of the living is unhealthy, and we've built up a long history of tales that try to discourage it by not giving stories where the dead come back to the living world a happy ending.

more please

No, what you do is be a skelebro, and you go about your barely duties as normal. The GM always fades to black, and you wait until some poor shmuck asks how you get it on when you're a skeleton.

You tell them the only reasonable response.

He bones them.

Depends on the setting

Because by definition, if you're animating them as an undead you're not "bringing them back to life."

I like how his kingdom AND the empire were both long since lost to history. It neatly sidesteps what could have been a cliche revenge plot and instead changes the motivation to an almost philosophical struggle. His home is gone, and so is anyone who could be remotely held responsible. There is no justice to be had, no villain to punish, no grand quest to fulfill. What now?

resurrection isn't evil.

undeath isn't resurrection. It's at a minimum an inversion of ordinary life energies, which may not be evil per se but is certainly dangerous, unwholesome and ecologically unwise. Other versions of undead are mentally traumatized shadows of people. Sometimes the animated corpses are granted intelligence though adding a demonic spirit. Sometimes they are willing remnants, but necromancers rarely interact on an equal footing with them. And of course, bringing back true souls unwillingly from their rightful rest to slave under your command in a rotting corpse is soul rape, plain and simple.

Necromancers are the pedophiles of fantasy settings. Depending on how light or dark, complex or simple your game is, there can be empathy, gray areas, or moral quandries in almost anything. Necromancers exist so that paladins and other LG people have is a clearly evil thing to smite on sight without feeling bad about it.

Of course, this theme only works in classic western fantasy. I suggest Clarke Ashton Smith as a representative example

>eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/61/the-empire-of-the-necromancers

If you're playing a JRPG, the rules are doubtlessly different.

Okay, my fiancee is still at work and most shit around the house is done, so I'm back.

So because the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, Gnome gets the whole party trapped in a cave system. His idea of just blasting the rubble back out of the entrance is immediately vetoed by every party member except Rogue, as the other three all realize that doing so would probably cause a larger cave in and kill them all, and that--even if it didn't--there was still a massive swarm of monster bats outside that would murder them all anyway. So the decision was made to set up a camp a short distance into the cave, rest for bit, and proceed to explore the deeper reaches, hoping against hope to find a way out. Props to our DM real quick for improvising the entire cave system shenanigans, I've played with a few who would have just TPK'd us with "you're all trapped and you die" because improv is hard and fun isn't allowed.

So in almost every case of our underground travels, Dwarf is going first as he's much more skilled with subterranean adventurers than the rest are. At first the cave system was really uneventful, and it looked like starvation and thirst would be the major enemies. Between the two of them, Gnome and Dwarf managed to find enough edible moss and fungus to keep everyone alive, and water mostly came from the occasional trickle flowing though cracks in the stone. Commander refused both at any offer with the insistence that he was fine, and, for some reason, nobody was even remotely suspicious about this except for Cleric, who started intensifying the stink eye treatment until Commander assured her that "fasting was a part of his repentance" to shut her up and throw her off the scent.

A few days (by Dwarf's estimate, but nobody really knew because cave) into spelunking, they ran into a huge, naturally domed chamber with a vast underground lake and several smaller passages leading off in various directions.

>Is it possible to play-
Yes.
>Are there people out there who will give you shit for it?
Yes.

Figuring this would be the most sensible place for a temporary base camp, tents are pitched and a fire pit is constructed. I use the term "fire pit" loosely, because in an effort to conserve what little wood we had, Gnome use a combination of his alchemy and sorcery to create a mass of mana-charged stones that he then agitated to the point where they produced a magical glow of an intensity relatively similar to fire. I have to admit that I loved and still love the dude playing Gnome. He's one of the most creative roleplayers I've ever met, coming up with shit like this relatively often.

Okay, so there's a camp set-up and everyone is laying out plans for how they think the group should proceed. The first order was to divide and conquer by checking the passages leading away from the base camp. Gnome took a piece of magicked chalk from his pack, split it into pieces, and the party split into three. Gnome went with Cleric, Dwarf with Rogue, and Commander took the last tunnel by himself.

Commander ended up having to come back to base camp first. His tunnel ended up running straight into a dead end. Nothing special, the cave just sort of tapered off to and end. Dwarf and Rogue came back second after finding out that their tunnel split into two further along the way, and had signs of habitation by something at some point in the indeterminate past, evidenced by shards of bone and scraps of what seemed to be tools made of some kind of stone. Cleric and Gnome were gone the longest. Their tunnel had gotten progressively smaller to the point where Cleric had to get down on her hands and knees and Gnome had to stoop over. Eventually they reached a place where Cleric simply couldn't fit, so Gnome got down on his belly and shimmied through the hole into a chamber littered with bones and echoing with the sound of something very large breathing rhythmically, as though it were asleep.

Gnome had Cleric pull him back through the hole by his ankles, and the two piled stones in front of the opening as quickly and quickly as they could before retreating back to base camp.

After reuniting and the tale of whatever promise of horror lived at the end of Cleric and Gnome's tunnel, everyone decided to take a chance on following Rogue and Dwarf's passage to the split, then deciding from there.

After packing up camp, everyone headed down the passageway to the split, where Dwarf pointed out the bones and tool fragments, but nobody was able to identify what they were. The group went a fair distance down each tunnel, then returned to the split and debated which to take, eventually choosing the left-leading passage after having seen more bone shards and observing a few markings on the walls of the cave.

As the party continued on their chosen path, the tunnel became less and less rough. Eventually the stone became very polished, almost to a mirror sheen, and was engraved with all sorts of symbols Gnome could only describe as recognizably arcane, but very wrong somehow, a trait Cleric corroborated, stating that she sensed evil practically oozing from them. Not long after the runes began to appear, the party run across a massive stone door, engraved with the same symbols and locked with some kind of mechanism.

At this point there were two options. Either Rogue opened this door and we found out what was on the other side, or we went back to take Cleric and Gnome's tunnel, where we'd have to break open the small entrance so everyone could fit and face whatever slept in the darkness. After much deliberation, it was decided to press forward into whatever was behind this massive door because, quite frankly, fuck whatever lives in the dark and nests in a pit of bones.

Rogue managed to get the lock on the door to release and Dwarf and Commander worked together to heave it open. On the other side was a scene right out of a Lovecraft book.

Behind that door was an unfathomably large underground space. It was lit well enough to be able to see clearly, but even then, the ceiling of the chamber wasn't in view. Ahead of us was some kind of pathway or bridge and across it was an entire city that seemed to be made of the same polished, engraved stone that the tunnel and door had been. In the distance dots of eerie blue light flickered. Most stationary, but many moving about, which we deduced were probably some kind of patrols or another. Preparing for a shitstorm the likes of which we've never seen, we started across the bridge and into the underground metropolis.

So, that's officially the end of the caves. I'll come back later and start the part about the city.

Sure, why not? I had a player who really wanted to play as a Jack Skellington-esque character, so we came up with a backstory where he was "uplifted" into undeath after impulsively signing a pact with a neutral god of death, order, and afterlife management (taking a job as a very minor divine agent). We play it just like his "original" race (a human) except he doesn't sleep, can't taste or smell, doesn't need to breathe, and terrifies or at least greatly startles everyone he meets. He often forgets that he can't use facial expressions anymore. I have handwaved him as a "positive energy" undead because I can. He tries to counteract the offputting nature of his appearance with the antics of a jester (acrobatics, musical displays of questionable quality, horrific bone puns) in order to not ruin the first impressions of the otherwise normal party.
It's a good group. Things can get pretty silly with the skeleton player character, but not outrageous, and having fun is all that matters anyway. I think you should go for it. It certainly makes gameplay interesting.

Skellys should get a racial bonus to riding checks and perform checks involving dance and the xylophone.

Yes, there are good undead. The "Good Lich" is an entry in Monsters of Faerun, and described in Libris Mortis as well. (That's if you are talking about D&D, which we all know you are but it is poor form to not say so in the OP.)

However, I would not allow anyone from Veeky Forums to play it. I doubt they would do it well, as it seems the people here prefer to go counter to the norm all the time just to be contrarian.

That sums Veeky Forums up pretty nicely