Can someone explain to me why necromancy is inherently evil?

In my DM's setting it's evil because it inflicts unnatural mutation upon an unwilling soul. Basically the same reason anything's evil according to the Golden Rule.

Writers come usually from a Western major religion, and in those playing with the dead is tabboo. Other cultures might not think the same though.

it's either that or inherently chaotic as it goes against the natural order of life. Typically as life is considered inherently good, things that are in contrast are evil. So if life magic heals, what does death magic do? if all death magic does is kill things that just makes it a less versatile version of any other offensive magic, so necromancy is given to death magic and so is inherently evil.

>Most D&D
Both says it's a form of soul torture OR the [Evil] type in such a world where evil is a weighted thing. So both lore and rules says it's bad

>Other settings
Generally have their rest, most imply that it's some form of stress on the souls of the dead. Them saying "Thank you" after you kill them

>Less still
Considered CRAZY taboo to fuck with dead bodies.

>minority of settings
No one put any good reasons for good or bad, thus it's neither. Few few setting work under these rules but yes their exist. Also, none of them are common here on Veeky Forums

>Thread about necromancy
>Op's pic is from the Simpson's

What exactly are you getting at here?

it's dragging souls already free from the material world back to it and they don't even get to live

If I made my own setting, necromancy would only be evil when manipulating souls in bad way.
Creating souless zombies is not evil if they are workers and you have not used corpses against the will of their former owners or families.
Even becoming a lich is not inherently evil if you don't use a ritual where you have to kill innocents for becoming immortals. (but this easier so there is still a lot of evil liches who have to kill to become and/or remains immortal)

You may want to look up the definition of evil.

(hint: type evil out backwards and you'll see what I mean)

Homebrew are not that rare.

And ? still don't means a nation where corpses are willingly used to make zombies would be evil.
Are those who donate their body to science, evil ?

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>And ? still don't means a nation where corpses are willingly used to make zombies would be evil.

>Are those who donate their body to science, evil ?

Yes.

What ?
Those who donate their body to science are evil ?

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STOP DOING STUFF WITH CORPSES YOU FUCKING WEIRDO

>Necromancy in games
>Evil or pissed wizard in pursuit of nondescript POWER defiles local graveyards by animating the sacred remains of the deceased through FORBIDDEN MAJIKKS or seals the souls of the dead into their rotting husks where he mindcontrols them, creating his own personal army of EVIL

>Necromancy as it should be
>Occultist, mysticist, shaman taps into the afterlife to commune with the spirits of the dead for guidance and council, risking to be overwhelmed by angered ghosts whose rest he disturbed, and who can only beg them to retake an earthly form through deals or sacrifice
>Asshole mysticists who actually enslave the dead are under such immense strain to uphold the mental shackles through which they chain the revered dead that, should he fail, he's gonna get fucking fucked

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There is a difference between social norms and evil.
Stuffing corpses with cotton and chemicals, and put makeup on them so you can pretend they still have some existence after death is more playing with corpses than actually doing something useful with the mindless and utterly dead remains of someone.

Talking to the dead either disturbs their rest, distracts them from a heavenly afterlife, or pulls them away from their rightful punishment. Commanding a mindless undead body is generally illegal (the person assigned to care for the person's remains, usually a next of kin, has the responsibility to care for the person's body respectfully; if you are that person you're not being respectful, if you aren't that's basically theft), and binding someone's soul is coercion.

It's about as inherently evil as theft, blackmail and murder, in that while there are situations where it might be the best choice, it's generally not, it can be habit-forming, and should you consider your options very carefully before you resort to it.

You're not supposed to mess with the natural order of life and death and yada yada...

Pulls the person's soul from the afterlife and binds it to a mindless servant.
Basically, I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream.

Only the gods have the right to give life, which includes returning it. Only the gods (or their representatives) may rightfully breach the barrier between the living and the dead with their magic. For faithless mortals to return life to the departed, even if it is only an appearance of life, is unnatural and a blasphemy!

Sincerely,
Adventuring Clerics Interfaith Cooperation Association

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Corpses spread disease or indicate the presence of a predator so people instinctively revile them and do not wish to be near them.

>reanimating someone's loved ones to serve as meatshield for your party isn't evil, just taboo
What if a wizards revived your PC's son or wife and used its animated remains to carry his fucking baggage, would you hate him or would that be perfectly fine, just taboo stuff?

First case, not evil.
Second case, evil.

youtube.com/watch?v=8EGYVS7jUn8

>pulls them away from their rightful punishment
Now I want a necromancer that's trying to spare lost souls hell, for as long as he can.
> Hell has been emptied and now the corpse legions of Mercy are fleeing the gods wrath!

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What's the difference?
Do you think a corpse buried in a graveyard never had a life once, didn't have any parents, friends or lived ones?
Or are you a psychopath in that you only think something is bad when it directly affects you?

If necromancy is performed on a corpse, it rips a soul from Morrs realm to animate the cadaver, denying the dead their rest and putting their eternal souls at risk beyond the gates of Morr.

>a band of brigands invade a village, pillaging, raping and killing everyone
>they eventually die
>"good" necromancer comes in and revives them because he somehow thinks they don't deserve to burn in hell for all eternity

But putting skulls of the dead fucking everywhere is cool

because when somone decides to unleash that horrbile magic that everyone says is horrible it its fucking epic
last night in a campaign im apart of I saw an entire nation of halflings get torn apart by a lich and his cabal of nutjobs and it was insane when you see the legions of dead rise and attack
it aint fun if everyone says its A ok and is flinging corpses everywhere all the time.

Profaning the dead is a lesser evil than the letting a human being die.
Sure that will hurts the feelings of the family, but you have a greater right to preserve your own life than them to not have their dead relatives not being profaned.
This is like self-defense that end up with the death of the assaillant, this is still a crime (more or less severe whether or not your defense was proportionnate to the degree of menace) but you didn't had to sacrifice yourself.
The second case is just petty.

but souls don't exist (in my setting)

But you have magic?

>Giving away something that is yours is evil
Wat

D&D Good and Evil (capital both) are batfuck retarded.

No contradiction.

D&D (...) batfuck retarded

Yep, I just like the idea of playing in a single solid reality, no afterlife, just death.

Because for necromancy to be OK would break many settings. Consider: if necromancy was good or neutral, most clerics would learn it and most churches would offer the service to the wealthy and powerful. You'd have kings reigning for millennia, sapping years from convicts, reading when they die naturally. Humans would basically be elves, at least in enough numbers.

Second, as a metagame thing, you don't fuck with a PC's gear, and once he's dead you don't fuck with his corpse. He's totally defenseless by then, so necromancy makes him a lootable resource.

GURPS banestorm has a PDF supplement called Abydos where things work like this. Pretty fucking cool, actually.

This.

>GURPS banestorm has a PDF supplement called Abydos where things work like this. Pretty fucking cool, actually.
Nice, I have this one in my GURPS folder.

It violates the NAP

Jeez, once perv puts their penis in a skeleton ONE time and ruins it for the rest of us Necromancers.

Sounds to me like your wizards would get on to CREATING an afterlife as soon as possible, then.

>tearing a soul out of its afterlife/etc
>binding it back into a barely functional body and enslaving it to do your dirty work and/or manual labor
>probably defiling their burial site in the process

morally grey at best

Because the Circle of Darkness and Shadow have an image to maintain, as do many other necromancer's unions, as well as the Blackguard's Guild, the Legion of Witches, and the Coalition of Vampires, Liches, and Other Sentient Living Impaired. The use of black magic for the betterment of mankind (as well as elfkind, dwarfkind, gnomekind, etc.) is deeply frowned upon and subject to hefty fines, confiscation of any and all necromancing paraphernalia, and possible expulsion from one's guild, cult, lair, or other such place of evil employment

Thing is, taxidermy is with animals. If you did the same things with a human corpse you'd have a SWAT team busting down your door followed by a half dozen warning shots to the chest and your public image and legacy completely trashed over a national news station.

>Walking around town doing commoner things
>Guy in dark robes walks down the street like he owns the place followed by a bunch of zombies.
>Hey, I know like half of those zombies! How dare he defile their corpses for his petty gains!
>Go around inciting a riot and spread rumors, that nobody is smart enough to disprove, that the zombies are filled with the souls of the former living ripped from heaven to waste away in a walking corpse.
>Put deceased relatives to rest via bludgeoning and hang the demonic necromancer from the gallows.

if necromancy is not a special type of magic, then you're better off animating constructs instead
if it is, you're probably fucking with someone's soul which people will generally take offense to

either way, no real reason to go with necromancy

>Considered CRAZY taboo to fuck with dead bodies.

Generally, this is because the "curses" you get from fucking with dead bodies is disease. Even the fucking native Siberians know you don't fuck with frozen mammoths and other shit you find out there; that shit's potentially covered in dormant diseases from a million years ago that you might not have any acquired immune defense to.

Of course, with advances in embalming and access to lots of salt for it, you can dessicate a body safely and mummify it, or otherwise use lacquer or something to preserve a corpse.

In a setting where Cure Disease spells and Necromancy are potentially common, a society might develop in a way that embraces necromancy, even in a limited sense. Could be considered a tradition where bodies are animated so that they might make one last march or pilgrimage to a site of burial ground ritual/cultural significance before being laid to rest permanently. Such animated undead would probably not involve fucking with a dead person's soul, and be little more than spiritual puppetry to keep them moving, probably under the guidance of a shepherding necromancer and attendants like embalmers to keep the marching dead in working order.

Might depend on how it works:

>thing was walking before
>now has stopped walking
>use magic to make it start walking again

>thing has never walked
>use more magic to try and imbue it with concept of walking
>and also make it start walking

If you're just replacing it with a semblance of life, rather than recalling a tethered soul or some shit, then it's fine. If it does involve soul fuckery, then people probably would stick to constructs. Also, constructs don't rot and can take on more forms than dead things can.

And in some cultures mummification is the standard treatment for the dead, and they continue to have contacts with it.

Mummification is generally followed by burying the body and never digging it backup to stuff full of animatronics that make it move.
Besides, the entire point of this argument is trying to explain to the average person in your setting why necromancy isn't evil while parading around with freshly buried corpses of peoples' loved ones.

Different settings have it different ways. SoS's way is pretty good. The only way to animate dead corpses is to use Dark Pyromancy, which is a corruption of the primal energy of life, fire. Because it's a corruption, however, the corpse is essentially motivated by the darkest human impulses the creator had, and he wouldn't be able to perform dark pyromancy at all if he weren't a perverse guy to begin with. So the undead created in this manner both give off magical radiation that kills living things and poisons the ground and water, and sometimes snap and attack people. They'll also interpret orders in such a way as to allow them to harm or kill people, if they can. The dark fire that animates them has a mind of its own and hates all living things, including its supposed master.

So when you perform necromancy, you're literally bringing an intelligent, malign entity into the world whose sole desire is to inflict pain and death on humans. Sure, you can force it to do something else, but it will be looking for a way to subvert you the entire time.

>I don't use the dnd rules!
>now explain to me using dnd rules why I'm wrong!

Go be a fucking retard somewhere else

Kids who grew up with media and games that portrayed them as such think that's the golden universal rule and that anyone who tries otherwise is just a black arts matter dindu nuffin sjw.

Necromancy has been associated with more positive things like speaking with dead ancestors and others for wisdom, guiding spirits and spirit guides, and even resurrection and healing.

Most cultures actually have acceptable of even positive interactions with the dead in one form or another that could be considered a type of "necromancy" and much of surgery was considered defiling the body at various times and places.

The ghostwalker campaign supplement played with some of the more interesting aspects of that idea with spirits wanting bodies that they could inhabit.

There are some places that would make the material plane seem like a picnic even in a sub-par body. I mean some people even specifically seek it out like liches.

Even neutral or unaligned souls can get fucked, I can't remember which but in one setting they're used as bricks in a magical wall in the outer planes and are occasionally stolen by demons.

>Most cultures actually have acceptable of even positive interactions with the dead in one form or another that could be considered a type of "necromancy" and much of surgery was considered defiling the body at various times and places.
>acceptable
Wrong. You ever read classical lit? Antigone? Achilles(Non Brad Pit)?

>Positive interactions with the dead
Those interactions go along the line of "Zombies!" *blam blam blam* "Haha you see how far his eyeballs exploded?"

I'm sure Hamlet accounts for this too.
"HOLY FUCK ITS A GHOST!"

>getting your Buffy the Vampire Slayer all over my Hamlet
Fuck you, Joss Whedon

>Buffy
Nigga. I didn't call you a faggot.

If you read the rest of my post you'll see that when I say necromancy I'm using a wider definition than "spooky bad guy raises skellingtons to hurt people".

>shamanistic communication with ancestors should just be blam blam boom like in my action zombie movies XD
No.

Don't even pretend like necromancy in-game is anything like shamanistic rituals. It's more like:
>I use this ability and turn these corpses into undead under my control.
>I command them to fight/carry burdens/guard/etc.
>When they die (again) I leave their rotting corpses wherever they fell and walk off

So voodoo?

Voodoo is with the living not the dead.

Alternative, necromancy as practiced by the Tomb Kings isn't considered evil because those who are brought back agreed to such a fate. Them having martial skills when they were living is also the reason why they're usually better than what a vampire or necromancer could raise.

Also, in many settings, it's implied that the forced slavery that spirits are subjected to as a part of necromancy is excruciating for the spirit involved.

In earlier editions of d&d resurrection was actually necromancy, in the elder scrolls the dark elves can be aided by ancestor spirits.
There are even good liches.

Just because a lot of newer media has settled into the version of necromancy you portray doesn't mean that it's the only acceptable option.

Go read Libris Mortis, niggbag.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Tanzler
>The public mood was generally sympathetic to Tanzler, whom many viewed as an eccentric "romantic".

"Necromancy" isn't inherently evil, it's just a School of magic.
Now, animating the dead? That's Evil because it draws on tremendous negative energy sources and expands the forces of death throughout the multiverse little by little.
Unlike, say, Inflict Wounds, which just takes a wedge of negative energy and disperses it like a heat wave, animating a skeleton is like opening a tap to the Negative Energy Plane that keeps leaking out death into the multiverse, slowly dragging everything closer to ruin.