Necromancer queen of the frozen north

Just replace it with vodoo zombies.

That's a real thing: just people kept drugged and used as slaves so they don't run away.

No magic needed! Edgy, real world counterpart, moral grey/black area.

Players wouldn't be required to LIKE this civilization, after all.

Throw in some skimpy harem girls for the hell of it.

Honestly I'd just go full dead kingdom with this.
>The entire Kingdom is dead except Queen and maybe a few members of the royal family
>Queen animates any corpse she can to keep the kingdom around as much out of a desire to preserve something of her people and to just spite the assholes who tried to wipe them out
>The only common people around her are mercenaries that she hire since she doesn't have to pay anyone else and the very few people willing to trade a great deal of their freedom to live in pretty good safety being defended by monsters

Other than what kind of twisted demonic, unholy or corrupting ways of magic she would use (lawful evil, tainting energies or just forgotten arts?); the implicancies of fucking around with the "soul realm" or superpopulation because no one can die and people keeps reproducing (can holy magic also revive? Is it often allowed? ); and finally what about the intelligence and freedom of the undead, there should not be problems.

The question of evil necromancy comes from the means you need to achieve the results(big undead army) and the way you use those results.

>but nobody ever seems to enforce any sort of consequences or environmental effects.
>Like, undead don't produce any disease or miasma they're just perfect little skellies or zombies that do everything exactly as you instruct them.

>When stupid bitch niggas like you don't know dick think they talking bout' shit they know
>Taint
>Corruption
>Vile Darkness
>Fucking Necrotic cysts
>All those necromantic environmental effects,
>That vast No. of disease based undead, some rules for undead giving it anyway

Either take the fucking time to read nigga, or don't post, this negligence is fucking disgusting.

As for why people don't follow this shit up, because most of em don't know about the Plane of Negative energy's will, the what Negative energy actually is, they don't read The Necromancer handbook, they don't know what hauntings are, they DON'T FUCKIN READ NIGGA, NIGGA FUCKIN READ.

Souls sometimes get trapped in the Undead and this can drive them insane with a hatred of all life intermingling with the will and corrupting the soul

You can literally get tainted by the plane, and switch out your positive/negative energy spectrum with a sexually transmitted disease, or from over exposed contact to the stuff

It literally damages the Soul, The life-force, which is the souls composite energies, It fucking kills nature off, see necrotic Cysts, necromantic Intelligences, and fuckload of other shit.

You know that little demiplane where you kill a Nature spirit in Neverwinter Nights 1? The Plane of negative energy got it's own version of that, except it's basically a massive asshole Sky Skeleton playing a MOBARTSNIGGERIDON'TPLAYTHATSHIT with undeadspam out the ass and template stacking left and right.

Fucking Orcus made the Undead by casting a Dweomer that killed every infintasmal thing on his native plane, himself included, which is stated by the G-man himself, that it was even referenced later on in 4e an onward.

Necromancy is MOSTLY evil. Not Entirely, MOSTLY

5e DM here, where do I find this kind of stuff?

How the fuck is raising the dead not soulbinding?

That's a cool backstory for more socially accepted necromancy.

Of course you need to go into more detail about how necromancy works in the setting. Are undead still pure evil unless controlled? If so, they'd want to have some explanation for why when anyone lost control of undead servants, they invariably turned on the living.

Or is it more benign? In which case you need to ask why it was banned in the first place.

One is trying to harness a useful but very dangerous and often corrupting force and could add a lot of flavor and tension to a civilization, particularly an undersupplied one. The other is one of those cheap "your traditions were wrong, necromancy is totally OK and I can prove it" deals that doesn't really add much.

>4e-5e
>Lore
>4e-5e
Well, 4e did better in some areas, but not a lot, Orcus being Demon Poster Boy, removal of Non explicit Demon Lord Faith use, the fact that 4e was all dream 5e's godless content lacking Ravenloft with !notmyStrahd and a Van Richten Who should not fucking be there at all for multiple reasons tying back to the lack of content.

But to grace you with Information- on the undead
Bloodstone pass (Very fucking important shit on Wand of Orcus, and his abyssal lair, and how fucking impossible he is to beat)
Slayers Guide to the Undead (d20 Gary Gyax, Orcus Origin here credited by reference in 4e and onward)
Fiend Folio 1 (Orcus, but not the one you want this is for the updated in for on his Abyss layers, but use later information if available, as there was a purge of the denizens and iconic servants in his layer preceding Dead gods)
(Great Modron March, Dead Gods)
Dungeon 149 (Actual post Tennebrous Orcus, (Missing a few spells fuck 4e and 5e's Orcus, utterly incorrect Pazio competition fodder)
Dragon Magazine
Libris Mortis (Vampires variant on base Vampire important stuff)
Book of Vile Darkness (Vecna fucking wrote it, it's literally in the game itself)
Mostly All of 2e Ravenloft, no excuses- Ever. (Still canon as of 3.5, Expedition to Castle Ravenloft is non-canon and a remake of the older 1e adventure stated in the Dragmag, use Sword and Sorceries 3.5 updates, (this was't the entirety of 2e unfortunately, stuff is left out) )
Complete Necromancers handbook 2e (Follows on to Heroes of Horror with Kazerabet being the example Dread Necro)
Complete Divine (Vampire intelligence concept presented in order of the Stick is actually Canon for SOME base MM vampires)
Heroes of Horror (Taint)
Dragon Magazine Bloodlines, Wee jas, Vecna cult articles
Hauntings in Dragon Magazine Also
Plane based manuals and adventures in the Plane of Negative energy, Kas the Betrayer also in the 2e quests with Vecna
Mortimers

But I'm feeling generous So I'm going to fill your WIS score a little.
volafiledotioslashrslashb42hwny0

You know what would be a real twist? Something interesting and unexpected? Play it fucking straight. Necromancy is evil, anyone who uses it is a hateful shit bag, and they're raising an army of murder zombies to destroy the things you like.

"Le gud necromancy" is the laziest inversion of a trope I've ever fucking seen, and the justifications for it are even fucking lazier.

...

Golems and other constructs cost massively more to produce than undead, and still involve enslaving elemental spirits to animate them. Mindless undead are little more than animals or even bugs, powered by "negative" energy instead of positive. No trapped souls, no will of dark gods, just a different fuel source.

Negative energy is also not evil or every Inflict spell would have an Evil tag in the descriptors. Hell, positive energy explodes you if you get too much, and it powers demons just as much as it powers paladins. So why the fuck should undead be "always evil" other than someone thinking it's icky?

>"Butterfly" belief about the soul is widely accepted- the body is a cocoon, discarded on death.
Do you know how silk is made? The cocoon is boiled, with the moth inside.

It was played straight for decades and decades and decades user. There is a reason why people got so sick of muh shambling hordes and started into the whole good necromancer thing across the board.

I prefer for necromancy and the lot to be more amoral than immoral.

Digging up a graveyard and putting the bodies to use as mindless servants won't smear you with cosmic Evil the same way summoning a Balor will, but its still a dick move to do because what the fuck dude have a little respect.

There's plenty of reasons for necromancy to be used vs golems and other automata

Cost. The average midlevel caster may not have access to the enormous resources needed to make tons of the big, metal, enchanted golems, especially if he's alone as opposed to working with a party. He also may not have the required skills to do so, it's a he'll of a lot easier to just cast Create Undead than to invest in all those item creation feats and crafting. He may very well not even know alternatives exist.

Cost-effective ratios of undead compared to shit like an adamantium golem is a vast chasm. Even at high levels there's still plenty of very powerful undead that can be made

Also, he probably just doesn't give a fuck. Like Black mana users in mtg, the morality of what they're doing is never a concern. Its the most direct route to power and so they take it.

Negative and Positive energy are different from being Evil or Good aligned classes of spell.

c ,

>Lawyers
>Souls

Did I miss something?

>Players wouldn't be required to LIKE this civilization, after all.
>Throw in some skimpy harem girls for the hell of it.

They wouldn't be REQUIRED, but they would like it anyway. If you're going to toss in a harem for the hell of it, might as well go all the way and make them catgirls.

They are an anomaly, they are clearly intelligent, yet have no soul of their own, it is postulated that they take and consume the souls of living beings to power themselves. Regardless the creation of a lawyer is increadibly evil.

Actually, what might make this idea more interesting would be to go with a more Black Mirror (S3 E4) aspect. Spoilers:
Around 80% of the population is dead, but the dead are nigh indistinguishable from the living

youtube.com/watch?v=GlKL_EpnSp8

At least in my homebrew, Magical minds are usually sub-par compared to biological and especially sapient minds. Necromancy isn't conjuring some sort of negative energy from an alternate plane - it's making a bunch of magical simulacrums to restart the body. Torn muscles are replaced with (more powerful) magical muscles, organs replaced with semi-intangible magical ones; It's basically a step up in every way but the intelligence.

Of course, intelligence is VERY important in combat - the reason mages don't use a shitload of constructs all the time is because they tend to be very shitty programmers. Skeletons and your easily accessible shambling mass of flesh zombie generally are missing a lot of grey matter, so they lack much creativity. Skeletons and the worst zombies don't even have the ability to react to stimuli that the mage hasn't thought of, unless they're quite good.

On the other hand, fresher zombies, ones with less missing grey matter, are smarter. They retain more of their old personality too - evil necromancers and necromancers with a need for absolute obedience will sometimes scrape out the frontal lobe, and magic just that, even though it still damages the zombie, because otherwise they can actually turn on their master. A specially prepared Zombie can actually be literally their old self but tougher and stronger.

Ghosts can be called back, but being intangible they're only really of use as scouts and messengers. Vampires have multiple classes raging from "Edward Cullen but evil" to "poor sod catches Immortal Flu", and are sapient with all the problems that provides. Liches are a special case, where their brain is preserved and is basically remote operating a necromantic puppet through their phylactery; killing the brain kills the lich, smashing the phylactery generally makes it easy to smash the brain.

The thing is, Skeletons and the like are programmable... like computers. Or robots.

Robots that can make more robots...

Isn't reusing corpses for work one of the tenets of the planescape setting? Seemed to work fine there. Go for it.

why should it be?
a necromancer need not be evil, and if they are a fair and just ruler, would they even care about an arbitrary "evil" tag?

Well considering that many settings define necromancy as an inherently evil force that is usually both physically and mentally corrupting, yeah, it might be a little far-fetched.

Also I'm not sure how animating rotting flesh is more efficient than creating golems. If nothing else golems are certainly more sanitary.

>fair and just ruler is a necromancer
>necromancy is evil
maybe she just doesnt care about whether its evil or not, as long as everyone is happy

necromancers having the capacity to be good is considered a "Yes" by an overwhelming majority, so people will accept it

If something is tagged as "evil" it will have some negative consequence attached to it. Maybe it creates a miasma of disease, maybe it corrupts the user's mind, maybe the magic itself is powered by the screaming souls of the damned, or it drags the soul of the subject back from the afterlife and binds it to the rotting corpse and forces it to do your bidding.

It's comparatively rare for it to be defined as nothing more than generic magic with spoopy aesthetics, and even in that case it raises the question of why you're all that generic magic go-juice to reanimate putrefying flesh and brittle bones rather than any other form of non-rotting magical automata.

>not wanting spoopy magic for the masses

I enjoy the occasional LOL SKELEBONES LMAO as much as the next guy, but it's not good world building.

>not wanting to make massed skellymans into good worldbuilding
>not taking it as a challenge to overcome, instead of giving up and saying "we can never make this work"

WHFB did it pretty well with the Tomb Kings. But the Tomb Kings are more "if you aren't my descendent or my peasant, get the fuck off my lawn, mortal."

I can confirm this - our souls are usually surgically removed around 2nd - 3rd year of law school and by the time we do professional qualification courses nothing but an empty, highly efficient husk remains.

I used to want to join a prosecutor's office and make world a better place. By the end of my LPC the only things I cared about were money and fun cases.

t. UK lawyer

The issue I have with this scenario is nobody is really gonna want the government coming by to desecrate Gramgram's body to turn her into an unliving tractor. Neutral Necromancy works okay if it's part and parcel of ancestor worship, raising up the bones of the honored dead to protect sacred places or your homelands, but "we're sorry for your loss, but now the village ombudsman/dark wizard is going to scoop out your pop's eyeballs, put onyx in the oozing sockets, and jack him full of corrupting energy, and his bones are going to rise up out of his magically-decaying flesh and serve our Dark Queen's will, remember to vote McGillicutty for mayor!"

Also, if your Necromantic Overlord isn't a lich, what happens when she chokes to death on a fishbone? Does the whole agricultural and labor sector drop, or do all the skeltals, released of their master's dark will, just start fucking up the nearest fleshbags?

>You know Jackie fucking Chan about me. YOU KNOW FUCK ALL ABOUT ME! I am totally beyond the realms of your fucking tousle-haired, fucking dimwitted compre-fucking-hension! I don’t just take this fucking job home, you know. I take this job home, it fucking ties me to the bed, and it fucking fucks me from arsehole to breakfast! Then it wakes me up in the morning with a cup full of piss slung in my face, slaps me about the chops, to make sure I’m awake enough so it can kick me in the fucking bollocks! This job has taken me in every hole in my fucking body! MALCOLM IS GONE! You can't know Malcolm, because Malcolm is not here! Malcolm fucking left the building fucking years ago! This is a fucking husk, I am a fucking host for this fucking job. Do you want this job?
>Yes!
>Yes, you do fucking want this job. Then you're gonna have to fucking swallow this whole fucking life and let it grow inside you like a parasite. Getting bigger and bigger and bigger until it fucking eats your insides alive and it stares out of your eyes and tells you what to do.

That's all homebrew personal opinion user. Show me where the skeletons get a deadly miasma or flower wilting shadows in their stat blacks and you might have a point but as it stands they do not. Making shit up about how bad and scary your undead are is fine for your setting but it does not apply to anything outside of it. Even if you play a game where it might be official that a single zombie can destroy your soul just by getting close, it is not the standard and you don't get to assume those rules across other systems.

You had me at skeleton memes. Long live the Necroarchy.

Don't make the the most reasonable authority figure.

Make them ONE of the most reasonable, sure, but still with a good few quirks and eccentricities that hamper her rule a bit.

Having her be the most logical and fair ruler around just smacks of HAY GUIZE LOOK HOW SPESHUL MY SETTING IS

To be fair this changes depending on the setting.

The social mores that led to people not wanting Gramgram's eyes to be replaced with onyx were destroyed in the backstory, user.

The Necroarchie's peasants are of the opinion that the body isn't Gramgram, Gramgram's gone to [setting specific afterlife] and doesn't give a fuck about what her achy old bones do. So nobody else does either.

Besides, the body nets them a few copper. Hell, some of the youths have fun with it, and there's a whole new surgery place in town that can open you up and start drawing designs on your bones so that when you're Mr. Skeletal, you can be the coolest skelly around! They say it's "sick" or "Hellacious". Damn kids have no respect for the old ways - back in my day, we were smoothboned and liked it!

In 3.x undead are FAR easier to animate than golems. Cheaper and no XP cost.

And you don't need to enslave living sentient creatures to use as batteries for it.

It's weird that people claim raising the dead is edgy and cruel, then turn to fucking golems when asked for a better alternative.

For the most part you don't, because most of that stuff is homebrew and doesn't apply in most official settings.

5e explicitly states that not all necromancers are evil in the PHB

Eh, bot all constructs need bound elementalsm

>turning a pile of bones of an evil monster into a robot is bad
>kidnapping a nonevil person from another plane and shoving him into a mindless husk to silently obey is good

When did you realize the edgy person was you?

>elemental
>sentient creatures

Golems are fine. No one gives a shit about elementals. Still way more good than trapping grandma's soul in her stinking rotting corpse and driving her insane from negative energy poisoning so she can do menial chores.

Totally not evil.

I could dig it

isnt rule number one of good necromancers is dont trap souls?
just use mindless skellys

Souls have nothing to do with corporeal undead. A person could be True Ressurected and you can still use the old corpse to make a skeleton. Hell you could raise it as a vampire and send it out to fight whoever it's now the bloodsucking clone of. Had a DM pull that once, setting with basically "adventurer insurance" if you joined the explorer guild. Everyone long assumed the reason they never found their old bodies on returni g to dungeons was because duh they got brought back so why would the body be there? Turned out it was a plot by a necromancer king to amass generations worth of undead for his super horde and we had to fight several versions of ourselves among them.

I like necromancy and the undead, so I'm already sold. And frankly I thought the phrase you put was badass.

the quest giver, and de facto "head" of my parties local kingdom is a necromancer who hates injustice and will send skellies to kill his foes

he is ruthless and efficient, but (mostly) kind and just

when people call him out on being a necromancer, he will flip out with his skeletons, but he prefers to let actions speak for him

I'd use it but for the bones of the dead being used for the manual labour, the dead deserve their rest. Also the smell and hygiene concerns. Also job depletion and ever tom dick and harry having done this before.

The Necromancer King does have a collection of dead advisors, each the wisest of their generation who have come back of their own free will out of concerns for their nations well being.

May also raise the spirits of other dead people to find answers and obtain wisdom.

Actually raising the Silent Majority back to this world is only done if the Godzilla threshold has been crossed and it's all out and total war time.

As it is the majority of the dead stay dead and sleep in wait for Judgment Day. The land is hard and almost barren. The Earth needs their discarded husks more.

Zombies are unhygienic as fuck and a skeleton, lacking the shock absorption of soft tissue, will grind itself down and become brittle quickly.

skellys are expendable

>It's another episode of 'The good necromancer' show.
>It's not even a good one.

Whatever, OP

So how it matter that they are dead?

Even if you magically strip them, they'll break quickly enough that you'd need extra skeletons that clean up the broken ones and the mess they produce when their legs suddenly snap.
And then you'd need even more to clean up the cleanup squad, because they'd degrade so quickly from constantly cleaning up broken skeletons, and who then takes care of those?

To make it more morally grey, make it so you still need to bind the souls of the dead for undead to work.

Then after 15 years the dead have served their term and get their funeral.

>good necromancers is dont trap souls

>Souls have nothing to do with corporeal undead.

Your houseruling is nice, but has no bearing on this discussion.

Necromancy is Evil with a capital E.

>But muh good necromancers

There is no way to raise dead without evil methods. Get over it and either use explicitly neutral Golems or get used to being treated like the psychotic soul trapping torturer you are.

Go on then, quote me a page that states you need souls to animate skeletons. Now, incorporeal undead ARE souls, twisted and spiteful as you say except for when the devs decide one should totally be CG or something. But mere skeletons? No soul needed, just negative energy which last I checked was still not evil in itself.

>herp derp go do my research for me because Im a lazy fuck

No amount of whining is going to change your necromancer being a psychotic baby-eating evil fuck.

Now now, you know as well as I that the burden of proof lies with the one making the claim. You say souls are required, so prove it.

I've started a campaign where in the southern area there is a forest that radiates dark energy and necromatic power, the ruler is the same way. I made it to where if tou were born in this forest there was a chance you'd come back. But I made the reasoning for my undead not being so aggressive is because the dark energy nulls their constant pain. Of course outsiders of the forest are affected by the dark energy and act more aggressive.

Why not a good Evil Guy?

Nothing says he has to be without style, after all. Why not have him have that Galactic Empire appeal in-universe? Yeah he's an evil fuck, but he's a fucking cool evil fuck, and the evil is more of a side-business in the whole saving-the-world part.

At any point in a persons life, they may allow themselves to pass on to the afterlife by submitting themselves to the city council. Rituals are conducted, and the person is reformed into a revitalized body, but is sterile and can never truly be killed, die, or age in any way. Society is a mixture of living and dead, and unless the dead tell you they had passed over, it's impossible to tell the difference. After hundreds of years, some of the dead get bored/go insane and begin haunting crypts/throwing crazy undead orgys to fill their time and try to revitalize what it was like when all those feelings were brand new.

Nope. If you believe that a discarded body is no longer of use to its previous possessor and that its previous possessor is not somehow bound to it when the body is reanimated, and there is no cultural, sentimental attachment to dead bodies as a memento of the previously living, using necromancy for utilitarian purposes it totally fair.

It's like going to a junkyard and building a machine out of the parts you find. As long as the undead aren't self-aware, no problem.

A problem does arise if they grow souls through action.