What are some ways to make a necromancer bad guy more interesting than just zombie hordes?

What are some ways to make a necromancer bad guy more interesting than just zombie hordes?

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Necromancer tries to kill death.

Resurrect the heroes' loved ones as minions.
"More interesting than just zombies" is a pretty low bar, so...

Ghosts
Dealings w death gods/the underworld

I once played a villain in a superhero campaign whose goal was to symbolically infect the Earth with the zombie curse.

Guerrilla warfare necromancy.
Dropping some mass undead plague rats into city.
Or just generally having head of undead army know military tactics and strategy and utilize them. There is a lot of stuff necromancer can pull off that living army just cant.

Necromancer turns celebrities into undead and manages a huge PR campaign to make the undead socially accepted. Society then proceeds to crumble.

The necromancers followers are people who willingly chose to be turned into undead because they wanted to "live" forever.

He proposes altruistic use of undead labor for benefit of common man. The most terrifying of his mindless minions are not the undead themselves but masses of peasantry buying into the idea.

Resurrect dinosaurs

How about a Chaotic Neutral necromancer?
He just want's to preserve the world, to preserve life, even if it is half-rotted.

>What are some ways to make a necromancer bad guy more interesting than just zombie hordes?
Try Skeleton hordes.

He/she is cute and clumsy and messes everything up in cute/clumsy ways. All the other necromancers laugh behind his/her back and no one takes him/her seriously

The necromancer doesn't raise the dead, but instead makes an amalgam of bodies and metal, animates them, and engineers them to create unique monsters. They're frankenrobotzombies.

Related to this, necromancer kills important people and kidnaps their souls. He then ransoms the soul for reserection.

make him so the players feel sympathetic rather than bad
youtube.com/watch?v=4VfVTWGwLFo

This Also, spooky ghosts spying on people

I want to at some point trick a party into doing an all-bard party, and the adventure is a series of battle-of-the-bands-style clashes with other bardic groups. The only bad guy I have solidly in my head is a bard necromancer who specializes in pipe organ and xylophone, and has hordes of low-level ribcage-xylophone-playing skelly bards. Also, like, bone flutes maybe. You can always have the pipe organ be made out of the bones of some colossal creature he reanimates if he thinks the battle won't go his way.

Bards are the solution, is what I'm getting at.

> What are some ways to make a necromancer bad guy more interesting than just zombie hordes?
Just give him some good ol' big fat giant titties.

He's a philosopher, rather than a lunatic or tyrant. He wants to know the nature of life and death, why there should be a separation between finite "life" and infinite afterlife. Wants to know whether the soul's personality or identity is fixed--are dead souls impressions if a deceased mortal, or the mortal in new form?

You can't learn this without doing experimenting with undeath and resurrection, so he pisses off the purists who are just out to destroy zombies. But he's also treading on the nature of faith and divinity, so gods might take a mire personal interest.

Or make the necromancer a hot chick in bikini armor.

Use the other parts of Necromancy. Blood magic, bone magic, negative energy, drain effects, possession, skin twisting, fear effects, animated hands, etc.

>ghost spies
Instead of bodies, use spirits to do your dirty work. Track people, gather info, or curse people.
>ransoming souls
Steal a soul and sell it back. Or make it a hostage. Either way, "you have very little time before that empty body rots so... give in."
>summoning souls for information
A recently dead person could give plenty of information about an event no one else was there for. Solving mysteries, learning about a recent battle or troop movements, or even helping innocents by asking the departed loved ones for help.
>keeping important people alive
Part of a revolution and your figurehead just died? Need to sneak into a noble house but you accidentally killed your hostage? Desperate to spend just a few more years with the love of your life? Have you tried Mastery Of Death?
>spirit damage
Each encounter with the necromancer's magic deals unhealable, crippling damage to your soul with each magic hit. Be careful.
>whatever-good zombie user
Magic is magic. Unless you're in a setting where necromancy is 100% inherently evil for some lore reason, body's a body. Dude's dead and not using it anymore. Why can't a weak-ass magic user take advantage of a dead fighter?
>soul transfer
You in need of a spare body for a dangerous task? Have the necromancer put your soul in an expendable corpse. Not as good as your original body maybe, but you don't need to worry about the return trip, assuming you paid the necromancer enough.

>Necromancer terrorizes party with re-animated boobs from dead giants

Reminded me of this

youtu.be/HCd5vnXMLhc

In this vein of thought, have the necromancer attempt utilize deception and illusions to seat themselves closely, but innocuously, to those in power to attempt to either enthrall them, kill through poison or other means and then resurrect them to puppeteer , or leverage the lifespan of those in power or their loved ones for their own means

something like that

Make them a bard too! youtube.com/watch?v=-TqfBEX6QtE&t

Worse : the necromancer wants to bring Death back to life

I made my necromancers get their power from abyssal demons, so fights can be more than just throw more skeletons at them

The only way to make it interesting is to make the necromancy just a tool to make a more interesting idea possible.

The zombies and rotting undead in general don't need to be part of the story at all, if your necromancer's evil plot is crashing a village's economy by reviving a dead cook to get his family's secret potato pie recipe.

Or something less retarded, but you get what I mean.
Use necromancy to achieve an idea that couldn't be realized otherwise, not as if it was a plot point in itself.

Make him a weaver spider. Unrecognizable body parts fused into a mix of spidertaur and flesh golem, sewing zombies with silk made of sinews. He's not a ncromancer, but an artist of flesh.

Have him manipulate rot itself in ways that maximize the production of methane and tallow, creating zombies that can both float and become incendiary bombs. Or just walk into markets and explode into flaming gore, making wounds that will certainly be infected. Also, do that with a whale.
youtube.com/watch?v=7X0hq0ug9q4

Create a wicker man and reanimate the bodies inside so they act as muscles to the wooden frame. Cover it with iron plating. Put a chair in the torso, become the first giant robot pilot.

The bastard wants to develop necrogenic undead, making death itself independent from life.

A necromancer becomes rich after offering a service based on invoking the souls of the dead for testimonies and interrogatory. The king is currently collecting taxes unpaid three hundred years ago. For extra weird, have him invoke the souls using ectoplasm made from his own fluids, like mediums suposedly did.

An undead doesn't need food or sleep, and never tires. Everything that steam power did, a box full of undead moving levers or walking in wheels could. Necro-powered galleys would be even better than steam ships, for no coal is necessary. Water pumping for mines, elevators, wagons pulled in railways by running undead horses, try to grasp the possibilities.

I like to base my necromancers on Diablo 2. They're all about balance, or what they consider balance, and thus they tend to dislike immortality and consider death to be a gift, one that must sometimes be delayed to achieve their objectives. Thus, a necromancer would do whatever it takes to achieve their life's goal as quickly as possible so that they can embrace death as soon as possible.

As far as magic goes, I prefer necromancers to be more about life magic and just plain magic than just plain raising dead. Their mastery comes from the study of the nature of death and magic. For example, stuff like probability manipulation, spells that focus on dispelling or leaving the opponent without magic, curses like the diablo 2 necromancer, or in the case of more powerful necromancers, simply willing people to die. The idea is that the undead a necromancer has are never a threat by themselves, but when supported by a powerful necromancer that shuts down any efforts to put them down, these undead can go about their work unimpeded.

We recently had an encounter with a necro that despised zombies and the like and thought of them as an affront to her god. She actually went out of her way to destroy undead wherever possible. Her whole thing was classical necromancy, i.e. calling upon the spirits of the dead to answer questions and gain knowledge. As near as we can tell she wants to make all that knowledge her own, but we haven't actually seen her in a while.
Maybe we should check up on her. Leaving a necromancer unsupervised that long might be a mistake. Then again, she saved our asses once and was generally helpful.

He wanders around summoning small groups of zombies at random. Allows them roam wild

Necromancer lawyer. Basically deal with the devil and you fucked up.

Unless he's also a geomancer,the fossils won't be controllable,if he could find enough complete skeletons in the first place.

Does it really matter if it's not actual bone? I mean, couldn't you just use the same negative energy to animate a construct made of the fossils? You're still using what are essentially the remains of the animal for your ritual.

Mess more with souls than the undead. He has the captured souls of artificers bound within golems, forcing them to craft him magical items. He keeps people imprisoned, weakening their gods, by preventing them from moving on after death. He's essentially 'locked' the gate to the afterlife, forcing people to remain in the world as ghosts.

>What are some ways to make a necromancer bad guy more interesting than just zombie hordes?

He's pursuing the "true end goal" of undeath: self-sufficiency and total exemption from the system.

No sleeping, no eating, no breathing, no drinking; it won't need any outside energy and it can't be killed by any normal means.

An entirely "perfect" undead being: it won't rot, it won't fear the sun, it will be perfectly aligned into undeath and stillness of true immortality.


Because they're under the assumption that whoever is the last man standing when the universe ends: gets to be the one true god for the next one.

A necromancer physician who can't save people from a terrible plague so he tries to preserve victims with undeath. His misguided efforts result in disaster and his passion makes negotiation impossible.

...

They're trying to bring historic evil spellcasters back to life as undead thralls.

-or-

They're trying to make an entire forest of skeleton trees.

-or-

They're going digging for dinosaur bones.

Twist: the necromancer is in love with Death. Like, romantically.

Follow this guy's example. Those ghouls of his were goddamn terrifying, and the undead cyclops was a huge bastard.

Basically, while your necromancer might keep a few zombies around as fodder and materials, he much prefers using high-quality minions. Wight assassins, mummy sentinels, vampire court mages, that kind of thing. Have him keep an eye open for rare subjects to add to his forces.

Also, give him a decent motivation, while still having him be an unreasonable asshole about it. Pic related was trying to stop Mega-Satan, but he still pointlessly massacred anyone who got close to him on the way there, just because.

Necromancer that doesn't raise the dead, he just denies certain people the privilege of death. The elderly, those in pain, sickened, etc. they just continue suffering with no hope of release.

Body snatching. The Necromancer decided to become immortal by making their soul immortal and not their body. So now they either possess people and eat/shove aside their soul or kill them and inhabit the corpse like a puppet.
The necromancer can be anyone. And even if you kill the host, what the fuck you going to do now?

Possible solution: he's a 'reverse-lich', the body is akin to a phylactery and is stored somewhere else.

Make him bring back loved ones and such, but for money. He could ransom kings and such.

>Or just as a business, starting with pets, but just to fund your cult untill they can open a portal to let in a judge death.

He uses necromancy to grant immortal lichdom to all the rulers and high ranking people in all kingdoms. No cost, or minimal cost. He seems just completely interested in granting eternal life.

Of course, his real objective is the massive, MASSIVE wars that will result when people start figuring out that there is no social mobility anymore. "Can't take it with you!" doesn't matter much anymore when you won't ever die.

Xana's voice was fucking sex in that game, holy shit. Demon boners all day, and if you betrayed her for that human hussy you were a terrible person-god-demon-thing.

There's a book series called Johannes Cabel about a necromancer. He started practicing to revive his waifu but by the time of the books he's entirely devoted to magical research.

He could do the zombie horde thing but they'd be a distraction. What he does is robs graves and libraries and leaves abandoned undead abominations produced by failed experiments in his wake.

>For millennia the mortal races of the world have been enslaved, denied their birthright out of the petty favoring of the gods' blessing other races over all their creations equally. For eons we have been forced to watch our predecessors wither and die while some of the very first Elves still walk this realm.

>No more
>No more slavery, no more death. Today we rebel. We upset the unnatural order, and we rip fire from the hands of the gods, and no power can rival us now.

>Today we reclaim our souls from the underworld, and deny the gods' their dominion over any of their creations. Death is a thing of the past. Now, all life that has ever lived and will ever lived shall be immortal. We are our own divinity now, let none other control the fate of your existence any longer.

>TO ALL I GIVE THEE, EVERLASTING LIFE

I'd suggest someone raising the dead to steal their secrets. Blackmail, magical knowledge, all that good stuff.

just 2 animated tits, bouncing along after the party. like indiana jones.

youtube.com/watch?v=FL7-sbiGlzw

youtube.com/watch?v=cMZi217RUUY

>Or make the necromancer a hot chick in bikini armor.
Unironically this. The players will treat her much differently if she's hot and playful.

He wants to resurrect an ancient King of legends that is rumored to be the best king that ever ruled over the kingdom, because he brough prosperity, but was also prone to conquest and to wage war.

So there would be this moral doubt about him coming back or not, is it just? Will he able to rule effectively? Will his mind stay sane? Will he just turn the kingdom into a conquering horde of undeads?

Anima's undead work that way. Small but nice shift.

Also they are created by what is basically Umbrella Corp in an anime fantasy setting.

A simple approach would be mixing the necromancer with another archtype and then think about how it might change they way they use necromancy.

A assassin/necro could use ghosts to possess people close to his victims and maybe become incorpreal himself for short amount of time. Yeah, looking yourelf up in your saferoom won't help!

Or give him a job. Might not fit for a bad guy, but the guard/detective +necromancy who speaks with the dead to solve crimes isn't hard to pul of but still a not so common concept.

In general: develop you bad guys' goals, motivations and modus operanti without his profession. Patch the necromancy part onto him afterwards.

An industrialist who uses necromancy to please his shareholders and maximise profits using cheap labour

Make her liberally use enchantment spells too, and really play up the seductress angle. Your players will get hooked.

The necromancer has discovered something like the Legacy of Kain Elder God eating at the world.

The use of soul-ed undead is both a naked power grab and an attempt to starve the voracious thing at the heart of the world.

Only Dresden has the balls to do that

The necromancer lives/travelled to a place that is borderline uninhabitable. A sunblasted desert or article tundra, magical badlands, etc. There he works to make a functional nation of the undead, cities, parks, infrastructure. They gather with them any other budding necromancers, & offer anyone who contacts especially to them the gift of unlike, to forever live where nothing bad happens (zero crime because the biggest drive for crime is gone)

Jurassic Park, the lich tries to pull off as a jurassic park and inadvertently puts the kingdom at risk.

Now THIS is real lichdom. Testing the bounds of 'just because we can, does it mean we should?' and put it on full display for the players.

necromancer that uses fume knight ultra greatsword?

...

A small town starts coming under attack by terrible undead beasts. They kill some one every few days.

A new doctor and healer shows up in town. He offers his services for free. His abilities are a miracle as he is able to heal the gravest of injuries. The beasts continue to attack the town from time to time, but each time, the doctor is able to step in and heal those who were attacked.

But the people he saves seem just a little bit off to their loved ones. Those family members occasionally become concerned and go to the doctor to voice their concerns, but they always leave with their concerns completely alleviated.

One concerned citizen watches her whole family one by one visit the doctor and come back "off". She confides in her best friend about the strange little changes in personality in behavior shes noticed, and her friend says she's seen the same thing. But the next day, when she talks to her friend, her friend tries to explain how the doctor showed up to her house and explained how it's all in her head and just a result of having a hard time accepting the miracle that is the doctor's abilities. But her friend now seems "off" too. So, she flees town.

She runs into the party and explains what she's seen and begs the party to help find out what's wrong with her friends and family.

When the party comes into town to investigate, all they can find is tons of friendly towns people who extol the miracle of a doctor that they have. They act baffled that the girl who asked for the party's help would be concerned about anything as they have no idea what she's talking about with things being "off".

At some point in their investigation the party is attacked by a much larger force of undead beasts than any of the townspeople had described seeing. Should one of the party die in this fight. The doctor shows up and offers to help, and casts some spell which must have been some kind of resurrection as everyone was sure they were dead but they get back up as though they hadn't even been attacked.

The doctor leaves in a hurry saying he has to go prepare more medicine if he's to save the village after these bold new attacks.

The party starts to doubt if the girl they met was telling the truth, and they realize they haven't seen her since the battle started. They go looking for her and find her at home. She explains that she feels silly now and has no idea why she asked the party for help since the doctor has everything under control. But there's something in her eye and her total change in demeanor as she's no longer the terrified girl the party first met.

When they go to confront the doctor, they find him among a large group of the townsfolk as they are throwing him a dinner to thank him for his continued service. As the party presses their questions about the weirdness of the whole situation, the townsfolk around him shout down the party "Everything is great now that he's here! How could you accuse him of anything? You're the ones not welcome here! Leave!".

But with so many people here in one place, some one in the party notices the smell. A familiar smell. The smell of death. But you're far from where the undead were slain. And you'd cleaned off your weapons. The party presses again for answers. The doctor finally looks up after having remained silent while the people defended him from your accusations, and says "You should have left like they said".

And all the townfolk in the room unhinge their jaws, the party hears the unearthly wails and screams of all in the room but the doctor as well as hundreds of wails coming from every direction of the rest of the town, and the rogue who was resurrected by the doctor earlier stabs one of the other party members in the back.

>Haha hi adventurers! Here to stop me? Too bad, I'm on a skeletal T-Rex.
>Oh man this guy's eating me. Hope I don't die!
>Haha you thought I was screwed. But no he has no stomach and now I'm inside a T-rex I can control. WOOO DINOSAAAAUURS!

Necromancer giants.

Giant skellingtons.

Dwarven necromancers.

Dwarven skellingtons.

Make him akin to the Sorrow for MGS3, as in a medium who communicates with the recently deceased on the battlefield in order to obtain vital info.

The necromancer has established and held his kingdom for decades and has become an uncomfortable but unignorable part of the political landscape

The necromancer was originally a sorcerer for a band of soldiers sworn to protect the innocent from the forces of evil. He is the only one still alive.

Through necromancy, he contacts the souls of his old comrades and raises their bodies so they can continue their sworn duty, if only for a while.

He knows he should just let them lie, and that tampering with death itself can lead to disastrous consequences, but the minions of evil are many, and the spirits seem so eager to keep fighting the good fight.

This is a really good idea. Thanks!

sounds like a Doctor McNinja strip

Why does he look so gay? Terrible character design or just really old and never updated

I dont know man, people are always trying to fuck with a classic. Want to make an interesting character? Make a town. A town full of NPCs, its a great place, but the issue is they are all dead, not just dead, but soulless and very, very hollow. Each one is just a puppet of the local necromancer who had to watch as everyone he cared about died, and he sorta lost his shit, decided to make life keep on keeping on. Each corpse is perfectly regenerated to a life like state, and moves around even talking a little, but its just puppateering.

Protip: the party doesnt know. The corpses are techincally alive and warm, they eat, they go through the motions of the day, but its the necromancer's power that keeps them going. Nothing good or evil here, its just one big empty, weird, place.

the necromancer is a former paladin who was cursed into undeath and now uses nercomancy in order to fight evil, but some people think his methods are too extreme

Necromancers aren't allowed to use enchantment spells.

The undead are a result of a money-minded, adventurous merchant finding an ancient tome revealing the secrets of life and death.

He uses his magic to allow aging nobles to keep living as long as they like, provided they can pay a monthly fee. Not to mention selling them all the embalming oils and perfumes to keep their undead bodies from spoiling the nobility's latest ball.

This causes a power struggle amongst the younger generation of nobles who now have their succession put on indefinite hold, and the peasantry who grows unruly at the new taxes levied to pay for the nobles undead treatments.

Yes they are. 3.5 necromancers have to pick schools that are banned, and many choose enchantment, but you don't have to. And in 5e you don't have banned schools.

Really old design that was more fitting for the marvel space aesthetic at the time and never really updated because he hasn't had a good story in decades.

Which is part of why I am so iffy about that infinity war bullshit they're setting up for the MCU, given that the Infinity Gauntlet storyline was just a gigantic clusterfuck of battles and set-pieces held together through the fact that ultimately it was a story about Thanos' crushing despair and depression that he can never truly be with his one love as partners, and setting up a potentially universe destroying series of events so he can save face when it all inevitably goes wrong and he fakes his own death.

Souls are just raw materials for the tug-of-war between the Heavens and Hells, The necromancers are the good guys trying to starve both sides of resources by preventing souls from passing on.

If you want necromancy, read World of Darkness books. VtM's got a pretty good version of creepy incestuos banker necromancers, Mage:the Ascention's got an interesting take too.

Uses necromancy to stop death instead of cause it.
Minions are huge cancer-golems.

>numerous reports of local villages sighting their loved ones leaving their graves and tormenting the town
>heroes go to investigate
>find the one responsible
>he's sacrificing people to exhume the dead
>heroes intervene and fail
>the attacks are getting worse, the undead are growing bigger and less human, and now people are being abducted
>villain is finally caught in his lair
>villain this whole time is trying to resurrect dead daughter and experimenting on others with no success
>villain decidedly needs a grand sacrifice for the ritual to work
>sacrifices himself as well because the ritual requires familial blood
>ritual fails, creates gargantuan abomination as final boss

make the profession a government-run institution.

All necromancers are basically FBI agents running around solving cases both before and after the grave comes into play

evil necromancers are rival agents or those who've gone rogue

This spell.

Bringing a popular king back to life
>Remember that guy who conquered most of the world and made sure people had enough food and didn't tax you to death? He's back now

Necromancer with the hipster mentality. Everything has to be obscure and different.

"Oh god, all the skeletons under this tomb are just HUMAN. Everybody has used human. Are there any Orcs or Trolls or something?"

It'll make your party hate him/her that much more.

Or as has been previously suggested, necromancer/blacksmith who is hammering metal into his minions to give them blade arms, reinforced bones, or just kickass spikes. Look up skelecopters. Extra points if they see themselves as an artist and are trying to perfect the body's form.

Failing either of those, just go for big ass titties.

These guys nailed it. Big titties and bikini armor

Many cultures had the deceased ancestors being quite present in people's everyday lives. Giving advice and whatnot. We also have the Egyptian take, with the souls of the deceased travelling around and undergoing spiritual rebirth every day. And there is of course always the question of what'll happen to you after you die, many care quite a lot about that.

A necromancer, being able to communicate and interact with the dead, with or against their will, should be able to do a lot there. Force the honoured dead to give specific advice, threaten to curse people so their souls will suffer after death, etc.

That cunt from Dark Messiah scared me by having a constant entourage of ghouls

Using necromancy to make something that ACTUALLY IS GOOD.
Like, not good aligned, but not-shitty.
As in, an actually professionally crafted re-animated life form. Probably with psionic powers from some beholder and the arms of a master swordsman and all sorts of shit like that.

If done correctly, the creation will have a boss chorus.

"Necromancer" is actually just someone possessed by the ghost of his great-X grandfather, who's upset that he decided to study (other type of magic) and broke the family lineage

Necromancer that goes frakenstien with it and uses undead as a power source by having them endlessly move a dynamo or some other wheel without stopping

Necromancer who isn't aware they're doing anything wrong because they just act as a passive medium for ghosts and believe they're actually talking to nature/divine spirits

Mad scientist, Frankenstein type, but he's trying to create flesh golem weapons to replace soldiers in war. For whatever reason he's crossed paths with the party, they've necome the perfect test subjects to send his monsters after. Think RE Nemesis. Now that I think about it, this is also a good opportunity for a long-term villain since he can just watch the party and send his creatures after them from the shadows.

What if my players are half female?

>Control-F colossus of ylourgne
>not found
Better fix that oversight.
eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/27/the-colossus-of-ylourgne

Big tits
Big dick
everyone's happy

You do exactly the same thing and active their latent bisexuality