Become a necromancer today!

Become a necromancer today!

>"It makes it so much easier to raise a family!"

>Not really. Necromancy is less about just death magic, and more of life magic.
>Necromancy
>life magic
>Necro - Mancy
>Death - Magic
>word means Death Magic
>must be life magic

>Don't use those parts that are just lying about which are literally fucking free and not being used by anyone to improve peoples lives!
>You have to throw trillions of gold pieces into extremely expensive golems which can't be produced at any reasonable rate so that only a tiny number of people can benefit from it.
>Also if you're trying to improve peoples lives in the most efficient way that makes you lazy!
Admit it.
Necromancers are the Libertarians of fantasy, in the free market of magic they win out and out.
So the fucking (((Gnomes))) have to regulate that shit and give them a bad rep so they can keep the plebians down.

You're not a true libertarian unless you're socialist

Man, if undead even mindless undead didn't arm themselves and form militaries for the singular purpose of destroying all life when left to their own devices then maybe they're allowable.

It's like saying let people use chemical weapons for pest extermination. Sure it works better, but fuck is it more dangerous than the job requires.

They only do in generic fantasy settings, besides a responsible necromancer would have safety precautions

>[The Complete Book of Necromancers] sorts spells into three color categories, each linked to a particular ethos:
>Black necromancy, encompassing spells that bring physical injury or spiritual annihilation, is associated with evil practitioners
>gray necromancy, to which the majority of necromantic spells belong, are appropriate for neutral wizards
>good wizards are drawn to white necromancy, with spells that restore life and fortify living bodies.

Y'all both befuddled, Necromancy's roots lie in people who speak to the dead. Whether it be talking to ghosts or ancestral spirits, it's the true root of necromancy. None of these evil alignment or raising the dead bullshit, the latter is more of Vodoun's schtick.

I blame Orcus. He created necromancy and holds monopoly over spells, and all new shit is made from his. Spells made by a fat chaotic evil fuck who killed his world will, of course, be shit.
That's why we need to break his monopoly. Make new necromancy from ground-up.

>They only do in generic fantasy settings
It's the standard for how undead operate in many published settings. If you want to change that sure, but if we get into 'in muh homebrew setting' then literally this entire argument is pointless.

>besides a responsible necromancer would have safety precautions
It's basically uses a live grenade to exterminate rabbits. Sure, you made sure to wear oven mitts, but it's still a live grenade.

The word "necromancy" is adapted from Late Latin necromantia, itself borrowed from post-Classical Greek νεkρομαντεία (nekromanteía), a compound of Ancient Greek νεkρός (nekrós), "dead body", and μαντεία (manteía), "divination by means of"

>You're not a true libertarian unless you're socialist
Now you stop that shit before you violate my NAP.
We know what you're up to you wily Marxist.

The way I see it and have always seen it is thus.
Fire is very, very useful.
It can also burn your god damned house down.
You treat it with respect, you don't let it get out of control, you don't give it any chance to become a danger.
Meanwhile you get people who go
>Hurr durr how can you want to use fire to improve the lives of people when beating cold iron into shape with a bit of wood is so much safer? Also eating raw meat isn't so bad, sure dozens of us die from worms each year but at least no ones house burns down. Why would you want fire in the camp when it might burn us all!

>necromancy
>Necro coming from the Greek word Nekros meaning corpse
Go fuck yourself with your shitty ass fan wank that compels you to project and see everything in your own way.

>good wizards are drawn to white necromancy, with spells that restore life and fortify living bodies.
Kurtz can eat my fucking dick. That's not necromancy. It's healing. You can have a healing domain or whatever.

Libertarian socialism predates capitalist libertarianism, it's not really meant as a serious criticism though, I am just fucking with you

The dangers don't outweigh the benefits. If the fire is explicetly malicious and will attempt to end all life and if left unchecked will rip a hole in reality to let powerful extra planar super undead through then it isn't worth it.

There are cheap ass constructs you can make. Both require level 5. Heck now in some systems you can start making constructs at level 1 for copper on the gold piece.

>Necromancer gets bullied by other magic users
>retaliates by raising the local cemetery skellingtons to give the bullies atomic wedgies

>Old-school Necromancer gets bullied by other magic users
>retaliates by throwing bones and calling their ancestors' voice down
>"Your late father doth declare thee a mistake of his loins!"

>It's basically uses a live grenade to exterminate rabbits. Sure, you made sure to wear oven mitts, but it's still a live grenade.
Having a labor force that never has to stop is exterminating rabbits is it?
Literally building roads from one end of a nation to another through the worst conditions in months rather than years is rabbits?
Totally expendable workmen who can go into the deepest, most uncomfortable mines (A job that historically was The Worst Job) to bring up ore 24/7, 365, with nary a fuck given about flood, firedamp, needing good ventilation or logistics beyond 'So we need to get all this dank ore down from our mine up in the most shithole mountain in the Kingdoms where nothing else can survive' is rabbits?
God damned soldiers who fight longer and harder than any man, don't need to be trained, don't have any logistical problems and who the death of won't leave widows, orphans and children is fucking rabbits mate?
What the fuck are you smoking? Because I want some.
Like it or not Necromancy is a school of magic that's the equivalent in terms of life saving and suffering ending potential of a universal cancer cure.

I know, I'm just fucking back.

Totally agree in those circumstances where you can make cheapo robots that it isn't even worth it. If it's literally copper pieces to make a construct them party hard.

>DnD

Necromancer's a good job, mate. Out of doors. I guarantee you'll not go hungry.

>You're only allowed to use DnD as an example if it proves me right, otherwise I will mock you for it :^)

I see we've abandoned all pretense in this argument.

Semi-related, does it bother you when in a setting a civilization is basically a marry sue? Like it's fine if eclipse phases authors are into anarcho-socialism but if you believe a form of government is perfect it shouldn't exist in your setting

There are multiple people arguing against you, I never cited DnD

Ok what system do you want to talk about instead for necromancy stuff?

>respond to a post that all it says is "D&D"
>someone else says "that isn't me, *I* never said D&D"
why did you even reply to that post then?

I mean I am more interested in necromancy for worldbuilding but I also like golarion

Just a disclaimer I'm not actually a libertarian.
But I think any civilization being too good to be true is retarded in any setting because it removes all the conflict and isn't realistic. Unless the government has total control (In which case fair enough) or no control (In which case it wouldn't be a nice place to live) then there's always going to be assholes that work around the system.

That and it's pushing a political point which always rumbles my bumbles. I'm not a fan of Eclipse Phase specifically because they've gone out their way to make anarcho-socialism come off as Da Best and ignored all the interesting plotlines that could come out of the fact that humans aren't perfect.
That and Transhuman Space took things further along the logical path for 'oh shit this is kinda fucked up'

Basically any Mary Sue civilization in any game only exists by ignoring the most vital fulcrum of story telling, that being that people are human.
Wonderfully and gloriously and irrationally and selfishly human.
Doesn't mean you can't include things you love in your setting.
But you have to pick at them just as hard as anything else.

>the cure for cancer is injecting a bigger cancer
>these desecrated corpses puppeted by eternally suffering souls enslaved with demonic energy are morally neutral meat golems, honest!

This is why necromancers should be executed on sight, like they were in the stories that inspired D&D, and often in 2e fluff.

Read further back in the chain

>Taking obvious propaganda at face value

Bet you're an asshole who argues for killing all who ping evil on sight.

>Hundreds of people should die of black lung just so that I don't have to spend an extra 40 years stuck on this mortal plane in a bit of a shit situation before going on to my eternal reward of getting my dick sucked by angels, waah!
Three things.
Demonic =/= Necromantic.
Negative Energy isn't evil in and of itself.
And if you think others should die a long, drawn out death of the black lung just so you can fuck off to eternal paradise a few years quicker then you're a bit of a selfish cunt.
Even in settings where you end up trapped in your own meat puppet that is.
Wouldn't force you since hey everyone has the right to be a selfish cunt, but going
>Anyone that tries it should also be executed
Is the fire argument

Can you play a necromancer in 5e adventurers league? I want to play in an evil campaign so I can be a necromancer but with less edgy shit. I accommodate my groups retard character concept constantly when I forever GM but the one time I get to play and want to run a necromancer I get roadblocks at every turn, the GM changed his homebrew to fuck me over and the other party members attacks me. Fucking cocksuckers.

>Negative Energy isn't evil in and of itself.
Yes it is. It absolutely is. It's quite literally anti-life.

Life doesn't equal good, that and I'm pretty sure there is some weird race in an old supplement that was both not evil and negative energy based

>Life doesn't equal good
In the D&D cosmology, yes, yes it does. Things are very black and white here.

DnD is multiple different settings you're going to need to name one, that and I am pretty sure there are good undead like those elvish ones

>Negative Energy
>Titles The Void
>Sphere Inner Sphere
>Alignment Unaligned
>Unaligned.
More importantly, life in and of itself isn't good.

Is a serial rapist good aligned just because he's fulla that positive energy?
Or a Drow?
How about Owlbears, those fuckers are full of positive energy.
Know what else is full of life, animation and explosive growth?
Cancer. Big ass tumours. See Ragnorra for proof of that.

Negative energy is entropy, it is an ending.
That isn't wrong. All things come to an end Senpai.
It isn't necessarily cruel, it isn't necessarily bad and it most certainly is as natural as living.

Eberron has the unliving and Balenorns are a thing in most settings.

99.9% of undead are evil. Also lets say we're talking about Golarion. Undead being around causes other corpses to start spontaneously rising from the dead. If left to it they eventually rip a hole in reality and let extra planar undead through. Necromancy causes the unquiet dead to happen near it.

Right, if we're talking Golarion then evil undead actually make sense.
Not because undead are intrinstically evil but because the first undead that defined what all other undead are since, the Archetypical Undead.
Is a Cunt.
A massive, massive, selfish, evil, greedy Cunt.
Basically you've got the Cunt goddess of being a Cunt who makes sure that anyone who follows her path must also be a Cunt.

There are exceptions still though
>Burning Crusader
>A few mentioned Liches
>Fair few mummies early on
>The Burning Child
ect, ect. Which still goes to show there are exceptions and thus hope for the undead as a concept beyond just Urgathoa and her tyranny.

>Harm kills living cells of the body

Gee nigger, can't exactly jack up retard's metabolism to bring em back, or heal the foot long gash or internal bleeding, because it'd burn his bones out to the point of making em hollow so what do I do?

OH I KNOW, ILL FUCKING REVIVE HIS DEAD TISSUE YOU LITERAL MANCHILD.

Necromancy historically, literally has all been about GRANTING LIFE. God's of death typically when not associated with males or judgement have been female, who also represented fertility, because to give life where there is none was associated with birth.

Even in the entamology of it being negative is flat out wrong. Taken literal it's literally Prophet OF the DEAD, NOT of DEATH.

Sorry, I meant glorantha, also I don't see why the majority of undead being evil precludes the ethical use of necromancy

Because of the fact that you using it means that animal corpses around everything down to insects, may raise and start an undead uprising. There is no safe way to use it.

What makes you think mancy means magic?

Depends on setting

Absolutely depends on the setting. Can the undead have sapience? Can they choose not to be evil? Then your necromancer can actually be the greatest good ever.

The necromancer(zombie) in this image can, if they choose, just travel the world raising the dead and granting immortality to everyone.

There is more to necromancy than fucking making undead you ignorant stupid fucks. Just went through PFs database of spells, 5 or so spells out of 204 necromancy spells deal with the creation or maintenance of undead.

And undead are evil because they are an abomination of unlife, fueled by malicious and corrupt spirits of hunger and death stuck into corpses. Just having them around causes the material plane to be slowly ripped apart from the plane of anti life, creating more undead, causing hauntings, withering crops, causing stillbirths and deformities, and a whole bunch of other awful shit for animals, plants, and people.

It's like having a walking fuel rod from a nuclear reactor, it's spreading dangerous energies inimical to life everywhere, and if you're not extraordinarily careful, it can get loose and kill a fuckton of people.

Its not a robot made of flesh, its a spirit of death shackled to a corpse, waiting for you to make a mistake, and then it can feed its unnatural hunger that it can never sate.

It not granting life. Just stop with your fan fiction already. It's cringe as fuck.

forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Heal
>Heal was a conjuration, evocation, or necromancy spell that cured many ailments and restored health.

>2nd Edition
>Healing

>1st Edition
>Necromancy

You're cringe as fuck.
Why wouldn't healing be part of the school that's all to do with the body and, and I fucking quote.
>manipulate the power of death, unlife, and the life force
But no, in 3e some pleb decided that it had to be part of conjuration because Reasons.
Reasons being the brand of lead paint they were drinking at the time.
>Hurp, can't have any benevolent spells in necromancy, durp, better change it to the summoning school instead.

I'm just going to chime in here, nobody says that all of necromancy must be evil, 100% of the time. We are talking about raising the dead, the thing that necromancers tend to do, and why they learn necromancy in the first place.
Because people say "necromancer", they don't typically mean a guy who casts, say, Speak with Dead or Cure Wounds. They're talking about people who raise corpses.

Dying ain't much of a livin' boy

>"Hm... I could learn to read the strings of fate and, with time, to weave them. The past, present and future as my playthings? Nah."
>"Or I could harness the power of the raw elements, to freeze and burn all who stand in my way. Power overwhelming? Nope."
>"What about delving into the secrets of conjuration, to always have myriads of creatures at my beck and call, to protect and serve me, and learn how to manipulate space and time? Fuck that."
>"I wanna be that creepy guy with no friends who always has to run from the law and who has to dig up stinking cadavers for company. Yeah. That's who I'll be."

>Fanfiction
lame

that's like saying you can't be a socialist with being a marxist.
tons of schools of thought between those two. no?

Basically that second point is my whole problem with it. I'm fine with handwaving weird societies if it's for the sake of the plot to happen, but if it's to prove a point I hate it.
In your own setting you're god. You can make anything happen or not happen. You can prove any ideology or metaphysics to be true. You merely have to write your characters all agreeing on it.
I hate it. I feels like a poorly constructed argument that I'm not allowed to respond to.

The dark arts are supposed to be easier right? That's what's so seductive about them.
Not such a big step from saying they're too lazy to do the more respected kinds of magic to saying they're not able to.
The elite have always looked down on the dealngs of the lower class. It sounds sort of believable that necromancy could be one of those lower class professions, looked down upon because it can be achieved without studying for decades in an expensive wizard's college. I'm sure there'd be plenty of reasons they'd be able to come up with as to why these lower class dealings are actually distasteful and harmfull, without ever actually utter the words "poor people".

The ancestral tombs in Morrowind do. Family members are resurrected and serve as guardians for the family tomb. It's necromancy, but good because it's done to stop tomb robbers and necromancers from looting and defiling the tomb, and the resurrected guardians do it voluntarily. Standard nercomancy is strictly prohibited and hunted down mercilessly.

I never understand people who insist on good necros all the time. It is not like being neutral or evil necromancer automatically makes you hostile to everything, have zero charisma and dead fish personality. And it is not like people oppose necromancers just because they belive guy is aiming for world domination, resurrecting someone dead grandma so she could work in factory is more jarring.
Not to mention that sending waves of corpses and incorporeal abominations upon your enemies is the best appeal of necromancy and great fun.

>tfw having a whole nation of Goodboy Necromancers
>tfw Veeky Forums autists can't do anything but complain.

Resurrected the king of some shit-hole empire and made him order his servants to give me the treasury. This derailed the entire plot and we have not gotten back together since.

I'd say i told you so during the undead uprising but you know.
Golems masterrace baby

I came here to post this.

the only good necromancers are ones that hang out with ghosts instead of gross smelly dead people

There's always good necromancers, but never good demon summoners. Why is that?

A corpse is just a corpse, their evilness is usually based on what magic or spirit is propping them up - demons are more often seen as being literally made of evil.

But even then you've got Solomon and others who bind and force demons to do things

I could see that as an aspect to it, might be quite a cool thing - adding class aspects (in the more conventional sense) to magical politics.

Sorcerers have the oldest blue-blood deal going on, while Wizards have had to study and maintain a library at considerable expense, Warlocks have a nouveau riche thing, holy magic users are somewhere in between but have considerable prestige as gods are a lot more selective than daemons, Alchemists are basically high-end magical craftsmen, Shamans and Druids are seen as savage but fairly noble, etc.

All this is underpinned by the fact that they are all chucking around magical firepower to some degree or another (and there may or may not be other (D&D) classes intermingling there as well), so things may tend towards social battles, lest things turn to actual battles and that warlock you insulted for getting his powers via a summoned daemon burns down half the city with hellfire in a sacrifice/rage.

>"Just make Golems"
>"Just enslave the spirits of a sentient elemental, and trap it in a body that's a living weapon"
>"Just ignore the fact literally every single golem inevitably goes berserk and needs to be destroyed before it causes too much damage"

Summoning demons used to be a fairly run of the mill thing to do for wizards. It's only with recent dnd settings with equally powerful and easy to summon elementals/djin/fae/angels/whatever that it's become more associated with evil. It used to just be dangerous, but potentially highly useful.

>has a believably in-character response that fits the vast majority of fantasy iconography in a conversation that is obviously being had for funs sake
>neo-Veeky Forums cries, knee-jerks, and flings shit

This board has seriously gone down hill. I remember when the autistic stupidity was kept in the edition wars threads.

>the vast majority of fantasy
>Everything is the same and should stay the same
>New ideas are bad!
New Veeky Forums really is shit.

Yeah, that's true enough.
Wonder why the shift towards that being seen as evil, maybe the rise in Clerics and Inquisitors perhaps?
(did the original D&D have it as evil? I'd would find it kind of hilarious if the moral panic over "muh satanic games" caused that shift)

Though spirits have long been an option, and I think Djinn fall into that as well

You're welcome to voice new content. Even shit content.
You're allowed, but not welcome, to shit on quality content.

Become an Italian necromancer today!

>"It's-a living!"

I like this. Let's do more this

> I'd would find it kind of hilarious if the moral panic over "muh satanic games" caused that shift)
It's this and the ability to summon them becoming easier that made them have to effectively "ban" it by only letting capital E evil characters use it

Even 1st edition AD&D, published well before the satanic panic, pointed out that Raise Dead is only frequently used by evil characters.

Either way you look at it, Necromancy isn't inherently evil.

If we're using the 3.5 viewpoint of "Good and Evil are objective forces like heat and entropy," then the argument quickly destroys itself.
In this form of morality, Good and Evil are entirely ends-based; it'd be perfectly okay to genocide Goblins by the millions, because Goblins are Evil and brutally slaughtering Goblins creates a quantifiable net loss in Evil present in the world.
With this frame of reference in mind, it's clear that Necromancy is Evil, but not evil. Remember, Evil and evil are two different things; the former is an intrinsic force of the universe, and the other is a human social fabrication.
Necromancy spells have the Evil descriptor because they literally create Negative Energy. But, not all Necromancy spells have to be used for evil, even if they are all Evil.

And, of course, if you're using the standard viewpoint that evil is based on actions and not on physical Negative Energy, then it's just the fire argument.

...

That logic is positively horrendous, unless he's talking about virtue in harmless small animals.

What's a decent name for a necromancer?

I would say that objective good and evil makes social constructs meaningless, that being said good aligned undead are literally canon in the DnD so people complaining about good necromancy are kind of missing the point

>"Just enslave the spirits of a sentient elemental
>they go berzerk
the fuck are you on about?
they are literally automatons, unless you put a piece of paper or give them direct commands they are incapable of doing anything.
thus the name, from yiddish means helpless.
there is only a magical animating vitae, no problems with spirit lingerings.
Undead however are capable of complex tasks. Without orders they are known to revert to base animal tenancies.

>muh elementals
you don't see them complaining when you make fucking houses out of rock, wood, and mud and what have you?
clearly they aren't in the components.
Perhaps flesh golems, but that's a weird nother matter.
When you raise the dead you are filling a void in a god damned husk, somethings going to get crossed in that fucking brain.

stop being a fag and work on golems, at least i can smell of something other than embalming fluids and rot all day long.
Fucking necrofags

>objective good and evil makes social constructs meaningless
I wouldn't say so.

To my great shame, I'm actually a fan of how 3.5 handled/implied the allignments; they were less about how you acted, and more about which fundamental part of reality you've sworn alegiance too. A fire and brimstone inquisitor who rules with an iron fist is still Lawful Good, even if he acts evil and chaotically. Similarly, an honorable Demon samurai who only fights fair is Chaotic Evil, no matter how lawful or neutral he really is.

You're forgetting about the canon good aligned undead

The thing is is that the inquisitor is right, like objectivity right because the universe itself supports his actions as good, to be evil in a world where morality is objective is to be wrong

but an death cleric can still use healing
fucking double standard

Not my concern really.
Golems are the shit and necrofags need to stop.
>but but it's just like golem making
fuck you, golem raising takes work

god damn you op i didn't ask for these feels

Let me tell you in excruciating detail why every single thing you just said was wrong.

As a kike, with a grandfather who literally studies Kabbalah, I've grown up hearing the original version of the golem myth, undiluted by fantasy tropes. Lots of things people like to forget about that myth, like how the golem was sentient, intelligent, had magic powers, and even fell in love (according to some versions).

People also always like to forget about the ending, also: the Golem went berserk and Rabbi Loew had to destroy it.

I don't know where you heard that Golem is 'helpless' in Yiddish. The Yiddish word for helpless is 'ofentik;' Golem comes from the Hebrew word meaning "raw [substance]," which can be found once, in the bible (psalms 139:16).

---

As for the Elemental stuff, keep in mind that there are exactly 2 fantasy settings that go in detail on a golem's creation, and both of them are from DnD: Forgotten Realms and Eberron. Eberron in particularly goes really into detail on the construction of golems, how elementals are summoned from the inner planes and bound to physical boedies, and how this process incredibly painful for the innocent and sentient elemental, and is often the cause for the elemental going berserk.

Compare this to Undead, who are so fucking tame when they're controlled, it's almost scary.

here is a valid question, necromancy is seen as evil because it goes against natures design of life to death to rebirth in other things (Dirt).
But healing is among holy magics which ALSO go against nature by circumventing a mortal wound, and holy magics can literally bring people back from the dead... and is ok??? I fail to see the logic, undead can act on their own accord doing complex tasks. good and evil are both sides of a coin that toys with life and death, saying one is bad for toying with it while the other does the same is just wrong.

>Let me tell you in excruciating detail why every single thing you just said was wrong.
fuck.
well can't argue with that.

Because most undead in DnD are tied to objectively evil forces, there are undead that aren't though, just fluff your necomancer as using the same power source that baelorns work off of, alternatively just as fiend pact warlocks can be good, necromancers drawing from an evil power source can be as well