Consider putting the undead to work instead of smiting them

White Necromancers.

>crops have returned record lows for the third straight year
>Supreme Necromancer Thadeus Bonapoart rolls forward a new plan to further boost the undead workforce and establish more farmland to ensure the food supply remains steady.

Sounds like a pretty good setting to me. A "utopia" slowly crumbling in Victorian style. After things slowly getting worse after generations, people in the capital just assume that it's normal for the sun to only shine weakly through the dark clouds once a month or so.

Gotta keep spreading the empire to get new resources and spread the good news about cheap undead labor.

What if, just consider this thought, we don't play with fire instead, and stick to NOT using corpses?

I tried to run a country with golems but Saladorm the Unliving stole all my trade with his cheap undead workforce! My golems required heavy initial investment and, while of superior quality, the merchants realized greater savings just using zombies and skeletons until they fall apart and replacing them!

I hope the king bail's out my golemmaking business and builds a wall between our kingdom and that fucking necromancer.

Das racist!
We wuz necromanvers an sheet.

>living in a land where even in death, you cannot rest in peace
>no rest, no wages, only an eternity of toil trapped in rotting meat enslaved to a single task
>knowing from the day you were born that one day this will be your fate

Necromancy: it's the worst parts of capitalism and communism combined.

That's a holdover from Tolkien, actually.

zombies are gross as shit and I refuse to believe anyone would want them involved in farming or food production in any way

Then you get run over by the less stagnant society that out produces you.

Now I kind of want a setting with some sort of Undead cold war, with each side continually easing up on their control restrictions to try to win an edge. Till the PCs show up and knock over the whole house of cards.

Then we are literarely wasting ressources and give other nations the edge on us.

Conman necromancer.
Your undead attack few villagers, you show up on the next day as friendly wizard, take contract on undead hunting, stage something with ghosts and few skillies, collect bounty, reanimate your undead buddies during the night after you leave and move to the next village.

I always assumed the used skeletons, for hygiene reasons.

No, we're living sustainably.

>consider
NO

PALADIN SMITES

Sounds really nice
And also see:
> The Empire of corpses
it is an anime (and apparently a book) about world where corpse reanimation\programming was one of the great inventions that changed the world... alongside the steam angine
Results, after undead labour and military forces became omnipresent, were predictable

And what's more sustainable than renewable ressources like corpses? People will always die. Might as well let their skeletons work for a few more years.

and then those nations crumble from the before listed problems and complications of using huge undead work forces

I mean really, for the cost of "purifying the goods they bring in" and all that other shit, you could have given every peasant enchanted tools of good harvest

Alright, explain how this dolphin thing can float in Pathfinder then?

If you are so great.

Psh, yeah, "wasting resources" by stockpiling holy goods instead of wasting them on controlling necromancy and not getting spiralling costs of villagers vanishing off the fucking map every few months when someone let the zombie get too close to the cow and the whole herd turning undead.

Poisoning the world with pure death energy isn't good for the ecosystem, user.

I don't you can't grew anything nonevil in Taint land

unless you like trees that leak blood and seem to grab at you

Or, hear me out, teach those peasants how to be clerics. You're now one further away from an undead nightmare while also giving your military and civilians work and better healthcare.

Hooded skeletons or with skulls painted and ornamented are used as domestic servants and other more public positions, whereas zombies are the gristle for dirty jobs and heavy industry because of the quickness they can be deployed postmortem and because the rotting skin and sinew provides more natural cohesion for the body that skeletons need greater magic investment to accomplish for any length of time.

>teach those peasants how to be clerics
This isn't how it works. This isn't how any of this works.

>Communist Necromantic Utopia

At least we'll get something out of the purges.

That's sort of the premise of Twig.

Assuming they don't conquer you for your resources, before they get around to that crumbling thing.

yeah but if you bring up Tolkien people just point out that Dnd and Tolkien are different and you can't use one for the other

better to just use old Dnd books

rules change but the fluff mosty strays the same

>When people don't understand that Undead are "Mostly Evil" because of pic related and because the Plane of Negative energy literally has an active will that seeks the end of all life to drive the undead with as means to this end.

There's a fucking reason why Atropus is a big deal in D&D, and it's because all undead reset to their default settings when it's near, yes, that includes the archliches.

The only one's getting off are those who are deathless and those who are positive energy undead, deathless because they basically are the Gentoo of regular proprietary Negative Energy plane arcane software.

That's the way I'd do it. Also skeletons for anything agricultural.

I think masks for the dead would be standard. Don't want to accidentally recognize anyone. Zombies probably get cheap burlap sacks instead of masks.

>Rumors of necromancer infiltrators carrying plagues into the country
Brings a new meaning to the Red Scare.

Then explain how cleric recruitment works.

We'll just wait for those societies to die out due to undead outbreaks.

No. Undead are powered by negative energy, which means their very existence is a drain on the energy of the Plane they're in. It's an extremely tiny drain, effectively insignificant... but even the tiniest leak will eventually drain an ocean to nothing over the fullness of eternity.

>Boohoo it's HARD to be good! It's HARD! Stop making me so HARD things!

>Diablo 2, came out almost 20 years ago,
And it was a shit game then, and its a shit game now. Just like anything Blizzard ever made.

Kill yourself, americuk

And, then we still have the literal massive list of things negative energy has attributed to it, including Evil descriptor spells, Taint, Vile Darkness, actually passive corruption which makes subjects undead-like due to overexposure, Mortimers, Pale Masters, regular Wizard specialists practicing from the eastern school of necromancy and deformities mentioned in the complete necromancers handbook, Hauntings, Necromantic intelligences, Necrotic cysts-

It's literally like, Nuclear Radiations over-excessive autistic cousin, there are fucking consequences for using it. Also, again what is undead is any creature with a direct P2P conection between itself and the plane of negative energy, as there are many creatures that can be degenerated by the plane but are strong enough via being empowered by it, and enduring it's draw to their life-force, which interrelates to powers granted by the various corruptions it has on the plate and classes related to actually following this procedure.

The amount of training required to be a cleric is fucking enormous. Learning how to cast spells and channel energy is a several year process. That's why clerics are in the highest starting age category. A cleric is a huge investment and even then most will become adepts because they're literally not faithful enough to be a cleric.

>putting the undead to work
Sounds like something a statist would say.

>I think masks for the dead would be standard. Don't want to accidentally recognize anyone.

Evil always flees from the truth.

Why hide, user? Look at the pus dripping from the sutured eyelids of that corpse dragging a broom down the street. It used to be someones mother. Now her spirit is denied its rightful rest in Elysium, chained to a rotting corpse for your convenience and petty materialistic greed.

Then that merely means that the undead production facility needs more time to be set up. Or alternatively, bring priests and other holy man from other countrys to it in exchange for generous donations to their religion of choice.

*Ahem*

With this kind of investment in time and effort, why not just make those damn golems!

You can't bless a golem. It doesn't have positive or negative energy by being a construct.

The costs just keep mounting. At this point villagers are likely cheaper and less likely to rip holes in reality and let extraplanar super undead through.

No seriously all it takes is enough undead for the barrier between planes to wear thin (which is a thing that happens in at least two published settings) for this whole thing to be fucked. A single Devourer let through because you had too many zombies in one place and a powerful undead managed to cross over and the whole fucking country side is fucked. That one Devourer can probably kill what ever clerics you brought I doubt you have a team of level 9+ clerics around.

And of course, the cycle of death, which is literally the set of rules that cause Undead to spawn, made worse by- suprise suprise! Necromancers! And in addition, Evil Deities and and Lower Planar creatures, including our fatdaddy himself!

Did I forget to mention that the reason why Atrocity calls to undeath is because the actual Ground 0 for the undead was Orcus back in life, casting a Dweomer that killed everything on his native plane so hard, it broke reality allowing the basic undead as we know them to spawn to begin with, and Gary Gygax is the one who published this? Yeah, want to use that skeleton now?

Infact, let me list a few things-

Basic skeletons, ghosts, ghouls, and zombies? Orcus.
Liches? Alluded to a Tanari'ri in Van Richten's Guide to the Lich, possibly Orcus.
Death Knights? Demogorgon after it violently rapes you to death over 3 days with it's instant rot tentacles, first gouging out your eyes, because Monkey-trouble don't fuck around. Divine Variant featured in Krynn (Lord Soth) made by Deific action.
Vampires? Result of Elves being fucking lazy during the creation period, made the Vampire deity Kanchelsis, but even if this didn't happen Vampires would come to be because multiple human cultures dropped in various settings from our earth in D&D is a thing.

The undead in the earliest timeperiods recorded in all settings are, primarily, the products of evil, with evil itself going to great lengths to secure it's ownership over the rights to these spoils, being the proprietors of Lich rituals dedicated to danm the user and those close to him, corrupt authroity and government, lead people into the kind of top level "behind closed doors" Esoteric evil /pol/ talks about and worse.

Now I can't decide if I want to do McCarthyism vs Undead Commies, or Natives vs Victorian Undead

Depends on the setting. Sometimes you have to be literally hand picked by a god.

Got any more like this?
Anti-undead rhetoric I mean.

>No seriously all it takes is enough undead for the barrier between planes to wear thin
Don't listen to this hate monger!
Undead are perfectly safe and have never killed anyone in recorded history.

He wants to take the food from your children's mouths! Trying to undermine the very fabric of out society.

Not to mention that Devourer is super intelligent, wise, and charismatic and has the ability to raise as many undead as it wants. You can get your clerics back because the Devourer will eat their souls as it goes and get stronger. In its first few minutes around it'll become next to impossible to kill with spells properly and have a fuck ton of extra health from eating the souls of what ever why near by.

No, as in, why not make golems instead of undead. If both are equaly laborious, why not resort to the method less likely to cause a plague upon the lands.

This assumes that in the setting, the soul is somehow affected by the body being animated.

>and have a fuck ton of extra health
The fuck is this, WoW?

Wait, doesn't even WoW have good undead?

user while I agree with you

I don't the soul is involved with basic Undead

they just leak negative energry and kill people if your control ever slips which is reason enough to destory them

It has Forsaken. They are genocidal nazis, who literally have death camps for humans.

It can pop souls for temp HP and it'll have a bunch of extras by the time anyone shows up.

>Wait, doesn't even WoW have good undead?
Considering undead almost destroyed the world on multiple occasions, have a portion of a continent quarantined because of them, and we're responsible for the Wrathgate Disaster I don't think you should use WoW for 'responsible undead usage'.

Much obliged user. I knew my autistic ramblings would fuel at least something salvagable. But I think I'm done here now, since I've argued myself into a corner and can't think of a single reason why one would pursu it further.
At least in a dnd setting.

Forsaken literally tried to fuck everyone permanently because of their absolutely enormous hate/ambition boner. They almost managed to get the entire world killed and everyone put aside their differences for 10 minutes to put the plot down.

You literally have to fuck corpses to join Orcus and willingly deform yourself, a good chunk of his shit involves being the nastiest CE fuck ever, it's all part of his subversion of life and such, and even then you're his bitch for doing so, it's mentioned multiple times he gives no fucks about anything but himself, the Liches are just there to wash his fat pig-goat balls. The whole thing is rigged.

I mean, this is the same fat fuck that was the epic-level cleric/wizard multiclass asshole who did something technically worse than Karsus and his folly, got away with it, causing a permanent horror to plague the multiverse, became a Demon, made it to Demon Lord, Slaughtered a deity/upper planar hero and mounted it to make a wand which he over-saturates with so much power it became intelligent enough to warp space around it to guard itself, drive men to CE to become Demon Loeds USING the wand, and kills on touch. Oh, and he became a deity, had his named and history erased getting killed as a deity, then came back as an undead deity and got the deity issued killphrase from a room full of other Cosmic debug codes which he erased for the lulz, and killed one of the two Immortal bros for life guarding it for a test run with the debug code, died again, got resurrected as a Demon Lord again by a half-ogre who killed a few Elves to bring him back, and STILL has the kill phrase, his wand, and fucking Undead-power armour that connects him directly to the Plane of Negative energy and can self-destruct, next to having the canonically confirmed FAST ARMY TO MOBILIZE IN THE ABYSS and yet somehow is NOT public enemy number 1.

He even has a library dedicated to sucking him off with nothing but stuff about his entire success story, and literally has minions plunder the planes for food for him to eat, because he's also a Gourmant.

And he literally sees the undead as tools to power, nothing else, even with all he's made, he literally does not care.

Yeah, but then some dumb motherfucker actually puts the soul back in along with the useful bits and fuck up a good thing for everyone

The golems could be used as weapons instead of civilians.

>Have you ever spoken with the dead? Called to them from this side? Pulled them from their silent rest? Do you know what it is they feel? Pain. Pain, when torn into this wakefulness, this reminder of the chaos from which they had escaped, pain at having to live.

The first Diablo was good.

Thats some interesting shit and someone should screencap this because it is on the same level as people not knowing why the wall of the faithless is needed or why there always has to be a Blood War.

So now we're making both undead and golems, even if it was argued that golems are too hard to make...

never played desu senpai

I'm making an assumption here, but I'm pretty sure I'm not mistaken.
Assumption is, you are living in a first world country.
For you, choosing the hard path is having a bit less time to sit on imageboards or using slightly outdated PC hardware which produces low FPS in latest games.
For a medieval peasant, choosing the hard path is a death from hunger.

Necromancy is bad. Using bad things is bad. Using bad things is also sometimes necessary. Because it's not always a matter of willpower or dedication or a personal choice, sometimes it's a matter of having to.

>brings up an example of necromancers in pop culture
>THAT GAME IS BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD
Dafuq happened to Veeky Forums?

You can make golems with all the resources you freed up using the undead.

Except in this case, the easy way will lead to a fate worse than death by starvation.

Good isn't easy. That's why most people are Neutral. But even Neutral people tend to shy away from explicitly Evil actions like creating undead. Neutral people don't murder, rape kids, torture people, or commit Evil necromancy.

Part of being good is sacrificing yourself instead of taking the easier, evil path. Part of being neutral is taking a look at the cost/benefit ratio and realizing that poisoning your fields with ambulatory death energy is not good for making more crops.

But no resources were freed up if making undead safely requires as much time and resources as making golems in the first place. And golems are still the safer option.

>Assumption is, you are living in a first world country.
You know, I live in a third world shithole, and for some reason, I think that some things are unacceptable. Also, for some reason I think that it's you who lives in Burgerstan, because living your life in comfort gives you a lot of time to discuss things like "What is evil REALLY?".

>Orcus

Remember when they wanted to pull a Lady of Pain and make him statless to show how big of a deal in D&D he is and then people bitched about it being mean because waaah waah its not heroic fantasy for me enough if I don't teabag the concept of Undeath itself ?

Is it okay if the Communist Necromantic Utopia in my setting is Neutral instead of Good?

And with necromancy instead of death by starvation your soul gets eaten by an extraplanar super undead who begins to raise an undead army. You soul is either tortured permanently or until the thing is killed and you are released.

I'll take death by starvation.

It's founded on an inherently evil deed, repeated in mass as an essential part of society.

Mass murder would be bad enough but at least killing itself isn't inherently morally biased. Animating the dead, channeling pure death energy to enslave spirits and pervert the cosmic order is capital-E Evil.

Orcus is beatable though. It's just HORRENDOUSLY DIFFICULT.

1st, Trip to the Abyss, barring all encounters with other Demon Lords, and the FUCK YOU PC'S tier hazards of each fucking layer and how easy it is to alignment shift on the plane, become tainted, or irrevocably insane

2nd Orcus's layer, which I might note is FLOODED WITH ALL THE UNDEAD EVER, SKELEGUNS, LAVA, TRAPS, HIS CULTISTS, AND ARMIES AND ARMIES OF STATIONED UNDEAD

BRAVING HIS RAPE CASTLE 9000

THEN You have to get rid of his wand, and for that, it's a trip to Bahamut and Tiamat and YES, YOU HAVE TO KILL TIAMAT TO DIP HIS WAND IN HER HEART'S BLOOD BEFORE BAHAMUT INIRATES IT, SO IT'S A TRIP TO THE 9 HELLS NOW

OH RIGHT, THE WAND TRIES TO TURN YOU EVIL AND IS A MASSIVE BEACON FOR ENCOUNTERS BECAUSE IT'S AS BAD AS THE BOOK OF VILE DARKNESS IF NOT MORE SO

NOW, WITHOUT THE WAND, YOU ALSO HAVE TO KILL ORCUS'S KIDS, HIS CULT, AND ANY ORCUS BLOODED CREATURES IN THE UNIVERSE (Orcus literally has a dedicated template in a monster manual entry for people infused with his blood)

THEN YOU HAVE TO FIGHT HIM, AND KILL HIM, ON HIS LAYER OF THE ABYSS, AND HOPE HE DOESN'T USE THE LAST WORD TO PERMA KILL YOU

OH RIGHT, BEFORE THIS, YOU'VE ALSO GOT TO GET RID OF HIS TENNEBROUS VESTIGE, WHICH WOULD JUST TURN HIM INTO A DEITY AGAIN IF HE DIED, MEANING HE COULD SPAM THE LAST WORD TPK THE PARTY, AND KILL EVERYTHING EVER.

Then it's a matter of getting Graz'zt on board and hoping this doesn't turn you evil for doing it, and erasing his cults across the planes, and also that drow goddess who killed him first time around.

Did I forget to mention the only reason this fat fuck loses is because he's lazy? if he tried, he's about a CR 37-40 encounter, especially if he's got his wand, Fucking Power armour and is anywhere on his layer, or the plane of negative energy.

OH RIGHT
VISAGES
HOPE YOU LIKE BEING FUCKED WITH THE WORST KIND OF ILLUSIONS KNOWN TO MAN

It was nothing more than an ordinary whale when whalers attacked. The whale managed to escape, but sustained a grievous wound from a whaler’s harpoon. It died after days of anger and pain, only to arise as an undead monstrosity bent on taking revenge for its demise.

As a bakekujira goes about its new, corrupted existence, it continues to rot until all the flesh is stripped from its bones, leaving behind only an immense skeletal whale. The decomposition process draws all sorts of sea scavengers to the rotting whale, from gulls to fish. However, the flesh of a bakekujira is not only rotten—it is also toxic and deeply infused with negative energy. Any creature that eats of this flesh sickens and dies, only to rise shortly thereafter and continues its existence as an undead thrall inexplicably bound to the bakekujira. Normally these creatures take up residence in and around the putrefied body of the bakekujira, swarming throughout the creature and only emerging to push back any who would seek to do harm to their rotting host.

So, not a dolphin, the magic that sustains its malevolent existence keeps it afloat in the ocean, and for the other fags here an interesting dilemma, its flesh is negative energy tainted and thus toxic.

iF THE NECROMANCER TAKES OVER A DAIRY farm only to produce milk for is skeleton army, is that a cause for concern?

Agreed, but it didn't have a necromancer class.

Not at all. The necromancer only tries to infuse the skeletons with a bit more extra calcium so we don't brittle too fast.

It is obvious that starving people disagree with you. Otherwise we would not be discussing this.
Besides, that does not happen every time and you know it. You are deliberately taking the worst possible outcome of using necromancy and claim that is a norm. You should be ashamed to use arguments like that.
Sacrificing yourself for the benefit of others may be good.
Sacrificing yourself without helping anyone out of fear is not.
Sacrificing others without helping anyone out of fear is definitely no go.
Necromancer is not the only one who is dying from starvation, his friends and family do, too.
It is commendable that you have standards, user. You are free to avoid necromancy, no matter what the cost. However, you have no right to make the same decision for other people.
You are also wrong, I am a slav and I live in a slav land. Although you are correct, I never really was in a situation where I had no choice but to resort to unlawful or evil activities to feed myself. We had good neighbors who loaned money to my family when we did not have enough to buy food.
Your attempts at sarcasm are unpleasant. It is a fact that necromancy is evil in DnD terms, and I agreed with it in the same post you are replying to. What I don't agree is the fact that there could be no negative consequences to obsessively avoiding every possibility of evil act.

You realize there are constructs that cost only like 30% more than undead and have none of the risk of causing an outbreak. Even necromancy is the WORST magic to put to agriculture. A Druid can ensure you have a harvest 26 times a year, no fucking necromancy required.

And for Pathfinder, to get rid of evil undead is literally impossible, because fighting gods is an impossible task. Urgathoa is a nasty ass goddess of undeath, disease, and gluttony. Shes also the first Undead, a woman who fled the judging of souls because she feared which hell she would go to. Her fleeing her fate also brought disease into the world. All undead stem from her evil ways and nature. She created the lich ritual, vampirism, the various curses and terrible ways in which undead can arise and kill. She basically bugged the universe and created an error in the way the death and life cycle works.

Making constructs is BARELY more costly than making undead. Your argument is fucking garbage because it assumes more labor is the best way to get more food when the answer is just eliminate the growing season and have all harvest all the time.

Defiling dead bodies has been considered a bad thing in just about every single culture ever

If you think necromancers are good or want to play as a good/useful necromancer, you're a grade A retard and you need to shut the fuck up real quick. Contrarians are the biggest plague on this board.

Those don't tempt people into evil tho; so a demon attempting to corrupt an entire society has no need to mention them.

If you have necessary resources, skills, time and knowledge, or a spare non-dickish druid, it would be preferable to avoid necromancy.
I am explicitly talking about the case when you have not.

And to use necromancy in any way that remotely approaches safely you need a good deal of necromancers around (a necromancer can only control so many undead), clerics (to kill random corpses that will start rising from the dead), and willing bodies (people don't want to give you grandma to work for eternity in a mine).

A Druid can do so much more for so much less. You're a retard.

Every time I see this image I get ROCKHARD. Should I join a Cult of Orcus?

>druids are more likely to be dickish than necromancers
Fucking what?

Animating dead bodies is bad.

Using them to do menial tasks is dangerous.

All it takes is one disgruntled assassin and you have a horde of ravening, hateful, mindless mudermachines wandering around killing everyone.

The first time it happens, necromancy will be outla3wed and normal magicians and wizards will get burned at the stake right along with them.