Necromancers are always "I summon skeletons and zombies to take over the world" or "I summon skeletons and zombies to...

spitualist in pathfinder can do exactly what you're saying and nobody is demanding it gets nerfed

> are just humanoids with some unique ghost only abilities and weaknesses but otherwise can be hit by a sword or the like just fine

Sounds more like zombies with intelligence than ghosts.

Skeletons and Zombies are basically robots who do what the Necromancer wants, while ghosts have a will of their own. Much harder to control

A zombie is a reanimated corpse while ghostwalk ghosts are ectoplasm/soul in the shape of their body at the time of death

They're the same in the same way that a living person is just a zombie with better skin care

Doesn't that work better from a Good Guy Necromancer perspective? Yet all the threads are about how if getting skeletons to put out an orphanage fire is morally acceptable or not.

That class sounds like a DM's nightmare made manifest.

No, we are not turning this into a necro morality thread.

We are talking about the variety and viability of using incorporeal undead opposed to physical ones.

Just step into a church or some other blessed place and WHAM. No more ghost helpers.

It really isn't. But that's because the spiritualist's phantom isn't a true undead, but an Outsider.

They really aren't ghosts at all but someones psychic imprint on the Ethereal that believes themselves to be an individual or something like that.

their ghost buddy is an outsider and can be of any alignment

it's basically just the pathfinder summoner but instead of being natural attack spam you have lots of spooooookyyyyy abilities

Well one big issue is if Ghosts can touch, and grab things. There are ghosts that can do that, but Poltergeists aren't what you'd call Team Players. And most other ghosts aren't very practical for combat. Unless scaring the shit out of the enemy is a viable tactic.

They're excellent for gathering Intel as long as an area isn't consecrated against the unquiet dead, you've got someone who can walk through walls and go completely unseen. Biggest hurdle is keeping them on task and not just re-creating the circumstances of their deaths. Maybe by letting them do it between missions.

there's at least one archetype where it is literally an undead ghost or shadow, but I don't see how the type matters so much as the abilities to go incoporeal whenever and all that other classic ghost stuff

I play my necros like a forensics detective. It's like the majority of people stop after reading 3 spells.

It can only exist Incorporeal when it's within 50 feet of it's master, and if it moves out of that range for too long(1 round(i.e six seconds a level) it winks out of existence for a full 24 hour period.

It also can't attack other creatures while Incorporeal. You can give paizo shit for a lot of stuff, but they thought this class through reasonably well.

Some anons mentioned main issues. To build upon them and add a few of my own:
- Stereotype: necromancer is often imagined as a brooding guy summoning masses of creepy dead things and skeletons/zombies are considered the most basic creepy dead things. Not many people willing to break the mold
- Mechanics - in quite some settings, for very understandable reasons, ghosts cannot be just messed up by physical damage - you can cliche it with zombies and skeletons breaking apart once their shells lose enough integrity but without really far-fetched handwaving, you won't hurt a ghost without some access to magic. On top of that, traditionally, proper ghosts have plenty of inbuilt power - intangible, invisible at will, flying, often having minor powers like very limited telekinesis. All in all, it may break some systems.
- Truth to be told that without some artificial limitations ghosts would be so much better than most low-tier physical undeads that in turn they need those limitations to not outdo them

...

I was gonna use marona in the OP but that would've attracted the wrong kind of discourse

Because necromancers are just working with the body left behind when someone dies, not the soul.

Well there's quite some old folk-tales and stories where the term necromancer is used for what we'd call a medium nowadays. The idea of necromancers being undead reanimators is relatively recent.

Because ghosts are stronger than the necrocuck, cuck.

Came here to post Marona leaving satisfied.

Well, not to be completely outdone, I realize she isn't a Necromancer and these aren't technically ghosts but hey, fuck it, close enough.

Animating the now inanimate remains emptied of spirit is a much simpler task than shackling and controlling an entity of unbound spirit and pure ego. You simply put back what was once already present in the body - a will - substituting sorcery in place of the soul.

Souls by their very nature possess will and thus resist control, but a puppet of flesh and bone devoid of reason offers no resistance; merely providing a convenient vessel to be filled as one sees fit. It's not impossible to bind a soul, mind you, just inefficient for the type of work you describe. I hope that provided some insight.

If the body was the house of the soul, then a corpse is a vacant house. If you have the 'key' you can move right in and do whatever you want, not like the house cares. The former occupant of said house is a different story altogether.

I'm playing that sort of Necromancer currently. It works out nicely, since it's mostly calling in favors from different ghosts and spirits for the effects. A bit of refluffing going on, but a lot of what people have brought up with invisibility, flight, and intangibility are things a lot of mages can already do.

I find it works a lot better for a good aligned necromancer, since you do have to be cooperating with these ghosts and working to ensure they can move on.

I do wonder why everyone always jumps to minion summoning with necromancers though. There's a whole lot of stuff you can do that doesn't just involve flooding the battlefield with spooky tokens

Valkyrie Profile and Lezard Valeth a best.

Filling your stockpiles with banshees and wraiths is still a good idea. If adventurers come get killed by the angry spirits you get more bodies and more spirits!

>Naked tube loli in the background
Just what kind of experiments is he getting up to in there?

Homonculi I think. Japs don't do the necromancer Sthick very well, Khajiit is the only one I can think of next to that one guy from the Tales series who looked relatiely normal, and Faust from Shaman king, who If fucking thought was the freakiest shit when the dub was airing in my country.

Fucking magic ring that allows you to pass your hands into someones insides to fiddle with them, and giant skelewaifu.

How did it become to this?

I mean, the original necromancers were a bunch of guys who took a bit of the corpse to establish contact with the spirits of the ancestors. Originally, a necromancer was more a medium than supernatural tyrant slaving the undead.

When did this changed?

Disturbing and improperly disposing of the dead is a seriously Bad Thing in most cultures. There's a proper way to dispense of the dead so that they get a proper afterlife. Desecrating a corpse literally damages or destroys their soul and/or eternal reward. This is constant across all human culture. Just recently, Catholics who get cremated and miscarried or aborted fetuses don't go straight to Purgatory anymore.
So, take this great taboo, and invent a fiction where it can get even worse due to supernatural effects. What does that mean? Necromancy.

These days they tend to commune with and often control the dead, in particular they raise corpses en masse to do their bidding. Why did they stop being harmless diviners? I don't know. Times change, the meanings of words shift.

Lezard Valeth was not strictly a necromancer. His primary field of study was alchemy, if I recall. He was versed in necromancy and various other fields of sorcery, and he provided ghoul powder to unscrupulous mages via black market deals to fund his research into creating vessels. That was his main concern since witnessing the Valkyrie attending to her duties in Midgard and becoming infatuated.

We've still got spirit mediums but to be honest I've never heard of one who claims to be able to commune with deceased relatives called a necromancer. Not in this modern era, anyway.

Garth Nix books, bruh.

Ghosts tend to have their own reason for being around, at least in most tabletop games. It's a lot harder to think of them as generic troops when they clearly have their own ego and hangups.

That makes me wonder. You can use magic to raise a skeleton from the dead, and puppet it around, or you could take a large amount of bones and make a bone golem.

Is there a similar case for ghosts? Could you gather up a large amount of ethereal energy or ectoplasm and make a 'ghost golem' or an 'ethereal elemental' of sorts?

Yeah, you can create an amalgam of spirits. They try to separate and can become really spastic, and often go into full on poltergeist territory. Knocking shit over, lashing out blindly, trying to possess the living. That kind of thing. There have been a few stories though I can't think of anything specific, where a bunch of fused together souls were enslaved, stripped of their identity and bound to a large construct. I'll try to think of examples, but at the moment they elude me.

I was thinking less a Legion-style amalgam and more just taking the 'essence' of what ghosts are made of and making something that would have the upsides of a ghost without all that pesky willpower. I guess that does depend a lot on how ghosts work in the setting though.

Their essence is usually thoughts and regrets, so it'd be hard to make a ghost without involving them.

Pretty much this. You can strip them of their memories and identity but the lingering emotional residue is pretty much what makes them what they are. Sort of like that movie Ghostbusters 2, with the slime. Ectoplasm (the ghost essence to which you refer) is like that except less Double Dare slime and more ethereal in nature, as far as I'm concerned.

Because ghosts are usually handled by spiritualists and shamans, and class-based systems are always very anal about niche protection.

What's the difference between the soul of an evil man and a demon?

Both are non physical entities called from another dimension. Both possess individual personality and may have agendas of their own.

In fact, in d&d, the souls of the evil dead (kek) end up in places like the abyss or the nine hells and eventually become demons.

So aren't those who summon ghosts simply just summoners and not necromancers?

>What's the difference between the soul of an evil man and a demon?
Their point of origin, generally speaking. One is native to the mortal realm and has mortal concerns and attachments and the other is a malevolent entity from Hell. But depending on the setting I suppose that line can become quite blurry. So in the end, that's a question for you to decide.

Playing as a ghost in a campaign right now, AMA

Is your ghost smug or spoopy?

Okay, that makes more sense. I thought the legs were boobs from above and at an angle, or possibly just the top of a torso.

>I do wonder why everyone always jumps to minion summoning with necromancers though.
Because there's only a few other archetypes that can make mass mook summoning work, and the angellic/demonic/extraplanaretc. tend to be focused on other shit or unable to focus well on mass mooks, and because you generally want mooks you can lose in bulk.
Really, it's the cheapest option, given the usual Summon Monster limitations.

17 year old girl, got hit by a taxi [it happens] is now trying to find a way back to life. Setting is a fantasy setting with modern technology [Not the real world, but there's magic alongside skyscrapers and cars].

Mechanically she can go between a completely tangible form that can be damaged but can interact with the world like any other being, or a completely intangible, invisible, inaudible form that cannot interact with the world at all. In both forms she can float/fly.

Spying on people and passing through walls is very fun.

>Really, it's the cheapest option, given the usual Summon Monster limitations.
I've always wanted to run a caster focused around Animate Objects-ing all the things, but there's no way to do it before it's mediocre to terrible as a strategy.

I'm asking less why people go to Necromancer to get mook summoning, and more why people never go to it for anything aside from mook summoning.

It always does feel a bit odd when summoning a horde of skeletons is the only way to have an army though. If anything you'd think it'd be easier to do what suggests and say, animate a bunch of brooms to do things for you.

Brooms can't wield swords; they're only really good for carrying buckets of water.

Why hasn't holy water caught on and be mass produced? I mean if I was a spoopy asshole ghost, I would use my powers to peep on the women's shower just because no one can stop me.

The brooms hit you with themselves stupid. Or they have little arms and are overly emotive despite lacking faces or heads.

Easier to animate some things than others I think. Corpses would be babby easy tier so long as you're willing to dirty your hands with the sinister implications. That's why they're often raised in bulk as opposed to big ass golems and the like.

Wouldn't ghosts be the ultimate spies, they can go into meeting rooms, look onto computers people are using, use their limited telekinesis to steal shit or move stuff to a more accessible area to be stolen?

Neat. I love magical takes on more modern settings. Sounds cool. Don't go into the light.

You'd think size would be a factor with it though. Animating a dead rat is probably simpler than animating a full human skeleton.

Although for inanimate objects, I think making it so they could bend or float around to move would be an issue. You'd probably have the easiest time animating something that already has joints, hinges, or some other method of manipulating itself.

Some sort of chain might actually be a good candidate. Not too much difference between that and a skeletal snake, for example. Just put a knife on one of the ends and you have an easy non-necromantic minion

She's currently on an alien planet where the only inhabitants are sentient animals, plants, and elementals [instead of normal races] and where everything reincarnates as part of some grand magical Cycle. Said planet orbits a gas giant and until this moment nobody in the setting even knew alien life was possible.

All the players were invited to this planet by mysterious spirit-beings who promised them their hearts greatest desire if they came along [in my case, a way back from the dead, which as far as anyone knows is impossible in the setting. But then, so are ghosts].

So far the funnest part has been combining flight with intangibly to go to places that would otherwise require the party to fight their way through hordes of enemies or sneak their way through entire complexes.

The other players have begun to affectionately refer to it as "no-clipping".

>"But user doesn't that break the game?"

Given a Demon punched me off a mountain top when I tried to fight the boss alone, no, no it does not. Ideal for scouting, fighting not so much.

>Ghosts tend to be rather overpowered.
So I'm guessing this kind of sentiment comes from a d&d mindset. But I honestly have to ask, why are we assuming that the ghost summoner is controlling the thing like a drone improper use of animal companion style?

The rest really boils down to exactly what kind of stat block these ghosts have. Whose to say a low level ghost summon isn't a ghost rabbit or some such? Why are they only human ghosts? Why are people assuming they can communicate with 0 issue perfectly speaking the modern tongue of the summoner, let alone speaking at all? Why are we assuming that the caster can see out of the ghosts eyes as if they were their own? Hear what the ghost hears? Touch what the ghost might not be physically capable of touching? etc.

I fail to see how giving an order to something which must from their own reference interpret that order, and then play a game of telephone with that entity to understand the outcome. Does the ghost know who to attack? What to look for specifically and so on and so forth?

Ghost combat is also setting dependant but presumably any setting worth its salt would have means of dealing with errant spirits especially if they're common.

Because that's a summoner dumbass

Oh jeez

I can't remember the setting, but I'm pretty sure something I read had a justification for magic and animating things deal primarily with how the spellcaster sees things. It's easy to see a corpse as a body, and give it life, because bodies of (once-)living things are associated with being alive. They have a head were the brain and thoughts are stored, legs for moving, arms for grabbing. But if you were to "animate" a random object, it couldn't see/walk/think/talk unless the caster had the perspective to figure out how it did those things (eg. drawing eyes on it would allow it to see, but if the eyes were to be rubbed off it would be blind). It basically meant that if the caster could justify it (or was crazy enough to not see any problems), it could be animated.

Was your ghost an angsty crossdressing dude in his previous life who thought that he will become a cartoon ghost if he kills his coworkers?

Because the people that want to play oldschool chainmail while everyone else is playing dnd don't have any other options for cheap minions. Invisible Servants are specifically nonfighty, every other sort of minion is extremely temporary and/or you're limited to one alone, or you have to go through a giant pile of rigamarole with planar binding.

That, or just animate a shitload of flying oversized shuriken things to get ghetto manhacks.
This thread is making me want to combine these and make "Bedknobs and Broomsticks: The Character". Use the sheer power of your patriotism to ask fallen warriors for their help in the name of Albion, collect relics and cool shit over the course of the campaign, etc.

Show of hands, how many would fap to porn of their own character?

I frequently commission Porn of my character

It's just laziness and generalization of language. Any x-mancy is divination by some means. Pyromancy = reading flames, necromancy = asking spirits, etc.

Nowadays it just means some flavor of magic, so a hydromancer can do all sorts of shit with water instead of trying to see the future in a tide pool or something.

I do wonder. If I were a necromancer and wanted to raise a undead but having him keep his personality, then maybe making a deal with said soul would be better than shackling it to my will. Would that work?

I started using shadows as a necromancer in a medium-high level 3.5 D&D game, because if we're going to be in wizard edition I'm gonna wizard.

My group doesn't let me necromancer anymore.

Its Pathfinder. I'm fairly certain your average Pathfinder player is incapable of understanding the mere concept of game design or balance, much less argue about it.

Mandatory

...

>i need to spam this on a D&D board because my peepee is tiny

It's sad.

Giovanni in VtM are an entire clan of Necromancers who focus almost entirely on wraiths over reanimated dead.

well, that and incest

>D&D board
holy shit

Veeky Forums was made as a 40k containment board, dumbcuck.

That's an old lie 40kids tell themselves without any proof to back their claims.

1d4chan.org/wiki/Warhammer_Wednesday

>That, or just animate a shitload of flying oversized shuriken things to get ghetto manhacks.
At least in d&d animated objects don't fly unless you enchant them to separately, they just kind of hop or slither along the ground.

It works out that way in D&D since it's based on HD which usually advance along with size. So you could animate one big troll skeleton or like twenty rats.
There's actually a tactic relating to that using a feat that makes your undead explode when they're destroyed. Suicide bombing rat swarms.

I'd think that entirely possible. It depends on how well you can commune with said spirit, and how convincing you can be to recruit them to your cause. Most disembodied spirits that linger in the land of the living aren't particularly easy to talk to, however, as it takes an abnormally potent will or spiritual training to remain completely coherent after death.

Also, in order to 'take over the world or save a town', as OP prefaced, you'd generally prefer quantity over quality. Many hands make light work, as they say! Not to say it's impossible with autonomous willing individuals but at that point why not just hire mercenaries?