Necromancy, demon summoning, and blood magic are usually the go too "evil" magics for most settings, but which is most commonly depicted as being completely and irredeemably evil?
Also how do you tend to justify your characters using magic like this?
Weeabo Fightan Magic.
I think Demon summoning is often considered the most Evil of the three, with Blood magic being the least.
Blood magic is creepy, and may have a corrupting and sadistic element to it, but unless it's the only sort of dark magic around, then it's probably more neutral by comparison.
Necromancy would be on par with Blood magic, maybe a bit less, but that's only for spells that don't create undead directly, like your life-draining damage spells. Anything that's actually making undead tends to be depicted as more sinister, and there aren't many settings where raising an army of undead isn't evil to do. Still less evil than demons though, because undead are pretty mindless even if they attack anything living while not being controlled.
And of course, summoning demons tends to be pretty diabolical just due to the fact they can think more. Unless there's some pretty strict controls in place, odds are it'll wreak havoc and cause a lot of mayhem.
The only way to really justify them is if they're either not a specialty and using them rarely for extreme circumstances, or if they are a specialist in it, but do so in a regard that they focus on control and moderation above all else.
Think of it like Arcane magic users in Dark sun. All magic defiles the landscape, and the only way to really be a good magic user is to draw from your own life force and otherwise cast very sparingly and cautiously.
Necromancy is probably the most obviously unethical, although a small handful of settings have cultures in which certain limited uses of it are considered acceptable.
Demon-summoning doesn't look good on a resume, but plenty of folk tales have characters who trick or compel demons into doing their bidding. If it goes poorly, it was a cautionary tale about thinking oneself too clever. If it goes well, our protagonist is a clever folk hero. Standard warlock stuff, basically.
Blood magic is usually seen as a "risky" power source, but not necessarily an evil one. Harming oneself for power is okay. Sacrificing others isn't, usually.
I feel like necromancy is usually justified as a utilitarian enterprise, since it's (relatively speaking) the safest of the three. Demon-summoning is the most risky, justified by reassuring everyone else that everything's under control, or that the risk is necessary or worth the pay-off. Blood magic: "I haven't run out yet!"
Necromancy works easily with conjured ghosts.
Your ancestors picking up their old weapons to save their great grandchildren is awesome, and not sinister in LONGTERM implications even if it looks ghoulish (Dead appearance or the like).
I actually know that made blood magic their Christ analogue by saying that the "God" is actually the life blood of the universe, and with personal sacrifice one could empower their magic.
Thinking about it, most of Christian mythology is "Blood" magic.
Demonology is possible by being a bitch ass cheater. Muh "The angels are all evil and the demons resist them!"
Or by cocky protagonists. Characters like Dante are half demon or the like but are so full of spunk you just can't help but find them charming.
How come mind control magic gets the least "This is obviously evil" of them all?
my necromancer grew up in a small town near a river. each summer he would swim in the cool waters with his friends until the sun went down and they were called back for the nightly prayer. one day him and his best friend decided to have a race and see who could swim to the other side first. the current was extra strong that day and it took longer than either expected. they were exhausted when they reached the other bank and spent several silent minutes catching their breath. once they regained their composure they quickly noticed that the sun was setting on the horizon. they panicked, knowing they would be late to the evening prayer. rather than swim back they decided to run down-river to the old bridge. as they neared the bridge they saw a large group of dark figures gathered before it. some of the figures were on horseback and all brandished weapons. it was a raiding party, preparing to make a surprise attack on the town during the nightly prayer. the two boys were young and didn't know what to do. they hid among the reeds and watched as their town burned to the ground. they would both come to regret this course of action and spend countless nights wondering if they could have done something to intervene.
>Also how do you tend to justify your characters using magic like this?
Mostly with the idea that tools themselves are Amoral and that in the long term research of every form of magic will lead to more efficient forms of gain.
Does anyone have that screencap of the guy who played a necromancer in a solo campaign and he brought down tyranny and corruption across the land and created a utopia by having the undead do all the menial labor?
I think your picture sums it up perfectly. It's too often used for laughs or lewd.
the two boys had no choice but to travel the dirt roads away from their ruined home and try to find a way to support themselves. they were small but scrappy and managed to get work as farm hands and doing light construction. over the years their desolation turned to indignation and the boys became strong young men with broken hearts. over time the remembrance of that horrid night was recounted less with fear and more with anger. the dark figures who killed their families became subject to an endless hatred. to this extent both of the young men took an oath of vengeance and decided to become fierce warriors. both could fight decently but the gift of necromancy is hard to ignore. so as one became a muscular fighter the other perfected dark arts. no matter how much physical strength the fighter developed he could not defend himself from more subtle foes. as the two young men grew closer and closer to discovering the identity the dark figures the fighter became very ill and within three days he was gone. the necromancer had never raised anything larger than a foul bird or a dead hound, but starring at the lifeless body of his best friend he knew there was only one way the two of them could enact sweet revenge upon the dark raiders. together as they had always planned.
>Also how do you tend to justify your characters using magic like this?
6000 years of labour camp you will fall apart after 3500 if you are lucky
I think summoning demons is the kind of bad/risky thing that people glorify, because everybody dreams about the day that a poor hick fucks over the devil, to make up for all the times that the devil fucks over poor hicks.
Necromancy is bad/risky in an eww-gross-get-away-from-me kind of way. Nobody really admires the archelich, he isn't a rockstar, he's gross.
The issue is complicated by the fact that "demon" means a lot of different things in different cultures. But then I guess different cultures have different ideas about undeath too. Egyptian afterlife sounds a lot like undeath to me.
I think that depends on what kinda demon summoning. Lots of stories have good guys summoning demons and forcing them to give up information and shit.
This, Necromancy and Blood Magics aren't inherently evil most of the time. Using the dead or your own lifeforce to help good triumph may be kinda weird, but there's nothing particularly irredeemably evil about it.
On the other hand, being able to rip someone's free will away from them while they are powerless to resist is cruel no matter how you spin it. I'd dare say it's nearly always an evil act, especially if you use it for anything but stopping someone from doing evil.
Demon Summoning is universally evil and dangerous, unless you live in a gay setting with "ma good demons".
I'd argue that the use of undead might be depending on the effects it would have on the soul of the host in the setting or any other quirks they might have, but so long as destroying the undead puts everything right again I could still see even using that in the right circumstances.
Necromancy.
Because its the only school of magic ( out of the three you mentioned ) where you need to torture living things in order to practice.
Wait, what? Uh, I'm not saying that necromancers are above torture, but I've never heard of it being a necessity.
And honestly torture seems like something more in the demon-summoner's wheelhouse than the necro's.
Pretty good distinction though.
I mean making deals with/trying to trick a power everyone is pretty sure is malevolent or at the very least knows it is risky as fuck to do, it is understandable a society would frown upon it.
Treatment of the dead though, that is way more variable between different peoples and often there is far less in the way of risks.
Just look at the huge differences between burial styles across the ages and peoples. What is abhorrent to some is perfectly normal for others.
Assuming there is no actual like "binding and tormenting of peoples eternal souls" type stuff going on the only real risk from necromancy I could see would be disease based from having zombies shuffling around while rotting.
So if the magic stopped the disease risk, or if the necromancer only used nice clean skeletons I could certainly see a society existing that had no problems with it.
Just look at some of the catholic displays of bones, from important people all the way down to chapels which are essentially mass graves covered in displayed bones.
Yeah, assuming undead are essentially just bones animated with the same magical energy you would use to power a golem, there shouldn't be an issue aside from the factors of graverobbing and just how unsettling it might be.
Of course, then it becomes a question of why you'd use a skeleton when you could also simply animate some wooden planks. And if the answer is something to do with life energy, then you stray back into the territory where it might have adverse effects that wouldn't apply to a normal golem.
OH BOY IT'S THIS THREAD AGAAIINNN
Casting a spell is a skill.
Your character had to learn and practice that skill to be able to do it. You can't just read a spell perfectly on the first try after just reading it on a book once. ( of course that's what happens in the meta-game, but not in the roleplay side )
Imagine that you're learning Enervation:
The spell is a ray of negative energy that saps the life of living beings.
You can't cast it on a wooden dummy.
You can't cast on anything that isn't alive.
How would you practice Enervation then?
You get some animal or someone as your practice target and cast the spell on it until you get the hang of it.
Even if you're studying on some kind of government sanctioned necromancy school that only uses criminals from the death row as dummies, you're still torturing a living thing just for the sake of learning how to cast a spell. That's evil, no matter how you look at it.
But OK, you could find someone that give you their consent and allows you to sap their life force in order for you to learn Enervation, I guess... but what about Bestow Curse, Vampiric Touch, Harm, Finger of Death?
Spells can't be evil because they're only tools.
But necromancy spells are tools that were acquired by evil means. Even if you're using it for a good purpose, you're still benefiting from something that you acquired by torturing/killing stuff.
>You can't just cast a spell perfectly on the first try after just reading it on a book once.
Fix'd.
That's true for all the targeted spells though. How does one practice Charm? Phantasmal Killer? Baleful Polymorph?
My playing a negromancer in my current game, it's I gotta say, pretty fun.
>He can talk to animals and has a kinda protohivemind with most living creatures.
Have fun being compelled to read this in my voice
Charm and Polymorph spells are things you can practice harmlessly because you can always dispell it or cast short-lived versions of it.
Phantasmal Killer is a deadly spell but it belongs to the Illusion school of magic, which unlike Necromancy, doesn't require of you decades of torture and death to advance in it.
Did you forget to post the image or something?
>Implying you don't know whos voice to read this in
Praise his name, am I right?
You know, absent Scion, I don't think I've ever heard of a setting where Blood Magic is allowed for PCs.
Usually because it's too powerful or some bupkiss.
>Imagine that you're learning Enervation:
>The spell is a ray of negative energy that saps the life of living beings.
>You can't cast it on a wooden dummy.
>You can't cast on anything that isn't alive.
>How would you practice Enervation then?
Cast it upon your undead minions to heal them and assume it works the opposite way for living things, as it generally does for all Necrotic/Negative Energy spells.
My wizard believed in hatred and unforgiveness to the point of religion.
Demon summoning to make sure a enemy was damned for all eternity was routine.
I've actually played in a setting where blood magic was allowed, but mostly in ritual format to link the effect to these specific individuals, despite there being other participants involved in casting the ritual. The other main use of it was to augment spells, such as doing 1d4 to yourself in order to add that many dice to how many you roll to heal the target, or adding that number as a bonus to overcome spell resist or boost the save. It wasn't common, but it was a skill that could be taught.
Necromancy, specifically meaning the raising of undead, I think a lot has to do with how it is used. If you are raising them as skeletons and zombies, programming them as either simple labor or as part of an automated system a la Deep Rot, that can be acceptable, especially if you are animating your friend because you are unable to carry the fighter back out of the dungeon and into town to be revived. That is just the magic, and maybe a sliver of a spirit, animating the body. Sentient undead on the other hand, especially malevolent ones, that's evil. Ripping somebody's soul back to their body and shoving it inside, making them act in a way that they didn't in life, that is evil. Nod
Summoning of evil outsiders, is pretty universally an evil act, though if you summon them by trickery to fight other evil, that's a grey area. Summoning to interrogate them to verify other information sources, then kill/banish them, like Cadderly in FR does sometimes, that's also grey, but less dark.
raising undead is "evil", but not evil. Nobody is inherently harmed by it, unless your DM specifically states so. Otherwise undead are basically constructs that make people really really mad.
So yeh, i mutilate a few corpses so to protect the living, is that so wrong?
Yeah but a lot of settings tend to have that fuck with the soul in some way.
How do you get a demon to damn someone else's soul without their permission? That seems a pretty big violation of free will/defeats the point of demonic deals if they can just grab the soul.
of all of these, probably demon summoning, since fiends are generally unholy creations of the god of evil
blood magic and necromancy are not going to kill people if the person using them doesnt want to, and their are more than a few heroic examples in fiction like the necromancer from diablo 2 and sorin markov from MTG
that being said "depends on the setting" even for demon summoning, if you have Howls moving Castle-style demons in your setting, than demon summoning doesnt become instantly evil out of principle
calcifer, the fire demon in question from howls moving castle, is certainly not evil, and dealing with devils in their setting is taboo but not strictly evil
Stupid question, but why does his armour have boobholes? And why don't we see that more often?
>And why don't we see that more often?
Because it defeats the point of armour
Because telepathy and mind control amount to a higher form of social interaction that forgoes the concept of diplomacy and speech. It's your own fault if you find yourself convinced by someone's superior ability to communicate with you on a deeper, emotional empathetic level just because he's good with his mind-words.
The scariest thing about mind-control is that it's not the idea of you having no choice of your own, but the idea that you really wouldn't think otherwise in any but retrospect of you being placed under such a state, it's effectively an acknowledgement of superiority, mastery influence, force of personality wisdom, intelligence and Charisma all on it's own.
Except for Domination, which is closer to the like of seizing a person's motor functions whilst they are still conscious of what is happening but are unable to do anything about it, so it's pretty evil. Proper application of this is better done in short bursts as to not raise self-suspicion of being controlled in any manner, leaving the like of timely suggestions and other means at a persons disposal with better placed diplomacy do the true work.
Thrallherds for example are literally people that have the ability to send signals trigger pure loyalty, and the chemical reactions found in people akin to reverence, love, respect admiration and care, and let that person's choices there on out work their own magic to gain someone who in their own free will, acknowledge the thrallherd person as their Raison d'etre.
most settings have the skeletons be some kind of crude flesh golem, and arent powered by souls, and most players wont turn evil due to necromancy, so all examples of "necomancy turns you evil" would be NPC examples
I don't know for sure but if I had to guess it would be so you can see the bones are actually in there.
Despite all the armour and ornamentation it is the bones that are the important thing.