Solomonologist (AKA Demon Jailer) >demon summoner who carefully binds demons they command and force them to do good deeds everyday until they like it
Necromanager (AKA Ectoplasmic Employer) >only uses corpses of people who signed a waiver willingly to let their corpses be used as such, makes consensual pacts with ghosts and other spirits often with quid pro quo "payments" done by the necromanager in return for spirits doing shit. Doesn't do anything particularly negarious with the undead
Bloodhealer (AKA The Bleedwagon) >mostly uses own blood, only manipulates the blood of others in emergencies, in self defense or during medical procedures that call for it
Alexander Murphy
What's the catch?
Dominic Young
I like it. Has potential to be very useful but also be a disaster waiting to happen. All it takes is one person to become corrupt or be negatively influenced to ruin it for everyone else.
Mason Myers
The catch is you have more anti-paladins, couch-potatos (or whatever an inverted ranger is) and evil druids as standard enemies
Robert Foster
High risk play for cool powers, I always felt like the more snowflake potential an option has the more risks should be inherent to it
Benjamin Hall
>evil druids AKA Druids
Jace Gutierrez
I always thought a magic user that wields a Necronomicon-like tome is an underused idea for a hero/player character, but I don't know how you'd go about balancing the inherent madness.
Henry Garcia
I always loved the heroic necromancers of the Abhorsens in the Old Kingdom series.
They're explicitly the good guys, but they still dabble in some really dark stuff, and it can hurt them, endanger them or risk corrupting them at times. Even when they're on top of it, their abilities with necromancy and free magic are still seen as pretty scary things that they have to always treat with respect, lest they lose control and be destroyed by them.
Grayson Wright
I like that thinking
Ryan Phillips
For example, an old pathfinder game I played as a lizard man, people rated accordingly as they were not familiar with my kind, most people were terrified of me, contacted further by my character generally being very polite as he was a diplomat from his tribe, albeit only by their standards.
Robert Ross
>Solomonologist That's domb. Solomonist at most. Maybe Solomist. Solomonologist is too many syllables.
Dylan Clark
I can approve of the idea, but again the key phrase is: >depends on the setting
Camden Jones
Binding Demons has the usual caveat of them backfiring on you, the necromanager (AKA Normal Not looking for immortality and just want a peaceful life necromancers) might get a spirit that tricks the user with their pacts and the blood one is self-explanitory.
OP is clearly looking for extra examples, but I can't think of one right now outside of consensual fleshgrafting, which isn't necessarily magic.
Zachary Gutierrez
But user, with more syllabes comes more power, that's the rule.
Angel Russell
hence the rule of The Great & Wise Supercalifragulisticispialidociousantideestablishmentariancer
Joshua Kelly
Beneficial use of curses. Plague of rats on a town? Lay a curse upon those rats. Plague? Someone ravaged by cancerous tumors? Curse the tumors. Having trouble enforcing the law? Curses are laws that enforce themselves!
Jonathan Thompson
Is this based on that thread yesterday asking about which was the most evil out of blood,magic, demon summoning, and necromancy?
I honestly don't understand why this obsession is brought up over and over again of good ways to use bad magic.
Camden Lewis
>Curses are laws that enforce themselves! I understood that reference
Julian Russell
That's something I think should be in more campaign or something that more DM's should include. If let's say a Dragonborn is adventuring with a party and they go to a small human town most people are going to freak out in some way when they see the Dragonborn because 99% of people have never seen one or have only heard about them.
Liam Jackson
Addition
Also if you're playing in a "standard" setting then other stuff like different types of magic or races or weapons etc.. That aren't normalized in the setting are going to stand out big time and should have the risk involved as you said.
Jace Cooper
Why the fuck do people always feel compelled to argue for "positive" dark arts in fantasy. There is evil stuff and good stuff, and shilling for shit like necromancy just sounds contrarian and edgy as hell.
Brayden Gomez
Warkey: exposes loopholes in demonic contracts in order to free the undersigned from terms
Austin Williams
Because DnD's entire moralty system comes down to "thats how it is, because it is", and DnD is taken as the norm.
That being said, I wouldn't expect a frogposter to have played anything other than pathfinder.
Jeremiah Long
>the clayr saw me >the wallmaker made me >the king quenched me >Abhorsen wields me so that no dead may walk in life, for this is not their path
Asher Miller
Except you'd be hard pressed to find any stories or settings where summoning a plague of zombies wouldn't be malevolent. As far as more modern cultural examples go, zombie movies have been around for longer than D&D, and them alongside vampires has shaped this commonality that undeath is very unnatural and dangerous to the living.
But of course, you get all of these people who A) assume D&D when they're talking about necromancy in the first place, and B) assume the Necromancy school consists of Animate Dead and nothing else
But we have to go through this song and dance over and over, with people suggesting a world where skeletons are just harmless bone golems, but are also easier to make than other sorts of golems because reasons.
If you're going to walk around with an army of the same, fucking own it.
Jeremiah Rodriguez
Easy. He thinks he's doing evil shit while he heroes it up because the book is warping his perception. He was evil and got the book so he could do more evil but...
Hudson Ward
Good shit. I'm actually playing an Abhorsen in a game, although it's not set in the Old Kingdom. It's a Dungeons the Dragoning game where the GM has gone out of his way to add more stuff to the setting, including the Bright Shiners and most of the mythology side of the Old Kingdom. It all works weirdly well.
Levi White
>contrarians
Blake Campbell
Because there are plenty of people who like the idea of using "evil" powers and abilities to do good, and it stands to reason that many of those people would do exactly that if it were possible irl. It stands to reason that there would be similarly-minded people in the game world too
Christian Jenkins
In general, the more benevolent examples are things like undead guardians or fallen heroes and ancestors fighting on in defense of a noble cause. They don't get called zombies then, of course.
Jose Mitchell
I like the bloodhealer. Hemomancers kick ass.
Chase Wright
I want to use genocide for the greater good, senpai! Gas the gnomes, racewar now!
Nathaniel Cox
Yeah, you get more benevolent depictions of undeath occasionally, usually involving spirits of ancestors or the like that persist in the world due to strong convictions.
However, being a 'necromancer' of those is simply a matter of being able to communicate with them and convincing them of your cause. Of course, Necromancy no longer means just speaking to the dead anymore, and such a character would likely be called a Shaman or an Animist or the like, someone who communicates with the spirits of the dead and more natural ones as well.
And of course, any necromancer trying to forcibly enlist good undead through magical means towards good ends is still being evil, just in a more roundabout way
Xavier Smith
The protagonists in Lord of the Rings used a hoarde of undead oathbreakers to save a city and destroy and evil army.
Anthony Myers
It's about being a special snowflake.
Blake Bennett
And bargaining with an army of evil ghosts is still different from creating that army yourself
Gavin Walker
No. Fuck you. You need to work harder than that to make your setting interesting. Try again.
Christian King
Necromancers bargain with the dead as much as, if not more than, create them in fantasy.