Why does the necromancer archetype attract so many autists, contrarians and fedoras...

...

ITT: weak ass bait

I just like having a skeleton mariachi band man.

You've made this thread around once every 2-3 days for more than a month now.

Just stop posting.

>or is their evil nature the main attraction?

Only time I played a necromancer I was TN and the DM said I played the best example of a TN character that he had ever seen.

His out out llook was as follows: his peoples enemies (mostly Thay) use necromancy as a weapon why should his people not use it also? Because if they lose to them they face enslavement or genocide. In the face of survival arguments over good and evil are of little importance.

Having said that he was not a dick to people either.

Undead are cool man. They're by far the coolest classification of monster.

user it's full of fucking skulls what do you think

Why do necromancers trigger "YOU'RE HAVING FUN THE WRONG WAY" spergs so much? Like OP, or this guy .

Because it is attacking the themes of how nercomacers are in D&D.

In D&D necromancy is a powerful, heinous yet charming tool. It is also a trap for those who think they know better. That it does not corrupt those how use it. That many of the users of it that came before were merely power mad or turned on by a unjust society. Most new users of necromancy think "I will be different". Then it goes into a area "that man was not meant to go, doing things that man does not have the right to do". Think Frankenstein.

If a player makes a PC that does not fall into that trap it makes every NPC necromancers into merely a dick. A powerful dick but a dick non the less.

>if I ask in all honesty and with no fedora why necromancy is always evil, I'll get called a contrarian
>if I support this, I'll get called a manchild who supports strict DnD alignment

...

because they are easy to play in a edgy way. The bog standard necoromancer is a week pale guy wearing lots of black, who likes skulls and can summon undead to do his bidding. This is for many people "cool" if you assume that the meaning of cool is beaing a goth and brooding in a full leather outfit when its 30 C in the shade outside. Add to that the fact that necromancer is perfect for someone with a control/dominate fetish and you can easily tack on fake deepnes and there you have it, a perfect cherecter for autists and fedorafags to play that needs to extra work. You can show how much not a sheeple you are by doing something most people dont aprove of, you have your own personal army AND all the skulls you want

...

Somethin' about this picture just speaks to me, and that's why I play necromancers

D&D has no mechanics for corruption. Necromancy is no more dangerous or corrupting than any other form of magic in D&D, which is to say it's a stable and completely safe tool to use. This kind of tacked on fluff is just wankers like the OP injecting their own preferences on it, all stemming from an off the cuff line in the AD&D PHB "only evil characters would regularly use this spell" which likely had more to do with Gygax's hangup about evil being ugly and gross than any corrupting influence of the magic itself.

"Completely safe" in the sense that you can lose control of your undead creatures if you are prevented from sustaining control over them, and they are inherently murderous and cruel monsters.

In every edition except fifth, skeletons and zombies are mindless automatons.

d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/undead/skeleton-medium/
Neutral Evil

Intelligence -

So just for fun, how about you quote the section about what creatures with no intelligence score do?

How the heck can a nonsentient creature have an alignment?

They're animated by pure evil energy from the literal plane of bad shit. As a result, their alignment for the purposes of detection and smiting is evil.

It's not a plane of evil

The negative energy plane is neutral, like all the other elemental planes.

And as far as I remember, the negative energy plane doesn't blow up undead that go to it, unlike the positive energy plane does to living people

And yet, the various Demon lords and Archdevils whose portfolios cover undead say otherwise. The fact that only Evil gods and Evil "gods" provide access to such spells. Do you know who furnishes fresh necromancer recruits with the knowledge of Create Undead? A fuckign Demon Lord of Undeath. Who created Liches? That same fuckign Demon Lord. Making undead is something furnished and supplied by a being of literal evil, thus making those who dabble in it slowly corrupt their souls into being hell bound. He whispers to them in their weak moments, and at their frustrations, tempting them down paths which only monsters tread. Trying to redeem knowledge made by and from a demon lord is a fool's quest and only mortals whose hubris and ego far outstrips their abilities attempt it.

Mindless does not mean without urges. Insects are mindless and yet they still go about killing and eating and doing things. Undead are filled with malicious (mindless) spirits of hunger and death. You would know this if you had read any fucking lore on the undead from AD&D, 3.5, or 4e. The common portrayal of movie zombies which mindlessly wander around killing and tearing apart people to try and sate a perpetual hunger for blood and flesh is the same basic idea behind D&D zombies when they are uncontrolled.

It's so paladins can smite them.

And yet a skeleton in a tomb will still mindlessly attack living creatures.

Any neutral cleric can cast animate dead, and any wizard can learn it. They don't need a demon lord for it.

But hey, go ahead and point out them corruption mechanics that

are part of the core rules, why don't you?

>Mindless does not mean without urges.

Go ahead and post the section about what a creature with no intelligence does on its own. Or hell, quote a section about what skeletons or zombies do without orders.

That is because of the spells them self which have the evil tag.

If a neutral spellcaster researched enough he could make a spell that uses the neutral energy plane without the evil tag

They attack the nearest living target.

>D&D has no mechanics for corruption.

The mechanics have existed at various points in D&D's history, just not necessarily in core. The 2e "Complete Book of Necromancers" describes the price of necromancy like this:

>Whether they realize it or not at the outset of their careers, wizards that specialize in necromancy make painful, personal sacrifices for their profession. Even if they shun the Black Arts entirely, a necromancer is still subject to the social prejudices, physical dangers, psychic pressures, and curses that plague those who channel the forces of the spirit.

>As we have seen in the kit descriptions of Chapter One, the mental demands placed on certain necromancers, as a result of their trafficking with the dead and lower-planar entities, will eventually wither the sanity of the most stable individuals. Because of their high wisdom, necromancers rarely go stark-raving mad. They are almost never incapacitated by their own insanity. Rather, the necromancer's own twisted mind becomes a most insidious handicap. The wizard docs not even realize that the mental disability exists, and even if he or she acknowledges its existence, the necromancer does not care to remove it! The necromancer's "professional" madness does not usually result from a single, traumatic experience, but rather from a slow destabilization of the mind, a gradual erosion of the sanity that occurs while learning the terrible secrets of the Dark Art.

It then discusses mechanics involved in necromancers going insane, suffering deformities, or becoming cursed. I think makes a fair point that the core themes of necromancy, which typically involve great power that comes with great risk, have been watered down and reduced to just another form of standard magic that happens to be kind of icky, often because players demand the powers of a BBEG without having to sacrifice anything for it.

Q U O T E

U

O

T

E

They do. Those are called golems. Evil magic is just a shortcut to power with a bunch of drawbacks.

NOT CORE
O
T

C
O
R
E

Also from the point where D&D was trying to shake its image. There have never been rules for magic as a corrupting force in the core of D&D, which makes these even more optional than anything else in the game. Magic in D&D is about as safe as magic gets unless you're intentionally altering it to achieve a specific tone (A horror campaign for instance, in which case, what are you doing using D&D?).

>enslaving elemental spirits to create a construct that does actually stand a chance of going berserk
>less evil than creating a completely obedient automaton that will just continue following your last orders after you're gone

Yes, yes, we all know D&D was written by retards to pander to retards who don't have a consistent ethical framework.

I could animate an undead without it being evil

If I made my own spell without the evil tag I could just make neutral undead

It's even more ethical because you aren't trapping a elemental in a body

Saying the negative energy plane is evil is like saying the weak nuclear force is evil.

Evil necromancers, friendly necromancers, I'm just so damn tired of them all.

The weak force is obviously the most evil of the four forces

So do animals are druids evil.

Animals don't do that unless threatened or enraged. They have enough Int to decide for themselves what to do.

Negative energy is not inherently evil. At least in D&D and planescape.

From inner planes (i.e planescape):

"You can save the philosophical discussions for the outer planes. This isn't a matter of good or evil." Page 64

The manual of the planes (3e or 3.5e) also does not give an orientation to the negative or positive energy plane on the good/evil or law/chaos axis. I assume it means that neither energy planes are inherently evil or good, lawful or chaotic.

The planar handbook (also 3 or 3.5e) also does not define the negative energy plane and positive energy plane as good/evil chaotic/lawful.

Thanks for the time, I had fun doing some research.

>NOT CORE

I already said that, but "D&D has no mechanics for corruption" is not the same as "D&D has no mechanics for corruption in core" (which isn't saying much, because core doesn't have mechanics for a lot of things).

>Also from the point where D&D was trying to shake its image.

But animate dead has been singled out since at least 1e as being a spell mostly used by evil-doers. The Complete Book also says:

>Modern writers about necromancy have continued with this allegorical convention. The necromancers of dark Ashton Smith, for instance, are so powerfully evil that their baneful nature is painfully apparent to all around them, as if the corrupt wizards radiated a palpable aura of malevolence. Normal acts of kindness, such as a smile or laughter, become perverted into frightening glimpses of their twisted nature.

Is it not possible that D&D was borrowing from themes and ideas that have existed for a long time, in which necromancy has frequently been portrayed as dangerous and insidious?

same in warcraft lore.
light/shadows are both powerful and despite the popular belief the void is true neutral.

>and despite the popular belief the void is true neutral.

That's explicitly untrue as of Chronicle. The void is pure evil.

Possible, but as I said, it was never modeled except in supplements distant from its initial run. Gygax made an offhand comment about it, and then proceeded to do fuckall in modelling it, which means we can safely assume that it doesn't corrupt anyone. As I said, it likely has more to do with Gygax's general belief that evil = ugly and gross.

NOT CORE
O
T

C
O
R
E

It's DM's discretion whether to include that kind of crap, and as DM of this discussion (if you don't like it, you should have thought of it first) I declare that book verboten.

>Saying the negative energy plane is evil is like saying the weak nuclear force is evil.

>hey that plane that is the embodiment of death, darkness and evil? yeah it's not that bad!
>why are the paladins buying rope?

“Skeletons and zombies are evil, even though they are mindless. This is because undeath itself is a naturally evil force, just as fire is naturally hot. While life and death exist in a cycle, neither is inherently good or evil, for creatures must die to feed others and make room for new life, which in turn must die to make room for even newer life. Undeath, by contrast, is a perversion of the natural order; an endless state that is neither life nor death, and a power that only corrupts and consumes. Vampires and brain hungry zombies cannot create new life or sustain other life, they can only destroy life and propagate their kind until the world is filled with undying predators and no prey. Even things built with the power of undeath are merely perversions and mockeries of life, whether an animate corpse or an intelligent palace made of bones.

“This is not to say that all necromancers are evil or the school of necromantic magic is inherently evil. Necromancy spells manipulate the power of death, unlife, and the life force—the magic of death and the magic of undeath are two different things. A circle of death spell uses the power of death to snuff out life, but it is no more evil than stabbing a creature with a sword. Some argue that magic is just a tool, and how a tool is used determines whether the act is good or evil, but a counterargument holds that some tools are specifically designed to be used for evil, like implements of torture. Worse, some tools are inherently evil, and want
to be used for evil. If fire always burned the innocent and spared the guilty, fire would be evil. Undeath is an inherently evil source of power, designed to corrupt and destroy life for no purpose other than hatred and because it can. There are exceptional, intelligent undead that are not evil, just as there are extremely rare demons and devils who become good, but evil is the norm because their essence is evil.”

animals eat to sustain themselves and attack in self defense
undead dont need to feed and will seek out living creatures to kill

>he thinks death and darkness are evil

The negative energy plane isn't an embodiment of evil, and death and darkness are not evil.

can you list some non evil creatures that reside in that plane?

Don't have my books but negative energy elementals

lomion.de/cmm/elemneen.php
chaotic evil

I thought the problem with golems were they were prohibitively expensive to mass produce rather than any actual difficulty in making them.

d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/outsiders/elemental/elemental-negative-energy-tohc/negative-energy-elemental-greater-tohc/
Look right next to the type

See the N?

Yes.

>pathfinder

Yes.

Find me the book where the 3.5 listing is and we can talk.

>>pathfinder
>Yes.
beat me to it
there's actually a juju priest in pathfinder who could raise neutral zombies but they retconned it

He gave you a source from AD&D, and that's the only source in any official D&D product that has ever had positive and negative elementals.

3.5 does not, and never has, had traditional elementals from the Positive and Negative planes.

Isn't the newest stuff considered canonical?

Or are you just ignoring that?

The newest stuff has no positive or negative elementals. All references to them have been excised from modern D&D material.

The Xag ya or Xag yi or something like that.

I remeber reading about negative energy golems in a 3.5 book

I'll look for it.

Yes. Since 3.5, 4 and 5 don't have anything about that and PF isn't canon, what matters in the AD&D definition.

We'll you do have an answer
It's not all bad, it's just that demons found it able to be used for evil things

>On the other hand, some say that neither creature is a true native of its plane at all. These folks claim that the xag-ya and xeg-yi came into existence elsewhere (perhaps on the same plane, perhaps on different planes), forming in isolated pockets of positive and negative energy. The beasts might even have been created by some intelligent agency for an unknown purpose.’Course, this is just idle speculation, but it comes about for a very good reason. The Positive Energy Plane is practically life incarnate. How could a creature attain enough true individuality in such a place to achieve consciousness and an ambulatory body? And the Negative Energy Plane is as antilife as a basher can conceive, which makes the idea of a living creature of negative energy seem a bit of a contradiction.

>we exist in a post-Diablo 2 world and some people still insist on evil only necromancers

It's a shame that such terrible taste continues to exist.

>Necromancers
>evil nature
Ayy lmao.

I always interpreted the D2 necromancer as a bad guy teaming up with heroes to fight a common enemy.

If you read the fluff, he's the priest of a non-evil god.

I'm playing a necromancer and I'm just a straight up evil character.

I'm playing a necromancer and I'm basically skeletor

Your character better be fucking cut.

I like them because Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3. They were the most fun to play.

>not liking 80's ripped wizard doctor doom

I wasn't knocking it. I'm just saying, his character had better be totally ripped, otherwise he's bringing shame on a great name.

Personally for my good necromancer it was because being a necromancer is at the end of the day about being someone really interested in humanity.
You got two traits that intersect really well for a PC
>You care about people (and tend to see them at their worst)
>You need people to do your job
Sure I could have played Jimbofuck the Golem-tinker for Kingmaker but Cacklebones the Necromancer was far more entertaining because rather than digging a hole in the ground and fucking it until a golem appeared he had to go out, find people to whom the worst had already happened and work with them to get them over their trauma enough to be of use to society.
Basically if you're doing it wight a good necromancer is 50% wizard, 50% Social worker/tard wrangler for any evil undead or therapist/gay boyfriend for 'good' (read as unstable) ones
>Now Vlad you know you're not allowed to drain the blood of the innocent, it's part of the terms of me not turning you into fucking ashes and scattering you to the four winds, even the innocents that are fighting us now put the baby orc down
>White Lady, we've been over this, I know he killed you and he'll pay for it, but you can't inflict your suffering on others, it won't make you feel better will it?
>She-of-Sin, your empire has been gone a thousand years, people have moved on, they're happy, I know you swore to protect their descendents for eternity but...
>Oh Billy, I know you loved her and you had so much to say but you can't stay here, you need to move on, you're scaring her, she's trying to move on. I know it's hard but don't you want her to be happy? You did before you got hit by that runaway goat.

ST 20 IQ 20 baby

That actually sounds like an interesting take on a necromancer. People get caught up on the whole raising the dead thing, but there is a host of other stuff necromancers can do that isn't godawful evil, like communing with the dead and helping restless spirits find peace. Part of the problem with D&D is that necromancy is good for creating and controlling undead, but has nothing in its purview for putting undead back into the ground where they belong. It's an oversight, desu.

>It's not a skeleton, it's a bone golem!

Here's my take on Necromancy. These are all example abilities, GMs would have discretion to expand upon each level of abilities if they saw fit (say a player wanted to bind a spirit to a spiritless body, for example). It has its evil applications, like the level 2 example, but also it's not-so-evil applications, like being able to resurrect people who have recently died.

>IQ20

He'll stop when you stop.
That's the social dynamic.

It's gurps you add an extra 0

>IQ 200

>evil
>edgy
>commands total obedience from minions; easy way to fantasize about holding authority
>thematically associated with death, sacrilege, and dark colors, all of which are edgelord bait
>defies common interpretations of divine law, spites nature; gives fedoras and HFY types a lot to work with
>strong and coherent generic theme creates a very easily grasped "subversion" of common tropes in the good-aligned industrial necromancer
>mechanically above-par in several popular systems, optimizable
>bone puns

>bone puns

The only real reason

i thought d2 necro was true neutral
>satan gets too strong
>team up with god
>god gets too strong
>team up with satan

It's been mentioned before but I feel like a lot of people conflate undeath and necromancy when they aren't the same thing. Necromancy is the magic of death which isn't any more evil than Stabby McSmiter the LG paladin. Undeath is evil by its nature though due to the energies and where they come from. It's just unfortunate there aren't many options for playing a necromancer that's not constantly raising spooky scaries. I personally liked 3.5 which had evil as a spell descriptor and only applied to a few necromancy spells and still applied to some spells from other schools.

I once rolled up a LN necro how's previous job was to reanimate recently deceased convicts to fulfill their prison sentence posthumously. I just liked the concept.

Unfortunately, I had shit RP skills at the time. And that didn't matter, because the campaign closed after the first session because the group wanted to play another system.

Why do good guy necromancers never try to hang out with ghosts? Something that has actual precedence for being good or at least neutral and leads to more interesting/thematic secondary abilities.

It's always skeletons or zombies being used to revolutionize industry or save peasants from orcs

PCs are the most power hungry, ruthless yet incompetent characters in any campaign necromancy fits them perfectly.