In the standard, 4 element (earth, water, air...

Wouldn't that make death the absence of all those? That's way deeper philosophy than I think OP is looking for.

basically this, the body is a mixture of all 4 elements, ergo reanimating one requires manipulating all 4

Not really. Do you really need Air and Fire if you're reanimating mindless (and obviously souless) undead? Do you even need water? Zombies and skeletons don't bleed.

It's probably more complicated than that.

that user's description isn't based on classical belief at all. It actually went:
>Blood-Air
>Yellow Bile-Fire
>Black Bile-Earth
>Phlegm-Water

Air for Soul
Fire for Animus
Earth for Body
Water for intelligence

But not unlife.

Okay, so to expand upon this:
If you only use...
- Air lets you communicate with the Other Side (divinations)
- Fire is life energy manipulation ("Warmth of life"), so draining/giving health
- Earth, you get mindless, soulless, slow moving and relatively weak zombies, but at least they have corporeal bodies
- Water lets you communicate with the dead body (speak with dead).

So using all 4, you'd get an actual living person, or something approximate, depending on specifics.

Using water and air you'd get a guy you could talk to and he could tell you what he knows without being all jumbled, cryptic and riddles, or overly specific, like you had if you only used one.

Fire+Air and you get a poltergeist, that is all feelings, no intelligence.
Fire+Water and you get an unseen servant, which understands and follows orders, but has no incentive of its own.

etc. you can see where this is going.

Unrelated to the topic, but at which point would somebody go: "Yes, one singular stocking is exactly what this outfit needs for perfection."?

As you see from the thread, you can answer your question quite validly with:

>earth
>all of them
>none of them
>a combination of them depending on the effect
>a different single element depending on the effect

I guess the question is, why do you want to know? What do you have to work with so far? And what do you want to do?

Without context I can't tell if that's a high boot rather than a stocking, or if the other leg's stocking has fallen. In any case, asymmetrical armor has historical precedent as well as asymmetrical fashion. There are many fun setting configurations that would provide for both types of asymmetry.

>Without context
I'd say context is OP's pic.

I meant the context of the pic at , actually.

For OP's, the context is obviously
>I am made for fucking

which I totally approve.

Good thing necromancers don't bring shit to life. They speak with the dead and use their remains to see the past, present, and future.

>Necromancy (/ˈnɛkrəˌmænsi, -roʊ-/[1][2]) is a supposed practice of magic involving communication with the deceased – either by summoning their spirit as an apparition or raising them bodily – for the purpose of divination, imparting the means to foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge, to bring someone back from the dead, or to use the deceased as a weapon, as the term may sometimes be used in a more general sense to refer to black magic or witchcraft.

Of course, if you want to get technical, Necromancy doesn't do anything because magic doesn't exist. In any case, nitpickers like you should at least bother to be correct in their complaints.

You mean a corruption of Earth magic in an effort to mimic Air magic.

One of the major laws of magic is to never attempt to use an element to reproduce the effects of its opposite. It's why water mages trying to light fires using water end up getting radiation sickness, why Air mages trying to create material with wind end up siphoning away their own flesh, and why Earth mages trying to fly using earth magic end up severing their ties with gravity and falling off the face of the Earth.

Though, while trying to bind the Breath of Life using Earth magic gets corrupted and creates undead, binding spirits that never breathed (like elemental spirits) simply creates golems.

It depends on how the body was disposed of. Dealing with the buried who've been returned to the earth is obviously earth. Dealing with the ashes of the cremated would be fire. Dealing with those buried at sea would be water. And dealing with those given a sky burial would be air.

What separates a dude building a golem and animating it and a dude animating a bunch of dusty old bones? Surely the spirits of the dead must be involved?

>dealing with those given a sky burial

Good luck with that.

Nope.

Depends on the system. Sometimes golems are powered by enslaved elementals and thd undead may or may not have a soul at all. Sometimes golems are powered by divine blessings and the undead are corpses puppeted around by demons. Sometimes all sorts of other ways exist to get things moving.

>he has never heard of steam or lava mages
get good

According to HoMM, Earth would do it having both Animate Dead and Resurrection.

>steam or lava mages
No such thing

Combining elements isn't the same thing as trying to use one element to emulate another.

Red and Blue can make Purple, but painting something Red won't make it Blue.

>or to use the deceased as a weapon
Does it even mentioned anywhere outside voodoo zombie creation? Are there examples in fiction of European and Asian mages doing this?

Aether as necromancy deals with souls

Yes. If a toist sorcerer animates a corpse, it becomes a zombie. however, after a cvertain amount of time, if the sorcerer doesn't put it back in it's grave, it becomes a vampire.

And a Chinese vampire isn't nice. it isn't pretty. It definitely isn't sexy. It's a rotting corpse that hops everywhere - and its 'hops' are ninja-style leaps - sees your breath, and drains away your breathe and your blood (along with EVERYONES in the vicinity) right through your body. Yes, that involves your blood literally tering it's way out of your flesh as you suffocate horribly.

Taoist sorcerers who follow dark paths get large sections of cities killed.

yes there is

>tfw Chinese Cultural Revolution was country wide purge of dreaded taoist sorcerers and it went as expected

THIS IS WHY YOU USE THE CHINK ELEMENTS

earth

or at least that was the association in greco-roman culture, since the deities and spirits of death were "chthonic" (of the earth, as opposed to the "olympian" deities who lived in the sky). and since you've chosen the greek elements it would make sense.

But corrupt Taoists are heretics and the orthodox Taoists would be the ones to take them out.

No, the Cultural Revolution would had have taken out all magic users, and for a different reason.

>Are there examples in fiction of European and Asian mages doing this?
How do you recognize the word "necromancer" at all, without knowing about European fiction about the weaponized dead?

A biological entity requires a soul to be animate, so yes, necromancy involves the spirits of the dead. Usually this is just a case of nabbing some random soul from the aether before it's finished passing on. Souls are normally finely tuned to their particular body, so cramming a soul into a body it isn't made for in this quick-and-dirty fashion tends to cause a lot of damage to the soul, like forcing a square peg into a round hole. Hence why most undead are mindless, deranged things.

Intelligent undead require a bit more finesse, getting hold of a particular soul to fit into the original body or carefully adjusting it to the intended body. This requires the active cooperation of the soul in question, which means you pretty much only get evil souls trying to escape a fate of eternal damnation. Souls destined for a more pleasant afterlife generally aren't keen on sticking around as a wight or what have you.

Why? Would wood and metal make this question any clearer?

>A biological entity requires a soul to be animate
See various undead and organic golems.

I guess if someone's too dumb to figure out classical Western elements that explicitly say which elements are necromancy then they're too dumb to figure out classical slant elements that explicitly say which elements are responsible for necromancy.

skellies in diablo are explicitly training wheels for golem construction, working with once living material is a bit easier than clay, steel, or air

there is even a flesh golem, the natural evolution of a skeleton, only needing the flesh for structure, with the power completely from your own magic

5e also says that animate dead imbues your skellies with a simulacrum of life, so you arent using souls, just cheap knock offs of them

Organic matter fashioned into another shape is not the same as a biological entity. A wood golem is not a dead tree, it's an artifact. Likewise, a skeleton and a bone golem are quite different things, fundamentally.

It's not just about the type of matter, but how it's put together.

A skeleton isn't a biological entity, it's a magical entity grounded in the idea of a skeleton that _used_ to be a biological entity. Same with ghosts, vampires, zombies, liches, etc.

None of the undead that are usually considered the products of necromancy are considered biological organisms or biologically alive. If you mean "biological but not alive" then you simply mean organic.

It's not an organism, but it is *biological*, not merely *organic*. The base material is the body of an organism. Not merely matter derived from an organism, but a BODY.

A corpse is different from a living organism, yes, but it is also different from organic matter. Again, it's not just about the kind of matter, but HOW IT'S PUT TOGETHER. It's about form, essence, archetype.

You can't expect to understand MAGIC using real-world science that only looks at matter and nothing else. We're talking about a totally different paradigm here.

>sky burial
Stick the dead in a cloud, let him decompose for a while, direct the cloud over your fields, and enjoy the enhanced rain. Next generation fertilizer! (actually past generation)

Sky burial is the funerary practice of feeding a dead body to carrion birds like crows and buzzards.

The base material of a wood golem is also made from the body of an organism; if you argue that the wood isn't the "whole" organism, then this applies to skeletons and cadavers with damage or stitched together as well.

A corpse is simply organic matter; where it came from is merely a matter of was, not an is, and how it can move is merely a matter of its shape and mechanisms (how it's put together), which apply to golems and other constructs too.

Even if you insist that your setting uses some special mojo of "used to be alive", that does not necessitate spirit - and if you make it so in this specific setting of yours, that does not meaningfully restrict the answer to 's question.

The divide between magic and SCIENCE! is as artificial as the separation between church and state, or the separation of religion and science.

>The divide between magic and SCIENCE! is as artificial
How so?

You mean besides being man-made? It's sort of incumbent upon you to explain your position that the divide is necessarily natural.

>It's sort of incumbent upon you to explain your position that the divide is necessarily natural.
user, you made the statement about artificial separation between magic and science. I'm not him . But since you are so defensive of your position I'd like to hear your explantation and reasoning as to why the divide between magic and science is artificial.

Not him but rarely is there a firm distinction between magic and suficiently advanced technology across fiction and even when there is, it's usually arbitrary.
>What's the difference between the Sun Sword from "Curse of Strahd" and a Lightsaber from Star Wars?
>What's the difference between a shield spell and technological shields Halo?
>What's the difference between Magitek and Sci-Fi?
The answer, nothing that matters so much that changing the terminology around vastly changes the end result of a given concept.

It's honestly on the same level of faggotry as martialfags who complained that 4e turned everyone into casters because everyone's actually fucking useful.

Earth, if you're using the 4 elements, Void, if you're using 5-element Japanese system, Earth or Ether, if you're using the 5-element Greek system.

I see nothing in that definition that mentions giving the dead actual life, unless you're implying that raising them bodily counts as giving them true life. My nitpicking is still correct.

Try being less of a twat.

>made from
This is the key difference here. The wood golem is MADE FROM the body of an organism; the skeleton IS the body of an organism (or what's left of it, anyway). The act of reshaping the matter transforms it -- literally, it's changing from one form (or perhaps I should be capitalizing it, Form, given I'm drawing on Platonic/Aristotelian concepts here) to another, altering its essence. Making something from it change it from something biological to something merely organic.

>Even if you insist that your setting uses some special mojo of "used to be alive", that does not necessitate spirit - and if you make it so in this specific setting of yours, that does not meaningfully restrict the answer to 's question.
Well, yes, obviously. It should be apparent to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the only truly "correct" answer to anything about the particulars of magic is simply "depends on the setting." (Or maybe "It isn't real," if you want to get super pedantic.) Unless a particular, specific setting is specified in the question, should go without saying that any answer more detailed than that is prefaced with an implied "In my setting..." There's simply no other way to discuss the topic.

(Personally, I also like to think that the debates we have in threads like this are the sorts of debates scholars and wizards in a fantasy would have about how magic works. Just because there's an objective truth in-setting doesn't mean that the particulars are apparent to people in that setting at the time period where a given campaign is set.)

True, but that's why I specified MATERIALISTIC, REAL-WORLD science. In a setting with magic, the distinction between magic and science is arbitrary, but THEIR science is going to be substantially different from our science as far as its content. The distinction I've been drawing between biological vs organic matter IS the science of my setting, but it's different from real-world science.

>a Lightsaber from Star Wars?
>technological shields Halo?
Oh, user you shouldn't consider them science because none of them are. Basing your comparison on fantasy in space opera like Star Wars no wonder you don't see the crossing line.

It is much less efficient to prove the absence of something than the presence of something. In this case, a connection between science and religion.

So really it's up to user to outline why they think science and religion are inherently separate (i.e. lack any connection).

>Oh, user you shouldn't consider them science because none of them are.
What makes them non-science though? Just because they don't exist in the real world? Then I guess spaceships in general don't count as science either since we've yet to develop FTL travel either.

Life is a moderation of the four elements while death is those elements in extremes. Necromancy is modulation of the four elements. Alternatively, Necromancy is the governance of a fifth element, spirit.

Are we still talking in this context?
>You can't expect to understand MAGIC using real-world science
Lightsabers aren't based on exising analogues but expectation that future (or distant past which is more technologically advanced) and progress will somehow produce any wonderful item you can think of and therefore they can be assumed to exist. This is merely a handwaving mechanic. Why people think magic (SCIENCE magic or just plain magic) can handwave anything into reality without any limitations and crippling costs is beyond me.

None, it deals with spirits either possessing bodily vessels or ghosts. Spirits aren't made of 4 elements.

>Why people think magic (SCIENCE magic or just plain magic) can handwave anything into reality without any limitations and crippling costs is beyond me.
Because Sci-Fi and Fantasy were never meant to be an accurate portrayal of real life conventions and both genres have ultimately suffered from people trying to push the realism meme into shit that neither requested or required realism in order to function.

If you're using Platonic ideals, then naturally we are dealing with something very different. This is fine, but it does just boil down to "I use this setting and therefore it is how I say it is"; after all, it is really unrealistic to expect someone to guess that you meant to invoke a hypothetical Platonic ideal of a "living corpus, alive or dead" based on an English word coined in 1819.

I wish you would respond to my point about partial cadavers, even if just to say "well in my chosen setting that obviously wouldn't work".

You're right that all discussions of fictional or hypothetical systems are naturally understood to be prefaced with "in this scenario"; but in answering the question would agree that you are attempting to answer something more than a self-contained "I say it is because in this case I say it is"?

(I quite like the scene you have painted with scholars and wizards debating the nature of magic, but I think that their arguments would be rather different than ours considering that [depending on the setting, of course] certain kinds of magical disputes would be easy to settle through direct and immediate trials. So the discussion would be contained to something either too costly to perform or too esoteric to be observed and refuted directly. Honestly they would resemble the philosophical debates found in our world more than anything; I can argue, I can suggest, I can convince, but rarely can I prove.)

Materialistic, real world science is not exempt from the possibility being the nature of a hypothetical setting. Of course, this depends on the setting...

Seriously though, I would recommend against using terms from our world that are particularly dissonant or misleading in the context of the elements of your setting they are associated with, UNLESS you are cultivating this dissonance or misconception intentionally and plan to use it to some worthy effect.

>trying to push the realism meme
Pop culture fantasy is so devoid of its mythological roots, some people consider mere notion of putting limitations on magic a dire act of pushing realism meme.

>Lightsabers aren't based on exising analogues
Sure they are. They're a compound analogue of light + swords.

Actually their an analog of light and saber.

Nonsense. People put limitations on PARTICULAR portrayals of magic all the time, and are generally happy with those limitations.

The resistance you describe is in response to the notion of putting a limit on ALL possible portrayals of magic, as a matter of type.

A saber is a type of sword. Lightsabers are not particularly saber-like apart from being sword-like.

I don't know, whatever I'm doing seems to be working out.

>Nonsense.
Not at all. Some people are very defensive of their unlimited escapism and wish fullfilment vessels.
>putting a limit on ALL possible portrayals of magic
Are you talking about something that was actually tried?

>I wish you would respond to my point about partial cadavers, even if just to say "well in my chosen setting that obviously wouldn't work".
Ah, I missed that. Partial or repaired cadavers would still qualify, since a partial cadaver is simply a damaged body (your body doesn't cease to be your body if you lose an arm, right?), or restored body (your body doesn't cease to be your body if you get stitches), respectively. Though if you're stitching a corpse together with a lot of material taken from other corpses to patch missing bits, it gets into a gray area where eventually you are transforming it into something else. There is a line between a patched-up zombie and a flesh golem, but it's tricky to pin down.

>but in answering the question would agree that you are attempting to answer something more than a self-contained "I say it is because in this case I say it is"?
If the asker didn't specify a particular setting or premise (and in this case, he didn't), there's no other possible answer one CAN give.

>Materialistic, real world science is not exempt from the possibility being the nature of a hypothetical setting. Of course, this depends on the setting...
True, but I personally find that it makes for a more robust and interesting magic system if it's not.

>Seriously though, I would recommend against using terms from our world that are particularly dissonant or misleading in the context of the elements of your setting they are associated with, UNLESS you are cultivating this dissonance or misconception intentionally and plan to use it to some worthy effect.
Fair point, I didn't consider the implications that would've been taken from my terminology as thoroughly as I ought.

Magic has always had some sort of limitation that prevented people from using it to solve their issues, 3.PF just dropped the ball by forcing in WBL and allowing mages to invest their wealth towards wands, staves, orbs, scrolls, and other magical trinkets to offset their limited spell list.

In either case, the issue comes when we have mages who wield cosmic power while martials are held to a standard that's weaker than most olympic athletes IRL, let alone in a fantasy setting where magic not only exists but can be utilized by any PC.

>3.PF just dropped the ball by forcing in WBL and allowing mages to invest their wealth towards wands, staves, orbs, scrolls, and other magical trinkets to offset their limited spell list
If you use 3.PF as example I think we established here on Veeky Forums that casters in D&D grow to become more powerful than all gods in Earth pantheons except Shiva the Destroyer and YHWH. 3.PF mages are absurdly powerful both in breadth and depth of their magic for no reason whatsoever and surpass deities of the myths from which very concept of magic came from. That's before touching on internal economy of the system you've mentioned.

I'm going to steal from Anima here and say: It dosen't. Rather, Necromancy is a perversion of the naturual order of birth>life>death and so exist OUTSIDE the natural order of magic as well.

They way they do this mechanically in Anima is that each type of magic has it's oposite, Fire and water oppose as do earth and air. You get points to spend to show how much mastry you have with this or that element, and once you spend points the costs in it's oposite increase. You buy fireball? Gonna be a lot harder to learn water walking later. Necromancy is opposed to ALL elements.

In regards to partial cadavers I was also hinting at combined (i.e. crafted or constructed) bodies made from multiple cadavers, which are a common trope as far as necromancy goes.

>your body doesn't cease to be your body if you lose an arm, right?
No, but I would say that the arm ceases to be my body when it leaves my body, especially if I grow a new one. Of course, this is semantics based around your interpretation of the terms "biological", "cadaver", "body", etc. so there is really no way for me to refute any of this in a setting that you can clarify or alter as you see fit. Saying that an abomination or a patched up zombie is different from a flesh golem but that this difference is elusive is a pretty clear hand wave (not that I disapprove - a sense of mystery, discoverability, and unknowability can be a delicious element of a great setting).

>there's no other possible answer one CAN give
Disagree. If someone says "how do dragons usually operate", of course you can answer with "well in my setting [or a specific setting not your own, like the legend of Merlinand King Vortigern's tower], dragons usually...". You can also say "dragons usually..." referring to a plurality of settings. I guess OP didn't specify whether their question was a request for potential setting details where both the concepts necromancy and of classical elements were concerned, or an invitation to discuss how they might interact generally.

>it makes for a more robust and interesting magic system
>robust
I don't see it.
>interesting
A matter of opinion and personal taste.

>implications that would've been taken from my terminology
What terminology would you use now, instead?

Magic always has limitations of some kind, at some level of analysis (ie. even when "magic can do anything", there is a limited logic to it; whether or not this is effective or pleasing is a matter of implementation).

YOU FOOL

YOU'VE MESSED WITH THE NATURAL ORDER

>No, but I would say that the arm ceases to be my body when it leaves my body, especially if I grow a new one.
Certainly, though that's more a question of belonging to an individual, as opposed to belonging to a category. It ceases to be part of your body, but it is still a (detached) body part.

>(not that I disapprove - a sense of mystery, discoverability, and unknowability can be a delicious element of a great setting).
Yep, I do try to deliberately aim for that. Honestly, I don't think it's even a good thing to try to aim for perfect 100% complete explanation. In real life, we know a whole hell of a lot about the way our world works, but there's still plenty we don't know, and we're waaay ahead of where your typical fantasy setting society would be, even a relatively advanced setting (say, comparable to 19th-century development level). It's silly to pin down details that nobody in-setting is going to know and that won't be pertinent to events in the stories you're trying to tell in the setting.

>If someone says "how do dragons usually operate"
I would say that asking how something "USUALLY operates" IS specifying a particular premise for the question (ie, it suggests that they're asking for an overview of the general trends across disparate settings out there).

>What terminology would you use now, instead?
I'm not sure off the top of my head if there's anything that wouldn't require a little explanation one way or another. I could stick with "biological" and just clarify what that term means in my setting.

"Animal" might come closer with less explanation, but I'd still need to explain that I'm using it more in the classical sense, not the modern taxonomical sense, and even there it's still a little different (I think a sufficiently advanced automaton might be considered an "animal" under the classical meaning, but it wouldn't fit the category I'm trying to outline). (More pedantically, there's also the fact that the necessity of some manner of "soul" applies to vegetable life as well, though that's not as relevant to the topic of necromancy.)

Or I could coin my own term, which would require its own definition be given. Maybe or something.

Question by ignorant user. Since we can give matter negative temperatures below absolute zero does it mean when we will reach -1300C we will create negative fire?

Painting something red with blue will literally make it purple, as long as they are both plastic or the blue is transparent... honestly it was a shitty metaphor anyway.

Better to say that while mixing macaroni and cheese might be useful, trying to spread macaroni on toast seems like a trainwreck waiting to happen.

>Food Analogy
You were better off using paint user.

The Greeks were familiar with decomposition. What is the defining criterion that marks the transition from "body" to "not body"? Ideally this be a criterion that would establish a theoretical underpinning for the quality, would be intuitive once described, and would function to determine for the casual observer across a wide body of cases what would or would not be considered an exhibitor of that quality.

>that's not as relevant to the topic of necromancy
Not sure I agree. In any case it is very interesting to imagine a boreal necromancer that works with the husks of dead trees, binding the dryad that once lived there much as a normal necromancer would bind the spirit that inhabited a human body.

How do you figure? We are simply comparing the combination vs substitution of two natures.

Maybe you require a metaphor that include a smaller set of natures and the idea of natural opposition:

You can hop forward with your right leg while leaning right, or your left while leaning left, or with both while balanced; but trying to hop forward with your left leg while leaning to your right will not get you where you are trying to go.

You can not go beyond 0 degrees Kelvin. By definition.
Besides fire is the release of energy in the form of heat and light, not the temperature of the air.

Please. A skeleton is just a cheap, mineral-based golem.

>And thus negative energy was invented.

>we can give matter negative temperatures below absolute zero
No, we absolutely cannot.

>first the negative steam engine paved the road into the new era quickly followed by internal negativity engine

Watch your tone with me boy! You may be the waiter, but i'm still your superior as a chef.

I just tried that. It's crazy and dangerous. Don't do it.

>-1300C
Literally whose ass did you pull that out from, son?

1300C is temperature of the flame for natural gas according to wiki