What would a utopian necromancer be like?

These forward thinking ideas were not allowed to be pursued to their fullesst extent on Dredd's world, but elsewhere it wass a roaring successs.

>real death communism has never been tried before

Roboticized corpses?

They would work towards all the things listed in this thread despite the fact its unrealistic and ignores what is practical.

Think about it, undead have no needs not wants. They perform the tasks appointed to them tirelessly, without sleeping or getting bored. The entire society can be organized into a single uniform machine with little waste or oversight. It is eternal and perfect!

"death communism" is a term weaponized by the CIA in the 1960s to discredit the only truly legitimate utopian societal model.

He would be a healer and oracle commuting with spirits. Also he would be a sexy twink

Then why are all ghost stories, stories of undead, and tales of undeath all about their needs, desires, wants, and their lack of fulfillment? Ghosts don't arise from peaceful deaths, shadows don't exist in harmless places, wraiths seek the destruction of those around it, vapires consume endlessly, even liches must have more and more knowledge to slake their eternal desire to Know More.

There are no undead that do not hunger for something, there are no undead that are peaceful or at rest...if they were they would simply by DEAD.

You would do better with golems in such a case.

Skeletons as manual labour

if they have no wants then why would the society exist in the purpose. No wants means no goals and no goals means no reason for any for the tasks to be completed.

Someone needs to post The Caretaker.

Depends on how undead works in the setting.

It would be hell as their demonic masters finally breach into this plane.

Daily reminder to: Hide necromantic utopia threads. Ignore necromantic utopia posts. Do not reply to necromantic utopia posters.

1d4chan.org/wiki/Deep_Rot

1)This isn't the case in every culture. Invoking the spirits of your ancestors is something people do. Also Ouija boards.
2)Those undead arise naturally, and are different from those summoned by necromancy.
e.g. skeletons don't eat people.
And liches are eternal wizards, of course they are gonna look for more knowledge, they're nerds with dessicated bodies, what else could they do?

"When everyone is dead, no one will be"

"if you defeat your enemies, they win"

ALL DEAD ARE EQUAL

BUT SOME DEAD ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

"When your enemies kill you, you win"

one of the big problems with fantasy things like the undead os that they end up perpetual motion machines. It would make more sense then that a necromancer may be required to constantly maintain the undead with magic, which would be taxing on the necromancer. A utopian necromancer might animate the dead to do manual labor, or communicate with with loved ones past.

But lets be real. We live in a bad dragon society. If a fantasy necromancer existed they would be doing it because it is their magical realm

Have you read Utopia?

He would establish an undead-servitude based economy to allow the living a world of leisure.

Ghost internet. Everyone gets a ghost companon who flies around asking the other ghosts for expert advice when you néed help with something.

MA Sceleria

A dystopian necromancer who isn't willing to make the sacrifices necessary for a perfect world.

Golems are enslaved elementals. Theyre not happy either.

Typical "I'm a Good Necromancer!" baloney.

Really with necromancy and pissing on the laws of life and death in general you're playing with a loaded gun. I'd think "industrial" necromancy where you essentially use the dead as chattel would eventually come back and bite you in the ass one way or another. If the dead still have their minds, their desires and goals, you're basically making them slaves, and since the worst you can do is re-kill them and put them back to rest, I'd say they'd revolt as soon as they feel abused. If they're more of the mindless zombie type, you're pretty much inviting someone with less clean intentions than yours to make themselves the Lich King. Plus, disturbing bodies is bound to cause problems. Even if the dead stay leashed, I'd think you'd be taking some pretty serious corruption on yourself committing such vile acts. Eventually, you'd start seeing the dead as being more valuable than the living. The dead don't hunger, nor thirst, nor desire the things that make men kill each other. They simply carry out their tasks and harm no one....unless you tell them too of course.

Really, using the dead in a manner that constitutes "good" would be very limited and small in scope, mostly involving the etheric rather than the physical. A wizard communing with the spirit of his former master to complete a world-saving ritual, or a cleric raising a fresh-killed corpse to find it's murderer (the body in this case has not been laid to rest yet, therefor it's rest cannot be disturbed) before burying the body respectfully.

The best and biggest "good" necromancy I can envision would be the head of an order of paladins calling on the honored dead of his order to fight an army of demons, and even that is a stretch to call "necromancy".

I've actually though a lot about this.

If I had a huge workforce of mindless dead whose purpose is only to improve the condition of the living, why would I start to value the dead higher than the living?

Literally any utopian world relies on the fact that people doesn't value profit and personal gains over 'the greater good'. This is obviously why utopian worlds never work, but I don't see why the dead should inspire more corruption than just regular tools and machines in any other setting.

Because regular tools and machines aren't usually empowered by dark magic. And it IS dark magic, there's no way around it. It doesn't matter your intent, or it's exact application, you are disgracing the dead and channeling dark energy. Even if you're using it for the greater good. If you use a death coil to kill a murderer, you've used dark magic. If you summon a demon to fight the dragon razing a village, you're using dark magic. If you raise an army of undead to perform labor so that the living can be hedonists, you're DEFINITELY using dark magic.

Eventually being a focal point for so much dark energy will have a degrading effect on your body and mind. Especially if it's on the scale you're imagining. And eventually, you'd come to realize that the dead are "superior" to the living. They never fight amongst themselves, they never steal or cheat or lie or make war on their neighbors or do any of the heinous actions humans are capable of doing. So why not just kill and raise everyone? Society would be better off for it, wouldn't it?

Okay sorry I didn't know we used your personal setting where it's dark magic and that's just evil by definition then fair enough.
But in any setting where necromancy is just neutral magic like everything else I don't see the problems with using the dead as tools (assuming they are mindless and thus 'dont care').

If magic can provide an infinite power supply and/or infinite resources, it seems implausible that the only mechanism for doing so in a productive fashion involves reanimating corpses.

If you can enchant a corpse to get up and walk forever, then you should be able to enchant a generator to spin forever. If the argument is that the source of the magic isn't external to the corpse--that some part of the human essence must be consumed in the process--then that's capital-e Evil.

Well this I can agree with. I guess it just sort puts a halt OPs question as necromancy is ALWAYS evil and you can't have a dead utopia.

Well that's the point of utopias right? They always turn out LE in the end.

I don't understand how in any setting disturbing a laid-to-rest corpse and empowering it with magic to be kept as a slave could ever be construed as anything but "dark" if not outright evil. You are ripping people out of their graves and forcing them to labor so your citizens don't have to work for themselves. I literally cannot imagine a more selfish act.

I'm sure there are plenty of settings where it's treated as just another form of summoning but it's objectively an uncool thing to do. I'll give you credit though, if they truly are mindless meat robots it's a little less bad, but eventually someone is going to go "Hey I bet these guys would make great shock troops, no worrying about morale or losses, they'll never turn up their nose at barbarity, and they won't even loot, leaving all the spoils for me!" And bam, now you have an army of undead warriors to deal with and there's nothing you can do about it because your citizens are all fat and lazy.

It's just not a winning situation.

> disturbing a laid-to-rest corpse and empowering it with magic to be kept as a slave

And that's the best case moral scenario!
In most Veeky Forums settings, necromancy works by channeling negative energy to power the undead and it leaks out into the world as collateral damage. And in the original fantasy series that preceded D&D and most of Veeky Forums, necromancy raised and enslaved the very soul of the dead, perverting the cosmic cycle in the process too.

Necromancy is about as bad as it gets. Any game has certain thematic niches. You want some gray areas for moral debate sometimes, and you want other black-and-white areas so your local paladin can hack and slash.

In a setting without religion or with a religion where the souls or life energy or whatever leaves the body when you die the bodies are literally useless and a culture could easily emerge where they wouldn't care for them.

The part about undead troops is more interesting because it's like modern day drones. You just send your machine/dead guys to fight the enemy and avoid human loses (for your side at least). Assuming both sides had access to undead it could be a fun setting, but not really a utopian one though.

>the bodies are literally useless
>because the souls leave the body when you die

That's what necromancy is for! You summon the soul back before it can drift away into its rightful afterlife reward, bind its will with sorcerous chains, and slam the sucker into a rotting corpse to slave for you forever.

Ah yes, surely a culture that has no respect for it's deceased ancestors is the pinnacle of morality. Give me a fucking break, it's like you're asking for an undead uprising.

If the undead are mindless slaves, someone is going to use them as filler for their evil army. If they're not and they retain their agency, congratulations, you've created an army of pissed-off death revenants who are ACTUALLY RIGHTFUL AND JUSTIFIED in their hate of the living. These are the only end results possible, sure it will work in the short term, but after a while it will fail catastrophically.

Necromancy is pretty much Soviet-style communism, where the dead are the common folk and the living are the party apparatchiks and nomenklatura.

Not that guy but if the dead retain only parts of themselves after death, like a willingness to fulfill tasks that they would have been alright with while living, then a society that champions the service of the living in death would be an interesting dynamic. The dead serve the living and the living respect this agreement with service after death to their children afterwards.

It don't have to be black and white my dude. I don't even care about the argument you're having with that other user but you can make things work here in a pretty cool way, I might incorporate this in my setting.

I know we hate him, but he did a thing about this

I have a friend I'd like you to meet.

By your standards, cultures that cremate their dead or eat them are objectively evil.

Goddamn ethnocentrism at its finest.

>making friends with inanimate objects
wow lol

The idea that the dead consent really does mix it up, I'll give you that. My objections are based around the idea that when you raise the dead, you're violating not only their remains but their wishes.

Still, what you describe has far more in common with calling on an ancestral spirit than "industrial necromancy" where the dead are treated like machines, or slaves. If I were you I'd have the spirit imbued into some sort of heirloom golem or construct, when the descendant dies the soul currently imbuing the golem with power moves on to make room for the new one. Just make sure you don't violate the agency of the deceased, that's where you start to have problems.

Cremation and eating the dead serve as rituals to honor the deceased and lay the corporeal part of them to rest. Nothing evil about that. What makes an act evil is disrespect or degradation of the corpus. If, in your culture, the proper way to honor the dead is to eat their flesh, you are not disrespecting them.

Also, how do you even get "ethnocentrism" from "disrespecting people's dead bodies and keeping them as chattel slaves will piss them off", quit trying to inject /pol/ into everything.

I agree that it's pretty besides the point of what you were arguing about before, the thought just sort of came to mind.

It would probably be better to work with spirits imbued into a golem or construct, but I'm starting to see parallels between the half-mindless dead and my career field of mental health. The gray area of consent in regards to the mentally inhibited is something I've wanted to showcase to my players in an appropriate way, as it's something I have a lot of experience with.

I should add my field of specialty is alzheimer's/dementia, where many of my clients cannot feed themselves, let alone consent to treatment. I don't mean to draw comparisons like this to most of the population who seek mental health services, the tone of that post looked pretty awful in retrospect.

t. literal kid who doesn't know the history of necromancy and can only follow the latest edition of D&D

>weeaboo shitposters can't help leaking out and shitting over all other boards

>the obvious joke
>your head
How is that double digit IQ treating you?

It would require a setting where necromancy isn't fucked up. eg.
>Undead keep their memories and are sentient they can dispell themselves at any time their bodies turning to the state they should be and their souls returning to the afterlife
>Undead have no souls, they are simply empty husks whose masters have moved on, using a skeleton to sweep your floor is like moving into a house which has been abandoned for a hundred years and is overgrown with vines
For the former case necromancy could be akin to letting people who died finish things they have left undone, a father can return to support his family until his sons come of age, a grandfather can tell his grandchildren goodbye, a man can fight in the military in place of his brothers, etc. For the latter case the undead are simple servants, sure it might be grim having a rotting corpse sweeping your floors and milling your grain but its free labour without any of the ethical concerns of slavery.

Sylvanas pls go

>projecting retardation
Ironic shitposting is just shitposting.

At least post the better necromancers. Ktonian Agartha knows to improve upon the frail human skeleton (when possible).

In fact, all this morality infighting falls apart when you only reanimate horses and oxen to pull carts, plow, and turn mills.

If you really want to make sure there are no issues, make part of the last rites a living person receives a contract, they'll serve the living until their closest descendant dies and upon the death of the descendant, they are released and their descendant takes over. They can refuse, but because they broke tradition and greedily refused to continue serving the family, the family will not see to their proper burial or honor their memory. Consent and respect are key.

Re-corporation into the golem should benefit the deceased in some way beyond extending their "life", upon the spirit entering the construct they call on some of the memories and experiences of the previous occupants, not enough to drive the spirit mad but enough to make the knowledge of their ancestors useful. It would make them more than a menial laborer, something to be revered as an important guide to the living as it passes down not just their own wisdom and knowledge but that of the entire bloodline.

Also make sure that the living have an obligation to the dead, keeping the construct in good working order, respecting it as you would an honored elder, maintaining the burial site/ashes/remains of the corpus after the proper "disposal of a dead body" ritual has been carried out, if there are physical remains to be maintained.

It could also open up interesting plot hooks where the constructs go rogue, you can't just destroy it because it's your dad, gramma and great-uncle bob all rolled into one being and you cant just go around letting it kill people for obvious reasons. There's you another parallel with your profession, is it better to force them into treatment against their will, or do nothing while their condition, unchecked, destroys their loved ones?

I came up with an idea for a civilization of undead where a giant necromantic spell was cast on an entire nation as a last resort to save a population that was being wiped out by a plague. The result being that everyone is transformed into an ever-living undead, initially this looks like zombies, but as flesh decays the entire population ends up being animated skeletons that are sustained indefinitely by magic and that have very little in the way of physical need.

The result being that the people who don't go sufficiently insane that they destroyed themselves now live in a society where the only physical need is repair of injuries (which do not cause pain, but are debilitating), which can be accomplished very easily via a combination of magic and craft and where security is essentially the most important basic need.

still* shitposting

The only people who believe the fool on tv is an actual fool are the foolish, I made it incredibly obvious friend

This is good food for thought, I'll mull this over for a bit. Thank you user

Tragedy of commons applies.

The living are the commons. Kill them for lasting power or don't and wait for someone else to kill them for lasting power until they accumulate enough to crush your utopia and take your citizens to make more weapons. You basically have to kill everyone in self defense if you don't kill necromancers on sight.

Something like this.

>I'm not a retarded shitposting weeaboo, I'm just pretending! that's why I have an anime girl with every reply and all my posts are shitposts
wew kid have fun shitposting, I'll stop replying now to not give you any more (you)s, feel free to have "the last word"

>that's why I have one in every reply
only because it hurts you so, every respectable Veeky Forums poster should have a folder of smug anime girls for these situations. That's just being prepared.

...

I'm surprised no one has posted that one about the friendly old necromancer with butterfly symbolism.

There was another neat one I saw in a more recent thread although I'm not sure if anyone screencapped it. It was about some girl falling for a guy and going with him to his home country with a shockingly(for her) different culture around the undead and ends with the husband's friendly skeleton grandpa giving her some candied violet leaves.

He'd be a communist, but he's actively trying to starve the population, rather than doing it as a result of.

I could see the implication of your referring to people with dementia vs. people with depression and other mental stuff that doesn't make consent weird.

Granted, this is because my Grandma died a year ago through that path, so I might be more aware of the possibility of the reference.

Or a bunch of M:tG setting where the fleshy undead exist and are helpful.

... Or even just the eldar and their wraith host.

b-but muh stereotype of the "default" and only acceptable necromancer being a spooky murder goth, based on my cursory knowledge of recent modern rpgs and ignorance of anything beyond

Nagash pls

dead

And you can also honor the deceased by making their corporeal remnants nurture and protect their offsprings.

No, you can't, you can't force someone out of the grave and into bondage and still honor them.

The only way it works is as
and
laid it out, where the spirit consents to be animated into an artificial vessel.

If the soul hasn't left the corpse by the time you put magic in it to reanimate it, cremating or eating the dead isn't very cool either.

Besides, unless they were going to heaven (unlikely in most fantasy settings), they have few reasons to complain.

Finally, if forced farming work is evil, then the whole feodal system (and the entire society that promotes it) also is, so we're left with very few non evil realms. So I wouldn't condemn serfdom as slavery in a medfan setting.

Canada is a necromantic utopia? I'm happy?

The soul leaves the body upon death, that's why (besides the cause of death, obviously) they're DEAD and not alive. By definition, being dead means your soul is separated from your non-functioning body.

A body put to rest, by burial, cremation, by mortephagy, by being sent down a waterfall on a raft or tossed off the peak of a mountain, whatever the cultural norm is, should not be tampered with, ever, full stop.

And they have plenty reasons to complain, if, at the end of your life, you're dead and buried, only to be brought back to chop wood and stack brick for eternity, you're going to be pissed. Even if you were a slave and all you did in life was chop wood and stack bricks, you're going to be pissed, you labored tirelessly all throughout your life only to die and be raised to do it again.

As for the last bit, it doesn't matter what you're having your undead thralls do, you're using the undead to do it, and that's what makes it bad. It doesn't matter if you've raised a corpse to read stories to children in the cancer ward, you're forcing the deceased back into life. It. Doesn't. Work.

...

If the only reason the corpse functions is because you "added magic", then there's no reason to be using a corpse at all. You could add magic to a wheel and make it turn, or make a boiler hot, or animate a golem instead of a corpse. You're choosing the most offensive and disgusting way to go about it.

...

You would be surprised to what happens to bodies in a cemetary after a consession ends, then.
And if necromancy is part of their culture, of course they aren't gonna bury their dead just to raise them a couple years later romero-style. Expect a nice ceremony where everyone is present and the priest brings grampa back so the family is reunited again.
We've got cultures IRL where ancestors are made into charms and act as protectors. Imagine that, being forced to watch over your house forever instead of going on the afterlife. Surely this is the sign of an evil culture.
Not to mention the cultures where slaves and servants served their masters in the afterlife; same thing with slain enemies.

Besides, you're talking like individualism is the norm everywhere. I can guarantee you that if the medieval church had access to a cheap, reliable necromantic workforce, they'd have enforced the shit out of it, and find excellent reasons why not getting reanimated is a sin.
You can even go full inverted retirement plan, where the living are attended by the dead and live in complete luxury until their time come.

It should be easier to move already exisiting nerves and muscles on a skeleton instead of aniamting solid rock

The undying court

For example, because the bones of men did lots of labor, they are better at doing the tasks of men, for emotional resonance reasons.

Even accounting for that, "I'm able to resist the inherently corrupting effects if Death and the dead by virtue of my semi-elemtL bloodline" is not necessarily the same as saying necromancy is not evil magic.

Most utopian necromancy schemes involve things that would horrify the abhorsens who normal only communicate with spirits, turn indeed and banish them (in D&D terms, they're closer to divine casters)

... Divine casters can easily raise the dead as shades and skeletons.

Death domain much?

You could enchant the tools of labor for the same reason. A good tool is filled with generations of blood. They'd float around tending a field themselves without the distractions and wants inherent in using a human corpse.

>weaponized, so it existed as both a term and concepts before the CIA.

That amounds to telekinesis. With a corpse you just have to replicate nerve signals.

>necromancy
>disgustiing

Not wanting to continue to be useful to society after your death, to be reduced to ashes or petrified through embalming sounds like the ultimate selfishness.
In death the flesh will be rendered free of my bones, and my bones will turn the crank that drives society.

This, minus the fucked up sentence structure.

Someone who genuinely wishes to make the world a better place. The fact that they are a necromancer is ancillary to their goal and their use of necromancy has no real bearing on what they're doing or how they're doing it.

In short, a utopian who just happens to be a necromancer, rather than a necromancer seeking to create utopia.