As a necromancer I am appalled

I spent years trying to resurrect my family, studying the art of reanimation in my lab. people threw rocks and sent knights after me when they found out. Yet, when that Priest in town came by to resurrect six wandering folk including a hdrow and kobold of all things, he gets praised by everyone. WHY!?!

Because the average human is foolish and believes that some paltry god must save them when human achievements can do the same.
You were planning on putting the souls in the body right?

Necromancers reanimate the dead, remake flesh or simply sculpt it into a different form.
You do nothing with the soul; Necromancers simply can't recall the soul of a person once they are gone.
Hell, you see that priest? He is basically a conduit for divine power. It was his God that brought those people back, he just gave a little direction.
I mean, if most villagers had to choose between having an evening tea with you or a rogue they'd choose the rogue every time.

Necromancers animate, they don't ressurect...

Actually, necromancy was originally just the act of communicating with the dead.

Necromancer-op, you should move to GURPSland. There, healing and necromancy schools hold hand in hands and skip into the sunset as one is physical and the other the soul. Not like generic NOTD&Dland, where everyone shits themselves the second you do VERBOTEN magic without some circlejerk god behind you.

>Necromancers reanimate the dead, remake flesh or simply sculpt it into a different form.
>Necromancers simply can't recall the soul of a person once they are gone.
>Hell, you see that priest? He is basically a conduit for divine power.

Doesn't this mean that, a Necromancer is just a Priest without a God and that all Priest are practiced and accomplished Necromancers? Or that they should work in tandem?

What if 'The Church' is secretly a mass Necromancer training facility that teaches it's student in plain sight of the world with no one the wiser and Necromancers outside 'The Church' are just figuring it out on their own and haven't realized the Divine Element to it yet? That there must be some faith to go with the work otherwise it won't work?

I wish to know these things!

Because it's what they know. Like it or not Necromancers in the past have done shitty things. Now don't get me wrong, most practitioners are more or less good and mostly law abiding same as everyone else just doing their best to preserve old traditions and obscure knowledge. That's fine. Admirable even.

Then you get the one in a thousand nut job. The thing about manipulating the scythe and hand of Death is that when someone goes bad with it they don't just go bad, they go all manner of horrendous. A pyromancer can only make a big fire but a necromancer of sufficient skill and malevolent intent can cause a level of destruction of which has no easily discernible upper limit.

People remember when whole nations that covered half a continent vanish over night.

Is it fair for the small businessman just trying to get by? No it isn't. Life is unfair. You have to just deal with it or go mad and become the reason why life is unfair for the rest of us.

There is no power greater than Death, to have such power it is only right to be held to more exacting standards.

because your zombies look shit and no one in their right mind wants to be near one

whereas the priest had them looking proper


what you need to do is get good at making humonculi/ vampires or other lifelike undead

either that or make golems- then it doesent matter if they throw rocks

I suppose we'll have to steal those secrets.
But think about it, the Priest was just a vessel for the divine power and there to properly direct the soul into the body. I suppose the actual healing would be the God's own work.
Necromancers are like surgeons, they fix what's broken and use magic to make all the different parts work as they should; thus resulting in reanimation.

I guess a Necromancer that figures out the Divine element would be able to preform perfect resurrections as long as the had God Juice to bring the soul back too.

As a necromancer you don'the touch the soul directly, you mess with the force that binds souls to physical forms. what divine entities do is regurgitate souls back into the material bodies. THe wording there is very precise, since gods are usually made up of the souls of believers anyway, taking traits the still living give them.

As for the above about channeling divine energy without a god, that is an ur-priest. it's a ... messy job doing so, there is a reason there aren't very many of us.

Because he's filling those people with the same force that animated them in the first place. You however, are trying to fill them with the opposite force, a force inherently harmful to anything it touches.
It's like you're trying to water your garden by making it rain saltwater, then asking why the other farmers are getting mad.

>Necromancer-op, you should move to GURPSland. There, healing and necromancy schools hold hand in hands and skip into the sunset as one is physical and the other the soul. Not like generic NOTD&Dland, where everyone shits themselves the second you do VERBOTEN magic without some circlejerk god behind you.
Depends on the setting, though. It's hard to generalize about GURPSland, really.

Because the forces your were looking for were anathema to life and death. Most every necromancer who has sought these forces was blinded and tricked by demons and devils, their research leading them towards damning their soul and only making mockeries of the living.

The Priest on the other hand was blessed by the gods themselves with the power to restore those people whole and unblemished by their time among the dead. The gods worked their powers over life and death, something you as a mere mortal cannot achieve. No, you try to steal their ability, to place yourself as their equal. A fools endeavor. All you can do is make a mockery of that power, cheap puppets fueled by horrific experiments and dangerous energies.

Your goal is a blasphemy against the rightful powers who rule over everything. It is a wonder and a grace you still live.

I've got one of these "tragic necromancer" characters, who has the advantages of being in a setting where flesh-shaping is "common" for both living and dead beings, albeit limited to a few widespread organizations, as well as the fact the setting's afterlife is turning into a ghost in a sort of pocket dimension that occasionally intersects with reality. So while cultural acceptance and the availability of the soul are there, the downsides are that not only is this D&D, so Resurrections are still strictly religious magicks, but also said character has a grudge against the clergy that deals with such things and refuses to work with them through sheer pride.

>Resurrections are still strictly religious magicks
>what is Philosophers' Stone
>what is Reincarnation
>what is Eberron clerics
>what is Ur-Priest

You don't exactly get those things playing full wizard user, at least not from what I've read.

>Tear the souls of the blessed dead from their afterlives and force them to do my bidding while trapped in a state of unending suffering
>Break into crypts and graveyards, pull corpses from the ground and animate them in a mockery of life with spells which, if I lose concentration for a moment, will loose undying creatures into town to try and kill all life, including the living relatives of those whose bodies I've reanimated
What the fuck? Why do villagers not like me?

>Tear the souls of the blessed dead from their afterlives and force them to do my bidding while trapped in a state of unending suffering
depends

diablo 2 and 5e skellies are not powered by souls, since explicitly using souls of the living would make a somewhat more intelligent undead, rather than a proto-flesh golem like most skellies are

The Circle of Death and Shadow would like to remind everyone that using necromancy for purposes other than bringing misery, darkness, and general evil upon the land is strictly forbidden. Anyone found using the dark arts to better communities or, god forbid, create utopian societies shall be subject to heavy fines and confiscation of necromantic paraphernalia.

>Philosopher's Stone
A powerful artifact no paltry low level wizard can create, if any wizard can create them at all anymore.
>Reincarnation
A divine spell given by nature and its god equivalents.
>Eberron clerics
Still clerics, still powered by faith and divine energies entailed within rituals of religious significance.
>Ur-Priest
A divine caster that steals the power of gods and a mistake the gods quickly rectified.

screw you, i do what i want

im going to use my knowledge of anatomy to be a physician

and i am going to sue my skeletons to help fight evil doers, and to help me set ap an orphanage

what are you gonna do about it?

In D&D, which is where all of this always-evil-necromancy nonsense comes from, you don't actually use people's souls either. Instead, you scoop up a bit of PURE EVIL from the plane of PURE EVIL, use it to fake a soul, then use the resulting undead creature WITH AN ETERNAL THIRST TO DESTROY ALL LIVING BEINGS AND GOOD IN GENERAL as your living sock puppet.

It's evil because you're basically summoning up background radiation from another plane of existance for personal use; In addition to making anything infused with it hilariously evil, it also makes the world a worse place just by existing there. We're talking about raising the divorce rate by .01 percent per ton of necromantic energy that gets into the world.

Halt criminal scum!
We got an anonymous tip of skeletons and zombies terrorizing the neighborhood. I see there the tip was accurate. Put you hands where I can see them and don't say a word.

the terrorizing skeletons belong to my archnemesis and elementary school classmate "darkbeard the evil"

my skeletons are busy hauling wagons of food and supplies for the locals

Did you remember to renew your permit?

Don't fucking lie to me, just because the skeletons and zombies are terrifying doesn't mean they're terrorizing. Besides, what kind of law-abiding Paladin doesn't read their arrestee their rights? You've got six seconds to convince me you're not a Blackguard in disguise.

I think you may have confused the Republic of Yuessa with our beloved kingdom of Ereba. You only have the right to silence in your arrest. And the terrified countenance of the various bystanders says they are being terrorized. Now come quietly or I will strike you down for resisting arrest.

I know Blackguards among other casters know the Fear spell, that could easily be considered planting damning evidence. Also I doubt my talking can be considered resisting arrest, unless you're somehow not allowed to arrest me while I'm talking? What's your Order son, I'd like to file a complaint for poor conduct and unnecessary hostility.

Brb, learning gurps.

>TFW you despised the gods for profiting off the suffering and weakness of mortals so invent a whole new school of arcane magic called Necromancy, only for your followers to worship you as a god anyway.

You even get the title thrown upon you against your will and you don't really have any option but to take it.
...Was this their plan all along?

>what divine entities do is regurgitate souls back into the material bodies.
...This process looks and sounds eerily similar to a cat coughing up a hairball, doesn't it?

Uh... how about graffiti? Can I use my undead minions for petty vandalism?

I mean, I'm assuming public murals are out. Unless they're really ominous, chilling murals, maybe? I guess that's sort of a grey area, isn't it.