I'll play a good necromancer and you can't stop me

Does destroying the flesh-sack inhabited by the id negatively impact the astral ego entity in any significant way?

Yeah, it destroys it because all it really is is a new awareness in the fleshsack. Being an actual dimension hopper is infinitely more metaversal and gives you infinitely more options to fight entropy if you choose to do that. A necromancer just looks through a dirty lens at one tiny aspect of what lies beyond the veil.

Go ahead. Necromancy isn't inherently evil, unless you are enslaving free-willed undead.

Most religions hold that improperly disposed of corpses disrupt or damage afterlives, sometimes irreparably. Egyptians believed that you could completely obliterate someone by erasing them from history, and that tomb robbers literally stole from the afterlife. It was only very recently that cremated Catholics don't go to purgatory. People don't like it when you fuck with the dead. "It's just a sack of meat now!" doesn't hold up when failing to bury that body results in broken afterlives and angry ghosts. A good necromancer would be someone who communicates with the angry dead and resolves their funeral rites properly, not someone who fucks with the bodies and souls for their own purposes.

a good necromancer aka "paranormal grief counselor who sometimes communicates with ancestors for guidance too" would still be fun to play

That's honestly more of a shaman than anything else.

Traditionally in the fantasy, necromancy is raising corpses to do shit for you. Most societies would view this as defilement at best. The necromancer may have the best intentions, but they're still doing something society at large condemns as gravely (hah) immoral and they'll be dealt with as such.

People can go on and on about how necromancy isn't inherently evil. But you have to be completely retarded if you argue with the GM for making the townsfolk angry at the guy using their dead loved ones as slaves because "lol it's just a meat sack now".

But we're playing Unknown Armies, girl! Necromancers (Tanatomancers) here are either weak, or have to torture people to death in lengthy rituals. You can't be a powerful death wizard without being a serial killer.

Bible had zombie roam jerusalem - bible is filled with necromancers

Just once, I'd like to see someone take this seriously. A Necromancer that takes care not to cause unnecessary harm through his craft, so he only raises the recently deceased in combat when necessary, only uses clean remains like skeletons for more permanent works, has an extensive knowledge about medicine so he can better clean and maintain his "equipment", uses his powers to actually commune with the dead and somesuch.

K.

Okay. In my setting necromancy is frowned upon, but it's not inherently evil. Regular zombies are just flesh robots powered by necrotic energy and small numbers of them can be used safely. It's only when you start raising by the hundreds or thousands that the excessive amounts of necrotic energy that they radiate begins to effectively kill the land around them. Also, if you lose control over them they revert to feral instincts and begin to attack other people, so be careful.

My necromancer uses slave labor of dead bandits and mages to try and save the kingdom. He also destroys all cursed undead. He doesn't trap souls in the undead body, he helps the spirits be put to rest, but he still uses corpses of his enemies as cannon fodder. How is he bad?

I'm currently playing a good Necromancer.
I mean, it's Mage the Awakening so that's not that uncommon.

I mean, I guess you could call him a 'bad guy' as his Guardian responsibilities require him to lie, cheat, murder and trap people in an occult maze to avoid them Awakening, but really that's pretty tame compared to the soul-eating bullshit some other fucked up Mages get on with.

Using corpses instead of interring them affects their afterlives, and undead tend to go bad if the controller lapses.

Actually am playing one in a campaign right now. Granted actually raising the dead is an emergency tactic for him, all but once using freshly fallen enemies, and putting them down once they are no longer needed to deal with an immediate threat. Outside of that his magic tends to revolve around consulting the dead and manipulating negative energy to weaken and harm. Mechanically he still could but in character his affinity for negative energy is so high it overrides any other elemental magic he tries to use and causes those spells to fizzle out. Despite this he is still at a point where he wants to use his power for others but time will tell whether the harshness of the world towards his kind will turn him cynical or even evil.

Isn't it that in d&d even good clerics can raise the dead to aid them in battle?

>I'm going to role-play Timothy Mcveigh as lawful good and you can't stop me

>some cultures have actively embraced the practice
Some cultures are evil though user

Yeah if they follow right gods.

You'll try.

But by any definition, you choose, you will fail.

In Grenth's name.

Grenth says burn the Charr,

Sure, go for it. Just make sure to get rid of all the bone iconography and the skeletons before we go into town. It freaks people out.

Depends on the setting. People are making a lot of assumptions here

Not gonna lie the boob tattoo really makes me wanna fap to this because it automatically makes you think about her nipples. Ingenious.

Good necromancers are best necromancers.

You can sign up during your life to be raised in order to defend the town in dire need or regularly if you agree to it. Your family are either paid what would be your wage or you're given a cash payment whilst you're alive. It's a greatly respected choice to make as it means that living people don't have to go into dangerous combat situations.

I wanna play a lolich

Oh good, a chance to post this. Benevolent necromancers are amazing if done right.

>"It's just a sack of meat now!" doesn't hold up when failing to bury that body results in broken afterlives and angry ghosts.
This isn't a thing in any D&D setting for the most part. Necromancy doesn't fuck with the persons soul unless you make it intelligent. As for angry ghosts, no one bitches about the dozens of descrated, broken, and looted Orc'/monster corpses the party leaves behind and the fucking hordes of ghosts the average adventurer should leave in their wake.

Considering how the ATF and FBI were being run under Clinton and Reno, that is entirely plausible

>takes care not to cause unneccessary harm through his craft
Ok, let's go through this.
>only raises the recently deceased in combat when necessary
So you're ok with forcing a recently-deceased corpse in owrk conditions? Like a grandmother, with her face still on and only buried yesterday, to work a mill or construction?
>only uses clean remains for more permanent works
So you're still going with a bone crew, walking manifestations of the certainty of death, as a posse, rather than fraterniizing with actual living people
>extensive knowledge about medicine so he can better clean and maintain his equipment
Anachronism for most medieval settings, also why are you using medical knowledge for necromancy when you could be using it to treat living people? Unless you're afraid that your patients will never trust you to take care of them properly and are just waiting for them to die so you can bone-crew them.
>actually commune with the dead
If you're going for dead people as laborers, people will be happier if you're raising empty shells; if there's actual dead souls inside, you've violated the realms of heaven and hell to compell labor by magical force.

The only good necromancer is a paleontologist, using a sack of raptor-bones in a sled for combat, then immediately letting them fall back into rest after their work is done. And since fossils are basically rocks rather than spent biomass, Just Use Golems/Elemental Sprites to Vigorate, not Death Magic

Ok bad example

Ayy

There's plenty of shit a necromancer can do and still be good:
>Bestow Curse (remember, you have to cast this on bad guys to remain a good guy)
>False Life (temporary HP is almost as good as healing!)
>Magic Jar (wasn't this one of the best spells in 3rd edition?)
>Chill Touch (always have a damage-dealing spell as backup)
>Haste (denn die todten reiten schnell)
>Speak With Dead (three pillars etc.)
>Resurrection (it's a stable of high-level play!)

>Chill Touch (always have a damage-dealing spell as backup)
It's even better than that in 5e. Not only do you deal damage but you also shut down an enemy's healing for a turn and you can give undead disadvantage on their attacks.

Thanks user. That was great.

>implying he wasn't lawful good
Ok atf

So, Diablo 2 necromancers.

>like a grandmother
That would be the opposite of what was stated. "Only when necessary will the recently-slain be raised; primarily in the middle of combat where the alternative is to die".
>bone crew
Then nobody can recognize who is who. Also, a clean white skeleton with nothing on it just looks silly, rather than scary; nobody's going to think that much about them if they're working the fields or mining.
>Anacronism
Bullshit, the Middle East had medical knowledge comparable to late 1800s Europe, and "huur duurrrr darkage yuropoor only" is a shitty setting anyway.
>why are you using medical knowledge for necromancy
Because living things have too much of a time-limit on them; if someone's bleeding you only have so much time to fix them before they get infected, or bleed out, or some other nasty result. The undead don't have that drawback to them.
>Violated the realms of heaven and hell
Okay now you're just fucking stupid. "Commune" doesn't mean "grab them by the dick and shove them into a body", it means calling them up on the Ghost-Phone and asking them a few questions before letting them continue their afterlife. It's no more intrusive than calling someone on vacation (or in prison, in Hell's case); yes, they might get a bit annoyed at you interrupting their time, but you're not DOING anything to them but talking. Also, they're free to just hang up or not answer; you're not forcing a spirit to do anything.

TLDR, your counterarguments are stupid, fuck you.

Reminder that if you're not smoking your zombies to preserve them, you're doing it wrong. Who wants to hang out with smelly corpses when you could have a crew of barbecue bois instead?

Also always remember to wash and polish your skeletons.

Grenth says: Necromancy A-OK!

Too bad he bailed with the rest of the gods the minute the whole dragon situation got serious.

What's wrong with making friends?

We don't talk about that.

>So you're ok with forcing a recently-deceased corpse in owrk conditions?
That doesn't sound like combat. Manual labor is something you'd use bare bones skellies for.
>So you're still going with a bone crew, walking manifestations of the certainty of death, as a posse, rather than fraterniizing with actual living people
The two aren't mutually exclusive
>Anachronism for most medieval settings
Not really. If you have people who can figure out how to travel between planes and warp reality itself, it's safe to say that someone eventually figured out that boiling water kills microbes.
>If you're going for dead people as laborers, people will be happier if you're raising empty shells
You don't generally have to raise someone as a shambling corpse to talk to their spirit.

Played a Neutral Necromancer. It was done through a God who was essentially the God of progress and second chances. The church has two real sects. You have the priests who raise empty husks of whatever is around. They do make a note not to raise officially buried people. They also raise the souls of people who wanted a second chance in life and don't mind coming back as an intelligent undead (grave knights and the like). A key not of the undead that are raised is that they all turn up as true neutral. They're really just puppets.
The second group is a bit more intense. Due to necromancy typically being abused by evil people. The paladins and inquisition of this church are responsible for hunting down evil undead and purging them and releasing their souls back into the afterlife.

An interesting thing happened in a campaign where the soul of an evil grave knight was released and his soul begged for a way to make up for the evil he did in this world. So he was given a job in the church until he could save enough people to feel like he could pass on.

Go ahead. Try. Of course you can, since necromancy is present in the setting and morality is not related to skillset.

Let's see how anyone reacts to your army of minions, especially when you understand they are not as much under your control as you thought they'd be.

I can even make it a (short) interesting campaign

>He doesn't disguise his undead
>He doesn't wash and perfume them to hide smells
>He doesn't restrain his undead when they're not in use

This is why we need industrial standards for necromancy. A spooky OSHA if you will.

>only using necromancer to summon minions when you can use it for much more subtle things, like death curses or blood transfusion spells

I've played one good necromancer who was also a multiclassed monk.

>When a master of their kung fu style dies, a student must raise their master from the dead and complete their final request.
>"Master," the student said. "What is your final wish?"
>"Find a place to bury me, so I may spend my death plesntly."
>So wrapped in a buriel cloth, the Student carried his master on his back and traveled with a party of wanderers.
>The Student tried to bury his master several times, but each time was refused.
>Next to his wife, the Student thought, but his Master only replied:
>"She nagged me my whole life, you wish me to be in nagged in death too?!"
>Then again next to a lovely river, but his Master only replied:
>"This river is far too noisey! I would never be able to get any peace!"
>Heading his Master's wish, the Student tried again on a high mountain top. The master replied:
>"You would leave your Master in such a lonely place? You think so little of me Student?"
>And so the Student traveled on.

Sadly the session ended before his story was completed. The master would also make snide remarks to his student as he fought and encouraged him to hit on women, which embarrassed the student to no end.

They're not going to tell me I can't put my skeletons in wheels, are they? I've got to have something to handle on site security with.

>A BLOO BLOO BLOO I AM SO ANGSTY I SURROUND MYSELF WITH THE UNDEAD BECAUSE THE LIVING ARE MEAN POOPYHEADS AND I HAVE NO FRIENDS

>I'll play a good necromancer and you can't stop me.

No need. You don't have a group.

Reked with reality

That's basically the premise of Dungeon Life Quest, if you're interested. /shill

Thats a nice Necropolis army you have there, would be a shame if something happened to it

Has a DM never said no to you? Is that why you're like this? Have you never had a DM with balls?

fucking this

My friend has attempted two separate times to make a non-evil necromancer. In both instances, his character got insta-killed by a lucky crit.

We told him maybe wizards weren't for him.

>The Holy Order shows up and burns the peasants for sexing a witch

How do you balance a necromancer PC in a team based RPG anyways?

Ayyy I haven’t seen that images in ages. Thanks user.

Sure I can.

>tears charsheet
>kicks out of the group

Is capturing goblins and converting them to good a better solution than necromancy? I keep mine in a cabin outside of town.

What are your conversion methods?

>every God in the setting views necromancy as undeniably and irrevocably Evil
There, stopped.

The cleric uses ceromony after some persuasive charisma checks. Got almost a dozen.

Wait. So you're using methods to FORCE them to change their very nature? Morally speaking that sounds chaotic neutral at best but personally that seems kind of evil. Are you at least freeing them afterwards instead of keeping them for personal use?

A bad necromancer summons the dead, a good necromancer puts them back.

Some run away, we have no way of stopping them. The villagers come pay them for chopping firewood from time to time. We havent really made them do anything yet but we might see if a team of them will go do a quest for us.

Why are you all so autistic about good necromancers

So you change their very being according to your whims then have plans to make them do slave labor.
Sorry, man. You and especially that cleric are dropping down a level on the alignment chart no character level reduction.

>Forcing people to be good is chaotic

Free will is a chaotic ideal. Mind controlling entire populations to be good citizens is lawful as fuck.

Lawful follow certain higher rules hence them being lawful. Go get the consent of every God in your setting on their stance of slavery, mind control, and sublimation and subjugation of the soul being lawfully positive and we'll renegotiate your alignment change.

Awww.... she thinks she's the moral superior! And she's already abandoned public modesty of her own volition! She's shaping up to be an amazing evil witch.

And to think, all the other Dark Ones had to deal with their ruby-eyed charmers running off with the first strapping young brat to pose them a moral dilemma! All they had to do was impose a strict moral dogma, and teenage rebellion would do the rest!

if you want to make friends try talking to people instead of fucking desecrating the dead

Fucking brilliant.

Because Veeky Forums is bitter and automatic about anyone playing pretend differently.

The only problem I can imagine with it is if the player doesn't consider having a small number of ghostly allies to be an acceptable alternative to having hordes of zombie minions. Or if they really want to be edgy and misunderstood, I guess.

Really weird how bitter and hateful everyone becomes when someone mentions "good necromancer" around here. Child raping barbarian is a-okay though.

A barb that rapes kids is just a barb. Necromancy, much like my mother and taxes, is an inherently Evil act on the alignment chart and so it CAN'T be Good.

I decided to try making a communist necromancer. Skeletons were labor tools to allow the populace to eliminate disparity of wealth. Since everyone had dead relatives and most were willing to create children for cheap labor, free labor became even easier to convince them to have. Most peasants were perfectly willing to allow their bodies to be used after death to help their family further.

I haven't gotten high enough level to make free willed undead yet, but not sure where they would fit into the necropolis utopia I've created. Perhaps liches would be a good means to avoid having knowledge lost over time but so could a brain in a jar.

I don't care and you can't make me

I hate that these presumably tribal-type girls always wear modern-looking bikinis. There are so many cool-looking primitive revealing garments to choose from for your half-naked savage and she gets a boring black anachronistic two-piece swimsuit..

Assuming you play DnD, Liches are a bad idea if you want to be any semblance of Good. Their entire thing is that you have to commit terrible rituals of unspeakable evil.
Which is pretty stupid, because by the time you become strong enough to be a Lich, there are way better and simpler options available to become immortal. You don't have to do everything with Necromancy, you are still a competent Wizard otherwise.

Who said anything about D&D?

Alignment charts are dumb.

That's not the point of the scenario and as such is irrelevant to it. In setting the alignment chart is a thing and actions taken fall somewhere on that chart. Necromancy sits in the Evil section of this chart and as such can never be a Good thing let alone there being a Good necromancer whether the system this is based on is stupid or not.

Wait a minute, are you saying that rape is not an inherently evil act?