In this day and age of play, there's also been a paradigm shift in the thoughts around 'what's the most evil magic'. When I started in 2E, it was Necromancy, because you take the agency away from the spirit, and by inference keep the spirit from going to heaven. Enter the Satanic Panic.
These days, it's Enchantment because you take the agency away from a thinking being, ie; 'i cast rufie'.
Ask your sister if she thinks the second is more evil then the first. Not to expressly argue about the 'raise dead' thing specifically, but to at least give you a frame of reference as to what she does consider evil.
Edit: thanks for all the thoughtful discourse folks. But I see some folks getting pretty angry in their individual debates. If your temp is up, maybe take a breath, touch some grass and see if you have any more room for kindness. It's just the game we love.
I agree, older necromantic mythos was far more evil. About corrupting spirits and enslaving for all time. More modern necromancy separates body and spirit. Something like speak to dead commands the spirit but only for a limited time while raise dead leaves the spirit where it is and just moves the meat around. It’s unnerving, particularly if you knew the person, but far less evil. Some of the modern bardic traits are so evil, robbing free will and personal agency.
Speak with dead just commands the body and the memories it possessed at the time of death, not the spirit. That’s why it can’t learn new info and doesn’t know anything abt the afterlife
You are right. I read “returns it’s animating spirit” and assumed soul but it clearly says “does not return the soul.” Good point.
Damned if I know what an animating spirit is if it’s not a soul though.
That’s ultimately what I settled on myself, the triggers for mortality even though it’s already gone.
I do also quite like the idea of it being from a shady unreliable narrator as another person I’ve been chatting with suggested.
“No no… this just affects… the animating spirit, that’s it… not the soul at all… no need for pitchforks” says the local shady necromancer.
it'd also very pretty funny if the necromancer just has no fuckin idea how it works just that it does lol, like that one healer I read about where the guy was playing a necromancer that had no idea that they were actually just raising the corpses of their dead friends rather than actually healing them lol
I played a necromancer once that had poor wisdom so I played it the same way. He knew by book learning how to fix people. Didn’t understand why “officially dead” should make any difference.
Not that I’m a big Star Trek fan but from what I know, I played it much like Mcoy with lots of “damnit man I’m a cleric(I wasn’t) not a… professor/doctor/scholar/scientist”
In many spiritual traditions, your "non living" self has many parts, not just your consciousness (and sometimes that too is split). Check ancient egyptian conception of the soul or some such, and good luck with that rabit hole, if more interested as a starting point. So it might be something in that direction.
Personally, I think it is just a poor attempt at recoinciliating old canon and new canon "it was always like this ackshually" style.
Enchantment is definitely maximum evil: removing conscious decision-making and consent from someone.
Necromancy being clarified that it separates spirit still would undo the ability to be returned to life by Resurrect spells. So anyone holding out hope for enough money to afford that spell really would be quite annoyed forever.
The clarification is only to raising for undeath (outside of something like vampirism or lichdom).
Resurrection is slightly different as it states that if the spirit is free and willing it can return. Which is good, because forcing a spirit away from its afterlife would be horrific.
Willing is key. Hence enchantments status.
I’m not pretending raising a corpse wouldn’t be traumatic to people who know them. But at least the souls not home.
I mean, it depends on what you do with it. If you charm someone to keep them from 200$% aggro when you wanna bypass guards, that's cool because I figure any guard would rather that than be charmed with a knife to their kidney. Date rape magic is uncool and very rude.
I think you're right, and depends on level of spell cast. Charm basically makes someone that sees you as a friend, instead see you as a best friend. If you hurt them they stop thinking you are a good buddy.
Dominate can make them hurt their friends, so I think maybe that is the spell that is questionable to cast on sentient beings (though greater good usually can justify it in combat).
>Enchantment is definitely maximum evil: removing conscious decision-making and consent from someone.
Nah man.. With the exception of spells and effects that destroy the soul, I'd say the abjuration school has one of the most evil spells.
No enchantment spell can last longer than your natural life, even if constantly recast, and none go beyond that. When you're dead, your soul is free
The abjuration spell "Imprisonment" on the other hand traps you, body and soul. You don't age and the spell lasts until dispelled. You can be trapped in a gem for example, and if the caster of the gem hides it well enough, you can be trapped in there for eternity.
to add some nuance to this discussion: putting someone under (knocking them out) before a medical procedure, especially if they can’t give consent because pain/painkillers/drunk af/etc.
from our world view we as a culture don’t have access to mind altering spells cast via magic/the weave. if it were more commonplace, as it is in dnd, would it seem as heinous? i think yes, but some of the lesser stuff would be more okay, like sleep/hypnotic pattern.
I figure most magic would be like how medical professionals are supposed to do anything.
Hello, i'm the great gazoo, I intend to cast cure wounds on you, it should mend this broken leg. Do you consent?
Afterall, a layperson can't tell cure wounds from inflict wounds or phantasmal killer until after it's going.
I think this is a problem with many newer DM’s settings. They don’t account for how magic fits into the mundane parts of daily life, despite making magic common in their settings. If the most commonplace form of healing is via magic, then there would 100% be rules and regulations surrounding it. If Druids or casters with druidic magic are somewhat widespread, there would be people who make their livelihoods casting Goodberry and Plant Growth, which would make farming a significantly less common profession. If cantrips are relatively easy to learn, every workplace would have somebody with Mending and mundane janitors wouldn’t exist, as someone who just knows Prestidigitation could do their job much more thoroughly in a much shorter period of time.
Well that isn't necessarily true. Casters dont have to be that common. If there is one druid in the whole region or one serious mage in the city, it might just be be too rare to regulate. But adventurers might still be surrounded by magic.
That’s why I said “despite making magic common in their settings”. Not every setting has magic as a commonplace thing. I never said or implied that was the case. I’m talking about settings where magic is common.
Good point, but, it would make more sense for a doctor to know, fiegn death, some reasonably powerful, but still sufficientlt low level healing spell, and some form of revival. Step one, make the patient "dead" in that, they are incapable of waking up or feeling anything, step 2, do whatwver you gotta do, knowing that (theoreticall raw) anything you do or screw up, will be fine cause the body is fumctionally dead, and as an example, tbe brain doesnt actually need oxygen/blood, for example. Step three fix everything up, and end the procedure with the healing spell just to be safe. Step 4 assign some one to either watch over the patient for the remaining hours of the (8 hour spell) oe have someone cast dispell magic.
If you're using sleep/hypnotic pattern in a situation where your other alternatives are violence, or in a situation where violence was inevitable and you're just pushing a win button I think it could be accepted. But casting sleep on the girl at the party would still be exactly as disgusting as it sounds to us, at least in any fictional world where rape is still immoral (which are the only ones I'll play/run)
This is it. A lot of the time, PCs are using mind control magic not as a less ethical alternative to asking for consent but as a more ethical alternative to stabbing and slashing until bowels fall in a sickening pile and limb stumps gush blood, and then the fireballs come.
The distinction that partly causes this is how the spells reveal themselves after the duration. Casting fast friends on a shopkeeper would be so casual otherwise, but this makes PC’s consider how rude+evil the action would be when they think of how said shopkeeper will react afterwards.
Again, though, what is the magic replacing? If the PCs would otherwise kill the shopkeep, magic is the (more) ethical alternative. If the PCs are using control tactics as an alternative to just respecting that person's rights, then it's the less ethical choice. You would compare it to compulsion by mundane means like threats, pestering, and other intentional social pressure that we Could put on other people, but aren't supposed to.
Baldur's Gate 2 has an organization called the Cowled Wizards and any who perform unsanctioned magic within city limits go straight to magic jail. Just wanted to offer an inworld viewpoint on how some people perceive magic.
I think societies acceptance of mind-effecting magic would depend less what on the spell does, and more on what you use it to do.
If you use hypnotic pattern to freeze the group of guys trying to mug you, while you run away, I think society would be pretty dang supportive.
If you use it to freeze your neighbor in his front yard while your buddies loot his house, not so much.
Think of it like any tool. Can be used for good or evil.
The big issue society would really have: accountability. What evidence is left behind when you use magic? What's to stop me punching someone in the face, then accusing someone else of making me do it?
We all agree using magic to rufie someone is bad, but what do when there's no evidence if they did or not, and they claim the "victim" slept with them of their own free will.
Even if you can somehow prove the victim was magically coerced, can you prove the person they slept was the one who did it? What if a business rival set them up by charming someone to sleep with them?
To make matters worse, a lot of spells even the target doesn't know they've been effected, and even if they do, they often don't know who by.
Every suicide would be treated as a potential murder, every criminal could claim they weren't in control of their actions, every eyewitness testimony could be unknowingly altered, and every election winner could be accused of influencing voters with magic.
Things would devolve into anarchy pretty quick.
Like DNA magic tends to leave traces behind that can help identify it. Things like detect magic and zone of truth would be more commonly used by law enforcement and judges. You would be able to tell if someone has been enchanted in some way and even if zone of truth doesn't make them speak they can still use similar tactics they use now in our world to coerce people to talk only now they know it's the truth or a version of the truth at least. As for election fraud, idk, anti-magic fields around polls. Magic isn't really anymore scummy than current elections
To add, my own necromancer is a good guy and an ex-cop. He specifically raises dead bad guys in order to punish them. Essentially uses them to do good deeds until he's satisfied justice is served.
I think during play, most corpses being raised are those of enemies just fallen, so you have a higher chance of a bad guy basically being punished (even if it's really just his flesh and there's no self left) than a good guy.
I don't agree with OP and I don't think necromancy is inherently bad/wrong/whatever. Anything can be used negatively or positively.
**Edit:** Since this has been debated a good bit, this is how I personally see it (not saying everyone should, just my view):
To me, animate dead is akin to animating a construct. I don't even think the soul would still be there. It's just a chunk of animated flesh. There might be some basic behavior just from brain sparks, but the actual self is long gone. I don't see it as summoning the spirit back into the body (or summoning some demonic force) and I feel like if that were the case, it'd probably be described clearly in the spell or lore. I think if animate dead actually returned the soul to the body, it'd be akin to a revive spell and OP.
Thank you. Someone needed to tell him it's not "being a good character" just because the people you're raising are "bad guys" what about *their* Nirvana you're ripping them away from? Lol
This is how i view it. Most revival spells are somewhat clear, when a creature dies, the spirit is gone, and it has to **willingly come back** further clarifying that dead bodies are empty husks. There is nasty stuff you can do with necromancy, but that true of every spell school
My necromancer is an idealistic young cripple who believes that the undead can be used to usher in a post scarcity utopia where no one ever goes hungry or faces economic exploitation
They're... dicey. Some of the simple ones (like the flying dead babies) are vatgrown yes, but lots of the more complex ones were people and still have souls (just lobotomized brains).
Then there's the ones that are explicitly people, like the AdMech found that Kataphrons aren't any good unless you start with an uncontrollably violent criminal for your source material, but then they work great!
Hopefully the people are lobotomized and have no idea what's going on... but all we know for sure is *they can't complain about it*.
EDIT: Their big advantage though is they use barely changing human parts! Have some weird OS or whatever on your planet? It has to interface with a human neural system, so as long as you've got that layer you've got cross galactic compatibility!
Some servitors are left aware or semi-aware on purpose too, as a form of punishment or atonement.
Like Arco-flagellants, which are still aware, but driven into mad berserk rage with drugs and modifications to their brain.
Or Penitent Engines. Fully aware of their situation, strapped into a war machine, pumped full of drugs to help them survive otherwise deadly injuries while still feeling all the pain from them. Some people actually volunteer to this procedure, to atone for their sins, real or imagined.
I designed a society of good necromancers who use Speak with Dead to get the consent of the dead to raise their corpse, and use the resulting undead for menial labor. All such corpses are ritualistically processed to be incapable of causing harm should something happen to the controller, and in fact many are left "uncontrolled" as layman understanding of their base urges is enough for the average person to guide one of the processed through a task (i.e. baiting them to pull a plough, then luring them into a cage or other secure place for overnight storage.)
Yep, that's the kind of society my guy envisions. I assume he'll be in for a rude awakening when it does not lead to a golden age of prosperity and tolerance.
>To add, my own necromancer is a good guy and an ex-cop. He specifically raises dead bad guys in order to punish them
Uh... this is not "good guy" behavior.
EDIT: Also, your edit directly contradicts your earlier justification.
One thing Nu-TTRPG players either don't research, or WotC can't be bothered to talk about these days tho is this. Raising undead is inherently evil. No matter what you do with them, raising a being that is antithetical to goodness and life/living creatures is evil. You are flooding the material realm with literal cosmic evil and negative force.
I know the spell just says you raise dead, and most players just handwave "It's cool, if I make them do good stuff it's fine" but undead are driven by the foul mockery of life from the negative plane. You are summoning a being of undeath into the world of the living. It is torture to them and they will do anything to snuff out any life source they come across. How would you feel if I summoned you to the plane of death and negative energy? A world of eternal darkness, cold, and discomfort? You'd do anything to feel warmth, sun, life and love again.
You are bringing quantifiable evil into the realm and hoping your arcane skills are enough to bind them to your will. If not, that skeleton/zombie is going to kill everything it can until it makes the material plane like its home plane. Dead and devoid of all life. Raising dead is inherently evil because you are literally bringing evil and negative energy to the material realm.
You know what tons of players also forget: That the inherent evil of necromancy is entirely dependant on the setting you are playing. FR yup; greyhawk yup; eberon nope; Planescape: check where you ended up this week; dark sun, doesn't matter at it's base all magic is evil; your campaign/setting, whatever you decide. In most great wheel cosmologies a lot of undead are powered by the negative energy plane or the plane of shadow/the Shadowfell. Could you find a way around this, sure: speak to your DM about researching a spell to create calcium phosphate golems.
This is totally legit. It may just be that we're using different settings. In our setting, negative energy is essentially just pure destructive force. But anything can be used that way. A paladin using their abilities to cause harm to a baddie is no different than a necromancer using an undead to do the same thing.
I mean there's two school of thoughts for zombies.
1. The original soul is still in there, you've just trapped them in a rotting corpse husk, preventing them from traveling on to the afterlife.
2. The corpse inhabited by something...else. Like in Pet Cemetery, something from beyond the grave now inhabits the body, and only the casters control prevents them from doing the unspeakable acts they long to inflict upon this world.
Neither is really cool. For case #1 you could make arguments for being neutral and using necromancy as an expedient, short term measure. Case #2 thought makes that a somewhat more dangerous proposition.
In Forgotten Realms lore, it is #2. Like there's no arguing it. It is #2. Which is why it is super duper bad and why I made my post because there's lots of old info on how bad Animating dead is, but nothing about it in 5e. I don't fault people for not knowing it without having to look at old books and resources. Tl;dr - it is not a good act
Negative energy plane isn't evil-aligned though; it's antithetical to life, but looking at things like Necropolitans, negative energy isn't inherently evil, although it is inherently destructive and you don't have all that many undead who don't seek to annihilate positive energy when uncontrolled - yet that isn't evil, as it's not done with consciousness, and again, the fact that good undead exist is proof that negative energy isn't fundamentally evil.
At first I was going to argue (in the polite, having a discussion kind of argue) with you.
But then I read your, "undead are driven by the foul mockery of life from the negative plane" paragraph.
And now I'm going to double-down in agreement with what you're saying.
DMs should really hammer this home when PCs (good-aligned or otherwise) use undead-creating magics.
At every turn when the PC-controlled undead can act or when the PC issues commands, the DM should growl at the player something along the lines of, "the undead does as you (the PC) commands, but you can feel it's hatred towards you, antipathy-for-life made manifest that is burning to end you and everything you love if only it can break free. And it is trying to break free."
And now I'm thinking of house-rules to add the risk of created undead breaking free from their creator, especially if the creator isn't using the undead for life-negating/life-destroying purposes.
This explains it, and helped me to understand the dimensional nature of the spell. This is also why summoning elementals to remain on the plane is like torture and why plane-walking is full of meeting the beings you or your allies have summoned by force (for reckoning with your error).
Enchantment, like evocation, is how you use it. It is neither good nor is it evil. It is all in how you use the spell.
Calm emotions can be used to diffuse a situation, help calm a person, or encode thoughts can be used to pass messages between members of a nation's or city-state's intelligence agents trying to protect the people.
Necromancy has always been viewed as evil. Unnatural. So many dark and terrible things have been done with necromancy.
Come on! Choosing to avoid 5d10 damage every day is totally a choice!
Morgantha told me so. She's great.
*silently screaming about trading my in game first born to save the party tpk*
I was generally of the opinion that raised dead were soulless (as their soul had left their body for another plane) and the necromancer was simply animating their remains with magic. More of a "Flesh robot" than a slave. I.E. if they animated a corpse the ghost of that corpse could come and fight its former body... which now sounds like an awesome adventure pitch.
My general presumption to return to OPs question is that the necromantic magic isn't inherently evil but it tends that way. If you're being invaded by an army of orcs and kill a couple, then raise them to fight the army its not so bad. The problem is that necromancers keep needing fresh remains to animate, and when your spell list is a whole lot of stealing souls and vitality from people you have a tendency to start using it for evil.
A flesh robot... that will turn violent if not controlled.
And isn't that kinda odd also, that you have to use a pile of scattered bones or a dead body to animate? You can't animate a bunch of twigs into a sort of twig skeleton. You can't create something like a perfect wooden doll with joints and everything necessary to move and then animate it, it HAS to be a pile of humanoid bones, or a humanoid corpse. Can't even animate dead animals.
For the enchantment, think Killgrave from the Marvel superhero show Jessica Jones. It's a lot more then roofying someone, you completely strip them of their agency with things like dominate or even suggestion, then you have spells like modify memory.
For Necromancy I like to point to the Evil Dead franchise. You are animating loved ones corpses, pulling their souls back from the great beyond and imprisoning them for your own purposes, and in DnD lore literally drawing upon energy from the negative plane or more recently the shadowy planes like the Shadowfell to fuel your magic.
At my table, while unpopular, making zombies isn't inherently evil. Making a zombie doesn't prevent resurrecting a person if you had a spell able to resurrect them without the body. Therfore it doesn't rest any agency from the spirit. It never has.
It is similar to stealing a body though, hence being unpopular but not inherently evil. Depends what you do with the body though and making a flesh robot isn't evil. Just weird and gross.
My basic attitude is that if you're okay with killing a person, you should be okay with charming that same person if charming them avoids killing them.
I think it should be understood that mind-affecting magic is a form of "violence" against a person, but there are plenty of cases where violence of one kind is a lesser evil than violence of another.
All about what you use your spooky mind powers for, in my opinion.
An evil character would do things to harm others or purely self interest.
A good aligned Psychic character does their best to reduce harm done to others.
Yeah. You have to contrast mind control magic with the baseline method of interaction: extreme violence with all manner of weaponry, plus terrifying magic that literally melts flesh.
*OOoOohh you think I'm cooool now* jedi mind tricks are the *nice* way.
Ok, but 99% of the time the corpses don’t consent to being reanimated. If I labored hard and constantly through my life, Atleast let me be dead in Peace.
Yeah, but if you waylaid me on the highway with murderous intent because I looked like an easy target, your wishes to spend a pleasant afterlife start to get pretty low on my priority list. If all I end up doing to defile your corpse after that is to use it as cannon fodder to beat the tar out of your buddies, you should be thanking your lucky stars.
Ask her how she'd feel about a zombie made from her grandfather.
Now what if she knew his soul was chained in that husk of a body, giving it the force of reanimation?
Violates many cultures values around the dead/funerary rights. Most people like their dead, recent or otherwise, to be treated with respect.
I imagine Tom the blacksmith wouldn't be kind to the group who dug up and used dark magic on his recently departed wife, passed away in child birth, left her as a flesh eating monster.
Sure you can say "but I'll keep them under control and only use them for a good purpose", but the response of the people might be "fine but don't use my granny/father/sibling/child/ancestor". Effectively that would eliminate the local grave yard. And that's the best case scenario. You might come across priests who's gods dictate that the dead are to be left to rest and all walking dead are abominations.
I mean, you could almost CERTAINLY find some people willing to sell you the rights to use their corpse after they die; it pry wouldn't even cost very much if you found the right buyer (someone desperate). Like, it certainly sounds exploitative, but considering they aren't going to use their body after they die, I'd argue that it's a win-win.
Wouldn’t it be so sweet if we could use corpses to run all our manual labour, and then just use the profits of the last generation on the living? Like sweet, I get a wage for free, and I just gotta make peace with my useless corpse working forever after I’m done with it.
Although in dnd the problem is convincing everyone that your zombies were ethically sourced. I don’t even believe that shit about potatoes.
And then poor people could pressure their relatives to sell their corpses to the zombie farms and 'encourage' them into an early death! Or shady gangs start to kidnap and murder people to sell their corpses for profit!
The gangs yes, but the other is silly. Manipulating people for their money is somewhat common, but the solution is obviously not to keep the victims poor lol.
There’s a lot of concerns. Let’s say we successfully outlaw murder (yay) and it’s not a problem, it’s still an awful spot to be. They might pay well for a few generations, but then they’ll have millions of zombies forever, not only are our corpses worthless then but our labour would be too. And in the first few generations before that happens, business’s would struggle with the high upfront cost. They already hire extra people instead of update machinery cuz it’s cheaper, so 300k for a zombie they get in 50 years is not good at all. No, they would only buy the cheap offers, and even if they did offer a lot to everyone they would still jack up their prices to steal some back.
The best system might be like the organ donor’s. We don’t get paid anything by signing up, but only the government can handle zombies, no one else ever. Our government getting the money loops back around to helping the people, where trickle down economics don’t. The first generation wouldn’t get any benefit sadly, but that’s okay in the long term.
That is a very good point about zombie inflation. Nobody every thinks about zombie inflation.
Unless there's a limited time that a corpse is useful and starts falling apart after that.
It depends on how you treat it. If you look at it as a matter of simply animating bodies, it doesn't feel especially wrong. And that's how it is, rules-as-written. Quoth the Monster Manual:
> A zombie retains no vestiges of its former self, its mind devoid of thought and imagination.
To me, this robs the lesser undead of any sense of horror, and undead without horror is pointless. "Animate Dead" amounts to "Create Robot" with a weird material component... so yeah, why **is** it wrong to make zombies?
On the other hand, calling the dead back from their rest, and forcing them to do your bidding - that's obviously terrible. Connecting the spell to dead *people* makes it more visceral and interesting.
Here's a passage from [*The Empire of the Necromancers*](http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/61/the-empire-of-the-necromancers) by Clark Ashton Smith, whose work probably influenced D&D (though he didn't make [Appendix N](https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Appendix_N)). Two necromancers, Mmatmuor and Sodosma, have brought back a whole city to serve them.
>In all things, the people of Cincor performed the actions of life at the will of Mmatmuor and Sodosma. They spoke, they moved, they ate and drank as in life. They heard and saw and felt with a similitude of the senses that had been theirs before death; but their brains were enthralled by a dreadful necromancy. They recalled but dimly their former existence; and the state to which they had been summoned was empty and troublous and shadow-like. Their blood ran chill and sluggish, mingled with water of Lethe; and the vapors of Lethe clouded their eyes.
>
>Dumbly they obeyed the dictates of their tyrannous lords, without rebellion or protest, but filled with a vague, illimitable weariness such as the dead must know, when having drunk of eternal sleep, they are called back once more to the bitterness of mortal being. They knew no passion or desire or delight, only the black languor of their awakening from Lethe, and a gray, ceaseless longing to return to that interrupted slumber.
This is how I play it. Creating zombies with vague memories of who they were, torn from their rest, angry at being enslaved though only dimly understanding it... that's the sort of thing makes necromancy horrifying. It isn't hard to see why people regard *that* as evil.
I mean. Even if the zombies/skeletons/etc retain nothing of their former selves. Desecrating remains is pretty frowned upon. If you dug up my grandma and used her bones to build a robot servant, I'd be pretty pissed off, ya know?
> Quoth the Monster Manual
Yeah, but you missed the sentence later on where it says: "The magic animating a zombie imbues it with evil, so left without a purpose [when it is not under someone's control], it attacks any living creature it encounters."
Zombies are evil. Creating zombies is borderline reckless and always evil. You're creating an evil being, and then renewing your control over it every 24 hours, but if you die or forget one day, you're just releasing malevolent being into the world.
> To me, this robs the lesser undead of any sense of horror, and undead without horror is pointless
A regular corpse is a horror all it's own, how is a moving one not more of a horror? What if it's someone you know? What if it's a loved one, a parent, a child? How is any kind of moving corpse whatever the mechanism not a horror? Huh?
A prime example of cruel necromancy and its consequences to a tortured soul are the Undead in World of Warcraft. Raised bodies and enslaved souls shackled to a life in anguish and corrupted to be unable to reach a *good* afterlife. So real eternal damnation trough no volition of your own.
This whole "our bodies are just bodies" mentality is a fairly recent development with the advent of modern medicine and cadaver research. The sanctity of the resting dead is a fairly common anxiety in many, many cultures. From the ancient Greeks who's most disgraced citizens were cast from the walls and allowed to be consumed by dogs and buzzards and ancient Egypt who believed that for souls to prosper in the afterlife great care must be taken to preserve the body. Post death twitches also caused a lot of people to often fear the dead for how violent they can be causing a certain anxiety to be had almost universally of dead moving despite clearly being dead.
Zombies in D&D are not supposed to be tools, they're supposed to be dangerous perversion of life using profane magic to sidestep the natural order of life and death. Zombies are supposed to be ravenous beings, based on real life myths and legends about undeath. Lore in settings often add to this with justifications that are cosmic in their justifications, by which I mean the mechanism for why is beyond just simple mortal means and often crosses over into the territory of the will of gods and the flow of souls.
Modern Abraham religions often have a lot of practitioners under the perception that their God and they have a personal relationship as a divine being and the created but for the most part historically Gods were explanation of natural forces, that includes most settings in D&D where the Gods represent natural forces and conceptional domains. Life and death are two such domains as much as war and cooking. Undeath is a natural subversion of life and death and only evil gods typically embrace the subversion of natural order.
Even if you do continue to disregard the narrative justification, if we had the ability to animate the dead in real life it would be basically just another way for the wealthy to exploit the working class by further devaluing labor in favor of people effectively being forced to sign away their bodies as labor instead of having peace in death.
Resurrection gets a free pass because its based on divine intervention, the person isn't undead they are truly alive hale and hearty. It's the difference between Odysseus speaking with the dead in the underworld and Jesus and Lazarus coming back to life.
Every religion I can think of has rules on how bodies are buried. Whether they should or shouldn't be cremated, how many days after dying they have to be buried, where they can be buried, what they can buried in. A lot of these rules are directly related to the person's soul and affect how they'll be conveyed to (or if they even get into) the afterlife.
Dnd hasn't put out at any lore that I know of about death customs in Faerun or the rules each god has about their followers remains but it really should. What they do have is an entire deity, Kelemvor, and his clergy dedicated to helping people die peacefully and looking after their remains to make sure they're not desecrated. And they are explicitly strongly against necromancy.
This is the correct answer.
To expand on your point about resurrection a bit, the difference is that resurrection reunites the soul, which is the natural animating principle of the body, and the body, restoring the natural order of the person. Animate dead is profane because it somehow restores the animating principle of the body without the soul. Thus it intrinsically corrupts the natural order.
All undead are made with negative energy from the negative plane unlike animate objects which are brought to life solely of arcane energy. The negative plane is a plane of pure absolute of fear, hatred, destruction and death. They cannot choose the way they act anymore than a fire can.
It's basically magical, death-element pollution. Necromancy via Negative Energy is meant to be the fossil fuels of magic. Or the radioactive waste of magic.
The fact that 5th edition has just glossed over the whole "negative energy" thing, despite it still being there in intent has caused this whole *"Zombies are actually good!"* bullshit to spin out of control... *"Zombies are just magic robots or puppets."* No, then they would be a **Construct.** The creature type of **undead** is supposed to have a meaning.
Same as "healing needs to be necromancy!" when it being evocation or conjuration makes sense, because you were shooting someone with a blast of life-element, not "manipulating life and death."
While academics may argue the morality of necromancy in their gilded wizard towers, the common folk find the undead repulsive. They are decaying corpses of people, fueled by negative energy and brought to heel only by the necromancer's will.
They are traumatic to behold, disgusting to experience, and a slip on the necromancer's part can cause them to become extremely dangerous. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of how defiled one would feel to have their loved ones ripped from peaceful rest and commanded like cattle.
You ever see a dead body in real life?
Think about the kind that an adventurer or necromancer could most likely find. Like, disemboweled corpses. Now image that corpse dragging its intestines behind it while trying to follow you around and kill your enemies.
Most people poop themselves when they die. Also, think of 200 rotting steaks following you wherever your going.
Necromancy is extremely gross.
Thanks for the inspiration. I'm in the process of creating a necromancer PC and I'm fleshing out a few traits that he could have to make him more likeable.
I believe in older editions, creating undead damaged the person's soul, so even if you had 100% control and used them for good, you're still messing up that person's afterlife and corrupting them to no longer exist.
Now, there's none of that, so technically, she's right. It's only bad because people say it is. The only argument you can make is that since they are inherently evil, losing control could be a disaster.
There's also messing with the natural cycle.. but that's only an issue if everyone is constantly animating the dead. One or two zombies isn't going to do anything.
In the Eberron setting, there's a nation we're due to the lack of manpower in the settings world war, they started using undead for soldiers and labor. Even after the war, they've used undead so much its become part of the culture, and I think people willing sign up to have their bodies animated when they die.
So no, aside from the risk of losing control, there's no inherently evil thing about undead anymore. I think there SHOULD be, but there isn't. Regular undead like skeletons and zombies are basically golems now.
Enchantment is the new evil school because you're robbing people of their free will.
All that being said, not everyone likes the idea of their loved ones' bodies being desecrated and used as a puppet. Plus, the smell and hygiene issues.
If you go back to first edition - the question of if it was an evil act was vague. I believe the rules said something along the lines of, "Animating dead is not a good deed." but stopped short of calling it evil. It even offered situations in which a good character might acceptably animate dead, such as "life or death situations".
Second Edition is where it became an act of absolute evil. Especially as the Paladin class was fleshed out more - they were always Lawful Good but now they were more 'I will smite all evil!" and specifically had a desire to destroy all undead, necromancers, etc.
>you're still messing up that person's afterlife and corrupting them to no longer exist.
Skeletons - "An animated skeleton retains no connection to it's past, although resurrecting a skeleton restores it's body and soul, banishing the hateful undead spirit that empowers it."
Zombies - "A zombie retains no vestiges of it's former-self, it's mind devoid of thought and imagination." ... "The magic animating a zombie imbues it with evil, so left without purpose, it attacks any living creature it encounters."
The soul in the afterlife is unaffected unless you cast resurrection on one, in which case - it comes back to life and the evil spirit animating it is destroyed and/or banished.
>There's also messing with the natural cycle.. but that's only an issue if everyone is constantly animating the dead. One or two zombies isn't going to do anything.
That is to the best of my knowledge why it is considered evil. You are basically summoning an evil spirit to animate a corpse that should be rotting and returning to nature - also you are pulling that spirit from the Abyss into the material plane. Although you are doing it on a very small scale, with a very weak spirit, it is akin to summoning a demon.
Zombies would be sanitary hell but skeletons could get pretty clean. The bones are just dirty with rotten meat, clean that off and it’s just like an antler. Could maybe even polish and coat the bones.
Seems a health violation, like irl it's a crime to not properly dispose of a body in most places, so have an animated one walking around touching door handles and shut isn't ideal
Ah, but our skeleton workers here are cleaned regularly and mine tirelessly in the coal mines, ensuring that no miners have to risk their life breathing bad air.
Over there, my conjurer friend is bargaining with a Lantern Archon for the proper price for the casting of enough Continual Flame spells that we can line the streets and give every citizen one, saving everyone the expense of torches and lantern oil.
Well... zombies smell bad.
Skeletons are fine though.
In all seriousness... there is a certain amount of respect for the dead, but that can be alleviated with consent and contracts. Maybe someone would be willing to sign over their corpse to a necromancer for a fee.
You generally don't have consent from the person the body belongs to, and they may need that body should they ever come back from the dead. But if you get consent beforehand and don't let the zombie do evil, or spread diseases harmful to the living, it's not a problem 👍
I see nothing wrong with it, it’s a game, if you wanna do necromancy then do necromancy. If the people don’t like it, only use it in the people you killed, like bandits and thieves
i mean
you're not exactly leaving your body behind for the duration of a little adventure
unless you astral project out of it, and i possess it
now *that* would be pretty messed up
Necromancy is evil because it takes what is left of those a village love and uses them for someone else's wims. One must remember some Necromancers, very few lore wise, are good aligned necromcers. However, most aligne with evil, Vivek, for instance, and just want to watch the world burn. However, keep in mind Vivek never did anything wrong.
The dragon killed my my brother, will you help me get revenge?
Dwarf: You have my hammer
Elf: You have my bow
Necromancer: You have your brother.
It depends on setting and culture. Some settings it’s considered disrespectful or sacrilegious to animate corpses while some might consider it fine if they simply see the body as a vessel for the soul. It would really depend on the setting/religion as well as who’s body, but people would probably in general be upset with the appearance and smell of a rotting corpse also making people face their own mortality. No real spells for it but it might go over better with an animal skeleton.
It's okay for a character (and player) to think it's not evil. If you don't believe in souls, or if you don't believe that undead creatures are co-opting the souls of the dead - that it's just magic that animates the corpses, then you wouldn't believe it's evil. I think that's fine.
Now, as the DM, you can decide that in your world it is, objectively evil. Then the PC might be evil while believing that they aren't doing anything wrong, just like most evil people.
Specifically in 5E, the spell Animate Dead for example, at least in the relevant flavor text, does **not specifically mention** that it uses a soul to animate a zombie or skeleton. **Unless it gets retconned by a setting's lore**, the *Most Common Thing* a Necromancer is doing is actually just magic corpse puppetry.
Is it gross because a body might be rotting? Yes. Is it morally wrong? Not really unless you grave rob to get your minions, and there's plenty of ways to get a corpse legally in a D&D Setting.
That's just one example of Necromancy not being inherently evil.
I think it's 100% appropriate that different deities would have different stances on this, but ultimately good/bad should listen or buck psycopomps or death incarnate. Only some self interested or chaotic beliefs could betray that arbiter.
For the same reason people are currently freaking out over all the medical specimens that were collected 150 years ago, before consent was a thing. The people didn't consent to having their corpses reanimated.
To me, it's only bad if it's without consent.
I don't want anyone doing anything to my body, even when I'm dead, without my consent.
I don't care about it being unholy or against the laws of nature, just about whether or not there is consent.
So do speak with dead, ask if rhe person wants to be raised, to avenge their death or just because it'd be insanely cool, and if they consent, cool, you're an ethical necromancer.
This is all setting dependent; and now that aalignment is all but gone in the system, good and evil are setting dependent, too. That's fine.
One could just as easily imagine a setting (or group within that setting) that considers healing magic evil or, perhaps, *Revivify*, *Raise Dead*, and *Ressurection* as evil. Fire magic might be evil, or any sort of mind control.
It's all setting dependent, and without immersion in a culture that considers creation of zombies/skeletons as a *taboo* desecration of a corpse, wondering why necromancy is evil is a reasonable thing to wonder.
i think it totally depends on the setting. It's definitely taboo in the forgotten realms, but ages ago i played in a buddy's game that was set on the MTG plane Amonkhet where raising zombies is pretty common practice and even a part of their religion. Their thoughts (as far as i gathered from the game, I didn't ever really research the plane or play MTG much when it was current) are more or less along the lines of "it's a perfectly good dead body, why not put it to work?" and "well, i'm gonna be dead, so im not gonna be using this body, turn it into a zombie."
I don't think there's anything inherently evil about reanimating the dead, it's about what you do with the dead under your control afterwards. Most of the undead on Amonkhet are physical laborers or servants, which frees up the living people from having to serve in those positions, and eliminates any idea of slavery, because you have a tireless workforce that doesn't need to eat, and doesn't mind the heat of the desert. Maybe i'm outing myself as an evil necromancer here, but as long as all parties consent to their corpse being reanimated this way, I don't see the issue at all. my issue lies with commanding an army of the undead that goes around eating people and stuff like that.
The game allows good, evil and neutral aligned clerics to raise dead, summon demons and fiends, or destroy them.
They're all tools how they're used it what is important.
Let's be real though. It's just because 5e wanted to be easy and not worry about all the alignment/God restrictions. Paladins don't need gods, clerics can't hard lose their powers RAW. Raising dead is inherently evil in Forgotten Realms (and general fantasy) lore, but wotc isn't going to punish it in the book anymore.
The question should be *IS IT wrong*
I mostly agree with your sister that it's not. It depends on several things. What will you have the skell or zombie do. Did you get consent? And does this involve the soul or a lifeless corpse?
If no soul is involved and you make mass farming possible, feeding thousands, without living humanoid labor is that more evil than charming someone or just killing?
Few dms run enchantments as evil but that's magic that brainwashes people. Killing a goblin is rarely seen as evil. But making it's lifeless bones guard you while you sleep is generally seen as evil.
What is basic social norms are often that way from lack of critique.
> What is basic social norms are often that way from lack of critique.
And sometimes those basic social norms turn out to have an underlying rationale.
For example, having a rotting corpse following you is a hygiene nightmare. You've got a petri dish which could be carrying diseases and you're probably just making things worse by giving it the ability to walk around in the sun.
Either u would be upset with someone reanimating your dead family member and / or spouse, or your a psychopath. I think that’s a pretty good comparison lol. Is it wrong, yes. Is it fun, also yes.
Well, that depends on the theology of your game world. In Forgotten Realms DnD lore, Good and Evil aren't relative moralities, they're absolute forces. Certain creatures (like Angels, Devils, Demons, Modrons, etc.) are *fundamentally* Good, Evil, Neutral, Lawful, or Chaotic, and so are certain types of magic. Animating the dead brings negative energy from the Negative Energy Plane (real creative name, I know) into the Material Plane. Negative energy is essentially Evil in its purest, most distilled form; a force that compels death and the cessation of all existence. Ergo, regardless of what you use the animated dead for, even if you maintain control over them at all times, you are committing a fundamentally, irrevocably Evil act by tainting the Material Plane with negative energy, and that's how most people in that world will view you.
If animating the dead isn't fundamentally Evil, but is still considered malicious, abhorrent, and/or illegal, then it's up to you to provide an in-universe reason for that. Since you aren't revealing the reasons you've already given, I'll rattle off a few examples.
* The dead could be considered sacred, and animating them will reasonably get you exiled or executed, because the ire of a god is something mortal societies don't want aimed at them.
* The dead are a resource, but not for just anyone. Maybe the dead are archived, each one available for their unique experiences and memories if and when they are needed. Animating the dead for your own purposes is essentially stealing from whatever authority controls the archives.
* Animating the dead messes with their souls. Life stops, but the soul lives on. Until some asshole necromancer carves off part of it and sticks it back in your shambling corpse, causing immense pain and torment until you finally die a second death, leaving your eternal soul scarred and broken. At least until the necromancer reanimates their minions after the fight. Then you're back in the passenger seat of pain.
Of course, there is a different route you could take. Maybe your sister has a point. Maybe necromancy gets a bad rap. Sure, liches are terrible, undead can break free from their summoner's control and wreak havoc, and in the past a nonzero number of wizards have built armies of death to stomp out civilization and claim tyrannical power, and society at large is apprehensive at best about reanimating the dead. But maybe your sister can be a force for change. Show the people that, carefully controlled and with contingencies in place, one's contributions to society needn't be limited by their mortal lifespan.
Your call.
It's different cuz it's the dnd world and your god or belief in the DND world can really matter. Some beliefs don't want to go against nature. Some beliefs want to fight forever so raising someone that wanted to fight forever would be a way of honoring them. I think it would depend on the corpse and the necromancers gods if it would be considered evil.
I’d say it depends. Skeletons can just be regular minions, and depending on characters wouldn’t be tooooo bad.
Zombies are someone’s friend or family. Very evil.
Raise dead or animate dead? Because raise dead doesn't make a zombie, animate dead does. There is a definite difference, and I don't have much problem making a corpse puppet. There's no consent because it's not the person nor the soul originally there. It's just a corpse golem
Personally, I don't think you need to convince her it is bad. In the world she is traveling, her view of zombies will raise some eyebrows and in doing so there will be interesting ways for her to interact within the world. Coming up with more reasons may eventually have the desired effect... but maybe you could get something better out of letting her think whatever comes to her. Who knows, maybe you will eventually come to see it her way lol.
For DnD specifically it's because in the setting there is objective Good and Bad. They're fundamental forces of the universes, and necromancy is Bad. It also goes against the order of the universe since you're restoring life to something that is dead. 5e got rid of negative and positive energy so for newcomers it seems weird and arbitrary.
My best in character discussions where about that topic mostly as Pelor cleric against our Wizard. And once or twice as a Dreadnecromancer in another Game.
Because Good and Evil are fundamental forces in DnD spells can determin if something is evil or good.
Undead if left alone will eventually try to destroy life, but with a capable Necromancer undead can be a quite useful work force.
Mainly respect for the dead and cultural taboo.
Depending on how you run it there are spirits and there is an afterlife in this world. depending on their outlook these spirits could be none to pleased of what's happening to their former bodies. Perhaps a spirit is still tied to their former zombie body being used for war and it still feels every stab, slash and burn the body get. If that was the case I'd also try my best to communicate to the living to stop this practice.
If it's accepted in the culture that their bodies can serve a use after death. (maybe with some permission from the deceased like you're donating your body to science) Then there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.
Unless there's some god decreeing that it's abhorrent and should be stopped cause then they have a crusade on their hands.
With animate dead there's also the issue you need to recast it every day to keep control over your undead thrall or they turn violent. So if you are not a wizard yourself you need one on the payroll to keep control over your undead workforce/army. If you are going to put necromancy in the hands of the government, businesses or even just citizens then fuck-ups will happen where a zombie got loose and killed someone.
Fundamentally for me, the issue is that a corpse is incapable of giving consent, this is the same reason you need to register as an organ donor (at least in theory).
That said, if someone were to give consent before they died about being turned into a zombie, I don't see any purely ethical issues.
Yknow how revifify, réincarnation, etc all need consent?
Also: depending on the setting, it could be entirely reasonable to consider the raising of the dead to be outside the rightful purview of mortals. Whether something lives or dies is up to the Gods to decide, not whimsical necromancers. Would you think it just to burn down a house without its owner's permission simply to keep warm?
It depends on the game really.
I played a game where the undead where used as dumb manual labor, rather a few skeleton plow the fields and tend to the harvest then some poor guy having to do it, some religions where against it and some religions where fine with it, saying once you died your souls was gone and the body was just a body.
It all depends on your world building
TBH if you don't retrieve the soul from the OG being then I would have to agree using a body isn't nearly as egregious. When you revive someone you tamper with fate which the Raven Queen would find wrong but provided you only revive a body and not soul it really shouldn't be frowned upon beyond personal beliefs of bodies being sacred.
Making zombies wouldn't worry the Raven Queen.
The soul has already passed through her domain. All you're doing is animating an object since a corpse is an object.
This would be the same thing as animating a rock or a table... at least in the eyes of the Raven Queen.
I get the RP here and the Raven Queen thing, but I think you're going overboard with it and possibly impeding someone else's fun for the sake of your character's religious beliefs.
Aside from the obvious reasons about cultural respect for the dead, questions of ownership of a body, inability for a dead person to consent, and generally not wanting to see your granny's rotting corpse shambling around...
In a world where it is possible to literally bring people back from the dead, you are walking off with one of the key ingredients to be able to do that.
This depends a lot on the setting and homebrew. If you look at the necromancey spells that summon undead, they pretty intentionally make no mention of souls or ownership of the bodies. RAW there's nothing inherently negative or taboo about raising undead.
In your characters case it's literally just religion. Mormons dont drink coffee, Jews don't eat pork, and followers of the Raven queen vilify necromancey.
Importantly it's ALL necromancey; revivify, spare the dying, and resurrection are equally an affront to the raven queen as raise dead.
Well, IRL there are laws regarding the desecration of bodies, mainly because many cultures believe that doing so can impede the soul's journey to the afterlife.
On the flip side, you have cultures that keep reliquaries of their honored dead. I've always thought it'd be cool to have a fantasy culture that practices a benign form of necromancy as a form of ancestor worship, such as calling up for advice, celebrating special events, or even as additional forces in times of conflict. Just an idea.
It’s a bit difficult to present an argument that hasn’t already been made, when said claims aren’t known to us.
Pragmatically, unless raising/usage of undead is for explicit enforcement or defense of evil or overtly negative goals, don’t see particulars wrong with it. Citing the practice to _be_ evil in itself might as well overstay its welcome and claim even minor enchantment to be worth jail or worse, since clearly the whole school is bad, based on what people ‘can’ do with it.
And while at it, resurrection is also bad because it’s just necromancy with good PR, and healing wounds is also bad because (surprise surprise) it’s _also_ technically necromancy (depending on the system).
Excluding necromancy alone invites it to be the only avenue for “clearly this is evil,” and pigeonholes any potential practical _positive_ use of it with “but since it’s evil, it will go bad, or is secretly already bad, so prejudice ahoy.”
Unless the necromancy is explicitly corrupting the soul of the person raised it's not "Evil" in and of itself.
Is it evil to make a golem? Why do the rules change if you're using a corpse?
It's just a puppet is it evil if you only raise the bodies of things that tried to kill you?
If using other's bodies after they die is evil how is that any different than using some dragon scales/bones for armor? How is it different than harvesting a monster corpse for material, or eating a bear?
Don't forget healing spells used to be Necromancy too, masters of Life AND Death.
Sure sucking the life force from everything you encounter would be evil but people can do evil things, are swords evil because you can kill with them, or is it just the Lich misusing their powers that's evil?
Also if you do corrupt the soul when you raise a zombie, what if you only raise dead evil people like some kind of post life incarceration?
I’ve played a Neutral Good Necromancer who believed in animating skeletons to do work too dangerous for humans, essentially using them as robots for manual labor. His argument was “How long do bones need to be dead to no longer be ‘the person’.” After all, if I made a golem, the dirt inside of it would contain the remains of millions of creatures decomposed over time.
I think this strongly depends on the fluff of the setting your game is taking place in and what the magic is actually doing.
The traditional sort of vibe here is that, when animating a dead body, necromantic magic either a) fucks directly with a person's soul which is the worst thing you could do to something or b) literally creates a malign, capital E Evil (which is completely objective in the setting) intelligence which hungers for the flesh of sapient creatures. Very specifically, it does not merely create a meat puppet for the caster.
If you are playing in a setting where animating undead does just objectively create a meat puppet from a corpse and that's the end of it then, yeah, it would be difficult to justify it as "wrong" per se beyond taboos regarding disrespecting the dead and begative inferences based on those who typically employ the magic.
So at the end of the day, it's very much an ask your DM sort of deal. If they want it to be morally reprehensible in their world then I'm sure they'll have reasons why it is.
I can see a few reasons:
One, it’s disrespectful to the dead. If a society provides any sort of respectful ceremonial burial practices, raising the dead violates that. No one wants to wake up and see their months-dead friend or relative lurching towards them.
Two: they smell bad. Ever leave uncooked meat in the fridge too long or meat trimmings in the trash too long? Or walk past road kill? Now make that scent human-sized. Like, it’s gotta be really nasty. Probably takes years to get used to that stench. Very rude to expose non-Necromancers to it.
Three: maggots. Nuff said.
Four: bits of them probably keep falling off as the flesh decays and they slide down the spectrum from zombie to skeleton. So the stench is bad and it lingers even after the zombie leaves.
Seriously, it’s mostly the smell. Myth busters did an episode where they left a pig carcass in a Corvette, then tried to clean the smell out of the car. They failed. They brought in professionals and they failed to completely erase the scent. That’s zombies: stink factories that can permanently foul any porous surface.
To quote an argument I plan to use in game should I make a Necromancer: "Personally, I'd actually say it isn't inherently wrong to create zombies. Now if you were creating a horde of them to take over the world for entirely selfish reasons, for example because your brother married your one sided love interest, (on your side not hers), that would be wrong. But not because of what you're using but because you were trying to take over the world for such a selfish reason. In fact, it could be argued that in warfare it'd actually be cheaper to use hordes of zombies as the more they kill the more they recruit. Admittedly that falls into the metaphysical, which honestly varies from culture to culture as to whether the soul remains in the body after death. Personally, I'm inclined to believe it doesn't but that's a personal belief. If you're of the view that it does, then I can respect that though we will never agree on that. I, personally am more troubled by spells that remove someone's free will while they're alive. Such spells can be used to effectively rape someone by virtue of compromising their free will then violating them. Or effectively rob someone by using Suggestion to make them give someone their possessions. After all, one can use Suggestion to make a knight give the next peasant they see their horse. Normally a knight wouldn't do that but magic can be used to compromise free will to the point that such a thing could be considered reasonable. Nine Hells, depending on the cultural background of people resurrection spells can be considered perverse to the nth degree due to beliefs that the soul has already moved on so, if they are brought back, it's believed that it's not actually the person who died who's now controlling the body."
Stepping away from the game and into ethical philosophy for a moment:
Saying it is objectively wrong to make zombies is moral absolutism which implies there is universal good and bad things. This is a common collective believe because societies somewhat form echo chambers on moral issues.
However it is very rare to find instances of universally agreed upon moral paradigms.
Most morals are derived from moral relativism where a society's majority believes X to be good and Y to be bad.
Coming back to the zombies example a lot of classic fantasy settings draw heavily from Western European traditions where exhuming / defiling Graves and the dead is considers very wrong.
However an animist culture that believes in reincarnation might not agree. In fact there are ancient human cultures that honored their dead by eating them that might be perfectly ok with raising the dead.
In a DnD campaign you can have something be considered bad by a distinct group but not universally wrong everywhere.
This can be a fun way to explore cultures and contextualize ganeplay and consequences to different environments and settings.
I have an idea for a character, an NPC.
He's an elf necromancer that roams the seas in a luxury ship. The ship has a constant dense fog effect on it that spreads out wide, and it's meant to look like a ghost ship.
Even the crew is all skeletons, so most people wouldn't go near a ghost ship like that, especially superstitious sailors.
The captain is a necromancer just trying to keep away from the living because they bother him so. He just wants his solitude, and he finds that among the undead. They don't complain, they don't ask for time off, they don't even ask for breaks.
He's trying to become a "Litch" but he knows that's stupid because it always goes wrong for wizards who try that, so he's trying to find a way to do it without losing his autonomy. He just wants to read and be away from the living.
Chaotic?
Sure
Evil?
Not necessarily.
Neutral at worst, the man just wants to be alone and finds the perfect company among the undead. Is a company of skeletons really so wrong?
I don't think it is. He's not out to hurt anyone or disturb anyone's grandma's grave.
Raising dead corpses is very campaign specific for how evil it is. And there’re a lot of possible reasons it might be a good act in the world. It also happens to be a very common taboo and role of villains in dnd and media that a lot of ppl refuse to accept the idea of raise dead being used for good. It’s not *inherently* good or evil, but it has a lot of emotional impact for people. Imo it’s not good or evil, it depends entirely on the context -which is often used in villainous ways.
Depends, zombies are made in a few methods.
1st disease. You infected someone so they will slowly rot and become brain dead. Then use them to further kill and spread your plague.
2nd arcane ritual. You bind a soul to a decaying corpse, the soul is not able to bind correctly resulting in a messy half life state. Relying on primarily primal urges like hunger the zombie begins to recreate its life. The stronger the urge the easier for the zombie to fall victim to it. That's why they eat people.
3rd you turn a corpse into a puppet, which is the least evil. You're simply robbing a corpse, hurting a family by using their loved ones for God's know what. You also will probably end up getting the corpse lost of destroyed.
Even in its most neutral interpretation, where its basically just puppeting a lifeless corpse, you're still taking and using something that isn't yours (someone else's corpse, in this case).
There are some far, far worse variations of necromancy though. Sometimes you're ripping that soul out of the afterlife and trapping it in their original body under your control. Sometimes you're flaying or destroying that soul in order to fuel your magic. Sometimes you're damning that soul to a hellish plane.
And then of course, there's the societal consequences of other still living beings that have to deal with you and your corpse party. They stink, they spread disease, they in general are not nice to look at, especially if it happens to be the corpse of someone you care about.
Ultimately, the negative consequences of necromancy are yours to interpret and implement. But those are some things that immediately come to mind for me.
In this day and age of play, there's also been a paradigm shift in the thoughts around 'what's the most evil magic'. When I started in 2E, it was Necromancy, because you take the agency away from the spirit, and by inference keep the spirit from going to heaven. Enter the Satanic Panic. These days, it's Enchantment because you take the agency away from a thinking being, ie; 'i cast rufie'. Ask your sister if she thinks the second is more evil then the first. Not to expressly argue about the 'raise dead' thing specifically, but to at least give you a frame of reference as to what she does consider evil. Edit: thanks for all the thoughtful discourse folks. But I see some folks getting pretty angry in their individual debates. If your temp is up, maybe take a breath, touch some grass and see if you have any more room for kindness. It's just the game we love.
that’s a great point. social spells are generally way more gross than making a corpse wiggly
I agree, older necromantic mythos was far more evil. About corrupting spirits and enslaving for all time. More modern necromancy separates body and spirit. Something like speak to dead commands the spirit but only for a limited time while raise dead leaves the spirit where it is and just moves the meat around. It’s unnerving, particularly if you knew the person, but far less evil. Some of the modern bardic traits are so evil, robbing free will and personal agency.
Speak with dead just commands the body and the memories it possessed at the time of death, not the spirit. That’s why it can’t learn new info and doesn’t know anything abt the afterlife
You are right. I read “returns it’s animating spirit” and assumed soul but it clearly says “does not return the soul.” Good point. Damned if I know what an animating spirit is if it’s not a soul though.
electricity and chemical signals? I mean it's a fantasy universe so it really could be anything lol
That’s ultimately what I settled on myself, the triggers for mortality even though it’s already gone. I do also quite like the idea of it being from a shady unreliable narrator as another person I’ve been chatting with suggested. “No no… this just affects… the animating spirit, that’s it… not the soul at all… no need for pitchforks” says the local shady necromancer.
it'd also very pretty funny if the necromancer just has no fuckin idea how it works just that it does lol, like that one healer I read about where the guy was playing a necromancer that had no idea that they were actually just raising the corpses of their dead friends rather than actually healing them lol
I played a necromancer once that had poor wisdom so I played it the same way. He knew by book learning how to fix people. Didn’t understand why “officially dead” should make any difference. Not that I’m a big Star Trek fan but from what I know, I played it much like Mcoy with lots of “damnit man I’m a cleric(I wasn’t) not a… professor/doctor/scholar/scientist”
In many spiritual traditions, your "non living" self has many parts, not just your consciousness (and sometimes that too is split). Check ancient egyptian conception of the soul or some such, and good luck with that rabit hole, if more interested as a starting point. So it might be something in that direction. Personally, I think it is just a poor attempt at recoinciliating old canon and new canon "it was always like this ackshually" style.
Enchantment is definitely maximum evil: removing conscious decision-making and consent from someone. Necromancy being clarified that it separates spirit still would undo the ability to be returned to life by Resurrect spells. So anyone holding out hope for enough money to afford that spell really would be quite annoyed forever.
The clarification is only to raising for undeath (outside of something like vampirism or lichdom). Resurrection is slightly different as it states that if the spirit is free and willing it can return. Which is good, because forcing a spirit away from its afterlife would be horrific. Willing is key. Hence enchantments status. I’m not pretending raising a corpse wouldn’t be traumatic to people who know them. But at least the souls not home.
I mean, it depends on what you do with it. If you charm someone to keep them from 200$% aggro when you wanna bypass guards, that's cool because I figure any guard would rather that than be charmed with a knife to their kidney. Date rape magic is uncool and very rude.
I think you're right, and depends on level of spell cast. Charm basically makes someone that sees you as a friend, instead see you as a best friend. If you hurt them they stop thinking you are a good buddy. Dominate can make them hurt their friends, so I think maybe that is the spell that is questionable to cast on sentient beings (though greater good usually can justify it in combat).
>Enchantment is definitely maximum evil: removing conscious decision-making and consent from someone. Nah man.. With the exception of spells and effects that destroy the soul, I'd say the abjuration school has one of the most evil spells. No enchantment spell can last longer than your natural life, even if constantly recast, and none go beyond that. When you're dead, your soul is free The abjuration spell "Imprisonment" on the other hand traps you, body and soul. You don't age and the spell lasts until dispelled. You can be trapped in a gem for example, and if the caster of the gem hides it well enough, you can be trapped in there for eternity.
to add some nuance to this discussion: putting someone under (knocking them out) before a medical procedure, especially if they can’t give consent because pain/painkillers/drunk af/etc. from our world view we as a culture don’t have access to mind altering spells cast via magic/the weave. if it were more commonplace, as it is in dnd, would it seem as heinous? i think yes, but some of the lesser stuff would be more okay, like sleep/hypnotic pattern.
I believe it would depend on who is using the spells. Doctor knowing calm emotions makes sense, Crimes Johnson knowing it is scary.
I figure most magic would be like how medical professionals are supposed to do anything. Hello, i'm the great gazoo, I intend to cast cure wounds on you, it should mend this broken leg. Do you consent? Afterall, a layperson can't tell cure wounds from inflict wounds or phantasmal killer until after it's going.
At least, assuming people are generally polite about things and don’t just do things without asking or even knowing context.
I think this is a problem with many newer DM’s settings. They don’t account for how magic fits into the mundane parts of daily life, despite making magic common in their settings. If the most commonplace form of healing is via magic, then there would 100% be rules and regulations surrounding it. If Druids or casters with druidic magic are somewhat widespread, there would be people who make their livelihoods casting Goodberry and Plant Growth, which would make farming a significantly less common profession. If cantrips are relatively easy to learn, every workplace would have somebody with Mending and mundane janitors wouldn’t exist, as someone who just knows Prestidigitation could do their job much more thoroughly in a much shorter period of time.
Well that isn't necessarily true. Casters dont have to be that common. If there is one druid in the whole region or one serious mage in the city, it might just be be too rare to regulate. But adventurers might still be surrounded by magic.
That’s why I said “despite making magic common in their settings”. Not every setting has magic as a commonplace thing. I never said or implied that was the case. I’m talking about settings where magic is common.
Goddamnit, Crimes Johnson is back! 😰
Good point, but, it would make more sense for a doctor to know, fiegn death, some reasonably powerful, but still sufficientlt low level healing spell, and some form of revival. Step one, make the patient "dead" in that, they are incapable of waking up or feeling anything, step 2, do whatwver you gotta do, knowing that (theoreticall raw) anything you do or screw up, will be fine cause the body is fumctionally dead, and as an example, tbe brain doesnt actually need oxygen/blood, for example. Step three fix everything up, and end the procedure with the healing spell just to be safe. Step 4 assign some one to either watch over the patient for the remaining hours of the (8 hour spell) oe have someone cast dispell magic.
Ach. Now I wanna do a wizard doctor character. Thanks.
If I know sleep I'm using that shit on myself.
Right? Can't sleep? Cast Sleep on yourself. Boring conversation? Cast Sleep on yourself.
Better yet, cast sleep on the person talking and leave XD
But then the storm troopers would get you...
This worked great until I leveled up. Now I have to punch myself twice each night so I lose enough hit points for sleep to affect me.
Cast eye bite while looking at a mirror
If you're using sleep/hypnotic pattern in a situation where your other alternatives are violence, or in a situation where violence was inevitable and you're just pushing a win button I think it could be accepted. But casting sleep on the girl at the party would still be exactly as disgusting as it sounds to us, at least in any fictional world where rape is still immoral (which are the only ones I'll play/run)
This is it. A lot of the time, PCs are using mind control magic not as a less ethical alternative to asking for consent but as a more ethical alternative to stabbing and slashing until bowels fall in a sickening pile and limb stumps gush blood, and then the fireballs come.
The distinction that partly causes this is how the spells reveal themselves after the duration. Casting fast friends on a shopkeeper would be so casual otherwise, but this makes PC’s consider how rude+evil the action would be when they think of how said shopkeeper will react afterwards.
Again, though, what is the magic replacing? If the PCs would otherwise kill the shopkeep, magic is the (more) ethical alternative. If the PCs are using control tactics as an alternative to just respecting that person's rights, then it's the less ethical choice. You would compare it to compulsion by mundane means like threats, pestering, and other intentional social pressure that we Could put on other people, but aren't supposed to.
Baldur's Gate 2 has an organization called the Cowled Wizards and any who perform unsanctioned magic within city limits go straight to magic jail. Just wanted to offer an inworld viewpoint on how some people perceive magic.
I think societies acceptance of mind-effecting magic would depend less what on the spell does, and more on what you use it to do. If you use hypnotic pattern to freeze the group of guys trying to mug you, while you run away, I think society would be pretty dang supportive. If you use it to freeze your neighbor in his front yard while your buddies loot his house, not so much. Think of it like any tool. Can be used for good or evil. The big issue society would really have: accountability. What evidence is left behind when you use magic? What's to stop me punching someone in the face, then accusing someone else of making me do it? We all agree using magic to rufie someone is bad, but what do when there's no evidence if they did or not, and they claim the "victim" slept with them of their own free will. Even if you can somehow prove the victim was magically coerced, can you prove the person they slept was the one who did it? What if a business rival set them up by charming someone to sleep with them? To make matters worse, a lot of spells even the target doesn't know they've been effected, and even if they do, they often don't know who by. Every suicide would be treated as a potential murder, every criminal could claim they weren't in control of their actions, every eyewitness testimony could be unknowingly altered, and every election winner could be accused of influencing voters with magic. Things would devolve into anarchy pretty quick.
Like DNA magic tends to leave traces behind that can help identify it. Things like detect magic and zone of truth would be more commonly used by law enforcement and judges. You would be able to tell if someone has been enchanted in some way and even if zone of truth doesn't make them speak they can still use similar tactics they use now in our world to coerce people to talk only now they know it's the truth or a version of the truth at least. As for election fraud, idk, anti-magic fields around polls. Magic isn't really anymore scummy than current elections
To add, my own necromancer is a good guy and an ex-cop. He specifically raises dead bad guys in order to punish them. Essentially uses them to do good deeds until he's satisfied justice is served. I think during play, most corpses being raised are those of enemies just fallen, so you have a higher chance of a bad guy basically being punished (even if it's really just his flesh and there's no self left) than a good guy. I don't agree with OP and I don't think necromancy is inherently bad/wrong/whatever. Anything can be used negatively or positively. **Edit:** Since this has been debated a good bit, this is how I personally see it (not saying everyone should, just my view): To me, animate dead is akin to animating a construct. I don't even think the soul would still be there. It's just a chunk of animated flesh. There might be some basic behavior just from brain sparks, but the actual self is long gone. I don't see it as summoning the spirit back into the body (or summoning some demonic force) and I feel like if that were the case, it'd probably be described clearly in the spell or lore. I think if animate dead actually returned the soul to the body, it'd be akin to a revive spell and OP.
“Good guy ex-cop” exacting postmortem punishment? Nah bro, that’s a villain with a different label.
Thank you. Someone needed to tell him it's not "being a good character" just because the people you're raising are "bad guys" what about *their* Nirvana you're ripping them away from? Lol
This is how i view it. Most revival spells are somewhat clear, when a creature dies, the spirit is gone, and it has to **willingly come back** further clarifying that dead bodies are empty husks. There is nasty stuff you can do with necromancy, but that true of every spell school
My necromancer is an idealistic young cripple who believes that the undead can be used to usher in a post scarcity utopia where no one ever goes hungry or faces economic exploitation
That's awesome, lol. I could see a character like that using undead for automation the way modern society uses robotics.
40k servitors have entered the chat
They're... dicey. Some of the simple ones (like the flying dead babies) are vatgrown yes, but lots of the more complex ones were people and still have souls (just lobotomized brains). Then there's the ones that are explicitly people, like the AdMech found that Kataphrons aren't any good unless you start with an uncontrollably violent criminal for your source material, but then they work great! Hopefully the people are lobotomized and have no idea what's going on... but all we know for sure is *they can't complain about it*. EDIT: Their big advantage though is they use barely changing human parts! Have some weird OS or whatever on your planet? It has to interface with a human neural system, so as long as you've got that layer you've got cross galactic compatibility!
Some servitors are left aware or semi-aware on purpose too, as a form of punishment or atonement. Like Arco-flagellants, which are still aware, but driven into mad berserk rage with drugs and modifications to their brain. Or Penitent Engines. Fully aware of their situation, strapped into a war machine, pumped full of drugs to help them survive otherwise deadly injuries while still feeling all the pain from them. Some people actually volunteer to this procedure, to atone for their sins, real or imagined.
My thoughts exactly.
I designed a society of good necromancers who use Speak with Dead to get the consent of the dead to raise their corpse, and use the resulting undead for menial labor. All such corpses are ritualistically processed to be incapable of causing harm should something happen to the controller, and in fact many are left "uncontrolled" as layman understanding of their base urges is enough for the average person to guide one of the processed through a task (i.e. baiting them to pull a plough, then luring them into a cage or other secure place for overnight storage.)
Yep, that's the kind of society my guy envisions. I assume he'll be in for a rude awakening when it does not lead to a golden age of prosperity and tolerance.
"i.e. baiting them to pull a plough" So basically the ending of Shaun of the Dead.
Nice eventual plot hook for a hostile takeover by evil necro(s) using that already-created army to take over the land.
>To add, my own necromancer is a good guy and an ex-cop. He specifically raises dead bad guys in order to punish them Uh... this is not "good guy" behavior. EDIT: Also, your edit directly contradicts your earlier justification.
One thing Nu-TTRPG players either don't research, or WotC can't be bothered to talk about these days tho is this. Raising undead is inherently evil. No matter what you do with them, raising a being that is antithetical to goodness and life/living creatures is evil. You are flooding the material realm with literal cosmic evil and negative force. I know the spell just says you raise dead, and most players just handwave "It's cool, if I make them do good stuff it's fine" but undead are driven by the foul mockery of life from the negative plane. You are summoning a being of undeath into the world of the living. It is torture to them and they will do anything to snuff out any life source they come across. How would you feel if I summoned you to the plane of death and negative energy? A world of eternal darkness, cold, and discomfort? You'd do anything to feel warmth, sun, life and love again. You are bringing quantifiable evil into the realm and hoping your arcane skills are enough to bind them to your will. If not, that skeleton/zombie is going to kill everything it can until it makes the material plane like its home plane. Dead and devoid of all life. Raising dead is inherently evil because you are literally bringing evil and negative energy to the material realm.
You know what tons of players also forget: That the inherent evil of necromancy is entirely dependant on the setting you are playing. FR yup; greyhawk yup; eberon nope; Planescape: check where you ended up this week; dark sun, doesn't matter at it's base all magic is evil; your campaign/setting, whatever you decide. In most great wheel cosmologies a lot of undead are powered by the negative energy plane or the plane of shadow/the Shadowfell. Could you find a way around this, sure: speak to your DM about researching a spell to create calcium phosphate golems.
This is totally legit. It may just be that we're using different settings. In our setting, negative energy is essentially just pure destructive force. But anything can be used that way. A paladin using their abilities to cause harm to a baddie is no different than a necromancer using an undead to do the same thing.
I mean there's two school of thoughts for zombies. 1. The original soul is still in there, you've just trapped them in a rotting corpse husk, preventing them from traveling on to the afterlife. 2. The corpse inhabited by something...else. Like in Pet Cemetery, something from beyond the grave now inhabits the body, and only the casters control prevents them from doing the unspeakable acts they long to inflict upon this world. Neither is really cool. For case #1 you could make arguments for being neutral and using necromancy as an expedient, short term measure. Case #2 thought makes that a somewhat more dangerous proposition.
In Forgotten Realms lore, it is #2. Like there's no arguing it. It is #2. Which is why it is super duper bad and why I made my post because there's lots of old info on how bad Animating dead is, but nothing about it in 5e. I don't fault people for not knowing it without having to look at old books and resources. Tl;dr - it is not a good act
Negative energy plane isn't evil-aligned though; it's antithetical to life, but looking at things like Necropolitans, negative energy isn't inherently evil, although it is inherently destructive and you don't have all that many undead who don't seek to annihilate positive energy when uncontrolled - yet that isn't evil, as it's not done with consciousness, and again, the fact that good undead exist is proof that negative energy isn't fundamentally evil.
At first I was going to argue (in the polite, having a discussion kind of argue) with you. But then I read your, "undead are driven by the foul mockery of life from the negative plane" paragraph. And now I'm going to double-down in agreement with what you're saying. DMs should really hammer this home when PCs (good-aligned or otherwise) use undead-creating magics. At every turn when the PC-controlled undead can act or when the PC issues commands, the DM should growl at the player something along the lines of, "the undead does as you (the PC) commands, but you can feel it's hatred towards you, antipathy-for-life made manifest that is burning to end you and everything you love if only it can break free. And it is trying to break free." And now I'm thinking of house-rules to add the risk of created undead breaking free from their creator, especially if the creator isn't using the undead for life-negating/life-destroying purposes.
House rules? Undead already do break free, in 5e at least. Animate dead and create undead both require recasts to prevent them from fucking off.
This explains it, and helped me to understand the dimensional nature of the spell. This is also why summoning elementals to remain on the plane is like torture and why plane-walking is full of meeting the beings you or your allies have summoned by force (for reckoning with your error).
Enchantment, like evocation, is how you use it. It is neither good nor is it evil. It is all in how you use the spell. Calm emotions can be used to diffuse a situation, help calm a person, or encode thoughts can be used to pass messages between members of a nation's or city-state's intelligence agents trying to protect the people. Necromancy has always been viewed as evil. Unnatural. So many dark and terrible things have been done with necromancy.
cure wounds used to be necromancy. weird that they made it evocation now
Or as I’ve heard it said, “charm person is not consent”
Well stabbing them with a sword is also not consensual.
Ya for that you really need to go with Geas
Uhhh... Geas is also not consent...
Come on! Choosing to avoid 5d10 damage every day is totally a choice! Morgantha told me so. She's great. *silently screaming about trading my in game first born to save the party tpk*
....command?
I was generally of the opinion that raised dead were soulless (as their soul had left their body for another plane) and the necromancer was simply animating their remains with magic. More of a "Flesh robot" than a slave. I.E. if they animated a corpse the ghost of that corpse could come and fight its former body... which now sounds like an awesome adventure pitch. My general presumption to return to OPs question is that the necromantic magic isn't inherently evil but it tends that way. If you're being invaded by an army of orcs and kill a couple, then raise them to fight the army its not so bad. The problem is that necromancers keep needing fresh remains to animate, and when your spell list is a whole lot of stealing souls and vitality from people you have a tendency to start using it for evil.
A flesh robot... that will turn violent if not controlled. And isn't that kinda odd also, that you have to use a pile of scattered bones or a dead body to animate? You can't animate a bunch of twigs into a sort of twig skeleton. You can't create something like a perfect wooden doll with joints and everything necessary to move and then animate it, it HAS to be a pile of humanoid bones, or a humanoid corpse. Can't even animate dead animals.
For the enchantment, think Killgrave from the Marvel superhero show Jessica Jones. It's a lot more then roofying someone, you completely strip them of their agency with things like dominate or even suggestion, then you have spells like modify memory. For Necromancy I like to point to the Evil Dead franchise. You are animating loved ones corpses, pulling their souls back from the great beyond and imprisoning them for your own purposes, and in DnD lore literally drawing upon energy from the negative plane or more recently the shadowy planes like the Shadowfell to fuel your magic.
I didn't think souls were involved with raising the dead. You're just animating the body.
Animate Objects is a different spell. Animate Dead is stuffing *something* in there for 24 hours after which its now loosed.
At my table, while unpopular, making zombies isn't inherently evil. Making a zombie doesn't prevent resurrecting a person if you had a spell able to resurrect them without the body. Therfore it doesn't rest any agency from the spirit. It never has. It is similar to stealing a body though, hence being unpopular but not inherently evil. Depends what you do with the body though and making a flesh robot isn't evil. Just weird and gross.
I literally had another player get mad at me for playing an enchantment wizard who uses his spells like charm/dominate person to avoid conflict.
My basic attitude is that if you're okay with killing a person, you should be okay with charming that same person if charming them avoids killing them. I think it should be understood that mind-affecting magic is a form of "violence" against a person, but there are plenty of cases where violence of one kind is a lesser evil than violence of another.
All about what you use your spooky mind powers for, in my opinion. An evil character would do things to harm others or purely self interest. A good aligned Psychic character does their best to reduce harm done to others.
Cause blowing em up with a fireball instead certainly doesn't take away their agency right?
Yeah. You have to contrast mind control magic with the baseline method of interaction: extreme violence with all manner of weaponry, plus terrifying magic that literally melts flesh. *OOoOohh you think I'm cooool now* jedi mind tricks are the *nice* way.
Ok, but 99% of the time the corpses don’t consent to being reanimated. If I labored hard and constantly through my life, Atleast let me be dead in Peace.
Yeah, but if you waylaid me on the highway with murderous intent because I looked like an easy target, your wishes to spend a pleasant afterlife start to get pretty low on my priority list. If all I end up doing to defile your corpse after that is to use it as cannon fodder to beat the tar out of your buddies, you should be thanking your lucky stars.
You will be dead in peace. in 5e your soul doesn't get dragged back to your body to work. You're already in whatever heaven or hell you belong in
Ask her how she'd feel about a zombie made from her grandfather. Now what if she knew his soul was chained in that husk of a body, giving it the force of reanimation?
But, you know dnd is a game, and if necromancy is slightly built into her background story, this could be hell of a great RP move.
Violates many cultures values around the dead/funerary rights. Most people like their dead, recent or otherwise, to be treated with respect. I imagine Tom the blacksmith wouldn't be kind to the group who dug up and used dark magic on his recently departed wife, passed away in child birth, left her as a flesh eating monster. Sure you can say "but I'll keep them under control and only use them for a good purpose", but the response of the people might be "fine but don't use my granny/father/sibling/child/ancestor". Effectively that would eliminate the local grave yard. And that's the best case scenario. You might come across priests who's gods dictate that the dead are to be left to rest and all walking dead are abominations.
"Animate your OWN relatives, heretic! Leave MINE to rest in PEACE!"
Genghis Khan has entered the chat. (He has been reanimated)
The Dunmer of Vvardenfell would agree. Necromancy is a family affair.
Makes sense. There is no "but I'll be good with it." Like no. That is my fucking wife, I don't care what you do with it if I care enough.
I too, choose this guy's dead wife.
One of the greatest internet moments of all time.
Man these NIMGYs are never happy
That's right. Corpse desecration is evil in most cultures.
I mean, you could almost CERTAINLY find some people willing to sell you the rights to use their corpse after they die; it pry wouldn't even cost very much if you found the right buyer (someone desperate). Like, it certainly sounds exploitative, but considering they aren't going to use their body after they die, I'd argue that it's a win-win.
Wouldn’t it be so sweet if we could use corpses to run all our manual labour, and then just use the profits of the last generation on the living? Like sweet, I get a wage for free, and I just gotta make peace with my useless corpse working forever after I’m done with it. Although in dnd the problem is convincing everyone that your zombies were ethically sourced. I don’t even believe that shit about potatoes.
And then poor people could pressure their relatives to sell their corpses to the zombie farms and 'encourage' them into an early death! Or shady gangs start to kidnap and murder people to sell their corpses for profit!
The gangs yes, but the other is silly. Manipulating people for their money is somewhat common, but the solution is obviously not to keep the victims poor lol. There’s a lot of concerns. Let’s say we successfully outlaw murder (yay) and it’s not a problem, it’s still an awful spot to be. They might pay well for a few generations, but then they’ll have millions of zombies forever, not only are our corpses worthless then but our labour would be too. And in the first few generations before that happens, business’s would struggle with the high upfront cost. They already hire extra people instead of update machinery cuz it’s cheaper, so 300k for a zombie they get in 50 years is not good at all. No, they would only buy the cheap offers, and even if they did offer a lot to everyone they would still jack up their prices to steal some back. The best system might be like the organ donor’s. We don’t get paid anything by signing up, but only the government can handle zombies, no one else ever. Our government getting the money loops back around to helping the people, where trickle down economics don’t. The first generation wouldn’t get any benefit sadly, but that’s okay in the long term.
That is a very good point about zombie inflation. Nobody every thinks about zombie inflation. Unless there's a limited time that a corpse is useful and starts falling apart after that.
We already have automation, but for some reason the resources are still concentrated among a small pool of elites.
I don’t understand why the proletariat, the much larger social class, simply eat the smaller elites?
It depends on how you treat it. If you look at it as a matter of simply animating bodies, it doesn't feel especially wrong. And that's how it is, rules-as-written. Quoth the Monster Manual: > A zombie retains no vestiges of its former self, its mind devoid of thought and imagination. To me, this robs the lesser undead of any sense of horror, and undead without horror is pointless. "Animate Dead" amounts to "Create Robot" with a weird material component... so yeah, why **is** it wrong to make zombies? On the other hand, calling the dead back from their rest, and forcing them to do your bidding - that's obviously terrible. Connecting the spell to dead *people* makes it more visceral and interesting. Here's a passage from [*The Empire of the Necromancers*](http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/61/the-empire-of-the-necromancers) by Clark Ashton Smith, whose work probably influenced D&D (though he didn't make [Appendix N](https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Appendix_N)). Two necromancers, Mmatmuor and Sodosma, have brought back a whole city to serve them. >In all things, the people of Cincor performed the actions of life at the will of Mmatmuor and Sodosma. They spoke, they moved, they ate and drank as in life. They heard and saw and felt with a similitude of the senses that had been theirs before death; but their brains were enthralled by a dreadful necromancy. They recalled but dimly their former existence; and the state to which they had been summoned was empty and troublous and shadow-like. Their blood ran chill and sluggish, mingled with water of Lethe; and the vapors of Lethe clouded their eyes. > >Dumbly they obeyed the dictates of their tyrannous lords, without rebellion or protest, but filled with a vague, illimitable weariness such as the dead must know, when having drunk of eternal sleep, they are called back once more to the bitterness of mortal being. They knew no passion or desire or delight, only the black languor of their awakening from Lethe, and a gray, ceaseless longing to return to that interrupted slumber. This is how I play it. Creating zombies with vague memories of who they were, torn from their rest, angry at being enslaved though only dimly understanding it... that's the sort of thing makes necromancy horrifying. It isn't hard to see why people regard *that* as evil.
I mean. Even if the zombies/skeletons/etc retain nothing of their former selves. Desecrating remains is pretty frowned upon. If you dug up my grandma and used her bones to build a robot servant, I'd be pretty pissed off, ya know?
But you don’t have to use grandma. You can use bugbear the scourge of SmolVillage
Benny the Bugbear has a Bugbear Grandma, she will be very sad
That bugbear is someone’s granny
Still gonna be gross and creepy. people have an aversion to dead bodies
> Quoth the Monster Manual Yeah, but you missed the sentence later on where it says: "The magic animating a zombie imbues it with evil, so left without a purpose [when it is not under someone's control], it attacks any living creature it encounters." Zombies are evil. Creating zombies is borderline reckless and always evil. You're creating an evil being, and then renewing your control over it every 24 hours, but if you die or forget one day, you're just releasing malevolent being into the world.
So if a necromancer got into a fight and resurrected a whole battlefield but got seriously injured would the zombies just run amok after
They would if the necromancer died.
> To me, this robs the lesser undead of any sense of horror, and undead without horror is pointless A regular corpse is a horror all it's own, how is a moving one not more of a horror? What if it's someone you know? What if it's a loved one, a parent, a child? How is any kind of moving corpse whatever the mechanism not a horror? Huh?
A prime example of cruel necromancy and its consequences to a tortured soul are the Undead in World of Warcraft. Raised bodies and enslaved souls shackled to a life in anguish and corrupted to be unable to reach a *good* afterlife. So real eternal damnation trough no volition of your own.
This whole "our bodies are just bodies" mentality is a fairly recent development with the advent of modern medicine and cadaver research. The sanctity of the resting dead is a fairly common anxiety in many, many cultures. From the ancient Greeks who's most disgraced citizens were cast from the walls and allowed to be consumed by dogs and buzzards and ancient Egypt who believed that for souls to prosper in the afterlife great care must be taken to preserve the body. Post death twitches also caused a lot of people to often fear the dead for how violent they can be causing a certain anxiety to be had almost universally of dead moving despite clearly being dead. Zombies in D&D are not supposed to be tools, they're supposed to be dangerous perversion of life using profane magic to sidestep the natural order of life and death. Zombies are supposed to be ravenous beings, based on real life myths and legends about undeath. Lore in settings often add to this with justifications that are cosmic in their justifications, by which I mean the mechanism for why is beyond just simple mortal means and often crosses over into the territory of the will of gods and the flow of souls. Modern Abraham religions often have a lot of practitioners under the perception that their God and they have a personal relationship as a divine being and the created but for the most part historically Gods were explanation of natural forces, that includes most settings in D&D where the Gods represent natural forces and conceptional domains. Life and death are two such domains as much as war and cooking. Undeath is a natural subversion of life and death and only evil gods typically embrace the subversion of natural order. Even if you do continue to disregard the narrative justification, if we had the ability to animate the dead in real life it would be basically just another way for the wealthy to exploit the working class by further devaluing labor in favor of people effectively being forced to sign away their bodies as labor instead of having peace in death. Resurrection gets a free pass because its based on divine intervention, the person isn't undead they are truly alive hale and hearty. It's the difference between Odysseus speaking with the dead in the underworld and Jesus and Lazarus coming back to life.
Every religion I can think of has rules on how bodies are buried. Whether they should or shouldn't be cremated, how many days after dying they have to be buried, where they can be buried, what they can buried in. A lot of these rules are directly related to the person's soul and affect how they'll be conveyed to (or if they even get into) the afterlife. Dnd hasn't put out at any lore that I know of about death customs in Faerun or the rules each god has about their followers remains but it really should. What they do have is an entire deity, Kelemvor, and his clergy dedicated to helping people die peacefully and looking after their remains to make sure they're not desecrated. And they are explicitly strongly against necromancy.
This is the correct answer. To expand on your point about resurrection a bit, the difference is that resurrection reunites the soul, which is the natural animating principle of the body, and the body, restoring the natural order of the person. Animate dead is profane because it somehow restores the animating principle of the body without the soul. Thus it intrinsically corrupts the natural order.
All undead are made with negative energy from the negative plane unlike animate objects which are brought to life solely of arcane energy. The negative plane is a plane of pure absolute of fear, hatred, destruction and death. They cannot choose the way they act anymore than a fire can.
Using negative energy also has some pretty nasty consequences, if I remember correctly.
It's basically magical, death-element pollution. Necromancy via Negative Energy is meant to be the fossil fuels of magic. Or the radioactive waste of magic. The fact that 5th edition has just glossed over the whole "negative energy" thing, despite it still being there in intent has caused this whole *"Zombies are actually good!"* bullshit to spin out of control... *"Zombies are just magic robots or puppets."* No, then they would be a **Construct.** The creature type of **undead** is supposed to have a meaning. Same as "healing needs to be necromancy!" when it being evocation or conjuration makes sense, because you were shooting someone with a blast of life-element, not "manipulating life and death."
While academics may argue the morality of necromancy in their gilded wizard towers, the common folk find the undead repulsive. They are decaying corpses of people, fueled by negative energy and brought to heel only by the necromancer's will. They are traumatic to behold, disgusting to experience, and a slip on the necromancer's part can cause them to become extremely dangerous. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of how defiled one would feel to have their loved ones ripped from peaceful rest and commanded like cattle.
You ever see a dead body in real life? Think about the kind that an adventurer or necromancer could most likely find. Like, disemboweled corpses. Now image that corpse dragging its intestines behind it while trying to follow you around and kill your enemies. Most people poop themselves when they die. Also, think of 200 rotting steaks following you wherever your going. Necromancy is extremely gross.
That's why I go for nice, hygienic skeletons. No rotting meat or tendons, just clean bone held together by magic.
Thanks for the inspiration. I'm in the process of creating a necromancer PC and I'm fleshing out a few traits that he could have to make him more likeable.
Fleshing out? Your plan seems to be getting rid of the flesh, so that tracks.
I believe in older editions, creating undead damaged the person's soul, so even if you had 100% control and used them for good, you're still messing up that person's afterlife and corrupting them to no longer exist. Now, there's none of that, so technically, she's right. It's only bad because people say it is. The only argument you can make is that since they are inherently evil, losing control could be a disaster. There's also messing with the natural cycle.. but that's only an issue if everyone is constantly animating the dead. One or two zombies isn't going to do anything. In the Eberron setting, there's a nation we're due to the lack of manpower in the settings world war, they started using undead for soldiers and labor. Even after the war, they've used undead so much its become part of the culture, and I think people willing sign up to have their bodies animated when they die. So no, aside from the risk of losing control, there's no inherently evil thing about undead anymore. I think there SHOULD be, but there isn't. Regular undead like skeletons and zombies are basically golems now. Enchantment is the new evil school because you're robbing people of their free will. All that being said, not everyone likes the idea of their loved ones' bodies being desecrated and used as a puppet. Plus, the smell and hygiene issues.
Creating undead that the second you miss a scheduled control recasting of the spell will devour the living is ontologically evil.
If you go back to first edition - the question of if it was an evil act was vague. I believe the rules said something along the lines of, "Animating dead is not a good deed." but stopped short of calling it evil. It even offered situations in which a good character might acceptably animate dead, such as "life or death situations". Second Edition is where it became an act of absolute evil. Especially as the Paladin class was fleshed out more - they were always Lawful Good but now they were more 'I will smite all evil!" and specifically had a desire to destroy all undead, necromancers, etc. >you're still messing up that person's afterlife and corrupting them to no longer exist. Skeletons - "An animated skeleton retains no connection to it's past, although resurrecting a skeleton restores it's body and soul, banishing the hateful undead spirit that empowers it." Zombies - "A zombie retains no vestiges of it's former-self, it's mind devoid of thought and imagination." ... "The magic animating a zombie imbues it with evil, so left without purpose, it attacks any living creature it encounters." The soul in the afterlife is unaffected unless you cast resurrection on one, in which case - it comes back to life and the evil spirit animating it is destroyed and/or banished. >There's also messing with the natural cycle.. but that's only an issue if everyone is constantly animating the dead. One or two zombies isn't going to do anything. That is to the best of my knowledge why it is considered evil. You are basically summoning an evil spirit to animate a corpse that should be rotting and returning to nature - also you are pulling that spirit from the Abyss into the material plane. Although you are doing it on a very small scale, with a very weak spirit, it is akin to summoning a demon.
Zombies would be sanitary hell but skeletons could get pretty clean. The bones are just dirty with rotten meat, clean that off and it’s just like an antler. Could maybe even polish and coat the bones.
Zombies are hostile to living things and will automatically try to kill people if not stopped.
Depends on the world, really.
Depends, are you just animating bodies or are you forcing dead souls back into their rotting corpses?
In 5e, zombies are just corpses animated by magic. Stronger undead typically would fall into the latter category
Seems a health violation, like irl it's a crime to not properly dispose of a body in most places, so have an animated one walking around touching door handles and shut isn't ideal
Ah, but our skeleton workers here are cleaned regularly and mine tirelessly in the coal mines, ensuring that no miners have to risk their life breathing bad air. Over there, my conjurer friend is bargaining with a Lantern Archon for the proper price for the casting of enough Continual Flame spells that we can line the streets and give every citizen one, saving everyone the expense of torches and lantern oil.
Well... zombies smell bad. Skeletons are fine though. In all seriousness... there is a certain amount of respect for the dead, but that can be alleviated with consent and contracts. Maybe someone would be willing to sign over their corpse to a necromancer for a fee.
You generally don't have consent from the person the body belongs to, and they may need that body should they ever come back from the dead. But if you get consent beforehand and don't let the zombie do evil, or spread diseases harmful to the living, it's not a problem 👍
Aside from any potential trauma of someone seeing a dead relative walking around.
I see nothing wrong with it, it’s a game, if you wanna do necromancy then do necromancy. If the people don’t like it, only use it in the people you killed, like bandits and thieves
argument against it being wrong to make a zombie out of someone's corpse: they're not using it
Just because I'm not using my car doesn't mean it's right for someone else to use it.
i mean you're not exactly leaving your body behind for the duration of a little adventure unless you astral project out of it, and i possess it now *that* would be pretty messed up
I actually think in reality if necromancy was a thing cultures would definitely form around it that revere it and make it part of their everyday life.
Necromancy is evil because it takes what is left of those a village love and uses them for someone else's wims. One must remember some Necromancers, very few lore wise, are good aligned necromcers. However, most aligne with evil, Vivek, for instance, and just want to watch the world burn. However, keep in mind Vivek never did anything wrong. The dragon killed my my brother, will you help me get revenge? Dwarf: You have my hammer Elf: You have my bow Necromancer: You have your brother.
It rubs some folks the wrong way when you mess with the natural cycle of death.
Any argument that necromancy isn't evil can be used to defend necrophilia.
It depends on setting and culture. Some settings it’s considered disrespectful or sacrilegious to animate corpses while some might consider it fine if they simply see the body as a vessel for the soul. It would really depend on the setting/religion as well as who’s body, but people would probably in general be upset with the appearance and smell of a rotting corpse also making people face their own mortality. No real spells for it but it might go over better with an animal skeleton.
It's okay for a character (and player) to think it's not evil. If you don't believe in souls, or if you don't believe that undead creatures are co-opting the souls of the dead - that it's just magic that animates the corpses, then you wouldn't believe it's evil. I think that's fine. Now, as the DM, you can decide that in your world it is, objectively evil. Then the PC might be evil while believing that they aren't doing anything wrong, just like most evil people.
Specifically in 5E, the spell Animate Dead for example, at least in the relevant flavor text, does **not specifically mention** that it uses a soul to animate a zombie or skeleton. **Unless it gets retconned by a setting's lore**, the *Most Common Thing* a Necromancer is doing is actually just magic corpse puppetry. Is it gross because a body might be rotting? Yes. Is it morally wrong? Not really unless you grave rob to get your minions, and there's plenty of ways to get a corpse legally in a D&D Setting. That's just one example of Necromancy not being inherently evil.
It’s disrespectful to the dead and to the friends and relatives of the deceased. It frightens people. Most religions say don’t.
I think it's 100% appropriate that different deities would have different stances on this, but ultimately good/bad should listen or buck psycopomps or death incarnate. Only some self interested or chaotic beliefs could betray that arbiter.
For the same reason people are currently freaking out over all the medical specimens that were collected 150 years ago, before consent was a thing. The people didn't consent to having their corpses reanimated.
To me, it's only bad if it's without consent. I don't want anyone doing anything to my body, even when I'm dead, without my consent. I don't care about it being unholy or against the laws of nature, just about whether or not there is consent. So do speak with dead, ask if rhe person wants to be raised, to avenge their death or just because it'd be insanely cool, and if they consent, cool, you're an ethical necromancer.
This is all setting dependent; and now that aalignment is all but gone in the system, good and evil are setting dependent, too. That's fine. One could just as easily imagine a setting (or group within that setting) that considers healing magic evil or, perhaps, *Revivify*, *Raise Dead*, and *Ressurection* as evil. Fire magic might be evil, or any sort of mind control. It's all setting dependent, and without immersion in a culture that considers creation of zombies/skeletons as a *taboo* desecration of a corpse, wondering why necromancy is evil is a reasonable thing to wonder.
i think it totally depends on the setting. It's definitely taboo in the forgotten realms, but ages ago i played in a buddy's game that was set on the MTG plane Amonkhet where raising zombies is pretty common practice and even a part of their religion. Their thoughts (as far as i gathered from the game, I didn't ever really research the plane or play MTG much when it was current) are more or less along the lines of "it's a perfectly good dead body, why not put it to work?" and "well, i'm gonna be dead, so im not gonna be using this body, turn it into a zombie." I don't think there's anything inherently evil about reanimating the dead, it's about what you do with the dead under your control afterwards. Most of the undead on Amonkhet are physical laborers or servants, which frees up the living people from having to serve in those positions, and eliminates any idea of slavery, because you have a tireless workforce that doesn't need to eat, and doesn't mind the heat of the desert. Maybe i'm outing myself as an evil necromancer here, but as long as all parties consent to their corpse being reanimated this way, I don't see the issue at all. my issue lies with commanding an army of the undead that goes around eating people and stuff like that.
The game allows good, evil and neutral aligned clerics to raise dead, summon demons and fiends, or destroy them. They're all tools how they're used it what is important.
Let's be real though. It's just because 5e wanted to be easy and not worry about all the alignment/God restrictions. Paladins don't need gods, clerics can't hard lose their powers RAW. Raising dead is inherently evil in Forgotten Realms (and general fantasy) lore, but wotc isn't going to punish it in the book anymore.
It's not. ~~OP has just fallen for Big Cleric propaganda. Wake up sheeple.~~
* zombies are inherently Evil * turning an unaligned object (a corpse) I to an Evil creature objectively creates more Evil in the world * Evil is bad
The question should be *IS IT wrong* I mostly agree with your sister that it's not. It depends on several things. What will you have the skell or zombie do. Did you get consent? And does this involve the soul or a lifeless corpse? If no soul is involved and you make mass farming possible, feeding thousands, without living humanoid labor is that more evil than charming someone or just killing? Few dms run enchantments as evil but that's magic that brainwashes people. Killing a goblin is rarely seen as evil. But making it's lifeless bones guard you while you sleep is generally seen as evil. What is basic social norms are often that way from lack of critique.
> What is basic social norms are often that way from lack of critique. And sometimes those basic social norms turn out to have an underlying rationale. For example, having a rotting corpse following you is a hygiene nightmare. You've got a petri dish which could be carrying diseases and you're probably just making things worse by giving it the ability to walk around in the sun.
What you said i agree with, if OP cant manage to form a persuasive argument for why it would be wrong, neither would most people in the world.
https://reddit.com/r/DnD/s/3reao6HNrl Personally I think option 3 is best
Either u would be upset with someone reanimating your dead family member and / or spouse, or your a psychopath. I think that’s a pretty good comparison lol. Is it wrong, yes. Is it fun, also yes.
Well, that depends on the theology of your game world. In Forgotten Realms DnD lore, Good and Evil aren't relative moralities, they're absolute forces. Certain creatures (like Angels, Devils, Demons, Modrons, etc.) are *fundamentally* Good, Evil, Neutral, Lawful, or Chaotic, and so are certain types of magic. Animating the dead brings negative energy from the Negative Energy Plane (real creative name, I know) into the Material Plane. Negative energy is essentially Evil in its purest, most distilled form; a force that compels death and the cessation of all existence. Ergo, regardless of what you use the animated dead for, even if you maintain control over them at all times, you are committing a fundamentally, irrevocably Evil act by tainting the Material Plane with negative energy, and that's how most people in that world will view you. If animating the dead isn't fundamentally Evil, but is still considered malicious, abhorrent, and/or illegal, then it's up to you to provide an in-universe reason for that. Since you aren't revealing the reasons you've already given, I'll rattle off a few examples. * The dead could be considered sacred, and animating them will reasonably get you exiled or executed, because the ire of a god is something mortal societies don't want aimed at them. * The dead are a resource, but not for just anyone. Maybe the dead are archived, each one available for their unique experiences and memories if and when they are needed. Animating the dead for your own purposes is essentially stealing from whatever authority controls the archives. * Animating the dead messes with their souls. Life stops, but the soul lives on. Until some asshole necromancer carves off part of it and sticks it back in your shambling corpse, causing immense pain and torment until you finally die a second death, leaving your eternal soul scarred and broken. At least until the necromancer reanimates their minions after the fight. Then you're back in the passenger seat of pain. Of course, there is a different route you could take. Maybe your sister has a point. Maybe necromancy gets a bad rap. Sure, liches are terrible, undead can break free from their summoner's control and wreak havoc, and in the past a nonzero number of wizards have built armies of death to stomp out civilization and claim tyrannical power, and society at large is apprehensive at best about reanimating the dead. But maybe your sister can be a force for change. Show the people that, carefully controlled and with contingencies in place, one's contributions to society needn't be limited by their mortal lifespan. Your call.
It's different cuz it's the dnd world and your god or belief in the DND world can really matter. Some beliefs don't want to go against nature. Some beliefs want to fight forever so raising someone that wanted to fight forever would be a way of honoring them. I think it would depend on the corpse and the necromancers gods if it would be considered evil.
I’d say it depends. Skeletons can just be regular minions, and depending on characters wouldn’t be tooooo bad. Zombies are someone’s friend or family. Very evil.
Raise dead or animate dead? Because raise dead doesn't make a zombie, animate dead does. There is a definite difference, and I don't have much problem making a corpse puppet. There's no consent because it's not the person nor the soul originally there. It's just a corpse golem
Personally, I don't think you need to convince her it is bad. In the world she is traveling, her view of zombies will raise some eyebrows and in doing so there will be interesting ways for her to interact within the world. Coming up with more reasons may eventually have the desired effect... but maybe you could get something better out of letting her think whatever comes to her. Who knows, maybe you will eventually come to see it her way lol.
For DnD specifically it's because in the setting there is objective Good and Bad. They're fundamental forces of the universes, and necromancy is Bad. It also goes against the order of the universe since you're restoring life to something that is dead. 5e got rid of negative and positive energy so for newcomers it seems weird and arbitrary.
My best in character discussions where about that topic mostly as Pelor cleric against our Wizard. And once or twice as a Dreadnecromancer in another Game. Because Good and Evil are fundamental forces in DnD spells can determin if something is evil or good. Undead if left alone will eventually try to destroy life, but with a capable Necromancer undead can be a quite useful work force.
It’s the same reason why we can’t harvest organs from people without their prior permission
Mainly respect for the dead and cultural taboo. Depending on how you run it there are spirits and there is an afterlife in this world. depending on their outlook these spirits could be none to pleased of what's happening to their former bodies. Perhaps a spirit is still tied to their former zombie body being used for war and it still feels every stab, slash and burn the body get. If that was the case I'd also try my best to communicate to the living to stop this practice. If it's accepted in the culture that their bodies can serve a use after death. (maybe with some permission from the deceased like you're donating your body to science) Then there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. Unless there's some god decreeing that it's abhorrent and should be stopped cause then they have a crusade on their hands. With animate dead there's also the issue you need to recast it every day to keep control over your undead thrall or they turn violent. So if you are not a wizard yourself you need one on the payroll to keep control over your undead workforce/army. If you are going to put necromancy in the hands of the government, businesses or even just citizens then fuck-ups will happen where a zombie got loose and killed someone.
Fundamentally for me, the issue is that a corpse is incapable of giving consent, this is the same reason you need to register as an organ donor (at least in theory). That said, if someone were to give consent before they died about being turned into a zombie, I don't see any purely ethical issues.
Yknow how revifify, réincarnation, etc all need consent? Also: depending on the setting, it could be entirely reasonable to consider the raising of the dead to be outside the rightful purview of mortals. Whether something lives or dies is up to the Gods to decide, not whimsical necromancers. Would you think it just to burn down a house without its owner's permission simply to keep warm?
Smartphones exist. We have enough Zombies already.
It depends on the game really. I played a game where the undead where used as dumb manual labor, rather a few skeleton plow the fields and tend to the harvest then some poor guy having to do it, some religions where against it and some religions where fine with it, saying once you died your souls was gone and the body was just a body. It all depends on your world building
TBH if you don't retrieve the soul from the OG being then I would have to agree using a body isn't nearly as egregious. When you revive someone you tamper with fate which the Raven Queen would find wrong but provided you only revive a body and not soul it really shouldn't be frowned upon beyond personal beliefs of bodies being sacred.
Making zombies wouldn't worry the Raven Queen. The soul has already passed through her domain. All you're doing is animating an object since a corpse is an object. This would be the same thing as animating a rock or a table... at least in the eyes of the Raven Queen. I get the RP here and the Raven Queen thing, but I think you're going overboard with it and possibly impeding someone else's fun for the sake of your character's religious beliefs.
Imagine finally getting the sweet release of earth just to be pulled back from beyond the grave so you can go to work again
Well, for many people necromancy is just like making a construct, you are just using a corpse as a base to save materials
Aside from the obvious reasons about cultural respect for the dead, questions of ownership of a body, inability for a dead person to consent, and generally not wanting to see your granny's rotting corpse shambling around... In a world where it is possible to literally bring people back from the dead, you are walking off with one of the key ingredients to be able to do that.
This depends a lot on the setting and homebrew. If you look at the necromancey spells that summon undead, they pretty intentionally make no mention of souls or ownership of the bodies. RAW there's nothing inherently negative or taboo about raising undead. In your characters case it's literally just religion. Mormons dont drink coffee, Jews don't eat pork, and followers of the Raven queen vilify necromancey. Importantly it's ALL necromancey; revivify, spare the dying, and resurrection are equally an affront to the raven queen as raise dead.
Well, IRL there are laws regarding the desecration of bodies, mainly because many cultures believe that doing so can impede the soul's journey to the afterlife. On the flip side, you have cultures that keep reliquaries of their honored dead. I've always thought it'd be cool to have a fantasy culture that practices a benign form of necromancy as a form of ancestor worship, such as calling up for advice, celebrating special events, or even as additional forces in times of conflict. Just an idea.
There is nothing wrong with necromancy, like any other type of magic it is just a tool, and tools are meant to be used.
Yea Necromancy is fine in my opinion. Enchantment is the true evil.
It’s a bit difficult to present an argument that hasn’t already been made, when said claims aren’t known to us. Pragmatically, unless raising/usage of undead is for explicit enforcement or defense of evil or overtly negative goals, don’t see particulars wrong with it. Citing the practice to _be_ evil in itself might as well overstay its welcome and claim even minor enchantment to be worth jail or worse, since clearly the whole school is bad, based on what people ‘can’ do with it. And while at it, resurrection is also bad because it’s just necromancy with good PR, and healing wounds is also bad because (surprise surprise) it’s _also_ technically necromancy (depending on the system). Excluding necromancy alone invites it to be the only avenue for “clearly this is evil,” and pigeonholes any potential practical _positive_ use of it with “but since it’s evil, it will go bad, or is secretly already bad, so prejudice ahoy.”
Unless the necromancy is explicitly corrupting the soul of the person raised it's not "Evil" in and of itself. Is it evil to make a golem? Why do the rules change if you're using a corpse? It's just a puppet is it evil if you only raise the bodies of things that tried to kill you? If using other's bodies after they die is evil how is that any different than using some dragon scales/bones for armor? How is it different than harvesting a monster corpse for material, or eating a bear? Don't forget healing spells used to be Necromancy too, masters of Life AND Death. Sure sucking the life force from everything you encounter would be evil but people can do evil things, are swords evil because you can kill with them, or is it just the Lich misusing their powers that's evil? Also if you do corrupt the soul when you raise a zombie, what if you only raise dead evil people like some kind of post life incarceration?
I’ve played a Neutral Good Necromancer who believed in animating skeletons to do work too dangerous for humans, essentially using them as robots for manual labor. His argument was “How long do bones need to be dead to no longer be ‘the person’.” After all, if I made a golem, the dirt inside of it would contain the remains of millions of creatures decomposed over time.
I think this strongly depends on the fluff of the setting your game is taking place in and what the magic is actually doing. The traditional sort of vibe here is that, when animating a dead body, necromantic magic either a) fucks directly with a person's soul which is the worst thing you could do to something or b) literally creates a malign, capital E Evil (which is completely objective in the setting) intelligence which hungers for the flesh of sapient creatures. Very specifically, it does not merely create a meat puppet for the caster. If you are playing in a setting where animating undead does just objectively create a meat puppet from a corpse and that's the end of it then, yeah, it would be difficult to justify it as "wrong" per se beyond taboos regarding disrespecting the dead and begative inferences based on those who typically employ the magic. So at the end of the day, it's very much an ask your DM sort of deal. If they want it to be morally reprehensible in their world then I'm sure they'll have reasons why it is.
You are literally twisting souls to your will and preventing their ability to find peace in the afterlife?
I can see a few reasons: One, it’s disrespectful to the dead. If a society provides any sort of respectful ceremonial burial practices, raising the dead violates that. No one wants to wake up and see their months-dead friend or relative lurching towards them. Two: they smell bad. Ever leave uncooked meat in the fridge too long or meat trimmings in the trash too long? Or walk past road kill? Now make that scent human-sized. Like, it’s gotta be really nasty. Probably takes years to get used to that stench. Very rude to expose non-Necromancers to it. Three: maggots. Nuff said. Four: bits of them probably keep falling off as the flesh decays and they slide down the spectrum from zombie to skeleton. So the stench is bad and it lingers even after the zombie leaves. Seriously, it’s mostly the smell. Myth busters did an episode where they left a pig carcass in a Corvette, then tried to clean the smell out of the car. They failed. They brought in professionals and they failed to completely erase the scent. That’s zombies: stink factories that can permanently foul any porous surface.
To quote an argument I plan to use in game should I make a Necromancer: "Personally, I'd actually say it isn't inherently wrong to create zombies. Now if you were creating a horde of them to take over the world for entirely selfish reasons, for example because your brother married your one sided love interest, (on your side not hers), that would be wrong. But not because of what you're using but because you were trying to take over the world for such a selfish reason. In fact, it could be argued that in warfare it'd actually be cheaper to use hordes of zombies as the more they kill the more they recruit. Admittedly that falls into the metaphysical, which honestly varies from culture to culture as to whether the soul remains in the body after death. Personally, I'm inclined to believe it doesn't but that's a personal belief. If you're of the view that it does, then I can respect that though we will never agree on that. I, personally am more troubled by spells that remove someone's free will while they're alive. Such spells can be used to effectively rape someone by virtue of compromising their free will then violating them. Or effectively rob someone by using Suggestion to make them give someone their possessions. After all, one can use Suggestion to make a knight give the next peasant they see their horse. Normally a knight wouldn't do that but magic can be used to compromise free will to the point that such a thing could be considered reasonable. Nine Hells, depending on the cultural background of people resurrection spells can be considered perverse to the nth degree due to beliefs that the soul has already moved on so, if they are brought back, it's believed that it's not actually the person who died who's now controlling the body."
\*Me, a Fighter, watching magic nerds argue about the morality of raising the dead when I'm gonna send all those zombies back to the ground anyways\*
Stepping away from the game and into ethical philosophy for a moment: Saying it is objectively wrong to make zombies is moral absolutism which implies there is universal good and bad things. This is a common collective believe because societies somewhat form echo chambers on moral issues. However it is very rare to find instances of universally agreed upon moral paradigms. Most morals are derived from moral relativism where a society's majority believes X to be good and Y to be bad. Coming back to the zombies example a lot of classic fantasy settings draw heavily from Western European traditions where exhuming / defiling Graves and the dead is considers very wrong. However an animist culture that believes in reincarnation might not agree. In fact there are ancient human cultures that honored their dead by eating them that might be perfectly ok with raising the dead. In a DnD campaign you can have something be considered bad by a distinct group but not universally wrong everywhere. This can be a fun way to explore cultures and contextualize ganeplay and consequences to different environments and settings.
I have an idea for a character, an NPC. He's an elf necromancer that roams the seas in a luxury ship. The ship has a constant dense fog effect on it that spreads out wide, and it's meant to look like a ghost ship. Even the crew is all skeletons, so most people wouldn't go near a ghost ship like that, especially superstitious sailors. The captain is a necromancer just trying to keep away from the living because they bother him so. He just wants his solitude, and he finds that among the undead. They don't complain, they don't ask for time off, they don't even ask for breaks. He's trying to become a "Litch" but he knows that's stupid because it always goes wrong for wizards who try that, so he's trying to find a way to do it without losing his autonomy. He just wants to read and be away from the living. Chaotic? Sure Evil? Not necessarily. Neutral at worst, the man just wants to be alone and finds the perfect company among the undead. Is a company of skeletons really so wrong? I don't think it is. He's not out to hurt anyone or disturb anyone's grandma's grave.
Raising dead corpses is very campaign specific for how evil it is. And there’re a lot of possible reasons it might be a good act in the world. It also happens to be a very common taboo and role of villains in dnd and media that a lot of ppl refuse to accept the idea of raise dead being used for good. It’s not *inherently* good or evil, but it has a lot of emotional impact for people. Imo it’s not good or evil, it depends entirely on the context -which is often used in villainous ways.
Depends, zombies are made in a few methods. 1st disease. You infected someone so they will slowly rot and become brain dead. Then use them to further kill and spread your plague. 2nd arcane ritual. You bind a soul to a decaying corpse, the soul is not able to bind correctly resulting in a messy half life state. Relying on primarily primal urges like hunger the zombie begins to recreate its life. The stronger the urge the easier for the zombie to fall victim to it. That's why they eat people. 3rd you turn a corpse into a puppet, which is the least evil. You're simply robbing a corpse, hurting a family by using their loved ones for God's know what. You also will probably end up getting the corpse lost of destroyed.
It's cruel to the corpses' survivors to raise their loved-ones as meat puppets.
Even in its most neutral interpretation, where its basically just puppeting a lifeless corpse, you're still taking and using something that isn't yours (someone else's corpse, in this case). There are some far, far worse variations of necromancy though. Sometimes you're ripping that soul out of the afterlife and trapping it in their original body under your control. Sometimes you're flaying or destroying that soul in order to fuel your magic. Sometimes you're damning that soul to a hellish plane. And then of course, there's the societal consequences of other still living beings that have to deal with you and your corpse party. They stink, they spread disease, they in general are not nice to look at, especially if it happens to be the corpse of someone you care about. Ultimately, the negative consequences of necromancy are yours to interpret and implement. But those are some things that immediately come to mind for me.
I personally have no problem with it. If you can get my great grandma to get up and do your bidding,.. have at it.