g3taso
2015-08-31, 06:46 PM
I like undead, but like many of you small-minded clerics and paladins the Oerth over are constantly attempting to stop me from enjoying my little hobby. You'd think I was smoking in a public place!
It occurred to me as a LN character that I could cast Mark of the Enlightened Soul prior to casting Desecrate. According to the "specific beats general" philosophy, Desecrate is now a Good spell, having lost the evil descriptor. Presumably, profane bonuses become sacred bonuses and so forth and we roll on. Casting Animate Dead (or the Create Undead spells, possibly having to persist the MotES to a day duration) results in good-aligned undead, since how can Evil spring from Good?
A second philosophy holds that applying a Good spell descriptor to an Evil spell leaves a Desecrate with no alignment descriptors. Presumably profane bonuses become untyped bonuses and so forth and we roll on. Casting Animate Dead (or the Create Undead spells, possibly having to persist the MotES to a day duration) results in unaligned undead. (I personally am thinking of mindless undead as "robots", since they typically aren't swallowing souls, inflicting negative levels or other "I'm gonna eat ya" behavior.
Of the two, I personally hold to the latter notion of no Good/Evil descriptors on the spell at all, as they cancel each other out. While I normally follow the specific-beats-general philosophy, the undead consequences just don't make sense barring one or two extremely rare undead.
That being said, I have two questions for everyone. (1) Do you hold to a (Good) Desecrate or an (Untyped) Desecrate or a third option I haven't considered? (2) What are the implications/possibilities/spiffy consequences for undead?
It occurred to me as a LN character that I could cast Mark of the Enlightened Soul prior to casting Desecrate. According to the "specific beats general" philosophy, Desecrate is now a Good spell, having lost the evil descriptor. Presumably, profane bonuses become sacred bonuses and so forth and we roll on. Casting Animate Dead (or the Create Undead spells, possibly having to persist the MotES to a day duration) results in good-aligned undead, since how can Evil spring from Good?
A second philosophy holds that applying a Good spell descriptor to an Evil spell leaves a Desecrate with no alignment descriptors. Presumably profane bonuses become untyped bonuses and so forth and we roll on. Casting Animate Dead (or the Create Undead spells, possibly having to persist the MotES to a day duration) results in unaligned undead. (I personally am thinking of mindless undead as "robots", since they typically aren't swallowing souls, inflicting negative levels or other "I'm gonna eat ya" behavior.
Of the two, I personally hold to the latter notion of no Good/Evil descriptors on the spell at all, as they cancel each other out. While I normally follow the specific-beats-general philosophy, the undead consequences just don't make sense barring one or two extremely rare undead.
That being said, I have two questions for everyone. (1) Do you hold to a (Good) Desecrate or an (Untyped) Desecrate or a third option I haven't considered? (2) What are the implications/possibilities/spiffy consequences for undead?