Use of Undead - A Tangent

[AnimeTheCat]

So, this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?536961-The-Aspiring-Necromancer-%96-How-do-you-interpret-utilize-%93Animate-Dead%94-in-3-5e#top) thread started and I was interested so I gave my opinion and thougths to part of it. That, however, created a tangent within the thread that I don't really think fit the original theme of the thread. As an attempt to keep that thread on target, I'm starting a new thread to continue that tangent.

My stance was that using undead as a mindless, tireless, free workforce would be an excellent way to take over the world, Economically and through conquest if necessary. Psyren brought up a good point that good deities and churches would likely not stand for this and halt you at your early planning/implementation stages. Others brought up good counter points about what they feel the reality of the world is.

A few specifics were brought up, which is really what spurred this new thread.
1) Wee Jas as a deity would be the most likely to support this type of action. Psyren disagrees, BlackOnyx and I think that's true.
2) The good churches would band together to work and beat a growing evil. While I think this may circumstancially be true, I think there is a fair amount of backstabbing and power grabbing amung the good churches. Just not as blatent or obvious as between the evil churches/followers.

I really only have one thougth out response, and that's to the first specific that I noticed.
1) Wee Jas as described in Deities and Demigods isn't just "allowing" of necromancy and undead. She's the Patron Deity of many necromancers. So long as the follower is using magic or magic items to find the root of all things, there are no major problems. According to Deities and Demigods, that is. She even has Animate Dead as a spell-like ability. I don't think that there would be any problem with a lawful society that uses undead for the betterment of the society. So long as the society isn't attempting to achieve eternal life by means of becoming liches, or other sentient undead, there should be no problem using mindless skeletons/zombies as servants to society. The skeleton or zombie is simply an animated corpse, a "mindless automaton" as the description on the SRD puts it.

What does the rest of the playground think? This thread can expand and change until we've fully explored the topic, I'm not partial to keeping it unique to these things I've noted.

[Psyren]

Please note that my response was specific to printed D&D settings, because Libris Mortis and BoVD both establish the rule that making undead for any reason, no matter how benign, is ultimately an evil act - and doing so in large numbers would therefore be an evil act on a massive scale. In a custom setting or a different game, I have nothing to say against this - go nuts and enjoy your world peace or whatnot.

One of my core philosophical stances when it comes to D&D tricks like this is "there's actually a good reason why nobody has tried this yet, your character is not the unique snowflake they think they are." (This relates to the quote in my sig.) Otherwise someone would have come up with the undead labor force long before you came along, much like the nation of Geb did in Golarion. Libris Mortis happens to supply my preferred reason as a theory, but even if that theory is not true, the fact still remains that in D&D, creating undead results in evil by whatever means you choose to explain it.

[Segev]

Use of mindless undead is one of those things that is fraught with contradiction in canon, and requires careful decision-making on a setting fluff and "underlying metaphysics" level to reconcile in any given game. If the players and GM care enough to bother, that is.

Using strictly the mechanics of them in most systems - D&D in particular - the only thing that makes use of skeletons and zombies inherently evil is the [Evil] tag. It is, essentially, a tautology rather than an emergent, measurable property based on the typical standards of good and evil applied by RL societies (usually involving cost/benefit analysis and a fundamental question about respecting the lives, liberty, and property of others, at least in modern Western societies). Now, it's obvious that a vile necromancer who slaughters innocents to fuel his undead armies is doing evil. But what of the one who simply buys corpses or scavenges them from places they'd be left to rot?

If you want a coherent "good gods oppose undead-creation!" stance, you need to dig deeper to avoid it being an arbitrary "ew" reaction taken to a divinely mandated extreme. (The equivalent of outlawing anybody having sausage because the princess thinks it's gross.) The most common, still hand-wavy explanation is that [evil]-tagged magic taints the world in some imperceptible way that nevertheless builds up over time. It's the equivalent of greenhouse gasses: nothing you do, personally, is likely to cause a measurable increase to the problem, but over time and with enough users, the theory goes, you'll stain the world/cause global warming. Animating that pile of skeletons to do your bidding will have no measurable impact on the "general evil level" of the world, just like driving your car to work one day won't. But in theory, all those evil necromancers out there doing it are causing a measurable effect, just like, in theory, all those people driving cars are causing global warming to occur.

I dislike this because it creates a disproportionate response, and still feels disingenuous. "It's evil because, um, a problem will occur long in the future if you and others like you keep doing it!"

However, without some reason - some wickedness that occurs as a direct result of animating the undead - there is no rational reason for Good to oppose the ethical and responsible use of mindless undead.

One possibility - though I think it actually makes animate dead too powerful in theory, even if not in mechanical practice - would be to have each "unintelligent" undead actually have the tormented soul of its original host trapped, mute and helpless, in the body. Unable to act. Unable to use its mind and intellect. But there. Behind the eye( socket)s. A prisoner being used as fuel to power the mindlessly obedient automaton.

[Necroticplague]

The important question, of course, is then 'is this the kind of evil your average person gives a s*&% about'? After all, something can be evil because of it's role as it pertains to the grand cosmology of things, without necessarily having a negative on the actual world most people live in. And, as most people are effectively completely in the dark about the larger cosmological implications (since, short of powerful divination, only deities and their more well-informed servants could even hope to have the full picture), it's unlikely that your average person would care. We know animating the dead is evil, but is there a reason to care about some divine fiat? Unless there are other casters going around with alignment-related spells, or the animator is a cleric of Good god, it's highly unlikely even shifting to evil will affect one's life while one's alive (and the information about what happens after your dead isn't common knowledge for obvious reasons).

[Psyren]

I dislike this because it creates a disproportionate response, and still feels disingenuous. "It's evil because, um, a problem will occur long in the future if you and others like you keep doing it!"

It's not "long in the future" though. Per LM it's happening right now, and it explains the prevalence of undead in the world (mindless and otherwise) that no necromancer actually set out to create. It's more like radiation or toxic waste than greenhouse gases, except it's worse because the material is being dumped somewhere you can't even see or guess at.

I personally like it because it explains how things like Shadows and Wraiths can come to be even in places where there is nobody around to make them. Or why some murderers spontaneously become Mohrgs and others just rot in the ground.



One possibility - though I think it actually makes animate dead too powerful in theory, even if not in mechanical practice - would be to have each "unintelligent" undead actually have the tormented soul of its original host trapped, mute and helpless, in the body. Unable to act. Unable to use its mind and intellect. But there. Behind the eye( socket)s. A prisoner being used as fuel to power the mindlessly obedient automaton.

While this one does explain why even True Resurrection can't rez somebody whose skeleton is wandering around undestroyed, it has very headache-inducing implications. If I animate a centuries-old skeleton, is that person's soul yanked out of the afterlife and stuffed inside? What if they were in an evil afterlife, like Hell - wouldn't pulling them out of that into a skeleton actually be an improvement?


The important question, of course, is then 'is this the kind of evil your average person gives a s*&% about'? After all, something can be evil because of it's role as it pertains to the grand cosmology of things, without necessarily having a negative on the actual world most people live in. And, as most people are effectively completely in the dark about the larger cosmological implications (since, short of powerful divination, only deities and their more well-informed servants could even hope to have the full picture), it's unlikely that your average person would care. We know animating the dead is evil, but is there a reason to care about some divine fiat? Unless there are other casters going around with alignment-related spells, or the animator is a cleric of Good god, it's highly unlikely even shifting to evil will affect one's life while one's alive (and the information about what happens after your dead isn't common knowledge for obvious reasons).

Will individuals care, or even the reanimator himself? You're correct, probably not. But given that there are entire clergies dedicated to opposing this sort of thing (Kelemvor, Lathander, Pharasma, Wee Jas, Pelor etc) it's a safe bet that those gods do care, and therefore the organizations they command will as well. Even if you can successfully keep them at bay, they're probably going to disrupt your operations enough to ruin any kind of efficiency this scheme would have gained. Hard to turn a profit when your workforce is constantly being turned.

[Zombimode]

It's not "long in the future" though. Per LM it's happening right now, and it explains the prevalence of undead in the world (mindless and otherwise) that no necromancer actually set out to create. It's more like radiation or toxic waste than greenhouse gases, except it's worse because the material is being dumped somewhere you can't even see or guess at.

I personally like it because it explains how things like Shadows and Wraiths can come to be even in places where there is nobody around to make them. Or why some murderers spontaneously become Mohrgs and others just rot in the ground.

Thats actually in LM? Thats great :smallsmile:! This is my personal head-canon that I use for most settings (and tend to imply when being a player).

[Necroticplague]

Will individuals care, or even the reanimator himself? You're correct, probably not. But given that there are entire clergies dedicated to opposing this sort of thing (Kelemvor, Lathander, Pharasma, Wee Jas, Pelor etc) it's a safe bet that those gods do care, and therefore the organizations they command will as well. Even if you can successfully keep them at bay, they're probably going to disrupt your operations enough to ruin any kind of efficiency this scheme would have gained. Hard to turn a profit when your workforce is constantly being turned.

If people outside of church entities have no real reason to care, those church entities will have difficulty operating on those principle. After all, to the average person, that paladin wouldn't be a man selflessly risking himself to prevent future calamity, they'd be a woman taking away useful tools while ranting about cosmic nonsense without any real proof (since divine revelation and divinations are both very conveniently unverifiable except to other diviners). It would be hard for such an organization to operate as such, which would just lead to a bunch of it done by non-church members (much like how usury was some years ago).

[Eldariel]

It's not "long in the future" though. Per LM it's happening right now, and it explains the prevalence of undead in the world (mindless and otherwise) that no necromancer actually set out to create. It's more like radiation or toxic waste than greenhouse gases, except it's worse because the material is being dumped somewhere you can't even see or guess at.

I personally like it because it explains how things like Shadows and Wraiths can come to be even in places where there is nobody around to make them. Or why some murderers spontaneously become Mohrgs and others just rot in the ground.

Magi: The Kingdom of Magic puts it well. Turning rukhs (basically magical energy or rather, positive/negative energy in that setting) dark allows controlling them and doing all kinds of cool magitech stuff that a whole city makes heavy use of but that also means they aren't fulfilling their real function in the wheel of fate leading the world towards destruction rather than salvation. The good conclusion is being sidetracked eventually leading to basically Evil God being summoned. And the big problem is, it's easy enough to turn the energy negative but turning it back into neutral/positive is a whole different matter. The question of negative and positive energy could easily be seen similarly in this kind of light; creating negative energy creates an imbalance that slowly taints the world and there's no equivalent way to keep creating positive energy to keep the balance eventually leading to a harmageddon. In other, you get cool toys in the short run and it's very, very convenient, but it also every act deals irrevocable damage to the world bringing it closer and closer to ruin.

That said, on most neutral or evil characters I have little reason not to make as much use of undead as I can. And I won't mind using them on good characters in spite of the evil tag as long as the settings lets me get away with it. Some slow end of the world isn't something most characters are likely to be concerned with and if it does occur? Bring it on, they were itching for a fight anyways. In D&D, you can generally save the world by fighting the evil off - the comparisons are much more difficult to deal with.

[Zanos]

I'm going to disagree with Psyren on a general level, because he assumes that in a general setting Good churches wield enough power to immediately shut down any serious Evil threat. Considering that Evil threats plainly exist and endure for considerable time, I think it's safe to say that in the general setting there is not enough cooperation or power shared amongst the Good Clergy to put up a unified, implacable front against any Evil.


Using strictly the mechanics of them in most systems - D&D in particular - the only thing that makes use of skeletons and zombies inherently evil is the [Evil] tag. It is, essentially, a tautology rather than an emergent, measurable property based on the typical standards of good and evil applied by RL societies (usually involving cost/benefit analysis and a fundamental question about respecting the lives, liberty, and property of others, at least in modern Western societies). Now, it's obvious that a vile necromancer who slaughters innocents to fuel his undead armies is doing evil. But what of the one who simply buys corpses or scavenges them from places they'd be left to rot?

This is a consequence of alignment being an elemental cosmic force, not really the fault of necromancy. Evil is Evil because it's Evil, just as Fire is Fire because it's Fire. You can't really compare real morality with D&D morality because in D&D you can pick up and put down Evil, you can make creatures and objects out of Evil, and yes, you can even taste Evil. But does it taste good?


If you want a coherent "good gods oppose undead-creation!" stance, you need to dig deeper to avoid it being an arbitrary "ew" reaction taken to a divinely mandated extreme. (The equivalent of outlawing anybody having sausage because the princess thinks it's gross.) The most common, still hand-wavy explanation is that [evil]-tagged magic taints the world in some imperceptible way that nevertheless builds up over time. It's the equivalent of greenhouse gasses: nothing you do, personally, is likely to cause a measurable increase to the problem, but over time and with enough users, the theory goes, you'll stain the world/cause global warming. Animating that pile of skeletons to do your bidding will have no measurable impact on the "general evil level" of the world, just like driving your car to work one day won't. But in theory, all those evil necromancers out there doing it are causing a measurable effect, just like, in theory, all those people driving cars are causing global warming to occur.

One possibility - though I think it actually makes animate dead too powerful in theory, even if not in mechanical practice - would be to have each "unintelligent" undead actually have the tormented soul of its original host trapped, mute and helpless, in the body. Unable to act. Unable to use its mind and intellect. But there. Behind the eye( socket)s. A prisoner being used as fuel to power the mindlessly obedient automaton.

I prefer making animating undead not inherently Evil, as long as they're not undead that feed or create spawn. But it's still not something that Good churches tolerates because at it's core your profession revolves around using dead stuff to acquire power, which means you have a really big incentive to make more dead stuff. "Natural" undead mindlessly attack since there's nothing to give them orders, so Good churches also make it a point to eliminate them. Vampires and Shadows and other creatures that drain life to survive and spawn and undead that exist in perpetual torment like Allips are Evil to create for obvious reasons.

So creating skeletons and zombies isn't "Evil" but it's very heavily associated with stuff that Evil people do, and it's only really one step further into really nasty stuff.

I also move a lot of healing spells back into Necromancy, so some people kind of walk a thin line manipulating life and death.

[Psyren]

I'm going to disagree with Psyren on a general level, because he assumes that in a general setting Good churches wield enough power to immediately shut down any serious Evil threat. Considering that Evil threats plainly exist and endure for considerable time, I think it's safe to say that in the general setting there is not enough cooperation or power shared amongst the Good Clergy to put up a unified, implacable front against any Evil.

You don't have to eradicate all evil to simply disrupt any large scale operations/big movements they pursue. "Evil threats exist" is not a good enough reason for "we can therefore successfully raise legions of undead unchallenged."



I also move a lot of healing spells back into Necromancy, so some people kind of walk a thin line manipulating life and death.

I'm actually fine with this too, though it seems a non sequitur.


If people outside of church entities have no real reason to care, those church entities will have difficulty operating on those principle. After all, to the average person, that paladin wouldn't be a man selflessly risking himself to prevent future calamity, they'd be a woman taking away useful tools while ranting about cosmic nonsense without any real proof (since divine revelation and divinations are both very conveniently unverifiable except to other diviners). It would be hard for such an organization to operate as such, which would just lead to a bunch of it done by non-church members (much like how usury was some years ago).

Except those good clergies are the ones going around and stopping that shadow that wiped out the hamlet the next town over, or curing the other one that was stricken by plague. So the commonfolk have good reason to trust them whether they are shown evidence of the metaphysical decay or not.

[Zanos]

You don't have to eradicate all evil to simply disrupt any large scale operations/big movements they pursue. "Evil threats exist" is not a good enough reason for "we can therefore successfully raise legions of undead unchallenged."
Not all large scale Evil operations are disrupted though. Evil clergy exist and the Evil deities they serve are doing as well as the Good deities. Evil nations and cities exist in the default setting as well.

Yeah you won't go completely unchallenged, but I think it's an oversimplification to say that all of the Good churches will join forces to steamroll over you. They have more pressing threats and can't commit all of their resources. Evil might not explicitly work together but other organization will be more than willing to capitalize on your providing a distraction to make gains against the Good organizations in other areas.

You won't be able to take over the world, sure, but you might carve out a nice empire for yourself.


I'm actually fine with this too, though it seems a non sequitur.
Just a tangent about how I like to handle necromancy personally.

[AnimeTheCat]

Ok, so maybe this would make the society lawful evil, but still... aside from the fact that whomever is creating the undead is performing an evil act of creating a conduit of negative energy to power the undead, what exactly does a good church have against such a society? Especially a Lawful Good church? I'll expand on what I see the Pros are.

Pros:
- You have removed menial, mundane tasks from your people. Undead perform tasks like "Push this lever" which gives mechanical energy to an area. Said energy can power a grinding stone and a conveyer belt. The conveyer belt feeds grain into the grinding stone which has a siv at the bottom to catch any particles that don't meet a size requirement. As the ground grain passes through, you could even have it pass to finer and finer stones to ultimately make flour. Use this process for sugar, salt, etc. conveyer belt, grinder, powder. food/goods are incredibly cheap and now more affordable, improving the standard of living for all citizens and meaning more money in the citizen's pockets.
- Assign people more skilled labor jobs such as farming, smithing, etc. Even those jobs are easier with the simple application of mechanical engineering and a never ending energy source, crank powered tools. A team of two undead or even one, can power a home for pumping water, creating heat, powering a wood chopping machine. You've improved the life of every citizen just by having these things available.
- Undead can power mechanisms to make chopping trees down less intensive, causing a boom of skilled carpentry, exporting cut wooden beams for a low cost. Creates more jobs, more prosperity.
- The population of the city need not be evil to capitalize and benefit from the existence of undead as mundane, mindless, tireless workers.
- By increasing the available workforce, not every family needs everyone to work the farm, children can attend schools. This works incredibly well for a culture that patronizes Wee Jas. Educating the young with the knowledge of the past, paving the way for a smarter, better future.
- Before someone dies, they can opt in to allow their corpse to be used for the betterment of the society by allowing it to be animated. Such a method gives those who want it the chance to give their lifeless body to better their nation. If someone chooses not to give their body or dies in service to the nation, be that through war or similar, you are laid to rest with honor. Simple as that.

I feel like, although there would be a large amount of undead, there wouldn't be 1,000 HD of undead in any given 100 foot radius sphere. If there were, the planners and keepers of the nation would need to plan accordingly so as to not oversaturate any given area with negative energy. There would, of course, be an overarching aura of negative energy, but just because one resides in close proxemity to negative energy that doesn't mean that person must be evil.

It would seem to me that, even though negative energy is being used to power the society, that the prosperity of such a society could not be driven to the wayside. The population would be happier, more learned, and healthier in the long run for it.

[Westhart]

Just to note the nation would be susceptible to terrorist with command undead... Thus I doubt they would give everyone an undead servant... Since they would be a security liability.

[Eldariel]

Just to note the nation would be susceptible to terrorist with command undead... Thus I doubt they would give everyone an undead servant... Since they would be a security liability.

I mean, just because humans get a save vs. Charm Person doesn't exactly make them more reliable in this regard. That's not a real issue.

[Psyren]

Not all large scale Evil operations are disrupted though. Evil clergy exist and the Evil deities they serve are doing as well as the Good deities. Evil nations and cities exist in the default setting as well.

They do, and that's exactly the issue - right now it's a stable equilibrium. This scheme would be seen as an expansion, and THAT is what would provoke a response.

Using Golarion as an example - there is in fact a nation that does canonically use efficient mindless undead labor, called Geb. You could certainly live there and even climb the upper echelons of its society, and probably be left alone - good nations and anti-undead religions grudgingly tolerate it as long as it stays over there and doesn't try to spread. But if you try to establish Geb 2.0 somewhere else, that is what is going to bring down all kinds of wrath on your head, and if you try to overthrow Geb to do it, its current (eponymous and posthumous) ruler is going to bring all his arcane might to bear against you as well.

So it's not so much "evil can't do anything" as it is "evil already has, and trying to do more than that is what is going to attract trouble."


Ok, so maybe this would make the society lawful evil, but still... aside from the fact that whomever is creating the undead is performing an evil act of creating a conduit of negative energy to power the undead, what exactly does a good church have against such a society? Especially a Lawful Good church?

*snip*


The premise as set forth in D&D is that this causes more evil than it solves, because the more good you want your undead to do, the more numerous or powerful ones you'll need, and thus the more unintended side effects will result for innocents elsewhere. There's nothing wrong with listing the benefits of this approach, but so long as you reject the underlying premise, the design choice the authors made will continue to not make sense.


I mean, just because humans get a save vs. Charm Person doesn't exactly make them more reliable in this regard. That's not a real issue.

To be fair, Command Undead is no-save against mindless targets. Rebuking doesn't have a save either (in 3.5.)

[Zanos]

More secure in some ways, since it's not like mindless undead can really give you much information. Most spying is done by servants, after all.

[Doctor Awkward]

One thing you have to keep in mind is that the world of D&D operates on a scale of absolute morality. There are certain actions defined as good, and certain actions defined as evil, with very little gray areas or "wiggle room" in between. Within the world there is also very little philosophical discussion on these matters, on account of there being very little metaphysical mysteries left to solve. Gods do exist. Living things have souls. Your actions in life very clearly spell out what happens to you after you die. Meanwhile, there are terrible forces in the multiverse that exist purely for the sake of spreading their own version of law and order, and others that just want to destroy everything to see if they can.

On this scale of morality, necromancy is evil.

Animating the dead, no matter the reason, is always an evil act. At a minimum, because it involves the desecration of a corpse, or the torment/general discomfort of another beings soul. It is a violation of another beings mortality in every possible sense. A person cannot make an informed decision on the subject of "donating their corpse to the cause", because they cannot comprehend the magnitude of volunteering to push a level for eternity.

Furthermore, undead by their very nature are a force for the destruction of life. They are sustained by drawing on the Negative Energy Plane, which itself exists as a fundamental force whose sole purpose is to drain the life from the living to sustain itself. Mindless undead, if left uncontrolled, will act in according to this nature and seek only to destroy anything living. The is no greater motive behind these actions. It's just what they are. It is for this wanton destruction of life that on the absolute scale they are evil. It is also heavily implied that this is the reason intelligent undead are evil. No matter their original intentions, they are inevitably warped into a force for destruction by the negative energy upon which they are now dependent.


On the subject of Wee Jas:

Despite the fact that her portfolio contains death, necromancy is not one of her primary concerns. Her dogma teaches that magic in general is the key to all things. Wisdom, understanding, personal power, security, order, and control all come from how well one understands magic. The only real difference between her and Boccob is that he is a distant, uncaring deity who considers himself above petty concerns such as good and evil, while she is very active presence in the mortal world. She concerns herself over death only so far as it is inevitable, and that you live on through the knowledge that you record and pass on to the next generation.

[AnimeTheCat]

Animating the dead, no matter the reason, is always an evil act. At a minimum, because it involves the desecration of a corpse, or the torment/general discomfort of another beings soul. It is a violation of another beings mortality in every possible sense. A person cannot make an informed decision on the subject of "donating their corpse to the cause", because they cannot comprehend the magnitude of volunteering to push a level for eternity.

That's the thing though, the spell "Animate Dead" does not say anything about binding a soul, tormenting a soul, desecrating a corpse, or anything of the sort. You're not making that person's eternal soul push the lever forever, you're making the magically animated bones (powered by negative energy) push the lever. The original posessor of the body is in no way disturbed. That person has no further use for the bones/body, why not put it to good use right? They are not volunteering for anything, they're donating their body. Just as someone might donate clotes, computers, cars, tools, etc. Once the soul has left the body, the body is nothing more than a composition of elements waiting to deteriorate. Using magic to create self-resetting traps of gentle repose and installing it into the corpse prior to reviving it, you could feasibly prevent any sort of rotting thusly preventing a primary health concern for the society.

Again though, I know the caster of "animate dead" is performing evil acts, but doing something evil once does not make you evil forever. Doing something evil repeatedly does not make you necessarily evil, so long as you balance that with goodness. That's what would create a neutral character. A necromancer is wholsomely capable of being entirely evil or neutral and still utilize undead. Sorry good, "create deathless" isn't a spell as far as I know so no mindless, tireless, free laborers for you.... unless constructs but those are really expensive.

[Psyren]

The counterargument is. if it doesn't interfere with the character's soul, why can't they be resurrected until the zombie is destroyed? Even TR, which doesn't need any body parts, won't work.

(Note that I actually don't think it interferes with the soul either - or at least, I think it shouldn't - but there is reason to think it does.)

[Elkad]

Seems in a world with both Raise Dead and Animate Dead, what you do with the deceased would change.

People you care about.
Keep the body for 7-30 days. After all, you might get him Raised. Probably kept in a hallowed/defended area to keep wandering necromancers out.
After that, destroy it. Cremation works. Save the ashes for Resurrection if you like.
If you have reason to believe they were killed by something that could bring them back as spawn, skip directly to step 2.

People you are indifferent to, or despise, especially enemies.
Destroy the body immediately. If you are really mad/thorough, scatter the ashes in the river.

As to bringing their soul back, you can fluff that. Think of it something like Astral Projection. Soul stays in the afterlife, but some small portion of it is drawn off to reinhabit the Prime. Which doesn't ruin your 'eternal reward', just interrupts it slightly.

[AnimeTheCat]

The counterargument is. if it doesn't interfere with the character's soul, why can't they be resurrected until the zombie is destroyed? Even TR, which doesn't need any body parts, won't work.

(Note that I actually don't think it interferes with the soul either - or at least, I think it shouldn't - but there is reason to think it does.)

The answer is simple. Resurrection requires the original vessel, or a recreation of said vessel. When someone's body (vessel) is occupied by magic as a conduit to the negative energy plane, that body is unavailable to serve as a vessel for that soul. If the vessel has been destroyed, true resurresction rebuilds the vessel and brings the soul back to it.

I know there will be those who think "But wait... Reincarnate has that same clause. It doesn't restore the original vessel. That's can't be correct thinking." At first glance, you're right. But look deeper. You need a part of the original body to use the spell. If the original body is posessed by magic, it can't serve a the component since it's a conduite to the negative energy plane.

It doesn't have to do with the soul, but the vessel. That's why those spells don't work on someone who's corpse has been animated.

[chimaeraUndying]

The counterargument is. if it doesn't interfere with the character's soul, why can't they be resurrected until the zombie is destroyed? Even TR, which doesn't need any body parts, won't work.

(Note that I actually don't think it interferes with the soul either - or at least, I think it shouldn't - but there is reason to think it does.)

I'd assume one of two things, here:

There's just a lore contradiction, and/or an opportunity for GMs to rule one way or the other (as mentioned above, "binds the soul to the body"; etc.)
Reviving a character who's still got an animated body wandering around produces some sort of cosmic collision error (perhaps like quantum entanglement gone nasty? I'm sure there are better analogies); as such the spell doesn't work because the laws of the universe just pave over it since they forbid the "same" person from existing in two places.

[Zanos]

One thing you have to keep in mind is that the world of D&D operates on a scale of absolute morality. There are certain actions defined as good, and certain actions defined as evil, with very little gray areas or "wiggle room" in between. Within the world there is also very little philosophical discussion on these matters, on account of there being very little metaphysical mysteries left to solve. Gods do exist. Living things have souls. Your actions in life very clearly spell out what happens to you after you die. Meanwhile, there are terrible forces in the multiverse that exist purely for the sake of spreading their own version of law and order, and others that just want to destroy everything to see if they can.

This is true.


On this scale of morality, necromancy is evil.
This is true.


Animating the dead, no matter the reason, is always an evil act.
This is true.


At a minimum, because it involves the desecration of a corpse, or the torment/general discomfort of another beings soul.
Both of these things are not true. Desecration of a corpse is not considered Evil in any book I've read. Non-Lawful for eschewing traditions at best, maybe. But corpse desecration is cultural, even in D&D.

And animating undead trapping and tormenting the soul is setting specific. The base setting mentions literally nothing about that.


Furthermore, undead by their very nature are a force for the destruction of life.
Some undead are. There's a lot of types of undead, some of which are intelligent and free willed and have no need to feed on the living to sustain themselves.


They are sustained by drawing on the Negative Energy Plane, which itself exists as a fundamental force whose sole purpose is to drain the life from the living to sustain itself.
This is not true. Negative energy does not feed on positive energy in any sense, they're just opposing forces. Water does not feed on fire.


Mindless undead, if left uncontrolled, will act in according to this nature and seek only to destroy anything living. The is no greater motive behind these actions. It's just what they are. It is for this wanton destruction of life that on the absolute scale they are evil.
This part is actually true.


It is also heavily implied that this is the reason intelligent undead are evil. No matter their original intentions, they are inevitably warped into a force for destruction by the negative energy upon which they are now dependent.
None of this is true. There are examples of Neutral-Good undead creatures in almost every setting, other than maybe Ravenloft. Among the Evil ones many are cruel and violent, but they aren't wanton destroyers. Many large empires are built by liches, vampires, and mummies. It's also difficult to extricate personality changes from negative energy than the ones from not aging, eating, drinking, sleeping, and existing for hundreds of years.


On the subject of Wee Jas:

Despite the fact that her portfolio contains death, necromancy is not one of her primary concerns. Her dogma teaches that magic in general is the key to all things. Wisdom, understanding, personal power, security, order, and control all come from how well one understands magic. The only real difference between her and Boccob is that he is a distant, uncaring deity who considers himself above petty concerns such as good and evil, while she is very active presence in the mortal world. She concerns herself over death only so far as it is inevitable, and that you live on through the knowledge that you record and pass on to the next generation.
There is nothing about her dogma about passing on to the next generation. She is revered by necromancers. Necromancy is clearly among her primary concerns.

[Kallimakus]

One possibility - though I think it actually makes animate dead too powerful in theory, even if not in mechanical practice - would be to have each "unintelligent" undead actually have the tormented soul of its original host trapped, mute and helpless, in the body. Unable to act. Unable to use its mind and intellect. But there. Behind the eye( socket)s. A prisoner being used as fuel to power the mindlessly obedient automaton.

This is the way it works in my games. Not necessarily the original soul, far more likely to be a soul of some easily accessible recently deceased person. This is mostly because of the thing Psyren brought up about afterlife and pulling souls from out of there. It takes Create Undead (or Resurrection) to get that far. (In my setting)


Ok, so maybe this would make the society lawful evil, but still... aside from the fact that whomever is creating the undead is performing an evil act of creating a conduit of negative energy to power the undead, what exactly does a good church have against such a society? Especially a Lawful Good church? I'll expand on what I see the Pros are.

Pros:
- You have removed menial, mundane tasks from your people. Undead perform tasks like "Push this lever" which gives mechanical energy to an area. Said energy can power a grinding stone and a conveyer belt. The conveyer belt feeds grain into the grinding stone which has a siv at the bottom to catch any particles that don't meet a size requirement. As the ground grain passes through, you could even have it pass to finer and finer stones to ultimately make flour. Use this process for sugar, salt, etc. conveyer belt, grinder, powder. food/goods are incredibly cheap and now more affordable, improving the standard of living for all citizens and meaning more money in the citizen's pockets.

For most of this, you could just use a river. And standards of living only improve if the middle men don't take all the wealth. In fact, who needs the living at that point?


- Assign people more skilled labor jobs such as farming, smithing, etc. Even those jobs are easier with the simple application of mechanical engineering and a never ending energy source, crank powered tools. A team of two undead or even one, can power a home for pumping water, creating heat, powering a wood chopping machine. You've improved the life of every citizen just by having these things available.

I don't think there's a very good means of storing or transferring mechanical energy.


- Undead can power mechanisms to make chopping trees down less intensive, causing a boom of skilled carpentry, exporting cut wooden beams for a low cost. Creates more jobs, more prosperity.

I'm curious as to what this mechanism would be to be honest


- The population of the city need not be evil to capitalize and benefit from the existence of undead as mundane, mindless, tireless workers.

This is true.


- By increasing the available workforce, not every family needs everyone to work the farm, children can attend schools. This works incredibly well for a culture that patronizes Wee Jas. Educating the young with the knowledge of the past, paving the way for a smarter, better future.

Well, I feel that farm labour is beyond (undirected) mindless undead. So it wouldn't really help there that much.


- Before someone dies, they can opt in to allow their corpse to be used for the betterment of the society by allowing it to be animated. Such a method gives those who want it the chance to give their lifeless body to better their nation. If someone chooses not to give their body or dies in service to the nation, be that through war or similar, you are laid to rest with honor. Simple as that.

Well, this is the way it works on Golarion. Well, I think it's actually mandatory, but you enjoy the benefits too.


I feel like, although there would be a large amount of undead, there wouldn't be 1,000 HD of undead in any given 100 foot radius sphere. If there were, the planners and keepers of the nation would need to plan accordingly so as to not oversaturate any given area with negative energy. There would, of course, be an overarching aura of negative energy, but just because one resides in close proxemity to negative energy that doesn't mean that person must be evil.

While this isn't official, I consider a bunch of negative energy around an area to increase the chance of spontaneous undead creation.

[Psyren]

The answer is simple. Resurrection requires the original vessel, or a recreation of said vessel. When someone's body (vessel) is occupied by magic as a conduit to the negative energy plane, that body is unavailable to serve as a vessel for that soul. If the vessel has been destroyed, true resurresction rebuilds the vessel and brings the soul back to it.

I know there will be those who think "But wait... Reincarnate has that same clause. It doesn't restore the original vessel. That's can't be correct thinking." At first glance, you're right. But look deeper. You need a part of the original body to use the spell. If the original body is posessed by magic, it can't serve a the component since it's a conduite to the negative energy plane.

It doesn't have to do with the soul, but the vessel. That's why those spells don't work on someone who's corpse has been animated.

But that clause only applies to being undead - there are other situations where the body can be absent but intact. Say, if you try to True Rez someone whose body is part of a flesh golem, it will actually work, showing that the condition/location of the "vessel" isn't actually a factor unless that creature is undead. This suggests that the state of undeath itself - presumably, the conduit to the negative energy plane that is involved - is what presents the problem for these spells, rather than needing the body to be either at hand or destroyed.



Well, this is the way it works on Golarion. Well, I think it's actually mandatory, but you enjoy the benefits too.


It works that way in theory, but Geb has its corruption and troublemakers like any other city.



This is not true. Negative energy does not feed on positive energy in any sense, they're just opposing forces. Water does not feed on fire.

It's more "cold and heat" than "fire and water." And you're right that they don't feed on each other, but they do seek equilibrium, which in the presence of too much cold will result in the extinguishing of the "heat" (life.) Where that becomes a moral issue is that sapient life generally prefers not to be equilibriumed to death.

[skunk3]

I have a hard time understanding why good people and organizations would object to necromancy as long as the undead created are not the type that feed or spawn, and also if it is generally agreed upon that souls are not contained in the bodies of the undead. As long as the undead created do not feed or spawn and no soul-related coercion is going on, why would anyone really care aside from the "ew, gross!" factor? That's overthinking it a bit though. I've always been perfectly fine with evil being evil and keeping things simple and RAI.

[Necroticplague]

I have a hard time understanding why good people and organizations would object to necromancy as long as the undead created are not the type that feed or spawn, and also if it is generally agreed upon that souls are not contained in the bodies of the undead. As long as the undead created do not feed or spawn and no soul-related coercion is going on, why would anyone really care aside from the "ew, gross!" factor? That's overthinking it a bit though. I've always been perfectly fine with evil being evil and keeping things simple and RAI.

Well, since the spells are [evil] that means that the very act of casting them brings some evil (metaphysical force) into the world. Good dieties and their servants (including paladins, clerics, and various Celestials) naturally exist to oppose this force, just as Evil dieties and their servants exist to oppose the type of enery brought about by casting [good] spells. They'd care. Anybody who wasn't caught up in this higher-order metaphysical war wouldn't, but never underestimate the power of the 'ew, gross' factor. It keeps several otherwise pointless traditions, prejudices, and practices alive today, against all rational reason.

[Psyren]

Common folk will care if they are told "you know that shadow that appeared out of nowhere and wiped out your cousins in the neighboring hamlet? That sort of thing will only become more common if necromancy is allowed to spread." Especially if it's true. And even if you can't lay the blame for that at an individual necromancer's feet, the next one who strolls into town with a retinue of skeletons carrying his bags is likely to expect a chilly reception at best, pitchforks and torches at worst. Even if the cause and effect are not immediate or direct, they are still related, and so the aversion/revulsion can have a rational basis.

[Telonius]

For Wee Jas, I think it depends a bit on the source material. I spent a bit of time Googling this; unfortunately nobody had cited exactly where, but apparently in Greyhawk at one point she was stated as being anti-undead. The idea was there's a split in the Greyhawk pantheon, with Nerull being the Lich, necromancer, and un-natural death god, and Wee Jas being the natural death goddess.

In the official 3.x sources, that anti-undead thing is never explicitly stated. Her LN clerics do have to rebuke rather than turn undead, so it's pretty clear that she's not going to raise a fuss about channeling negative energy.

[Necroticplague]

Common folk will care if they are told "you know that shadow that appeared out of nowhere and wiped out your cousins in the neighboring hamlet? That sort of thing will only become more common if necromancy is allowed to spread." Especially if it's true.

And what gives cause for the common man to believe the inquisitor's words? Yes, in this case, they're correct, but words from the mouth of a zealot that are conveniently difficult to verify are very easily met with suspicion and dismissed (especially if one also has someone who says the opposite).

[Doctor Awkward]

This is not true. Negative energy does not feed on positive energy in any sense, they're just opposing forces. Water does not feed on fire.

There is nothing about her dogma about passing on to the next generation. She is revered by necromancers. Necromancy is clearly among her primary concerns.

Water not feeding on fire is a false equivalence. The elemental forces don't interact at all in the sense of cosmic balance. Positive and Negative energy do.

And don't complain to me. Go complain to the Manual of the Planes and Deities and Demigods about how "untruthful" they are being to their readers.


None of this is true. There are examples of Neutral-Good undead creatures in almost every setting, other than maybe Ravenloft. Among the Evil ones many are cruel and violent, but they aren't wanton destroyers. Many large empires are built by liches, vampires, and mummies. It's also difficult to extricate personality changes from negative energy than the ones from not aging, eating, drinking, sleeping, and existing for hundreds of years.




You don't have to be a psychotic wanton destroyer to be irredeemably evil. Nothing about building an empire precludes you from being a cruel and heartless being.

[Necroticplague]

Water not feeding on fire is a false equivalence. The elemental forces don't interact at all in the sense of cosmic balance. Positive and Negative energy do.

Positive and negative energy is unrelated to good and evil. You mention 'elemental forces', ignoring that Positive and Negative are just as much elemental forces as Water, Fire, Earth, and Air.

Funny you should mention MoP, because that section of the IPs has some very interesting things to say about negative energy being evil.

Mildly Neutral-Aligned: Within the D&D cosmology, the Inner Planes have no affinity to particular alignments.
And on the portion about xeg-yi (creatures of undiluted negative energy):
[quote=MoP page 169] Alignment: always neutral]
So, MoP states negative energy isn't evil. It's hostile to most life, yes, but not evil.

[Psyren]

And what gives cause for the common man to believe the inquisitor's words?

Two main reasons:

1) From a purely practical standpoint, common folk would have little reason to find the trappings that surround such necromancy endearing. This goes beyond cosmetic effects like the oozing rot on your zombies, the constant uncanny valley unease of their movements, or the surely pleasant odor that accompanies them - there are also truly practical reasons for not wanting undead shambling around. Being corpses, they're prone to attract carrion animals like rats and flies that are nuisances at best for a peasant society, and outright threats to their lives at worst. They also lead to disease, whether from contact with the corpses themselves or the aforementioned scavengers they attract (and parasites of same) being vectors. So already the necromancer starts at a huge disadvantage with arguing the merits of his position before he and the paladin even open their mouths to debate.

2) The gods who promote and encourage the practice of necromancy have much worse PR than those who denounce or oppose it. Deities like Velsharoon, Nerull, and Urgathoa do not do a great job of winning friends and influencing people who aren't already on board with the idea of raising corpses. This includes putting a stop to the uncontrolled undead (both mindless and otherwise) that are giving their industry-minded associates like the OP a bad name. Generally that task is left for the good clerics, rangers and paladins, who are left as the only credible source. Now, certainly there are necromancers out there who care about the living beyond seeing them as an eventual resource, but such altruistic people would not get far in an evil church or nation, yet those are the very places most suited to honing their craft. Certainly there will be exceptional individuals who can make it out of that environment with their morality intact - but most don't, and it's that majority that the average denizen of a D&D setting will see, just like most Drow are to be avoided.


So even when the effects are not immediately apparent, when the followers of the god(s) of light and healing point out those effects, and the followers of the god(s) of darkness and decay disagree, it's not hard to see who the common folk will side with.


Yes, in this case, they're correct, but words from the mouth of a zealot that are conveniently difficult to verify are very easily met with suspicion and dismissed (especially if one also has someone who says the opposite).

Okay, let's pause a minute to address the "difficult to verify" thing. There are all kinds of divinations that are quite easily verifiable. So you submit a bunch of requests for information or predictions to your local good cleric and they all come up aces. What reason would you have to disbelieve them on this one? Nobody has a problem with the idea that Belkar is going to snuff it soon (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0572.html) despite us having absolutely no evidence to verify it - none that is, except the fact that every other divination the source has made has been accurate. Combined with the stuff above, it's easy to see why they and their churches would be trusted members of most communities. Especially since even Neutral people "would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones" (PHB 105).



So, MoP states negative energy isn't evil. It's hostile to most life, yes, but not evil.

Radiation isn't evil either, but smearing uranium on every doorknob in the village is still an evil act. There's nothing wrong with Negative Energy when it's kept in its home plane, it's bringing it here where it can devour life that's the problem. Tigers aren't evil either, but turning one loose in the town square will probably not look great on your final review.

[Zanos]

Well, I think part of the point of the post-scarcity skeleton empire is to work on the bad PR.

Before you slaughter them for their foolishness and devour their souls.

[Necroticplague]

Two main reasons:

1) From a purely practical standpoint, common folk would have little reason to find the trappings that surround such necromancy endearing. This goes beyond cosmetic effects like the oozing rot on your zombies, the constant uncanny valley unease of their movements, or the surely pleasant odor that accompanies them - there are also truly practical reasons for not wanting undead shambling around. Being corpses, they're prone to attract carrion animals like rats and flies that are nuisances at best for a peasant society, and outright threats to their lives at worst. They also lead to disease, whether from contact with the corpses themselves or the aforementioned scavengers they attract (and parasites of same) being vectors. So already the necromancer starts at a huge disadvantage with arguing the merits of his position before he and the paladin even open their mouths to debate.

2) The gods who promote and encourage the practice of necromancy have much worse PR than those who denounce or oppose it. Deities like Velsharoon, Nerull, and Urgathoa do not do a great job of winning friends and influencing people who aren't already on board with the idea of raising corpses. This includes putting a stop to the uncontrolled undead (both mindless and otherwise) that are giving their industry-minded associates like the OP a bad name. Generally that task is left for the good clerics, rangers and paladins, who are left as the only credible source. Now, certainly there are necromancers out there who care about the living beyond seeing them as an eventual resource, but such altruistic people would not get far in an evil church or nation, yet those are the very places most suited to honing their craft. Certainly there will be exceptional individuals who can make it out of that environment with their morality intact - but most don't, and it's that majority that the average denizen of a D&D setting will see, just like most Drow are to be avoided.


So even when the effects are not immediately apparent, when the followers of the god(s) of light and healing point out those effects, and the followers of the god(s) of darkness and decay disagree, it's not hard to see who the common folk will side with.
Too long to adress everything indavidually, so I'll point this out as a generality: you're assuming things that aren't safe assumptions, and can easily vary by setting. Where's any mention of maggots and scavengers? The rules about training attack animals seem to contradict it.

Normally, an animal will attack only humanoids, monstrous humanoids, giants, or other animals. Teaching an animal to attack all creatures (including such unnatural creatures as undead and aberrations) counts as two tricks. So, on their own, animals will actually avoid undead. Assuming this extends down to smaller animals as well, there's no need to worry about maggots or flies, either. They're pretty fine once they rise up.

Also, not sure why a Good church would definitely have better PR, unless you assume that from the outset. Evil clerics are just as capable of curing disease and healing as good ones. In fact, the Sacrifice rules and similar also indicate that, oddly enough, Evil dieties are more rewarding of your worship while you're alive. So, in terms of PR, it seems like it will basically go to 'whoever was here first'.




Okay, let's pause a minute to address the "difficult to verify" thing. There are all kinds of divinations that are quite easily verifiable. So you submit a bunch of requests for information or predictions to your local good cleric and they all come up aces. What reason would you have to disbelieve them on this one? Nobody has a problem with the idea that Belkar is going to snuff it soon (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0572.html) despite us having absolutely no evidence to verify it - none that is, except the fact that every other divination the source has made has been accurate. Such a test only proves that they are capable of reliable divination. That provides absolutely no defense against them being liars. After all, unless I can also use similar divinations, I can't actually know what you saw during those casting sessions. So even if I know your divinations can be accurate, unless I trust your honesty, then I have no way of knowing if you're feeding me BS to advance your own agenda when it's convenient. They trust the Oracle because they don't really think he has much of a reason to lie to them.


Radiation isn't evil either, but smearing uranium on every doorknob in the village is still an evil act. There's nothing wrong with Negative Energy when it's kept in its home plane, it's bringing it here where it can devour life that's the problem. Tigers aren't evil either, but turning one loose in the town square will probably not look great on your final review.
Then why is calling an Xeg-yi not evil? Or casting any of the couple dozen spells that directly bring negative energy into this world to harm someone? Why is it that only undead are specifically called out as having this effect, as opposed to the many other negative energy effects?

[AnimeTheCat]

For most of this, you could just use a river. And standards of living only improve if the middle men don't take all the wealth. In fact, who needs the living at that point?

I don't think there's a very good means of storing or transferring mechanical energy.

I'm curious as to what this mechanism would be to be honest

Well, I feel that farm labour is beyond (undirected) mindless undead. So it wouldn't really help there that much.

The thing is rivers aren't everywhere. This would make an otherwise inhospitable place hospitable. Also, you could settle near stagnant lakes and not be concerned with finding flowing waters. To prevent the middle-man, you need a star, strong rule set surrounding the undead and their use. Have the breaking of these laws be punishable by the worst of fates and have your dying will be revoked from you. It is, after all, a theoretically lawful society.

Gears are quite sufficient to transfer mechanical energy and since you have a limitless supply, you have no need to store it.

You can create a machine that works similar to a train wheel, but with a circular sawblade attached to it instead of another wheel.

Undead can't farm themselves, but they can power simple or complex machines capable of watering, airrating, tilling, plowing, and even planting. All that's left is the harvesting which can also be accomplished via machine.

Lastly, any society that values it's prosperity will value it's citizens. Citizens can be trained and paid for pest control. Undead can be under the effect of gentle repose for long periods of time, the spell lasts days per level after all. And if there is an undead problem, the necromancy school possesses plenty of spells that are effective against undead. Good clerics/paladins/etc don't have the corner market on be good against undead.

[Psyren]

Too long to adress everything indavidually, so I'll point this out as a generality: you're assuming things that aren't safe assumptions, and can easily vary by setting. Where's any mention of maggots and scavengers? The rules about training attack animals seem to contradict it.

Are we talking strict rules here? Because I thought you were talking about why the common folk would believe one church over another. If we're sticking to pure rules, all we have to go on is that making undead is an evil act, and the reasons given in Libris Mortis for that.


So, on their own, animals will actually avoid undead. Assuming this extends down to smaller animals as well, there's no need to worry about maggots or flies, either. They're pretty fine once they rise up.

Since we're being technical here, maggots and flies are vermin.



Also, not sure why a Good church would definitely have better PR, unless you assume that from the outset. Evil clerics are just as capable of curing disease and healing as good ones. In fact, the Sacrifice rules and similar also indicate that, oddly enough, Evil dieties are more rewarding of your worship while you're alive. So, in terms of PR, it seems like it will basically go to 'whoever was here first'.

They can, but the dogma of most evil deities would actually get in the way. They could do it anyway of course and fall, which would make them a lot less helpful.

That, and the evil clerics' ability to channel negative energy is generally unhelpful to common folk.


Such a test only proves that they are capable of reliable divination. That provides absolutely no defense against them being liars.

Clerics aren't known for their Bluff, and anyway, most people assume you're telling the truth until they have reason to believe otherwise. \


Then why is calling an Xeg-yi not evil? Or casting any of the couple dozen spells that directly bring negative energy into this world to harm someone? Why is it that only undead are specifically called out as having this effect, as opposed to the many other negative energy effects?

They're the exception that proves the rule at best, or just a badly designed monster. 3.0 was full of them, so I'm quite happy writing them off as being irrelevant.

Of course, the fact that they're outsiders may mean there's different implications to their existence than being undead. After all, the Libris Mortis passages don't apply to them. Perhaps if necromancers had come up with a way to call negative energy outsiders rather than undead, they could utilize the energy safely. Or perhaps the nature of outsiders simply means less "leakage." An outsider's presence in the Material is more tenuous after all - you can't Dismiss a skeleton.

[Necroticplague]

Are we talking strict rules here? Because I thought you were talking about why the common folk would believe one church over another. If we're sticking to pure rules, all we have to go on is that making undead is an evil act, and the reasons given in Libris Mortis for that. I never disputed either of these points, so I'm not sure why you bring them up. Yes, it's evil, and the good clerics are right. However, there really isn't proof other than "cmon, just trust me." available to the average person, which isn't horrifically convincing.

They can, but the dogma of most evil deities would actually get in the way. They could do it anyway of course and fall, which would make them a lot less helpful.
Evil dieties should, above most beings, understand the importance of having to conceal your nature to perform your goals. As long as you perform the ultimate goal of delivering souls onto them, I don't think you'll fall for putting in the effort of a convincing facade.

Clerics aren't known for their Bluff, and anyway, most people assume you're telling the truth until they have reason to believe otherwise.The fact they're attempting to get me to change my ways, and that their the cleric of a god I don't worship, are automatically reasons for me to know they have a specific agenda they push, and thus for me to believe they lie by default.

Or perhaps the nature of outsiders simply means less "leakage." An outsider's presence in the Material is more tenuous after all - you can't Dismiss a skeleton.
Except that even more tenuous forms of undead are still [evil]: see also, the Summon Undead line.

[Pleh]

I've done this both ways (as a DM).

In one game I played, I created a Necromonger civilization, inspired by industrial era american/german culture. Ruled by an immortal demi lich (but having a body like a lich) as a necromantic Emperor Palpatine, the culture is a LE society with complex evil ideology. They do not recognize themselves as evil, but pragmatic. All citizens are expected to be loyal and hard working to beyond death. Where our real culture expects aging citizens to work to earn a comfortable retirement and pass on wealth to descendents, theirs expects citizens to serve the glory of their great empire until their bones turn to dust. Selfish attempts to escape this duty are punished, usually by being animated as a lesser form of undead or even by having your conversion to undeath conducted prematurely. Those that serve with distinction are often rewarded by being made more powerful forms of undead and advanced in social status.

There were good aligned churches and nations that resisted them and warred with them, but they grew alongside them, making "nipping them in the bud" not viable

Out of time. I'll share the other version I've used later.

[Psyren]

I never disputed either of these points, so I'm not sure why you bring them up. Yes, it's evil, and the good clerics are right. However, there really isn't proof other than "cmon, just trust me." available to the average person, which isn't horrifically convincing.

As I pointed out, they have significantly more reason to trust the good clergy than the necromancers, and significant reason to find undead distasteful before considering any benefits the necromancers might espouse.



Evil dieties should, above most beings, understand the importance of having to conceal your nature to perform your goals. As long as you perform the ultimate goal of delivering souls onto them, I don't think you'll fall for putting in the effort of a convincing facade.

They do that by hiding their religion entirely, not by trying to represent it as someone else. Unless you're in a nation where evil churches can operate openly like Cheliax anyway, and in those places, they're far more interested in oppressing the downtrodden than making their lives better with pain-free labor.



The fact they're attempting to get me to change my ways, and that their the cleric of a god I don't worship, are automatically reasons for me to know they have a specific agenda they push, and thus for me to believe they lie by default.

That's nonsense. Everyone has an agenda - by your logic, that means everybody is lying and nobody can be trusted, but you won't get far in life without trusting something.



Except that even more tenuous forms of undead are still [evil]: see also, the Summon Undead line.

Those still summon undead, not outsiders, so my point stands.

[Blackhawk748]

To further muddy the waters, Tomb Tainted Soul makes a person run on Negative Energy, with no side effects. So Negative Energy can also sustain life

[Pleh]

I did fashion a setting where necromancy inherently involved disrupting the rest of the dead, explaining the pragmatic evil. By this logic, certain spells had to shift schools, but the change was pretty minor.

"Does necromancy steal a soul from their respective afterlife?"

Yes and no. The soul in question would probably experience insufferable nightmares in theit afterlife, possibly fall into a sickness or coma, and might even lose their place in the afterlife (depending on the strength of the spell affecting them). Then again, this is also a setting where disturbing a dead person's tomb or remains in a mundane manner can evoke a similar effect, drawing the spirit out of their deathly slumber to defend their remains.

"Would evil characters be relieved of hell by this?"

Yes and no. Torment is torment. This would exchange one imprisonment and torture for another. Even intelligent undead of evil people wouldn't be free to do as they please. They are still trapped in their own corpse serving some other evil purpose than their own, their soul agonized by the magic desecrating what is left of their flesh.

[Necroticplague]

To further muddy the waters, Tomb Tainted Soul makes a person run on Negative Energy, with no side effects. So Negative Energy can also sustain life
But not any Good life, because of the prerequisites for TTS.


Related sidenote. How negative energy can work as a power source, both for undead and people with that feat, always confused the tar out of me. Negative Energy is, by it's nature, entropic. It stops things from moving, removes energy from them. It pulls things towards itself and oblivion (thus, old age, as living things slowly lose their battle against the Negative's grim pull). How can such an energy be used to provide not only more motion at all, but increasing, infinite motion (see: evolved undead)?

[Blackhawk748]

But not any Good life, because of the prerequisites for TTS.


Related sidenote. How negative energy can work as a power source, both for undead and people with that feat, always confused the tar out of me. Negative Energy is, by it's nature, entropic. It stops things from moving, removes energy from them. It pulls things towards itself and oblivion (thus, old age, as living things slowly lose their battle against the Negative's grim pull). How can such an energy be used to provide not only more motion at all, but increasing, infinite motion (see: evolved undead)?

Simple, it's just Anti Matter. Ok, not literal anti matter but it's similar. Life on the Material Plane uses Positive energy to fuel life, Negative Energy is just the opposite power, neither good nor evil. Sadly the copyright for mindless undead is owned by Evil, much like Poison, so anyone fueled by Negative Energy is immediately forsaken by Good.

It's actually rather Evil as it's pretty judging someone, which good isn't supposed to do

[Necroticplague]

Simple, it's just Anti Matter. Ok, not literal anti matter but it's similar. Life on the Material Plane uses Positive energy to fuel life, Negative Energy is just the opposite power.Except that all descriptions of the PE and NE seem to indicate this is false. Even seperated from all other things to interact with, NE and PE have very different properties. A close collection of PE will explode outwards in a burst of light (thus, why the Positive's so bright), a close collection of NE will solidify into Voidstone.


Sadly the copyright for mindless undead is owned by Evil, much like Poison, so anyone fueled by Negative Energy is immediately forsaken by Good.Poison isn't inherently evil, and NE isn't linked to Evil either (as the NEP itself and it's Outsider are Neutral).


It's actually rather Evil as it's pretty judging someone, which good isn't supposed to do Actually, Savage Species indicates that Evil communities are more tolerant of different being, so that's actually a remarkably consistent note across differing books.

[BlackOnyx]

First off, fascinating thread. Thanks to AnimeTheCat for bringing it up.

My two cents on some of the opinions expressed.


That's the thing though, the spell "Animate Dead" does not say anything about binding a soul, tormenting a soul, desecrating a corpse, or anything of the sort. You're not making that person's eternal soul push the lever forever, you're making the magically animated bones (powered by negative energy) push the lever.


I'm under the same impression. The Libris Mortis makes a strong case that this is the case for the basic mindless undead that would be created by animate dead.


Under the "Atrocity Calls to Unlife" section on page 7:


"A sufficiently heinous act may attract the attention of malicious spirits, bodiless and seeking to house themselves in flesh, especially recently vacated vessels. Such spirits are often little more than nodes of unquenchable hunger, wishing only to feed. These comprise many of the mindless undead."


"Sometimes these evil influences also manage to reinvigorate the decaying memories of the body's former host. Thus some semblance of the original personality and memories remain...However, this being is not truly inhabited by the spirit of the original creature, which has left to seek its destiny in the Outer Planes. This amalgamation is something entirely new."


Like the spell "Speak With Dead," any memories that the animated dead retains are likely the result of imprinted knowledge left on the actual body. The actual consciousness inside is something new, more akin to an elemental or construct than anything.


However, this also lends itself to some interesting questions for undead that retain larger portions of their physical bodies (i.e. zombies). Could one bring a more obedient copy of their recently deceased lover to life via animate & awaken undead, even if their soul is long departed? Would they even be able to tell the difference? A very cool (and slightly unnerving) idea to explore.



Evil clerics are just as capable of curing disease and healing as good ones. In fact, the Sacrifice rules and similar also indicate that, oddly enough, Evil dieties are more rewarding of your worship while you're alive. So, in terms of PR, it seems like it will basically go to 'whoever was here first'.


I agree with you on this point. The Primacy Effect can work wonders in attracting people to ideals. Whether your aura is good or evil, if you're the first person to reach out to a disenfranchised people, there's a good chance they'll perceive you in a positive light. If you grow up in a society that espouses these ideals and treats you well, there's little reason for you not to trust it.



To further muddy the waters, Tomb Tainted Soul makes a person run on Negative Energy, with no side effects. So Negative Energy can also sustain life

I'm not sure I'd consider the process as "sustaining life" so much as "sustaining a soul." From my impression, the application of positive and negative energy define what is considered alive or undead.


On the topic of souls & consciousness, I recently stumbled upon on an r/DnD discussion that made an interesting analogy, likening positive & negative energy as a "battery" to an otherwise inert soul. Properly prepared, a given consciousness can run on either.


Tomb tainted soul is an interesting feat to consider though. If you're powered by negative energy, why wouldn't you enjoy all the benefits of being undead? The only thing I can think of is that the process is less efficient than "normal" undead animation--its like running the wrong type of fuel in a vehicle. Other means of creating undead "prepare" the soul for negative energy compatibility. Tomb tainted only represents a rough, jimmy-rigged approximation. Effective for negative energy healing, but you're still mortal in the end.



How negative energy can work as a power source, both for undead and people with that feat, always confused the tar out of me. Negative Energy is, by it's nature, entropic. It stops things from moving, removes energy from them. It pulls things towards itself and oblivion.


My take is that the whole "oblivion and entropy" caveat is that it's more of a biased understanding from the viewpoint of positive energy beings. When you see negative energy spells consuming the bodies of your friends and allies, why wouldn't you think that negative energy spells the end of all things?


From the standpoint of a negative energy being, I'd argue that positive energy could be viewed to be just as destructive. It's all based on your point of reference.


As a sidenote, maybe the reason that negative energy can power creatures for-(seemingly)-ever is the fact that it runs more efficiently. Positive energy is all about burning hot and fast; that's why the living eventually die while the undead persist. While creatures that are powered by negative energy might feel "cold" to living beings, it's not like they're running at absolute zero. Their required operating temperature is just on a much lower threshold.



**

Libris Mortis. Renton, WA, Wizards of the Coast, Inc., 2004. pp.7

[Blackhawk748]

Poison isn't inherently evil, and NE isn't linked to Evil either (as the NEP itself and it's Outsider are Neutral).

Actually, Savage Species indicates that Evil communities are more tolerant of different being, so that's actually a remarkably consistent note across differing books.

Poison use is inherently evil unless you naturally produce it. Yes it's dumb.

Then how is Good, Good if they are a bunch of intolerant jerkbags?

[Necroticplague]

Poison use is inherently evil unless you naturally produce it. Yes it's dumb.BoED draws a very important distinction: It's poison that does ability damage that's evil. Poisons that don't do ability damage, like Drow sleeping poison, are perfectly fine.

[Psyren]

Simple, it's just Anti Matter. Ok, not literal anti matter but it's similar. Life on the Material Plane uses Positive energy to fuel life, Negative Energy is just the opposite power, neither good nor evil. Sadly the copyright for mindless undead is owned by Evil, much like Poison, so anyone fueled by Negative Energy is immediately forsaken by Good.

It's actually rather Evil as it's pretty judging someone, which good isn't supposed to do

The problem as I see it is that the universe already tends towards entropy. Everything dies. Adding more negative energy to a system where life is already losing is evil, not because of the energy itself, but because of the implications it has for all the innocent life already there. It shows a certain level of callous disregard for that life, like pouring (perfectly neutral) toxic waste into the village square - even if said toxic waste is the byproduct of a perfectly well-intentioned industrial innovation.

[Blackhawk748]

The problem as I see it is that the universe already tends towards entropy. Everything dies. Adding more negative energy to a system where life is already losing is evil, not because of the energy itself, but because of the implications it has for all the innocent life already there. It shows a certain level of callous disregard for that life, like pouring (perfectly neutral) toxic waste into the village square - even if said toxic waste is the byproduct of a perfectly well-intentioned industrial innovation.

That's actually really Neutral, especially because we've seen that life can adapt to run on said "waste". I agree it's incredibly callous but there's arguments for it not being evil

[Necroticplague]

That's actually really Neutral, especially because we've seen that life can adapt to run on said "waste". I agree it's incredibly callous but there's arguments for it not being evil

But most things don't. Good involves a respect for life, something casually throwing around environmental toxins violates. Most life can't adapt, so you disrespect most life by doing so.

[Telonius]

BoED draws a very important distinction: It's poison that does ability damage that's evil. Poisons that don't do ability damage, like Drow sleeping poison, are perfectly fine.

That one line is among the dumbest statements in the whole book, especially since it's right before Ravages. Apparently it's totally evil to deal ability damage to your enemies, but completely okay to deal ability damage to your enemies if what you're using will only cause them undue suffering if they're Evil. Then you have the issue of Couatl venom, the purified version of which is mentioned in the very same section. Couatls, an "always Lawful Good" creature, have a single method of attack: a bite that does 1d3+6 plus poison damage.

[ErebusVonMori]

So what if the necromancer in question makes a point of casting positive energy spells to counteract the effect of his actions? Is it still evil or have we finally pushed the needle into good?

[Psyren]

So what if the necromancer in question makes a point of casting positive energy spells to counteract the effect of his actions? Is it still evil or have we finally pushed the needle into good?

That's how it works in a video game like Neverwinter Nights, but not in D&D. BoED:


A character who has committed an evil act cannot simply obtain an atonement spell and carry on as if nothing had happened. She must first make amends for her actions, at least trying to repair any damage she caused and offering sincere apologies to those who might still hold resentment against her. She must demonstrate a willingness to try harder in the future to avoid such actions, a real commitment to avoiding evil at all costs. In many cases, she must also perform an act of penance: a good deed that most likely has nothing to do with reparations to those she injured, but simply demonstrates her renewed commitment to good.

[ErebusVonMori]

Well that's shockingly inconsistent when it comes to balance. The idea that the slightest bit of evil taints the entire thing means that evil should have won years ago.

Also how is it evil when you've mitigated the thing that made it evil in the first place? You've balanced the positive and negative energy and your skeleton is doing nothing but be useful and helpful.

[BlackOnyx]

Also how is it evil when you've mitigated the thing that made it evil in the first place? You've balanced the positive and negative energy and your skeleton is doing nothing but be useful and helpful.


In this instance, I think it all stems from how 3.5e interprets [Evil] from an objective standpoint rather than an ethical one. In short, D&D [Evil] is not equal to real world "evil."


[Evil], in the context of spell descriptors and effects, is a definition, not a morally weighted value judgement. The powers that be have recognized/defined [Evil] spells as [Evil] by definition. Good gods define [Evil] spells as [Evil]. Evil gods define [Evil] spells as [Evil]. The act of casting these spells will always be [Evil] despite the intent behind them.


Even though gods and mortals often associate moral judgements with certain spell types (i.e. "it should be condoned" or "it shouldn't be condoned"), the terms [Good] and [Evil] (as descriptors) don't necessarily define how all others will perceive their effects.


Think of it like a computer reading code. Execute spell x and the output is a spell effect that is either [Good], Unaligned, or [Evil] (...or lawful, chaotic, etc). There's no emotion inherent in the judgement itself--it's just a definition used to categorize the spells based on their effects. It's a mechanic.


That said, some good and/or neutral gods/societies might be more willing to allow [Evil] marks on one's record than others. Whereas some might simply condemn any individuals that register positive for [Evil] without a second thought, others might consider the context of the situation and allow for leeway should the action be deemed necessary.


It's a sad truth, but it makes sense. Based on their prior experiences and preconceptions, many good and neutral gods/societies find it most practical or morally right to consider [Evil] acts a heinous crime without question. Though there are cases where characters might have had good intentions in mind, the bad precedent set by most others that have used [Evil] spells precedes them.

In short:

[Evil] = bad is a value judgement.

[Evil] = [Evil] is an objective one.

[Psyren]

Well that's shockingly inconsistent when it comes to balance. The idea that the slightest bit of evil taints the entire thing means that evil should have won years ago.

Which is why good is fighting an uphill battle and has zero tolerance for animating undead. No need for necromancers, however well-intentioned, to make that any harder.


Also how is it evil when you've mitigated the thing that made it evil in the first place? You've balanced the positive and negative energy and your skeleton is doing nothing but be useful and helpful.

It doesn't matter what you make them do. BoVD this time:


Unliving corpses—corrupt mockeries of life and purity—are inherently evil. Creating them is one of the most heinous crimes against the world that a character can commit. Even if they are commanded to do something good, undead invariably bring negative energy into the world, which makes it a darker and more evil place.

Note that the bolded passage fits with the Libris Mortis explanation perfectly.

Changing that via houserule or custom setting is fine, but that's how it works in standard D&D settings.

[ErebusVonMori]

I know all that, but if bringing in negative energy is what makes it evil, then why doesn't cleaning up after yourself with positive energy solve that?

[Necroticplague]

I know all that, but if bringing in negative energy is what makes it evil, then why doesn't cleaning up after yourself with positive energy solve that?
For the same reason that a murderer isn't seen as a.o.k. if they save a few people's lives. Yes, their total balance sheet is positive, that doesn't stop the bad thing they did from still being bad. Killing 2 people and saving 3 is damning, while just saving 1 is commendable. Same net gain in life, not morally equal.

[ErebusVonMori]

Except murder and saving lives aren't equivalent actions, one doesn't counteract the other, but summoning positive energy does counter negative energy. It's a false equivalence.

[Grim Portent]

Except murder and saving lives aren't equivalent actions, one doesn't counteract the other, but summoning positive energy does counter negative energy. It's a false equivalence.

Adding positive energy into the system isn't equivalent to animating the dead either. Creating undead is like knocking holes in a boat, adding positive energy to the universe is like bailing out that boat afterwards, the hole is still there no matter how much you bail out the water rushing in.

[RedMage125]

I've done this both ways (as a DM).

In one game I played, I created a Necromonger civilization, inspired by industrial era american/german culture. Ruled by an immortal demi lich (but having a body like a lich) as a necromantic Emperor Palpatine, the culture is a LE society with complex evil ideology. They do not recognize themselves as evil, but pragmatic. All citizens are expected to be loyal and hard working to beyond death. Where our real culture expects aging citizens to work to earn a comfortable retirement and pass on wealth to descendents, theirs expects citizens to serve the glory of their great empire until their bones turn to dust. Selfish attempts to escape this duty are punished, usually by being animated as a lesser form of undead or even by having your conversion to undeath conducted prematurely. Those that serve with distinction are often rewarded by being made more powerful forms of undead and advanced in social status.

There were good aligned churches and nations that resisted them and warred with them, but they grew alongside them, making "nipping them in the bud" not viable

Out of time. I'll share the other version I've used later.
This (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=17124888&postcount=1) is something similar I worked on. The relevant part is in the spoiler block at the end. You might like it.




"Does necromancy steal a soul from their respective afterlife?"

There's a lot of evidence to support the idea that there is SOME connection between an undead creature, and the soul of the person who used to inhabit that body.


From Dragon #350, which had a Core Beliefs article on Wee Jas, it states:

"Her focus is on the spirits of the dead, not their bodies, and thus she tolerates necromancy-especially if the subject is willing (although she frowns on stealing lawfully-buried bodies). Because she guards the spirits of the dead, she is displeased when these spirits are involuntarily summoned back to the mortal world and corrupted into undead (again, voluntray corruption into undead-bodied or bodiless-does not disturb her). Her belief in the sanctity of death is so strong that her clergy are forbidden from raising the dead by any means without first consulting her (whether directly via commune or indirectly through a divine messenger)."


It is interesting, however, that the article on Wee Jas says that when an undead creature is created, that the soul of said person is summoned from the afterlife and forced into said undead. That shines a whole new light on the other discussion that's been going on in this thread, huh?

Also found this in the Wee Jas article:
"Wee Jas does not appreciate the use of Suel spirits for creating undead, and any arcane spellcaster bent on creating undead should be careful about what sort of spirit his spell draws to the Material Plane. In most cases, undead-creating spell (including animate dead) can be adjusted as they are cast to avoid contacting the remnant of a Suel spirit, and doing so does not alter their casting or effects in any way. A few spells, however, specifically draw on the soul that once inhabited the target body (often intended as a punishment for the dead person)..."

So apparently, the default of undead-creating spells affects the soul of the target body, but animate dead can be altered so that it does not, but other undead-creating spells (presumably the ones that create non-mindless undead) still draw on the target body's soul. This fits in perfectly with the character concept. It even lists Pale Master, Master of Shrouds, and True Necromancer as some of the Prestige Classes that he faithful are likely to follow.
MORE importantly (and not in a Dragon article), is the circumstantial evidence offered up by the core rules:
If a person has been animated into an undead creature, and that creature still exists, no magic can restore them to life.
You can Disintegrate someone's remains, scatter the ashes among several planes, and True Resurrection can bring them back, creating a new body.
But if you get killed by a sword, and some level 5 evil cleric turns your body into a mindless zombie, then True Resurrection cannot create a new body for you (actually, even if your corpse is NOT animated somewhere, TR requires the body to be on hand. Specifically only makes a new body if the old one was destroyed). Even more disturbing, if you get killed by a wraith, and become a new wraith spawn, and your allies recover your physical body without destroying said wraith...you STILL cannot be brought back by True Ressurection.

I know it's circumstantial evidence, but it seems to be a pretty strong indication that there's SOME connection between the undead creature and the soul of the person who used to inhabit the body.

Fun fact, that's the best way to make sure someone stays dead in D&D. Kill the person, animate them as a zombie. Put the zombie in a lead-lined box. Get Dimensional Anchor and anti-locating spells permanently cast on the box. Drop the box into the ocean. Now the person cannot be brought back as long as the zombie exists, but the zombie cannot be summoned. Someone's going to have to physically retrieve that box from the bottom of the ocean. And since it will be difficult, if not impossible, to divine the location of said box, the search for the box must be conducted by visual search.



"Would evil characters be relieved of hell by this?"

Yes and no. Torment is torment. This would exchange one imprisonment and torture for another. Even intelligent undead of evil people wouldn't be free to do as they please. They are still trapped in their own corpse serving some other evil purpose than their own, their soul agonized by the magic desecrating what is left of their flesh.
Agree 100%


I know all that, but if bringing in negative energy is what makes it evil, then why doesn't cleaning up after yourself with positive energy solve that?

The other part of the BoVD quote that Psyren didn't bold is that undead are mockeries of life and purity. And that creating them is a crime AGAINST THE WORLD.

It's not just "bringing in negative energy". It's VIOLATING A CORPSE and turning it into a twisted parody of its former self, in a gruesome pantomime of the works of nature.

The magicks that sustain their existence is evil. That's not to say that Negative Energy is "always evil", which is patently (and provably) false. But the specific way in which that negative energy is used are evil. And since the magicks that animate them are evil, and those magicks-by definition-are omnipresent ion their bodies (as they would collapse if those magicks failed), the rules that support the "mindless undead are evil" means that the rules for beings for evil is "an inherent part of their nature" (much like fiends) supercedes the rules regarding non-intelligent creatures not having an alignment.

[Necroticplague]

Except murder and saving lives aren't equivalent actions, one doesn't counteract the other, but summoning positive energy does counter negative energy. It's a false equivalence.

Summoning positive energy doesn't counter the negative energy created by animating undead. If it did that, the Negative in the undead being cancelled out would cause to to de-animate.

EDIT:

The magicks that sustain their existence is evil. That's not to say that Negative Energy is "always evil", which is patently (and provably) false. But the specific way in which that negative energy is used are evil. And since the magicks that animate them are evil, and those magicks-by definition-are omnipresent ion their bodies (as they would collapse if those magicks failed), the rules that support the "mindless undead are evil" means that the rules for beings for evil is "an inherent part of their nature" (much like fiends) supercedes the rules regarding non-intelligent creatures not having an alignment.
IIRC, there are mindless constructs that have an Evil alignment due to being made out of fiendish materials, further providing support to this argument.

Also, my personal headcannonical (but in no way supported) theory: current status of undead is linked to Orcus's portfolio holding sway over them. Since they're in his portolio, all undead derive some of their existence from his power. Thus, animating undead is always evil because it draws upon the fiendish power of the Demon Lord of Undead. If one could find another way to create undead without link (most realistically through slaying orcus again and handing his 'undead ' portfolio to a non-evil god), one could fix this.

[ErebusVonMori]

Except using positive energy on an undead literally does stop them. You're just not directly applying it, just using enough around it to mitigate the effects to the surrounding area.

[Necroticplague]

Except using positive energy on an undead literally does stop them. You're just not directly applying it, just using enough around it to mitigate the effects to the surrounding area.

In which case, we're back at Grim Portent's 'bailing out the boat after you punched a hole in it'. Long as the undead exist, they'll continue to spread Negative Energy into the world. Sure, if you do an excellent job bailing, you might be able to keep it afloat, but everyone's gonna be pretty pissed you put the hole there in the first place.

[Psyren]

In which case, we're back at Grim Portent's 'bailing out the boat after you punched a hole in it'. Long as the undead exist, they'll continue to spread Negative Energy into the world. Sure, if you do an excellent job bailing, you might be able to keep it afloat, but everyone's gonna be pretty pissed you put the hole there in the first place.

This.


Except murder and saving lives aren't equivalent actions, one doesn't counteract the other, but summoning positive energy does counter negative energy. It's a false equivalence.

Even if it were possible to solve this via maths, every undead you animate adds evil at least twice - the negative energy brought by the undead you've created, and the negative energy brought in by any undead that spontaneously show up from you having thinned the veil. And that's before you add in the evil that those uncontrolled undead do before they're caught. Worse, many of those are then capable of spreading even more darkness - making spawn, corrupting areas, haunting etc. It's a cascading effect.

Also, how are you "summoning positive energy" anyway? There is no non-outsider creature type that does that, and as the evidence indicates, outsiders are treated differently. They are in the world, but not part of it (quite literally "outside") so summoning a bunch of xag-yas and xeg-yis won't tip the balance no matter what you do.

[ErebusVonMori]

Ok summoning wasn't the right word, but a spell that uses or produces positive energy. If high enough level just open a gate to the positive energy plane once a day and that should solve it. I can easily picture a mage working out the energy produced by each spell/undead and keeping it balanced.

[Psyren]

Ok summoning wasn't the right word, but a spell that uses or produces positive energy.

Which one? I don't know of any spells that would help here. Gate wouldn't (see below).


If high enough level just open a gate to the positive energy plane once a day and that should solve it. I can easily picture a mage working out the energy produced by each spell/undead and keeping it balanced.

Gate does two things: planar travel, which works like a precise form of plane shift, or calling creatures, which only pulls creatures through (extraplanar ones at that.) Neither of those would help.

[ErebusVonMori]

The gate itself is a circular hoop or disk from 5 to 20 feet in diameter (caster’s choice), oriented in the direction you desire when it comes into existence (typically vertical and facing you). It is a two-dimensional window looking into the plane you specified when casting the spell, and anyone or anything that moves through is shunted instantly to the other side.

A gate has a front and a back. Creatures moving through the gate from the front are transported to the other plane; creatures moving through it from the back are not.


Whilst it's open positive energy should leak through, the question becomes how many zombies equals a single gate spell for a round

[Psyren]

The gate itself is a circular hoop or disk from 5 to 20 feet in diameter (caster’s choice), oriented in the direction you desire when it comes into existence (typically vertical and facing you). It is a two-dimensional window looking into the plane you specified when casting the spell, and anyone or anything that moves through is shunted instantly to the other side.

A gate has a front and a back. Creatures moving through the gate from the front are transported to the other plane; creatures moving through it from the back are not.


Whilst it's open positive energy should leak through, the question becomes how many zombies equals a single gate spell for a round

Nothing in your quote says anything about "energy leaking" :smallconfused:

[ErebusVonMori]

It say anything that moves through, now if positive energy follows the same laws everything else does then it will diffuse from an area of high density to low density

[Psyren]

It say anything that moves through, now if positive energy follows the same laws everything else does then it will diffuse from an area of high density to low density

I can understand wanting to apply physics to D&D, but that way lies madness :smalltongue:

[Feantar]

Undead are one type of perpetual motion machine that exists, but they are not the only one and, with the exclusion of berserk golems, the others don't have that many dangers. One of the biggest being, the death of the controller causes a massacre if not handled perfectly.

Note however, that the above argument doesn't include the scenario of animating undead temporarily, to jumpstart an industrial revolution (that renders them obsolete). In that case, it shifts closer to a reckless act and not a completely self-indulgent one. Why do this? Because you might not have the resources (XP) to jumpstart one without them, and so you take a risk(a huge one).


Bob the Necromancer is an educated man who leads a small settlement. He sees the people toiling in the fields and having no time or resources to educate themselves. Knowing that education is a force multiplier, he begins creating undead, to work the fields(somehow - the way is not important as long as he does not kill to do it) and gives the funds back to the community. Out of his pocket, he pays to construct a large college, and makes sure people spend their newfound free time studying. The next generation is a generation of magecrafters and wizard, who assist Bob in the creation of magic items making the undead obsolete. He then begins destroying his small horde until none remain - but doesn't pause the construction. Bob's Town exports their machines at cost, thus slowly making the world industrialized, and bring about a Golden Age.

In this scenario if Bob had, somehow, not used undead I'd have ruled that the was probably exalted. Since he did, I'd lower it to neutral. He did some extremely evil acts, some extremely good acts, and his intentions were good(If I Recall, BoED does take intentions into account at least partially).
tl;dr: Undead are no permanent solution due to inherent dangers, but the easy nature of their creation just might justify their utilization to initiate an industrial evolution, as long as they are destroyed before they go bananas. There's even an non Golarion in-setting sort of precedent for this, see Monsters of Faerun, good liches, animate dead.

[Necroticplague]

It say anything that moves through, now if positive energy follows the same laws everything else does then it will diffuse from an area of high density to low density
Magical energy doesn't follow rules of physics.

[ErebusVonMori]

That still doesn't mean it won't travel through the gate.

[Pleh]

I believe this discussion was answered by Spock:

"It has always been easier to destroy than to create."

Bringing negative energy into the world breaks down the fabric upon which mortals exist. It destroys what we subsist of. Its very existence on our plane is destructive (unless you are already undead).

However, just pumping raw positive energy into our plane doesn't simply create what never was or put back together what has been torn apart (it does, but it not simply). In fact, too much positive energy kills just as effectively as too much negative energy.

I'd say it's like money. Invoking negative energy is like armed robbery, where you take something from someone else to profit. Just dumping positive energy into the world to make it better is like tossing some of the stolen money to a homeless person. It's just not quite neutral, because you've still caused far more harm than you've helped, not mention you have no actual investment in giving any real help to the homeless guy.

Now, it gets more balanced if you're pulling a Robin Hood, stealing from illegitimate tax funds and giving back to the people it was wrongfully taken from. Stepping away from the metaphor, you could create undead to save a village, destroy them after, and then heal the sick and injured in the village after.

Not a perfect balance. It's still evil to do it, but you might manage to keep a neutral alignment at the end.

[ErebusVonMori]

By that logic though a skilled enough wizard would be able to use the positive energy for repair work.

[Psyren]

That still doesn't mean it won't travel through the gate.

There's no evidence that gates work this way, and even if they did, you're proposing a 9th-level solution to a problem that starts at 2nd/3rd.

[ErebusVonMori]

That's why you'd need someone to seriously study just how much energy each spell brings into the world. But that's something that would have to be decided be an individual DM, how much of any given spells adds what to the scales.

[Psyren]

That's why you'd need someone to seriously study just how much energy each spell brings into the world. But that's something that would have to be decided be an individual DM, how much of any given spells adds what to the scales.

Before you get to a "how much" question, you need to first prove that this is possible at all. So far the only spells we know capable of bringing energy in like this are the ones that animate or create undead, as per BoVD and LM.

We also have Fiendish Codex 2 - casting evil spells is a Corrupt act, but no amount of casting [good] or positive energy spells afterward removes that corruption. This goes back to Necrotic's analogy with the hole in the boat.

[RedMage125]

IIRC, there are mindless constructs that have an Evil alignment due to being made out of fiendish materials, further providing support to this argument.
I'm honestly surprised flesh golems aren't evil, since making one involves at least one evil act (Animate Dead is on the list of spells used in their creation).


Also, my personal headcannonical (but in no way supported) theory: current status of undead is linked to Orcus's portfolio holding sway over them. Since they're in his portolio, all undead derive some of their existence from his power. Thus, animating undead is always evil because it draws upon the fiendish power of the Demon Lord of Undead. If one could find another way to create undead without link (most realistically through slaying orcus again and handing his 'undead ' portfolio to a non-evil god), one could fix this.

Interesting, but it also kind of implies that undead ONLY exist because of Orcus. Which could, of course, be an interesting red herring for a high level party, who might believe that they could destroy all undead everywhere if they can just permanently kill Orcus. but, as you said, it's your personal headcanon, so I'm not going to tell you that you are in any way "wrong" :smallbiggrin:

Off topic, hence the spoiler block, but I have a personal headcanon that has no ACTUAL support from the books, but I see plenty of circumstantial evidence for it. I believe I know the location of Vecna's phylactery.
Vecna was once a powerful lich and ruler of a vast kingdom, right? And he MADE the sword he granted to his lieutenant, Kas. By all accounts, Vecna was an Epic-Level wizard, so how did a FIGHTER (vampire or not) manage to cut through all his personal defenses and sever his hand and cut out his eye?
My suggestion: Because all of Vecna's protection spells failed to recognize the Sword of Kas as an object separate from Vecna himself. Because the Sword of Kas contains Vecna's soul. It was therefore able to pierce all of his magical protections like they weren't even there.

[Coidzor]

So do Deathless cancel out Undead or do they both ruin the multiverse/material plane in their own special, different ways?

[rel]

2) The good churches would band together to work and beat a growing evil. While I think this may circumstancially be true, I think there is a fair amount of backstabbing and power grabbing amung the good churches. Just not as blatent or obvious as between the evil churches/followers.


So I had a really long answer going into depths about the nature of published settings being organically growing places of adventure that can trivially acomodate a few extra undead kingdoms on the borders.
After all, they do it whenever a new module is released.

But I had a better thought:

If you asked the developer of a published setting

'In my game I was thinking of dropping an evil undead empire into your setting say over their next to Sword and Sandal Egypt'

How do you think said developer would respond?

a) 'Sure there is room in my setting for all sorts of wierd things why there is another such place just next door and I am thinking of ading something similar with my next book.'

or

b) 'No, the forces of good are so well funded and organised that no evil kingdom no matter how stealthy or harmless would be permited to stand. Not for a decade, not for a day!'

So yeah, a game about building up an undead kingdom using the principles of mass manufacture would fit into almost any published D&D kitchen sink setting with no trouble at all.

In fact it would probably stretch believability less than the published module featuring robot dino riders from not barrier peaks.

[DrKerosene]

Before you get to a "how much" question, you need to first prove that this is possible at all. So far the only spells we know capable of bringing energy in like this are the ones that animate or create undead, as per BoVD and LM

If you open a Gate from the Plane of Water to the Prime Material Plane, does water pour through into the PMP? Lets pretend you place the Gate spell on the PoW where it is in the way of the subjective gravity. Would a current/river flowing into the Gate spell go through? I would handwaive the Positive/Negative Planes as working similarly.

That being said, I would be too tempted to start using the Ragnorra Elder Evil elements if someone was regularly openning Gates to the Positive Energy Plane.

In any case, I explain the options from Tome of Necromancy about naturally evil or neutral undead, and ask my Players which option they would like to be part of how the gameworld works.

I do like the whole "getting extra uncontrolled undead" side effect.

[RedMage125]

So do Deathless cancel out Undead or do they both ruin the multiverse/material plane in their own special, different ways?

Neither.

Deathless, as per RAW, are only animated on a temporary basis, to serve a specific goal or accomplish a specific task. They are also created voluntarily. Undead will-unless destroyed-remain around as a mockery of nature, indefinitely. And the corpse to be used has little say in whether or not to become said mockery. To quote Raziel from Soul Reaver, Undeath is rudely inflicted on their unwilling corpse.

So they are not meant to "cancel out" undead, and their temporary nature means they do not "ruin" the material plane.

[Psyren]

If you open a Gate from the Plane of Water to the Prime Material Plane, does water pour through into the PMP? Lets pretend you place the Gate spell on the PoW where it is in the way of the subjective gravity. Would a current/river flowing into the Gate spell go through? I would handwaive the Positive/Negative Planes as working similarly.

A river is already moving before it gets to the Gate though, and water is material besides. We have no evidence that the ambient energy of a plane behaves similarly, and no evidence for the effect it would have on what the undead are doing even if it did. It's easy to conclude from the rules that undead are walking conduits, or anchors, of negative energy in a way that a mere Gate is not.

In fact, we have reason to believe that a standing gate (i.e. an interface between planes) does not transmit energy of this kind at all. Gate only becomes subtyped (Good, Evil, etc.) if you use the calling function, i.e. if you use it to pull a creature through. If I Gate in an Inevitable, my Gate will be Lawful, but if I simply open a Gate to Mechanus, it is a Creation effect instead, and it won't have an alignment at all.



So yeah, a game about building up an undead kingdom using the principles of mass manufacture would fit into almost any published D&D kitchen sink setting with no trouble at all.

I'm not here to tell you "this won't work at your table, and you are committing badwrongfun if you even mention it." I'm telling you "this is the baseline the designers have set up, and if your GM decides to simply uphold that status quo, they are not committing badwrongfun for doing so."

[Zanos]

The other part of the BoVD quote that Psyren didn't bold is that undead are mockeries of life and purity. And that creating them is a crime AGAINST THE WORLD.
Purity is not defined.

Mocking "life" is not evil. See constructs and deathless. Or the various 3000 ways to become immortal without being undead.

A crime against the world? In this case the world commits crimes against itself when undead arise naturally. A "crime against the world" would be like trying to tear down the deities themselves. Necromancy is part of the world the gods created, even if it is Evil. You've been drinking too much of Pelor's propaganda, I think.


It's not just "bringing in negative energy". It's VIOLATING A CORPSE and turning it into a twisted parody of its former self, in a gruesome pantomime of the works of nature.
Disrespecting corpses is not Evil. As mentioned previously, disrespecting burial customs and laws is probably chaotic, but there's nothing I've read that said not treating a corpse with respect is Evil.

There is nothing inherently Good about nature. In fact, druids can be Evil while being entirely natural, and most animals, magical beasts, and plants are neutral. Unnatural != Evil.


The magicks that sustain their existence is evil. That's not to say that Negative Energy is "always evil", which is patently (and provably) false. But the specific way in which that negative energy is used are evil. And since the magicks that animate them are evil, and those magicks-by definition-are omnipresent ion their bodies (as they would collapse if those magicks failed), the rules that support the "mindless undead are evil" means that the rules for beings for evil is "an inherent part of their nature" (much like fiends) supercedes the rules regarding non-intelligent creatures not having an alignment.
Except undead don't have the [Evil] subtype.


I'm not here to tell you "this won't work at your table, and you are committing badwrongfun if you even mention it." I'm telling you "this is the baseline the designers have set up, and if your GM decides to simply uphold that status quo, they are not committing badwrongfun for doing so."
They're going to have to uphold that status quo for everything in the setting. If they're only applying the inability to enact significant change to the PCs, I would say that's badwrongfun. Or maybe some kind of horror game.

[Psyren]

Except undead don't have the [Evil] subtype.

The spells that create them do, and the vast majority of them are.



They're going to have to uphold that status quo for everything in the setting. If they're only applying the inability to enact significant change to the PCs, I would say that's badwrongfun. Or maybe some kind of horror game.

You can "enact significant change" in a great many ways besides consequence-free undead labor. In fact, undead labor with consequences would indeed be one of those ways.

[Zanos]

The spells that create them do, and the vast majority of them are.
The vast majority of undead are Evil but they don't have the [Evil] subtype, and the [Evil] subtype is used by the game rules to indicate a create that's physically made of Evil, which undead are clearly not.


You can "enact significant change" in a great many ways besides consequence-free undead labor. In fact, undead labor with consequences would indeed be one of those ways.
Sure, there should be consequences, but as I discussed earlier every single Good organization immediately abandoning all of their other concerns and steamrolling you isn't a very realistic one. Establishing a significant empire should be a challenge for a high level character, not something you can do as soon as you can cast animate dead.

[Psyren]

The vast majority of undead are Evil but they don't have the [Evil] subtype, and the [Evil] subtype is used by the game rules to indicate a create that's physically made of Evil, which undead are clearly not.

So what? That just means they're not outsiders. It has nothing to do with how safe they are to employ, the effects they have on the material plane, or any other moral judgement.



Sure, there should be consequences, but as I discussed earlier every single Good organization immediately abandoning all of their other concerns and steamrolling you isn't a very realistic one. Establishing a significant empire should be a challenge for a high level character, not something you can do as soon as you can cast animate dead.

I'm not saying that a high level PC couldn't set out to establish such an empire. Just that they'd be deluded if they think they could do so unchallenged, and equally deluded if they think they're the first entity in history to attempt it.

[Feantar]

This is setting bound, but in Eberron, there's a Create Deathless spell (and a greater version) that creates permanent deathless. They are sentient however (all deathless are), so keep that in mind. As spells, they have the Good subtype - that could possibly counteract the Undead animation. Maybe.


The vast majority of undead are Evil but they don't have the [Evil] subtype, and the [Evil] subtype is used by the game rules to indicate a create that's physically made of Evil, which undead are clearly not.

Counterpoint: For some reason, Undead detect as evil in detect evil - always. Also, undead don't get drawbacks from Taint - while everyone else but those who have the evil subtype do, including deathless (so the argument that they don't get taint drawbacks because they are not alive is unsound).

[Necroticplague]

Counterpoint: For some reason, Undead detect as evil in detect evil - always.
That actually makes a bit of sense: the two ways for undead to be created either involved evil spells, or horrific/gruesome situations. So even if the resultant undead is, itself, Good (like a ghost of Good alignment), you'd expect the evil that created them to linger in some fashion. That Evil aura is it.

[RedMage125]

Purity is not defined.

Mocking "life" is not evil. See constructs and deathless. Or the various 3000 ways to become immortal without being undead.

A crime against the world? In this case the world commits crimes against itself when undead arise naturally. A "crime against the world" would be like trying to tear down the deities themselves. Necromancy is part of the world the gods created, even if it is Evil. You've been drinking too much of Pelor's propaganda, I think.
Your points are pretty thin. This may blow your mind, but D&D is a construct of fantasy, and as such, the designers can say "in the default RAW of D&D, X is Evil because Y", and it is RAW true. The creation of undead, specifically, is evil for the listed reasons.

Your "purity" point is therefore irrelevant.

Constructs are fake bodies (not even necessarily humanoid) with an elemental spirit bound into them, not the same thing at all. Deathless cannot be created against the will of the living creature who once inhabited the body, and exist on a temporary basis.

And any method that is not undeath is non sequitur to this discussion.

The spontaneous, non-caster-involved occurrence of undead is not necessarily "natural". We might use the term "naturally occurring" to describe the phenomenon, but nowhere in the RAW does it say that it is a byproduct of the way the world was supposed to work by the gods' design (also, furthermore, the gods are beholden to the cosmic forces of Good/Evil/etc, they do not control them). Dark Forces and powers need not act in spectacular fashions to have an impact. The Dark Powers of the Domain of Dread, for example, have influence in every reality, and all an outsider will notice is some fog. Strahd was vampirized in such a manner. Also, the Libris Mortis suggests that the existence of other undead "weakens the veil", which allows for other kinds of undead to arise under certain circumstances. But not all creatures in those circumstances arise as undead. Not every murderer who is hanged becomes a morhg, for example. Not every sailor who dies at sea becomes a Drowned, and so on.

Perhaps we should be saying "spontaneously" occurring undead, to be more precise.




Disrespecting corpses is not Evil. As mentioned previously, disrespecting burial customs and laws is probably chaotic, but there's nothing I've read that said not treating a corpse with respect is Evil.
It's not just "disrespect". There's leagues of difference between mockingly playing with remains and FORCING unlife onto them. As I said in post 62, there's some circumstantial evidence, even in the PHB, that there is some connection between the undead creature and the soul of the person who used to inhabit it.


There is nothing inherently Good about nature. In fact, druids can be Evil while being entirely natural, and most animals, magical beasts, and plants are neutral. Unnatural != Evil.
Again, you missed the point. Nature itself is Neutral and everything purely of Nature (all natural creatures, and acts of instinct and survival) exist outside the influence of those cosmic forces that shape the universe (Good/Evil/etc). So undeath magicks are doing something that other magicks do not do. They are cracking into the very CYCLE of Life&Death, and BREAKING it with a surge of Negative Energy (which is the energy of death and decay), but twisting that energy until the corpse moves in a manner that LOOKS like Life, but is not. And if the "weakening the veil" theory is true, then the very existence of that undead creature makes it more likely that others will appear (not to mention the Create Spawn ability of many undead).
You will note that even spells that return a creature to TRUE Life (Raise Dead through True Resurrection), only work on a creature that did NOT die of natural causes. So Nature only does not shriek and cry out against it if you are A) returning the subject to full and normal Life, and B) The subject's life was unnaturally cut short in the first place.



Except undead don't have the [Evil] subtype.
As Psyren pointed out, this just means they are not Outsiders.

Evil Outsiders are made of Evil on a physical level. Undead are still made of flesh (or ectoplasm), but evil magicks are bound up in their systems, sustaining their existence, keeping them ambulatory. So my point still stands. They detect as Evil because Evil magicks are inherent to their nature.



This is setting bound, but in Eberron, there's a Create Deathless spell (and a greater version) that creates permanent deathless. They are sentient however (all deathless are), so keep that in mind. As spells, they have the Good subtype - that could possibly counteract the Undead animation. Maybe.
Incorrect. Those spells also create the types of Deathless from the BoED, which are stated to be temporary. Nothing about those SPELLS makes a deathless permanent.
The Undying in Aerenal are "permanent" because they live in a giant permanent Manifest Zone to Irian, the Endless Day (Eberron's Plane of Positive Energy). The Positive Energy that sustains them (which deteriorates in a normal deathless) is constantly being renewed. Deathless which travel outside Aerenal (such as guards to ambassadors, etc) must periodically return to renew that energy.
This is in a few of the books (I know the core setting book talks about the manifest zone, and I'm almost certain Faiths of Eberron has even more detail), as well as a dragonshard article by Keith Baker (creator of Eberron).




Counterpoint: For some reason, Undead detect as evil in detect evil - always.


That actually makes a bit of sense: the two ways for undead to be created either involved evil spells, or horrific/gruesome situations. So even if the resultant undead is, itself, Good (like a ghost of Good alignment), you'd expect the evil that created them to linger in some fashion. That Evil aura is it.

Yes, yes, YES!

THIS...I have been saying this for years! I'm so glad others get it!

[Segev]

The "undead happen in horrific circumstances" argument works, but the "created by evil spells" one is still problematic. Mainly because it's circular. "Oh, those spells are evil because they create undead, which are always evil." "Why are undead always evil?" "They are created by evil spells."

There needs to be something those spells DO that is evil for it to make sense rather than just be a "team colors" marking. And I have never been a fan of alignments as merely team colors with arbitrary "codes."

[Necroticplague]

The "undead happen in horrific circumstances" argument works, but the "created by evil spells" one is still problematic. Mainly because it's circular. "Oh, those spells are evil because they create undead, which are always evil." "Why are undead always evil?" "They are created by evil spells."
Undead aren't always evil. Ghosts can be good, off the top of my head.

I wasn't saying undead are always evil because they're made by evil spells,I'm saying they detect as evil because they're made by evil spells. The spells are themselves evil for separate reasons (the damage they do to the world).


There needs to be something those spells DO that is evil for it to make sense rather than just be a "team colors" marking. And I have never been a fan of alignments as merely team colors with arbitrary "codes."
Sadly, though, it's probably the second most sensible way to make sense of DnD's alignment rules, next to houseruling them into oblivion (my personal preference).

[Zanos]

Your points are pretty thin. This may blow your mind, but D&D is a construct of fantasy, and as such, the designers can say "in the default RAW of D&D, X is Evil because Y", and it is RAW true. The creation of undead, specifically, is evil for the listed reasons.
I'm not arguing that animating undead isn't Evil, because it obviously is Evil according to the RAW. I'm arguing that your reasons for claiming it is Evil aren't supported by the actual text.


Constructs are fake bodies (not even necessarily humanoid) with an elemental spirit bound into them, not the same thing at all. Deathless cannot be created against the will of the living creature who once inhabited the body, and exist on a temporary basis.
No, it's a pretty similar thing. We have actual evidence in the case of constructs that a living, sentient creatures soul is being imprisoned for a possible eternity in order to provide the animating force for the resultant creation. It's not Evil because the text says it isn't, but again this creates precedent. And the spirits must hate it because they have a chance of breaking free and trying to murder the caster immediately for some constructs.

Also, flesh golems. Again, not Evil.



And any method that is not undeath is non sequitur to this discussion.
Only because you don't want to address that methods that meet your criteria for being Evil aren't actually described as Evil by the texts.



The spontaneous, non-caster-involved occurrence of undead is not necessarily "natural". We might use the term "naturally occurring" to describe the phenomenon, but nowhere in the RAW does it say that it is a byproduct of the way the world was supposed to work by the gods' design (also, furthermore, the gods are beholden to the cosmic forces of Good/Evil/etc, they do not control them).
Varies by setting. In Faerun and Greyhawk undead are part of the natural design. But the core books absolutely don't say that the creation of undeath is a crime against the Gods vision, especially since there are deities of undeath that endorse it in pretty much every setting that are not ascended mortals.


Also, the Libris Mortis suggests that the existence of other undead "weakens the veil", which allows for other kinds of undead to arise under certain circumstances. But not all creatures in those circumstances arise as undead. Not every murderer who is hanged becomes a morhg, for example. Not every sailor who dies at sea becomes a Drowned, and so on.
Undead are Evil because there being a lot of them creates more Undead is exactly as recursive as the RAW, which is that Undead are Evil because Undead are Evil.



Perhaps we should be saying "spontaneously" occurring undead, to be more precise.
Nah, I like that this highlights how absolutely terrible "nature" and "natural" are used throughout the lore. But not even Druids agree on what is and isn't natural, so people in universe are just as confused at least. Hell, there's even a feat for nature worshipping druids to wildshape as undead creatures. Woo.



It's not just "disrespect". There's leagues of difference between mockingly playing with remains and FORCING unlife onto them. As I said in post 62, there's some circumstantial evidence, even in the PHB, that there is some connection between the undead creature and the soul of the person who used to inhabit it.
I cast animate object on the corpse. Whoops, not Evil.

The stuff about souls is hilariously inconsistent, because mechanically nothing stops you from creating an undead creature from the body of someone who was resurrected elsewhere, or who had their soul trapped or destroyed.


Again, you missed the point. Nature itself is Neutral and everything purely of Nature (all natural creatures, and acts of instinct and survival) exist outside the influence of those cosmic forces that shape the universe (Good/Evil/etc). So undeath magicks are doing something that other magicks do not do. They are cracking into the very CYCLE of Life&Death, and BREAKING it with a surge of Negative Energy (which is the energy of death and decay), but twisting that energy until the corpse moves in a manner that LOOKS like Life, but is not. And if the "weakening the veil" theory is true, then the very existence of that undead creature makes it more likely that others will appear (not to mention the Create Spawn ability of many undead).
You will note that even spells that return a creature to TRUE Life (Raise Dead through True Resurrection), only work on a creature that did NOT die of natural causes. So Nature only does not shriek and cry out against it if you are A) returning the subject to full and normal Life, and B) The subject's life was unnaturally cut short in the first place.
Breaking the cycle of life and death is, again, not Evil. See: Baelnorn, Archlich, Good Lich, Ghosts, Necropolitans, Gravetouched Ghouls, and Revenants. See all the various ways immortality is granted to canon characters.

Those spells only work on creatures who have not died of Old Age. They work fine on starvation, disease, poison, exposure, etc. just fine. And violence, which is perfectly natural according to some Druids.

Your problem with this argument is that you're creating sacred cows that don't exist. Mortals play around with Life and Death constantly with magic and it's not Evil. It's only Evil when you start casting spells tagged as [Evil]. Again I'm not arguing that animating undead isn't Evil, because it obviously is Evil according to the RAW. I'm arguing that your reasons for claiming it is Evil aren't supported by the actual text.


As Psyren pointed out, this just means they are not Outsiders.

Evil Outsiders are made of Evil on a physical level. Undead are still made of flesh (or ectoplasm), but evil magicks are bound up in their systems, sustaining their existence, keeping them ambulatory. So my point still stands. They detect as Evil because Evil magicks are inherent to their nature.
Lacking the [Evil] subtype means there's nothing inherent about sentient undead that locks them into any alignment or behavior, unlike creatures that actually have the [Evil] subtype. Evil behavior is a property of the specific type of Undead, not being Undead in general.

[gkathellar]

Proviso: I'm only talking about the Great Wheel.


I'm not arguing that animating undead isn't Evil, because it obviously is Evil according to the RAW. I'm arguing that your reasons for claiming it is Evil aren't supported by the actual text.

Bear in mind that capital-e Evil, the kind that sticks to spells and gods, is often intrinsically cosmic in scope and consequences, but also in time spans involved. Creating Undead causes the Prime to more closely resemble the Plane of Shadow (more on this later) - something which is pretty demonstrably bad for everyone, everywhere. It is very easy for mortals to ignore these kind of consequences of this kind of evil, but the spell is uninterested in that. The evil thing is happening, it's just not interesting to most of us.


No, it's a pretty similar thing. We have actual evidence in the case of constructs that a living, sentient creatures soul is being imprisoned for a possible eternity in order to provide the animating force for the resultant creation. It's not Evil because the text says it isn't, but again this creates precedent. And the spirits must hate it because they have a chance of breaking free and trying to murder the caster immediately for some constructs.

Also, flesh golems. Again, not Evil.

It is pretty clearly a lower case-e evil thing to create a conventional golem in most circumstances, because it's usually tantamount to slavery. It is not, however, an Evil thing, because it causes no direct harm to the planes as a whole.


Varies by setting. In Faerun and Greyhawk undead are part of the natural design. But the core books absolutely don't say that the creation of undeath is a crime against the Gods vision, especially since there are deities of undeath that endorse it in pretty much every setting that are not ascended mortals.

Undead are indeed part of the grand architecture of the Planes, as is the Negative Energy Plane they are ubiquitously linked to. But that same grand architecture contains Dagon, the embodiment of You Die In A Rush of Dark Water And Cruel Jaws. It contains Obox-Ob, the embodiment of The Invertebrate Hatred Crawling Under Reality's Skin Chewing Away At Its Flesh. It contains Hades, a plane that destroys hope. It contains Hell.

The Great Wheel contains a lot of stuff that could be called "natural" that is cruel and harmful and impossible to get rid of. This includes the Powers: take a god like Erythnul - he is not just the god of savage jerks, but a Power born from the savagery and self-destructive cruelty that mortals have the potential for. He is evil beyond reckoning, and he is deeply, deeply wise, and he is an embodiment of something that is not going away. Hell, take a Realms deity like Myrkul, a cruel, vaguely sadistic god of death whose cult was nonetheless extremely useful to society because it oversaw funerary rites and generally took it upon itself to manage the affairs of death.

There are gods of undeath because undeath is a real thing that exists in the Great Wheel. Not all of these gods are evil, because there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Zanosio, than are dreamt of in my philosophy. Nonetheless, the act of creating the undead is deleterious to life, and, if carried to its logical extreme, will result in a bad time for most.


Undead are Evil because there being a lot of them creates more Undead is exactly as recursive as the RAW, which is that Undead are Evil because Undead are Evil.

Uh-uh. Creating undead is evil because the presence of undeath is a leak through which negative energy enters the planes as a whole, and especially the Prime, making them gradually less hospitable. Part of that decline in hospitality is, indeed, the emergence of naturally occurring undead (like wraiths, morghs, shadows, Night Walkers, etc), who do horrible things to people and create more undead. Eventually, the Prime starts looking less like the place we know and love and find habitable, and a lot more like the Plane of Shadow. The evilness does not arise from some inherent quality of zombies. It arises from the fact that undeath is, on some cosmic level, antithetical to all life; that it leads eventually to a situation in which the suffering of the cosmos is far greater than it is today.


Nah, I like that this highlights how absolutely terrible "nature" and "natural" are used throughout the lore. But not even Druids agree on what is and isn't natural, so people in universe are just as confused at least. Hell, there's even a feat for nature worshipping druids to wildshape as undead creatures. Woo.

100% accurate, as I understand it. Many, even most druids worship a specifically defined scope of the word "nature," and ascribe universal animistic characteristics to it from which they exclude all other things. Nothing makes it impossible for a druid to expand that definition such that it includes the undead, aside from the fact that druids are generally opposed to things which are antithetical to life. A druid who accepts undeath as part of the natural order won't see much sympathy from other druids (even evil ones), or from the beings that they deal with. They will find that the cosmos itself is much more accommodating.


I cast animate object on the corpse. Whoops, not Evil.

The stuff about souls is hilariously inconsistent, because mechanically nothing stops you from creating an undead creature from the body of someone who was resurrected elsewhere, or who had their soul trapped or destroyed.

I mean, first of all, animating object on a corpse should be rule 0'd into the ground if you're playing on the Great Wheel. Hell, if I were DMing for you, I'd probably turn it into some form of undead creation that you weren't in control of, just to make my point. But I concede that the rules do not provide a good definition of the word "object."

Anyway, souls rarely have much of a role to play in all of this. It mostly comes down to letting negative energy flow into the planes pretty much unabated.


Breaking the cycle of life and death is, again, not Evil. See: Baelnorn, Archlich, Good Lich, Ghosts, Necropolitans, Gravetouched Ghouls, and Revenants. See all the various ways immortality is granted to canon characters.

Those spells only work on creatures who have not died of Old Age. They work fine on starvation, disease, poison, exposure, etc. just fine. And violence, which is perfectly natural according to some Druids.

Your problem with this argument is that you're creating sacred cows that don't exist. Mortals play around with Life and Death constantly with magic and it's not Evil. It's only Evil when you start casting spells tagged as [Evil]. Again I'm not arguing that animating undead isn't Evil, because it obviously is Evil according to the RAW. I'm arguing that your reasons for claiming it is Evil aren't supported by the actual text.

I agree. There's nothing intrinsically evil about playing around with life and death. It has the potential to really mess with the Outer Planes if done on a wide enough scale, but that can hurt the Lower Planes and gods of evil as much as it can the Upper Planes and gods of good. It is not, however, intrinsically good or evil. It's just a thing you can do and if you do it expect to hear the furies knocking at your door.

It's important to stress that the Great Wheel as a whole has no interest in anyone's "just reward," and it could care less about the "natural cycle" in most formulations of that term. It is a thing of entirely brute fact, formed of good, evil, law and chaos, but not intrinsically beholden to any hierarchy we assign them.

The Great Wheel is weird.


Lacking the [Evil] subtype means there's nothing inherent about sentient undead that locks them into any alignment or behavior, unlike creatures that actually have the [Evil] subtype. Evil behavior is a property of the specific type of Undead, not being Undead in general.

Agreed. Most undead are evil, in part because the Negative Energy Plane is typically pretty hostile to the happiness of everyone and everything. But there's no reason this must be so, and undead are definitely capable of being good and even created by good forces.

[Feantar]

Proviso: I'm only talking about the Great Wheel.



Bear in mind that capital-e Evil, the kind that sticks to spells and gods, is often intrinsically cosmic in scope and consequences, but also in time spans involved. Creating Undead causes the Prime to more closely resemble the Plane of Shadow (more on this later) - something which is pretty demonstrably bad for everyone, everywhere. It is very easy for mortals to ignore these kind of consequences of this kind of evil, but the spell is uninterested in that. The evil thing is happening, it's just not interesting to most of us.



It is pretty clearly a lower case-e evil thing to create a conventional golem in most circumstances, because it's usually tantamount to slavery. It is not, however, an Evil thing, because it causes no direct harm to the planes as a whole.



Undead are indeed part of the grand architecture of the Planes, as is the Negative Energy Plane they are ubiquitously linked to. But that same grand architecture contains Dagon, the embodiment of You Die In A Rush of Dark Water And Cruel Jaws. It contains Obox-Ob, the embodiment of The Invertebrate Hatred Crawling Under Reality's Skin Chewing Away At Its Flesh. It contains Hades, a plane that destroys hope. It contains Hell.

The Great Wheel contains a lot of stuff that could be called "natural" that is cruel and harmful and impossible to get rid of. This includes the Powers: take a god like Erythnul - he is not just the god of savage jerks, but a Power born from the savagery and self-destructive cruelty that mortals have the potential for. He is evil beyond reckoning, and he is deeply, deeply wise, and he is an embodiment of something that is not going away. Hell, take a Realms deity like Myrkul, a cruel, vaguely sadistic god of death whose cult was nonetheless extremely useful to society because it oversaw funerary rites and generally took it upon itself to manage the affairs of death.

There are gods of undeath because undeath is a real thing that exists in the Great Wheel. Not all of these gods are evil, because there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Zanosio, than are dreamt of in my philosophy. Nonetheless, the act of creating the undead is deleterious to life, and, if carried to its logical extreme, will result in a bad time for most.



Uh-uh. Creating undead is evil because the presence of undeath is a leak through which negative energy enters the planes as a whole, and especially the Prime, making them gradually less hospitable. Part of that decline in hospitality is, indeed, the emergence of naturally occurring undead (like wraiths, morghs, shadows, Night Walkers, etc), who do horrible things to people and create more undead. Eventually, the Prime starts looking less like the place we know and love and find habitable, and a lot more like the Plane of Shadow. The evilness does not arise from some inherent quality of zombies. It arises from the fact that undeath is, on some cosmic level, antithetical to all life; that it leads eventually to a situation in which the suffering of the cosmos is far greater than it is today.



100% accurate, as I understand it. Many, even most druids worship a specifically defined scope of the word "nature," and ascribe universal animistic characteristics to it from which they exclude all other things. Nothing makes it impossible for a druid to expand that definition such that it includes the undead, aside from the fact that druids are generally opposed to things which are antithetical to life. A druid who accepts undeath as part of the natural order won't see much sympathy from other druids (even evil ones), or from the beings that they deal with. They will find that the cosmos itself is much more accommodating.



I mean, first of all, animating object on a corpse should be rule 0'd into the ground if you're playing on the Great Wheel. Hell, if I were DMing for you, I'd probably turn it into some form of undead creation that you weren't in control of, just to make my point. But I concede that the rules do not provide a good definition of the word "object."

Anyway, souls rarely have much of a role to play in all of this. It mostly comes down to letting negative energy flow into the planes pretty much unabated.



I agree. There's nothing intrinsically evil about playing around with life and death. It has the potential to really mess with the Outer Planes if done on a wide enough scale, but that can hurt the Lower Planes and gods of evil as much as it can the Upper Planes and gods of good. It is not, however, intrinsically good or evil. It's just a thing you can do and if you do it expect to hear the furies knocking at your door.

It's important to stress that the Great Wheel as a whole has no interest in anyone's "just reward," and it could care less about the "natural cycle" in most formulations of that term. It is a thing of entirely brute fact, formed of good, evil, law and chaos, but not intrinsically beholden to any hierarchy we assign them.

The Great Wheel is weird.



Agreed. Most undead are evil, in part because the Negative Energy Plane is typically pretty hostile to the happiness of everyone and everything. But there's no reason this must be so, and undead are definitely capable of being good and even created by good forces.

Adding to this: Maybe, making undead is evil because it goes against the fundamental energy of the Negative Energy Plane - which isn't evil. Negative Energy is anihilation - it's a necessary part of any cycle of renewal. But undead are persistent. So you've taken a fundamental force and perverted it so much that you've inverted it. It is the equivalent of Ragnora's (See Elder Evils) influence which is constantly destructive life(Positive Energy Inversion). To rephrase, undead are not a mockery of life, they are a mockery of death, and that's blasphemy on a cosic scale.

Then again, I might be talking out of my voidstone, so take the above with a grain of salt.

[Psyren]

Lacking the [Evil] subtype means there's nothing inherent about sentient undead that locks them into any alignment or behavior, unlike creatures that actually have the [Evil] subtype. Evil behavior is a property of the specific type of Undead, not being Undead in general.

Neither that subtype nor this thread have anything to do with "alignment or behavior." We're talking about some quality intrinsic to the creatures themselves that has the potential to be harmful. The fact that they detect as evil no matter what they're doing or what their alignment is, suggests that there is indeed such a quality, and it fits with both LM and BoVD. In fact, BoVD explicitly states that even commanding your undead to do good deeds is irrelevant.

[rel]

I'm not here to tell you "this won't work at your table, and you are committing badwrongfun if you even mention it." I'm telling you "this is the baseline the designers have set up, and if your GM decides to simply uphold that status quo, they are not committing badwrongfun for doing so."


I don't think playing a game about setting up an undead kingdom in a published setting automatically upsets the baseline asumptions that the designers have set up.
Nor does it damage the status quo.


I'm not sure what badwrongfun has to do with it but if everyone at the table is having fun then the game is probably doing fine and if anyone at the table is not having fun then there is a problem with the game.

[RedMage125]

The "undead happen in horrific circumstances" argument works, but the "created by evil spells" one is still problematic. Mainly because it's circular. "Oh, those spells are evil because they create undead, which are always evil." "Why are undead always evil?" "They are created by evil spells."

There needs to be something those spells DO that is evil for it to make sense rather than just be a "team colors" marking. And I have never been a fan of alignments as merely team colors with arbitrary "codes."
You and I have gone rounds on this before, Segev.
The argument is NOT circular, it's cohesive, there's a difference.

Once again, from the top:
As per the RAW, the creation of undead, itself, is an act of Evil. Ok, full stop here. Before any arguments about whether or not you "agree" or "find this compelling", no one cares. We're talking about how the rules work as far as RAW. House rule what you like, play how you like, but this is the RAW. The BoVD (which IS a rules source) specifies that some acts are Evil regardless of intent. Damaging a Soul, Dealing With Fiends, and Creation of Undead among them. The ACT of creating an undead creature is Evil, period. So the means don't matter. If a wight murders someone with energy drain, and that person animates as another wight, the first wight has committed TWO Evil acts (probably irrelevant to the wight, but still true). If an epic-level evil cleric with the proper feats spends a rebuke undead attempt to animate every corpse within 60' as a zombie, he has committed Evil acts.
This is a true maxim of the 3.5e D&D RAW because the designers say so. And there's nothing further that needs be explored than that. As a construct of fantasy the designers are fully within their rights to say "in the default setting of D&D, by the RAW, creating undead is an Evil act, a crime against the world", and it is true by RAW. All the rules that pertain to and result from this design decision are consistent and cohesive.
Ok, so now on to the spells. Casting those spells is an Evil act, right? We know this because those spells have the [Evil] designator, right? There's no greater "why" to this than what I have already discussed. The ONLY thing that Animate Dead or Create [Greater] Undead do is an act of Evil, right? They ONLY create undead, which is an Evil act. So casting those spells is an Evil act. And thus, the spells get the [Evil] designator, even though they do not contact the energy of the Lower Planes, like other spells with the [Evil] tag.

It's not circular, not even from within the game world, once you accept, as a truism, that the creation of undead-by ANY MEANS- is, in and of itself, an act of Evil. From a metagame perception it's "because the designers say so", but from in-game logic it's "that's just the way the laws of the universe work".

I don't care if you, personally, don't find that compelling, that doesn't make the argument "circular".
Zanos, in looking over what I wrote, I'm afraid I became a bit abrasive. It's not personal, please do not take it as such. I have been making these EXACT same points for years now to LOTS of people on the forums who missed a fine point of the rules here or there, and thus I have become rather blunt when making my points. I did not change what I wrote because I'm at the point where I don't really know how else to put it. I also get my hackles up when people think they're challenging my support from the RAW, when I've ALWAYS been happy to provide text and page numbers. I do enjoy debates, however, and welcome any counterpoint that you can provide with text to support your claim.

I'm not arguing that animating undead isn't Evil, because it obviously is Evil according to the RAW. I'm arguing that your reasons for claiming it is Evil aren't supported by the actual text.
Dead wrong. The actual text, taken word-for-word from the book, was provided by Psyren. That's what I was referring to. So you either missed reading his post that I mentioned, or you don't understand what "supported by the text" means. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former. Book of Vile Darkness, Chapter 1 (The Nature of Evil), page 8, right column. first subheading, "Animating the dead or Creating Undead":
"Unliving corpses-corrupt mockeries of life and purity-are inherently evil. Creating them is one of the most heinous crimes against the world that a character can commit. Even if they are commanded to do something good, undead invariably bring negative energy into the world, which makes it a darker and more evil place."
So actually, what I said IS supported by text, and what you are saying has no text or RAW to back it up.



No, it's a pretty similar thing. We have actual evidence in the case of constructs that a living, sentient creatures soul is being imprisoned for a possible eternity in order to provide the animating force for the resultant creation. It's not Evil because the text says it isn't, but again this creates precedent. And the spirits must hate it because they have a chance of breaking free and trying to murder the caster immediately for some constructs.
Elementals do not have souls. Never have, not in any edition of D&D. When you slay an elemental, its energies return to its hoem plane and make a NEW elemental. not the same elemental reborn, but a new one. Outsiders work the same way. So...NO, actually, constructs are NOT the same thing.

"Spirit" and "Soul" are not the same thing in D&D. Not necessarily.


Also, flesh golems. Again, not Evil.

The creation of a flesh golem, as I was the person to point out, does, in fact, involve at least one act of Evil, as Animate Dead is one of the spells used in the making. Check your Monster Manual. The golem itself, however, is housing a Neutral Elemental spirit and is animated by said spirit, not by negative energy and not by the dark powers of unlife. Ergo, flesh golems do not always radiate evil like an undead creature does.


Only because you don't want to address that methods that meet your criteria for being Evil aren't actually described as Evil by the texts.
Don't try and act like I'm deflecting from anything. It's smug, and it's flat wrong. We're discussing undeath. Like I said to Segev, above, as per the developers, it is SPECIFICALLY the creation of undeath that is an Evil act. So any other point you try to make about "what about this other means of immortality, why isn't THAT evil?"...Who cares? The thread is about undead, and according to the devs, the creation of undead is an act of Evil. Other forms of immortality that do not involve undeath are not relevant. No one said "unnaturally extending your existence" has anything to do with why it's Evil. If that was AT ALL part of the point, your question would be relevant. As it is not, those other means of immortality are non-sequitur.



Varies by setting. In Faerun and Greyhawk undead are part of the natural design. But the core books absolutely don't say that the creation of undeath is a crime against the Gods vision, especially since there are deities of undeath that endorse it in pretty much every setting that are not ascended mortals.
The core books have spells that only create undead. Those spells have the [Evil] descriptor. Casting [Evil] spells is an Evil act. The BoVD, which is a rules supplement, clarifies, and does not contradict the core rules, on the nature of Evil in D&D.
Also, who said anything about "the gods' vision"? I certainly didn't. Don't input your own preconceived (and not text-supported) ideas into MY words and then attack THAT. The gods are actually beholden to the objective, faceless cosmic forces of Good/Evil/Law/Chaos. The forces that shape the cosmos. The laws of the universe is what has made creation of undead a "crime against the world", not the gods.
All those deities you mentioned are Evil, you know that, right? Setting aside Faerun (because there's SO MANY deities), there's only ONE deity in the PHB who (even through using expanded resources to draw information from) explicitly promotes and endorses undeath. That's Nerull. Okay, two if you count Vecna, since he was a lich himself, but that means he was once mortal, and you specified deities who are not ascended mortals. Wee Jas TOLERATES undead in very specific circumstances (See Dragon #350 for the Core Beliefs article on her for more info), but by and large, she is considered a steward of the DEAD, not a goddess of undeath. Nerull is Neutral Evil in the "evil for the sake of evil" kind of way (where Vecna is NE in the "serve yourself above all others" kind of way). Nerull teaches that life itself is an abomination, and that undeath is a preferred state of existence.


Undead are Evil because there being a lot of them creates more Undead is exactly as recursive as the RAW, which is that Undead are Evil because Undead are Evil.
I'm sorry if I was not clear, I assumed you were either familiar with the text, or would look at the text yourself...
The "weakening the veil" part of the Libris Mortis is presented as one of many theories about the nature of undeath. There are several. Which is why I said that the Libris Mortis suggests that, instead of claiming that it was a "fact" of RAW.



Nah, I like that this highlights how absolutely terrible "nature" and "natural" are used throughout the lore. But not even Druids agree on what is and isn't natural, so people in universe are just as confused at least. Hell, there's even a feat for nature worshipping druids to wildshape as undead creatures. Woo.
Please provide rules citation.
All I am familiar with is the Blighter Prestige Class ability (which is explicitly FORSAKING druidic principles), and the Corrupted Wild Shape feat, which can only be used by undead druids. By the RAW, without this feat, a druid who becomes undead LOSES her wild shape ability, as it is based off polymorph, which works only on living creatures. So that feat is only for beings who are ALREADY undead and had the wild shape class feature. Is there another to which you refer?



I cast animate object on the corpse. Whoops, not Evil.
Correct. So?

It's apples and oranges. Animate Objects last 1 round/level, does not draw on the same energies as Animate Dead, produces a different product (which would be a Medium Animated Object, not a human zombie), and a host of other differences.

Again, I said there's leagues of differences between "disrespecting" a corpse and FORCING unlife on it. Casting Animate Objects is no different than picking it up with your hands and making it move like a puppet. Gross? Yes. Disrespectful? Certainly. Evil? No.


The stuff about souls is hilariously inconsistent, because mechanically nothing stops you from creating an undead creature from the body of someone who was resurrected elsewhere, or who had their soul trapped or destroyed.
The first part of what you say is dead wrong. Resurrection, and even True Resurrection require the body to be on hand. Both spells say they function as Raise Dead with exceptions to follow. None of those exceptions specify that the Range of the spell is no longer Touch, nor that the target is "dead creature touched", except that True Resurrection CAN bring back someone "whose bodies have been destroyed". If you were killed and the party had to leave your corpse behind, True Resurrection CANNOT make you a new body unless your body was destroyed. So there's no "resurrected elsewhere" caveat.
Pay attention to what I say, because I said that there's strong CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE of a connection between the undead creature and the soul of the body it used to inhabit. I never claimed a hard and fast fact about RAW, and I WON'T do so without text to support it. Don't act like you're "proving me wrong".
Your "trapped soul" is an interesting point, but not a new thought at all. You want another quirk that pokes a hole in the theory of connection? The Clone spell. Wizard has a clone, wizard dies. Clone immediately activates, wizard is alive. Evil necromancer finds first body and can animate it as undead. Boom. This is why I said the rules have evidence to SUGGEST these things. They are not absolutes.



Breaking the cycle of life and death is, again, not Evil. See: Baelnorn, Archlich, Good Lich, Ghosts, Necropolitans, Gravetouched Ghouls, and Revenants. See all the various ways immortality is granted to canon characters.
All of those have the undead type, and, as per the Detect Evil spell, will detect as evil. Even if they are not of evil alignment. A Lawful Good succubus will ALSO detect as Evil. Same principle.


Those spells only work on creatures who have not died of Old Age. They work fine on starvation, disease, poison, exposure, etc. just fine. And violence, which is perfectly natural according to some Druids.
You are either intentionally trolling, or do not actually understand the distinction between "life was ended by external factors" and "ended through no external factors". Disease, poison, exposure, starvation, these are all things that may EXIST in nature, but are external factors to the life functions of an organism. Violence also happens in nature, yes. So what? It's a non-sequitur point. The point of that limitation on those spells is that the potential lifespan of a creature was cut short through an external factor, or it reached its natural end.

If you want to be a complete troll, why not point out that there's actually no such thing as "dying of old age"?

What you are saying is not meaningfully contributing.


Your problem with this argument is that you're creating sacred cows that don't exist. Mortals play around with Life and Death constantly with magic and it's not Evil. It's only Evil when you start casting spells tagged as [Evil]. Again I'm not arguing that animating undead isn't Evil, because it obviously is Evil according to the RAW. I'm arguing that your reasons for claiming it is Evil aren't supported by the actual text.
I've quoted the actual text. These aren't "my reasons". I'm quoting what the RAW says. It's not a "sacred cow". It's what's in the RAW.

You have yet to provide even ONE rules citation to countermand anything I have brought up (and I have supported). And yet you claim what I say is "not supported by the text", which is hypocrisy. Put your research where your mouth is, or admit you are wrong.



Lacking the [Evil] subtype means there's nothing inherent about sentient undead that locks them into any alignment or behavior, unlike creatures that actually have the [Evil] subtype. Evil behavior is a property of the specific type of Undead, not being Undead in general.
Psyren answered this nicely, but I'm going to re-iterate it anyway.

It has nothing to do with "alignment or behavior". A Neutral Good ghost still radiates Evil. Also radiates Good. Evil magicks are inherent to the physiology of an undead creature. Ergo a Detect Evil spell will pick up on that. An unholy sword is completely non-sentient and still radiates Evil.

Uh huh.

Someone needs to tell that to the Undying Court, then.

What's with this strange last sentence, though? The use of the word meant here is positively bizarre on your part.

Also, this whole mockery angle is doggerel and worthless to this exploration that only serves to distract onto pointless tangents, as it's a post-hoc value judgment.
I said it before, you must have missed it.

Deathless in Eberron are not "uniquely permanent". The Undying Court exists in Shae Mordai, City of the Dead, which is built on a manifest zone to Irian, the Eternal Day (Eberron's Positive Energy Plane). One of the books, either the Eberron Campaign Setting, or Aerenai Elf section of Races of Eberron, or Faiths of Eberron mentions that the deathless must return to Irian manifest zones periodically or they expire. So they're not any different from BoED deathless, they just exist in a place that constaly "recharges their batteries" so to speak.

The last sentence was in response to YOUR question. YOU asked if deathless "cancel out" undead, or if they both "ruin the material plane" in different ways.

The "mockery of life" was paraphrasing the RAW on the subject of undeath, so it's not tangential at all. Try and keep up.

[gkathellar]

Neither that subtype nor this thread have anything to do with "alignment or behavior." We're talking about some quality intrinsic to the creatures themselves that has the potential to be harmful. The fact that they detect as evil no matter what they're doing or what their alignment is, suggests that there is indeed such a quality, and it fits with both LM and BoVD. In fact, BoVD explicitly states that even commanding your undead to do good deeds is irrelevant.

In total fairness, BoVD is an awful, awful book with a plurality of issues surrounding its take on good and evil (hey, remember the part where they say All BDSM Is Evil? yeah I do).


You and I have gone rounds on this before, Segev.
The argument is NOT circular, it's cohesive, there's a difference.

Once again, from the top:
As per the RAW, the creation of undead, itself, is an act of Evil. Ok, full stop here. Before any arguments about whether or not you "agree" or "find this compelling", no one cares. We're talking about how the rules work as far as RAW. House rule what you like, play how you like, but this is the RAW. -snip-

Well, that's what you're talking about, but I don't actually see Segev mention RAW anywhere. It seems to me that you're arguing "these are the rules," and Segev is arguing "there's not much in the way of justification for these rules."

Let me add something: when you reduce ethical questions to "because the designers say so," you are invoking exactly what people hate about the alignment system. Alignment can be made to work - fairly intuitively, even. But it cannot be made to work via an appeal to authority; the statement, "well, the writers said so, all questions are answered," just raises more questions for most of us.


Deathless in Eberron are not "uniquely permanent". The Undying Court exists in Shae Mordai, City of the Dead, which is built on a manifest zone to Irian, the Eternal Day (Eberron's Positive Energy Plane). One of the books, either the Eberron Campaign Setting, or Aerenai Elf section of Races of Eberron, or Faiths of Eberron mentions that the deathless must return to Irian manifest zones periodically or they expire. So they're not any different from BoED deathless, they just exist in a place that constaly "recharges their batteries" so to speak.

Oh, that's interesting. Didn't know that - it does resolve some of the conceptual problems with Deathless (i.e. why doesn't everyone just use them instead of undead).

[RedMage125]

Well, that's what you're talking about, but I don't actually see Segev mention RAW anywhere. It seems to me that you're arguing "these are the rules," and Segev is arguing "there's not much in the way of justification for these rules."
No, he says they are "circular", and specifies "undead are evil because evil spells which are evil because undead are evil", which is myopic to the point of being blatantly incorrect and misleading.


Let me add something: when you reduce ethical questions to "because the designers say so," you are invoking exactly what people hate about the alignment system. Alignment can be made to work - fairly intuitively, even. But it cannot be made to work via an appeal to authority; the statement, "well, the writers said so, all questions are answered," just raises more questions for most of us.
In a debate about a REAL topic? Yes, you would be right.

In a rules discussion about a FANTASY construct? You are categorically wrong. This is not an "ethical question". This is a RULES discussion. And as a construct of FANTASY, it is what the authors say it is. "Appeal to Authority" is a fallacy in debate because authority could be WRONG. As a construct of fantasy, authority here actually HAS the ability to mete out absolutes and maxims. There are lots of in-depth aspects to explore, even after one accepts WHAT the devs have said. But in this instance, they are consistent and cohesive. The mechanics resonate with the fluff very well. Some claim it does not, only because they have preconceived notions about "Good" or "Evil" or even about "moral agency", and the RAW don't resonate well with their preconceived notions. So they complain that the rules are "inconsistent" or "circular", because the RAW do not fit their assumptions, rather than accommodating their assumptions to fit the rules.




Oh, that's interesting. Didn't know that - it does resolve some of the conceptual problems with Deathless (i.e. why doesn't everyone just use them instead of undead).
A lot of people forget that. I get tired of the smug condescension of some people who bring up Eberron deathless like they've just de-bunked the "deathless are temporary" point. I find myself repeating it so often that I've memorized the name of the plane-Irian-even though I haven't played Eberron in years.

But as to why more people don't use them, also remember that deathless have to be created with the consent of the original creature. You can't force "deathlessness" on a corpse like you can with unlife.

[hamishspence]

In total fairness, BoVD is an awful, awful book with a plurality of issues surrounding its take on good and evil (hey, remember the part where they say All BDSM Is Evil? yeah I do).


BoVD version always involves hit points being reduced by lethal damage - so a BoVD masochist always has less than maximum damage, and a BOVD sadist arguably requires to reduce target's hit points, to be satisfied.

In other words, way beyond "safe and sane."

[Necroticplague]

Let me add something: when you reduce ethical questions to "because the designers say so," you are invoking exactly what people hate about the alignment system. Alignment can be made to work - fairly intuitively, even. But it cannot be made to work via an appeal to authority; the statement, "well, the writers said so, all questions are answered," just raises more questions for most of us.

Both in character and out, the alignment system is an appeal to authority. In-character, it's the authority of various powers/gods of Good and Evil. Thus, why one doesn't necessarily care much if someone pings on Detect Evil, because that only means they act/think in a way that Good powers disagree with, not necessarily that they've commited great moral wrongs (often differentiated on these forums by distinguishing Good and Evil from good and evil). Out of character, it's an appeal to the authority of what the rules say, even if it doesn't make much sense. That's the difference between alignment and morality: alignment is absolute and comes from higher powers fiat, morality is considerably murkier. Thus the stupidity of Poisons and Ravages, the assymetry of [good] and [evil] spells.

[Cosi]

Question: is there some mechanical implication to animate dead being Evil? Is there a rule that says you can't be Chaotic Evil and spend all your time saving kittens and hugging orphans? Does committing enough Evil acts eventually turn you Evil?


"Unliving corpses-corrupt mockeries of life and purity-are inherently evil. Creating them is one of the most heinous crimes against the world that a character can commit. Even if they are commanded to do something good, undead invariably bring negative energy into the world, which makes it a darker and more evil place."

I'm not contesting that this is what the rules say, but this is clearly not applied consistently. The rules do not treat negative energy as if it were inherently evil. The Negative Energy Plane -- which is, one assumes, as full of negative energy as it is possible for any place to be -- is not evil aligned (DMG, page 157). The inflict wounds spells, which channel negative energy, do not have the evil descriptor (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/inflictLightWounds.htm). The Xeg-Yi Energon, a creature comprised entirely of negative energy, has no alignment descriptor (Manual of the Planes, page 169). The invocation the dead walk animates dead precisely as animate dead does, and it does not have the evil descriptor listed and per the Warlock's alignment restrictions a Good character can cast it, though it may inherit it somewhere (Complete Arcane 133).

In sum, while it is true that the rules describe animating undead as an unambiguously evil act, that description and the justification for it are not consistent with the rest of the rules.

[RedMage125]

Question: is there some mechanical implication to animate dead being Evil? Is there a rule that says you can't be Chaotic Evil and spend all your time saving kittens and hugging orphans? Does committing enough Evil acts eventually turn you Evil?
DMG, page 134.

Yes, committing enough Evil acts turns you Evil...eventually.




I'm not contesting that this is what the rules say, but this is clearly not applied consistently. The rules do not treat negative energy as if it were inherently evil. The Negative Energy Plane -- which is, one assumes, as full of negative energy as it is possible for any place to be -- is not evil aligned (DMG, page 157). The inflict wounds spells, which channel negative energy, do not have the evil descriptor (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/inflictLightWounds.htm). The Xeg-Yi Energon, a creature comprised entirely of negative energy, has no alignment descriptor (Manual of the Planes, page 169). The invocation the dead walk animates dead precisely as animate dead does, and it does not have the evil descriptor listed and per the Warlock's alignment restrictions a Good character can cast it, though it may inherit it somewhere (Complete Arcane 133).

In sum, while it is true that the rules describe animating undead as an unambiguously evil act, that description and the justification for it are not consistent with the rest of the rules.

Fire isn't evil, either. Burn down an inhabited orphanage, and you have committed evil WITH fire.

Negative Energy is not evil. Animate a corpse with it, and it is.

[Psyren]

The "undead happen in horrific circumstances" argument works, but the "created by evil spells" one is still problematic. Mainly because it's circular. "Oh, those spells are evil because they create undead, which are always evil." "Why are undead always evil?" "They are created by evil spells."

There needs to be something those spells DO that is evil for it to make sense rather than just be a "team colors" marking. And I have never been a fan of alignments as merely team colors with arbitrary "codes."

As has been stated numerous times in this thread, LM and BoVD both tell you what they DO. The choice is yours whether to accept that rationale or reject it in your games, just as I choose to accept it in mine.


I don't think playing a game about setting up an undead kingdom in a published setting automatically upsets the baseline asumptions that the designers have set up.

Nothing in this thread is stopping you from setting up an undead kingdom in a published setting. Trying to do so while getting sanctioned by good-aligned organizations in that world may be difficult without rule zero however.


In total fairness, BoVD is an awful, awful book with a plurality of issues surrounding its take on good and evil (hey, remember the part where they say All BDSM Is Evil? yeah I do).

Not only is this a fallacy (the book is flawed, therefore we should throw the entire thing out), it's also irrelevant. They've (a) set up the way they want things to work in their game and (b) given you the tools to change those things in yours. But (b) does not stop (a) from being true.

[Necroticplague]

Question: is there some mechanical implication to animate dead being Evil?
yes.
1. It means casting it enough will turn you evil, sending you to an Evil afterlife when you kick it.
2. it means Good clerics (or neutral clerics of good gods) just plain can't cast it.
3. The [Evil] descriptor is used for some mechanical purposes, though my mind forgets most of them right now. I vaguely recall a feat that was basically Spell Focus for all [Evil] spells, but that's obviously non-applicable in this situation.


Is there a rule that says you can't be Chaotic Evil and spend all your time saving kittens and hugging orphans? No, because alignment works in reverse: alignment is dictated by your actions, not dictating too it.



Does committing enough Evil acts eventually turn you Evil?
yes. That's kinda what being an Evil act means.

[Cosi]

Negative Energy is not evil. Animate a corpse with it, and it is.

But per the thing you quoted, the reason doing that is evil is that it lets more negative energy into the world, making it "a darker and more evil place". If a place that has a bunch of negative energy in it is not, in fact, evil, then clearly that description is wrong.


1. It means casting it enough will turn you evil, sending you to an Evil afterlife when you kick it.

Is that spelled out mechanically? I get that there is a claim made that it eventually happens, but are there rules for adjudicating that claim?


2. it means Good clerics (or neutral clerics of good gods) just plain can't cast it.
3. The [Evil] descriptor is used for some mechanical purposes, though my mind forgets most of them right now. I vaguely recall a feat that was basically Spell Focus for all [Evil] spells, but that's obviously non-applicable in this situation.

Sorry, I phrased the question poorly, I meant it mostly in terms of impact on the character's actions.


No, because alignment works in reverse: alignment is dictated by your actions, not dictating too it.

Then who cares (from a character alignment perspective, as noted there are mechanical implication to the tag) whether its Evil or not? You can be good (in an out-of-character sense) while still doing stuff the game tags as Evil.

[gkathellar]

Both in character and out, the alignment system is an appeal to authority. In-character, it's the authority of various powers/gods of Good and Evil. Thus, why one doesn't necessarily care much if someone pings on Detect Evil, because that only means they act/think in a way that Good powers disagree with, not necessarily that they've commited great moral wrongs (often differentiated on these forums by distinguishing Good and Evil from good and evil).

Well, no. The Powers don't define the alignments. Alignment is far older, and far more important, than such puny beings as gods. Law and Chaos in particular are very easy to map to objective, primordial concepts of Form and Formlessness. Good and Evil are harder to map but do follow an intuitive logic of benevolence vs. malevolence.

In general, the concepts Powers embody fit more-or-less roughly into aligned conceptual spaces, but even that can get sticky. Many powers do identify strongly with their alignment (above all Lolth, who is both a god and an exemplar - but compare Gruumsh, a CE God who lives in Acheron because that's where the war is), but that's not so different than a mortal who does the same, like a paladin. Many powers may deal in alignment-related matters and work to further the interests of their alignment. But alignment is not something the Powers control, and when the Powers try to do so, their efforts usually backfire. There's a reason that nobody and I mean nobody gets to tell Primus how to run his plane.

Likewise even the mightiest Exemplars don't really set the rules - at most, they shape the planar manifestations of those rules. Usually it's the other way around, and alignment shapes them. Remember, Demogorgon is a sentient accretion of mortal fear and anguish, and the Abyss recognizes him as Prince of Demons. Not a Power, not an Obyrith, not Abyssal royalty like Graz'zt; Demogorgon, born of belief.


Out of character, it's an appeal to the authority of what the rules say, even if it doesn't make much sense. That's the difference between alignment and morality: alignment is absolute and comes from higher powers fiat, morality is considerably murkier.

This absolutely can be the case, but it really shouldn't be. I am of the general view that when Good stops mapping to good, you are Doing It Wrong. But plenty of DMs play it that way.


Thus the stupidity of Poisons and Ravages, the assymetry of [good] and [evil] spells.

On the asymmetry of spells, I think it simply comes down to the relative ease of doing meaningful harm to the wellbeing of the Planes, as opposed to how difficult the reverse is.

On Ravages ... yeah look BoED and BoVD were not just badly written books. One of their key writers is notoriously bad about anything alignment-related. He once wrote an adventure path in which an angel is committing genocide and OH NO, MORAL CONFLICT! HOW COULD YOU FIGht an angel who's doing something transparently evil.

There are things about alignment I'll stand by as working in a particular context. Ravages ... Ravages are not among them.

[RedMage125]

But per the thing you quoted, the reason doing that is evil is that it lets more negative energy into the world, making it "a darker and more evil place". If a place that has a bunch of negative energy in it is not, in fact, evil, then clearly that description is wrong.
Bringing an unrestrained, persistent fire into the world will cause a great deal of death and destruction. Doing that intentionally would certainly be evil, yes? And yet, fire itself is not evil.




Is that spelled out mechanically? I get that there is a claim made that it eventually happens, but are there rules for adjudicating that claim?


Dungeon Master's guide, page 134, I already told you.

[Cosi]

Bringing an unrestrained, persistent fire into the world will cause a great deal of death and destruction. Doing that intentionally would certainly be evil, yes? And yet, fire itself is not evil.

And neither is the plane that is made of fire, all of which is both unrestrained and persistent. The argument the passage you quoted is very specifically not about being "unrestrained" (which, I will point out, undead under your command aren't), it is about doing it at all on the basis that a place with more negative energy is more Evil, a claim handily disproven by the fact that the place defined by negative energy is not Evil at all.


Dungeon Master's guide, page 134, I already told you.

Those aren't rules. There's nothing that says "if you do X Evil things, you become Evil". It's just a suggestion that maybe if your DM thinks you are super Evil you become Evil.

[RedMage125]

And neither is the plane that is made of fire, all of which is both unrestrained and persistent. The argument the passage you quoted is very specifically not about being "unrestrained" (which, I will point out, undead under your command aren't), it is about doing it at all on the basis that a place with more negative energy is more Evil, a claim handily disproven by the fact that the place defined by negative energy is not Evil at all.
On the Plane of Fire it is a part of the normal environment of the plane. the denizens there are not killed or destroyed by it.




Those aren't rules. There's nothing that says "if you do X Evil things, you become Evil". It's just a suggestion that maybe if your DM thinks you are super Evil you become Evil.
They absolutely are.

Alignment change is gradual. Continuous behavior outside one's alignment over a period of time, to be no less than a week of in-game time. And Indecisiveness indicates neutrality. There's not a set value of x for "x acts of evil", because it's not a score. Otherwise people would keep track of it like strikes in baseball.

[Psyren]

On the Plane of Fire it is a part of the normal environment of the plane. the denizens there are not killed or destroyed by it.

This is correct. An analogy:

Imagine you had access to a kind of magic fire that burned endlessly without fuel. You could revolutionize industry with such an energy source, right? Now imagine that, every time you used it, you had the potential of starting an unrelated fire somewhere else in a location you can't anticipate. Worse, the more of it you used, or the more people that would use it, the number and magnitude of spontaneous fires breaking out elsewhere increase as well. Imagine further that these spontaneous fires have the potential to not be randomly destructive, but instead actively malevolent and cunning towards all life, with sufficiently strong blazes even able to (somehow) use magic of their own to further that goal.

Utilizing such a fire on the Plane of Fire would not be evil - after all, random fires breaking out there, regardless of strength or unpredictability, would have no potential of harming any innocent life because all the life on the Plane of Fire is immune or at least resistant to Fire. But the Material Plane is different, and full of life that couldn't defend itself against such a threat. Therefore, no matter how useful your own fire is, actually using it here (especially routinely, or in large amounts) would be irresponsible at best. Entire orders would spring up to make sure that use of that kind of fire would not get too widespread, and the opposition of good deities to that kind of fire would make sense, while it's support from evil deities would also make sense.

It's the same with necromantic energy - using it in its home plane doesn't matter. But bring/use it here, and all the concerns above apply.

[gkathellar]

But per the thing you quoted, the reason doing that is evil is that it lets more negative energy into the world, making it "a darker and more evil place". If a place that has a bunch of negative energy in it is not, in fact, evil, then clearly that description is wrong.

Let me pose a hypothetical: would you generally classify "lighting a house full of people on fire," as an evil act?

Negative energy is not intrinsically evil. It can do harm, but so can a lot of things, like fire. People cannot live on the Negative Energy Plane, but they also can't live on the Elemental Plane of Fire. Undeath is not like a fire, or even like the average negative energy spell, because these things (a) do not typically last forever, and (b) do not cause the whole Prime to slowly become uninhabitable. Creating undead is evil not because of some inherent property of the forces involved, but rather for the same reason that it's evil to light a house full of people on fire. If you could create undead with elemental fire, the effect would be just as bad.

If you want a more concrete example how a plane infested with undead and negative energy would be bad, turn to the Plane of Shadows. It, too, is not intrinsically evil. It is, however, a profoundly ugly place, full of violence and suffering, where life is nastier, more brutish, and extra short. Making a hospitable prime resemble it is a pretty crappy thing to do.


Then who cares (from a character alignment perspective, as noted there are mechanical implication to the tag) whether its Evil or not? You can be good (in an out-of-character sense) while still doing stuff the game tags as Evil.

A lot of beings don't care. The Powers tend to, as their perspective is more cosmic, but they are not the arbiters of all that is. There are good and neutral beings that use [evil] spells, because they don't understand or appreciate the harm they're doing or the profound selfishness intrinsic to the act. There may even be good reasons for taking the act - life is complicated like that, especially mortal life. The act is, however, cosmically harmful and profoundly selfish.


Not only is this a fallacy (the book is flawed, therefore we should throw the entire thing out), it's also irrelevant. They've (a) set up the way they want things to work in their game and (b) given you the tools to change those things in yours. But (b) does not stop (a) from being true.

Oh I'm not saying we should throw it out. I'm saying that it may be good to take BoVD with a grain of salt, because it's not exactly the line's crowning achievement and big parts of it stink to high heaven. Bear in mind that I'm pretty consistently in agreement with you in this thread.

[Cosi]

On the Plane of Fire it is a part of the normal environment of the plane. the denizens there are not killed or destroyed by it.

Is it evil to create undead on the Negative Energy Plane?

[gkathellar]

Is it evil to create undead on the Negative Energy Plane?

In principle, probably not, but what would you even create them with? The Negative Energy Plane is pretty devoid of corpses, and I'm not convinced an inanimate corpse could survive exposure any better than, uh ... anything else.

Also, creating them in one place and moving them off-plane probably doesn't circumvent their deleterious effects on the place they end up. Or I mean it might, but ... honestly the resource costs would get prohibitive.

[Psyren]

Oh I'm not saying we should throw it out. I'm saying that it may be good to take BoVD with a grain of salt, because it's not exactly the line's crowning achievement and big parts of it stink to high heaven. Bear in mind that I'm pretty consistently in agreement with you in this thread.

Thanks, and I'm all for taking it with a grain of salt. But that line is not just in BoVD, it is backed up by what we see in Libris Mortis, Fiendish Codex, and even the DMG. So I'm inclined to take it seriously and accept the rule for my games, because it appears internally consistent to me.

[Pleh]

But per the thing you quoted, the reason doing that is evil is that it lets more negative energy into the world, making it "a darker and more evil place". If a place that has a bunch of negative energy in it is not, in fact, evil, then clearly that description is wrong.

Actually, you might have overlooked something here.

Maybe in its native plane, there is nothing evil about it.

What if it is the act of bringing it to the material plane and using it to desecrate corpses that is the evil component? What if it's not evil until it is brought here, where it does not belong?

After all, many poisons only acquire a toxic effect when introduced to the human body, where they were never originally intended to be. Other poisons, lke natural venoms, are intentionally weaponized, but I'm saying many things are destructive that would not be if they remained separate from systems they naturally degrade.

Perhaps the evil is a perversion of the natural order to bring negative energy superficially with magic.

[Psyren]

Actually, you might have overlooked something here.

Maybe in its native plane, there is nothing evil about it.

What if it is the act of bringing it to the material plane and using it to desecrate corpses that is the evil component? What if it's not evil until it is brought here, where it does not belong?

After all, many poisons only acquire a toxic effect when introduced to the human body, where they were never originally intended to be. Other poisons, lke natural venoms, are intentionally weaponized, but I'm saying many things are destructive that would not be if they remained separate from systems they naturally degrade.

Perhaps the evil is a perversion of the natural order to bring negative energy superficially with magic.

Indeed - the purpose, or rather effect, of negative energy is to cancel out positive energy. The problem is that all living creatures on the Material Plane are based on positive energy. So through no fault of its own, negative energy threatens all life. Using negative energy (particularly in the way that undead do) on a plane that doesn't HAVE any positive-energy-based life is therefore fine, but the Material is not such a plane, and so "darker and more evil place" applies here and not there.

[Cosi]

In principle, probably not,

But animate dead doesn't say "has the [Evil] descriptor unless you cast it on a Negative Energy Dominant plane". It just has the [Evil] descriptor. Which suggests that it is just as Evil to do on the Negative Energy Plane as anywhere else.

EDIT: Also, the other spells that produce energy that is inimical to life (e.g. fireball) are not inherently Evil. They are Evil if you use them to do Evil things. This isn't "is lighting an orphanage on fire evil" it's "are matches evil because you could use them to light an orphanage on fire".

[gkathellar]

Actually, you might have overlooked something here.

Maybe in its native plane, there is nothing evil about it.

What if it is the act of bringing it to the material plane and using it to desecrate corpses that is the evil component? What if it's not evil until it is brought here, where it does not belong?

After all, many poisons only acquire a toxic effect when introduced to the human body, where they were never originally intended to be. Other poisons, lke natural venoms, are intentionally weaponized, but I'm saying many things are destructive that would not be if they remained separate from systems they naturally degrade.

Perhaps the evil is a perversion of the natural order to bring negative energy superficially with magic.

Expanding on this, remember that there are negative energy spells that aren't evil. Hell, Enervation is a pretty nasty piece of work, but even it lacks an alignment descriptor. It's just a tool. Undead can be a tool, too - but regardless of how you use them, their very existence does lasting harm.


But animate dead doesn't say "has the [Evil] descriptor unless you cast it on a Negative Energy Dominant plane". It just has the [Evil] descriptor. Which suggests that it is just as Evil to do on the Negative Energy Plane as anywhere else.

It does suggest that, and one could make a long winded argument about that, but I won't. If I were your DM and this came up, I'd talk it out with you and we'd reach an accommodation.

Also, you know, don't read too much into descriptors without immediate rules significance. The spell is evil, sure, but there might be situations where that doesn't matter at all. It always matters to good clerics because a good deity probably isn't interested in hearing your rationalizations for doing something You Should Not Be Doing. For everyone else? Eh. This ain't PF, we don't have a dev on record saying you can bounce between alignments by casting certain spells.


EDIT: Also, the other spells that produce energy that is inimical to life (e.g. fireball) are not inherently Evil. They are Evil if you use them to do Evil things. This isn't "is lighting an orphanage on fire evil" it's "are matches evil because you could use them to light an orphanage on fire".

See above. Fireball can be used to do evil. Animate dead always does at least a little evil.

[Psyren]

Expanding on this, remember that there are negative energy spells that aren't evil. Hell, Enervation is a pretty nasty piece of work, but even it lacks an alignment descriptor. It's just a tool. Undead can be a tool, too - but regardless of how you use them, their very existence does lasting harm.

Undead on the Material are described as a "conduit to the negative energy plane" (Libris Mortis pg. 7) whereas Enervation is not described that way. Clearly there is some fundamental difference in the way these two spells use the energy that leads to this discrepancy.

[Zanos]

[quote]Dead wrong. The actual text, taken word-for-word from the book, was provided by Psyren. That's what I was referring to. So you either missed reading his post that I mentioned, or you don't understand what "supported by the text" means. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former. Book of Vile Darkness, Chapter 1 (The Nature of Evil), page 8, right column. first subheading, "Animating the dead or Creating Undead":
"Unliving corpses-corrupt mockeries of life and purity-are inherently evil. Creating them is one of the most heinous crimes against the world that a character can commit. Even if they are commanded to do something good, undead invariably bring negative energy into the world, which makes it a darker and more evil place."
So actually, what I said IS supported by text, and what you are saying has no text or RAW to back it up.
Sure, but that doesn't say that "corrupt mockeries of life and purity is why Undead are Evil". It says that Undead are Evil regardless because they bring more negative energy into the plane in a nondescript generic way that has no printed effects. So again, undead are Evil because they are Evil. If they printed something concrete about negative energy "pollution" I'd probably complain a little bit less.

I've pointed out other areas where the rules are extremely inconsistent regarding alignment and concepts like purity and mocking life.



Elementals do not have souls. Never have, not in any edition of D&D. When you slay an elemental, its energies return to its hoem plane and make a NEW elemental. not the same elemental reborn, but a new one. Outsiders work the same way. So...NO, actually, constructs are NOT the same thing.

"Spirit" and "Soul" are not the same thing in D&D. Not necessarily.

Unlike most other living creatures, an elemental does not have a dual nature—its soul and body form one unit.
Elementals have souls in 3.X. It's just part of their body, like with an outsider. They still have souls. In fact, they are souls.


The creation of a flesh golem, as I was the person to point out, does, in fact, involve at least one act of Evil, as Animate Dead is one of the spells used in the making. Check your Monster Manual. The golem itself, however, is housing a Neutral Elemental spirit and is animated by said spirit, not by negative energy and not by the dark powers of unlife. Ergo, flesh golems do not always radiate evil like an undead creature does.
Is crafting a magic item that includes an [Evil] spell in it's creation process Evil? I was under the impression the spell slots were expended, but not actually cast.

In any case the point of the Flesh Golem illustration is that animating a corpse through binding and tormenting a soul into perpetual servitude isn't inherently Evil, which I will expand on below.


Don't try and act like I'm deflecting from anything. It's smug, and it's flat wrong. We're discussing undeath. Like I said to Segev, above, as per the developers, it is SPECIFICALLY the creation of undeath that is an Evil act. So any other point you try to make about "what about this other means of immortality, why isn't THAT evil?"...Who cares? The thread is about undead, and according to the devs, the creation of undead is an act of Evil. Other forms of immortality that do not involve undeath are not relevant. No one said "unnaturally extending your existence" has anything to do with why it's Evil. If that was AT ALL part of the point, your question would be relevant. As it is not, those other means of immortality are non-sequitur.
If I'm acting smug it's because you're deflecting points. If you say "Undead being Evil makes sense because of reasons x, y, and z" and I find other creatures that meet criteria x, y, and z where the creature is not inherently Evil, the rules are either inconsistent(admittedly likely) or your point is wrong.



The core books have spells that only create undead. Those spells have the [Evil] descriptor. Casting [Evil] spells is an Evil act. The BoVD, which is a rules supplement, clarifies, and does not contradict the core rules, on the nature of Evil in D&D.
I don't recall contradicting this.


Also, who said anything about "the gods' vision"? I certainly didn't. Don't input your own preconceived (and not text-supported) ideas into MY words and then attack THAT. The gods are actually beholden to the objective, faceless cosmic forces of Good/Evil/Law/Chaos. The forces that shape the cosmos. The laws of the universe is what has made creation of undead a "crime against the world", not the gods.
All those deities you mentioned are Evil, you know that, right? Setting aside Faerun (because there's SO MANY deities), there's only ONE deity in the PHB who (even through using expanded resources to draw information from) explicitly promotes and endorses undeath. That's Nerull. Okay, two if you count Vecna, since he was a lich himself, but that means he was once mortal, and you specified deities who are not ascended mortals. Wee Jas TOLERATES undead in very specific circumstances (See Dragon #350 for the Core Beliefs article on her for more info), but by and large, she is considered a steward of the DEAD, not a goddess of undeath. Nerull is Neutral Evil in the "evil for the sake of evil" kind of way (where Vecna is NE in the "serve yourself above all others" kind of way). Nerull teaches that life itself is an abomination, and that undeath is a preferred state of existence.
The forces that shape the cosmos determine that creating Undead was Evil. They did not determine that it was a "crime against the world". It's just Evil. Those are different things. Maybe we should define what we mean by that, because I consider a "crime against the world" in this context to be something that upsets the very foundations that reality is built upon, so a "crime against the world" would be something like destroying an entire plane or obliterating a deity and allowing their portfolios to collapse.

But considering Evil gods were presumably around when most of this stuff was put together too, being Evil != being a crime against reality itself.


All I am familiar with is the Blighter Prestige Class ability (which is explicitly FORSAKING druidic principles), and the Corrupted Wild Shape feat, which can only be used by undead druids. By the RAW, without this feat, a druid who becomes undead LOSES her wild shape ability, as it is based off polymorph, which works only on living creatures. So that feat is only for beings who are ALREADY undead and had the wild shape class feature. Is there another to which you refer?
I was referring to Corrupted Wild Shape. And actually wild shape does not inherit from polymorph, it inherits from Alternate Form, so technically corrupted wild shape does nothing. In any case the druid writeup mentions nothing about being against undead, and druids can get undead creation spells through various feats. I think there's one specifically for druids, but it might have been from Eberron.



Correct. So?

It's apples and oranges. Animate Objects last 1 round/level, does not draw on the same energies as Animate Dead, produces a different product (which would be a Medium Animated Object, not a human zombie), and a host of other differences.

Again, I said there's leagues of differences between "disrespecting" a corpse and FORCING unlife on it. Casting Animate Objects is no different than picking it up with your hands and making it move like a puppet. Gross? Yes. Disrespectful? Certainly. Evil? No.
You're using magic to puppet a corpse into a "disgusting mockery of life." Again, we're back to it's Evil because Negative Energy is Evil, so it's Evil. Nothing to do with desecration or mocking life.


The first part of what you say is dead wrong. Resurrection, and even True Resurrection require the body to be on hand. Both spells say they function as Raise Dead with exceptions to follow. None of those exceptions specify that the Range of the spell is no longer Touch, nor that the target is "dead creature touched", except that True Resurrection CAN bring back someone "whose bodies have been destroyed". If you were killed and the party had to leave your corpse behind, True Resurrection CANNOT make you a new body unless your body was destroyed. So there's no "resurrected elsewhere" caveat.
You only need a small portion of the body for Resurrection of True Resurrection to restore the person, not the entire thing. You can animate a skeleton from a corpse missing a finger.


Pay attention to what I say, because I said that there's strong CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE of a connection between the undead creature and the soul of the body it used to inhabit. I never claimed a hard and fast fact about RAW, and I WON'T do so without text to support it. Don't act like you're "proving me wrong".
Your "trapped soul" is an interesting point, but not a new thought at all. You want another quirk that pokes a hole in the theory of connection? The Clone spell. Wizard has a clone, wizard dies. Clone immediately activates, wizard is alive. Evil necromancer finds first body and can animate it as undead. Boom. This is why I said the rules have evidence to SUGGEST these things. They are not absolutes.
There's circumstantial evidence in favor of it and concrete evidence that contradicts it, so I don't think it has much value as a point.


All of those have the undead type, and, as per the Detect Evil spell, will detect as evil. Even if they are not of evil alignment. A Lawful Good succubus will ALSO detect as Evil. Same principle.
Nope. [Evil] subtype treats you as Evil for all spell effects. Undead only detect as Evil. Holy Word does nothing to a Baelnorn or Good Ghost. Blasphemy hits them full force. That is not the "same principle."

[Pleh]

But animate dead doesn't say "has the [Evil] descriptor unless you cast it on a Negative Energy Dominant plane". It just has the [Evil] descriptor. Which suggests that it is just as Evil to do on the Negative Energy Plane as anywhere else.

EDIT: Also, the other spells that produce energy that is inimical to life (e.g. fireball) are not inherently Evil. They are Evil if you use them to do Evil things. This isn't "is lighting an orphanage on fire evil" it's "are matches evil because you could use them to light an orphanage on fire".

Rather, this is, "are matches evil if we live in a universe where there is reason to believe that using them could ignite our atmosphere?"

Animate Dead is not simply, "using negative energy." It is desecrating corpses to create monsters that willfully feed on the innocent. If bringing negative energy to the material is evil, I don't see why bringing material corpses to the NEP to desecrate them would fail to also be evil.

Being [Evil] means that deities won't help their clerics any more or less because of the plane they happen to be on. It means the act will eventually set your alignment to evil if you keep doing it. Not because Negative Energy is evil, but the spell itself is.

[RedMage125]

Is it evil to create undead on the Negative Energy Plane?
That's more of a philosophy question than a rules issue.

Is it evil to summon a fiend when on the lower planes? Is the evil of the act intrinsic to contact with the energies utilized, or is it the opening of a channel between a purely evil plane and the Prime that is the evil?

As I understand it, creation of the undead IS a naturally occurring effect of the Negative Energy Plane. That is, beings that die there may spontaneously rise as undead.

I don't know if there's an official answer to this. If there isn't one, I would guess that it's still evil, only due to the principle of lack of exception being mentioned in the rules and avoidance of munchkin fallacy in our thinking. But that is just my guess.

But the truth is that I don't know the answer to that question.

Well played.

Actually, you might have overlooked something here.

Maybe in its native plane, there is nothing evil about it.

What if it is the act of bringing it to the material plane and using it to desecrate corpses that is the evil component? What if it's not evil until it is brought here, where it does not belong?


Perhaps the evil is a perversion of the natural order to bring negative energy superficially with magic.


Exactly why I called it a philosophy question, lol.

[Cosi]

See above. Fireball can be used to do evil. Animate dead always does at least a little evil.

Does it? All the "evil" I've seen is that it makes the Material Plane become terrible by some unspecified mechanism, and that doesn't seem like it could possibly apply if you did on on the Negative Energy Plane.


Animate Dead is not simply, "using negative energy." It is desecrating corpses to create monsters that willfully feed on the innocent.

Skeletons don't willfully feed on the innocent. If you create them, they don't willfully do anything because they are under your control. And it is not described as Evil for "descrating corpses", it is described as Evil for reasons that are very specifically about using negative energy to do stuff.

[Necroticplague]

Does it? All the "evil" I've seen is that it makes the Material Plane become terrible by some unspecified mechanism, and that doesn't seem like it could possibly apply if you did on on the Negative Energy Plane.

Except, as someone else pointed out previously (and I had earlier mentioned in passing), it still does damage on the Negative Energy Plane, because you're forcing Negative Energy to do almost the exact opposite of what it's supposed to do. Negative Energy is entropy, it's supposed to stop things from moving and living. Using it to make something get up and move is a horrific inversion of what it's supposed to do.

[Zanos]

Casting animate dead on the negative energy plane is Evil because casting [Evil] spells is Evil, and animate dead is an [Evil] spell. Welcome to cosmic morality. It's allowed to be arbitrary, and often is.


Except, as someone else pointed out previously (and I had earlier mentioned in passing), it still does damage on the Negative Energy Plane, because you're forcing Negative Energy to do almost the exact opposite of what it's supposed to do. Negative Energy is entropy, it's supposed to stop things from moving and living. Using it to make something get up and move is a horrific inversion of what it's supposed to do.

I don't recall any rules source that says that Negative Energy isn't "supposed" to create undead. That doesn't make much sense either way because it does so spontaneously, and there's few(any?) faiths that use negative energy and aren't necromancers.

[Cosi]

Except, as someone else pointed out previously (and I had earlier mentioned in passing), it still does damage on the Negative Energy Plane, because you're forcing Negative Energy to do almost the exact opposite of what it's supposed to do. Negative Energy is entropy, it's supposed to stop things from moving and living. Using it to make something get up and move is a horrific inversion of what it's supposed to do.

I'm pretty sure this isn't true. If you pump someone full of negative levels (e.g. negative energy), they turn into a wight, which is a type of undead.

[Pleh]

Does it? All the "evil" I've seen is that it makes the Material Plane become terrible by some unspecified mechanism, and that doesn't seem like it could possibly apply if you did on on the Negative Energy Plane.

Skeletons don't willfully feed on the innocent. If you create them, they don't willfully do anything because they are under your control. And it is not described as Evil for "descrating corpses", it is described as Evil for reasons that are very specifically about using negative energy to do stuff.

See Psyren's point about the "conduits of negative energy" above. I believe there's no hard mechanism because it is a global effect, so it's up to the DM which straw is breaking the camel's back, but just because it falls under DM prerogative doesn't mean that the rules aren't advising the DM to take action.

I went back to look at the animate dead spell again. It doesn't describe why it is evil at all, much less delineate between desecration and negative energy (though funny enough, the Desecration spell doubles the undead you can create and control).

Note also from Psyren's post the Enervation is not tagged as [Evil] despite using negative energy. The problem seems to be in the creation of a permanent "negative energy conduit" partly from the desecration of a person's body.

I noticed you didn't mention that creating too many undead releases some from your control. What does an uncontrolled skeleton do? IIRC, LM basically gives a few thematic options for the DM to choose which range from "nothing" to "wanders about brutally murdering anything living it comes across."

Kinda goes back to that problem of a permanent negative energy conduit. You've poked a hole between planes to create an everlasting fire that probably has a taste for the blood of the innocent and is only restrained by your own life force and magic prowess (which are definitively more limited in duration than the permanent conduit you've crafted).

If not a malevolent evil, certainly a reckless or negligent one. Enervation uses negative energy, too, but it's not creating an everlasting undead monster.

[RedMage125]

Sure, but that doesn't say that "corrupt mockeries of life and purity is why Undead are Evil". It says that Undead are Evil regardless because they bring more negative energy into the plane in a nondescript generic way that has no printed effects. So again, undead are Evil because they are Evil. If they printed something concrete about negative energy "pollution" I'd probably complain a little bit less.
It says-RIGHT AFTER saying they are corrupt mockeries of life and purity-that making one is a CRIME AGAINST THE WORLD. And you think that has nothing to do with the "why"?

I can't impact your comprehension, then.


I've pointed out other areas where the rules are extremely inconsistent regarding alignment and concepts like purity and mocking life.
In your opinion.


Elementals have souls in 3.X. It's just part of their body, like with an outsider. They still have souls. In fact, they are souls.
Cute that you cut the rest of that out because it may be used against you.
"When an elemental is slain, no soul is set loose. Spells that restore souls to their bodies, such as raise dead, reincarnate, and resurrection, don't work on an elemental."

Elementals do not have souls the way that MORTALS have souls, is that more clear? I'm trying to shy away from Judeo-Christian nomenclature here, but I can't think of any other way to phrase it, other than to say that they do not have Immortal Souls.



Is crafting a magic item that includes an [Evil] spell in it's creation process Evil? I was under the impression the spell slots were expended, but not actually cast.
I was under the impression that the spells were cast INTO the item. One or both of us needs to look back at the books on this matter.


In any case the point of the Flesh Golem illustration is that animating a corpse through binding and tormenting a soul into perpetual servitude isn't inherently Evil, which I will expand on below.
You're binding an elemental spirit to it. And since you were kind enough to point out that the elemental's body and soul are one unit, the elemental's body is thus impounded as well, is it not? You're not ripping a soul out of its home.



If I'm acting smug it's because you're deflecting points. If you say "Undead being Evil makes sense because of reasons x, y, and z" and I find other creatures that meet criteria x, y, and z where the creature is not inherently Evil, the rules are either inconsistent(admittedly likely) or your point is wrong.
No, you've decided you don't like my points, and that I must be wrong, and are obstinately trying to perceive everything I do or do not say as "proof" of your pre-existing notions.

Why is it difficult to accept that creating undead-SPECIFICALLY-is an action that is evil for the stated reasons? Other things may toe the line, but not violate whatever threshold makes undead creation Evil.

You've also yet to provide one example of a creature that meets ALL of the same criteria as the reasons for undead being evil that is, in and of itself, not undead AND not evil. To use your own words, you have presented cases of creatures who meet criteria x and y, or x and z, and claim inconsistency in the rules.



The forces that shape the cosmos determine that creating Undead was Evil. They did not determine that it was a "crime against the world". It's just Evil.
I gave you PAGE NUMBERS in the BoVD where the explanation says-IN EXACT WORDS- "crime against the world".


Those are different things. Maybe we should define what we mean by that, because I consider a "crime against the world" in this context to be something that upsets the very foundations that reality is built upon, so a "crime against the world" would be something like destroying an entire plane or obliterating a deity and allowing their portfolios to collapse.
Everything after the bolded text is your opinion and personal bias affecting your judgment in this matter. Your objectivity has faltered, and you are no longer examing the RAW based on the value of the words alone, but by how well those words meet YOUR expectations.


But considering Evil gods were presumably around when most of this stuff was put together too, being Evil != being a crime against reality itself.
Did the gods make reality in Core rules? Or does it depend on the setting? I don't think it's ever spelled out, is it? I know in 4e, the gods refined what the Primordials made, but that's not the same thing.



I was referring to Corrupted Wild Shape. And actually wild shape does not inherit from polymorph, it inherits from Alternate Form, so technically corrupted wild shape does nothing.
That book was published BEFORE the errata that made wild shape function as Alternate Form. If you find a pre-errata PHB, it also says polymorph. I was reading off the text in the feat, so...my bad.


In any case the druid writeup mentions nothing about being against undead, and druids can get undead creation spells through various feats. I think there's one specifically for druids, but it might have been from Eberron.
I don't think the Children of Winter (the Eberron sect you refer to) use undead. I think their faction-specific feats get you Vermin Shape.



You're using magic to puppet a corpse into a "disgusting mockery of life." Again, we're back to it's Evil because Negative Energy is Evil, so it's Evil. Nothing to do with desecration or mocking life.
Not the same thing. Again, no different than using telekinesis to move a corpse around. It's not a creature, it's an automaton.



You only need a small portion of the body for Resurrection of True Resurrection to restore the person, not the entire thing. You can animate a skeleton from a corpse missing a finger.

There's circumstantial evidence in favor of it and concrete evidence that contradicts it, so I don't think it has much value as a point.
I don't know about "concrete evidence against it". Because if your newly resurrected friend dies AGAIN, and that 9-fingered skeleton is still tooling around, then by the RAW he cannot be resurrected until it is destroyed.

Furthermore, I said evidence that there is SOME CONNECTION. What is NOT clear is exactly what that connection is.

If a wraith kills your character and he animates as a new wraith, then a necromancer takes your body and creates a mummy, which has to be destroyed to resurrect you? Both? Incorporeal undead seem to have stronger connections to the soul of the departed. A ghost has to have conditions met to set its soul to rest.

You cannot accurately claim that there is "concrete evidence" that in all circumstances, there is no connection between the soul of the departed and the undead creature they became.


Nope. [Evil] subtype treats you as Evil for all spell effects. Undead only detect as Evil. Holy Word does nothing to a Baelnorn or Good Ghost. Blasphemy hits them full force. That is not the "same principle."
*sigh*
I was only TALKING about Detection. You bringing up the other spells is a Straw Man that you think makes my point look weaker. I never covered those spells with relation to non-evil undead. If you look at what I said that you quoted I said that they DETECT as evil, like a Lawful Good succubus. It's also the same principle that a +2 unholy longsword will detect as evil, even though it is non-intelligent, has no sentience and therefore no alignment itself.

It's probably MORE akin to the evil sword, actually, now that I think about it, because it's about the magicks present.

[Cosi]

See Psyren's point about the "conduits of negative energy" above. I believe there's no hard mechanism because it is a global effect, so it's up to the DM which straw is breaking the camel's back, but just because it falls under DM prerogative doesn't mean that the rules aren't advising the DM to take action.

Once you step into the domain of DM action, even advised by the rules, you have stepped outside the purview of the rules and can no longer use your conclusions to make statements about them.


I noticed you didn't mention that creating too many undead releases some from your control. What does an uncontrolled skeleton do? IIRC, LM basically gives a few thematic options for the DM to choose which range from "nothing" to "wanders about brutally murdering anything living it comes across."

So don't create too many undead? Or kill the extra ones. Whatever. Again, see fireball. Totally possible to do evil with it, but that doesn't make every use of it Evil.

[gkathellar]

The Powers weren't present for the birth of reality, fwiw. Even the Prime predates them.

I feel like "crime against the world" is not a great choice of words in general. Undeath is a crime insofar as we understand crimes to be bad and harmful. It is not a crime against the world in the way that opening a passage way to the Far Realm is, however. It's evil, but in a cosmos where evil is present and accounted for. It's unnatural, but only in a very limited sense of the word.


Once you step into the domain of DM action, even advised by the rules, you have stepped outside the purview of the rules and can no longer use your conclusions to make statements about them.

Just because it's fluff doesn't mean there can't be statements about it. The canonical answer is this is this: creating undead is bad for everything, which is why it's evil in both fluff and crunch.


So don't create too many undead? Or kill the extra ones. Whatever. Again, see fireball. Totally possible to do evil with it, but that doesn't make every use of it Evil.

However, every use of it is evil for a separate reason: it's cosmically harmful.

[Quarian Rex]

In a rules discussion about a FANTASY construct? You are categorically wrong. This is not an "ethical question". This is a RULES discussion. And as a construct of FANTASY, it is what the authors say it is. "Appeal to Authority" is a fallacy in debate because authority could be WRONG. As a construct of fantasy, authority here actually HAS the ability to mete out absolutes and maxims.

In arguments like this I think that you are only half right. While the authors may have made the game the DM is the one who has to justify it to the players. So, in that vein, arguments like this are quite helpful. Saying that something is RAW, while technically being correct, adds little to the conversation without further explaining why that makes sense. Which you did do quite well here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22423690&postcount=101). It just took four pages to do so. That is not a judgement, that is just the nature of argument. Just keep that in mind the next time it seems like you're getting frustrated. To be fair, 3.5 is notorious for being fast and loose with the fluff justifications of the crunch.


I would, however, really like to return to the OP...


My stance was that using undead as a mindless, tireless, free workforce would be an excellent way to take over the world, Economically and through conquest if necessary. Psyren brought up a good point that good deities and churches would likely not stand for this and halt you at your early planning/implementation stages. Others brought up good counter points about what they feel the reality of the world is.


Accepting that the RAW interpretation of undead creation is being used (even if being utilized for good ends it is inherently Evil, etc.) what would be required to build an undead empire? I mean an actual one in play, without hand-waving the details or assuming a 20th level Necromancer with unlimited 18th level apprentices. What could it do to protect itself from attack. What reasons would there be for neighboring realms to not attack it? I tend to approach things from a Pathfinder perspective but let's look at what's available, trying to stay away from custom magic items (see hand-waving) and the cheesiest aspects of 3.5.

Traditionally 9th or 10th level is where characters are expected to be capable of starting/sustaining their own kingdom (assuming a keep and some outlying villages). That means he can passively control @40 1HD skeletons. Where would you actually go from there? What would you actually do with those 40 untiring bodies that would significantly benefit your kingdom?

[RedMage125]

You only need a small portion of the body for Resurrection of True Resurrection to restore the person, not the entire thing. You can animate a skeleton from a corpse missing a finger.



I just had another thought on this note.

Your friend dies, you can afford Resurrection, but somehow cannot carry his entire corpse back to town, so you sever a finger and head back. A necromancer animates your friend into this 9-fingered skeleton an hour after you leave. You arrive in town...WHOOPS! Resurrection doesn't work, does it?

[Psyren]

I just had another thought on this note.

Your friend dies, you can afford Resurrection, but somehow cannot carry his entire corpse back to town, so you sever a finger and head back. A necromancer animates your friend into this 9-fingered skeleton an hour after you leave. You arrive in town...WHOOPS! Resurrection doesn't work, does it?

Correct, it would not. Presumably divinations would be in order to find out why. (Happily, you'd be right next to a cleric capable of a Commune.)

[Segev]

Wow, this thread came back and exploded again. Neat. (Er, "exploded" as in "lots of posts," not as in "lots of vitriol.")


You and I have gone rounds on this before, Segev.
The argument is NOT circular, it's cohesive, there's a difference.

Once again, from the top:
(...omitted for brevity...)

It's not circular, not even from within the game world, once you accept, as a truism, that the creation of undead-by ANY MEANS- is, in and of itself, an act of Evil. From a metagame perception it's "because the designers say so", but from in-game logic it's "that's just the way the laws of the universe work".

I don't care if you, personally, don't find that compelling, that doesn't make the argument "circular".

I'm not disputing that the RAW say so. I am not arguing from RAW, though. I am discussing it in a broader sense of why it should make sense.

I could have a rule that says, "murdering puppies is a Good act" in an RPG book. This has no other justification, printed anywhere, other than "some vague aura of Good increases by a miniscule amount every time a puppy is murdered." It would be jarring and weird because it feels wrong, and doesn't seem to make much sense.


Well, that's what you're talking about, but I don't actually see Segev mention RAW anywhere. It seems to me that you're arguing "these are the rules," and Segev is arguing "there's not much in the way of justification for these rules."

Let me add something: when you reduce ethical questions to "because the designers say so," you are invoking exactly what people hate about the alignment system. Alignment can be made to work - fairly intuitively, even. But it cannot be made to work via an appeal to authority; the statement, "well, the writers said so, all questions are answered," just raises more questions for most of us.Well put. I don't mind an appeal to RAW for a discussion of how rules work and how mechanics unfold from them. I do start to get irked when the RAW are used to make statements about the game world without seeming to actually have an impact that makes sense.


No, he says they are "circular", and specifies "undead are evil because evil spells which are evil because undead are evil", which is myopic to the point of being blatantly incorrect and misleading.

In a debate about a REAL topic? Yes, you would be right.

In a rules discussion about a FANTASY construct? You are categorically wrong. This is not an "ethical question". This is a RULES discussion.Eh? It's... okay, I see the problem here.

I'm not addressing it as a rules discussion in the sense that I dispute what the rules say.

I'm addressing as a rules discussion only insofar as I am saying this rule is frustratingly divorced from the narrative.

Let's pretend for a moment we were talking about a novel, or a TV series, or some other work of fiction where we have no "by the numbers, here's some dice" mechanics. We absolutely can have "rules of magic," of course, within the setting and the narrative, and those are what I want to discuss.

"Creating undead is always evil!" begs the question of "what do you mean by evil?"

D&D's setting and narrative answers by saying, "It is an alignment energy/substance which is associated with the lower planes." It also, in theory, corresponds to the notions of good and evil we broadly accept in modern Western civilization. Murder, rape, tormenting others, and in general causing harm without really good reason. (You can get into circular arguments by chasing "good reason" down the rabbit hole, but I'm pretty sure that we can accept this notion on a broad level without having to do that.)

You do make a point that by cutting it out to "Creating undead is always evil," you're making it no longer circular. The next question is, "WHY is it always evil?" In theory, you can just say "because the designers/gods of good and evil say so," but that is an argument that undermines a setting's believability, because you get to the point where if they say so, then killing and raping can become good and helping orphans can become evil. Because you've stolen the actual meaning of the words "good" and "evil" and replaced it with "whatever the designers/GM/gods of good and evil say today."


Question: is there some mechanical implication to animate dead being Evil? Is there a rule that says you can't be Chaotic Evil and spend all your time saving kittens and hugging orphans? Does committing enough Evil acts eventually turn you Evil?It's a little bit more complicated and highly subjective, but in general, doing enough evil things stains your soul to make you count as evil, regardless of whether anybody agrees that they "really are" evil deeds or not. It is more hotly argued whether doing enough good deeds can make you good, despite all the evil you might have also done. It's probably well outside the scope of this thread to discuss that directly.


As has been stated numerous times in this thread, LM and BoVD both tell you what they DO. The choice is yours whether to accept that rationale or reject it in your games, just as I choose to accept it in mine.The best I've seen is, "It increases the amount of evil in the world by some miniscule amount that adds up over time." Which is annoying at best, because that means that there is actually no effect from me animating that corpse over there. It's only if a thousand necromancers animate a thousand corpses that "something" evil might start to happen. The real irony being that, if you asked around for ideas of what that might be? It'd probably be, "um, undead might start spontaneously arising in the region so tainted by necromantic energies." Cool, cool; why is that "evil?" Well, because creating undead is always evil. And that is back to circular logic.

Okay, so maybe it's not that. Maybe the "something evil" is more disease. Or random deaths. How can we measure that? How can we tell that Ned the Necromancer's latest zombie is the thing that pushed it over the edge so that little Suzy's new baby brother was stillborn?

The "it sort of makes things a little more evil all around" argument is just...a cop out. You can make that argument about literally any act you want to deem evil or good.

Want to know why utterly torturing a soul in perfect isolation for a year and a day is good? Because we say so! And it makes the world just slightly more "good" every time you do!


Nothing in this thread is stopping you from setting up an undead kingdom in a published setting. Trying to do so while getting sanctioned by good-aligned organizations in that world may be difficult without rule zero however.Never said it did. What I'm getting at is that this rule is one of those which, if left with no more explanation than we have, can lead to good/evil being incoherent concepts in the setting.

I've always had major problems with "Your kingdom is just too Good! It's going to fall apart because of all the horrible things being too Good does to people!" as a concept. It's from this you get dystopian "good" civilizations designed to show that "you need some evil to make life good for people." It tends to conflate Good with intolerance and hate and tyranny to do this, and then paints "evil" as actually caring about people, which is obnoxious in the extreme to me.

So I insist that any "good" effect must be coherent with colloquial real-world understandings of "good," at LEAST on a top level. It's okay if you HAVE to go deeper to see why it qualifies, but you must be able to make it work in a way that ultimately yields what people would accept as "good." I insist that "evil" effects similarly be demonstrably evil.

I don't mind "this thing is evil because we wanted it to be evil" as the design theory, but that can't be the end of why, IN SETTING, it is evil. Sure, "creating undead is always evil" was put there because that's what the designers wanted. But it still falls on their shoulders to design it so that it really is, rather than relying on "we say so."

Why does Inuyasha have a red coat and pants? Well, in-story, it's fire rat hair and makes him more resistant to fire. But in point of fact, he has red clothing because Rumiko Takahashi wanted to design him with it. She thought it looked good. But she gave a reason for it being red IN STORY when she didn't even have to.


If creating undead is always evil, but the only actual evil effect is "slightly increasing the evil in the world," then all you'd have to do to make it perfectly okay is find a way to make sure that each undead you create does more good than its creation added evil to the world. Since these are such miniscule "can't see the effect until years and years of doing this add up" sorts of deals, just the sheer good of saving one life would suffice to counterbalance all the evil of that undead's creation. Putting them to work farming and saving entire towns from starvation? Well, you've outweighed any amount of evil those individual undead add to the equation by existing.

"We must eliminate that charity group that houses orphans and feeds the starving! They animate too many undead!"

That's a cartoonish, incoherent definition of good/evil and a Captain Planet level moral quandary. It's unworthy of a game played by even teenagers.

Hence, I want the actual evil to be something measurable, that an INDIVIDUAL necromancer would have to be somewhat evil to be okay with, and that an even moderately good spellcaster would feel a bit guilty about having done. Not just because "making undead is taboo, so I feel icky," but because actually knowing what ELSE it does as a consequence makes them feel...bad...for having done it.

I'm half-way fond of the idea that it rips the soul out of the afterlife to re-animate the corpse, but that creates consistency problems elsewhere and makes the question of why skeletons and zombies are mindless start to bother me. And why intelligent undead tend to lose their class levels, etc.

At its core, what is an evil act? I'd say the easiest definition is that an evil act is one which deliberately or callously causes undeserved harm to sapient beings, and/or unwarranted suffering.

If, for example, all creation of undead required kicking a puppy hard enough to make it yelp and keep whimpering in pain afterwards, and do it in front of the orphan to whom the puppy is the only family, that would be an act of evil. Petty evil, but definitely evil, in the sense that any good-aligned person would feel awful for the suffering caused to the puppy and the orphan, even if they convinced themselves the good they could do with the undead was worth it.

This is why I keep looking for things to make part of the casting or part of the effect of casting the spells which qualify without seeming trite and/or silly. (Kicking puppies in front of orphans is trite, to say the least.)

[Psyren]

The best I've seen is, "It increases the amount of evil in the world by some miniscule amount that adds up over time." Which is annoying at best, because that means that there is actually no effect from me animating that corpse over there. It's only if a thousand necromancers animate a thousand corpses that "something" evil might start to happen. The real irony being that, if you asked around for ideas of what that might be? It'd probably be, "um, undead might start spontaneously arising in the region so tainted by necromantic energies." Cool, cool; why is that "evil?" Well, because creating undead is always evil. And that is back to circular logic.
...
I don't mind "this thing is evil because we wanted it to be evil" as the design theory, but that can't be the end of why, IN SETTING, it is evil. Sure, "creating undead is always evil" was put there because that's what the designers wanted. But it still falls on their shoulders to design it so that it really is, rather than relying on "we say so."

It's not circular at all. Uncontrolled undead hurt innocent people. Both willingly, and without restraint or remorse. Doing anything that results in more of them is questionable at best.

I don't particularly care about Sanctify The Wicked; one poorly-conceived spell does not invalidate an entire design philosophy.



I've always had major problems with "Your kingdom is just too Good! It's going to fall apart because of all the horrible things being too Good does to people!" as a concept. It's from this you get dystopian "good" civilizations designed to show that "you need some evil to make life good for people." It tends to conflate Good with intolerance and hate and tyranny to do this, and then paints "evil" as actually caring about people, which is obnoxious in the extreme to me.

I have no idea where this is even coming from :smallconfused:

[AnimeTheCat]

It's not circular at all. Uncontrolled undead hurt innocent people. Both willingly, and without restraint or remorse. Doing anything that results in more of them is questionable at best.

Not to be a thorn in anyone's side here, but uncontrolled wolves hurt innocent people. Both willingly, and without restraint or remorse. If you are near a wolf, it will likely attack you. Therefore, doing anything that results in more wolves is questionable at best. That argument is a little weak IMO. Any animal is going to hurt innocent people. How many stories have you heard of where a pack of wolves is feeding on travelers/livestock/a town. Lots of them, one of the oldests quests in the level 1 book.

Also would like to point out that the undead in my original post were all under control via spells, and confinement so those would likely not be hurting any innocent people. An easy way to solve the "undead popping up out of nothingness" that a lot of undead in an area apparently causes, have a force of trained people that go out and either a) destroy them or b) capture them.

If something in the various undead creation spells said "When you cast this spell you take x person's soul (against their will), and forcefully/painfully bind it to the lifeless corpse thereby using the negative energy generated by the tormented soul to power your undead abomination." I would have no problem saying "yep, animating dead is always evil and that is a vile thing to do". But it doesn't say that anywhere... there are vague hints, but there's no RAW, so aside from "The RAW says it's evil so it's evil", there's nothing to back up the claim of evil... You could even say that the casting of the spell (in the sense of the somatic and verbal components) is a ceremony honoring the deceased and willing the bones to be animated to life to continue service. That wouldn't be defiling anything and there's no RAW that says that can be what happens.


I would, however, really like to return to the OP...

Accepting that the RAW interpretation of undead creation is being used (even if being utilized for good ends it is inherently Evil, etc.) what would be required to build an undead empire? I mean an actual one in play, without hand-waving the details or assuming a 20th level Necromancer with unlimited 18th level apprentices. What could it do to protect itself from attack. What reasons would there be for neighboring realms to not attack it? I tend to approach things from a Pathfinder perspective but let's look at what's available, trying to stay away from custom magic items (see hand-waving) and the cheesiest aspects of 3.5.

Traditionally 9th or 10th level is where characters are expected to be capable of starting/sustaining their own kingdom (assuming a keep and some outlying villages). That means he can passively control @40 1HD skeletons. Where would you actually go from there? What would you actually do with those 40 untiring bodies that would significantly benefit your kingdom?

Accepting the RAW interpretation that animating undead is innately evil and will always be under every circumstance regardless of anything else, it wouldn't really take a whole lot. It would start by finding an area plagued by undead. Instead of coming in and destroying all of your free resources, just capture them and store them for future use. It's not like they're going bad or anything. This has the effect of making the party seen as an invaluable asset in the community because they've been taking care of the undead menace. Next, slowly start implementing the undead powering simple machines. A wheel crank that makes a skeleton/zombie walk in a circle that pumps the bellows for the blacksmith. Add additional gears to allow the blacksmith to control the flow of air to the coals. The blacksmith can now do work a little faster, take a break instead of pumping the bellows. Say that in the fall in this area the winds stop blowing. Have skeletons/zombies turn a wheel that turns the grindstone, now you never need wind ever again. There's never a lapse in flour production. As this happens, of course neighboring nations/countries will hear/find out. But now, unless they want to commit genoicde on an entire nation (few good deities would want to do this to neutral townsfolk) I've protected myself and my nation with my own people. No custom magic items, not magic other than the magic used to control the undead.

"But when the good guys come and say 'using undead like this is bad' the towns people will immediately revolt." Where is the precident to back this up? Sounds to me like the good guys are jealous of the better lives these towns people have and they would likely be asked to stay the night and then be on their way. The undead are contained, the guards keep the towns people safe, and if something happens, they don't hesitate to take out the undead that are causing the problem.

I'm not saying it's foolproof, but it would be a start and could be easily done around level 5+ to be honest. All you need is one crypt and a nearby town and you have the beginings of your own undead nation.

[Psyren]

Not to be a thorn in anyone's side here, but uncontrolled wolves hurt innocent people. Both willingly, and without restraint or remorse.

First of all, if you used magic that caused wolves to spontaneously appear in remote villages, that would be evil too! So thank you for proving my point.

Second of all, your analogy is flawed - wolves are never sapient, while a great many uncontrolled undead are. Wolves also don't propagate themselves using the living, but many undead do.

[AnimeTheCat]

First of all, if you used magic that caused wolves to spontaneously appear in remote villages, that would be evil too! So thank you for proving my point.

Second of all, your analogy is flawed - wolves are never sapient, while a great many uncontrolled undead are. Wolves also don't propagate themselves using the living, but many undead do.

Summon Nature's Ally isn't an [Evil] spell, so your point is incorrect.

Second of all, wolves are more sapient than skeletons or zombies as skeletons and zombies are not capable of great wisdom or sound judgement. Undead, as a type, don't propogate themselves using the living any more than Animals, the type. Animals, the type, require flesh to live (if they are a predator). Undead, as the type, typicaly require a corpse to become "un-living".

My analogy isn't really all that flawed because your point was that undead are evil because they attack innocent people. All I said is that animals do the same.

[Psyren]

Summon Nature's Ally isn't an [Evil] spell, so your point is incorrect.

That spell doesn't result in uncontrolled wolves appearing anywhere, so your refutation is incorrect.



Second of all, wolves are more sapient than skeletons or zombies as skeletons and zombies are not capable of great wisdom or sound judgement.

And what about shadows, ghouls, wights, allips, wraiths, mohrgs etc.? No sapience there?


My analogy isn't really all that flawed because your point was that undead are evil because they attack innocent people. All I said is that animals do the same.

Pray tell me, which animals "hate light and life with equal fervor?" Which animals have "warped minds, making them cunning and feral?" Which animals "despise all living things?" All of these are quotes from core.


Undead, as a type, don't propogate themselves using the living any more than Animals, the type. Animals, the type, require flesh to live (if they are a predator). Undead, as the type, typicaly require a corpse to become "un-living".

The difference is that animals achieve equilibrium. Wolves won't slaughter their entire food supply and leave the area bereft of life, but Shadows are quite happy to do that until stopped. Wolves also (generally) leave human settlements alone, but undead feel no fear unless that town is lucky enough to have a cleric.

[AnimeTheCat]

That spell doesn't result in uncontrolled wolves appearing anywhere, so your refutation is incorrect.

Animate Dead and Summon undead don't, as a result of casting the spell, result in uncontrolled undead appearing anywhere, so my point still stands.


And what about shadows, ghouls, wights, allips, wraiths, mohrgs etc.? No sapience there?

I wasn't aware that you could create shadows, ghouls, wights, allips, wraiths, mohrgs etc. with "Animate Dead". Also was unaware that I ever made any mention to any of the above in the sentence where I said (LITERALLY) "Skeletons and Zombies"...


Pray tell me, which animals "hate light and life with equal fervor?" Which animals have "warped minds, making them cunning and feral?" Which animals "despise all living things?" All of these are quotes from core.

Ape, "Kill and eat anything they can catch". Giant Squid, "Voracious Creatures.... Attack almost anything the meet". Whale, "Vicious predator, attacking virtually anything they detect". While those animals aren't exactly the same, they're similar and to the common folk, equally lethal. Also, wolves and hyenas "Known for their cunning"...


The difference is that animals achieve equilibrium. Wolves won't slaughter their entire food supply and leave the area bereft of life, but Shadows are quite happy to do that until stopped. Wolves also (generally) leave human settlements alone, but undead feel no fear unless that town is lucky enough to have a cleric.

Is there are rule to back up your statement? I'm pretty sure that wolves, coyotes, and other wild animals are very much a cause of child deaths, woodsman deaths, livestock deaths, townsfolk deaths, etc. when the town is on the frontier. In fact, unless undead were known to be in the area, I would wager than a commoner would be MORE fearful of the wild animals than the undead. Also, I hear you mentioning shadows a lot but creating a shadow take a lot more effort (and levels) than a skeleton or zombie and as such, they are less common than skeletons and zombies, and certainly less common than wolves.

There is no rule that says "animals only seek to make sure that nature lives in perfect harmony". Animals achieve a certain kind of equalibrium where as a food supply runs out, the predators die out until the prey come back then the predators come back. It's something of a fluxuating equalibrium.

[Psyren]

Animate Dead and Summon undead don't, as a result of casting the spell, result in uncontrolled undead appearing anywhere, so my point still stands.
...
I wasn't aware that you could create shadows, ghouls, wights, allips, wraiths, mohrgs etc. with "Animate Dead". Also was unaware that I ever made any mention to any of the above in the sentence where I said (LITERALLY) "Skeletons and Zombies"...

Animate Dead is not the only spell that makes undead. Furthermore, per Libris Mortis, uncontrolled undead are byproducts of these spells.



Ape, "Kill and eat anything they can catch". Giant Squid, "Voracious Creatures.... Attack almost anything the meet". Whale, "Vicious predator, attacking virtually anything they detect". While those animals aren't exactly the same, they're similar and to the common folk, equally lethal. Also, wolves and hyenas "Known for their cunning"...

So none that "hate life" then? Do you not see why one would be evil and not the other?



Is there are rule to back up your statement?

Wait, are you asking for rules or fluff? Because all the rules say is that creating undead is evil. The purpose of fluff is to explain rules. If you disregard fluff, the rule still stands, but now it simply lacks an explanation at all.

How common shadows are is irrelevant; a single shadow can cause far more loss of innocent life than a single wolf.

[AnimeTheCat]

Animate Dead is not the only spell that makes undead. Furthermore, per Libris Mortis, uncontrolled undead are byproducts of these spells.

What page? I've looked and looked but I can't find this.


So none that "hate life" then? Do you not see why one would be evil and not the other?

I'm sorry, "Kill and eat anything it can catch." "Attack anything they meet." "Attack anything they can detect" all sound like "I hate you, and I don't care who/what you are". Do you not see how that is pretty clearly evil? Little girl swimming, whale kills her. Little girl walking to her grandfather's grave, skeleton kills her... What's the difference exactly?


Wait, are you asking for rules or fluff? Because all the rules say is that creating undead is evil. The purpose of fluff is to explain rules. If you disregard fluff, the rule still stands, but now it simply lacks an explanation at all.

I was asking for rules that say that animals seek to keep equilibrium. To my knowledge, there's nothing to support that claim.

Look, I understand that there are rules that say something. My thing is WHY do the rules say that. Is there anything anywhere in the rules that says WHY creating undead is evil? I haven't yet found it. If the negative energy plane isn't evil and undead are powered by siphoning power from this place that's can't be why undead are evil. If undead are evil because they have a tormented soul trapped in them why isn't that stated anywhere? If undead are evil because they kill things without remorse, animals should be evil as a rule too. If undead are evil because they can create other undead, EVERY RACE IN THE ENTIRE BOOK should be evil. If undead are evil because the spell defiles the corpse then that needs to be in the rules somewhere to define that.

As of now there is a rule but NO explaination to it. We can give example of lots of evil things that undead do or can do, but at the end of the day literally any creature is capable of any of that as well.


How common shadows are is irrelevant; a single shadow can cause far more loss of innocent life than a single wolf.

Fine, that is a correct statement. one shadow is more lethal than one wolf.

EDIT:
I got heated when I typed that response. Sorry. I'm calm now.
I understand that creating undead is always evil, but the lack of justification for that is irksome. I just want to know why that is evil when they are powerd by a force that isn't evil. If it's because there's soul stuff involved I just wish there was a line that stated that, but there isn't (that i've been able to find).

[Psyren]

What page? I've looked and looked but I can't find this.

As have been cited in this thread previously - LM page 7 and (more broadly) BoVD page 8.


I'm sorry, "Kill and eat anything it can catch." "Attack anything they meet." "Attack anything they can detect" all sound like "I hate you, and I don't care who/what you are". Do you not see how that is pretty clearly evil? Little girl swimming, whale kills her. Little girl walking to her grandfather's grave, skeleton kills her... What's the difference exactly?

First off, your specific examples are all specious. The squid's entry says ALMOST anything they meet. The ape says APT TO attack anything they see. The wolf references killing things they can catch, but not what they'd be hunting in the first place. All of these qualifiers you (conveniently) omitted were put there to distinguish between territorial yet non-sapient beasts, and the actively malevolent undead and fiends that lack them.

Second and more general is the difference between hunger and hatred. Neither a skeleton nor a shadow need to feed on that little girl to continue existing, they're immortal. But they'll do it anyway, as well even many intelligent undead that are aware of their actions, as covered under Libris Mortis pg. 12 ("Compassion.")



I was asking for rules that say that animals seek to keep equilibrium. To my knowledge, there's nothing to support that claim.

If they didn't, druids wouldn't use them.



Look, I understand that there are rules that say something. My thing is WHY do the rules say that. Is there anything anywhere in the rules that says WHY creating undead is evil?

See the book citations above.

[AnimeTheCat]

As have been cited in this thread previously - LM page 7 and (more broadly) BoVD page 8.

Ok, so there are literally no rules there on page 7. Those are "...widely accepted theories about the origins of this affliction." So, it's a theory. It's not a law. It's equally as possible for that to not be true as it is to be true. To put it simply, there is nothing in any book that states "When there are X number of evil acts in a Y sized area, Z undead are created as a result". All that exists is "there's this theory that when bad people do bad things, more bad things happen that weren't originally intended". Like I said, there are no rules for that and there is no reason, aside from the rules saying so, that undead are evil and that the creation of them is also evil.


First off, your specific examples are all specious. The squid's entry says ALMOST anything they meet. The ape says APT TO attack anything they see. The wolf references killing things they can catch, but not what they'd be hunting in the first place. All of these qualifiers you (conveniently) omitted were put there to distinguish between territorial yet non-sapient beasts, and the actively malevolent undead and fiends that lack them.

Wrong, I'll quote the whole passage for the ape in Monster Manual I, "These powerful omnivores resemble gorillas but are far more aggressive; they kill and eat anything they catch. An adult male ape is 5 1/2-6 feet tall and weighs 300-400 pounds." it does not say "Apt to". Aggressive, not protective or territorial. I didn't omit any qualifiers. Also, mindless undead such as skeletons and zombies aren't exactly wild hunters... unless they're provoked they lack the capacity to seek out and kill. This, if anything, makes mindless undead MORE territorial than animals, especially ones that don't have specific territory like the aquatic animals.


Second and more general is the difference between hunger and hatred. Neither a skeleton nor a shadow need to feed on that little girl to continue existing, they're immortal. But they'll do it anyway, as well even many intelligent undead that are aware of their actions, as covered under Libris Mortis pg. 12 ("Compassion.")

Intelligent undead are capable of directing their actions, just as animals like wolves are. Mindless undead are unable to do so, surviving only on desire. This is basically an instinct, not in name, but in definition. "an innate, typically fixed pattern of behavior in animals in response to certain stimuli." That's only dealing with hunger, I know, but there is a definite distinction between hatred and hunger even in regards to undead.

Further, that same passage also mentions letting some "prey" go if they've recently fed. This is exactly the same kind of thing an animal would do. It would appear that the only thing that differentiates an undead from an aggressive animal is whether they are mindless or not...


If they didn't, druids wouldn't use them.

Well then... That seems... slightly incorrect. Equilibrium is balance right? Well druids can be Chaotic or Lawful or Good or Evil. Nothing about being a druid precludes being imbalanced. The only way a druid COULD be balanced is if they were true neutral, but druids can be any alignment that has an element of neutrality. Druids don't have "balance - the class feature".

The point I'm trying to make is that, yes animals maintain equilibrium with their prey in a sense of fluxuating equalibrium. Undead are similar, in a state of flux with life. It is an equalibrium.

[Psyren]

Ok, so there are literally no rules there on page 7. Those are "...widely accepted theories about the origins of this affliction." So, it's a theory. It's not a law.

You're absolutely right, it's just a theory. One that explains the RAW. You are free to reject that explanation at your table (and paradoxically keep yelling "WHY?" as you did in your last post) but that just leaves us still with (now unexplained) RAW.



Wrong, I'll quote the whole passage for the ape in Monster Manual I, "These powerful omnivores resemble gorillas but are far more aggressive; they kill and eat anything they catch.

"Anything they catch" is not "anything at all." Their alignment is still neutral.

I also notice you didn't defend the squid or wolves etc.



Intelligent undead are capable of directing their actions, just as animals like wolves are. Mindless undead are unable to do so, surviving only on desire. This is basically an instinct, not in name, but in definition. "an innate, typically fixed pattern of behavior in animals in response to certain stimuli." That's only dealing with hunger, I know, but there is a definite distinction between hatred and hunger even in regards to undead.

I know there's a definite distinction between them, that was in fact my very point. Uncontrolled undead will go after the living whether they need sustenance or not.


Further, that same passage also mentions letting some "prey" go if they've recently fed. This is exactly the same kind of thing an animal would do.

It is nothing at all like what an animal would do if you read the whole passage:

"Most intelligent undead retain enough memory of their former lives to know that their acts are horrendous. Some may even feel pangs of guilt, even going so far as to capriciously allow surviving victims to go free. This act becomes more likely if the undead is a feeder that has recently fed on its preferred morsel. However, when the hunger mounts again, as it must, the undead may curse its generosity, again seeking out those it previously allowed to escape."

There is absolutely no animal with "pangs of guilt," or that recognizes its own acts as "horrendous." And moreover, the act of letting the odd victim go is explicitly regarded as caprice, which yet again is a sapient act animals are simply not capable of.


Well then... That seems... slightly incorrect. Equilibrium is balance right? Well druids can be Chaotic or Lawful or Good or Evil. Nothing about being a druid precludes being imbalanced. The only way a druid COULD be balanced is if they were true neutral, but druids can be any alignment that has an element of neutrality. Druids don't have "balance - the class feature".

PHB 33:

"While druids accept that which is horrific or cruel in nature, they hate that which is unnatural, including aberrations (such as beholders and carrion crawlers) and undead (such as zombies and vampires). Druids sometimes lead raids against such creatures, especially when they encroach on the druids’ territory."


The point I'm trying to make is that, yes animals maintain equilibrium with their prey in a sense of fluxuating equalibrium. Undead are similar, in a state of flux with life. It is an equalibrium.

Life dies on its own just fine without undead around to help it along. It's already in equilibrium, no shadows or wraiths needed.

[Segev]

It's not circular at all. Uncontrolled undead hurt innocent people. Both willingly, and without restraint or remorse. Doing anything that results in more of them is questionable at best.Actually...nothing in the rules says that they do. In fact, skeletons and zombies just kind of stand around doing nothing without something ordering them around.


I don't particularly care about Sanctify The Wicked; one poorly-conceived spell does not invalidate an entire design philosophy.Oh, yes it does. It provides an example of why, precisely, you can't rely on that philosophy to produce consistent results.


I have no idea where this is even coming from :smallconfused:The example that comes most prominently to mind is the backstory of Dragonlance, wherein the Good Kingdom of Good was so Good that they told the Good Gods that they weren't being Good Enough, and the pride and arrogance to be right about it got them smitten, Lord Soth sent to Ravenloft for not telling them to stop being so Good, and the gods leaving the world in a huff for hundreds or thousands of years.

But it tends to crop up in shows where "demon" is an edgy and cool supernatural mostly-human critter that is maligned by the world because demons behave a lot like orcs in D&D do, and where the Good Kingdom led by the Holy Church of Good is actually corrupt and hurting people but it's depicted as because they're just TOO pure and purity means intolerance and that's why Evil is needed to stand up to oppressive, mean, people-harming Good.

Better-done versions will be telling a "looks are deceiving" thing, where the Church is faux-good but really evil and demons are not all really evil despite reputation, but I've seen it done with the Aesop instead being that you need to have some evil to avoid having Good hurt everybody and make them all miserable because too much Good is actually bad.



And that stupid Aesop is way too easily made with the way undead creation is handled in D&D as-is, because you COULD have that higher-standard-of-living society using tireless skeletons for menial labor and energy-production, and the "Good" kingdom coming down on them to force them back into dirt-farming poverty for use of evil undead.

[AnimeTheCat]

You're absolutely right, it's just a theory. One that explains the RAW. You are free to reject that explanation at your table (and paradoxically keep yelling "WHY?" as you did in your last post) but that just leaves us still with (now unexplained) RAW.

Life dies on its own just fine without undead around to help it along. It's already in equilibrium, no shadows or wraiths needed.

I feel like you're still missing my point... the "Why" question is unanswered by that passage in libris mortis anyway. Negative energy is an unaligned force, just as fire is. Casting Animate Dead is evil, but casting Fireball isn't. Both spells have side effects outside of those listed in the spell description. Animate Dead does this unexplainable, unwritten, cosmic thingy that is labled "evil" and fireball can literally burn down entire forests with a single spell. Both are unintended consequences, but animate dead is labeled "Evil" even though it doesn't have an actual measurable difference on literally anything as far as any book is concerned. All it has are theories and ideas. What if nobody actually knows, someone just gets the heebie jeebies because "ooh spooky skeleton... must be evil" when in actuality, they are quite natural and are simply the opposition to life. If you look at the material, it's a cycle of life and death. Given the chance, humanoids would tear up the world, but with the existence of undead as an opposition to the very life that would tear apart the world, life has an actual enemy to fight, Death. Thus, the cycle is balanced. As the living die, they can be brought back as the unliving and serve to keep the living in check. Just as the unliving keep the living in check, the living keep the unliving in check. It's literally the exact same fluxuating balance as in biomes.

All I'm saying is that even though there are theories and explainations, it doesn't satisfy the "why" question. It seems to me that undeath and life are simply in opposition to each other in a battle for equilibrium just like a normal environment. Nothing in the rules make a skeleton evil. It's an animated corpse. If the definition of a skeleton was "bones animated by the energy from a tormented soul" done! It would literally be that simple. But that's nowhere.

[Quarian Rex]

Not to be a thorn in anyone's side here, but uncontrolled wolves hurt innocent people. Both willingly, and without restraint or remorse. If you are near a wolf, it will likely attack you. Therefore, doing anything that results in more wolves is questionable at best. That argument is a little weak IMO. Any animal is going to hurt innocent people. How many stories have you heard of where a pack of wolves is feeding on travelers/livestock/a town. Lots of them, one of the oldests quests in the level 1 book.

Yup, wolves can be dangerous when they're starving. That's the reason we, as a race, demonized them for much of our existence. Can't tell how hungry they are from a distance so it's best to think of them as evil. Wolves, much like people, can take brutal actions when hungry/motivated enough to do so. The difference is that undead have murder/death/kill as a baseline. While you can find parallels between undead and other creatures (sapient or not) those parallels can only be made when those other creatures are at their worst (and likely most desperate). Wolves may attack a village because they haven't eaten in a week and this is the only source of warm life they can find in the middle of a harsh winter. Undead will attack the village because it is Tuesday.




Also would like to point out that the undead in my original post were all under control via spells, and confinement so those would likely not be hurting any innocent people. An easy way to solve the "undead popping up out of nothingness" that a lot of undead in an area apparently causes, have a force of trained people that go out and either a) destroy them or b) capture them.

See, this is the sort of thing where a hand-wavey explanation like this just will not due. The assumption that you would be able to maintain perfect control of a kingdom sized undead workforce (and probably military as well) is an assumption that seeks to negate the entire discussion. The actual method of control, and it's potential for failure, is one of the key factors in the viability of such a kingdom, and whether its leaders are committing acts of evil by accepting those risks.




Accepting the RAW interpretation that animating undead is innately evil and will always be under every circumstance regardless of anything else, it wouldn't really take a whole lot. It would start by finding an area plagued by undead. Instead of coming in and destroying all of your free resources, just capture them and store them for future use. It's not like they're going bad or anything. This has the effect of making the party seen as an invaluable asset in the community because they've been taking care of the undead menace. Next, slowly start implementing the undead powering simple machines. A wheel crank that makes a skeleton/zombie walk in a circle that pumps the bellows for the blacksmith. Add additional gears to allow the blacksmith to control the flow of air to the coals. The blacksmith can now do work a little faster, take a break instead of pumping the bellows. Say that in the fall in this area the winds stop blowing. Have skeletons/zombies turn a wheel that turns the grindstone, now you never need wind ever again. There's never a lapse in flour production. As this happens, of course neighboring nations/countries will hear/find out. But now, unless they want to commit genoicde on an entire nation (few good deities would want to do this to neutral townsfolk) I've protected myself and my nation with my own people. No custom magic items, not magic other than the magic used to control the undead.

"But when the good guys come and say 'using undead like this is bad' the towns people will immediately revolt." Where is the precedent to back this up? Sounds to me like the good guys are jealous of the better lives these towns people have and they would likely be asked to stay the night and then be on their way. The undead are contained, the guards keep the towns people safe, and if something happens, they don't hesitate to take out the undead that are causing the problem.

I'm not saying it's foolproof, but it would be a start and could be easily done around level 5+ to be honest. All you need is one crypt and a nearby town and you have the beginnings of your own undead nation.

See, this is almost a good reply, but not quite. So you have a handful of controlled undead and a gaggle of uncontrolled undead locked in a basement. With the controlled undead you can have them pump a bellows or turn a wheel, yup, that's a given. How many of your limited pool are you going to devote to such things? How many will you keep as personal protection/military back-up? You imply that you will use the uncontrolled undead to fill the gaps. How good sir? It matters. Locking an undead in a room with some tools (even simple ones) and expecting it to do what you want just won't work. Even if you managed to rig up something that worked on a treadmill (good luck with the engineering checks) you would need to use people as bait to get them moving and a relatively unobstructed path to the target. That would mean no secure cages and such, most likely loose chains bolted to the wall behind them. That's a lot of strength checks, eventually somethings gotta break...

What would you actually do to make this work? How would you deal with it not working? You seem to be missing the really interesting questions.

[Psyren]

Actually...nothing in the rules says that they do. In fact, skeletons and zombies just kind of stand around doing nothing without something ordering them around.

Even if you're correct and uncontrolled zombies/skeletons are impossible (note that LM states they are), that's what, 2 undead out of dozens? Shadows don't stand around doing nothing, and neither do ghouls or mohrgs or wights etc.



Oh, yes it does. It provides an example of why, precisely, you can't rely on that philosophy to produce consistent results.

Fine, point to it if you want - but the rules on undead being evil aren't even in that book, so it's moot anyway.



The example that comes most prominently to mind is the backstory of Dragonlance, wherein the Good Kingdom of Good was so Good that they told the Good Gods that they weren't being Good Enough, and the pride and arrogance to be right about it got them smitten, Lord Soth sent to Ravenloft for not telling them to stop being so Good, and the gods leaving the world in a huff for hundreds or thousands of years.

But it tends to crop up in shows where "demon" is an edgy and cool supernatural mostly-human critter that is maligned by the world because demons behave a lot like orcs in D&D do, and where the Good Kingdom led by the Holy Church of Good is actually corrupt and hurting people but it's depicted as because they're just TOO pure and purity means intolerance and that's why Evil is needed to stand up to oppressive, mean, people-harming Good.

Better-done versions will be telling a "looks are deceiving" thing, where the Church is faux-good but really evil and demons are not all really evil despite reputation, but I've seen it done with the Aesop instead being that you need to have some evil to avoid having Good hurt everybody and make them all miserable because too much Good is actually bad.

And that stupid Aesop is way too easily made with the way undead creation is handled in D&D as-is, because you COULD have that higher-standard-of-living society using tireless skeletons for menial labor and energy-production, and the "Good" kingdom coming down on them to force them back into dirt-farming poverty for use of evil undead.


Sorry, I wasn't clear; I know all about the Dragonlance setting's weird viewpoint on Good nations. What I don't understand is what relevance that has to undead in D&D. The explanation given in Libris Mortis has nothing to do with "Good nations being too good" or whatever else they went with, and LM is not setting-specific either.

[AnimeTheCat]

See, this is almost a good reply, but not quite. So you have a handful of controlled undead and a gaggle of uncontrolled undead locked in a basement. With the controlled undead you can have them pump a bellows or turn a wheel, yup, that's a given. How many of your limited pool are you going to devote to such things? How many will you keep as personal protection/military back-up? You imply that you will use the uncontrolled undead to fill the gaps. How good sir? It matters. Locking an undead in a room with some tools (even simple ones) and expecting it to do what you want just won't work. Even if you managed to rig up something that worked on a treadmill (good luck with the engineering checks) you would need to use people as bait to get them moving and a relatively unobstructed path to the target. That would mean no secure cages and such, most likely loose chains bolted to the wall behind them. That's a lot of strength checks, eventually somethings gotta break...

What would you actually do to make this work? How would you deal with it not working? You seem to be missing the really interesting questions.

a once daily, self resetting trap of command undead and a once daily, self resetting trap of magic mouth with the command "walk in a circle".... Command undead doesn't have a limit of undead under control so it won't count against any limit. Or, you can have 3rd level wizard who you've taken in as an apprentice walk around with a wand of Command undead every 3 days casting it on the handful of undead you have powering your machines. Also, the engineering checks would be fairly low since it's all just simple machines working together in a complex machine.

Alternatively, if you don't like the self resetting traps or the apprentice wizard as an answer, remove the arms of the skeletons, make an eliptical style machine, and use essentially a train wheel style system. Strap the armess skeleton into the mechanism and strap it's feet down into the pedals. any time it sees anything that lives, it will try to kill it right? put a bird in a cage in front of it. or a squirrel, it doesn't matter to me. when it tries to walk towards the thing, it will move the pedals and stay stationary, thereby moving the machine.

[Segev]

Even if you're correct and uncontrolled zombies/skeletons are impossible (note that LM states they are), that's what, 2 undead out of dozens? Shadows don't stand around doing nothing, and neither do ghouls or mohrgs or wights etc.And yet, animate dead, which only makes those two specific examples, is also an [evil] spell.


Fine, point to it if you want - but the rules on undead being evil aren't even in that book, so it's moot anyway.It's not moot. It's an example of why this is a bad design philosophy. By the design philosophy, there's nothing wrong with that spell being exactly what they say it is.


Sorry, I wasn't clear; I know all about the Dragonlance setting's weird viewpoint on Good nations. What I don't understand is what relevance that has to undead in D&D. The explanation given in Libris Mortis has nothing to do with "Good nations being too good" or whatever else they went with, and LM is not setting-specific either.
You missed the part of my post at the end where I explained how this rule on Undead leads, barring something to actually make it "feel" evil even upon deeper examination, to a similar Aesop.

I could easily write a scenario wherein the Good Kingdom That Is Too Good to Be Good For Anybody is bringing misery and woe to the world because it's Too Good nature won't let it allow the evil-but-hurting-nobody skeleton-run farms of the Neutral Village Confederacy to exist, and must destroy the farms to kill all the skeletons, and murder/execute the neutral peasants who are overseeing them for how corrupt they are for helping maintain this evil practice.

And it would make perfect sense under the RAW, while also painting "Good" as actually rather bad and "Evil" as innocently oppressed while doing nothing but trying to live a better life while hurting nobody and helping many.

My issue is that this asinine story would be perfectly sensible under the rules, and give credence to arguments that "good" isn't good.

In case it's inobvious, I dislike such arguments and strive to make the alignment system actually represent what it says it does, and count anything that supports "good isn't good" as bad design.

[Psyren]

I feel like you're still missing my point... the "Why" question is unanswered by that passage in libris mortis anyway. Negative energy is an unaligned force, just as fire is. Casting Animate Dead is evil, but casting Fireball isn't. Both spells have side effects outside of those listed in the spell description. Animate Dead does this unexplainable, unwritten, cosmic thingy that is labled "evil" and fireball can literally burn down entire forests with a single spell. Both are unintended consequences, but animate dead is labeled "Evil" even though it doesn't have an actual measurable difference on literally anything as far as any book is concerned. All it has are theories and ideas.

You're right, it is just theories and ideas to explain the RAW. You are free to come up with your own if you don't like the ones they suggested, but speaking personally I have yet to see a superior explanation for why making these creatures is not only an evil act, but a pretty heinous one to boot.

As far as negative energy having no alignment, we've covered that over and over in this thread but I'll do it again. Radiation and toxic waste have no alignment either, but pouring them into the town square is pretty much always going to be an evil act. If you set up a factory that would revolutionize everyone's lives so that nobody had to farm for themselves again, but it generated waste that you dumped in the water supply - or worse, someone else's water supply that you couldn't even see or predict - that would be pretty evil if you did that knowingly, and it's pretty impossible not to know that in D&D with the anti-undead deities constantly harping on about how bad an idea it is.


If nobody actually knows, someone just gets the heebie jeebies because "ooh spooky skeleton... must be evil" when in actuality, they are quite natural and are simply the opposition to life. If you look at the material, it's a cycle of life and death. Given the chance, humanoids would tear up the world, but with the existence of undead as an opposition to the very life that would tear apart the world, life has an actual enemy to fight, Death. Thus, the cycle is balanced. As the living die, they can be brought back as the unliving and serve to keep the living in check. Just as the unliving keep the living in check, the living keep the unliving in check. It's literally the exact same fluxuating balance as in biomes.

First, we have no examples of biomes with things like shades, wraiths and vampires in them. There aren't creatures (at least, not on a macro scale) with unending hunger or that propagate by turning living beings into more of themselves, at a geometric rate if left unchecked.

Second, as I said before, life is already balanced. If you erased every undead creature in D&D, mortals would still die. This argument that undead are performing some kind of "culling the herd" role just doesn't make sense, especially not when nearly every book that mentions them uses terms like "unnatural."


All I'm saying is that even though there are theories and explainations, it doesn't satisfy the "why" question. It seems to me that undeath and life are simply in opposition to each other in a battle for equilibrium just like a normal environment. Nothing in the rules make a skeleton evil. It's an animated corpse. If the definition of a skeleton was "bones animated by the energy from a tormented soul" done! It would literally be that simple. But that's nowhere.

What I hear is that it's not satisfying *to you.* And that's perfectly okay! You can even houserule away the RAW if you want. All I'm doing is explaining what they went with as the default for their game, and it is satisfying to plenty of people (myself included.) Because while a post-industrial society built on problem-free undead labor and the infinite energy that might result is indeed a cool idea on paper, it's not what I'd sit at a D&D table to actually participate in. Congratulations, you've solved hunger and poverty for the entire world, shall we play Yahtzee then?

[Psyren]

And yet, animate dead, which only makes those two specific examples, is also an [evil] spell.

The issue is not the direct results of the spell.



It's not moot. It's an example of why this is a bad design philosophy. By the design philosophy, there's nothing wrong with that spell being exactly what they say it is.

You realize they have different authors right?



You missed the part of my post at the end where I explained how this rule on Undead leads, barring something to actually make it "feel" evil even upon deeper examination, to a similar Aesop.

There IS something to make it feel evil. It's just a something that you and ATC don't like, so you're disregarding it. But that doesn't mean they didn't write it.

[gkathellar]

"Creating undead is always evil!" begs the question of "what do you mean by evil?"

D&D's setting and narrative answers by saying, "It is an alignment energy/substance which is associated with the lower planes." It also, in theory, corresponds to the notions of good and evil we broadly accept in modern Western civilization. Murder, rape, tormenting others, and in general causing harm without really good reason.

This is sometimes the case. The more coherent version is that evil by default is the capacity of intelligent beings to cause, by dint of ill intent or depraved indifference, suffering in others (defining the exact parameters of that statement is a vast philosophical project beyond the scope of this discussion). The Lower Planes are the product of that capacity and will to act, first by ancient beings of Law and Chaos, and then by mortals in the Prime Material. We can draw from this a fairly coherent principle: the relationship of an evil act to the grander concept of Evil as represented in the Lower Planes is the relationship of like to like.


You do make a point that by cutting it out to "Creating undead is always evil," you're making it no longer circular. The next question is, "WHY is it always evil?" In theory, you can just say "because the designers/gods of good and evil say so," but that is an argument that undermines a setting's believability, because you get to the point where if they say so, then killing and raping can become good and helping orphans can become evil. Because you've stolen the actual meaning of the words "good" and "evil" and replaced it with "whatever the designers/GM/gods of good and evil say today."

It's also, per sources like Planescape, an incorrect answer. The Powers are often good or evil (or lawful or chaotic), but they are not authorities over those forces, and very few gods embody them. Rather, their portfolios and the concepts they govern map to the concepts of good and evil just as other things do. Erythnul, for instance, is chaotic evil, because the concepts of slaughter and horrific violence he embodies are evil and chaotic. There's no "god of Chaotic Evil," however, because that's so vastly beyond the scope of any god that we call its embodiment the Abyss, and the beings that populate it embody the many different aspects of chaotic evil. The Powers, on the other hand, are more-or-less temporary residents.

What we can take from this is that creating undead, if it is an evil act, must map to the concept of evil.


The best I've seen is, "It increases the amount of evil in the world by some miniscule amount that adds up over time." Which is annoying at best, because that means that there is actually no effect from me animating that corpse over there. It's only if a thousand necromancers animate a thousand corpses that "something" evil might start to happen. The real irony being that, if you asked around for ideas of what that might be? It'd probably be, "um, undead might start spontaneously arising in the region so tainted by necromantic energies." Cool, cool; why is that "evil?" Well, because creating undead is always evil. And that is back to circular logic.

So here's that point on the map: regardless of their intrinsic characteristics, undead are dangerous and harmful in practice. Even mindless skeletons and zombies, uncontrolled, will kill and destroy. Beings like wights, wraiths, and shadows multiply explosively and turn people into corrupted, cruel versions of themselves. Vampires and ghouls eat people. Mohrgs are sadistic killers empowered to do even more harm. Ghosts are dangerous, and often tied to this world by their own suffering. Nightwalkers? Nightwalkers hate life and have the power to wipe a town off of the map.

What BoVD and Libris Mortis state is that the act of creating undead, and possibly of perpetuating their existences, allows more undead to spontaneously arise. It allows negative energy to leak into the world, effectively go bad, and propagate the existence of the types of horrors mentioned above. The spells don't cause this to happen right in front of you, but from a cosmic perspective considering countless individual necromancers who all seem to think, "I'm just a drop in the bucket," (in a multiverse where Defilers on Athas presumably thought the same thing, no less) that's not a very compelling argument.

So, what spells like Animate Dead are [Evil] because they cause the worlds of the living to, unambiguously, become places of greater suffering by at least one relevant metric.

And it is worth remembering that casting an [Evil] spell is only actually forbidden to divine casters serving good deities or concepts, because those forces are uninterested in granting those particular spells. Your average Chaotic Good necromancer, on the other hand can absolutely take a utilitarian tack to these matters, in which the good they feel they can do with the undead outweighs the intrinsic harm of their creation of maintenance. But they shouldn't feel surprised when a bunch of good clerics come knocking on their door and say, "Look buddy, we represent a variety of concerned citizens of the Outer Planes, who are troubled by your continued defecation onto the collective lawn."

And metatextually, I think that's a pretty good piece of fluff. Necromancy being evil is a genre trope, and this is a solid justification.


Want to know why utterly torturing a soul in perfect isolation for a year and a day is good? Because we say so! And it makes the world just slightly more "good" every time you do!

Yeah look Sanctify the Wicked is bad and Book of Exalted Deeds is a bad book, and if you're going to use it as the metric? No, the default setting doesn't make any kind of sense. You can either embrace that or err in favor of the stuff that does work. I prefer the latter, because the default setting starts looking pretty weird and cool once you see the scope of everything and the utter strangeness of it all.


I've always had major problems with "Your kingdom is just too Good! It's going to fall apart because of all the horrible things being too Good does to people!" as a concept. It's from this you get dystopian "good" civilizations designed to show that "you need some evil to make life good for people." It tends to conflate Good with intolerance and hate and tyranny to do this, and then paints "evil" as actually caring about people, which is obnoxious in the extreme to me.

I agree: Dragonlance was bad and its whole backstory is gross.

More generally, you're right that this is a stupid, bizarre trope that turns fairly coherent, emotionally powerful concepts of good and evil into a big dumb fight between two cosmic forces. There already is a big fight between two cosmic forces: law vs. chaos. It is infinitely cooler, and it was a really good idea to make it more central to Planescape than good vs. evil is.


If creating undead is always evil, but the only actual evil effect is "slightly increasing the evil in the world," then all you'd have to do to make it perfectly okay is find a way to make sure that each undead you create does more good than its creation added evil to the world. Since these are such miniscule "can't see the effect until years and years of doing this add up" sorts of deals, just the sheer good of saving one life would suffice to counterbalance all the evil of that undead's creation. Putting them to work farming and saving entire towns from starvation? Well, you've outweighed any amount of evil those individual undead add to the equation by existing.

It's a matter of perspective. The harm you do by creating and maintaining undead is something subtle and cosmic and quite possibly permanent. You can accomplish good with them, real tangible good, that is meaningful for humans and from a human perspective. That action is probably good, although from the perspectives of many longer-lived beings, it may come across as deeply egoistic and selfish.

(It's also potentially irresponsible: undead are phenomenally easy for someone with rebuke undead to seize control of. Worse, if something happens to you, those undead are now free-roaming murder machines.)

But the spell, regardless of how you use it, is still [Evil], for much the same reason that fireball doesn't become an [Evil] spell when you use it to blow up an orphanage.


"We must eliminate that charity group that houses orphans and feeds the starving! They animate too many undead!"

That's a cartoonish, incoherent definition of good/evil and a Captain Planet level moral quandary. It's unworthy of a game played by even teenagers.

Sure, but it's also not actually a definition I think anyone is touting? Or at least I hope not.

Taken more seriously, however, it's a great example of how the forces Good can end up at each others' throats because of differences in perspective and priorities. They generally try not to, but it can and does happen.


Hence, I want the actual evil to be something measurable, that an INDIVIDUAL necromancer would have to be somewhat evil to be okay with, and that an even moderately good spellcaster would feel a bit guilty about having done. Not just because "making undead is taboo, so I feel icky," but because actually knowing what ELSE it does as a consequence makes them feel...bad...for having done it.

See, I disagree. I'm fine with the spell itself being intrinsically evil because it has wider consequences, and leaving the social taboo against necromancy to, "well, look, it's super icky and also that zombie is my grandmother." That, to me, feels more believable and allows for more interesting stories with greater ambiguity. A charity where the warehouse is stocked by skeletons raises actual interesting questions and story possibilities.


This is why I keep looking for things to make part of the casting or part of the effect of casting the spells which qualify without seeming trite and/or silly. (Kicking puppies in front of orphans is trite, to say the least.)

I dunno, I don't want a Paizo-type thing where you can play Alignment Shuffle by casting spells with the right descriptor. That strikes me as distinctly missing the point of alignment.


Not to be a thorn in anyone's side here, but uncontrolled wolves hurt innocent people. Both willingly, and without restraint or remorse. If you are near a wolf, it will likely attack you. Therefore, doing anything that results in more wolves is questionable at best. That argument is a little weak IMO. Any animal is going to hurt innocent people. How many stories have you heard of where a pack of wolves is feeding on travelers/livestock/a town.

Wolves, while potentially dangerous to people and livestock, are an essential part of many healthy ecosystems and are extremely unlikely to attack people in settlements. Like most wild animals, it is entirely possible to discourage them from seeking contact with humans.

Wights are wights.

[Quarian Rex]

Actually...nothing in the rules says that they do. In fact, skeletons and zombies just kind of stand around doing nothing without something ordering them around.

The Pathfinder Bestiary has this, "Zombies are unthinking automatons, and can do little more than follow orders. When left unattended, zombies tend to mill about in search of living creatures to slaughter and devour", and that about sums up exactly how they're used in game.




If you look at the material, it's a cycle of life and death. Given the chance, humanoids would tear up the world, but with the existence of undead as an opposition to the very life that would tear apart the world, life has an actual enemy to fight, Death. Thus, the cycle is balanced. As the living die, they can be brought back as the unliving and serve to keep the living in check. Just as the unliving keep the living in check, the living keep the unliving in check. It's literally the exact same fluxuating balance as in biomes.

There is plenty of death in the balance of life and death even before undeath enters the picture. Life has no problem using death as a tool to keep other life in check. Undeath tips the balance too far to the side of death, to the point where death can win, wiping out all life, leaving neither life nor death, only undeath (because the undead can't actually die, now can they). That is the very opposite of balance, good sir.




Nothing in the rules make a skeleton evil. It's an animated corpse. If the definition of a skeleton was "bones animated by the energy from a tormented soul" done! It would literally be that simple. But that's nowhere.
See above for the zombie quote.



a once daily, self resetting trap of command undead and a once daily, self resetting trap of magic mouth with the command "walk in a circle".... Command undead doesn't have a limit of undead under control so it won't count against any limit. Or, you can have 3rd level wizard who you've taken in as an apprentice walk around with a wand of Command undead every 3 days casting it on the handful of undead you have powering your machines. Also, the engineering checks would be fairly low since it's all just simple machines working together in a complex machine.

Alternatively, if you don't like the self resetting traps or the apprentice wizard as an answer, remove the arms of the skeletons, make an elliptical style machine, and use essentially a train wheel style system. Strap the armless skeleton into the mechanism and strap it's feet down into the pedals. any time it sees anything that lives, it will try to kill it right? put a bird in a cage in front of it. or a squirrel, it doesn't matter to me. when it tries to walk towards the thing, it will move the pedals and stay stationary, thereby moving the machine.
This is what I mean by the hand-wavey. Self-resetting traps are one of the cheesiest go-to options in the game (which is why I said we should stay away from custom magic items), and this particular deus-ex-machina (and anything similar) couldn't work. Orders have to be communicated to the undead by the caster, a feat that is quite impossible when the spell is cast by an inanimate object. Having orders barked out by a magic mouth spell (or a trained parrot, or a paid commoner, etc.) would be no more effective than yelling at an enemy's undead minion, trying to convince it to attack its master.

An apprentice with a wand is slightly more viable, but only slightly. Command Undead is a 2nd level spell with a minimum caster level of 3. That results in a wand that costs 4,500 gp. That's 90 gp per cast and lasts for 3 days. What menial labor saving tasks are you going to have them perform that are worth 30 gp per day? That is per individual undead. Working a bellows would only require a single undead, but turning that millstone could require 4-5 (or more). Scale that up for a kingdom instead of just trying to help out the town blacksmith. How long can you justify hemorrhaging that kind of money?

As for the elliptical train piston idea, have you ever been on an elliptical? It requires some level of co0ordination and focus to get into the rhythm of that. Something that may be possible with the right commands for a controlled undead (which may be debatable) but would be nigh impossible for uncontrolled undead. They would merely lunge and fall forward, struggling uselessly (and unrhythmically) against their bound feet. No, for something like this you would need something with greater freedom of movement (and therefore greater potential danger) to accommodate their stumbling gait (like a treadmill) and that would require a sophisticated gear assembly to actually get any kind of real mechanical work out of it (like the zombie powered flour mill) and would probably require many such setups to be viable. Yeah, that's a bit of a tech jump for a medieval blacksmith.

[gkathellar]

@AnimetheCat: I mean if you're only interested in rules text, not in fluff, why even discuss the point? Like you say, there is no rules text on this matter, just fluff for the default setting.

[AnimeTheCat]

This is what I mean by the hand-wavey. Self-resetting traps are one of the cheesiest go-to options in the game (which is why I said we should stay away from custom magic items), and this particular deus-ex-machina (and anything similar) couldn't work. Orders have to be communicated to the undead by the caster, a feat that is quite impossible when the spell is cast by an inanimate object. Having orders barked out by a magic mouth spell (or a trained parrot, or a paid commoner, etc.) would be no more effective than yelling at an enemy's undead minion, trying to convince it to attack its master.

An apprentice with a wand is slightly more viable, but only slightly. Command Undead is a 2nd level spell with a minimum caster level of 3. That results in a wand that costs 4,500 gp. That's 90 gp per cast and lasts for 3 days. What menial labor saving tasks are you going to have them perform that are worth 30 gp per day? That is per individual undead. Working a bellows would only require a single undead, but turning that millstone could require 4-5 (or more). Scale that up for a kingdom instead of just trying to help out the town blacksmith. How long can you justify hemorrhaging that kind of money?

As for the elliptical train piston idea, have you ever been on an elliptical? It requires some level of co0ordination and focus to get into the rhythm of that. Something that may be possible with the right commands for a controlled undead (which may be debatable) but would be nigh impossible for uncontrolled undead. They would merely lunge and fall forward, struggling uselessly (and unrhythmically) against their bound feet. No, for something like this you would need something with greater freedom of movement (and therefore greater potential danger) to accommodate their stumbling gait (like a treadmill) and that would require a sophisticated gear assembly to actually get any kind of real mechanical work out of it (like the zombie powered flour mill) and would probably require many such setups to be viable. Yeah, that's a bit of a tech jump for a medieval blacksmith.

Option one I know was the custom magic item cheese and I knew wasn't what you were looking for.

Option two is really more feasible when you note the "days per level" duration of command undead. That turns 30gp per day to 10 gp per day. Also, that cost can be further reduced if said apprentice creates the want themselves. I did say level 3 apprentice.

As for scaling that up to a kingdom? Ideally this is a lawful society and ideally you'll have your pick of zealots. Train them as first level clerics and have your veritable hoard of first level clerics rebuke the undead in defined sections. Those who fail in their duties are punished and replaced. It doesn't have to be all that complex really. A first level cleric with the deathbound domain can control 3 human skeletons. It would only take one, maybe two skeletons, which means a single zealot can handle 2 or three sites. A typical temple will have plenty enough first level clerics to take care of a town and the large cities can be managed in more arcane or expensive ways.

Elliptical are really a series of pins, fulcrums, pullies, and levers. There's not too much else to it. You can fashion boots that are pinned on a hinge to the skates of the elliptical and if you keep the torso rigid and stationary the legs would be able to move but not the torso leading to a sort of forced walking motion. It's hard to explain with just words, I would have to show you a diagram to best explain.


@AnimetheCat: I mean if you're only interested in rules text, not in fluff, why even discuss the point? Like you say, there is no rules text on this matter, just fluff for the default setting.

Honestly this started off differently, but kind of naturally progressed into a discussion on why an undead is actually evil. Like, I know people have given answers, but none of them seem to be anything more than post creation justifications rather than thought out rationale. Like I keep saying, if the reason a skeleton is evil is because its existence is the direct result of a soul being permanently tortured then that fine, but that isn't the reasoning I've been given. Aside from "the spell is [Evil] so it just is" there hasn't been anything about the actual skeleton that makes it evil. "It's a conduit to the negative energy plane". That's not a rule, it's a theory. "They cause more undead to spontaneously create themselves". Again, a theory, not a rule, and still doesn't answer why a skeleton is evil anyway. "They hunt living things down and kill them". Not a reason for being evil because then every adventurer would be evil.

Am I being clear? None of the presented reason explain the innate evil-ness of a skeleton. The only reason they are is "because rules".

[Psyren]

"It's a conduit to the negative energy plane". That's not a rule, it's a theory.

Gravity is a theory too, doesn't mean you go jumping off buildings.

[Fizban]

Fitting to bring up a tangent in a thread with tangent in the title? I see someone starting to make cost calculations for use of undead power, and have to bring up this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?522922-Industrializing-a-Setting) thread on magical industrialization. Wherein I posited that simply sticking fire elementals in steel spheres and using them to power steam engines was the most efficient RAW source of energy. Opposition favored creating water at a height or levitating giant weights and we traded some calculations, but neither of us did any math for undead. Just skim past the bits where we bicker about NPCs and xp and weather or not infinite items are worth considering.

I'm quire sure that undead labor wouldn't hold a candle to elemental steam, at least on the known costs front (inventing the tech to use your new power source must have some cost, but it's not known). But if you're going to use custom items, I'm pretty sure Unseen Servant at-will crushes everything.

[Quarian Rex]

Elliptical are really a series of pins, fulcrums, pullies, and levers. There's not too much else to it. You can fashion boots that are pinned on a hinge to the skates of the elliptical and if you keep the torso rigid and stationary the legs would be able to move but not the torso leading to a sort of forced walking motion. It's hard to explain with just words, I would have to show you a diagram to best explain.

I understand exactly what you are saying (and, oddly enough, I understand how elipticals work), I just don't believe you understand how difficult it would be to get any kind of functional work out of it using medieval tech. If you did find the D&D version of Galileo to actually make the contraption then you would have to contend with an aggressive mindless undead who will not act the way that you want. At best, they would lunge at possible victims and, when it is hindered from getting to said target, it will just thrash against its restraints. No matter how many limbs you cut off or additional restraints you add, any functional work out of uncontrolled mindless undead in a 'safe' way will be sporadic and minimal at best, and an exercise in futility at worst.




Option one I know was the custom magic item cheese and I knew wasn't what you were looking for.

Option two is really more feasible when you note the "days per level" duration of command undead. That turns 30gp per day to 10 gp per day. Also, that cost can be further reduced if said apprentice creates the want themselves. I did say level 3 apprentice.

I read it correctly the first time, I even spelled out the math for you. That is a wand costing 4500 gp. That is 90 gp per charge for a duration of 3 days. That makes 30 gp a day per each individual skeleton/zombie that you want to maintain this way. Not 10 gp. You want to have an apprentice make the wands on the cheap? It takes a 5th level apprentice (3rd is too low level to get Craft Wand) 5 days to craft each wand. At that rate he can support 10 castings per day which would allow a single crafter and a single caster apprentice to maintain up to 30 undead (assuming that neither gets a day off). Normally this would cost you 300 gp a day but crafting on the cheap gets you a cost of 150 gp a day to maintain 30 undead. Yet even this is hand-wavey, since you're not even paying either caster a single copper. It is also operating under the hefty assumption that casters of any degree would be happy crafting like a slave or endlessly maintaining undead laborers, both endeavors that do not grant XP. Eventually they will adventure to gain power or you will have to expend considerable resources to keep them happy.

In the end you are going to a lot of trouble and tying up 2 casters to gain the manual labor of 30 undead when that same gp investment (150 gp a day, not including payment to the casters) would allow you to employ 1,500 commoners. Not only is the commoner labor 50 times more prolific but it is capable of following complex instructions (due to not being mindless).

I'm not trying to beat a dead horse here, but I tend to see this happen a lot. People have grand designs on how to revolutionize things (often through casual necromancy) but don't bother thinking about how that will actually be accomplished. There is usually just an assumption of absolute control from Animate Dead and an expectation that Command Undead will fill in the blanks. I do hope that you will begin to understand that it won't be nearly as simple as you assume.




As for scaling that up to a kingdom? Ideally this is a lawful society and ideally you'll have your pick of zealots. Train them as first level clerics and have your veritable hoard of first level clerics rebuke the undead in defined sections. Those who fail in their duties are punished and replaced. It doesn't have to be all that complex really. A first level cleric with the deathbound domain can control 3 human skeletons. It would only take one, maybe two skeletons, which means a single zealot can handle 2 or three sites. A typical temple will have plenty enough first level clerics to take care of a town and the large cities can be managed in more arcane or expensive ways.

Again, you're making a lot of hand-wavey assumptions here and completely misunderstanding the effects of the Deathbound domain. Deathbound allows the creation of undead of HD up to 3x his caster level (instead of 2x) It has no effect on control. The misprint in Libris Mortis was erata'd. Besides, either pre or post erata it had absolutely no effect on a Cleric's command undead.

Even under the best possible conditions in a Metropolis (and our budding necromancer will not be starting in control of a Metropolis) you only have access to 16 1st level clerics (according to the DMG. p139) and those have to be shared between the faiths. Say we look past this and you do happen to ally with a Cult of Undeath and they happen to ship in their new recruits. Congratulations, each 1st level Cleric can control a single skeleton as you wish. This will no doubt require substantial donations to the Cult. Oh, yeah, you are now allied with undead Isis. And you're putting an increasingly large portion of your strategic industry in the hands of religious zealots. I'm sure that won't end badly at all.

It may sound like I'm trying to shoot down the idea of a benevolent Necromantic Empire, but I'm really not. I just happen to think that necromatic benevolence is the hardest of hard paths. I think that the trope of the evil necro-empire is completely justified. Not because there are no good intentioned necromancers, I believe there are plenty, but because once they start trying to use their necromantic power to achieve secular power they hit bottlenecks, bottlenecks that are most efficiently bypassed by actions that would be considered questionable at best. That bottleneck, of course, is control. You cannot have a control pool big enough to service an empire. Not unless the DM provides you an unrealistically massive number of supplemental casters who all don't mind being your personal unthanked minions (aka. hand-waving). So that means that you will need to find a way to make use of uncontrolled undead.

One of the few that I can think of would be capable of real work (and not require Galileo to introduce new tech to the setting) would be the Wheel of Pain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5KYZ74OAak). But for that to work you would need to strap a couple undead to every second spoke and have living people man the alternates (to give the zombies behind you something to push towards). That would work great till someone tripped, then they get mauled/stomped to death. They can be used but there is risk. Once you have accepted that risk, what else might you accept?

What about if your kingdom is attacked and out-manned? That stockpile of undead that you've been collecting for future expansion is just sitting there... why not use them? You can't directly control all of them but you do have scouts and outriders that can move out in front of the horde and lead them to the enemy with your living army trailing far behind, cleaning up any stragglers. On the way you animate anything you can find to add to the pool, probably with the Plague Zombie template so your army can grow without your spell slots. Along the way some of your riders get caught and you miss some stragglers, but war demands sacrifice, right? You finally face the enemy army and perhaps numbers and undead resilience are enough to carry the day. You now have a battlefield full of uncontrolled undead that will most likely be multiplied several times over the next several hours. Will you lead the horde back to the citizens of your empire? Probably not. Why not just leave them here as a deterrent against further invasions? Congrats! You have now just released a plague of undead upon the world!

Intentions can be twisted by the tools at hand. Necromancy can be a dangerous tool. Pretending that those dangers can be easily bypassed does not do it justice.

[AnimeTheCat]

Gravity is a theory too, doesn't mean you go jumping off buildings.

no, if you have to bring physics into it make sure you understand them. The measure of gravitational pull is weight. The law of universal gravitation is that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force directed along the line of centers for the two objects with is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the separation between the two objects. These are precise, measured, and known. Not theorized. There aren't multiple ideas on what gravity is or isn't.


I understand exactly what you are saying (and, oddly enough, I understand how elipticals work), I just don't believe you understand how difficult it would be to get any kind of functional work out of it using medieval tech. If you did find the D&D version of Galileo to actually make the contraption then you would have to contend with an aggressive mindless undead who will not act the way that you want. At best, they would lunge at possible victims and, when it is hindered from getting to said target, it will just thrash against its restraints. No matter how many limbs you cut off or additional restraints you add, any functional work out of uncontrolled mindless undead in a 'safe' way will be sporadic and minimal at best, and an exercise in futility at worst.



I read it correctly the first time, I even spelled out the math for you. That is a wand costing 4500 gp. That is 90 gp per charge for a duration of 3 days. That makes 30 gp a day per each individual skeleton/zombie that you want to maintain this way. Not 10 gp. You want to have an apprentice make the wands on the cheap? It takes a 5th level apprentice (3rd is too low level to get Craft Wand) 5 days to craft each wand. At that rate he can support 10 castings per day which would allow a single crafter and a single caster apprentice to maintain up to 30 undead (assuming that neither gets a day off). Normally this would cost you 300 gp a day but crafting on the cheap gets you a cost of 150 gp a day to maintain 30 undead. Yet even this is hand-wavey, since you're not even paying either caster a single copper. It is also operating under the hefty assumption that casters of any degree would be happy crafting like a slave or endlessly maintaining undead laborers, both endeavors that do not grant XP. Eventually they will adventure to gain power or you will have to expend considerable resources to keep them happy.

In the end you are going to a lot of trouble and tying up 2 casters to gain the manual labor of 30 undead when that same gp investment (150 gp a day, not including payment to the casters) would allow you to employ 1,500 commoners. Not only is the commoner labor 50 times more prolific but it is capable of following complex instructions (due to not being mindless).

I'm not trying to beat a dead horse here, but I tend to see this happen a lot. People have grand designs on how to revolutionize things (often through casual necromancy) but don't bother thinking about how that will actually be accomplished. There is usually just an assumption of absolute control from Animate Dead and an expectation that Command Undead will fill in the blanks. I do hope that you will begin to understand that it won't be nearly as simple as you assume.



Again, you're making a lot of hand-wavey assumptions here and completely misunderstanding the effects of the Deathbound domain. Deathbound allows the creation of undead of HD up to 3x his caster level (instead of 2x) It has no effect on control. The misprint in Libris Mortis was erata'd. Besides, either pre or post erata it had absolutely no effect on a Cleric's command undead.

Even under the best possible conditions in a Metropolis (and our budding necromancer will not be starting in control of a Metropolis) you only have access to 16 1st level clerics (according to the DMG. p139) and those have to be shared between the faiths. Say we look past this and you do happen to ally with a Cult of Undeath and they happen to ship in their new recruits. Congratulations, each 1st level Cleric can control a single skeleton as you wish. This will no doubt require substantial donations to the Cult. Oh, yeah, you are now allied with undead Isis. And you're putting an increasingly large portion of your strategic industry in the hands of religious zealots. I'm sure that won't end badly at all.

It may sound like I'm trying to shoot down the idea of a benevolent Necromantic Empire, but I'm really not. I just happen to think that necromatic benevolence is the hardest of hard paths. I think that the trope of the evil necro-empire is completely justified. Not because there are no good intentioned necromancers, I believe there are plenty, but because once they start trying to use their necromantic power to achieve secular power they hit bottlenecks, bottlenecks that are most efficiently bypassed by actions that would be considered questionable at best. That bottleneck, of course, is control. You cannot have a control pool big enough to service an empire. Not unless the DM provides you an unrealistically massive number of supplemental casters who all don't mind being your personal unthanked minions (aka. hand-waving). So that means that you will need to find a way to make use of uncontrolled undead.

One of the few that I can think of would be capable of real work (and not require Galileo to introduce new tech to the setting) would be the Wheel of Pain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5KYZ74OAak). But for that to work you would need to strap a couple undead to every second spoke and have living people man the alternates (to give the zombies behind you something to push towards). That would work great till someone tripped, then they get mauled/stomped to death. They can be used but there is risk. Once you have accepted that risk, what else might you accept?

What about if your kingdom is attacked and out-manned? That stockpile of undead that you've been collecting for future expansion is just sitting there... why not use them? You can't directly control all of them but you do have scouts and outriders that can move out in front of the horde and lead them to the enemy with your living army trailing far behind, cleaning up any stragglers. On the way you animate anything you can find to add to the pool, probably with the Plague Zombie template so your army can grow without your spell slots. Along the way some of your riders get caught and you miss some stragglers, but war demands sacrifice, right? You finally face the enemy army and perhaps numbers and undead resilience are enough to carry the day. You now have a battlefield full of uncontrolled undead that will most likely be multiplied several times over the next several hours. Will you lead the horde back to the citizens of your empire? Probably not. Why not just leave them here as a deterrent against further invasions? Congrats! You have now just released a plague of undead upon the world!

Intentions can be twisted by the tools at hand. Necromancy can be a dangerous tool. Pretending that those dangers can be easily bypassed does not do it justice.

Firstly, if it seems like I insulted you I promise I didn't intend to. When i replied last, it was late and I was getting ready to go to sleep so I made an honest error when i read your response about the wand and the deathbound domains. You're right, my bad. things get foggy after being awake for 16+ hours with 4 ish hours of sleep.

When it comes to risk/reward of course you have to weigh the possible outcomes. Segev, albeit in a different way than I would have, also showed that there is risk with being "too good" though. I know this is radical and abnormal, but it is a possible outcome that should be weighed. In my ideal kingdom, which I know means you're going to discount what I have to say from now on, there are strict laws governing the use, handling, creation, and destruction of undead. This being said, there are specific rules governing what would happen in such a case where the kingdom is under attack and outmanned. In my ideal kingdom, the undead aren't used. Undead are machines, not weapons. When undead are created they are created without hands/arms or jaws. Far less risky as their natural weapons are now removed. Further, you could even just create torsos with legs. If skeletons need their heads to see, that's fine because they don't need to see to walk in a circle or in another device.

Specifically in regards to your wheel of death idea, create seats that the humans sit in, create harnesses that keep the zombies/skeletons upright and remove the threats of natural weapons. Its really not that difficult to diffuse the risk as much as possible. Everything has risk though. Using an ox has risk. The presence of risk is not a reason not to use a tool especially when the known risks can be fairly easily mitigated. There's no handwaving in a hatchet to a zombies arm and jaw and the tying it up to a wheel then provoking it to walk in circles. Even when you can't provoke it, it's still contained and tied up and is very low-threat.

All of this is not to say that I don't see your points. I really do. Both yours and Psyren's. I'm using you at this point to bounce my ideas and vet them through peers. I hope that by doing so I'm not coming across as rude, abraisive, insulting, or argumentative.

[Necroticplague]

no, if you have to bring physics into it make sure you understand them. The measure of gravitational pull is weight. The law of universal gravitation is that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force directed along the line of centers for the two objects with is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the separation between the two objects. These are precise, measured, and known. Not theorized. There aren't multiple ideas on what gravity is or isn't.

Laws and Theories and seperate things in science. Laws are merely observations as to a phenomena occurring (like that mathematical description of object motion you've mentioned). This is entirely separate from Theories, which are explanations as to why a phenomena occurs.
Law of Gravity: Things are attracted to each other at this mathematically determined rate.
Theory of Gravity: Things are attracted to each other because of [Reason].
The Law of gravity is well known and measured. Last I checked, an explanation as why was still being rather elusive (with just some competing theories being that mass warps space-time proportionally (relativity), that objects with mass emit gravitons (string theory), that gravity is a result of objects moving along thermodynamic gradients of potential energy (entropic gravity theory),

[RedMage125]

I'm not disputing that the RAW say so. I am not arguing from RAW, though. I am discussing it in a broader sense of why it should make sense.
But that's YOUR OPINION, not some kind of broad and universal fact. Like I said in what you responded to, just because you don't PERSONALLY find it compelling, does not mean it's "circular"


I could have a rule that says, "murdering puppies is a Good act" in an RPG book. This has no other justification, printed anywhere, other than "some vague aura of Good increases by a miniscule amount every time a puppy is murdered." It would be jarring and weird because it feels wrong, and doesn't seem to make much sense.
Argumentum Ad Absurdum.

The RAW give the definition that the creation of undead, "corrupt mockeries of life and purity" is a "crime against the world". As undead are (almost always) Evil, and spread like viruses (those with the Create Spawn trait), and are LITERALLY walking death in most cases, how is this ANYTHING like being as "jarring" as "killing puppies=Good"?

Argumentum Ad Absurdum, Segev. You know better.


Well put. I don't mind an appeal to RAW for a discussion of how rules work and how mechanics unfold from them. I do start to get irked when the RAW are used to make statements about the game world without seeming to actually have an impact that makes sense.

Eh? It's... okay, I see the problem here.

I'm not addressing it as a rules discussion in the sense that I dispute what the rules say.

I'm addressing as a rules discussion only insofar as I am saying this rule is frustratingly divorced from the narrative.
In WHAT way is it divorced from the narrative? The narrative is that creation of these monsters is a "crime against the world", and is therefore an evil act. All spells which perform this Evil act, have the [Evil] tag. Where is this "disconnect" you speak of between the rules and the narrative?


Let's pretend for a moment we were talking about a novel, or a TV series, or some other work of fiction where we have no "by the numbers, here's some dice" mechanics. We absolutely can have "rules of magic," of course, within the setting and the narrative, and those are what I want to discuss.

"Creating undead is always evil!" begs the question of "what do you mean by evil?"

D&D's setting and narrative answers by saying, "It is an alignment energy/substance which is associated with the lower planes." It also, in theory, corresponds to the notions of good and evil we broadly accept in modern Western civilization. Murder, rape, tormenting others, and in general causing harm without really good reason. (You can get into circular arguments by chasing "good reason" down the rabbit hole, but I'm pretty sure that we can accept this notion on a broad level without having to do that.)

You do make a point that by cutting it out to "Creating undead is always evil," you're making it no longer circular. The next question is, "WHY is it always evil?" In theory, you can just say "because the designers/gods of good and evil say so," but that is an argument that undermines a setting's believability, because you get to the point where if they say so, then killing and raping can become good and helping orphans can become evil. Because you've stolen the actual meaning of the words "good" and "evil" and replaced it with "whatever the designers/GM/gods of good and evil say today."
The "why" of this has been quoted to you multiple times. It's not just "because the designers said so". There's an in-game, narrative reason for it, I've even quoted it in this post. Your failure to consider that an answer to this question is just that - YOUR failure.


The best I've seen is, "It increases the amount of evil in the world by some miniscule amount that adds up over time." Which is annoying at best, because that means that there is actually no effect from me animating that corpse over there. It's only if a thousand necromancers animate a thousand corpses that "something" evil might start to happen. The real irony being that, if you asked around for ideas of what that might be? It'd probably be, "um, undead might start spontaneously arising in the region so tainted by necromantic energies." Cool, cool; why is that "evil?" Well, because creating undead is always evil. And that is back to circular logic.
You just completely ignore that even animating ONE corpse is creating a "corrupt mockery of life and purity" which is therefore "a crime against the world". You just blithely ignore these points every time they are brought up, and continue to pretend they were never pointed out to you so you don't have to change or let go of your "this logic is CIRCULAR!" argument that you hold so dear to your heart.
It's a crime against the world. That is why it is evil. To keep asking "why" is obstinate, childish, and pedantic. You may as well ask "Why do some dragons breathe anything other than fire?". Where does it stop? At some point, ALL you are REALLY questioning is the "why" of the designers' choices, which serves NOTHING constructive to ANY discussion, and is just being contentious.


I'm half-way fond of the idea that it rips the soul out of the afterlife to re-animate the corpse, but that creates consistency problems elsewhere and makes the question of why skeletons and zombies are mindless start to bother me. And why intelligent undead tend to lose their class levels, etc.
I've pointed out that there's some circumstantial evidence that this is the case, but I think the designers didn't want to lock that in stone to let DMs come up with their own reasons. Which is why the Libris Mortis is full of THEORIES on undead, instead of facts.


Not to be a thorn in anyone's side here, but uncontrolled wolves hurt innocent people. Both willingly, and without restraint or remorse. If you are near a wolf, it will likely attack you. Therefore, doing anything that results in more wolves is questionable at best. That argument is a little weak IMO. Any animal is going to hurt innocent people. How many stories have you heard of where a pack of wolves is feeding on travelers/livestock/a town. Lots of them, one of the oldests quests in the level 1 book.
This is sophistry, as is the whole conversation and every attempt you've made to DEFEND this ridiculous point.

A wolf kills to eat. It must eat to live. It does not kill what it will not eat. It is a naturally occurring creature, not animated by magic, and it only engages in violence that is necessary for it to continue its entirely natural existence.


The example that comes most prominently to mind is the backstory of Dragonlance, wherein the Good Kingdom of Good was so Good that they told the Good Gods that they weren't being Good Enough, and the pride and arrogance to be right about it got them smitten, Lord Soth sent to Ravenloft for not telling them to stop being so Good, and the gods leaving the world in a huff for hundreds or thousands of years.
My Dragonlance-lore is sketchy, but wasn't Lord Soth sent to Ravenloft because he murdered his wife to have an affair with an elf maid? Or something like that?

[Fizban]

My Dragonlance-lore is sketchy, but wasn't Lord Soth sent to Ravenloft because he murdered his wife to have an affair with an elf maid? Or something like that?
Further, I'm fairly certain that when the books actually look in on that time period it's immediately obvious that the people in charge aren't so much "Good Kingdom of Good," as "obviously corrupt buttheads," so I don't get the confusion either. Can't answer the question on Soth though, I think he's like the Boba Fett of Dragonlance: more and more expanded universe until he's been everywhere in everything.

[Pleh]

I was at work all day yesterday, so it will probably take me a bit to catch up on all the new material, but this one post has a few points I wanted to talk about.


I could have a rule that says, "murdering puppies is a Good act" in an RPG book. This has no other justification, printed anywhere, other than "some vague aura of Good increases by a miniscule amount every time a puppy is murdered." It would be jarring and weird because it feels wrong, and doesn't seem to make much sense.

The phrase you are looking for is, "suspension of disbelief." (not that you didn't know that, I just like concise things).

If I were playing your hypothetical game, I would read into your ruling a bit to determine, "why would murdering puppies be good in this world?"

Perhaps its a werewolf setting where every form of canine has the potential (no matter how small) to spread Lycanthropy (we would also suppose this to be the absolute monstrous variety of lycanthropy, not the wishy washy "misunderstood people" variety).

Maybe something more banal: the world is overrun with a dog overpopulation and every puppy you kill just helps keep the surplus of dangerous, feral grown dogs down to a more manageable number.

Point being, I would have to house rule an interpretation either way, so I'd either have fun inventing a reason, or I'd just throw that rule out entirely.


I do start to get irked when the RAW are used to make statements about the game world without seeming to actually have an impact that makes sense.

I'm not addressing it as a rules discussion in the sense that I dispute what the rules say.

I'm addressing as a rules discussion only insofar as I am saying this rule is frustratingly divorced from the narrative.

Let's pretend for a moment we were talking about a novel, or a TV series, or some other work of fiction where we have no "by the numbers, here's some dice" mechanics. We absolutely can have "rules of magic," of course, within the setting and the narrative, and those are what I want to discuss.

"Creating undead is always evil!" begs the question of "what do you mean by evil?"

D&D's setting and narrative answers by saying, "It is an alignment energy/substance which is associated with the lower planes." It also, in theory, corresponds to the notions of good and evil we broadly accept in modern Western civilization. Murder, rape, tormenting others, and in general causing harm without really good reason. (You can get into circular arguments by chasing "good reason" down the rabbit hole, but I'm pretty sure that we can accept this notion on a broad level without having to do that.)

You do make a point that by cutting it out to "Creating undead is always evil," you're making it no longer circular. The next question is, "WHY is it always evil?" In theory, you can just say "because the designers/gods of good and evil say so," but that is an argument that undermines a setting's believability, because you get to the point where if they say so, then killing and raping can become good and helping orphans can become evil. Because you've stolen the actual meaning of the words "good" and "evil" and replaced it with "whatever the designers/GM/gods of good and evil say today."

I was leading up to this in my last response. I think half the point of the ambiguity is to leave room for DMs to inject their own content. They add the plugin points so players and DMs know to expect Necromancy to be evil, but they don't want to step on the DM's toes or railroad players into a specific interpretation.

I can understand your frustration at this expectation to fill in the gaps like an Ad Lib game, considering that unlike other blank spaces (setting, PC character options, etc) this particular blank space isn't exactly pointed out as a part of the game that needs attention. It's presented as complete, more or less, when it's really prompting a DM insertion of Setting.

It gets into bad game design when it prompts DM insertion of Setting which ALSO contains intrinsic mechanical consequences which require the DM and players to be rather well versed in most all the game's mechanical nuances to answer well.

As something more of a side note, "Good and evil are what the gods (or other authority) say they are" is a better answer than you give it credit, though you're correct that it just needs some more justification. Let's suppose that Evil can be defined as "causing unjustified injury to others around you" for the purposes of this discussion. In most applications of evil, you can see the harm you are doing to others and can choose whether to feel empathy for this person or not. But look at modern medicine. There are literally some injuries and ailments that you cannot feel, but a doctor, who has a different perspective, could tell you was definitely harmful. Mapping the metaphor back into the situation, Necromancy might be evil for no reason particularly observable to mortals in D&D, but clearly evil to deities. Not because the morality is subjective, but the ability to perceive the evil is. In this scenario, the evil-ness of an action can be absolute and objective, a law that governs reality, but mortals could be limited in their ability to perceive the extraplanar effects of it while engaging in this behavior and thus perceive the action to be harmless, when it isn't.

The only other point I would need to make is that in some fantasy structures, there are forces and concepts unattainable by mortals. The problem is that the real world players and GM are also mortals and therefore are similarly unable to conceive of these notions. It's definitely a cop out, but it's a *justified* cop out because there is literally nothing else we can do about it if this is just an objective, factual quality of the world we are interacting with. "Some things cannot be known." The gods have explained to us what little we are capable of understanding: that necromancy is evil. Why is it evil? Perhaps that is beyond our current capacity to understand.

But to make this seem more reasonable for a moment, let's remove the religious connotations. Instead, take climate change as an example of taking morality from authority rather than observable cause and effect morality (I *really* don't mean to start a debate about climate change, just referencing the social debate that is often brought up because it seems to function similarly).

What I mean is that MOST people have not done the science for themselves, so they cannot see the effects of climate change in and of their own observations. They are told by higher authorities, who have a keener perspective, that pollution contributes to climate change. In fact, the criticism of "appeal to authority" is more or less the precise counterargument to proponents of climate change ("can we really trust the scientists?"). This is also that same problem with, "Every necromancy adds to the degradation of the cosmos," since in our society, everyone is feeling the social pressure to reduce their own carbon footprint. I don't think many people would go so far as to call every instance of personal pollution, "evil," but I am trying to demonstrate the reasonableness of obtaining morality from authority. It works just fine wherever there is harmful conduct that an expert could identify that a common person might not detect. Eventually, the awareness of the harm from that activity is absorbed into the collective social consciousness, but it takes time.

And to apply the metaphor to your main complaint: "Why can't you explain it to me?" Well, scientists who are at the front of the research on climate change would likely have to ask you how much detail you are wanting? Do you want to get a doctorate in the related sciences and look at the research they have done? If not, do you want to get a smaller degree and have the scientist explain their research in a general context? Do you want them to write an essay explaining their findings in common language? Do you want them to just sum it all up a quick paragraph? How much information are you asking them to produce to justify their claims?

My point is: appeal to authority is something people do all the time. It's only a bad idea when the source of your authority isn't justified by their trustworthiness.

NOTE: This is ABSOLUTELY a cop out, but that's why we have a few people who dedicate themselves to becoming an authority on complex issues so the rest of us can take the shortcut to getting the ultimate solution from these people. Appeal to authority is a good thing when trust in the reliability of the source is justified. It means not every single person needs to dedicate their lives to sorting out the nuances to every field of knowledge.

Stepping out of the In Game answer, we also need to address, "Why can't the real world game makers clarify this to the real world players, so we understand why necromancy is evil even if our characters might not?"

First of all, I would say for 3.5 this was answered in Libris Mortis. While they didn't give one single unified explanation, their format in offering several example solutions tells us the most important thing: the game makers intended to leave this area of the game blank. They didn't just forget to fill it in or have trouble explaining it, nor did they intend for the people using the game to leave this spot blank, either. They tried to make it Ad Lib where you can fill it in with whatever suits your personalized setting the best.

What they did not do very well was communicate how best to fill the blank without skewing a bunch of other mechanical content. Libris Mortis tried to do this somewhat, but even that seems to be more of a "do as seems best to you" kind of answer (which doesn't actually give us any more than we had before we read, besides a few nice examples to draw from).


I've always had major problems with "Your kingdom is just too Good! It's going to fall apart because of all the horrible things being too Good does to people!" as a concept. It's from this you get dystopian "good" civilizations designed to show that "you need some evil to make life good for people." It tends to conflate Good with intolerance and hate and tyranny to do this, and then paints "evil" as actually caring about people, which is obnoxious in the extreme to me.

The only concept I can think of that matches your description is Elysium/Demolition Man and other similar narrative arcs. Those stories seem to be making a point that it's dangerous to conflate Good with Law and Evil with Chaos. At least, the good stories make that point. Bad versions oftentimes themselves make the erroneous conflation.


I'm half-way fond of the idea that it rips the soul out of the afterlife to re-animate the corpse, but that creates consistency problems elsewhere and makes the question of why skeletons and zombies are mindless start to bother me. And why intelligent undead tend to lose their class levels, etc.

Actually, that was part of the evil of necromancy in my own imagining of the Undead Empire. Those who serve with distinction get animated as higher level undead, being allowed to keep more of themselves intact and gaining greater power from the transformation. Those who fail or betray the empire become zombies. Why are they mindless if their souls are used in their construction? Because while the soul is trapped inside and witnesses all that their body is doing, it is the spell that animates and directs the activity of the flesh. The soul is locked in the body, but the controls are severed and handed over to the spell that animates. So rebels who fight the will of the emperor are zombified and forced to disembowel their rebel allies, utterly unable to look away or stop themselves. So it isn't that they are truly mindless, but that the spell is mindless and the spell is the one in control of the body.


At its core, what is an evil act? I'd say the easiest definition is that an evil act is one which deliberately or callously causes undeserved harm to sapient beings, and/or unwarranted suffering.

If, for example, all creation of undead required kicking a puppy hard enough to make it yelp and keep whimpering in pain afterwards, and do it in front of the orphan to whom the puppy is the only family, that would be an act of evil. Petty evil, but definitely evil, in the sense that any good-aligned person would feel awful for the suffering caused to the puppy and the orphan, even if they convinced themselves the good they could do with the undead was worth it.

This is why I keep looking for things to make part of the casting or part of the effect of casting the spells which qualify without seeming trite and/or silly. (Kicking puppies in front of orphans is trite, to say the least.)

Well, there's still the desecration of a corpse. In our modern age, there's a bit more desensitivity to handling corpses than there has been through history. We're more used to thinking of them as, "they're dead, they won't mind" than probably any generation before us. Even now, it's considered rather bad taste for a comedian to use a real person's corpse as a prop for a comedy routine. So much so that real comedians joke about doing so. This isn't just reserved for comedy, in general we still find it wrong to do anything with a corpse that is not necessary to lay the body to rest (and even those things necessary to lay it to rest are somewhat distasteful to think about).

I mean, imagine taking someone's dead grandparent, inserting a bunch of robotic components, and having that cyborg grandpa do your bidding.

"But I'm using him to fight fires!"

Why didn't you just build a robot without using the corpse?

If you have magic, why did you learn necromancy, instead of some other school that can produce the same effect (a creature does your bidding) WITHOUT the moral conundrum of disrespecting the dead?

"Because necromancy spells are more efficient." So you're using grandpa's corpse because he is more cost efficient than just building a few more robots?

"It was an emergency." Ok, but that doesn't mean that what you did wasn't wrong. It may have been justified, but if we break someone's window to save them from a fire, we still have to account for fixing the window later somehow.

I dunno. It seems like "disrespecting the dead" is sufficient reason to me to call it at least a "small evil" at best and a "huge evil" at worst. At the very least, why on earth was necromancy the spellcaster's only valid solution to ANY situation? Why isn't it wrong that they didn't pick any other magical ability, since they are clearly given all kinds of alternative options?

[Psyren]

no, if you have to bring physics into it make sure you understand them. The measure of gravitational pull is weight. The law of universal gravitation is that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force directed along the line of centers for the two objects with is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the separation between the two objects. These are precise, measured, and known. Not theorized. There aren't multiple ideas on what gravity is or isn't.

The Law is what happens, i.e. RAW. The "theory" part comes from explaining why. Which, surprise surprise, is exactly what we're doing here. So my point stands, and you're the one who needs understanding.

[Segev]

The issue is not the direct results of the spell."It is always evil to create undead, because undead are inimicable to life; they inherently go out and kill people." "Skeletons and zombies don't." "Eh, they're still undead, so we'll call 'em evil anyway." "Why?" "Because consistency in our rules isn't as important as having labels, whether they make sense or not!"

No, the results of the spell are precisely what should determine if it's [evil] or not. Otherwise, the label is entirely arbitrary, and meaningless except as a sticker somebody thought looked cool there.


You realize they have different authors right?Irrelevant. The BoED author was 100% within his rights and the philosophy to create that spell, given the design philosophy. The problem, thus, is with the design philosophy that permits this badly thought-out spell. Because again: by the design philosophy that goes into "creating undead is evil because, um, it is," the spell is 100% fine.

And yes, there is the "it makes more undead likely to spontaneously arise!" claim. Sure. I can just as easily argue that this BoED spell makes it more likely that evil people will feel the weight of their sins and choose to repent of their own volition. Thus the spell isn't "bad," it really does have overall net good effects!


There IS something to make it feel evil. It's just a something that you and ATC don't like, so you're disregarding it. But that doesn't mean they didn't write it.No, there's something to let people claim that it makes sense to call it evil. Willie the Wizard who casts animate dead doesn't actually have any consequence of his casting it to which he can point and say, "Yeah, I...wish I hadn't caused that." Not on any level that just about any other spell he casts couldn't also come to a similar conclusion after similar ancillary misjudgments or mishaps.


It's also, per sources like Planescape, an incorrect answer. ... There's no "god of Chaotic Evil," however, because that's so vastly beyond the scope of any god that we call its embodiment the Abyss, and the beings that populate it embody the many different aspects of chaotic evil. The Powers, on the other hand, are more-or-less temporary residents.All true, but "the designers said so" is still a correct answer which I think is a BAD correct answer.


What we can take from this is that creating undead, if it is an evil act, must map to the concept of evil.

So here's that point on the map: regardless of their intrinsic characteristics, undead are dangerous and harmful in practice. Even mindless skeletons and zombies, uncontrolled, will kill and destroy. Beings like wights, wraiths, and shadows multiply explosively and turn people into corrupted, cruel versions of themselves. Vampires and ghouls eat people. Mohrgs are sadistic killers empowered to do even more harm. Ghosts are dangerous, and often tied to this world by their own suffering. Nightwalkers? Nightwalkers hate life and have the power to wipe a town off of the map.

What BoVD and Libris Mortis state is that the act of creating undead, and possibly of perpetuating their existences, allows more undead to spontaneously arise. It allows negative energy to leak into the world, effectively go bad, and propagate the existence of the types of horrors mentioned above. The spells don't cause this to happen right in front of you, but from a cosmic perspective considering countless individual necromancers who all seem to think, "I'm just a drop in the bucket," (in a multiverse where Defilers on Athas presumably thought the same thing, no less) that's not a very compelling argument.

So, what spells like Animate Dead are [Evil] because they cause the worlds of the living to, unambiguously, become places of greater suffering by at least one relevant metric.And if they also create more "good" than the literally-unmeasurable contribution to potential future evil, then they're net good when used. In fact, a robust civilization that utilized undead regularly would probably have a part of their policing force's duties be to clean up any undead that got out of hand. And they would be well-trained and capable, with possible emergency "command undead alarms" that any citizen could pull if a wild undead started being dangerous.

It simply is not a likely scenario that it would truly cause more harm than good, even if it genuinely led to more spontaneous undead. If managed intelligently, as measured by average human intelligence.


And it is worth remembering that casting an [Evil] spell is only actually forbidden to divine casters serving good deities or concepts, because those forces are uninterested in granting those particular spells. Your average Chaotic Good necromancer, on the other hand can absolutely take a utilitarian tack to these matters, in which the good they feel they can do with the undead outweighs the intrinsic harm of their creation of maintenance. But they shouldn't feel surprised when a bunch of good clerics come knocking on their door and say, "Look buddy, we represent a variety of concerned citizens of the Outer Planes, who are troubled by your continued defecation onto the collective lawn."

And metatextually, I think that's a pretty good piece of fluff. Necromancy being evil is a genre trope, and this is a solid justification."It's a trope" is a dreadful justification for bad design and bad writing. And that's what this is.

CG Necromancer-boy says to the representatives of the Outer Planes, "What harm am I doing?" and they say, "You're making undead more likely to occur, and we don't like it!" He says, "Send 'em my way; I'll deal with 'em."

Making it be a generalized across-all-multiverse "increase in evil" is even stupider than it being a localized miasma-like effect, too. At least a miasma-like effect suggests that doing it THERE makes the necromantic energies THERE stronger. But that undermines the "bad neighbor/concerned citizens" theory because Mr. Necromancer says, "Yeah, I have spells set up to control them when they arise, too. It's increased the efficiency of my undead-raising nicely."

Without a genuine, "every time you create an undead, you cause harm that can be specifically attributed to you" link, it just feels like a lot of excuse-making.

It's actually very like the climate-change argument. "We have models that predict that if you use your car, you make it more likely the ice caps will melt." "Show me evidence of this having happened." "Well, we have models..." "Those models predicted we'd already be underwater by now." "Yes, but the new ones--"

"Show me how my zombie farmhands are causing damage." "Well, it makes the rise of undead more likely, so if you keep it up, our models show that 2% more spontaneous skeletons will arise from graveyards in the area." "So if I animate one more zombie, how many spontaneous zombies are we talking about?" "Uh, it doesn't work like--" "And where are the spontaneous zombies and skeletons that should have already happened? How do you prove they're due to what I'm doing, and not something that would have happened anyway?" "Er, well, our models--" "Look, just let me work, okay? I have a farm to run, and am happy to go command undead any spontaneous zombies or skeletons you can find, whether they're my fault or not."


Yeah look Sanctify the Wicked is bad and Book of Exalted Deeds is a bad book, and if you're going to use it as the metric? No, the default setting doesn't make any kind of sense. You can either embrace that or err in favor of the stuff that does work. I prefer the latter, because the default setting starts looking pretty weird and cool once you see the scope of everything and the utter strangeness of it all.I also prefer the latter, which is why I err on the side of trying to find a better reason for animate dead to be [evil] than "um, evil spells make evil more likely, and so it makes evil more likely."



It's a matter of perspective. The harm you do by creating and maintaining undead is something subtle and cosmic and quite possibly permanent. You can accomplish good with them, real tangible good, that is meaningful for humans and from a human perspective. That action is probably good, although from the perspectives of many longer-lived beings, it may come across as deeply egoistic and selfish.It's egotistical and selfish of them to discount the good done for shorter-lived races just because they don't like it. Besides, the short-term good is also permanent. The skeletons and zombies and whatnot aren't going anywhere if you do it right, and cost next to no maintenance, so the good they're doing is good they'll KEEP doing.


(It's also potentially irresponsible: undead are phenomenally easy for someone with rebuke undead to seize control of. Worse, if something happens to you, those undead are now free-roaming murder machines.)

But the spell, regardless of how you use it, is still [Evil], for much the same reason that fireball doesn't become an [Evil] spell when you use it to blow up an orphanage.Which is where the incoherency sets in. Why is it [evil]? Because the RAW say so.

My contention is that the RAW, in this case, are poorly conceived.


Sure, but it's also not actually a definition I think anyone is touting? Or at least I hope not.

Taken more seriously, however, it's a great example of how the forces Good can end up at each others' throats because of differences in perspective and priorities. They generally try not to, but it can and does happen.It's a kind of story I've groaned at realizing I was watching or reading many times, often because somebody wanted to "prove" that "too much good" is a bad thing, and thus made up arbitrary "that's evil because the author claims good defines it as such" things which, on examination, really don't meet a real-world definition of "evil."

It isn't an "interesting moral ambiguity." It's clear-cut, and the so-called "good" of the show isn't actually good. It's just claiming to be and arbitrarily defining things it doesn't like as "evil" for no reason other than its personal preference, so the author can make a bad point.


If I were playing your hypothetical game, I would read into your ruling a bit to determine, "why would murdering puppies be good in this world?"To continue the analogy, it's good in this world because murdering puppies increases the likelihood that puppies will spontaneously die, and that's a good thing because dogs sometimes maul people (with exactly the same frequency it happens in the real world).



Point being, I would have to house rule an interpretation either way, so I'd either have fun inventing a reason, or I'd just throw that rule out entirely.I'd prefer to invent a reason why casting animate dead causes measurable, directly-attributable evil every time it's done, either as part of the casting ("The somatic component involves breaking an orphan's finger to capture his pained scream") or as a direct consequence/side-effect ("You rip the soul that once inhabited the corpse from the afterlife and that's the animating force, trapped within and helpless"). I don't like the latter because of reasons I've already given, though the former, if made more playable than "you had best be carrying around orphans in your spell component pouch; good thing they cost less than 1 gp on the open market," would be ideal. To cast this [evil] spell requires some specific Evil act, so that however justified you are, you still are doing something actively vicious and cruel.



My point is: appeal to authority is something people do all the time. It's only a bad idea when the source of your authority isn't justified by their trustworthiness.Sure. And when the reasons are complex and difficult to understand or prove, that makes sense. You look for authorities you trust and you examine their explanations to see if they make sense, and then you trust them until you find reason not to.

That doesn't work for a game system like this, because the GM needs to be the authority. "Trust us, GM, using a longsword is inherently evil and using a mace is inherently good. Why? Complicated reasons you don't want us to go into."




Stepping out of the In Game answer, we also need to address, "Why can't the real world game makers clarify this to the real world players, so we understand why necromancy is evil even if our characters might not?"

First of all, I would say for 3.5 this was answered in Libris Mortis. While they didn't give one single unified explanation, their format in offering several example solutions tells us the most important thing: the game makers intended to leave this area of the game blank. They didn't just forget to fill it in or have trouble explaining it, nor did they intend for the people using the game to leave this spot blank, either. They tried to make it Ad Lib where you can fill it in with whatever suits your personalized setting the best.

What they did not do very well was communicate how best to fill the blank without skewing a bunch of other mechanical content. Libris Mortis tried to do this somewhat, but even that seems to be more of a "do as seems best to you" kind of answer (which doesn't actually give us any more than we had before we read, besides a few nice examples to draw from).My issue is that LM's suggestions are very much of the "climate change" variety: untestable and unprovable where they haven't demonstrably failed to lead to the promised results, given settings as we have them presented. They are very clearly patches suggested for a glaring flaw in the original design: logically, the claim that it's [evil] doesn't hold up very well, so we're post-hoc making up an excuse that doesn't actually change anything.




I mean, imagine taking someone's dead grandparent, inserting a bunch of robotic components, and having that cyborg grandpa do your bidding.

"But I'm using him to fight fires!"

Why didn't you just build a robot without using the corpse?

If you have magic, why did you learn necromancy, instead of some other school that can produce the same effect (a creature does your bidding) WITHOUT the moral conundrum of disrespecting the dead?

"Because necromancy spells are more efficient." So you're using grandpa's corpse because he is more cost efficient than just building a few more robots?

"It was an emergency." Ok, but that doesn't mean that what you did wasn't wrong. It may have been justified, but if we break someone's window to save them from a fire, we still have to account for fixing the window later somehow.

I dunno. It seems like "disrespecting the dead" is sufficient reason to me to call it at least a "small evil" at best and a "huge evil" at worst. At the very least, why on earth was necromancy the spellcaster's only valid solution to ANY situation? Why isn't it wrong that they didn't pick any other magical ability, since they are clearly given all kinds of alternative options?

The analogy doesn't quite work. The undead cyborg is not more efficient than the robot; you basically built the robot anyway. Necromancy spells ARE more efficient; the results are permanent, reasonably inexpensive, and don't require the massive infrastructure to fund golem-making and other constructs.

Efficiency IS a virtue when it comes to resource-management.

Besides, I didn't animate your grandfather without consent. Either you sold his corpse to me for it, or I paid him before he died and got permission to do so after he passed on. (Quoth the ethical necromancer.)

[Zanos]

No, the results of the spell are precisely what should determine if it's [evil] or not. Otherwise, the label is entirely arbitrary, and meaningless except as a sticker somebody thought looked cool there.
Objective morality is by its nature arbitrary at times.

[Psyren]

"Skeletons and zombies don't."

Again, LM says they do. And there are tons and tons of modules and APs with free-roaming skeletons and zombies, i.e. with nobody giving them explicit orders.

It's only inconsistent if you willfully ignore what the people who make the game are trying to tell you about their game.



No, the results of the spell are precisely what should determine if it's [evil] or not. Otherwise, the label is entirely arbitrary, and meaningless except as a sticker somebody thought looked cool there.

Indirect results are still results.



Irrelevant. The BoED author was 100% within his rights and the philosophy to create that spell, given the design philosophy. The problem, thus, is with the design philosophy that permits this badly thought-out spell. Because again: by the design philosophy that goes into "creating undead is evil because, um, it is," the spell is 100% fine.

Sanctify the Wicked has no relevance to this discussion no matter how many contortions you try to make to get there.

[gkathellar]

All true, but "the designers said so" is still a correct answer which I think is a BAD correct answer.

The problem is that at a certain level of reductionism, it becomes the only answer to any question about a work of fiction. I get that questions of morality are more inherently subject to conflicting drives and forces, but a reasonable answer for why the thing is harmful has been presented; you simply don't like it as a reason.


And if they also create more "good" than the literally-unmeasurable contribution to potential future evil, then they're net good when used. In fact, a robust civilization that utilized undead regularly would probably have a part of their policing force's duties be to clean up any undead that got out of hand. And they would be well-trained and capable, with possible emergency "command undead alarms" that any citizen could pull if a wild undead started being dangerous.

It simply is not a likely scenario that it would truly cause more harm than good, even if it genuinely led to more spontaneous undead. If managed intelligently, as measured by average human intelligence.

And when the problem gets bigger than those measures can control?

Let me set forth a parable. It may come across as a little bit familiar.

For ages, people all over the world have known that elemental fire can be used to perform mechanical work. However, this magic has seen little implementation, because it is simply not worthwhile in practice. Emperors have enhanced the appearance of their might with clever Fire-Machines, and scholars have shown off their knowledge, but these have been trivialities in world history.

But then, in the Bronze Nation, reagents are discovered which allow for greater magical output. These reagents command a high price, but are found in submerged caves, so a miner and mage designs a new Fire-Machine that uses energy from these very reagents to pump out the caves. It's logistically sensible, since the fuel source is right there. Improvements are made to the Fire-Machine, and it becomes dramatically more efficient as a result of the work being done. The profit motive, in this case, takes a curiosity and makes a dynamo.

People in the Bronze Nation find other uses for the Fire-Machine, now that it is efficient. It can be used to heat whole housing complexes, to automate carriages and plows, and many other tasks. As long as a Fire-Machine can fit and mechanical work needs to be done, people will find ways to use it. Life in the Bronze Nation becomes easy, and because Fire-Machines can be engines of war, as well, it becomes powerful.

Fifty years in, they find the catch. Scholars begin to notice ambient changes in the elemental structure of the world related to the Fire-Machines. The elemental fire performing the work doesn't go away, but instead disperses, leading to an infinitesimal imbalance in favor of fire. There is speculation that over time, if the number of Fire-Machines continues to increase, these changes will cease to be infinitesimal, and the average temperature of the world will begin to rise very slightly. Maybe by a whole degree celsius!

At this time the weather-wizard's union notes that a 1 degree celsius increase will have dramatic consequ-

But this is speculation, and in the real world, the standard of living in the Bronze Nation is rising phenomenally quickly. This is an objective, indisputable good. Some nations share in the wealth, because they have their own abundance of reagents, or existing trade arrangements that allow magical knowledge to spread rapidly, or some other constellation of circumstantial factors that favor them. The Tin and Platinum nations in particular grow to rival the Bronze Nation. Soon they have running water, sewing machines, enormous forges, and more. Their magical knowledge advances.

It has been eight years, and the Silver Island Confederacy is sinking. Something about sea levels?

Other nations, such as the Nickel, Gold, and Zinc Nations lag far behind - their great distance from Bronze lands, as well as other social and economic factors, mean that the Fire-Machine was slow to reach them and slow to implement. Life looks much as it did in the Bronze, Tin, and Platinum Nations eighty or even ninety years prior. The process of magical modernization is one of exponential growth, and the modern wonders of the Fire-Machine require Fire-Machines to build. Who knows if Nickel, Gold, and Zinc will ever catch up?

It has been one-hundred years, and now the weather starts getting weird. Weather-wizards note that "hey jerks, while you were busy ignoring us about the detrimental effects of Fire-Machines, the world's average temperature rose 1 degree Celsius." And the Bronze, Tin, and Platinum Nations (we'll call them BTP) are like, "whaaaaaaaaa," and the weather-wizards are like, "yeah." So the BTP says, "okay but that's just like 1 degree who cares," and the weather-wizards say, "do you know how tropical cyclones work? They work because of precipitation off the surface of the ocean-"

The BTP seriously does not want to hear about tropical cyclones, so cuts in and says, "Okay shut up and give me the short version."

The weather-wizards say, "The weird weather is a direct result of mass-scale Fire-Machine use and it needs to be scaled back dramatically so that it doesn't get a lot worse. Eventually you're going to need to stop using them altogether, as this problem will take tens of thousands of years to undo itself." The BTP looks like it has an idea. "And no, throwing Fire-Machine powered bombs at tropical cyclones won't work, our very largest Fire-Machines can't output a thousandth of the energy of a tropical cyclone. Also the weird flash-freezing and droughts and all of that? Same thing."

The BTP is like, "OH COME ON."

The weather-wizards shrug.

This setting is optimistic about human nature, so the BTP doesn't drag its feet or pretend the weather-wizards are political troublemakers and is immediately like, "okay, we've discovered new ways to do mechanical work with magic, which are safer and better, and they may be expensive, but we're super-prosperous because of Fire-Machines so we can afford it."

And the Nickel, Gold, and Zinc (NGZ) Nations say, "Okay but we can't. So we're going to keep building Fire-Machines because we want to have independent, functional economies and a decent standard of living like you do."

BTP goes, "Well, guys, see, this is a worldwide problem. So you know you're just going to need to bite the bullet here. I mean maybe you can keep using the Fire-Machines for a little bit longer but we're all screwed if we don't scale back their use pretty quickly."

Now the Silver Island Confederacy pipes in and says, "uh, hey, so we're not super-developed either, and we're also hit significantly harder by tropical cyclones and floods and rising sea levels then you are. And you know like 80% of the world's Fire-Machines are in BTP nations so this feels kind of unfair. In fact this stuff has been happening to us for like 30 years and you seemed distinctly uninterested at the time."

"So you're going to pay for these new generators for us so we don't have to use Fire-Machines, I guess?" say the NGZ nations.

"Well we'll try but that might be stretching even our resources a little thin. I mean we have a lot of Fire-Machines, and a duty to our people to keep their standard of living from going down. You know how it is."

NGZ blinks. Silver Island Confederacy says, "So what you're saying is, now that you've reaped the benefits of this amazing magical revolution, having ignored the possible consequences to the lives of others that you were well aware of, now you're going to recognize that your actions might have an ongoing negative effect."

"Well it sounds bad when you put it like that."

And everyone sort of stands around and wonders how all of their close-to-objectively-Good interests can be in conflict. Eventually somebody says, "Maybe this would have gone better if we had used zombies instead. That couldn't have had any possible consequences."



"It's a trope" is a dreadful justification for bad design and bad writing. And that's what this is.

Not when one of the goals of the design and the writing is to produce that trope.


CG Necromancer-boy says to the representatives of the Outer Planes, "What harm am I doing?" and they say, "You're making undead more likely to occur, and we don't like it!" He says, "Send 'em my way; I'll deal with 'em."

From what, the tens of thousands of worlds this may effect? Exactly how many Gates are they supposed to create into his living room?


Making it be a generalized across-all-multiverse "increase in evil" is even stupider than it being a localized miasma-like effect, too. At least a miasma-like effect suggests that doing it THERE makes the necromantic energies THERE stronger. But that undermines the "bad neighbor/concerned citizens" theory because Mr. Necromancer says, "Yeah, I have spells set up to control them when they arise, too. It's increased the efficiency of my undead-raising nicely."

So it's stupider because it doesn't fit your convenient way around it?


Without a genuine, "every time you create an undead, you cause harm that can be specifically attributed to you" link, it just feels like a lot of excuse-making.

-snip-

"Show me how my zombie farmhands are causing damage." "Well, it makes the rise of undead more likely, so if you keep it up, our models show that 2% more spontaneous skeletons will arise from graveyards in the area." "So if I animate one more zombie, how many spontaneous zombies are we talking about?" "Uh, it doesn't work like--" "And where are the spontaneous zombies and skeletons that should have already happened? How do you prove they're due to what I'm doing, and not something that would have happened anyway?" "Er, well, our models--" "Look, just let me work, okay? I have a farm to run, and am happy to go command undead any spontaneous zombies or skeletons you can find, whether they're my fault or not."

Out of curiosity, why did the London Fog disappear after the 1956 Clean Air Act?


It's egotistical and selfish of them to discount the good done for shorter-lived races just because they don't like it. Besides, the short-term good is also permanent.


I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

That's from Earth. Talking to a being tens-of-thousands of years old, I suspect one might just receive a blank stare.


The skeletons and zombies and whatnot aren't going anywhere if you do it right, and cost next to no maintenance, so the good they're doing is good they'll KEEP doing.

And the harm they're doing is harm they'll keep doing, especially if you plan to make more of them.


It's a kind of story I've groaned at realizing I was watching or reading many times, often because somebody wanted to "prove" that "too much good" is a bad thing, and thus made up arbitrary "that's evil because the author claims good defines it as such" things which, on examination, really don't meet a real-world definition of "evil."

I mentioned no such thing. You keep harping on this, but no one else has raised anything of the sort. (What I in particular mentioned was that different forces for Good may end up at each other's throats because of their different particular interests and priorities.)


I'd prefer to invent a reason why casting animate dead causes measurable, directly-attributable evil every time it's done, either as part of the casting ("The somatic component involves breaking an orphan's finger to capture his pained scream") or as a direct consequence/side-effect ("You rip the soul that once inhabited the corpse from the afterlife and that's the animating force, trapped within and helpless"). I don't like the latter because of reasons I've already given, though the former, if made more playable than "you had best be carrying around orphans in your spell component pouch; good thing they cost less than 1 gp on the open market," would be ideal. To cast this [evil] spell requires some specific Evil act, so that however justified you are, you still are doing something actively vicious and cruel.

The odd thing is that you talk about Saturday morning cartoon villainy derisively, but then you seem uninterested in any explanation for why something might be a bad idea that's more complicated than "it's powered by puppy-kicking."

[Necroticplague]

Objective morality is by its nature arbitrary at times.

Depends on what you mean by arbitrary. Arguably, if morality is objective, there's arguably nothing arbitrary about it: something is either on the list, or it isn't. There is a system and reason for everything. If the list itself doesn't/can't change, it doesn't fit any definition of arbitrary (being neither subject to whims, random, or without a reason or system).

[Miko_Kira]

I remember something like this... There was a story of a group of adventurers who went throughout the land helping deposed kings and queens regain their hold on cities controlled by an evil lich and his necromancer apprentices. When the throne was restored each city would institute pyre funerals for all dead, and a bunch of other decrees to combat necromancy and route it out of their kingdoms. At the end of the adventure, the party came to the domain of the Lich, only to find a withered old man distraught with what the party had done.

He brought peace to the land, overthrowing tyrant after tyrant. He taught the most capable how to raise the dead and work the fields so others could pursue the paths of scholars. Innovation was underway and the undead workforce would eventually become a thing of the past. But it all came to a screeching halt because of a group of misguided adventurers with good intentions. They smote the dead and the ones who controlled them, reinstated the 'deposed' leaders, and helped put an end to any future necromancy. It wouldn't have been a clean path to a peaceful world, but the old man knew it was better than what those tyrants were doing. With his last days upon him he looked to the adventurers and showed them what they had done, and there was nothing they could do to undo it.

Here's the link! Link (http://i.imgur.com/rAdm2.png)

[King of Nowhere]

undead are dangerous and, if poorly used, could rampage and kill.

So can industrial machines. A chemical reaction making pharmaceutics that save thousands of lives can go wrong because somebody makes a mistake and accidentally release toxic gases that will kill thousands.

Does it make it wrong to produce pharmaceutics then? Obviously not. You just have to be careful and put more failsafe devices in the process.

So, undead properly controlled can be useful as workforce and be no more dangerous than industrial machines. Especially if you use zombies: they are so slow, even if they get out of control everyone still has time to escape. I don't know the rules well enough to figure out exactly how, but it can be done. Again, the argument that the world may also not know how and so should avoid using undead on principle is wrong. When humans first started to use fire, they did not know how to use it properly; if that had stopped them, we'd still be living in caves. And those caves would be cold.

So, unless there is a practical reason for why something bad happens when using the undead as workforce - like, every one you make empowers a dark god directly intent on bringing armageddon - then any pragmatic organization should do so.

@gkathellar:
well, taking your parable of the fire machine at face value, one would argue that we should never try to use any technology whatsoever because it may have detrimental effects in the long run. We should still live in caves in that case. That's not the way to go.
We must use technology to solve our problems, and when the use of technology creates more problems, we find some way to deal with it. And we keep going at it until we reach a stable point or until we die. Of course it is necessary to be careful and judge risks and not do everything blindly with the assurance that "certainly when this will become a serious problem someone will find a solution", but there are really no alternatives there. The moment the first man made the first metal tool, humanity sstarted tapping into a finite resource that was going to run out. It set the first armageddon clock to "when we run out of the metal we can dig with current technologies". Humanity could have lived without metals in a completely sustainable way. Well, except that soooner or later we'd get hit by a large asteroid. Or a particularly severe ice age. Or any other similar calamity. If none of them did us, the increasingly hotter sun would make the planet unlivable by humans in the next 100 million years. 200 millions at most.
So, if we do not try to use technology to solve our problems, we all die, and the whole planet dies, and we are but a curiosity that happened on a random space rock and left no consequence whatsoever.
I'd rather try and become something more, even if that carries a chance we'll kill ourselves by mismanaging something. Andd that applies to using zombies as a substitute for robots in workforce.

[King of Nowhere]

I remember something about this... There was a story of a group of adventurers who went throughout the land helping deposed kings and queens regain their hold on cities controlled by an evil lich and his necromancer apprentices. When the throne was restored each city would institute pyre funerals for all dead, and a bunch of other decrees to combat necromancy and route it out of their kingdoms. At the end of the adventure, the party came to the domain of the Lich, only to find a withered old man distraught with what the party had done.

He brought peace to the land, overthrowing tyrant after tyrant. He taught the most capable how to raise the dead and work the fields so others could pursue the paths of scholars. Innovation was underway and the undead workforce would eventually become a thing of the past. But it all came to a screeching halt because of a group of misguided adventurers with good intentions. They smote the dead and the ones who controlled them, reinstated the 'deposed' leaders, and helped put an end to any future necromancy. It wouldn't have been a clean path to a peaceful world, but the old man knew it was better than what those tyrants were doing. With his last days upon him he looked to the adventurers and showed them what they had done, and there was nothing they could do to undo it.

So... telling the party what he was trying to achieve was too complicated for the old man?

[Miko_Kira]

So... telling the party what he was trying to achieve was too complicated for the old man?
He did. I had to edit in a link, here it is again. LINK (http://i.imgur.com/rAdm2.png)

[Quarian Rex]

Firstly, if it seems like I insulted you I promise I didn't intend to. When i replied last, it was late and I was getting ready to go to sleep so I made an honest error when i read your response about the wand and the deathbound domains. You're right, my bad. things get foggy after being awake for 16+ hours with 4 ish hours of sleep.

Bah! Don't worry about such things. Seeing a point misquoted requires clarification. That clarification must be more detailed than the original to prevent further misunderstandings. Said attempted thoroughness can look a lot like beating a dead horse. Beating a dead horse can look a lot like insult. Tone doesn't come across well on the internet, the only real intention is to get us on the same page.



In my ideal kingdom, which I know means you're going to discount what I have to say from now on, there are strict laws governing the use, handling, creation, and destruction of undead. This being said, there are specific rules governing what would happen in such a case where the kingdom is under attack and outmanned. In my ideal kingdom, the undead aren't used. Undead are machines, not weapons. When undead are created they are created without hands/arms or jaws. Far less risky as their natural weapons are now removed. Further, you could even just create torsos with legs. If skeletons need their heads to see, that's fine because they don't need to see to walk in a circle or in another device.

Your assumption that I'll discount your goals makes me realize that I have apparently been coming across wrong myself (see tone on the internet above). I am very interested in a benevolent undead empire, especially one created by RAW. I just happen to see a lot of challenges that need to be overcome. Your statements have implied that these challenges have already been solved. That is the point of contention I believe, nothing else.

Look at the bolded part of your quote above. This view seems to be the biggest stumbling block. I think undead are weapons, not machines, and need to be treated as such. The point of a benevolent undead empire is to take these weapons and use them as tools. Some applications (like using a loaded handgun as a hammer) will be exceedingly dangerous, while others (like using the handgun as a screwdriver) will just not be possible. You can't just look at the limbs of an uncontrolled undead and see nothing but applications of mechanical force waiting for you to direct them. These are creatures whose sole need is to kill. if they are prevented from doing that too effectively (due to being completely, safely, restrained) then they will probably just sit still, waiting for a time to strike.

What I'm trying to do here is to steer you away from the most dull of possible solutions. One where every house has a magical (pseudo-technological) macguffin box (the almighty hand-wave) with a crankshaft coming out of it that, btw, just so happens to have a completely harmless and contained zombie inside. That would make for the most boring of all possible Benevolent Necromantic Empires (BNE).



Specifically in regards to your wheel of death idea, create seats that the humans sit in, create harnesses that keep the zombies/skeletons upright and remove the threats of natural weapons. Its really not that difficult to diffuse the risk as much as possible. Everything has risk though. Using an ox has risk. The presence of risk is not a reason not to use a tool especially when the known risks can be fairly easily mitigated. There's no handwaving in a hatchet to a zombies arm and jaw and the tying it up to a wheel then provoking it to walk in circles. Even when you can't provoke it, it's still contained and tied up and is very low-threat.

See, I think that you're on the right track but you have to think of this on multiple levels. You want to make something that will efficiently benefit the empire/economy. If every second spoke has someone sitting on it you have just hampered any work being done. And who is going to pay them to just sit there when they can be told to hop down and push? This doesn't have to be slave labor, you can rotate out the laborers every couple of hours or whatever, but I think that it does have to be taken into account. There will always be someone in the middle trying to squeeze a little more out of what he has to work with.

Most of the challenge (and fun) of this is going to be trying to figure out where undead can be used in the BNE and how its society is going to have to change to accommodate that. Think about using undead as transport. Undead rickshaws may become quite popular, using a cat in a cage, suspended from a pole, dangled in front of a de-armed/de-jawed fast templated zombie to steer and a hinged bucket placed on its head to brake. You now have an untiring form of locomotion that can be touchy to steer, may not break when you want it to, and things will get very hairy if you lead it into a crowd. This probably means that streets in your BNE will be quite wide and uncrowded, leaving a wide berth for undead transport.

This could be scaled up as well. Perhaps have a coach with wide running boards on each side where the undead are strapped in and a stage hand on either side to keep their attention and shoo away any distractions. Instead of a horse team in front you could have a bunch of zombies hooked up to a platform (with the ever helpful hinged head buckets), on top of a pair of wheels, that is attached to a tiller (a rudder handle), so that as the driver moves with the tiller from side to side the undead will follow, allowing the big thing to be directed.



All of this is not to say that I don't see your points. I really do. Both yours and Psyren's. I'm using you at this point to bounce my ideas and vet them through peers. I hope that by doing so I'm not coming across as rude, abraisive, insulting, or argumentative.

Idea bouncing is the key. I just don't want you to be dismissively saying 'that's easy' and relying on a solution that really doesn't work. Hopefully this all came across in the way it was meant.

[Segev]

Objective morality is by its nature arbitrary at times.Not really. Unless you mean in the same sense that physics is arbitrary, because why the fundamental forces are as they are is less important than what the consequences of them are. But that also illustrates the distinction I'm making: objective morality that is internally consistent and coherent with explicit results that work together is okay if the question of "well, WHY does it work out that way?" is "because this fundamental postulate is true." The problem I have is explicitly that this is not being treated that way. The "because it is" actually snarls the consistency.


Again, LM says they do. And there are tons and tons of modules and APs with free-roaming skeletons and zombies, i.e. with nobody giving them explicit orders.

It's only inconsistent if you willfully ignore what the people who make the game are trying to tell you about their game.Fine, they say they do. I'll accept that. Fire also burns out of control if not kept under control. And all it takes is an irresponsible campfire to start the plains burning, swallowing up acres of farmland and the lives of the farmers.


Indirect results are still results. I'm...not sure how this responds adequately to what you quoted. I suspect you took the wrong context from it. If that's my failure to make it clear, my apologies.

I am fine with indirect results as long as they're clearly caused by a specific act. I am not fine with them if it's not possible to say, "You, YOUR act did this. If YOU hadn't done YOUR part, THIS would not have happened."


Sanctify the Wicked has no relevance to this discussion no matter how many contortions you try to make to get there.Just because it makes my point perfectly doesn't mean you can declare it irrelevant. It means quite the opposite, actually. You've repeatedly ignored my explanation as to why it's relevant, to repeat "it's not relevant." You actually do need to explain why it's not relevant, addressing my explanation and not just your assertion that that's so, for your claim to have a chance to hold any water.


And when the problem gets bigger than those measures can control?

Let me set forth a parable. It may come across as a little bit familiar.

For ages, people all over the world have known that elemental fire can be used to perform mechanical work. However, this magic has seen little implementation, because it is simply not worthwhile in practice. Emperors have enhanced the appearance of their might with clever Fire-Machines, and scholars have shown off their knowledge, but these have been trivialities in world history.

But then, in the Bronze Nation, reagents are discovered which allow for greater magical output. These reagents command a high price, but are found in submerged caves, so a miner and mage designs a new Fire-Machine that uses energy from these very reagents to pump out the caves. It's logistically sensible, since the fuel source is right there. Improvements are made to the Fire-Machine, and it becomes dramatically more efficient as a result of the work being done. The profit motive, in this case, takes a curiosity and makes a dynamo.

People in the Bronze Nation find other uses for the Fire-Machine, now that it is efficient. It can be used to heat whole housing complexes, to automate carriages and plows, and many other tasks. As long as a Fire-Machine can fit and mechanical work needs to be done, people will find ways to use it. Life in the Bronze Nation becomes easy, and because Fire-Machines can be engines of war, as well, it becomes powerful.

Fifty years in, they find the catch. Scholars begin to notice ambient changes in the elemental structure of the world related to the Fire-Machines. The elemental fire performing the work doesn't go away, but instead disperses, leading to an infinitesimal imbalance in favor of fire. There is speculation that over time, if the number of Fire-Machines continues to increase, these changes will cease to be infinitesimal, and the average temperature of the world will begin to rise very slightly. Maybe by a whole degree celsius!

At this time the weather-wizard's union notes that a 1 degree celsius increase will have dramatic consequ-

But this is speculation, and in the real world, the standard of living in the Bronze Nation is rising phenomenally quickly. This is an objective, indisputable good. Some nations share in the wealth, because they have their own abundance of reagents, or existing trade arrangements that allow magical knowledge to spread rapidly, or some other constellation of circumstantial factors that favor them. The Tin and Platinum nations in particular grow to rival the Bronze Nation. Soon they have running water, sewing machines, enormous forges, and more. Their magical knowledge advances.

It has been eight years, and the Silver Island Confederacy is sinking. Something about sea levels?

Other nations, such as the Nickel, Gold, and Zinc Nations lag far behind - their great distance from Bronze lands, as well as other social and economic factors, mean that the Fire-Machine was slow to reach them and slow to implement. Life looks much as it did in the Bronze, Tin, and Platinum Nations eighty or even ninety years prior. The process of magical modernization is one of exponential growth, and the modern wonders of the Fire-Machine require Fire-Machines to build. Who knows if Nickel, Gold, and Zinc will ever catch up?

It has been one-hundred years, and now the weather starts getting weird. Weather-wizards note that "hey jerks, while you were busy ignoring us about the detrimental effects of Fire-Machines, the world's average temperature rose 1 degree Celsius." And the Bronze, Tin, and Platinum Nations (we'll call them BTP) are like, "whaaaaaaaaa," and the weather-wizards are like, "yeah." So the BTP says, "okay but that's just like 1 degree who cares," and the weather-wizards say, "do you know how tropical cyclones work? They work because of precipitation off the surface of the ocean-"

The BTP seriously does not want to hear about tropical cyclones, so cuts in and says, "Okay shut up and give me the short version."

The weather-wizards say, "The weird weather is a direct result of mass-scale Fire-Machine use and it needs to be scaled back dramatically so that it doesn't get a lot worse. Eventually you're going to need to stop using them altogether, as this problem will take tens of thousands of years to undo itself." The BTP looks like it has an idea. "And no, throwing Fire-Machine powered bombs at tropical cyclones won't work, our very largest Fire-Machines can't output a thousandth of the energy of a tropical cyclone. Also the weird flash-freezing and droughts and all of that? Same thing."

The BTP is like, "OH COME ON."

The weather-wizards shrug.

This setting is optimistic about human nature, so the BTP doesn't drag its feet or pretend the weather-wizards are political troublemakers and is immediately like, "okay, we've discovered new ways to do mechanical work with magic, which are safer and better, and they may be expensive, but we're super-prosperous because of Fire-Machines so we can afford it."

And the Nickel, Gold, and Zinc (NGZ) Nations say, "Okay but we can't. So we're going to keep building Fire-Machines because we want to have independent, functional economies and a decent standard of living like you do."

BTP goes, "Well, guys, see, this is a worldwide problem. So you know you're just going to need to bite the bullet here. I mean maybe you can keep using the Fire-Machines for a little bit longer but we're all screwed if we don't scale back their use pretty quickly."

Now the Silver Island Confederacy pipes in and says, "uh, hey, so we're not super-developed either, and we're also hit significantly harder by tropical cyclones and floods and rising sea levels then you are. And you know like 80% of the world's Fire-Machines are in BTP nations so this feels kind of unfair. In fact this stuff has been happening to us for like 30 years and you seemed distinctly uninterested at the time."

"So you're going to pay for these new generators for us so we don't have to use Fire-Machines, I guess?" say the NGZ nations.

"Well we'll try but that might be stretching even our resources a little thin. I mean we have a lot of Fire-Machines, and a duty to our people to keep their standard of living from going down. You know how it is."

NGZ blinks. Silver Island Confederacy says, "So what you're saying is, now that you've reaped the benefits of this amazing magical revolution, having ignored the possible consequences to the lives of others that you were well aware of, now you're going to recognize that your actions might have an ongoing negative effect."

"Well it sounds bad when you put it like that."

And everyone sort of stands around and wonders how all of their close-to-objectively-Good interests can be in conflict. Eventually somebody says, "Maybe this would have gone better if we had used zombies instead. That couldn't have had any possible consequences."Your parable fails to be analogous to any of the settings as presented, as your parable actually has the purported effects occurring in a measurable way.

The problem, in point of fact, can't get "bigger than such measures can control" unless there is a net, measurable effect which is greater than the utility being obtained from each individual use. Not unless there's a magical threshold that starts spontaneously generating hidden causes out of nowhere far, far away that can't be measured until they all decide to spontaneously appear at once. Which is incredibly contrived to manufacture a problem of this precise type and is not what is described for the "undeath-induced background radiation of evil" effect.

Not when one of the goals of the design and the writing is to produce that trope.On the contrary, PRECISELY when the goal is to produce that trope!

Consider this: The goal of my story is to create a setting where dragons are kidnapped by princesses. I want to write that story. So I write, "The dragon kidnapped the princess. He had no reason to, other than that's what dragons do. Why? Because the whole point of this story is that dragons kidnap princesses. They don't actually have any use for them, and it doesn't help them in any way. It doesn't even make them happy. It's just what they do, because it's a trope I want to have happen."

Not a very good story. Even if I write around that idiocy, any quality is in spite of it. Far better if my story has a compelling reason for the dragon to be kidnapping that princess. (In fact, when I set out to write a "dragon kidnaps princess" story for a D&D module, I deliberately created a chance for the PCs to question why this is happening. On the surface, it looks pretty arbitrary. Until they learn that the dragon is actually a polymorphed kobold. Then it becomes even more mysterious unless they figure out that one of the NPCs helping them is actually a polymorphed dragon who arranged the whole thing in order to get into the good graces of the King by helping the rescue.)




From what, the tens of thousands of worlds this may effect? Exactly how many Gates are they supposed to create into his living room?Wait, he's somehow affecting tens of thousands of worlds enough to create many undead on each of them? Specifically from his animation efforts on his home plane? At that point, YES, open those gates to his world; he has such a mighty industrial empire that he could export lavish resources to BUY them from you, and barely feel a pinch. He'd be buying manhattan for $12 worth of beads from his perspective, but your world will see it as riches enough to outfit a king's army!


That's from Earth. Talking to a being tens-of-thousands of years old, I suspect one might just receive a blank stare.It's also fiction. So extrapolation and fiction writing is all we have to determine how his works disappeared. I'm betting his grandsons decided that his empire's source of power was destroying the environment and therefore banned its use, squandered the wealth of the empire on "new" ways that really just allowed them to charge an arm nad a leg and raise taxes to pump money into their own pockets and those of their friends, and the empire collapsed due to lacking the support structure it once had.

See? I can make up fictional doomsday end-of-civilization scenarios, too.


And the harm they're doing is harm they'll keep doing, especially if you plan to make more of them.And it's still net LESS harm than the net GOOD they're doing. By definition, since animating any one of them doesn't create a measurable effect.


The odd thing is that you talk about Saturday morning cartoon villainy derisively, but then you seem uninterested in any explanation for why something might be a bad idea that's more complicated than "it's powered by puppy-kicking."Quite the contrary. I'm not rejecting "complicated." I'm rejecting "unimpactful." I'm rejecting a notion that is clearly a cop-out with no evidence in any setting we've got, which rationally is overbalanced by the potential utility/good.

I'll take complicated quite happily as long as it actually does something to make a given Neutral would-be necromancer actually stop and think, "Am I willing to live with myself for having caused that?"

And, sorry, any "global climate change" style explanation just doesn't rise to that level. Most modern human beings are Neutral to Good, and practically none of us - even those who believe in anthropogenic climate change - stop and have a moral crisis every time we turn on our cars.

[Quarian Rex]

At some point, ALL you are REALLY questioning is the "why" of the designers' choices, which serves NOTHING constructive to ANY discussion, and is just being contentious.

This is where you are in disagreement with most people. When encountering something that doesn't make sense to you, asking why is the natural response. When the official answer to the why doesn't seem to answer the question, or is otherwise unsatisfactory, then discussing the matter is extremely constructive. You seem to favour an extremely black and white campaign world (which is quite fine and valid) and in that context you also seem to be satisfied with an answer that is, essentially, 'just because'. For some of us that answer breaks suspension of disbelief and we want something more, something that fits within a more grey shaded kind of world. Sometimes that requires the asking and re-asking of similar questions until we can come to something that we find usable.

You have made your points as to the RAW. Now people are trying to find acceptable ways to apply that to their campaigns and in their worlds. Continually repeating variations of 'just because' adds nothing constructive to this discussion.




No, the results of the spell are precisely what should determine if it's [evil] or not. Otherwise, the label is entirely arbitrary

It is a spell that the permanently creates creatures that are unambiguously evil. Sounds like the results of the spell have determined that it is [Evil]. That is pretty clear cut. I don't think that's what you're actually arguing against though.



Willie the Wizard who casts animate dead doesn't actually have any consequence of his casting it to which he can point and say, "Yeah, I...wish I hadn't caused that." Not on any level that just about any other spell he casts couldn't also come to a similar conclusion after similar ancillary misjudgments or mishaps.

I think that this is one of the interesting aspects. That people can use a tool of objective [Evil] to achieve good ends and feel completely justified about it. He has created evil but that evil is on a very short leash. They do only what the caster says. They are only a danger if the caster is Dominated and tells his minions to run amok, or if he gives them poorly worded commands and they run amok...

Hubris is a fun thing to see played out.



And if they also create more "good" than the literally-unmeasurable contribution to potential future evil, then they're net good when used.

Which is the exact argument used in ivory towers across the game world by necromancers looking to solve problems with the tools they know best. Balancing the use of objective [Evil] to achieve subjective good. No amount of subjective good can erase the objective [Evil] that is being used, but does that really matter? So long as it's justified to the caster he's justified in doing so. Will using [Evil] to do good force you to become evil? I don't think so. Can you remain good while using [Evil] to do good? I don't think so. Good tends to require sacrifice and putting others before oneself. If a necromancer won't sacrifice the convenience of animated dead and is willing to risk the harm of innocents (even with the best of plans his death will result in uncontrolled cannibals who may kill before anyone can get to a safety measure) to achieve his goals, even if those goals are good, it doesn't make him evil but he can't be good. That's what neutral is for my good man.



*Eloquent talk with a Necromancer Farmer*

This made me think of Cattle Driving Necromancers (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?325177-Cattle-Driving-Necromancers-Bizarre-Campaign-Journal). Somewhat unrelated but a great example of Evil done right.



I'd prefer to invent a reason why casting animate dead causes measurable, directly-attributable evil every time it's done, either as part of the casting ("The somatic component involves breaking an orphan's finger to capture his pained scream") or as a direct consequence/side-effect ("You rip the soul that once inhabited the corpse from the afterlife and that's the animating force, trapped within and helpless")...

... To cast this [evil] spell requires some specific Evil act, so that however justified you are, you still are doing something actively vicious and cruel.

See, this is something that I really do not like. I think that this removes all of the moral ambiguity from the spell. Changing the spell like that means that having these kinds of arguments in game would be impossible. You can't pretend to believe that your undead manned farm is a positive force in the world when, if you listen really, really, carefully you can still hear the cries of the orphan souls that were used to make them.



Necromancy spells ARE more efficient; the results are permanent, reasonably inexpensive, and don't require the massive infrastructure to fund golem-making and other constructs.

Efficiency IS a virtue when it comes to resource-management.

And that is the difference between someone whom is good, and someone who is neutral but trying to do good things.

[Psyren]

I'm...not sure how this responds adequately to what you quoted. I suspect you took the wrong context from it. If that's my failure to make it clear, my apologies.

I am fine with indirect results as long as they're clearly caused by a specific act. I am not fine with them if it's not possible to say, "You, YOUR act did this. If YOU hadn't done YOUR part, THIS would not have happened."

But it is possible to say that. In this universe, this is the RAW result that people animating undead cause. The global warming analogy someone made earlier is apt - sure an individual driving on the highway in a clunker that is spewing exhaust everywhere probably isn't going to destabilize the planet on its own, but they're still going to get dirty looks and possibly even pulled over.



Just because it makes my point perfectly doesn't mean you can declare it irrelevant. It means quite the opposite, actually. You've repeatedly ignored my explanation as to why it's relevant, to repeat "it's not relevant." You actually do need to explain why it's not relevant, addressing my explanation and not just your assertion that that's so, for your claim to have a chance to hold any water.

It's not relevant because it's a spell that has nothing to do with undead, in a book that does nothing to contradict Libris Mortis or BoVD in any way, written by somebody who had nothing to do with writing either of those books. You might as well be saying "But I brought up potatoes earlier in this undead debate, why aren't you acknowledging the potatoes? Stop declaring the potatoes irrelevant and focus on the potatoes!"

[Fizban]

think about using undead as transport.
Transport is one of the only areas controlled undead may actually be significant. Weather or not they can hustle or run indefinitely is a little up for question, but even a single oversized beast of burden that requires no food or sleep is pretty huge. Take feed cost, multiply over time until your Command Undead item is paid for (I'd recommend using both Eternal Wand charges on the same target, overlapped, with actual caster teams assigned where security is a concern).

The best thing you can do with skeletons and zombies is get access to size and movement modes normally impossible, kill a creature and take its power. Elephants look handy but annoying to raise and train? Visit (or create) the elephant graveyard and mount up. Tired of dealing with poor winds for your ships? Skeletal whale. Flying machine? Kill something with wings, zombify. Dig a giant tunnel in a hurry? Search for wormsign, you know what to do. You can't put a controlled skeletal horse under every commoner, but you ought to be able to replace construction equipment and speed up a few express couriers at least. I really don't see an uncontrolled rickshaw working, but carts on a rail might work.

Magic strongholds and portals will still beat them for overland and long-distance, but the immediacy and singular skill set is of course the draw. You don't need to learn how to raise elephants, just raise and control them. You don't need to advance ship building, just raise and control a whale. You don't need to forge ties pegusai or domesticate hippogriffs, raise and control. You don't need to be high enough level to animate a stronghold (13th for overland), just to animate whatever you can kill (20HD at cl5 with Desecrate). You can't completely uplift the whole empire, but you can get immediate and drastic results that are absolutely tied to a certain group of people, either by their skill or being granted the discrete control items which require constant re-activation.

It's almost like it encourages evil empires :smalltongue:

[Calthropstu]

Isn't geb from golarion such an empire? (Though admittedly somewhat more of an evil persuasion)
Obviously you can use zombies and skeletons for things other than combat... geb has zombie workers in the fields, zombie porters.. even zombie prostitutes.
They have three classes of people, citizens, elite and slaves. Mindless undead and purchased/conquered people as slaves, sentient undead and normal people as citizens and necromancers and high level intelligent undead as elite nobles.
It's an... interesting place well worth reading up on.

[Necroticplague]

Transport is one of the only areas controlled undead may actually be significant. Weather or not they can hustle or run indefinitely is a little up for question, but even a single oversized beast of burden that requires no food or sleep is pretty huge.Not sure how this is a question.

A creature with no Constitution cannot tire and thus can run indefinitely without tiring (unless the creature’s description says it cannot run).

[RedMage125]

Segev, please respond to my last post, #168. You haven't yet.


This is where you are in disagreement with most people. When encountering something that doesn't make sense to you, asking why is the natural response. When the official answer to the why doesn't seem to answer the question, or is otherwise unsatisfactory, then discussing the matter is extremely constructive. You seem to favour an extremely black and white campaign world (which is quite fine and valid) and in that context you also seem to be satisfied with an answer that is, essentially, 'just because'. For some of us that answer breaks suspension of disbelief and we want something more, something that fits within a more grey shaded kind of world. Sometimes that requires the asking and re-asking of similar questions until we can come to something that we find usable.

You have made your points as to the RAW. Now people are trying to find acceptable ways to apply that to their campaigns and in their worlds. Continually repeating variations of 'just because' adds nothing constructive to this discussion.
I'm actually NOT in disagreement with "most people". Psyren's been arguing the same points as I have.

When asking HOW and WHY questions in D&D, the only valid points of discussion are straight-RAW. This is because it is impossible to account for every possible permutation of house rules.

You seem to think that I somehow am "satisfied with simple answers", which is condescending, unwarranted, and completely untrue. But I recognize (which some posters, apparently do not), that there ARE no "definite answers" that will resolve everyone's issues within "their campaigns" and "their worlds". I don't care how anyone else's game is run. D&D thrives on house rules and customization. Which is great. The only "wrong way to play" is a manner in which people at the table are not having fun. But when discussing the game, everyone participating needs to have the same frame of reference. Which means only the things that are true (and the reasons for them) are what is in the RAW. This because we all have access to the RAW, so we can all reference the same source material, which all says the same thing.

Furthermore, there's nothing wrong with asking "why". But when the question has been answered, MULTIPLE TIMES, and you keep saying "why" like a cartoon child (Mindy from Animaniacs comes to mind), eventually, you are down to game design bedrock, where you are only questioning "why did the designer make this choice?", which is not constructive to the ORIGINAL topic, which is discussing in-game phenomena.

And I never just gave the answer "just because". If you LOOK and actually READ, I have-MULTIPLE TIMES-answered Segev's question with the in-game reasoning. Like always, he ignores it, pretends it wasn't said, and does not respond to it, so he may later bring up his same points, continuing to claim "the reasoning is so circular!". He has stated that he doesn't like that reasoning, because it doesn't resonate with HIS OWN PERSONAL OPINION of what constitutes a "crime against the world". He therefore tries to indict the whole system as having flawed reasoning.

The problem with that mindset is narcissism, essentially. To throw your own words back in your teeth: When encountering something that doesn't make sense to you because the facts don't match up with your initial presuppositions, do you try and find flaw in your facts, or do you try and alter or re-examine your presuppositions? Segev and those like him believe that the facts must therefore be in error, that their opinions are so vital and universal that they hold the same weight as truth.

[Psyren]

Isn't geb from golarion such an empire? (Though admittedly somewhat more of an evil persuasion)
Obviously you can use zombies and skeletons for things other than combat... geb has zombie workers in the fields, zombie porters.. even zombie prostitutes.
They have three classes of people, citizens, elite and slaves. Mindless undead and purchased/conquered people as slaves, sentient undead and normal people as citizens and necromancers and high level intelligent undead as elite nobles.
It's an... interesting place well worth reading up on.

Indeed and no one is denying that undead can be used in a variety of ways. Geb is indeed a great example.

[Pleh]

To continue the analogy, it's good in this world because murdering puppies increases the likelihood that puppies will spontaneously die, and that's a good thing because dogs sometimes maul people (with exactly the same frequency it happens in the real world).

In continuing the analogy, that would be what defenders of your rule would use to justify your rule, not what the rule actually says. It's "an answer" and not necessarily "the correct one."

Your point seems to be that it's a bad way to run the game. Fine. But so what?


I'd prefer to invent a reason why casting animate dead causes measurable, directly-attributable evil every time it's done, either as part of the casting ("The somatic component involves breaking an orphan's finger to capture his pained scream") or as a direct consequence/side-effect ("You rip the soul that once inhabited the corpse from the afterlife and that's the animating force, trapped within and helpless"). I don't like the latter because of reasons I've already given, though the former, if made more playable than "you had best be carrying around orphans in your spell component pouch; good thing they cost less than 1 gp on the open market," would be ideal. To cast this [evil] spell requires some specific Evil act, so that however justified you are, you still are doing something actively vicious and cruel.

So make one up. The fact that the game intentionally leaves room for you to fill in the gap doesn't seem to be much of a game problem as much as their lack of communicating this need.


... the GM needs to be the authority. "Trust us, GM, using a longsword is inherently evil and using a mace is inherently good. Why? Complicated reasons you don't want us to go into."

So the DM should rule it as seems best to them. The Game Balance is designed for Necromancy to be evil, so for "best results" DMs should use that. It's probably meant to be the counter balance point to Necromancy: it may be more cost efficient, but it's less socially acceptable. Removing the downside without accounting for the change on the other end is mishandling the balance of the scenario. Sure, you can change your setting from default to intentionally play it that way and it should work just fine, but your players ought to know it isn't the "Default setting" and necromancy no longer possesses the stigma.

Balance issues are only issues when they aren't recognized. It's more of a preference thing than a good vs bad thing.


The analogy doesn't quite work. The undead cyborg is not more efficient than the robot; you basically built the robot anyway. Necromancy spells ARE more efficient; the results are permanent, reasonably inexpensive, and don't require the massive infrastructure to fund golem-making and other constructs.

Efficiency IS a virtue when it comes to resource-management.

The point rather being that it's evil to exploit helpless others just because it is more cost efficient to YOU.


Besides, I didn't animate your grandfather without consent. Either you sold his corpse to me for it, or I paid him before he died and got permission to do so after he passed on. (Quoth the ethical necromancer.)

This pretty much does not happen in a Default Campaign setting. Last I checked, the rules for buying corpses is BoVD, which doesn't help your claim that there's nothing evil about necromancy.

Outside the book all about doing evil things, there isn't much expectation that anyone would buy or sell corpses, much less be willing to give up their peace and sanctity of a peaceful rest after death.

I find the Default Setting for D&D to be more supportive of the mythical interpretations of Egypt or the Nordic inspired Skyrim ideas: if you don't leave the dead to rest in peace, it can cause them to "naturally" rise about and defend their grave. In that setting, people aren't going to be willingly handing corpses (their own or someone they love's) over for the purpose of animation, not any more than they'll willingly hand themselves into slavery with effectively no opportunity to rest.

And yes, by the way, I agree that slavery is VERY cost efficient. Of course, the real problem is that there's no *other* implied negative impact of using necromancy.

I still think the intent and spirit of the game is for the DM to impose a setting-relevant explanation, but I think it warps the intended balance of the game to simply ignore the social stigma just because there is no prepackaged component for it.

[Telok]

I'd be careful of equating pos/neg energy as heat, cold, fire, water type things. There are people around here who understand thermodynamics, so you could end up with the planar equivalent of a heat pump.

That said, if you're going with the RAW "casting [evil] spells will eventually make you evil without regards to intent or outcome" then you also must accept that casting [good] spells, with good/neutral intent and good/positive outcomes, will RAW cancel out. Even working under the assumption that there can be some sort of "build up" or "pollution" environmental effect of negative energy opens up the possibility of simply negating it by adding more positive energy to that environment.

One last note is that skeletons and zombies don't have special senses and unerringly follow verbal orders. Even if you assume (for some reason) that mindless created undead attack without orders, a wool filled leather sack over the head stops them from perceving anything to attack. You can't give them more orders after that (unless you build in a speaking tube or something) but it removes their ability to locate anything to act on.

Plus skeletal horses are really useful, even if all you do is lock them in a huge hamster wheel to create a perpetual motion machine.

Edit: And for some reason I never, personally, considered animating the corpses of people. It simply has too many social and cultural issues surrounding it. Horses, dogs, monkies, and other animals work just as well or better and don't have the same ick factor attached to them.

[Psyren]

That said, if you're going with the RAW "casting [evil] spells will eventually make you evil without regards to intent or outcome" then you also must accept that casting [good] spells, with good/neutral intent and good/positive outcomes, will RAW cancel out. Even working under the assumption that there can be some sort of "build up" or "pollution" environmental effect of negative energy opens up the possibility of simply negating it by adding more positive energy to that environment.

BoED pg. 7: "Good spells don’t have any redemptive influence on those who cast them, for better or worse." They can't be used to cancel out evil acts.

Also, note that per BoVD, if you animate undead you're actually committing two evil acts, not just one (the animation itself, and the [Evil] spell used to do so.)



One last note is that skeletons and zombies don't have special senses and unerringly follow verbal orders. Even if you assume (for some reason) that mindless created undead attack without orders, a wool filled leather sack over the head stops them from perceving anything to attack. You can't give them more orders after that (unless you build in a speaking tube or something) but it removes their ability to locate anything to act on.

What makes you think they use their heads to perceive anything? Are you saying that a headless zombie is blind and deaf, and takes the appropriate penalties? What about a Creeping Crawler (zombie hand) that has no head at all?

[King of Nowhere]

He did. I had to edit in a link, here it is again. LINK (http://i.imgur.com/rAdm2.png)

I meant, before they wrecked his whole plan. Like, as soon as those dumb adventurers overthrew the first democracy, somebody should have told the necromancer, and that necromancer shouldd have found a way to contact the adventurers and solve the question like responsible adults. For that matter, didn't anyone among the peasants ever told the adventurers that undead improved their living conditions? did those adventurers never ask?

that whole campaign seem to require a lot of collective stupidity to work. unfortunately, collective stupidity applies to most adventurers, ready to follow any plot hook without further questioning. I include myself in that category. but really, someone among the population or the npcs should have told them.

[Necroticplague]

What makes you think they use their heads to perceive anything? Are you saying that a headless zombie is blind and deaf, and takes the appropriate penalties? What about a Creeping Crawler (zombie hand) that has no head at all?
Libris Mortis, in 'undead senses' does.

The energy of animation extends to the undead's organs of [sense]....
The only exceptions that doesn't have the above statement that's relevant (thus stating it still used it's organ), is Lifesense. So yes, a headless zombie is blind, thought it might retain some ability to sense living things via the glow of their life.

Crawling Claws, on the other hand (heh) have Blindsight exactly to get around this problem. They can't see normally, so have an alternative sense to get around this.

[Psyren]

Libris Mortis, in 'undead senses' does.

You have that backwards; it says that their organs (if they have them) are powered by negative energy, sure. But it does not say that they need those parts to perceive things. You can reanimate headless zombies and skeletons just fine and they will not have 50% miss chance on everything they attack, or be impervious to your commands.



The only exceptions that doesn't have the above statement that's relevant (thus stating it still used it's organ), is Lifesense. So yes, a headless zombie is blind, thought it might retain some ability to sense living things via the glow of their life.

As I understand it, Lifesense is a specific ability in Libris Mortis that can operate through walls and such. It is separate from an undead's ability to simply (and inexplicably) see and hear.

[Necroticplague]

You have that backwards; it says that their organs (if they have them) are powered by negative energy, sure. But it does not say that they need those parts to perceive things. You can reanimate headless zombies and skeletons just fine and they will not have 50% miss chance on everything they attack, or be impervious to your commands.
Oh really? Then what does this line a sentence or two later mean?

As with sight, however, if an undead physically loses a particular organ, it can no longer use that particular ability.
Sounds like an even more explicit 'yes, a zombie needs its eyes to see, tongue to taste, act.'

[Fizban]

Not sure how this is a question.
There are no rules for running overland: the running rules are written without regard for the idea that a creature could run indefinitely, assuming a creature must stop eventually. The hustling overland rules give out cumulative damage, so a DM that stops to think could easily choose to apply that to overland runners. Undead are immune to nonlethal, but mounts take lethal damage from overland hustling. Thus, a creature with no con score could run indefinitely, until it pounds itself into dust under the weight of its rider. Alternatively, there's precedent in giving the rider penalties for riding a galloping mount all day in Arms and Equipment guide, under either the Horse Golem or skeleton horse. Either way, it's not quite ironclad enough for me to let it pass unmentioned.

So make one up. The fact that the game intentionally leaves room for you to fill in the gap doesn't seem to be much of a game problem as much as their lack of communicating this need.
That's at the heart of every single RAW argument ever though: many people refuse to accept anything in the game that is not explicitly spelled out, even when the game does explicitly say it's up to the DM (such as every single ruling of the game). Saying the game left it intentionally blank just means those people will declare the game wrong for leaving it blank, which is what some people have done here. I agree with having the DM make the choice, but I don't think this argument is going to convince those of that mind.

[Psyren]

Oh really? Then what does this line a sentence or two later mean?

Sounds like an even more explicit 'yes, a zombie needs its eyes to see, tongue to taste, act.'

Very well - I'm still not convinced that a headless corpse that was turned into a zombie or skeleton would be incapable of receiving commands or perceiving targets, but I'll concede that was likely the intent.

But whether you can feasibly bag the heads of every zombie laborer in your kingdom is a moot point - the docile, controlled zombies and skeletons were never the problem in the first place. Even if they can see everything going on around them, they're not going to cause trouble. It's the uncontrolled undead that spontaneously arise that are the real issue.

[Luccan]

BoED pg. 7: "Good spells don’t have any redemptive influence on those who cast them, for better or worse." They can't be used to cancel out evil acts.

Also, note that per BoVD, if you animate undead you're actually committing two evil acts, not just one (the animation itself, and the [Evil] spell used to do so.)


A part of me wonders if the reason these rules exist is because a lot of the most powerful monsters tend towards good. If Evil didn't operate on totally unintuitive rules (evil spells corrupt and no amount of good magic can undo that... What.), the good dragons, good giants and titans, and powerful good outsiders would have eradicated it eons ago

[Psyren]

A part of me wonders if the reason these rules exist is because a lot of the most powerful monsters tend towards good. If Evil didn't operate on totally unintuitive rules (evil spells corrupt and no amount of good magic can undo that... What.), the good dragons, good giants and titans, and powerful good outsiders would have eradicated it eons ago

Ooh yeah, a game where heroes are utterly superfluous, sounds like a really fun time to me!

Less facetiously, those rules do serve a purpose. If you didn't have them, people would be able to kick puppies down the street all day long, spam Bless Water or something a bunch of times before going to bed, then thumb their noses at Pharasma/Kelemvor/etc. before waltzing into a Good or Neutral afterlife at the end of it all. It would be standard optimization practice in moments. Hell, the go-to strategy of Chain Gating Solars would be even better by guaranteeing you a cushy spot in the upper planes regardless of your other deeds. Instead, the way to atone for your evil deeds is to actually atone, and refrain from continuing to do evil. Funny, that.

And of course it's not fair that evil is so much easier to do than good. "There wouldn't need to be paladins if the world was, like, fair." (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1032.html)

[Pleh]

Sounds like an even more explicit 'yes, a zombie needs its eyes to see, tongue to taste, act.'

If this is true, then why are skeletons not listed as being naturally blind? Why are skeletons able to do anything at all?

Edit: I think that passage in LM was saying that animated undead can be disabled. The spell animates them as they are, but cannot help them compensate for further damage.

A zombie animated with its eyes already lost takes no penalties, but losing them later disrupts its perceptions.


That's at the heart of every single RAW argument ever though: many people refuse to accept anything in the game that is not explicitly spelled out, even when the game does explicitly say it's up to the DM (such as every single ruling of the game). Saying the game left it intentionally blank just means those people will declare the game wrong for leaving it blank, which is what some people have done here. I agree with having the DM make the choice, but I don't think this argument is going to convince those of that mind.

They may not be totally wrong in calling the game wrong. If leaving it blank causes trouble, should the makers not have just filled it in? It's not like it would prevent DMs from making adjustments.

Maybe it was a bad design, even if it's not as bad as they bemoan.

[Psyren]

They didn't leave it blank. Segev just wants a direct causation (hence the "breaking an orphan's finger" or "damaging the soul" effects being added to animate dead) where none is needed. They did explain why it's evil, he (and some others) simply don't like the explanation given.

[Luccan]

Ooh yeah, a game where heroes are utterly superfluous, sounds like a really fun time to me!

Less facetiously, those rules do serve a purpose. If you didn't have them, people would be able to kick puppies down the street all day long, spam Bless Water or something a bunch of times before going to bed, then thumb their noses at Pharasma/Kelemvor/etc. before waltzing into a Good or Neutral afterlife at the end of it all. It would be standard optimization practice in moments. Hell, the go-to strategy of Chain Gating Solars would be even better by guaranteeing you a cushy spot in the upper planes regardless of your other deeds. Instead, the way to atone for your evil deeds is to actually atone, and refrain from continuing to do evil. Funny, that.

And of course it's not fair that evil is so much easier to do than good. "There wouldn't need to be paladins if the world was, like, fair." (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1032.html)

But I'm being somewhat serious. Is the overwhelming power of Good creatures why Evil gets to basically play by its own rules? Was that even taken into consideration or is it just playing on fantasy tropes? Kind of a tangent, but it occurred to me. Also, does this mean the existence or creation of Necropolitans is inherently evil?

[Psyren]

But I'm being somewhat serious. Is the overwhelming power of Good creatures why Evil gets to basically play by its own rules? Was that even taken into consideration or is it just playing on fantasy tropes? Kind of a tangent, but it occurred to me.

Individually, good creatures are stronger, but they are vastly outnumbered by demons. So much so, that they needed to enlist other evil creatures (i.e. Devils, via the Pact Primeval) to save themselves (and us) from being overwhelmed. And the Devils - as you'd expect from beings of Law - are actually upholding their end of the bargain and keeping the Demons in check; if it weren't for the Blood War, reality would have already have drowned in demons and been snuffed out.

And even after all that - heroes are still needed, including organizations like the Harpers or Pathfinders, without whom these settings would be doomed anyway.


Also, does this mean the existence or creation of Necropolitans is inherently evil?

It's implied to be. Libris Mortis:

"Upon hearing the petitioner’s last breath, the ritual leader calls forth the names of evil powers and gods to forge a link with the Negative Energy Plane, and then impales the petitioner."

Individual necropolitans can choose their own alignment, but the ritual itself appears to have an effect similar to animating undead any other way, and would be looked upon as such by the churches that care about that sort of thing.

[Zanos]

Not really. Unless you mean in the same sense that physics is arbitrary, because why the fundamental forces are as they are is less important than what the consequences of them are. But that also illustrates the distinction I'm making: objective morality that is internally consistent and coherent with explicit results that work together is okay if the question of "well, WHY does it work out that way?" is "because this fundamental postulate is true." The problem I have is explicitly that this is not being treated that way. The "because it is" actually snarls the consistency.
I mean in the same sense that physics is arbitrary, because alignments are physical forces. Why does fireball have the [fire] tag? Because it uses fire energy. Why does any evil spell have the [Evil] tag? Because it uses evil energy. Blasphemy, Holy Word, Dictum, and Word of Chaos are all pretty much the same spell. They have different alignment tags because they use differently aligned energy. But hitting a neutral person with Holy or Blasphemy has the same effect.

You can touch, taste, and build things out of solidified Evil. It is a physical force. Things can be Evil just because they are when you work off that kind of setting.

[Telok]

BoED pg. 7: "Good spells don’t have any redemptive influence on those who cast them, for better or worse." They can't be used to cancel out evil acts.

As, so I wrong (by a book I have ever and ever less reason to read) because good/neutral acts with evil spells make people evil but good/neutral acts with good spells cannot make people good.

Even with a person's moral sports team thus decided it does not address the second portion of what I was considering. One of the persistant complaints about widespread undead use is that the negative energy in some way pollutes the world and creates natural, free willed undead. While doing something like distributing a barrel of cure serious wounds oils (because most people can't use wands and potions can't be used to fight wights) or some healing belts would drive up the cost of each perpetual motion box, doind so would logically offset or negate any negative energy release with a corresponding increase in positive energy. Except of course for the fact that RAW and logic are often not on speaking terms with each other.

You know, calling them pos/neg energy may have been a mistake. The urge to try and make a planar thermocouple is pretty strong now.

[zergling.exe]

You know, calling them pos/neg energy may have been a mistake. The urge to try and make a planar thermocouple is pretty strong now.

I think I read somewhere that energy actually does flow from the PoPE through the rest of the planes and then to the PoNE, but then again, I may be misremembering that. Though I'm not really sure why you'd want a planar thermometer? Did you mean something else instead? Or was my brief google of thermocouple mislead.

[Luccan]

Oo, this thread gave me an idea. Have a campaign world where creating undead (mindless ones, at least) isn't inherently evil. But, it still leads to the creation of more undead and a sort of neg. energy rot. But in this world, that energy can be counteracted. Most regions just don't bother with the hassle and outlaw necromancy (at least the raising of the dead) as a result. But some regions make use of undead, it's just heavily regulated in order to control the flow of neg. energy. So you can send the PCs on quests like "arrest the rogue necromancer, because he's operating without oversight or a license", rather than "kill the necromancer that lives in the woods because he raises the dead". Plus you can have these regions undergoing a sort of "Undead Revolution", where simple tasks and menial labor can be handled by the dead, leading to more free time for the lower class and an explosion of learning, art, and cultural growth... Yeah, that's going in my next game.

[arkangel111]

I'm sure its been said but...

I think the morality and social stigma is being completely glossed over in your original assumptions. This is a ROLE playing game after all. These undead, even mindless ones were once living entities with friends and family. An overlord could work to change this stigma but that would have to be an entire campaign itself, unless you are in a homebrew world and then it doesn't matter.
I mean think about it really, would you want a bunch of shambling corpses in your back yard endlessly turning a crank for power? especially if it were a deceased relative? your grandmother? your child? A lover? We don't even have necromancer's in our world raising the dead for evil purposes and the vast majority of the population would never want such a thing.
Too many people get stuck on the ROLL playing and forget to give their character life. Its easy for my robot of a PC that I claim is human to have no feelings for anything at all in life except money because he might as well be a mindless undead too. I just want more money to roll more dice and be better than the guy sitting across from me.
Realistically, if you wanted to do this in an already developed world your first goal would have to be to eliminate ALL other necromancers that didn't agree with you, then you would have to spend 15 - 20 years slowly acclimating the world to the use of undead for menial tasks. Most likely starting with getting the rich on your side. After 30-40 years you could likely start your economical takeover. The prime reason for this is because you have to let the old thoughts die out and let the young be completely used to it. I mean the TV was introduced in the 40s and it is a completely harmless device that doesn't require raising the dead and it took nearly 20 years to make it mainstream and even then there were naysayers (which were right btw, but i love my TV anyways).

my $.02

[Luccan]

I'm sure its been said but...

I think the morality and social stigma is being completely glossed over in your original assumptions. This is a ROLE playing game after all. These undead, even mindless ones were once living entities with friends and family. An overlord could work to change this stigma but that would have to be an entire campaign itself, unless you are in a homebrew world and then it doesn't matter.
I mean think about it really, would you want a bunch of shambling corpses in your back yard endlessly turning a crank for power? especially if it were a deceased relative? your grandmother? your child? A lover? We don't even have necromancer's in our world raising the dead for evil purposes and the vast majority of the population would never want such a thing.
Too many people get stuck on the ROLL playing and forget to give their character life. Its easy for my robot of a PC that I claim is human to have no feelings for anything at all in life except money because he might as well be a mindless undead too. I just want more money to roll more dice and be better than the guy sitting across from me.
Realistically, if you wanted to do this in an already developed world your first goal would have to be to eliminate ALL other necromancers that didn't agree with you, then you would have to spend 15 - 20 years slowly acclimating the world to the use of undead for menial tasks. Most likely starting with getting the rich on your side. After 30-40 years you could likely start your economical takeover. The prime reason for this is because you have to let the old thoughts die out and let the young be completely used to it. I mean the TV was introduced in the 40s and it is a completely harmless device that doesn't require raising the dead and it took nearly 20 years to make it mainstream and even then there were naysayers (which were right btw, but i love my TV anyways).

my $.02

That's almost certainly the main reason it's seen as evil. The main problem people are having is that the mere creation of undead is a big E kind of Evil. We're talking on the scale of a cosmic morality where creating undead means that it's a little more likely something is going to eat your village and possibly the souls of everyone who lives there. But many feel the explanation given is inadequate or illogical. Especially since no matter what you do with them, casting the spells damages both your soul and brings a nearly irreparable amount of Evil into the world.

[Telok]

I think I read somewhere that energy actually does flow from the PoPE through the rest of the planes and then to the PoNE, but then again, I may be misremembering that. Though I'm not really sure why you'd want a planar thermometer? Did you mean something else instead? Or was my brief google of thermocouple mislead.

The wikipedia page for them is the second hit so you're probably not misled. They're the electrical equivalent of a Carnot engine, using a heat slope the generate power. You'd be tapping the flow of + to - to generate work skipping the moving parts of the usual engine type.

Hmm. Sun god temple in one place, necromancer dungeon in another, flow of adventurers carrying healing potions, siphon off a few adventurers to got some work done... Adventurers are the transmission medium of power between planes?

[Psyren]

But many feel the explanation given is inadequate or illogical.

And many see it as neither and are fine with it.


Oo, this thread gave me an idea. Have a campaign world where creating undead (mindless ones, at least) isn't inherently evil. But, it still leads to the creation of more undead and a sort of neg. energy rot. But in this world, that energy can be counteracted. Most regions just don't bother with the hassle and outlaw necromancy (at least the raising of the dead) as a result. But some regions make use of undead, it's just heavily regulated in order to control the flow of neg. energy. So you can send the PCs on quests like "arrest the rogue necromancer, because he's operating without oversight or a license", rather than "kill the necromancer that lives in the woods because he raises the dead". Plus you can have these regions undergoing a sort of "Undead Revolution", where simple tasks and menial labor can be handled by the dead, leading to more free time for the lower class and an explosion of learning, art, and cultural growth... Yeah, that's going in my next game.

Sure, have at it.



Even with a person's moral sports team thus decided it does not address the second portion of what I was considering. One of the persistant complaints about widespread undead use is that the negative energy in some way pollutes the world and creates natural, free willed undead. While doing something like distributing a barrel of cure serious wounds oils (because most people can't use wands and potions can't be used to fight wights) or some healing belts would drive up the cost of each perpetual motion box, doind so would logically offset or negate any negative energy release with a corresponding increase in positive energy. Except of course for the fact that RAW and logic are often not on speaking terms with each other.

If you hand a bunch of commoners cure oils to fight the wights you're creating, you're just going to end up with more wights :smalltongue:

[Luccan]

And many see it as neither and are fine with it.


Right, but I was kind of attempting to explain why this thread is still ongoing. If everyone agreed it was fine, it probably would have ended already.

[RedMage125]

Right, but I was kind of attempting to explain why this thread is still ongoing. If everyone agreed it was fine, it probably would have ended already.

The problem is that the people who find it "inadequate or illogical" find it so because they have concrete, hard set, pre-conceived notions about the nature of undeath or the nature of evil, and they complain that the default rules don't conform to THEIR specific perceptions.

As opposed to, you know, examining the rules and reasons given in them, and drawing conclusions AFTERWARDS.

As far as your concept, you may like this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?335215-Character-Concepts-Non-Evil-Necromancer). It's something I came up with a few years ago, a lot like what you're proposing. The meat of the proposal is in the spoiler block in the first post.

[AnimeTheCat]

Look, I understand that there are reasons given and that undeath and undead in general are just automatically evil. I understand that. I'm trying to wrap my head around the fact that animated bones are considered evil. Earlier in the thread we discussed that it couldn't be simply from them being animated by negative energy, because negative energy is not evil in alignment. It has been thrown out there that negative energy causes pollution in the world and makes things more evil, but again that doesn't make sense because negative energy isn't evil in alignment. It was brought up that skeletons (or other undead) being present in high volumes can cause the spontaneous creation of other undead. I can't see this as innately evil because we still haven't answered why the skeleton or other undead is evil.

We can go in to why specific undead are evil. Shadows are intelligent beings that seek to kill, spawn, and destroy anything living and have the capability to do so. Skeletons and zombies don't though... they're mindless so they literally lack the ability to know right from wrong. Vampires must drain the blood of victims to live, but what if the individual willingly offers up their neck and the vampire willingly decides not to kill said person? Is the vampire really evil? They're living in symbiosis with a living being and ensuring that being is taken care of. There isn't a rule for that other than "Vampire are just evil".

I'm not saying that when I play in games I just use the spells and don't expect negative impacts to my alignment... I'm trying to figure out what specifically about animating a skeleton with Animate Dead makes those magically animated bones any different from using animate object or something. It seems implied that the difference is the negative energy as that is the only real difference between the spells, but negative energy isn't evil.

I've read the theories in LM, but less than them being unsatisfactory, those are theories and are literally called out by the book to be theories. I would just excpect that if something is listed as being [evil] there would be a concrete reason for it.

[Psyren]

Look, I understand that there are reasons given and that undeath and undead in general are just automatically evil. I understand that. I'm trying to wrap my head around the fact that animated bones are considered evil. Earlier in the thread we discussed that it couldn't be simply from them being animated by negative energy, because negative energy is not evil in alignment. It has been thrown out there that negative energy causes pollution in the world and makes things more evil, but again that doesn't make sense because negative energy isn't evil in alignment.

You're right, negative energy is not inherently evil, just like fire is not inherently evil. But starting random fires in the town square (or the that of the town next door, or the next) would be, and that is what your anchoring of "benign" negative energy on this plane eventually does.

What's more, unlike fire, negative energy just doesn't belong here; it's sole purpose is to destroy life, and no matter how many tiny instances of it you're capable of controlling via reanimation, there will always be more that you can't. Thus the overriding message of D&D's Good organizations is "leave it the hell alone."


It was brought up that skeletons (or other undead) being present in high volumes can cause the spontaneous creation of other undead. I can't see this as innately evil because we still haven't answered why the skeleton or other undead is evil.

We can go in to why specific undead are evil. Shadows are intelligent beings that seek to kill, spawn, and destroy anything living and have the capability to do so. Skeletons and zombies don't though... they're mindless so they literally lack the ability to know right from wrong. Vampires must drain the blood of victims to live, but what if the individual willingly offers up their neck and the vampire willingly decides not to kill said person? Is the vampire really evil? They're living in symbiosis with a living being and ensuring that being is taken care of. There isn't a rule for that other than "Vampire are just evil".

Vampires and other intelligent spawned undead trending towards evil are explained at considerable length in Complete Divine:


Some undead such as vampires and wights create spawn out of a character they kill, trapping the soul of the deceased in a body animated by negative energy and controlled by a malign intelligence. Sometimes the undead creature can access the memories of the deceased (vampires, spectres, ghouls, and ghasts can), and sometimes they can't (as with shadows, Wights, and wraiths).

The "malign intelligence" is doing the driving, and is the source of the creature's evil deeds. The victim's own soul is a prisoner and has no control over the new creature's actions. Note that the Giant uses this very interpretation for his own vampires (Malack, Durkon etc.)

Note also that the Complete Divine passage is not described as a "theory" since you seem to be getting hung up on that word.



I'm not saying that when I play in games I just use the spells and don't expect negative impacts to my alignment... I'm trying to figure out what specifically about animating a skeleton with Animate Dead makes those magically animated bones any different from using animate object or something. It seems implied that the difference is the negative energy as that is the only real difference between the spells, but negative energy isn't evil.

See above, and also see the rest of the thread.

[Necroticplague]

The problem is that the people who find it "inadequate or illogical" find it so because they have concrete, hard set, pre-conceived notions about the nature of undeath or the nature of evil, and they complain that the default rules don't conform to THEIR specific perceptions.
In addition to the assumption that Good and Evil, physical cosmic forces, would line up with mortal good and evil, moral positions. While the unfortunate choice of names makes this understandable, I find it's much easier to be at peace that cosmic forces have much bigger concerns than mortal morals. Thus, Alignment and Morality, while correlating somewhat, can be different things.

[Cosi]

In addition to the assumption that Good and Evil, physical cosmic forces, would line up with mortal good and evil, moral positions. While the unfortunate choice of names makes this understandable, I find it's much easier to be at peace that cosmic forces have much bigger concerns than mortal morals. Thus, Alignment and Morality, while correlating somewhat, can be different things.

Uh, no. If you are going to call something "good", it should be good. Just like if you call something "a sword", it should be a sword, not "be vaguely sword-ish if you squint". If you want your cosmic forces to be weird abstract things beyond human concerns, don't name them after human concerns.

[Necroticplague]

Uh, no. If you are going to call something "good", it should be good. Just like if you call something "a sword", it should be a sword, not "be vaguely sword-ish if you squint". If you want your cosmic forces to be weird abstract things beyond human concerns, don't name them after human concerns.

Indeed, I did say that the choice of names was unfortunate, did I not?

[ErebusVonMori]

The better question is if Good isn't good, and Evil isn't evil, then why should anyone on the Prime give even half a damn about Good and Evil

[Necroticplague]

The better question is if Good isn't good, and Evil isn't evil, then why should anyone on the Prime give even half a damn about Good and EvilMost don't. Heck, most people are entirely ignorant of the cosmic Good and Evil. The ones who actually know and care is mostly just the servants of one side or the other, which can be easily motivated by hopes of rewards in the next life.

[ErebusVonMori]

My point is you can use undead for good if not Good.

[Cosi]

My point is you can use undead for good if not Good.

Yeah, I agree that "maybe cosmic Good isn't human good" is a point you can make, but it kind of undermines the whole argument that making undead is Evil. If "Good" and "Evil" are just poorly named descriptors, we shouldn't care that creating undead is "Evil" any more that we care that fireball is "Fire" or sepia snake sigil is "Creation".

[Psyren]

My point is you can use undead for good if not Good.

BoVD pg. 8: "Even if they are commanded to do something good, undead invariably bring negative energy into the world, which makes it a darker and more evil place." This has been cited previously.

The "darker and more evil place" comes from the thinning of the veil and subsequent increase in spontaneously appearing uncontrolled undead, as discussed in LM.

[Cosi]

BoVD pg. 8: "Even if they are commanded to do something good, undead invariably bring negative energy into the world, which makes it a darker and more evil place." This has been cited previously.

The "darker and more evil place" comes from the thinning of the veil and subsequent increase in spontaneously appearing uncontrolled undead, as discussed in LM.

I'm pretty sure not everyone considers actions that cause pollution automatically evil. That's a position you can take, but it's far from universal.

[Quarian Rex]

Shadows are intelligent beings that seek to kill, spawn, and destroy anything living and have the capability to do so. Skeletons and zombies don't though... they're mindless so they literally lack the ability to know right from wrong.

I think that this right here is what's hanging you up. You keep seeing animated dead as nothing more than robots. They're not. They are Evil. Neutral Evil to be exact, the evilest of the evil, unfettered by either Chaos or Law. If left uncontrolled they do not just stand there like puppets waiting a puppeteer, they seek violence of the most grievous sort. They inflict bloodshed and suffering, not to fulfill a physical need (skeletons and zombies have none) but because that is their singular desire.

Also, you seem to be under the impression that Mindlessness and innocence are the same thing. They are not. Slaughtering the living is not an act committed due to ignorance of a better way, for the animated dead there is no other way. And since they are Mindless they cannot even pretend otherwise. In a world where tangible evil can be infused into inanimate objects, animated dead are those objects granted the ability to act of their own volition.

Ignore the whole magical pollution idea. That is just something to justify the trope of the land reflecting the evil of the ruler (Mordor didn't always look like that...). Ask yourself more practical questions. Why aren't you just using golems and other constructs? They do exactly what you want and they have the precise moral neutrality that you are looking for. Is it because animated dead are more economical? Yes it is. That is because they are not being animated purely through magic (as the more expensive golems and other constructs are) but also through tapping the negative energy plane, a realm without moral inclination but only hunger and entropy. Placing that hunger in a static, yet animate, mortal shell results in an unrestrained malice directed toward the living that is the very essence of Evil. Much like summoning demons to fight ones enemies, creating undead is still Evil regardless of how well you control them.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't really look like you have much of an objection to undead=evil. It seems more like you have an objection to the DM declaring that you are evil regardless of the actions you take and that is really a discussion that needs to be had between the two of you. If your objection is to neighboring societies not being onboard with the undead utopia... you are playing a game whose content is dramatic conflict. Welcome to being a content creator.

[Divayth Fyr]

If left uncontrolled they do not just stand there like puppets waiting a puppeteer, they seek violence of the most grievous sort. They inflict bloodshed and suffering, not to fulfill a physical need (skeletons and zombies have none) but because that is their singular desire.

Actually, underlined is exactly what skeletons explicitely do and what zombies are implied to do.

https://i.imgur.com/cdrnnYe.jpg

[Cosi]

Ignore the whole magical pollution idea. That is just something to justify the trope of the land reflecting the evil of the ruler (Mordor didn't always look like that...). Ask yourself more practical questions. Why aren't you just using golems and other constructs? They do exactly what you want and they have the precise moral neutrality that you are looking for. Is it because animated dead are more economical? Yes it is. That is because they are not being animated purely through magic (as the more expensive golems and other constructs are) but also through tapping the negative energy plane, a realm without moral inclination but only hunger and entropy. Placing that hunger in a static, yet animate, mortal shell results in an unrestrained malice directed toward the living that is the very essence of Evil. Much like summoning demons to fight ones enemies, creating undead is still Evil regardless of how well you control them.

But if "Evil" is a cosmic force, rather than an objective moral judgment, why is "that's Evil" a sufficient, or even meaningful, argument against doing something? If Evil is a descriptor of the same variety as Fire or Cold, why is it any more meaningful to us as a moral judgment?

[Psyren]

Actually, underlined is exactly what skeletons explicitely do and what zombies are implied to do.

https://i.imgur.com/cdrnnYe.jpg

For starters, that line is contradicted by all the numerous examples in APs, modules, and setting descriptions of skeletons and zombies who attack travelers and PCs without being given any orders to do so. For example - the Battle of Bones is a cursed region in Western Faerun that is overrun with undead, and serves as "hunting grounds for zombies, skeletons, ghouls, wights, wraiths, spectres and even liches." (FRCS pg. 222).

Second, even if you were correct and there's no possible way that skeletons and zombies can attack without being told to do so, those comprise a whopping two undead out of dozens, maybe hundreds printed in the game. Whatever you think about those two standing around if given no orders, does not apply to all the other undead out there.

[Necroticplague]

Also, you seem to be under the impression that Mindlessness and innocence are the same thing. They are not. Slaughtering the living is not an act committed due to ignorance of a better way, for the animated dead there is no other way. And since they are Mindless they cannot even pretend otherwise. In a world where tangible evil can be infused into inanimate objects, animated dead are those objects granted the ability to act of their own volition.

No, mindlessness and innocence aren't the same thing. However, the SRD does have something very interesting on how intelligence relates to alignment:

Animals and other creatures incapable of moral action are neutral. Dogs may be obedient and cats free-spirited, but they do not have the moral capacity to be truly lawful or chaotic.
So it's literally saying a dog, something that has a mind, cannot actually have a non-neutral alignment because it's not smart enough to make actually lawful decisions. What does that say about creatures that literally have no mind or violation of their own?

[Cosi]

For starters, that line is contradicted by all the numerous examples in APs, modules, and setting descriptions of skeletons and zombies who attack travelers and PCs without being given any orders to do so. For example - the Battle of Bones is a cursed region in Western Faerun that is overrun with undead, and serves as "hunting grounds for zombies, skeletons, ghouls, wights, wraiths, spectres and even liches." (FRCS pg. 222).

Pretty sure the way sources work (at least in 3e) puts the MM ahead of those books for adjudicating contradictions. Also, skeletons totally can hunt. They just have to be ordered to hunt. By, for example, those liches. Or Ghoul Necromancers. Or maybe some vampires. Or their controllers died.


Second, even if you were correct and there's no possible way that skeletons and zombies can attack without being told to do so, those comprise a whopping two undead out of dozens, maybe hundreds printed in the game. Whatever you think about those two standing around if given no orders, does not apply to all the other undead out there.

Okay, so it's evil to create those other kinds of undead. Doesn't make it evil to create skeletons. That's just how groups work. The fact that some members of the set "Undead" have a trait doesn't mean they all do. You're essentially saying:

A is a kind of C
B is a kind of C
B is has property D
Therefore, A has property D

Which is fallacious. If you want to be specific, I think it's Hasty Generalization.


So it's literally saying a dog, something that has a mind, cannot actually have a non-neutral alignment because it's not smart enough to make actually lawful decisions. What does that say about creatures that literally have no mind or violation of their own?

That the rules for the morality of undead are inconsistent because the people writing them couldn't decide if PCs Necromancers were supposed to be okay or not?

[Segev]

See, this is something that I really do not like. I think that this removes all of the moral ambiguity from the spell. Changing the spell like that means that having these kinds of arguments in game would be impossible. You can't pretend to believe that your undead manned farm is a positive force in the world when, if you listen really, really, carefully you can still hear the cries of the orphan souls that were used to make them.It having the [evil] label is supposed to remove all moral ambiguity from it. The fact that it can be read to introduce moral ambiguity is dreadful design.

May as well suggest that the Necrotic line of spells should be [good] instead of [evil], because that would introduce moral ambiguity.


But it is possible to say that. In this universe, this is the RAW result that people animating undead cause. The global warming analogy someone made earlier is apt - sure an individual driving on the highway in a clunker that is spewing exhaust everywhere probably isn't going to destabilize the planet on its own, but they're still going to get dirty looks and possibly even pulled over.Nonsense. If you want to use the global warming analogy, driving anything on the road other than an electric car charged only on power grids that get their energy solely from nuclear power plants and which had batteries built strictly by plants which capture all waste product from the chemical processes in balloons that are sealed forever underground (read: none of them) is equivalent to casting animate dead every time that car is taken on the road.

And yet, no functioning human being feels a moral pang every time they climb in their car.


It's not relevant because it's a spell that has nothing to do with undead, in a book that does nothing to contradict Libris Mortis or BoVD in any way, written by somebody who had nothing to do with writing either of those books. You might as well be saying "But I brought up potatoes earlier in this undead debate, why aren't you acknowledging the potatoes? Stop declaring the potatoes irrelevant and focus on the potatoes!"It is relevant, because it uses exactly the same rationale as to why it's "good" that animate dead uses as to why it's evil.

Pretending it's a non sequitor doesn't make it so. Refusing to address the point I make about why it's relevant by pulling a Darth Ultron and arguing something else isn't exactly persuasive.

The point I'm making with it has nothing to do with animating the dead in any specific sense, and more to do with the philosophical underpinning of the justification for why questioning the declaration that animate dead is evil.

[Psyren]

And yet, no functioning human being feels a moral pang every time they climb in their car.

1) Whether they feel guilt is irrelevant to the damage they're causing. Though, you've just exposed the entire point of Good churches and deities, (i.e. to point out the issue and create that guilt) so congratulations?

2) You're right, it's not a perfect analogy, because spontaneously occurring undead are far worse.


It is relevant, because it uses exactly the same rationale as to why it's "good" that animate dead uses as to why it's evil.

As mentioned above, BoED states that casting [Good] spells cannot redeem you. So no, even the book you keep trying to bring up does not help your case one iota.

[Pleh]

No, mindlessness and innocence aren't the same thing. However, the SRD does have something very interesting on how intelligence relates to alignment:

So it's literally saying a dog, something that has a mind, cannot actually have a non-neutral alignment because it's not smart enough to make actually lawful decisions. What does that say about creatures that literally have no mind or violation of their own?

A general rule is trumped by a specific rule. Generally animals are neutral because they aren't sapient, but mindless undead are still specifically in the evil alignment. They are specifically a mindless evil force.

[RedMage125]

No, mindlessness and innocence aren't the same thing. However, the SRD does have something very interesting on how intelligence relates to alignment:

So it's literally saying a dog, something that has a mind, cannot actually have a non-neutral alignment because it's not smart enough to make actually lawful decisions. What does that say about creatures that literally have no mind or violation of their own?


A general rule is trumped by a specific rule. Generally animals are neutral because they aren't sapient, but mindless undead are still specifically in the evil alignment. They are specifically a mindless evil force.

It's more than that. It is Specific Overrides General, but there's actually another rule that specifically trumps the one about intelligence and alignment.

And that's the rules regarding creatures to whom Evil is an inherent part of their nature. Mostly, we think about fiends, who are literally MADE of evil. But in the instance of mindless undead, it has to do with the magicks that are animating them.

Look, we've established that animating undead is an objectively Evil act, yes? And that all spells that create undead have the [Evil] tag, right? Those things are consistent. Therefore the magicks that keep a zombie or skeleton ambulatory are Evil magicks, right? So Evil is inherent to their nature, not because their flesh is solidified Evil (like a fiend), but because there is Evil magic persistently present in their systems.

Make sense now? It's not that Neutral Evil mindless undead are violating the general rules about intelligence and alignment, but rather that they are SPECIFICALLY beholden to the rule about creatures to whom Evil is inherent to their nature.

[Necroticplague]

Look, we've established that animating undead is an objectively Evil act, yes?We don't need to, because the book very clearly states that's the case without ambiguity, but this is definitely true.


And that all spells that create undead have the [Evil] tag, right?Incorrect.

Fell Animate doesn't add an [Evil] tag, so there exists a massive amount of spells that can animate zombies without the [Evil] tag being used. And that's ignoring wight creation that things like Enervate and Fell Drain can cause (since that's only a by-product of negative levels). Neither Bestow Curse nor Wish are [Evil], despite their use in making Curst.


Therefore the magicks that keep a zombie or skeleton ambulatory are Evil magicks, right?Incorrect. The only prerequisite for Undead is animation via negative energy. Negative energy is an explicitly neutral force, much like Fire energy from it's fellow Inner Plane. Dangerous and normally destructive, yes, but not Evil.


So Evil is inherent to their nature, not because their flesh is solidified Evil (like a fiend), but because there is Evil magic persistently present in their systems. If that was true, you'd expect Flesh Golems to also be evil, since they're made using Animate Dead as well (among other spells).

[RedMage125]

Incorrect.

Fell Animate doesn't add an [Evil] tag, so there exists a massive amount of spells that can animate zombies without the [Evil] tag being used.
That's sophistry and you know it. That's like saying "every spell with the [Fire], [Cold], or [Electricity] tag is really an acid spell because Energy Substitution".
The effect of Fell Animate is a product of the metamagic feat, NOT the spell. All SPELLS which, in their description do nothing but animate the undead, have the [Evil] tag.


And that's ignoring wight creation that things like Enervate and Fell Drain can cause (since that's only a by-product of negative levels).
You said it yourself, the resulting wight is a by-product of death from negative levels, NOT the sole function of the spell.


Neither Bestow Curse nor Wish are [Evil], despite their use in making Curst.
Non-sequitur.

Furthermore all your examples are inherently flawed, because the rules state that the creation of an undead creature is-IN AND OF ITSELF-an act of Evil. So an evil Epic Cleric who takes the epic feats that allow him to animate all corpses within 60' as zombies with a rebuke attempt is also committing evil acts. If you create a wight by Enervating someone, you have committed an evil act.


Incorrect. The only prerequisite for Undead is animation via negative energy. Negative energy is an explicitly neutral force, much like Fire energy from it's fellow Inner Plane. Dangerous and normally destructive, yes, but not Evil.
Incorrect. Facts not in evidence.
We know negative energy is USED, but nothing says that it is pure, unadulterated Negative Energy from the NEP. That is an assumption you have made. As you cannot animate a zombie by constant castings of inflict spells into a corpse, it's safe to say that it is NOT pure, unadulterated Negative Energy.

To wit: A several-ton locomotive uses coal as a fuel source to move across the country. By the logic you use for negative energy, an inert chunk of coal has the energy potential to push a multi-ton object across the country.

Undead are animated by evil magicks that use negative energy as power. Negative Energy is the fuel that powers these magicks.


If that was true, you'd expect Flesh Golems to also be evil, since they're made using Animate Dead as well (among other spells).
Except that flesh golems don't bind a soul to the finished creature. Elementals' bodies and souls are a single, non-distinct unit. Therefore, the elemental's entire body is also housed within the golem's frame. And yes, since Animate Dead is one of the spells used to make a flesh golem, at least one evil act is committed upon their creation, unlike other golems. If you recall, I was the one to point that out initially in this thread.

[Calthropstu]

Except not all undead are inherently evil. Evening glory allows for non evil undead and there is also the baelnorn, the elven lich type creature.
So it is possible to create undead that are specifically not evil.

[RedMage125]

Except not all undead are inherently evil. Evening glory allows for non evil undead and there is also the baelnorn, the elven lich type creature.
So it is possible to create undead that are specifically not evil.

Never said they WERE inherently evil. I said evil magicks were inherent to their nature.

Even baelnorns, and non-evil ghosts detect as evil on a Detect Evil spell.

[Calthropstu]

Never said they WERE inherently evil. I said evil magicks were inherent to their nature.

Even baelnorns, and non-evil ghosts detect as evil on a Detect Evil spell.

Where does it say that? I know baelnorns get animate dead at will which is kind of odd since it's an evil spell.

[Necroticplague]

That's sophistry and you know it. That's like saying "every spell with the [Fire], [Cold], or [Electricity] tag is really an acid spell because Energy Substitution".
The effect of Fell Animate is a product of the metamagic feat, NOT the spell.
A spell that's being affected by a metamagic feat is still a spell.


All SPELLS which, in their description do nothing but animate the undead, have the [Evil] tag. Nice goalpost-shifting. You went from 'all spells that animate undead' to 'all spells that animate dead and do nothing else' rather quickly.


Non-sequitur.
Highly sequitur. I was giving examples of spells that can animate undead without the [Evil] Descriptor. Those two spells do animate a form of undead (Curst), and lack the descriptor.
Although, bringing cursts into it was a little unnecesary, since I realize simply using Wish to emulate Animate Dead also get the same point across (animating undead without [Evil] descriptor).


Furthermore all your examples are inherently flawed, because the rules state that the creation of an undead creature is-IN AND OF ITSELF-an act of Evil. So an evil Epic Cleric who takes the epic feats that allow him to animate all corpses within 60' as zombies with a rebuke attempt is also committing evil acts. If you create a wight by Enervating someone, you have committed an evil act. How it that relevant to the discussion? I had already completely granted this point. It's possible for casting a spell to be an Evil action without the Evil descriptor. Animating undead without an [Evil] Spell, such as through Enervate, Fell Animate, Wish......are some such examples.


Incorrect. Facts not in evidence.
We know negative energy is USED, but nothing says that it is pure, unadulterated Negative Energy from the NEP. That is an assumption you have made. As you cannot animate a zombie by constant castings of inflict spells into a corpse, it's safe to say that it is NOT pure, unadulterated Negative Energy. Fair enough. Especially given how undead are healed by negative energy, something which makes no logical sense (given Negative Energy's nature) unless some other tomfoolery is at play



To wit: A several-ton locomotive uses coal as a fuel source to move across the country. By the logic you use for negative energy, an inert chunk of coal has the energy potential to push a multi-ton object across the country.[/qwuote] I legitimately fail to see anything wrong with that statement. Yes, the chunk of coal does have the potential energy needed to do that. The challenging part it making that potential energy actually perform that action (thus, the rest of the engine).


[QUOTE=RedMage125;22517320]Except that flesh golems don't bind a soul to the finished creature. Elementals' bodies and souls are a single, non-distinct unit. Therefore, the elemental's entire body is also housed within the golem's frame. And yes, since Animate Dead is one of the spells used to make a flesh golem, at least one evil act is committed upon their creation, unlike other golems. If you recall, I was the one to point that out initially in this thread.
I'm simultaneously not sure what your point is with the elemental (since binding an elemental is also binding a soul); and sure you're missing my actual point. The fact creating the flesh golem is Evil is unrelated to the relevant part, which is the analogy to undead.

So let me step back to the square 1 of what I see our arguments as:

You: Undead, even if Mindless, are Evil because the only way to make them is with [Evil] magic, whose intrinsic [Evil] nature carries over to their alignment.
Me: First off, you can make undead without [Evil] magic. Second off, other things can only be made with [Evil] magic, but somehow result in Neutral creatures.

Am I incorrect on your base argument, and is my counter-argument getting it's point across?

[RedMage125]

Where does it say that? I know baelnorns get animate dead at will which is kind of odd since it's an evil spell.

In the description of Detect Evil. Undead get their own specific row. So all creatures of the "Undead" type register as evil under that spell.

[Quarian Rex]

Actually, underlined is exactly what skeletons explicitely do and what zombies are implied to do.

https://i.imgur.com/cdrnnYe.jpg

Read the first paragraph of that description. It is describing controlled undead. We're talking about what happens when they're not acting under magical constraints. That's like saying child murderers make wonderful kindergarten teachers, under the caveat that they have a permanent Dominate Monster cast on them and are instructed to not indulge in their deepest desires.

Also, we can all agree that 3.x is notorious for poor editing and descriptions that can often be seen as 'lacking'. Despite that, I think RAI is pretty clear. Stumbling into a pack of uncontrolled animated undead should re-enact a scene similar to Conan guest staring on The Walking Dead. Saying that you think the uncontrolled zombies should just innocently stand around like benign meat puppets is more than a little disingenuous.



But if "Evil" is a cosmic force, rather than an objective moral judgment, why is "that's Evil" a sufficient, or even meaningful, argument against doing something? If Evil is a descriptor of the same variety as Fire or Cold, why is it any more meaningful to us as a moral judgment?

Because in D&D-land the elemental forces manifest themselves in various forms of energy and matter, whether it is Earth (earth and Acid), Water (water and Cold), Air (wind and Lightning), or Fire (fire and more Fire), with no more effect on mortals than you would expect from the associated forms of energy and matter. The tangible (it is quantifiable and measurable through spells and such) force that is Evil (or Good, Law, and Chaos as well) usually manifests in (is born from?) the 'moral' actions of creatures. I say 'moral' because that tangible force can manifest in creatures not actually capable of moral choice but who still engage in actions that map to our expectations of evil (or law, etc.).



Pretty sure the way sources work (at least in 3e) puts the MM ahead of those books for adjudicating contradictions.

Well then...


Zombies are unthinking automatons, and can do little more than follow orders. When left unattended, zombies tend to mill about in search of living creatures to slaughter and devour.

This is one of the few descriptions of the animated dead that bothers to mention the difference between controlled and uncontrolled behaviour.



Also, skeletons totally can hunt. They just have to be ordered to hunt. By, for example, those liches. Or Ghoul Necromancers. Or maybe some vampires. Or their controllers died.

So, apparently you have already accepted what we're saying, that uncontrolled animated undead are single-minded engines of death. What on earth are you arguing about?



It (the Animate Dead spell) having the [evil] label is supposed to remove all moral ambiguity from it. The fact that it can be read to introduce moral ambiguity is dreadful design.

Really? I find that to be good game design (even if it was unintentional). The tag is there to clarify the meta interactions of the spell (a necessary game component) but the in-game use of the spell itself can support the argument of a moral grey area, much like we are having here. This can be a great source of dramatic conflict in a story and provide meaningful choices to the players. Again, that seems like good game design to me.



1) Whether they feel guilt is irrelevant to the damage they're causing. Though, you've just exposed the entire point of Good churches and deities, (i.e. to point out the issue and create that guilt)

This is a good point. In-game propaganda is going to (and should) have a big effect. Oddly, a lot of the arguments that I've been seeing in this thread seem to be made against an in-game anti-undead propaganda machine, making unintuitive, insincere leaps to try and pull the anti-deaders to a more centrist position. It actually comes off as kind of surreal.




If that was true, you'd expect Flesh Golems to also be evil, since they're made using Animate Dead as well (among other spells).

As was later mentioned, Flesh Golems are animated by elemental forces, not negative energy. However, I want to point out that they are one of the only golems that have the Berserk flaw. This can be seen as the undead influence hungering for the living, so it still fits.



Except not all undead are inherently evil. Evening glory allows for non evil undead and there is also the baelnorn, the elven lich type creature.
So it is possible to create undead that are specifically not evil.

Yup, magic can do all kinds of crazy sh*t. What else is new? We're not talking about the exceptions, we're trying to discuss the rule. We're also not talking about filling a society with Baelnorn. We're talking about the viability of a (functionally) slave based culture that uses potentially violent undead as the lowest strata of society, and to what extent that can be seen as benevolent.




So let me step back to the square 1 of what I see our arguments as:

You: Undead, even if Mindless, are Evil because the only way to make them is with [Evil] magic, whose intrinsic [Evil] nature carries over to their alignment.
Me: First off, you can make undead without [Evil] magic. Second off, other things can only be made with [Evil] magic, but somehow result in Neutral creatures.

Some thoughts from the sidelines here. We shouldn't be so quick to say that undead are evil because of the magic used to create them. Summon spells have their associated tags change based on what they summon (so summoning a demon makes the spell [Evil] and [Chaotic]) so why are we assuming that Animate dead works any differently? AFAIK everything that can be created with the actual Animate Dead spell (or any of the Create Undead spells) is Evil, so the spell itself reflects that.

Also...


other things can only be made with [Evil] magic, but somehow result in Neutral creatures.

Please tell me, of the creatures made only with [Evil] magic, which are Neutral? I am actually curious, and can't really think of any. I think that you over-reached quite a bit here.

[Necroticplague]

Some thoughts from the sidelines here. We shouldn't be so quick to say that undead are evil because of the magic used to create them. Summon spells have their associated tags change based on what they summon (so summoning a demon makes the spell [Evil] and [Chaotic]) so why are we assuming that Animate dead works any differently? AFAIK everything that can be created with the actual Animate Dead spell (or any of the Create Undead spells) is Evil, so the spell itself reflects that.
Except if that was true, you'd expect undead to be [Evil], not Evil. Summoning/Calling a devil still makes the spell [Lawful] and [Evil], even if the Devil's risen to be a paladin, because such spells work on subtypes, not alignment.


Please tell me, of the creatures made only with [Evil] magic, which are Neutral? I am actually curious, and can't really think of any. I think that you over-reached quite a bit here.I already stated it, and you even responded to it: Flesh golems. They require Animate Dead, an [Evil] spell, to make.

[Psyren]

I already stated it, and you even responded to it: Flesh golems. They require Animate Dead, an [Evil] spell, to make.

And they specifically warn you that making those creatures is an evil act.

[Quarian Rex]

Except if that was true, you'd expect undead to be [Evil], not Evil. Summoning/Calling a devil still makes the spell [Lawful] and [Evil], even if the Devil's risen to be a paladin, because such spells work on subtypes, not alignment.

That applies to outsiders because they universally embody their tag. Undead don't have an [Evil] tag because they are not a product of the outer planes, but the undead created with these spells are universally evil, and so the [Evil] tag is applied to the spell.






Please tell me, of the creatures made only with [Evil] magic, which are Neutral? I am actually curious, and can't really think of any. I think that you over-reached quite a bit here.

I already stated it, and you even responded to it: Flesh golems. They require Animate Dead, an [Evil] spell, to make.
Please note the bolding in my original statement. Once you start mixing magic the result is up for grabs (and the whims of the designer). Cakes can be made with eggs, that doesn't make them chickens. If we're looking at a spell se need to examine the products of that spell, not its interaction with anything else. The point still stands that the product of [Evil] undead creation spells is evil undead.

[Necroticplague]

And they specifically warn you that making those creatures is an evil act.
I'm aware of that, and that factor is immaterial to the discussion I was having with Redmage.
Their argument, to the best of my knowlege was that Mindless Undead can be Evil despite the SRDs statement on essentially being too dumb to have an alignment because they're made using [Evil] Spells only. The flesh golem serves as a counterargument by showing something that is made using an [Evil] spell that isn't, itself, Evil (as flesh golems are neutral, like most golems and collossi, despite requiring the same Animate Dead as skeletons and zombies usually do).
That making said golem would be an Evil act is both something the discussion started off with by agreeing on, and not related to the main point of the conversation.

[Cosi]

Look, we've established that animating undead is an objectively Evil act, yes? And that all spells that create undead have the [Evil] tag, right? Those things are consistent. Therefore the magicks that keep a zombie or skeleton ambulatory are Evil magicks, right? So Evil is inherent to their nature, not because their flesh is solidified Evil (like a fiend), but because there is Evil magic persistently present in their systems.

Sure, but you're still fundamentally basing your argument off of a slight of hand. Just because those spells have the Evil tag doesn't mean they're morally objectionable, just like the lack of it doesn't make using dominate person morally acceptable. Imagine that the spells didn't have the Evil tag. Imagine that it, and alignment as a whole, didn't exist in the game. Would there still be some reason for me to care that my civilization's workers are zombies rather than constructs?


The effect of Fell Animate is a product of the metamagic feat, NOT the spell. All SPELLS which, in their description do nothing but animate the undead, have the [Evil] tag.

So? If there is some method of making undead which isn't Evil, then clearly making undead can't be inherently Evil. Just like the fact that befoul has the Evil tag and does CON damage doesn't make everything that does CON damage Evil.


We know negative energy is USED, but nothing says that it is pure, unadulterated Negative Energy from the NEP. That is an assumption you have made. As you cannot animate a zombie by constant castings of inflict spells into a corpse, it's safe to say that it is NOT pure, unadulterated Negative Energy.

You can't create a wall of fire by repeatedly casting fireball. To suggest that this implies that wall of fire also invokes "Wall Energy" would be met with the same derision this deserves.


To wit: A several-ton locomotive uses coal as a fuel source to move across the country. By the logic you use for negative energy, an inert chunk of coal has the energy potential to push a multi-ton object across the country.

How do you think trains work? They're not magically giving coal motive power, they're harnessing the potential energy already present in coal. This is literally high school level physics. Maybe middle school.


Also, we can all agree that 3.x is notorious for poor editing and descriptions that can often be seen as 'lacking'. Despite that, I think RAI is pretty clear. Stumbling into a pack of uncontrolled animated undead should re-enact a scene similar to Conan guest staring on The Walking Dead. Saying that you think the uncontrolled zombies should just innocently stand around like benign meat puppets is more than a little disingenuous.

Yes, I know you think that's how the game should work. However, unless you can prove that is how the game does work, you should stop presenting your opinions as facts.


Because in D&D-land the elemental forces manifest themselves in various forms of energy and matter, whether it is Earth (earth and Acid), Water (water and Cold), Air (wind and Lightning), or Fire (fire and more Fire), with no more effect on mortals than you would expect from the associated forms of energy and matter. The tangible (it is quantifiable and measurable through spells and such) force that is Evil (or Good, Law, and Chaos as well) usually manifests in (is born from?) the 'moral' actions of creatures. I say 'moral' because that tangible force can manifest in creatures not actually capable of moral choice but who still engage in actions that map to our expectations of evil (or law, etc.).

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.


This is one of the few descriptions of the animated dead that bothers to mention the difference between controlled and uncontrolled behaviour.

You are aware that is a Pathfinder book, right? There's this whole other game people play called "3e" where the opinions presented in that book do not matter at all.


So, apparently you have already accepted what we're saying, that uncontrolled animated undead are single-minded engines of death. What on earth are you arguing about?

No, I just mispoke. There was supposed to be an "after they ordered them to be all murder-y" in there. But seriously, you thought that one sentence that agreed with you in out of a paragraph that disagreed with you out of a post that disagreed with you meant I agreed with you? Occam's Razor, man.


Really? I find that to be good game design (even if it was unintentional). The tag is there to clarify the meta interactions of the spell (a necessary game component) but the in-game use of the spell itself can support the argument of a moral grey area, much like we are having here. This can be a great source of dramatic conflict in a story and provide meaningful choices to the players. Again, that seems like good game design to me.

No. The game making (or trying to make) objective claims about what is "good" and what is "evil" is stupid. It will always be stupid, because the chance that game designers have a better answer to those questions than the actual thousands of years of philosophy that have failed to do so is zero. If you feel the need to put philosophy in the game (and to be clear, I'm not opposed to doing that), just give people philosophies and let players and DMs decide which ones they agree with.

[Quarian Rex]

Their argument, to the best of my knowlege was that Mindless Undead can be Evil despite the SRDs statement on essentially being too dumb to have an alignment because they're made using [Evil] Spells only.

You seem to be arguing insincerely against anti-undead propagandists again. A Flesh Golem is not the product solely of [Evil] spells, please stop saying that it is. It's dishonest and just serves to muddy the waters. Mixing magic gets weird results, yadda-yadda, see my previous post.

As to SRD support for mindless creatures being neutral, there is none. The quote you provided was for animals and the like. Things that can think but to such a limited extent that things like morality aren't even on their radar. I had that that this point had been responded to quite well previously, but perhaps not.

Mindless undead with a built in predisposition to evil are a completely separate concern. Though Mindless they do have agency and, acting solely to malicious ends, they cannot be reasoned with or persuaded, only controlled.

[Fizban]

Protip: using the word "morality" or any variation thereof in a DnD argument ensures that someone will drag real-world philosophy into it. As has been revealed in previous discussions, real-world philosophy is inherently subjective and fundamentally incompatible with the objective alignment used in DnD.

From what I've seen real-world philosophy, like other real-world debate techniques, is basically used to argue whatever you want regardless of reality. It's one of those things where in theory you're supposed to be explaining viewpoints to each other in order to resolve a specific problem amicably or just understand for the heck of it, but in practice at least one person is going to refuse to let it go and pretend that because you haven't "proven" anything to them, you're "wrong." So they're using a subjective tool about which they refuse to change their subjective viewpoint, which means you're objectively wrong, hmm. This applies to multiple people in this thread.

That's one of the nice things about a game: there can be objective morality, and when people refuse to accept this you can ignore them. The only person who's morality matters is that of the DM, or the books the DM using to inform their decisions. Unless the DM/group has decided to change it, the books say undead and their creation are evil, so they're evil. Simple.