Necromancer and Druid teaming up?

[Stryyke]

I'm looking to group up with some people in this pickup game. I'm playing a druid, and a Necromancer is trying to recruit me. Her argument is that necromancy is necessary to maintain balance. My instinct is that Druids would detest necromancy as unnatural.

So my question is this: Is anything about necromancy natural? Would a Druid accept necromancy in his/her compatriots?

[TheCount]

Depends.

Are they the type of necromancer that want armies of the dead scouring the lands? No, that wont go.

Are they using necromancy to debuff/kill thier enemies? sure

its also easier to make mindless undead kill themselves than fight them, also more entertaining if two of them fight it out.

They are also good for menial/manual/repetitive tasks, like plowing!

Honestly, as long as they dont want undead empires, or simply converting living beings into dead/undead ones, i wouldnt mind.

You might want to do something about the rotting smell of zombies though..... as well as putting down undeads with a....diet.

[eggynack]

Personally, I've always felt that the whole anti-necromancy thing was overblown. Druids have a decent set of ways to create what amounts to undead minions. Myconid sovereign, animate with the spirit, or even tossing out negative levels with blackwater tentacles to generate wights. What strengthens my feeling is that druids are also supposed to hate aberrations, but druids can straight up become those. Hell, they can even use the aberration stuff to do weird necromancy themed stuff. At the end of the day, what's so different between using cure light wounds to pump a living target full of positive energy to generate life and using animate dead to pump a dead target full of negative energy to create unlife? Y'know, in terms of naturalness. It strikes me as kinda arbitrary, as distinctions go.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

If you squint a little, necromancy can be framed as recycling, kind of like using all of an animal rather than letting any of it go to waste, and therefore eco-friendly.

[Crake]

Necromancy is far more than undead and undeath. A druid can oppose animate dead while not caring about waves of fatigue. Depends on what you're using necromancy for.

[ShurikVch]

Material Plane is made of mixed stuff from all Inner Planes
Negative Energy Plane is Inner Plane - thus natural
Which mean - Undead is natural too
Actually, non-native Outsiders are way more unnatural than Undead may ever be

Also, some of known Druids are Undead (such as Lossarwyn the Ice Lich, Maelik the Icegaunt, or example Swarm-Shifter 13th-Level Mummy King Druid), and Eberron have Nightbringers druidic sect

[Malphegor]

Necromancy is as varied as vitaemancy which is not a thing but bear with me a moment.

Life and death is a natural part of existence. But, there are spells that prolong life, yes? Druids use them almost as much as clerics do, perhaps more, healing the injured wildlife, and futzing with the natural order of things.

Druids, and nature-based magicians, are INVASIVE. They come waltzing into an environment subject to the laws of nature, and impose their rules. How many of you have entered a forest sung by elves and thought to yourself- "what does the tree get out of being sung into an outhouse for some pointy eared humans who can't just get an axe and kill for their structures like everyone else". They maintain ecological systems when they're really constantly changing things.

Because death is a gift. It promotes change to the system, it releases ecological niches for new things to enter it. Sometimes the most beautiful flowers bloom after the deadliest of blazes.

But, sometimes a niche cannot be filled. Sometimes, there's no elephants in England, meaning trees that adapted to the presence of mammoths no longer have the adaption. Species change. Perhaps even become diminished.

The druid needs things to become static, or some way to ensure that there's no cascade failure across the natural chains.

And that's where necromancy steps in. Necromancy lets nature have its cake and eat it too with gardner-necromancer-druids being environmentalists. Allowing dead species to continue existing, or storing the dead to fill a niche when a species is missing.

Imagine if honeybees disappeared from earth in an ancient time, but a necromancer could animate the corpses of fossilised honeybees to occupy the same role for the ecosystem? Poltergeist Pollinators, perhaps. I don't know.

That is where the necromancer meets the druid on common ground. Because ultimately, both just want to stop things dying, or if they do die, make it still useful.

[Karl Aegis]

Sounds like something that would happen in Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo universe. Necromancers there are an order of goons that try to maintain balance. Dungeons and Dragons Druids are the same thing.