A lawful good/neutral good level 6 necromancer. thoughts?

[dehro]

I wanted to try and see if I could make a necromancer that was actually a good person and used his powers responsibly. This is purely a thought exercise, a proof of concept.

I have come up with a backstory (once I have a concept in mind, that's where I always start) that makes sense, at least to me and thought I would share it for fun, whilst at the same time asking for support on how to make it work.


Altor left his village to apprentice with a local wizard living in the city.
When news came about his parents being struck by a flu affecting the countryside, he returned home, barely in time to bury them in the family plot.
Taking over the pig farm together with his sister, he attended the local church, volunteering in the infirmary and decided to look for an answer to why a simple flu could kill his parents. He resolved to do what was in his power to help people and to heal people.
He continued his magical studies privately, concentrating on life, health and such topics. Over time he became a very skilled medic/surgeon, supplementing his knowledge and skills with magic.
To help his sister run the pig farm, he realised he could in fact bring back his parents, after a fashion. Occasionally, he would raise them from the grave, in skeletal form, and put them to work in the small farming plot, and tending the pigs.
The first generation of pigs that experienced being cared for by a full animated skeleton, quite frankly, died out of stress. The next generations however got used to it.
When it was discovered how he had saved the family home from foreclosure by using necromancy, this posed an ethical conundrum to he village elders.
Altor was well liked, always ready to help, always a kind word to children, a great healer and many a farmer had been cured from a sore back, wounds had been healed with salves, broken bones set with care and meticulousness.
People liked him and his sister. He had not harmed anybody, and had confined his acts of necromancy to his own family. Sure, the local priest was a bit incensed overr the desacration of graves but he got over it eventually. He knew Altor to be a spiritual man and an honestly engaged healer.
So they closed an eye.
Over time, the local farmers and craftsmen asked more of Altor's services. Eventually, his services became a common resource for the villagers to leverage. Skeletons could assist defending the village in a fray, could help kill a bear that was endangering the cattle... if a farmer was laid up in bed, he would ask Altor to revive his deceased brother and have the skeleton plough the field or pick the crops... if a craftsman went on a business trip, maybe his wife asked Altor to raise her mother to help do the chores or run the shop.
Seeing the occasional skeleton doing menial tasks became almost commonplace in the village.
When local authorities became aware of the facts, they investigated the matter, intent on putting Altor on trial, but the village banded together and many witnesses spoke in the man's favour. Eventually he was cleared from his charges and even issued an official permit to conduct his necromancy, within the confines of the ethic code that he had lived by to that day.

Things went well... until a party of heroes came to the area to investigate something entirely unrelated and things escalated to the point where the village was forced to pick sides and ended up being decimated, collateral damage in a much bigger conflict.

As he lost his sister and most of the villagers in the fight, Altor, already an unusual character, became restless and decided, just like the surviving villagers, to leave the place. His sister had always said that she wanted to see the world, so he decided to do just that, to see the world and bring her along with him, in a large jar containing her bones which he would occasionally rise, so he could talk to her and show her the sights of new places, even if she couldn't answer back.

That's how Altor became a traveling surgeon/necromancer, always lending a hand when possible, preserving life and defending the weak and the ill.

I placed him at 6th level because that happens to be the current level of the campaign I am playing in, but this is a random build, not a character that I will actually play anytime soon, so also not necessarily constrained by the limitations of said campaign.

I did however roll the stats, for funsies, and rolled incredibly well (because I am not playing him, I reckon)... 17, 17, 17, 14, 13, 11 (first roll too!)
Now to he optimising bit... the main concern I have is that he is primarily a necromancer but I would like him to not be branded as one at the first spell he casts.
For this reason I have thought of the Healer feat.

I see him go in 1 of 3 directions:

full necromancer - maybe variant human? he uses mundane skills and feats to do most of his healing... maybe potions/alchemy? I guess in this case the only real challenge would be a balanced spell list containing both healing and enough of a punch to defend himself (or even go full throttle raising the dead, in a pinch)
druid necromancer - the background remains the same, except instead of going to church, he learned from a druid...his skeletons take the shape of animals, so, a pack of dire badger skeletons? a herd of undead wild boar? I assume this would need to be homebrewed, he is mostly taken for some kind of savage man living off the land.
cleric necromancer - He takes 1 or 2 levels of cleric... thematically relevant would be grave and life domain. He would present himself as a cleric or a lay person/medic, keeping his arcane arts mostly to himself.


Another thing that I would actually be interested to know is if it's possible for a necromancer to scale a single skeleton up rather than to augment the numbers.
Contextually, Altor would be making the skeleton of his sister (or his parents) more resilient/powerful/humanlike rather than raising dozens of anonymous skeletons.
Is such a thing within the realm of existing spells, artifacts or feats?

What do you think of the concept? would it be feasible with point buy rather than rolling ridiculously well like I did? is it underpowered by default?

[elyktsorb]

I wanted to try and see if I could make a necromancer that was actually a good person and used his powers responsibly. This is purely a thought exercise, a proof of concept.


Ultimately this comes down to the setting though right? Like, I know in some settings, just summoning undead at all makes you evil outright.

[dehro]

Ultimately this comes down to the setting though right? Like, I know in some settings, just summoning undead at all makes you evil outright.

well.. yes. I am thinking of standard Faerun, which has a lot of variety, and a bunch of ways for good and bad characters to bring people back from the dead and mess with the forces of life and death.

[Anymage]

When skeletons encounter living creatures, the necromantic energy that drives them compels them to kill unless they are commanded by their masters to refrain from doing so.

There's a lot of debate over this and the part saying that bound skeletons will follow the commands of their creator to the letter. Does it mean that the creator can just say "don't kill anybody" once and the skeleton will stay safe as long as control is maintained, or is it more like a child where it has to be constantly reprimanded to keep it on track? This is all very DM dependent, but if skeletons could be kept safe by just one command right after you animate them I don't think the part about them having omnicidal urges would be mentioned.


The creature is under your control for 24 hours, after which it stops obeying any command you've given it. To maintain control of the creature for another 24 hours, you must cast this spell on the creature again before the current 24-hour period ends. This use of the spell reasserts your control over up to four creatures you have animated with this spell, rather than animating a new one.

This part, however, is a lot less open to interpretation. A necromancer has to personally attend to all the undead he's raised. If you're out of town, laid up sick, just running late, or for any other reason can't get your cast off to reassert control, the skeletons stop doing what you had them doing and start eating people. Relying on skeletons for a society's menial labor is a very risky and failure prone and it's hard to square that with LG unless you have a massive ego and/or aren't smart enough to think of the potential risks.

Other necromantic spells can be squared with being LG without too much hassle. Including, if you want to have undead doing your bidding at less risk, the Summon Undead spell from Tasha's. But Animate Dead is at best a very risky spell, and a huge amount is dependent on where the DM stands on "morally neutral negative energy robots" vs. "incredibly dangerous beings where their creation and use shows a callous disregard for others".

[Unoriginal]

I wanted to try and see if I could make a necromancer that was actually a good person and used his powers responsibly. This is purely a thought exercise, a proof of concept.

I have come up with a backstory (once I have a concept in mind, that's where I always start) that makes sense, at least to me and thought I would share it for fun, whilst at the same time asking for support on how to make it work.


Altor left his village to apprentice with a local wizard living in the city.
When news came about his parents being struck by a flu affecting the countryside, he returned home, barely in time to bury them in the family plot.
Taking over the pig farm together with his sister, he attended the local church, volunteering in the infirmary and decided to look for an answer to why a simple flu could kill his parents. He resolved to do what was in his power to help people and to heal people.
He continued his magical studies privately, concentrating on life, health and such topics. Over time he became a very skilled medic/surgeon, supplementing his knowledge and skills with magic.
To help his sister run the pig farm, he realised he could in fact bring back his parents, after a fashion. Occasionally, he would raise them from the grave, in skeletal form, and put them to work in the small farming plot, and tending the pigs.
The first generation of pigs that experienced being cared for by a full animated skeleton, quite frankly, died out of stress. The next generations however got used to it.
When it was discovered how he had saved the family home from foreclosure by using necromancy, this posed an ethical conundrum to he village elders.
Altor was well liked, always ready to help, always a kind word to children, a great healer and many a farmer had been cured from a sore back, wounds had been healed with salves, broken bones set with care and meticulousness.
People liked him and his sister. He had not harmed anybody, and had confined his acts of necromancy to his own family. Sure, the local priest was a bit incensed overr the desacration of graves but he got over it eventually. He knew Altor to be a spiritual man and an honestly engaged healer.
So they closed an eye.
Over time, the local farmers and craftsmen asked more of Altor's services. Eventually, his services became a common resource for the villagers to leverage. Skeletons could assist defending the village in a fray, could help kill a bear that was endangering the cattle... if a farmer was laid up in bed, he would ask Altor to revive his deceased brother and have the skeleton plough the field or pick the crops... if a craftsman went on a business trip, maybe his wife asked Altor to raise her mother to help do the chores or run the shop.
Seeing the occasional skeleton doing menial tasks became almost commonplace in the village.
When local authorities became aware of the facts, they investigated the matter, intent on putting Altor on trial, but the village banded together and many witnesses spoke in the man's favour. Eventually he was cleared from his charges and even issued an official permit to conduct his necromancy, within the confines of the ethic code that he had lived by to that day.

Things went well... until a party of heroes came to the area to investigate something entirely unrelated and things escalated to the point where the village was forced to pick sides and ended up being decimated, collateral damage in a much bigger conflict.

As he lost his sister and most of the villagers in the fight, Altor, already an unusual character, became restless and decided, just like the surviving villagers, to leave the place. His sister had always said that she wanted to see the world, so he decided to do just that, to see the world and bring her along with him, in a large jar containing her bones which he would occasionally rise, so he could talk to her and show her the sights of new places, even if she couldn't answer back.

That's how Altor became a traveling surgeon/necromancer, always lending a hand when possible, preserving life and defending the weak and the ill.

I placed him at 6th level because that happens to be the current level of the campaign I am playing in, but this is a random build, not a character that I will actually play anytime soon, so also not necessarily constrained by the limitations of said campaign.

I did however roll the stats, for funsies, and rolled incredibly well (because I am not playing him, I reckon)... 17, 17, 17, 14, 13, 11 (first roll too!)
Now to he optimising bit... the main concern I have is that he is primarily a necromancer but I would like him to not be branded as one at the first spell he casts.
For this reason I have thought of the Healer feat.

I see him go in 1 of 3 directions:

full necromancer - maybe variant human? he uses mundane skills and feats to do most of his healing... maybe potions/alchemy? I guess in this case the only real challenge would be a balanced spell list containing both healing and enough of a punch to defend himself (or even go full throttle raising the dead, in a pinch)
druid necromancer - the background remains the same, except instead of going to church, he learned from a druid...his skeletons take the shape of animals, so, a pack of dire badger skeletons? a herd of undead wild boar? I assume this would need to be homebrewed, he is mostly taken for some kind of savage man living off the land.
cleric necromancer - He takes 1 or 2 levels of cleric... thematically relevant would be grave and life domain. He would present himself as a cleric or a lay person/medic, keeping his arcane arts mostly to himself.


Another thing that I would actually be interested to know is if it's possible for a necromancer to scale a single skeleton up rather than to augment the numbers.
Contextually, Altor would be making the skeleton of his sister (or his parents) more resilient/powerful/humanlike rather than raising dozens of anonymous skeletons.
Is such a thing within the realm of existing spells, artifacts or feats?

What do you think of the concept? would it be feasible with point buy rather than rolling ridiculously well like I did? is it underpowered by default?

I don't know how things work in your DM's setting, so I will speak using the default 5e lore:

1. It is perfectly possible to play a good necromancer, IF the necromancer does not regularly use Animate Dead (or similar undead-creating spells).

2. Animate Dead lets you create Zombies and Skeletons. A Zombie or a Skeleton is not your family member, or your friend, or your benevolent ancestor landing you a hand.

No matter whose corpses you used.

Zombies and skeletons are all omnicidial maniacs. They are negative energy spirits who are just sapient enough to hate you, your family, your pigs, your pet dogs, your potted plants, the blades of grass in the next town over, and they are just sapient enough to enjoy it when they finally manage to impale your lungs and watch as life leaves your body.

As you cast Animate Dead, you're shoving one of those spirits in a corpse, and making it as dangerous as a velociraptor. On purpose.

And then you are enslaving it with magic so it does your bidding.

Furthermore, a zombie/skeleton would be unable to help with farmwork or any kind of task unless the caster is personally there and giving them orders for every step.

3. Once the undead is created, you can either maintain the enslavement, which requires you to renew the spell each day, let it go free, which means it'll go on to pursue its "destroy all life" agenda to the best of its capacity, or destroy it. If you destroy it, you cannot use it for Animate Dead again, because it's no longer the corpse of an humanoid, it's the remains of an undead (admitedly can make a Skeleton out of a pile of any kind of bones, but, well, not really the aesthetic you want for your PC, from what you described).

4. If Astor is powerful enough to cast Animate Dead, he's more than powerful enough to earn tons of money in ways that don't require using undead to care for pigs. Heck, if he's that powerful, he can make a pile ofmoney using magic in other ways, pay for his sister to have a nice home in a place where she's less likely to be killed by disease or conflict, and still have more than enough to pay several people a good wage managing the pig farm.

5. Assuming that Astor is too deep in denial after his parents' deaths to realize the above four points, and the villagers are convinced by what the good kid who went to study to the big city tells them... the adventurers would still have every reasons to go against that system, because the creation and presence of undead can cause negative energy to pool and result in more undead getting animated without anyone being able to control the process. And those undead won't have any issue doing the "kill everything that is alive" thing if given the chance.

So yeah.

If you want a necromancer who doesn't have those problems but want to keep the "uses the shades of his dead family" angle, I suggest the Summon Undead spell.

[da newt]

Meh - it's just recycling, reusing, repurposing ... what's evil about that? The dead person's spirit has passed on and is unaffected by the reanimation of the material bits left over.

Now the real question is what is the source / consequence of the reanimation? If it's all necromantic, that's not good, but there are plenty of other ways to compel spirits to do your dirty work (Find, Conjure, Summon, Animate, Unseen Servant, Awaken, etc) and even though these things are functionally just the same as necromancy, they have no stigma attached. How you go about enslaving a spirit makes all the difference in the D&D canon - but you can always homebrew however you'd like it to be in your world/universe.


(and yes, I know terms like compel and enslave put a certain spin on things, but when you find, conjure, summon - it's not like there are a bunch of spirits just hanging out hoping someone will call them to act as cannon fodder and mundane labor either ...)

[Psyren]

Yay, this again!

1) The PHB says "Creating the undead through the use of necromancy spells such as animate dead is not a good act, and only evil casters use such spells frequently." If you want to deviate from that, discuss with your DM.

2) If you want to scale up a single durable undead minion rather than a horde, focus on the Summon Undead spell from Tasha's. Necromancer wizard's Undead Thralls ability still boosts it (well, two of the options in it anyway).

[icedraikon]

Summon Undead from Tasha's has already been mentioned, but Animate Dead could not be too bad either. In character you could only raise people with Animate Dead who were either convicted criminals or people who assaulted the party such as bandits. Or, people who gave their permission to be raised after the fact.

As for someone who focused their studies on medicine, if you went the Vuman route, you could pick up the Healer feat for some nonmagical short rest healing which scales decently well due to the 1d6+4+# of hit dice (lvl) per short rest per party member (50 avg/short rest on a 4 person lvl5 party which is about what an 18Wis Cleric would get from a Prayer of Healing on the same party). Other healing spells include Wither and Bloom and Life Transference.

Other good spells include the standard Wizard ones. Web, Hypnotic Pattern, Polymorph, Wall of Force, etc.

Edit: Few people have pointed out that Animate Dead is always bad/evil, but obviously it's your DMs world so just work with them with what you might feel good doing as a good necromancer. Like commanding your undead to never harm the living unless you give an explicit order and destroying them if your control is about to run out and you don't have the spells to reassert control.

[Unoriginal]

Summon Undead from Tasha's has already been mentioned, but Animate Dead could not be too bad either.

It would actually be very bad.



In character you could only raise people with Animate Dead who were either convicted criminals or people who assaulted the party such as bandits. Or, people who gave their permission to be raised after the fact.

No matter whose corpse you use, the end result is still an omnicidal monster whose very existence threatens to create more.

[Amano666]

If you go by what the PHB says about necromancy it is specifically mentioned as being always evil. But that is just what a corporation that is known for getting it wrong says in their rulebook from ten years ago. Lawyers were probably worried that some kid's parents would think they bought their kid the necronomicon rather than the players handbook. You and your DM aren't bound by that. You justify why you think it is good, and at my table, that IS good. You are trying to be good, and that counts for a lot with me.

Lawful is the tougher part. You and your DM might have already come up with a society that doesn't have laws against necromancy. But for the most part, most imaginary societies, don't usually have a very open minded policy when it comes to creating undead. This part is harder for me to imagine. What would that society look like? Probably no reverence/burial customs for the dead and a very practical and non-nostalgic view of the body. Your back story touches on it for sure, but in my opinion the reaction of the town just accepting it eventually seems entirely too reasonable and liberal for a pre-industrial society.

Nothing wrong with being a Chaotic Good necromancer who knows better than what those old fashioned laws say, and the results speak for themselves (when commanded to lol). Or a neutral good necromancer who creates the undead just to get by and survive (this seems closest to your backstory to me). But asking that the law officially recognizes you as being the good guy necromancer, breaks immersion for me.

[Damon_Tor]

One note, from a guy who has raised pigs: skeletons wouldn't phase them. You can literally kill a pig in front of its brothers and sisters and all its family will do is shove its corpse aside to get at whatever it had been eating. It would be easy to say "well the pigs are too dumb to understand what happened." but pigs are extremely intelligent. By human standards pigs are simply total psychopaths.

[JackPhoenix]

One note, from a guy who has raised pigs: skeletons wouldn't phase them. You can literally kill a pig in front of its brothers and sisters and all its family will do is shove its corpse aside to get at whatever it had been eating. It would be easy to say "well the pigs are too dumb to understand what happened." but pigs are extremely intelligent. By human standards pigs are simply total psychopaths.

Animals being spooked by presence of unnatural abominations is pretty common trope, and isn't reliant on the animals' normal psychology. It's not stated as being the case in 5e, and I don't think they would get accustomed it just from exposure.

[dehro]

2. Animate Dead lets you create Zombies and Skeletons. A Zombie or a Skeleton is not your family member, or your friend, or your benevolent ancestor landing you a hand.

3. Once the undead is created, you can either maintain the enslavement, which requires you to renew the spell each day, let it go free, which means it'll go on to pursue its "destroy all life" agenda to the best of its capacity, or destroy it. If you destroy it, you cannot use it for Animate Dead again, because it's no longer the corpse of an humanoid, it's the remains of an undead (admitedly can make a Skeleton out of a pile of any kind of bones, but, well, not really the aesthetic you want for your PC, from what you described).

4. If Astor is powerful enough to cast Animate Dead, he's more than powerful enough to earn tons of money in ways that don't require using undead to care for pigs. Heck, if he's that powerful, he can make a pile ofmoney using magic in other ways, pay for his sister to have a nice home in a place where she's less likely to be killed by disease or conflict, and still have more than enough to pay several people a good wage managing the pig farm.

5. Assuming that Astor is too deep in denial after his parents' deaths to realize the above four points, and the villagers are convinced by what the good kid who went to study to the big city tells them... the adventurers would still have every reasons to go against that system, because the creation and presence of undead can cause negative energy to pool and result in more undead getting animated without anyone being able to control the process. And those undead won't have any issue doing the "kill everything that is alive" thing if given the chance.

So yeah.

If you want a necromancer who doesn't have those problems but want to keep the "uses the shades of his dead family" angle, I suggest the Summon Undead spell.
2 The familial relation was mostly mentioned in the vein of not going to desecrate random graves of third parties.. more like an organ donor's vibe, where the family of the deceased authorises the use of the remains. I am of course aware that a skeleton left to its own devices would go on a rampage.. that's why Astor would have to stick around as they do the chores he commands them to... so basically he would be hired to attend to the farm/animals/whathaveyou, he just comes with an extra pair of hands or two.

3) This is actually interesting, game mechanics wise... is not being able to raise a skeleton from the remains of an undead a fact, a rule or the product of sage advice or are we just lost in semantics on account of how a pile of bones is a pile of bones, whether it was reanimated before or not? in other words, could a necromancer just have, say, 5 sets of bones/skeletons and reuse those continuously rather than digging up fresh graves every time, or is that explicitly against the rules?

4) he could, yes, but the way I picture Astor is.. he's a bit simple, in many ways... he's a farm boy with no worldly or monetary ambitions. he just wants the family business to do ok, his sister to be happy and to help his fellow villagers if they get a cold or injure themselves... he doesn't dream about power or riches... he is a little weird... think the Good Doctor meets Norman Bates... he talks to the dead, disassociating the fact that he knows they don't respond.. he does it because it brings him comfort, not because he's entirely stark raving mad, even though maybe he is a little mad. most definitely he doesn't think about the macroeconomic consequences or possibilities that his powers can potentially have.
His raise in power levels by levelling up the character is incidental and he's never really bothered to test his limits, because he never needed to.

Yay, this again!

2) If you want to scale up a single durable undead minion rather than a horde, focus on the Summon Undead spell from Tasha's. Necromancer wizard's Undead Thralls ability still boosts it (well, two of the options in it anyway).
thanks.. I was looking for something to that effect. Tasha's eluded me.

One note, from a guy who has raised pigs: skeletons wouldn't phase them. You can literally kill a pig in front of its brothers and sisters and all its family will do is shove its corpse aside to get at whatever it had been eating. It would be easy to say "well the pigs are too dumb to understand what happened." but pigs are extremely intelligent. By human standards pigs are simply total psychopaths.
my line was inspired by Terry Pratchett's writing and a bit tongue in cheek... (if you know, think of Susan who doesn't know that grandpa is a primal force of the universe and just thinks he has funny knees). The underlying idea being that animals would be intuitively aware that the natural order was somehow subverted and distressed by this.


as for the line about necromancy being always evil... eh I agree with your take, @Amano666 .. Spare the Dying, Gentle Repose, Revivify, Resurrection and True Resurrection are all necromantic spells... Cure wounds used to be too, in prior editions.. so I am figuring that is a line that aged poorly or is just plain wrong.

[dehro]

on a separate note.. thoughts on the multiclass into cleric or druid? Thematically I think it fits, but mechanically, does it work? and would it just a 1-3 level dip, or an equal progression?

[tokek]

Meh - it's just recycling, reusing, repurposing ... what's evil about that? The dead person's spirit has passed on and is unaffected by the reanimation of the material bits left over.



Using animate objects on dead bodies is icky but its not necromancy. Animate Dead is different in that it pulls anti-life energy from elsewhere and infuses it permanently into a body turning it into something evil.

Its like saying there is nothing evil about plastics and chemistry so strewing toy-like cluster munitions over an urban area is just fine. You made something terrible with your plastics and chemistry and used it in a way that the horrific consequences were entirely predictable. That's why most countries outlawed them.

Also we should actually stop rationalising around what's in the game and rationalise what is in the game instead. It outright says that regular use of animate dead is evil - it is incredibly easy to make sense of that statement so why tie ourselves in semantic knots trying to "prove" the reverse.

If the DM is running a strong homebrew where this is not evil then I suggest they would or should change the rules around it to make it not evil For example having the evil necromantic force/spirit leave if the spell is not renewed every day. Its not hard to homebrew a more morally neutral approach to it.

[Unoriginal]

2 The familial relation was mostly mentioned in the vein of not going to desecrate random graves of third parties.. more like an organ donor's vibe, where the family of the deceased authorises the use of the remains. I am of course aware that a skeleton left to its own devices would go on a rampage.. that's why Astor would have to stick around as they do the chores he commands them to... so basically he would be hired to attend to the farm/animals/whathaveyou, he just comes with an extra pair of hands or two.

3) This is actually interesting, game mechanics wise... is not being able to raise a skeleton from the remains of an undead a fact, a rule or the product of sage advice or are we just lost in semantics on account of how a pile of bones is a pile of bones, whether it was reanimated before or not? in other words, could a necromancer just have, say, 5 sets of bones/skeletons and reuse those continuously rather than digging up fresh graves every time, or is that explicitly against the rules?

4) he could, yes, but the way I picture Astor is.. he's a bit simple, in many ways... he's a farm boy with no worldly or monetary ambitions. he just wants the family business to do ok, his sister to be happy and to help his fellow villagers if they get a cold or injure themselves... he doesn't dream about power or riches... he is a little weird... think the Good Doctor meets Norman Bates... he talks to the dead, disassociating the fact that he knows they don't respond.. he does it because it brings him comfort, not because he's entirely stark raving mad, even though maybe he is a little mad. most definitely he doesn't think about the macroeconomic consequences or possibilities that his powers can potentially have.
His raise in power levels by levelling up the character is incidental and he's never really bothered to test his limits, because he never needed to.

thanks.. I was looking for something to that effect. Tasha's eluded me.

my line was inspired by Terry Pratchett's writing and a bit tongue in cheek... (if you know, think of Susan who doesn't know that grandpa is a primal force of the universe and just thinks he has funny knees). The underlying idea being that animals would be intuitively aware that the natural order was somehow subverted and distressed by this.


as for the line about necromancy being always evil... eh I agree with your take, @Amano666 .. Spare the Dying, Gentle Repose, Revivify, Resurrection and True Resurrection are all necromantic spells... Cure wounds used to be too, in prior editions.. so I am figuring that is a line that aged poorly or is just plain wrong.


Once again, necromancy as a whole is never portrayed as evil in 5e.

Only the act of creating persisting monsters who will go on to kill everything if given half a chance is portrayed as not being good, and even then the lore state you don't have to be evil to do it.

[tokek]

on a separate note.. thoughts on the multiclass into cleric or druid? Thematically I think it fits, but mechanically, does it work? and would it just a 1-3 level dip, or an equal progression?

Mechanically a 1 level dip into cleric is always good for Wizards, and a 2 level dip into druid is far from terrible (non metal armor restrictions do limit it though).

Spores druid is a good thematic fit.

Cleric is trickier, most of the good aligned faerun gods won't have anything to do with undead.

[LudicSavant]

Ultimately this comes down to the setting though right? Like, I know in some settings, just summoning undead at all makes you evil outright.

Sort of.

A setting can declare that you are Evil or Good, but it can't really declare whether Evil and Good (the cosmic forces) truly has a 1:1 relationship with evil (morally wrong) and good (morally right).

In Eberron, people disagree that something that pinged Good is actually good on a regular basis. What's to stop people from doing this in Forgotten Realms, the gods? The gods are fully capable of being wrong (and frequently are).

[JackPhoenix]

In Eberron, people disagree that something that pinged Good is actually good on a regular basis. What's to stop people from doing this in Forgotten Realms, the gods? The gods are fully capable of being wrong (and frequently are).

People may disagree, but supernatural evil is still objectively evil, even in Eberron. As for the FR, if the gods (Ao, presumably, as he makes the rules) agree something's evil, the mortal's opinions on the matter are irrelevant.

[Unoriginal]

Sort of.

A setting can declare that you are Evil or Good, but it can't really declare whether Evil and Good (the cosmic forces) truly has a 1:1 relationship with evil (morally wrong) and good (morally right).

In Eberron, people disagree that something that pinged Good is actually good on a regular basis. What's to stop people from doing this in Forgotten Realms, the gods? The gods are fully capable of being wrong (and frequently are).

In 5e, evil is evil, good is good. There is no capitalization.

There is also very few things that detect alignments, as the old "ping Good/ping Evil" methods were changed to "detect supernatural creatures" for the most part.

The gods are not morality arbiters, neither are Ao or similar beings. But they can be very thorough character witnesses if they want to.


A DM can absolutely make so that regularly animating undead isn't evil, IF they changes the consequences of such an act. Namely, make so the result isn't a malevolent entity that may create more malevolent entities by staying around.

[Anymage]

3) This is actually interesting, game mechanics wise... is not being able to raise a skeleton from the remains of an undead a fact, a rule or the product of sage advice or are we just lost in semantics on account of how a pile of bones is a pile of bones, whether it was reanimated before or not? in other words, could a necromancer just have, say, 5 sets of bones/skeletons and reuse those continuously rather than digging up fresh graves every time, or is that explicitly against the rules?

Animate Dead says that it targets "a pile of bones or the corpse of a medium or small humanoid". If you animate a zombie and then destroy it, you arguably have the remains of an undead instead of a humanoid. A destroyed skeleton could still be called a pile of bones. However, since destroying an undead generally involves doing damage to it, grandpa's skeleton will tend to be rather worse for wear if you animate it and then deactivate it. You can't just decide to end the spell and have the bones fall into a harmless, pristine heap.


on a separate note.. thoughts on the multiclass into cleric or druid? Thematically I think it fits, but mechanically, does it work? and would it just a 1-3 level dip, or an equal progression?

Clr1 is a popular dip for wizards, netting you armor/shield proficiencies, a domain feature, and access to a few low level cleric spells (most notably Cure Wounds/Healing Word) that might have useful scaling ability. A 50/50 split of spellcasting classes is going to have you painfully behind on spellcasting, since upcast spells aren't quite as good as a proper spell of that level.


In Eberron, people disagree that something that pinged Good is actually good on a regular basis. What's to stop people from doing this in Forgotten Realms, the gods? The gods are fully capable of being wrong (and frequently are).

The gods of Faerun are fully capable of being stupid jerkfaces and people inside the setting are fully capable of thinking that divine dictate may be at odds with useful morality, but it's worth thinking about undead in particular in this case. 3.x had undead as tightly bound robots who had no consequentialist moral problems beyond a blip in the Animate Dead spell saying that Good characters were unlikely to cast the spell often. Cue many discussions of how undead as perpetually functioning robots would revolutionize society, and questions of just why good characters would find undead distasteful when robots with a slightly macabre twinge have so many benefits with no clear drawbacks.

WotC wanted undead to be evil because undead are typically either villains or in the service of villains. Making historically mindless undead incredibly dangerous and making historically intelligent undead require doing ongoing harm (see liches now needing a monthly feeding instead of being able to perpetuate eternally with zero externalities) are there to give good characters concrete consequentialist reasons to loathe undead as a blanket rule.

People in universe are certainly free to disagree. I'm sure that Thayan philosophers have much to say on the subject. But it's worth looking at the added elements put in place specifically so that good-aligned characters would have reason to dislike the undead before deciding that animating someone's skeleton is just a way to let them continue contributing to society after they die.

[Unoriginal]

Animate Dead says that it targets "a pile of bones or the corpse of a medium or small humanoid". If you animate a zombie and then destroy it, you arguably have the remains of an undead instead of a humanoid. A destroyed skeleton could still be called a pile of bones. However, since destroying an undead generally involves doing damage to it, grandpa's skeleton will tend to be rather worse for wear if you animate it and then deactivate it. You can't just decide to end the spell and have the bones fall into a harmless, pristine heap.



Clr1 is a popular dip for wizards, netting you armor/shield proficiencies, a domain feature, and access to a few low level cleric spells (most notably Cure Wounds/Healing Word) that might have useful scaling ability. A 50/50 split of spellcasting classes is going to have you painfully behind on spellcasting, since upcast spells aren't quite as good as a proper spell of that level.



The gods of Faerun are fully capable of being stupid jerkfaces and people inside the setting are fully capable of thinking that divine dictate may be at odds with useful morality, but it's worth thinking about undead in particular in this case. 3.x had undead as tightly bound robots who had no consequentialist moral problems beyond a blip in the Animate Dead spell saying that Good characters were unlikely to cast the spell often. Cue many discussions of how undead as perpetually functioning robots would revolutionize society, and questions of just why good characters would find undead distasteful when robots with a slightly macabre twinge have so many benefits with no clear drawbacks.

WotC wanted undead to be evil because undead are typically either villains or in the service of villains. Making historically mindless undead incredibly dangerous and making historically intelligent undead require doing ongoing harm (see liches now needing a monthly feeding instead of being able to perpetuate eternally with zero externalities) are there to give good characters concrete consequentialist reasons to loathe undead as a blanket rule.

People in universe are certainly free to disagree. I'm sure that Thayan philosophers have much to say on the subject. But it's worth looking at the added elements put in place specifically so that good-aligned characters would have reason to dislike the undead before deciding that animating someone's skeleton is just a way to let them continue contributing to society after they die.

Very true.

Nothing stops a DM from using 3.X-style Undead in their settings, but that it is a departure from the default 5e lore has to be acknowledged.

[LudicSavant]

The gods of Faerun are fully capable of being stupid jerkfaces and people inside the setting are fully capable of thinking that divine dictate may be at odds with useful morality, but it's worth thinking about undead in particular in this case. 3.x had undead as tightly bound robots who had no consequentialist moral problems beyond a blip in the Animate Dead spell saying that Good characters were unlikely to cast the spell often. Cue many discussions of how undead as perpetually functioning robots would revolutionize society, and questions of just why good characters would find undead distasteful when robots with a slightly macabre twinge have so many benefits with no clear drawbacks.

WotC wanted undead to be evil because undead are typically either villains or in the service of villains. Making historically mindless undead incredibly dangerous and making historically intelligent undead require doing ongoing harm (see liches now needing a monthly feeding instead of being able to perpetuate eternally with zero externalities) are there to give good characters concrete consequentialist reasons to loathe undead as a blanket rule.

People in universe are certainly free to disagree. I'm sure that Thayan philosophers have much to say on the subject. But it's worth looking at the added elements put in place specifically so that good-aligned characters would have reason to dislike the undead before deciding that animating someone's skeleton is just a way to let them continue contributing to society after they die.

Which added elements are you referring to? Specifically with regard to Animate Dead.

If it's just that the undead go rogue if they're not issued orders within a given period, that's honestly less dangerous than factors that already existed in 3.X. I mean most people I know just order their undead to destroy themselves after a certain time period unless they're given new orders before then.

[Unoriginal]

Which added elements are you referring to?

Specifically with regard to Animate Dead.

The part where skeletons and zombies are not mindless automatons which just happen to have a funky power source, but moral actors who wish to cause lethal harm on anything living.

[Bosh]

For inspiration there's Nirriti the Black from Lord of Light by Zelazny who has corpse armies serving him but who is one of the more decent people in the book (not a high bar but still...).

[LudicSavant]

The part where skeletons and zombies are not mindless automatons which just happen to have a funky power source, but moral actors who wish to cause lethal harm on anything living.

As far as a consequentialist argument goes, 'irresponsibly leaving uncontrolled undead lying around' would have negative consequences -- but that is something you have to choose to let happen, not something that's inherent to the spell itself.

In the case of Animate Dead, zombies may wish to eat your brains, but they're under your control and therefore will not. Even if something would cause you to be unable to give them further orders, they will just destroy themselves (because responsible casters always order their undead to destroy themselves if they don't hear from you -- they're self-cleaning!)

Was there something beyond that?

[Anymage]

On each of your turns, you can use a bonus action to mentally command any creature you made with this spell if the creature is within 60 feet of you (if you control multiple creatures, you can command any or all of them at the same time, issuing the same command to each one). You decide what action the creature will take and where it will move during its next turn, or you can issue a general command, such as to guard a particular chamber or corridor. If you issue no commands, the creature only defends itself against hostile creatures. Once given an order, the creature continues to follow it until its task is complete.

Whether you follow the skeletons-as-robots interpretation or the skeletons-as-slaves one, it's arguable that a conditional such as "keep cleaning until an hour before control is set to lapse. Then start attacking yourself if I haven't been by to update programming" counts as a simple instruction. Remember that undead can't just choose to stop existing and then peacefully expire. They have to inflict damage upon themselves in one way or another. Often in ways that might leave the bones unsuitable for future reanimation.

Plus, the "commence self-destruction sequence when there's an hour of control left" command means that you need to reup your control every 23 hours while you can only get your spells back every 24. Skeletons as cheap extra bodies when you absolutely need reinforcements might be justifiable, but they can't serve as a perpetual labor force.

Plus the part where large concentrations of undead increase the likelihood of Uncontrolled undead spontaneously arising in the area.

Plus the old "rules as literal laws of physics vs. rules as a simplified abstraction layer" debate, and whether bound undead should be seen more as robots or slaves. Robots do what they're programmed for and only what they're programmed for, while slaves might take the occasional self-directed action if not carefully watched. When those self-directed actions are going to involve hurting/killing innocent bystanders that's a high risk if one is out of your sight for any amount of time.

[MukkTB]

Well there's nothing wrong with playing a character that has the hubris to think making undead is a good thing. And there's no roleplay as good as really believing it... Certainly I'd allow you to make that character if I was DMing. But if we were playing generic 5e setting and rules we'd be ass deep in monkey paw territory. I don't think you'd like how things would turn out.

[DruidAlanon]

on a separate note.. thoughts on the multiclass into cleric or druid? Thematically I think it fits, but mechanically, does it work? and would it just a 1-3 level dip, or an equal progression?

a) Cheesy option: Play a straight wizard and ask your DM for the Lorehold Student background (quite close to your backstory) or the Orzhov Representative background. You skip cleric levels and you get the Spirit Guardians + Grim Harvest combo.

b) Cleric 5/Wizard 15 is not exactly optimal, but can use the same combo. Cleric 1/Wizard X is good because you get armor proficiency.

c) Straight Spores Druid, played as a summoner/spellcaster. Gets access to animate dead and other necromancy spells including the magic stone+skellies combo, raises zombies, etc. Combined with the Golgari Agent background is quite thematic.


Some other comments (my 2 cents):

1) If you go straight necro wizard. Keep in mind that undead thralls is bread and butter for a necromancer. Avoiding having a great number of minions will make you feel like a wizard with no specialisation. IMO, do embrace what necromancy offers and aim to have an army of undead minions. You CAN focus on few strong undead but this comes quite late at 14th lvl with command undead (use it with silvery barbs to increace your chances of sucess). If you want to make potions go for it but don't waste a feat on healer. Take good feats for spellcasters, ie warcaster, resilient (con), fey touched, etc. Artificier 1/nerco wizard X is also good due to armor & con proficiency and the magic stone + skellies combo (you get the cantrip from artificier and the undead from wizard lvls).

2) If you want to be a healer, play a cleric or spores druid. Alternatively, play a shepherd druid and just reflavor your conjure animals to undead creatures and make your healing necromancy-based with your dm. E.g. reflavour goodberries as small necromantic potions that draw hitpoints from the environment (e.g. insects, flowers, whatever), make healing word do the same, etc. Reflavouring is free and can go a looong way. You can actually do that with any druid circle, if summoning is not your thing. E.g. reflavor the Stars druid as a necromancer druid where the power doesn't come from a stars map but from a skull, and instead of constellations you rely on the spirits of the dead. Similar ideas apply to any cleric subclass really. Just play the strongest cleric, eg Twilight, and assume you're a witch doctor. Same idea, reflavour your spells and abilities with a necromantic theme.

3) Of course you can play a good necro. 5e is a set of rules, not a set of ethics. Having said that animating as a skeleton your parents is not the definition of goodness because such undead are like walking-dead as pointed out by others. This is a spell meant to be a weapon. There are 6 spells that ressurect in the game, go for one of them if you want to ressurect your family. Now, it's up to the DM to decide whether raising dead is taboo. IF it's western european setting, then yes. But keep in mind that other cultures would embrace it (eg in Papua New Guinea used to cannibalise their dead family members). To give an example, in our game where I play necro-spores druid my quarterstaff broke. So I took the femur from a dead enemy. Our Paladin didn't like it but understood I come from the jungle and have different ethics. You can discuss with your DM and come up with something that makes sense for the game.

[LudicSavant]

Well there's nothing wrong with playing a character that has the hubris to think making undead is a good thing. And there's no roleplay as good as really believing it... Certainly I'd allow you to make that character if I was DMing. But if we were playing generic 5e setting and rules we'd be ass deep in monkey paw territory. I don't think you'd like how things would turn out.

Whether you follow the skeletons-as-robots interpretation or the skeletons-as-slaves one, it's arguable that a conditional such as "keep cleaning until an hour before control is set to lapse. Then start attacking yourself if I haven't been by to update programming" counts as a simple instruction. Remember that undead can't just choose to stop existing and then peacefully expire. They have to inflict damage upon themselves in one way or another. Often in ways that might leave the bones unsuitable for future reanimation.

Plus, the "commence self-destruction sequence when there's an hour of control left" command means that you need to reup your control every 23 hours while you can only get your spells back every 24. Skeletons as cheap extra bodies when you absolutely need reinforcements might be justifiable, but they can't serve as a perpetual labor force.

Plus the part where large concentrations of undead increase the likelihood of Uncontrolled undead spontaneously arising in the area.

Plus the old "rules as literal laws of physics vs. rules as a simplified abstraction layer" debate, and whether bound undead should be seen more as robots or slaves. Robots do what they're programmed for and only what they're programmed for, while slaves might take the occasional self-directed action if not carefully watched. When those self-directed actions are going to involve hurting/killing innocent bystanders that's a high risk if one is out of your sight for any amount of time.

This stuff sounds like 'playing with fire' territory. And while playing with fire can have consequences, it doesn't inherently have them -- the consequences are generally proportional to how responsibly you're using the fire.

And as far as playing with fire goes, "zombies that try to monkey's paw your orders" still seems less threatening to me than the kinds of fire that real engineers already have to build safeguards for.


Well there's nothing wrong with playing a character that has the hubris to think making undead is a good thing. And there's no roleplay as good as really believing it... Certainly I'd allow you to make that character if I was DMing. But if we were playing generic 5e setting and rules we'd be ass deep in monkey paw territory. I don't think you'd like how things would turn out.

I dunno, I kinda like Monkey's Paw stories. I'd be curious to hear how you'd have things go awry :smallsmile:

[Damon_Tor]

One of the worlds in my homebrew cosmology is a "Judge Dredd"-esque setting where good vs evil takes a backseat to law vs chaos. In this world necromancy is simply a property crime, a theft from whoever rightfully owns the corpse being reanimated. If you die with debts your estate will likely sell your corpse to a corpse handler to settle this debt. Because it's dangerous, necromancy is tightly regulated, and corpses legally animated are given serial numbers for enforcement. If one of your reanimated corpses goes feral and causes damage it can be tracked back to you and you'll face a fine and be liable for the damages.

Also as a note, warlocks with lawful patrons, including devils, exist entirely without stigma, and firms exist to help connect prospective warlocks with their patrons as well as drafting fair enforceable pacts and handle arbitration between patrons and their warlocks when disputes arise. In an otherwise unrelated campaign, the party traveled to this plane in order to retain the services of a specialized attorney to represent the party warlock in a dispute with his patron.

[LudicSavant]

Whether you follow the skeletons-as-robots interpretation or the skeletons-as-slaves one, it's arguable that a conditional such as "keep cleaning until an hour before control is set to lapse. Then start attacking yourself if I haven't been by to update programming" counts as a simple instruction.

Animate Dead makes no requirement that your instructions be simple. That said, for our purposes 'Do X thing at Y time' is sufficient -- we don't need to add conditionals like 'if I haven't been around' since if we're around, we can just issue whatever new orders we want.


Remember that undead can't just choose to stop existing and then peacefully expire. They have to inflict damage upon themselves in one way or another. Often in ways that might leave the bones unsuitable for future reanimation.

Under normal circumstances, the caster would be around to check on them within a span of 24 hours (stricter regulation might require that they be supervised at all times).

If that doesn't occur, then it likely means either A) something bad happened to the caster (in which case future reanimation isn't really our priority) or B) the caster would be liable for gross negligence (and gross negligence is enough to qualify as evil on its own, without Animate Dead helping it out).

[Tanarii]

Nothing in Animate Dead implies they can be programmed to take an action at a future time. Either they do it immediately for one round under your perfect control (unlike say Conjure line of spells) or they start following a general command immediately.

[LudicSavant]

Nothing in Animate Dead implies they can be programmed to take an action at a future time.

On the contrary, the examples given not only imply but require that it's possible for the animated dead to react to future conditions. You can't program a guarding behavior without that.

For example, if you order your zombies to guard a chamber, that requires that they can do things like 'if a creature shows up in this chamber at some point in the future, attack them.'

[Unoriginal]

As far as a consequentialist argument goes, 'irresponsibly leaving uncontrolled undead lying around' would have negative consequences -- but that is something you have to choose to let happen, not something that's inherent to the spell itself.

In the case of Animate Dead, zombies may wish to eat your brains, but they're under your control and therefore will not. Even if something would cause you to be unable to give them further orders, they will just destroy themselves (because responsible casters always order their undead to destroy themselves if they don't hear from you -- they're self-cleaning!)

Was there something beyond that?

The MM entry for either Zombie or Skeleton makes clear that having undead around can cause corpses to spontaneously transform into undead.

I also am not sure that "don't worry, I've ordered my evil slaves to destroy themselves in case I'm not here to renew the magic controlling them" is an indicator the person saying that is not a bad guy.

Also, I don't recall anything in Animate Dead saying the undead can follow several instructions at once. So if you gove them the order of destroying themselves if the spell duration is running out,they wouldn't be able to do anything else.I admit I could be wrong on that.

Regardless, declaring that there is no way the dangerous monster will escape your control is something you usually see either villains, fools, or foolidh villains do. And then the question is: how many time do you have to create a dangerous monster "for good" before it becomes willingly putting people in precarious peril?

[Kish]

I think everything in this thread can be summarized as:

If the DM is on board with you playing a good-aligned corpse-animator, you can.
If the DM is not, it's not going to work.

[LudicSavant]

The MM entry for either Zombie or Skeleton makes clear that having undead around can cause corpses to spontaneously transform into undead.

Good point. Though this still seems to fall roughly under the moral category of 'you should follow hazmat protocols when using this spell.'


I also am not sure that "don't worry, I've ordered my evil slaves to destroy themselves in case I'm not here to renew the magic controlling them" is an indicator the person saying that is not a bad guy.

If the undead are mistreated, then there might be a basis to consider the spell wrong on that alone.

However, I'm not sure the undead mind. The description of zombies says "A zombie retains no vestiges of its former self, its mind devoid of thought" while the description of skeletons says they "possess little sense of self and even less sense of self-preservation."


Regardless, declaring that there is no way the dangerous monster will escape your control is something you usually see either villains, fools, or foolidh villains do.

In B movies that follow this kind of script, sure. (https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bw3le/caveman_science_fiction_you_are_play_gods/) In real life, though, we play with fire all the time, sometimes with costs, but often to great success, too.

As far as the danger-level of Animate Dead specifically goes, zoos haven't had much trouble containing things smarter and more dangerous than D&D zombies, and we regularly handle materials that are both more difficult to control and would cause significantly more devastation in the event of an accident. So it's dangerous, but not overly so. I honestly would be more worried about a few other spells existing...


And then the question is: how many time do you have to create a dangerous monster "for good" before it becomes willingly putting people in precarious peril?

Depends on how responsibly you're handling the dangerous thing. Doing it one time is too many if you're being irresponsible. Doing it as a widespread cultural practice is fine as long as there are safety measures in place that reduce the risk to acceptable levels.

[JLandan]

Back in the old 3.5 days, I played a character who was a Pharaoh's executioner. He was, of course, from Egypt where raising dead is the core of their religion. The setting was a time skipping/alternate reality romp. He was a worshipper of Osiris, who himself was raised from the dead by his wife, Isis, and therefore an undead. I used the Dread Necromancer class from Libre Mortalis. One of its features was proficiency with a single martial weapon, so I chose an executioner's sword (greatsword). His schtick was that as a purveyor of justice, he could call upon the bodies or souls of criminals to return and serve the cause of justice and thereby lighten the burden at their judgement in the afterlife.

So, under these circumstances, the creation of undead was not only not evil, but served the cause of good.

It's all up to the DM's discretion.

[Anymage]

This stuff sounds like 'playing with fire' territory. And while playing with fire can have consequences, it doesn't inherently have them -- the consequences are generally proportional to how responsibly you're using the fire.

And as far as playing with fire goes, "zombies that try to monkey's paw your orders" still seems less threatening to me than the kinds of fire that real engineers already have to build safeguards for.

If you want to have undead be tightly regulated to limit the harm they can do, that's fine. That also definitionally limits what they can be used for, and thus the societal impact, but you can have Animate Dead be a tightly regulated spell that Good characters treat with major caution instead of an always Evil one where copies are to be burned on sight.

That still says that PC necromancers will have to follow very elaborate precautions and will often have to leave their undead behind to limit the risks to others. Or else face consequences of both alignment and practical natures. It also means that a kindly necromancer who tries to raise undead to do household chores is going to find out why the precautions and regulations are necessary.

You then have the questions of metaphysical effects of so much negative energy coming into the plane, and how (or even whether) that might be mitigated. That's all DM dependent on how he wants to style things, though.

[dehro]

point of order as to the premise of the post... this is supposed to act as the background of the character, rather than an ongoing thing, so in terms of gameplay, it might not be entirely relevant other than to set a baseline on how people who know Astor's past or know him from the past might or might not react to and interact with him.
people who don't know him and who aren't familiar with the peculiar situation his village lived in, might take him for a random wizard/cleric, and react to him according to how he behaves in game.
so from a gaming perspective I am not entirely sure it's a big deal either way we look at the morality of the issue, purely on account of how this is one guy in a backwater village, not a systemic thing. (I'm half thinking of a place with Barovia vibes).
What he does and how he acts once he is away from his familiar places and removed from his comfort zone is entirely up for grabs and open to being pounded upon by the DM if his actions don't gel with the rest of polite society.

that said, even in the background, Astor would purposely stay close to his skeletons, to make sure they don't get creative beyond what he needs them to do. He'd probably bring a book and keep an eye on them as they feed the chicken or plough a field or repair a fishing net.
I also thought of the families needing the extra manpower rising their family members on account of maybe some vestigial memory would give the undead a degree of familiarity and aptitude with the necessary tasks, but reading the description of the skeletons and such, that goes out of the window the moment we stick to RAW and keep to the notion that the raised undead has 0 affinity with their former self... bit of a shame from a narrative standpoint, but nothing too crippling.

so yeah, ultimately, this would very much be a case of a DM either accepting the backstory as a bit of creative writing and a potential source for a personal enemy or two, but otherwise sticking to how wizards (and necromancers in particular) are played and perceived normally in a game, or the DM integrating this take on utilitarian necromancy into the setting... or straight up refusing to do either and nixing the backstory... which would also be fine, as I said, this is not for playing but a thought experiment.. and I am seeing solid arguments being given by everybody.

[Tanarii]

Backstory isn't the point being called out under default rules. Nor is how the character thinks of themselves. It's a player describing their character as good and writing that down on their character sheet.

Does that matter? Quite possibly not at all. Roleplaying rules tend to be more easily ignored or changed than say using your Wis bonus to attack instead of Str, because you want to do something different to make a character concept. Or it might matter a lot. Depends on the group. Depends on the DM.

If someone wants to make a good character under the default rules, as a player, that is a necromancer, focus on necromancy spells that don't create undead creatures. And rarely if ever use those that do.

Or talk to your DM and make sure they're on board with changing something about the default rules.

[LudicSavant]

that said, even in the background, Astor would purposely stay close to his skeletons, to make sure they don't get creative beyond what he needs them to do. He'd probably bring a book and keep an eye on them as they feed the chicken or plough a field or repair a fishing net.
I also thought of the families needing the extra manpower rising their family members on account of maybe some vestigial memory would give the undead a degree of familiarity and aptitude with the necessary tasks, but reading the description of the skeletons and such, that goes out of the window the moment we stick to RAW and keep to the notion that the raised undead has 0 affinity with their former self... bit of a shame from a narrative standpoint, but nothing too crippling.

This line about skeletons seems relevant to your idea:

"Habitual Behaviors.
Independent skeletons temporarily or permanently free of a master's control sometimes pantomime actions from their past lives, their bones echoing the rote behaviors of their former living selves. The skeleton of a miner might lift a pick and start chipping away at stone walls. The skeleton of a guard might strike up a post at a random doorway. The skeleton of a dragon might lie down on a pile of treasure, while the skeleton of a horse crops grass it can't eat. Left alone in a ballroom, the skeletons of nobles might continue an eternally unfinished dance."

Zombies on the other hand are stated to have nothing whatsoever of their past selves remaining.

[JLandan]

Maybe you could create a new spell for this specific type of undead.
Call it Reanimate Loved One.
Have it only work on a corpse that has had a special last rite and has been prepared for this use.
It's sort of tapping into Animate Dead and Speak With Dead. Make it noncombatant, use commoner stats instead of monster stats.

[JackPhoenix]

In B movies that follow this kind of script, sure. (https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bw3le/caveman_science_fiction_you_are_play_gods/) In real life, though, we play with fire all the time, sometimes with costs, but often to great success, too.

In real life, there's no objective, capital E Evil. Or a malevolent spirits whose sole desire is to destroy all life, and who didn't have an opportunity to act on that desire until someone decided to give them physical bodies.


As far as the danger-level of Animate Dead specifically goes, zoos haven't had much trouble containing things smarter and more dangerous than D&D zombies, and we regularly handle materials that are both more difficult to control and would cause significantly more devastation in the event of an accident. So it's dangerous, but not overly so. I honestly would be more worried about a few other spells existing...

A tiger or a nuclear reaction isn't actively malevolent.

[LudicSavant]

Or a malevolent spirits whose sole desire is to destroy all life, and who didn't have an opportunity to act on that desire until someone decided to give them physical bodies.

They don't have an opportunity to act on that desire when you use Animate Dead, either. Unless the caster is acting like they dumped their mental stat instead of maxing it, an extremely high number of things would have to go wrong, and even if they all do, all you've got is... a D&D zombie. Which as far as outbreaks go, is pretty nonthreatening. A similar level of 'things going wrong' for other spells would be more dangerous.


A tiger or a nuclear reaction isn't actively malevolent.

So what?

A zombie is canonically devoid of thought. Its 'active malevolence' only extends about as far as going 'braaaains' and shambling towards anything with a pulse, which is no worse than what plenty of animals do (honestly, it's not even as bad -- some animals torture things to death for fun). And even that relatively tame danger requires a series of cascading failures to occur before it's even possible.

[JackPhoenix]

They don't have an opportunity to act on that desire when you use Animate Dead, either. An extremely high number of things would have to go wrong, and even if they all do, all you've got is... a D&D zombie. Which as far as dangerous outbreaks go, is pretty nonthreatening.

1 is "extremely high number"? You're right there's an extremely high number in play... an extremely high number of reasons why the necromancer possibly wouldn't cast the spell to maintain the control of the undead again within the 24-hour limit.

And 4-hp commoners would very much disagree with your assessment of the threat posed by zombies or skeletons.


So what?

This alone tells me any further discussion is pointless.

[LudicSavant]

1 is "extremely high number"?

Assuming that casters are using safety precautions as discussed in the thread above, then I imagine quite a few things would need to go wrong before there'll be any uncontrolled zombies wandering about. If you disagree, what's this 'one thing' that's going to cause disaster?


You're right there's an extremely high number in play... an extremely high number of reasons why the necromancer possibly wouldn't cast the spell to maintain the control of the undead again within the 24-hour limit.

Such as?


And 4-hp commoners would very much disagree with your assessment of the threat posed by zombies or skeletons.

This alone tells me any further discussion is pointless.

You were literally comparing a D&D zombie to a nuclear reaction in a discussion about risk assessment and consequentialism.

Being "actively malevolent" cannot make a D&D zombie more dangerous to a commoner than a nuclear reaction.

Indeed, it can't even make them as dangerous as a common hazmat chemical spill, or a tiger that decided humans were on the menu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champawat_Tiger).

[DeadMech]

I despise how often "necromancer raises dead to do agriculture" comes up. Are you seriously telling me you would eat food that was handled by undead? Do you want plague? Cause this is how you get plague.

[dehro]

as opposed to wearing armor and wielding weapons looted from a tomb, delving into rat infested sewers or dungeons, looting monsters for parts without wearing a hazmat suit, which are all perfectly sanitary activities that happen routinely in DnD?
by your logic, the very existence of ambulating undead should constantly keep any fantasy setting that includes them about 1 bite away from continuous plague everywhere.. which is the premise of a bunch of interesting TV shows, but doesn't have to be the central theme of a campaign... unless the DM makes it so.
to answer your question, yes, I am willing to stretch my suspension of disbelief into that particular way just like I am ok with the undead of various kind, ranging from skeletons to vampire lords interacting on the daily with other npcs, humanoids, pcs, monsters and so on, and not being walking epicenters of plague waves.

[LudicSavant]

I wanted to try and see if I could make a necromancer that was actually a good person and used his powers responsibly. This is purely a thought exercise, a proof of concept.

Just remember to put in a safety mechanism to prevent your zombies from eating anyone even if you were to die prematurely of adventuring-related causes. This is generally pretty easy for anyone who can spare mid-level spell slots for chores. You can do it via well-crafted orders, Magic Mouth, Forbiddance, or even just having a supervisor (it doesn't even have to be you; if you don't show up in time to re-up your control, just have them under orders to execute the undead).

[MukkTB]

This is what I would do if I was DMing.

#1 The first thing I had to think about was how to treat commands to the undead. Presumably I would be 100% on board with a necromancer casting Animate Dead for some skeletons, giving them crossbows, and using them as a unit in combat. If that's fine, using them for labor should be mechanically possible. So if I was DMing I would have any command last the 24 hours of the spell's duration and be carried out faithfully but not particularly intelligently. When you Renew Animate dead to retain control you would have to also give any long term commands again.
And I would be clear about this ruling.

#2 Trying to run 5e lore, the native behavior of a zombie would be something like Night of the Living Dead. "Brains..." Skeletons would be a bit less interested in eating the things they kill and more just straight murder machines. A burning hatred for living things either way. Animate Dead does not bring Grandma's soul back. It makes a horrible monster out of her corpse. You have really good control over that monster when you do have control over it. But it has absolutely dark intentions.
Assuming you took Knowledge Arcana or Knowledge Religion I would be very clear about that.

#3 I would be totally onboard with Summon Undead pulling a particular spirit. If the gilded skull was your sister's skull I don't see anything wrong with having her ghost be the one that keeps showing up. And since the Undead Spirit is listed as unaligned I would roleplay it as your sister without any planar influences twisting her personality.

#4 I would not contrive some bad scenario where your containment of Animate Dead failed. I would be watching closely for you to make mistakes. But the skeletons and zombies are just not smart enough to plot against you or undermine your control. And as DM I won't just come up with some way to have things go to **** just because I want to teach you a lesson or "prove" to you that necromancy is evil.
Now if you are using command undead to control a much more intelligent undead like a lich or something, you could have an incredibly dangerous incredibly conniving **** ready to stab you in the back the first opportunity that arises.
I would not tell you about these considerations.

#5 Regarding alignment - It's not my job to judge you the player or your character. But it is my job to accurately run NPCs according to their beliefs.
The Great Sunblade made by the "lawful good" gods to the defend the weak against the wicked and only wieldable by the pure of heart probably wouldn't work for you. You've had too much willing interaction with badly corrupting dark powers for the comfort of those stuck up purists up on their high thrones.
The local inquisition will probably also want a quiet word with you. Over in that unmarked building with the thick walls and no windows.
I would not tell you, "The Great Sunblade Requires a good alignment and you are neutral." I would not secretly write down that your alignment is neutral. I would just say "Somehow the Great Sunblade will not attune to you."
During character creation, if the inquisition existed in the setting we were going to run I would tell you about them. And I would tell you what the average peasant knows about them, how dogmatically intolerant they are and how they like to wear badges and little hats.
During character creation I would not tell you about the shadow government and their secret inquisition. If such a thing existed.
Good luck.

#6 Finally there are some miscellaneous religious issues.
Undead naturally occur in areas infused with sufficient negative energy. They will not come into existence under control and they will do the normal undead things. But in my opinion - it would take years of practicing low level necromancy to taint an area. You'd need something a lot more powerful or a lot more evil to quickly desecrate an area. Maybe if you happen to slaughter all the younglings at the local temple you shouldn't store any corpses there.
There are also some settings where the spirits of the dead don't rest easy. And an angry ghost can be a problem. I would be checking to see in the setting if spirits are whisked away right to Valhalla on the last breath - or if they need proper burial to keep them at bay. Grandma showing up to complain about how you desecrated her corpse could be a really unpleasant experience.

[dehro]

Good stuff.
On a more practical note, assuming that this character takes a 1 level dip in Life domain cleric, this gives him every armour proficiency. With a Dex of 14, a shield and Mage armor, he gets a 17 AC. Or he could just suit up and save the spell slot.
Considering that this is not a frontliner and that if he gets in melee range something has gone terribly wrong, what is traditionally considered the better choice with such a premise? Best to save the spell slot and invest in armour or to keep mobility and stealth in consideration? I just realised I've hardly ever played a primary wizard character, hence the rookie question

[LudicSavant]

Good stuff.
On a more practical note, assuming that this character takes a 1 level dip in Life domain cleric, this gives him every armour proficiency. With a Dex of 14, a shield and Mage armor, he gets a 17 AC. Or he could just suit up and save the spell slot.
Considering that this is not a frontliner and that if he gets in melee range something has gone terribly wrong, what is traditionally considered the better choice with such a premise? Best to save the spell slot and invest in armour or to keep mobility and stealth in consideration? I just realised I've hardly ever played a primary wizard character, hence the rookie question

For Life 1 / Necromancer Wizard X, you should generally get the armor.

As a side note, Life 1 / Necromancy X with Mark of Healing is one of the better healers in the game, if you really want to push the 'master of life and death' angle from both ends. Considerably better than most clerics at healing, in fact.

[Witty Username]

Stealth is an everybody on board kinda thing and especially at low levels the spell slot for maintaining mage armor is pretty significant. Medium to heavy armor will often be worth it if you can wear it.
--
The practical value of undead is pretty significant, even stuff like transportation and logistics benefit alot from extra bodies. I Say the big ones are:
-constuction
-heavy lifting
-guard posting
-autonomous warfare

Agriculture came up, sanitation would be a concern, but not an insurmountable one. Remember we grow food from compost, which is how we get contamination in our lettuce sometimes. Well maintained corpses wouldn't be much different than handling from humans. Wash your vegetables before you eat them.

Now, good people have invested interest in all of these things, think of the characters goals learning necromancy, and how necromancy applies too it.

[Tanarii]

Also armies to fight off the horrified neighboring nations. And some kind of plan to deal with adventurer strike teams coming in to wipe out the casters.

Even if necromancy isn't alignment evil, it's still likely to be culturally reviled by most non-necromantic nations and peoples.

[DruidAlanon]

Good stuff.
On a more practical note, assuming that this character takes a 1 level dip in Life domain cleric, this gives him every armour proficiency. With a Dex of 14, a shield and Mage armor, he gets a 17 AC. Or he could just suit up and save the spell slot.
Considering that this is not a frontliner and that if he gets in melee range something has gone terribly wrong, what is traditionally considered the better choice with such a premise? Best to save the spell slot and invest in armour or to keep mobility and stealth in consideration? I just realised I've hardly ever played a primary wizard character, hence the rookie question

Do wear a medium armor. Half plate = 15 + 2 (dex) + 2(shield) = 19 AC. You won't melee, ever. But more AC = more effective HP = more survivability. AC is good for everyone, not just frontliners. Don't forget that enemy archers/spellcasters can reach you from 500ft away if your DM is nasty enough.

Save a spell slot for the Shield spell for the occasional 24AC and absorb elements for higher levels (later Tier1- Tier2 onwards).

In most battles you can just concentrate on a nasty control spell (e.g. web), let your minions deliver massive amounts of DPR and you simply dodge (for the disadvantage on attack rolls against you). Dissadvantage + 19 (24)AC almost guarantees that your area spell is always on. Your skellies can simply attack with range. You win the encounter. Or if you need extra damage, go as far away as you can and instead of dodge you do your cantrip (e.g. the very thematic chill touch).

Your mobility = misty step + control spells (sleep, web, fog cloud) + your familiar (you can cast spells through him).

This is a relatively standard optimisation blueprint for wizards.

Stealth is quite occasional so no need to be always prepared for that, imo. If you need to be ultra stealthy for an encounter you can then plan accordingly. eg with prof in Arcana you can make scrolls (for invisibility).
Invisibility + mage armor + minor image/prestigidation (for distractions) + silence + darkness + fog cloud (concentrate on 1) will do the job.

Btw you can also get arcane eye at 7th lvl and you can be 100% invisible and safe.

[Anymage]

This thread is making me curious. If we make the following assumptions, how well count undead be integrated into society. Assume no drawbacks beyond the ones stated:


Undead will potentially attack any living being that gets close to them. The caster can pull them back if it's noticed, but an attack might get off before the caster has time to react and could be worse if the caster isn't around to step in. In practice this means that undead have to be sequestered away from living beings unless attacking is the whole point.
Undead can be told to set to a task, and will be able to adapt to said task at the level of a dim commoner, but cannot be given complex conditionals and will not change from one task to another unless the creator is present to command otherwise. (Or if another magical effect says as much, or if the undead become uncontrolled. But the former is likely going to require yet another high level caster to be kept on standby while the latter is a situation you want to avoid.) So no commanding the undead to suicide at a signal that can be given if the creator can't be present to reup control.
Undead in any appreciable quantities leach negative energy into the plane. Corpses nearby are more likely to spontaneously arise as uncontrolled undead. Animals and plants can't reach full vitality. Anything that is born and/or grows in the area is likely to be sickly or otherwise stunted, and even otherwise healthy adults tend to take longer to recover from illness an injury. Undead are unlikely to be around major population centers for the abovementioned "nonzero chance of random attack" reason, but this also means that agricultural undead will lead to smaller harvests of worse quality.
This is unchanged from the standard version but bears pointing out. Undead do require regular upkeep from casters with at least a few levels on them, and securing the area should also require guards to whom CR 1/4 skeletons are completely trivial. If each caster oversees exactly one undead, that seems like a waste compared to just hiring a commoner and pocketing the difference between 5th+ level caster wages and commoner wages. Since undead require regular upkeep instead of giving nigh-perpetual work for one upfront cost, it has to be economically worthwhile for everybody involved over other alternatives.


I could see mining being one case where the problems are nicely negated. It has routines of going in to mine the ore and then coming back out with it, giving an easy opportunity for daily refresh casts. They're digging through solid stone where it's unlikely that living things will be impacted by any of the drawbacks. The potential dangers of the work mean that miners will require high pay and it's arguably better to send expendable skeletons instead. And the nature of mine openings means that it's easy for a few guards to be on hand in case of screwup and something feral coming out. That said, however, I'm hard pressed to think of other cases where a good aligned kingdom would find undead both morally and economically justifiable even if there were no other pressures.

[JackPhoenix]

I could see mining being one case where the problems are nicely negated. It has routines of going in to mine the ore and then coming back out with it, giving an easy opportunity for daily refresh casts. They're digging through solid stone where it's unlikely that living things will be impacted by any of the drawbacks. The potential dangers of the work mean that miners will require high pay and it's arguably better to send expendable skeletons instead. And the nature of mine openings means that it's easy for a few guards to be on hand in case of screwup and something feral coming out. That said, however, I'm hard pressed to think of other cases where a good aligned kingdom would find undead both morally and economically justifiable even if there were no other pressures.

The issue with mining is that you need to know what are you doing (open-pit mining is more tolerant to mistakes, but the moment you get underground, the undead are useless without supervision). A skeleton may be expendable, but the cost of an collapsed mining shaft... which will happen more often with creatures without intelligence or sense of serf-preservation... more than make up for that.

[Unoriginal]

The issue with mining is that you need to know what are you doing (open-pit mining is more tolerant to mistakes, but the moment you get underground, the undead are useless without supervision). A skeleton may be expendable, but the cost of an collapsed mining shaft... which will happen more often with creatures without intelligence or sense of serf-preservation... more than make up for that.

Also, it costs a ton less to have underpaid miners or prisoners or slaves work the mine than to hire a caster powerful enough to make an undead workforce and direct it.

[Psyren]

I think everything in this thread can be summarized as:

If the DM is on board with you playing a good-aligned corpse-animator, you can.
If the DM is not, it's not going to work.

In broad strokes this is true but I think there's one additional layer - designer intent. Why do they continually add lines to the core books in every edition that discourage presumably heroic players from animating undead? I would argue it's because they want to provide covering fire for the DMs in the latter camp you mentioned. It's something the DM can point to and say "You can be a dedicated reanimator if you want, but here's why not a lot of good people in the world do that, and why you're likely to face censure or persecution if you try." They seem to want player-oriented necromancy to be, if not outright prevented, at least kept clandestine enough to not revolutionize most settings' industry or themes.

[DruidAlanon]

Why do they continually add lines to the core books in every edition that discourage presumably heroic players from animating undead?

They discourage summoning hordes of minions in general, including druids. Hence the relatively nerfed (vs conjure/animate) summon beast/undead/elemental/fey/s from TCoE. Perhaps this is more related to the unsatisfactory way 5e mechanics deal with minions and that strategically they want something that can work seamlesly with VTTs without requiring programming skills from players that want to play summoners.

[LudicSavant]

Animate Dead creatures going wild and eating people actually requires quite a lot of things to go wrong, assuming the caster is taking even the barest of precautions.

- A mid-level spellcaster must be incapacitated without warning, all day -- most of the things that could cause this mean you're already in an emergency situation, powerful people don't just get knocked out like that every day.
- The undead have to be in a place that they could escape (and there are really, really good wards against low CR undead in the game).
- The undead have to be unable to follow an order as simple as 'walk into this hole at sunset,' despite the books indicating otherwise.
- There has to be nobody or nothing else capable of telling them what to do -- no guards, no magic mouth, nothing.
- There has to be no force in the area capable of exterminating them for acting in an unauthorized way, such as a guard or Forbiddance ritual.
- The undead then have to find, engage, and defeat victims. Note that in order to even get to this step, there has to have been nobody around to notice that the caster was indisposed.
- The only reason you'd leave your skeletons with armor scraps, shortsword, and shortbow is if their purpose was warfare.


Undead will potentially attack any living being that gets close to them. The spell description for Animate Dead notes that the subject undead can't take any action without orders, with the sole exception of defending themselves from hostile creatures. The level of obedience to (and dependence on) orders of such creatures is reiterated in the Monster Manual (there's an entire subsection about it).


Undead can be told to set to a task, and will be able to adapt to said task at the level of a dim commoner

The discussion about the complexity of orders they can follow becomes a mostly moot point when one realizes you can just order them to, say, do whatever your Magic Mouth says.

That said, the description for skeletons suggests they can't adapt like even a dim commoner can ("Because of their literal interpretation of commands and unwavering obedience, skeletons adapt poorly to changing circumstances"), but they understand all the languages they did in life and orders will be "followed to the letter" and can be "relatively complex," with a list of examples including some things that are non-trivial to get untrained people to do correctly (like operating trebuchets or using a shield wall formation).

Skeletons necessarily have to be able to parse at least basic conditionals (like "do X when Y") or sequences (like "do X then Y") in order to be capable of performing the example tasks from the book, and that's all you need for a self-cleaning behavior ("walk into this room when the sun sets"). The primary limitation appears to be their literal and unswerving interpretation of commands.


Since undead require regular upkeep instead of giving nigh-perpetual work for one upfront cost, it has to be economically worthwhile for everybody involved over other alternatives.

Yeah, hiring a mid-level Wizard on an ongoing basis tends to be expensive.

[Psyren]

They discourage summoning hordes of minions in general, including druids. Hence the relatively nerfed (vs conjure/animate) summon beast/undead/elemental/fey/s from TCoE. Perhaps this is more related to the unsatisfactory way 5e mechanics deal with minions and that strategically they want something that can work seamlesly with VTTs without requiring programming skills from players that want to play summoners.

Eh, the 2014 minion spells have considerable issues long before you get to dubious allegations about VTT programming. They massively slow down turns, the possible choices bloated with every new monster book printed, CR balance was and remains all over the place, and unless specifically countered they easily outperform everything else at that spell level both offensively and defensively. And that's just the problems during combat.

As for Animate Dead, it has the additional DM fun of lasting for days at a time, which then leads to questions of what you can do with them when they're not fighting, and the implications that has for the world. And those implications are, in my view, the reason why the designers basically wrote "people will generally not be pleased if you roll into town with these."

[Witty Username]

The sad thing is that animate dead is easier to run than summon undead, at least for me, only one or two stat blocks to keep track of, one or two extra spots in initiative. Summon undead has three options, and a bunch of overhead because upcasting does alot of things to the monster's stats.

[Kane0]

Without reading the whole thread, I recall the AD&D guide to necromancers actually covering this sort of concept in a few different methods.

You could go with Necromancer Wizard, or Grave Cleric or (my favourite) Undying/Undead Warlock. You don't even need to do the whole creating undead thing if your DM/party don't like that, pick up medicine as a skill and you can still Toll the Dead, Speak with Dead, use a crawling claw or floating skull as a familiar, inflict wounds/vampiric touch, and so on. Summon Undead Spirit is a nice alternative to Animate Dead that doesn't have the same nasty implications if you lose control.

[Tanarii]

This is unchanged from the standard version but bears pointing out. Undead do require regular upkeep from casters with at least a few levels on them, and securing the area should also require guards to whom CR 1/4 skeletons are completely trivial. If each caster oversees exactly one undead, that seems like a waste compared to just hiring a commoner and pocketing the difference between 5th+ level caster wages and commoner wages. Since undead require regular upkeep instead of giving nigh-perpetual work for one upfront cost, it has to be economically worthwhile for everybody involved over other alternatives.
Yeah, the cost of a 5th level caster casting a 3rd level spell is non-negligible. Even if they're doing it for free for their own purposes, it still needs to be balanced against the "cost" of what else they might have done with another spell. Including possibly selling the casting, but also retaining it for personal defense (possibly in an offensive manner).

[Hail Tempus]

I despise how often "necromancer raises dead to do agriculture" comes up. Are you seriously telling me you would eat food that was handled by undead? Do you want plague? Cause this is how you get plague.
And proponents of raising the dead for menial labor always handwave away how traumatic it would be for the vast majority of people to see the bodies of their loved ones dragged out of their graves to plow the fields. People wouldn't just "get over it" after seeing their grandmother's undead body a few times. Torches and pitchforks would be the standard response to the creepy dude proposing this approach.

Everything about raising the dead is bad- it's much more potentially dangerous than the alternatives (such as investing in more oxen for the fields), it would cause pain to the families of the raised undead, and it literally increased the net sum of evil in the world.

I don't really know why people want to jump through hoops to make their necromancer good. Just play an evil character and be done with it.

[Kane0]

Or do necromancy that doesnt raise the dead. That exists you know.

[Melil12]

Concept wise there was a necromancer book series that had Good and Evil Necromancers.

Good necromancer had to follow a lot of rules, but it would be good RP wise. You can work with a DM to fit that type of character into your game.

[LudicSavant]

And proponents of raising the dead for menial labor always handwave away how traumatic it would be for the vast majority of people to see the bodies of their loved ones dragged out of their graves to plow the fields. People wouldn't just "get over it" after seeing their grandmother's undead body a few times. Torches and pitchforks would be the standard response to the creepy dude proposing this

People in other cultures aren't necessarily going to share your personal taboos, doubly so in a fantasy setting full of entire planes of otherworldly creatures. There are even cultures in real life that do things like preserve grandma's corpse, keep them displayed in the house for years, and talk to them like they're still alive. Moreover, there are established cultures in canon D&D settings where necromancy is publicly acceptable and not considered evil.


it would cause pain to the families of the raised undead

Not necessarily. It's not hard to imagine cultures that would have people volunteer -- and indeed, such cultures already exist in D&D canon (and are not considered evil, to boot).


it literally increased the net sum of evil in the world.

I see no mention of this in 5e. Do you have a source?

[Anymage]

Disease and the distaste of the living are actually easy to work around. Skeletons can be subjected to disinfection procedures well beyond what a living humanoid could survive. Your average person is hard pressed to recognize a person from their skeleton, so if the process is done out of most people's eyes it should be okay. (Similar to the amount of preparation that goes on in real life funeral homes.) And if people happen to find the sight of farming skeletons distasteful, a necro-industrial culture could keep the farms far enough from major living centers so as to keep the whole thing out of sight and thus out of mind.

Having said all that, I'm going to agree with something Psyren said. D&D devs have added increasing amounts of description to undead saying that they're dangerous and not something that Good characters would want to use. In light of that, I'm inclined to interpret ambiguity in ways that don't make them easy to render safe and controlled. Leaning on the line in Animate Dead about how they follow instructions to say that you can fully defang them by saying "don't be naughty" and "if the spell's control is about to lapse, cleanly and safely self-destruct" goes counter to that.

[JackPhoenix]

Having said all that, I'm going to agree with something Psyren said. D&D devs have added increasing amounts of description to undead saying that they're dangerous and not something that Good characters would want to use. In light of that, I'm inclined to interpret ambiguity in ways that don't make them easy to render safe and controlled. Leaning on the line in Animate Dead about how they follow instructions to say that you can fully defang them by saying "don't be naughty" and "if the spell's control is about to lapse, cleanly and safely self-destructive" goes counter to that.

The interesting sentence is "If you issue no commands, the creature only defends itself against hostile creatures." As far as a skeleton or a zombie is concerned, anything with a pulse is hostile (including the necromancer- unlike (most) summoning spells, Animate Dead lacks the "the creature is friendly to you and your companions" clause), and considering they have no sense of self-preservation, you probably don't want to rely on their interpretation of what self-defense entails. After all, offense is the best defense.

[Vahnavoi]

The actual reason why Animate Dead, and creation of undead in general, are bad have been obscured across editions. 5th edition adding clauses about how horrible they are is as much a step back from previous lack of detail as anything else.

But, in 3rd edition, to give an example, the real reason why it is Evil isn't even spelled out in Animate Dead or related spell descriptions. For that, you have to browse through Raise Dead line of spells and put together some rather scattered clues.

Let me spare you some time: the real reason creating undead is bad, is because there is a link between the corporeal body and the soul even after death. That is why the body needs to be relatively whole when brought back. Bringing someone's body back as soulless and mindless mockery of who they were is a defilement and interference on the real possibility of a divine intervention bringing back a person who died before their time.

Most other kinds of undead, even non-Evil ones, come into existence through some crime or tragedy. In the simplest terms, undead come into being through suffering, being an undead is suffering, and their existence either directly or indirectly causes suffering. Nobody who understands this wants to be, or wants others to be, undead, which why destroying them is Good. Yes, even when they're non-Evil. The classic case for non-Evil undead is that they're trapped somehow and want to be released. Hence, the classic Good necromancer is one who goes around speaking to, laying to rest and releasing into afterlife, such trapped spirits.

Of course, across editions there are also all kinds of alternate rules for undead that kind of ruin the whole thing. Those exist because some author either missed the (implied) details already in place, or deliberately decided to do something different. Same reason why we have oxymoronic characters like Succubus Paladins. The lesson there is that for a coherent setting, and coherent alignment, a game master has to pick their metaphysics and stick to them, and the fantasy kitchen sink of assorted rules does more to harm than help there.

[Unoriginal]

The actual reason why Animate Dead, and creation of undead in general, are bad have been obscured across editions. 5th edition adding clauses about how horrible they are is as much a step back from previous lack of detail as anything else.

But, in 3rd edition, to give an example, the real reason why it is Evil isn't even spelled out in Animate Dead or related spell descriptions. For that, you have to browse through Raise Dead line of spells and put together some rather scattered clues.

Let me spare you some time: the real reason creating undead is bad, is because there is a link between the corporeal body and the soul even after death. That is why the body needs to be relatively whole when brought back. Bringing someone's body back as soulless and mindless mockery of who they were is a defilement and interference on the real possibility of a divine intervention bringing back a person who died before their time.

Most other kinds of undead, even non-Evil ones, come into existence through some crime or tragedy. In the simplest terms, undead come into being through suffering, being an undead is suffering, and their existence either directly or indirectly causes suffering. Nobody who understands this wants to be, or wants others to be, undead, which why destroying them is Good. Yes, even when they're non-Evil. The classic case for non-Evil undead is that they're trapped somehow and want to be released. Hence, the classic Good necromancer is one who goes around speaking to, laying to rest and releasing into afterlife, such trapped spirits.

Of course, across editions there are also all kinds of alternate rules for undead that kind of ruin the whole thing. Those exist because some author either missed the (implied) details already in place, or deliberately decided to do something different. Same reason why we have oxymoronic characters like Succubus Paladins. The lesson there is that for a coherent setting, and coherent alignment, a game master has to pick their metaphysics and stick to them, and the fantasy kitchen sink of assorted rules does more to harm than help there.

I for one am extremely glad 5e removed any 'actually, it's Good to kill them even if they're not evil" bovine manure and gave actual reasons as to why only evil people regularly use Animate Dead or similar.

[JLandan]

The actual reason why Animate Dead, and creation of undead in general, are bad have been obscured across editions. 5th edition adding clauses about how horrible they are is as much a step back from previous lack of detail as anything else.

But, in 3rd edition, to give an example, the real reason why it is Evil isn't even spelled out in Animate Dead or related spell descriptions. For that, you have to browse through Raise Dead line of spells and put together some rather scattered clues.

Let me spare you some time: the real reason creating undead is bad, is because there is a link between the corporeal body and the soul even after death. That is why the body needs to be relatively whole when brought back. Bringing someone's body back as soulless and mindless mockery of who they were is a defilement and interference on the real possibility of a divine intervention bringing back a person who died before their time.

Most other kinds of undead, even non-Evil ones, come into existence through some crime or tragedy. In the simplest terms, undead come into being through suffering, being an undead is suffering, and their existence either directly or indirectly causes suffering. Nobody who understands this wants to be, or wants others to be, undead, which why destroying them is Good. Yes, even when they're non-Evil. The classic case for non-Evil undead is that they're trapped somehow and want to be released. Hence, the classic Good necromancer is one who goes around speaking to, laying to rest and releasing into afterlife, such trapped spirits.

Of course, across editions there are also all kinds of alternate rules for undead that kind of ruin the whole thing. Those exist because some author either missed the (implied) details already in place, or deliberately decided to do something different. Same reason why we have oxymoronic characters like Succubus Paladins. The lesson there is that for a coherent setting, and coherent alignment, a game master has to pick their metaphysics and stick to them, and the fantasy kitchen sink of assorted rules does more to harm than help there.

All your statements are setting specific. In an alternate setting, say one based on Egyptian mythology, a bad person's body may be used by a necromancer in a fight for justice, thereby lightening that person's burden at the time of judgement. The same could be said of returning a soul from the afterlife. A criminal may mitigate his crimes by fighting for good after his death. This is not an evil act, nor is a necromancer that provides this benefit to the deceased performing an evil act.

In this setting, a deceased good person may continue to do good after death in this same manner. So creating or summoning undead as an evil act, or the mere existence of the undead creature being evil is relative to the cosmology of the setting.

[Vahnavoi]

Well duh. Why did you think I said a game master has to pick their metaphysics and stick to them?

[Dork_Forge]

Ethics aside, I don't understand how the logistics of using undead really make sense looking at it from player options. For the cost of a single Wizard capable of casting Animate Dead you could surely pay a veritable cabal of 1st level Wizards to make use of Unseen Servant, Floating Disc, Mold Earth etc.

Undead as a labor force only even starts to make sense logistically if there's a sustainable way to create and control them and Animate Dead will never be that. So it would need to be some NPC power, a magic item, or the only real alternative I can think of:

The society believes in the death penalty, which is carried out by Finger of Death, which would create permanently controlled Zombies. The issues obviously being the level of caster needed, the incentive for the society to execute more prisoners for labour, and the fact that it basically creates an undead army for the caster.

If you want to stick to neutral/good whilst being as unambiguous as possible then just avoid creating undead. Necromancy includes damaging spells, resurrection magic, False Life etc.

[Aeson]

Let me spare you some time: the real reason creating undead is bad, is because there is a link between the corporeal body and the soul even after death. That is why the body needs to be relatively whole when brought back. Bringing someone's body back as soulless and mindless mockery of who they were is a defilement and interference on the real possibility of a divine intervention bringing back a person who died before their time.
According to the 3.5E SRD (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/raiseDead.htm), this is Raise Dead's "whole body" clause:

While the spell closes mortal wounds and repairs lethal damage of most kinds, the body of the creature to be raised must be whole. Otherwise, missing parts are still missing when the creature is brought back to life.
The reason Raise Dead wants a "whole" body would appear to be far more that Raise Dead cannot replace nonessential missing parts than that there's some kind of spiritual linkage between body and soul that needs to be intact for the spell to work and which can be broken by damage to the corpse.

Additionally, Flesh Golems are problematic for this line of reasoning - dismembering a corpse and incorporating pieces of it into one or more constructs should fairly reasonably be at least as much of a desecration of the dead as raising the corpse as a zombie/skeleton/wight/etc., and yet unlike for people whose corpses have been turned into undead creatures there is no explicit prohibition on using Raise Dead to raise someone whose body has been partially or even wholly incorporated into one or more Flesh Golems, not even when the head and torso of the corpse that you're interested in raising are the head and torso used for the golem and thus presumably have been made to house the golem's animating spirit.

Incidentally, Flesh Golems - and other constructs with a chance to go berserk - are also a bit problematic for the "creating zombies/skeletons is evil because zombies/skeletons are dangerous when left unattended" argument, especially since depending on edition there's either no mechanism to regain control of a berserk golem or a berserk golem can only be brought back under control by its creator.


The society believes in the death penalty, which is carried out by Finger of Death, which would create permanently controlled Zombies. The issues obviously being the level of caster needed, the incentive for the society to execute more prisoners for labour, and the fact that it basically creates an undead army for the caster.
Another issue with that methodology is the question of what happens if and when the caster dies.

[JackPhoenix]

Additionally, Flesh Golems are problematic for this line of reasoning - dismembering a corpse and incorporating pieces of it into one or more constructs should fairly reasonably be at least as much of a desecration of the dead as raising the corpse as a zombie/skeleton/wight/etc., and yet unlike for people whose corpses have been turned into undead creatures there is no explicit prohibition on using Raise Dead to raise someone whose body has been partially or even wholly incorporated into one or more Flesh Golems, not even when the head and torso of the corpse that you're interested in raising are the head and torso used for the golem and thus presumably have been made to house the golem's animating spirit.

3.5's Flesh Golem had Animate Death as a requirement for its creation. Animate Dead was [evil] in itself.


Incidentally, Flesh Golems - and other constructs with a chance to go berserk - are also a bit problematic for the "creating zombies/skeletons is evil because zombies/skeletons are dangerous when left unattended" argument, especially since depending on edition there's either no mechanism to regain control of a berserk golem or a berserk golem can only be brought back under control by its creator.

Unlike undead, golems aren't hostile towards every living thing or actively aggressive. Or harmful by their very presence. And while flesh and clay golems can go berserk, circumstances when that happen... either being engaged in combat, or losing half hit points... and 5e golems are immune to P/B/S damage... make it much less likely it'll happen on accident. A golem left without orders will simply do nothing (or follow the latest command it was given), an undead will attack any living thing. 5e golems can also be made with control amulet, making transfer of ownership possible.

The issue with golems is that they are too expensive to be economical, though that's an issue easily solved with animated objects, homunculi or other constructs. That's the real reason people advocate for undead... they are cheaper than otherwise safer and generally superior options.

[LudicSavant]

Another issue with that methodology is the question of what happens if and when the caster dies.

The orders from Finger of Death don't expire if you die (or expire ever), so as long as the nature of your orders render the zombie harmless you're good on that front.

[JNAProductions]

Golems are made, if I recall correctly, by enslaving elementals as the power source.

[JackPhoenix]

Golems are made, if I recall correctly, by enslaving elementals as the power source.

Technically. "Elemental" as in "where does it come from", not "a specific creature". It's got even less individuality than the spirits powering undead: "After constructing the body from clay, flesh, iron, or stone, the golem's creator infuses it with a spirit from the Elemental Plane of Earth. This tiny spark of life has no memory, personality, or history. It is simply the impetus to move and obey."

[Vahnavoi]

@Aeson: read further. There is a specific prohibition for raising any kind of undead lower in the description. This applies even to vampires and other undead that are whole in body. The same cause covers death effects, so it is rather clearly about supernatural interference.

[Witty Username]

@Aeson: read further. There is a specific prohibition for raising any kind of undead lower in the description. This applies even to vampires and other undead that are whole in body. The same cause covers death effects, so it is rather clearly about supernatural interference.

An undead body does inhibit raise dead, resurrection is neat in 3.5 because it will destroy an undead to restore a subject to life because of of this stuff.
In 5e, Gentle repose arguably touches on this flavor though as it prevents the body from decaying, suspends the time limit for raising, and prevents animation (which it didn't do in 3.5, it was in fact a pickup spell for necromancers because it could cold store bodies to keep them good animation targets).

There is a note here that, inhibiting raising is going change depending on how available or potent raising is. Even at day per caster level like 3.5 used, that also means too long to worry is a consideration.

[Aeson]

@Aeson: read further. There is a specific prohibition for raising any kind of undead lower in the description. This applies even to vampires and other undead that are whole in body. The same cause covers death effects, so it is rather clearly about supernatural interference.
1. That's in an entirely separate paragraph from the "whole body" clause.

2. "Desecration of a corpse breaks the link between body and soul, thereby preventing resurrection" isn't in the spell description, and I don't think it's anywhere else in the rules, either. It might not be an unreasonable interpretation of the "people whose corpses have been turned into undead creatures cannot be raised" clause, but then so is "creating an undead creature imprisons the soul of the creature whose corpse was used and you need something stronger than mere destruction of the undead creature and a Raise Dead spell to free the soul" - and considering that the Raise Dead spell specifies that the soul needs to be both willing and free to return in order for the spell to work but says nothing whatsoever about any kind of linkage between body and soul, the latter is at least arguably a better-supported interpretation.


3.5's Flesh Golem had Animate Death as a requirement for its creation. Animate Dead was [evil] in itself.
I'm not arguing that creating a Flesh Golem isn't an at least somewhat evil act, I'm arguing that "turning a corpse into an undead creature prevents Raise Dead from functioning because it breaks some kind of spiritual linkage between body and soul" is on shaky grounds given that incorporating a corpse into one or more Flesh Golems does not do the same, especially considering that both seem to work on essentially the same "corpse animation by shoving an alien spirit into it" principle.


The orders from Finger of Death don't expire if you die (or expire ever), so as long as the nature of your orders render the zombie harmless you're good on that front.
Even ignoring the issue of whether or not you can render a zombie or similar undead creature "safe" for as long as it exists with a concise set of simple instructions that can't be permanently updated after the demise of the zombie's creator, there's the problem that things change over time. Fantasy tends not to acknowledge this very much, but a lot of things change over the kind of timespan that undead creatures seem able to last in many settings - dynasties and governments come and go; languages, cultures, and populations move, mix, mingle, and morph, sometimes almost beyond recognition; new settlements are founded and grow into cities or collapse as conditions change and climates shift; great cities fade into obscurity and legend or become forgotten, empty shells; entire civilizations rise and fall. It's all well and good to create some zombies to tend the fields, vinyards, orchards, and whatever else, but are people still going to want those zombies to be doing whatever you ordered them to do in that location even a few decades from now, let alone in a couple centuries or a millennium? Even a standing order like "do whatever the guy bearing the Seal of Zombie-Management tells you to do" is likely to run into issues within the first few hundred years at the outside.

Also, going back to the safety issue, I have to say that I don't find it particularly reasonable to think that there is a concise set of simple instructions that you could give to something like a zombie and render it safe for the next best thing to eternity if you take the book at its word and have zombies that are actively malevolent and hostile to all that lives despite their low intelligence. A zombie might not be any smarter than your average lawnmower, but it's a lawnmower that wants to kill you and potentially has decades, centuries, even millennia to work out ways around whatever safeguards its creators put in place to prevent it from killing you or twist its understanding of its instructions through whatever contorted logic allows it to see "hacking you to pieces" as consistent with "don't kill people."

[LudicSavant]

Even ignoring the issue of whether or not you can render a zombie or similar undead creature "safe" for as long as it exists with a concise set of simple instructions that can't be permanently updated after the demise of the zombie's creator, there's the problem that things change over time. Fantasy tends not to acknowledge this very much, but a lot of things change over the kind of timespan that undead creatures seem able to last in many settings - dynasties and governments come and go; languages, cultures, and populations move, mix, mingle, and morph, sometimes almost beyond recognition; new settlements are founded and grow into cities or collapse as conditions change and climates shift; great cities fade into obscurity and legend or become forgotten, empty shells; entire civilizations rise and fall. It's all well and good to create some zombies to tend the fields, vinyards, orchards, and whatever else, but are people still going to want those zombies to be doing whatever you ordered them to do in that location even a few decades from now, let alone in a couple centuries or a millennium? Even a standing order like "do whatever the guy bearing the Seal of Zombie-Management tells you to do" is likely to run into issues within the first few hundred years at the outside.

Also, going back to the safety issue, I have to say that I don't find it particularly reasonable to think that there is a concise set of simple instructions that you could give to something like a zombie and render it safe for the next best thing to eternity if you take the book at its word and have zombies that are actively malevolent and hostile to all that lives despite their low intelligence. A zombie might not be any smarter than your average lawnmower, but it's a lawnmower that wants to kill you and potentially has decades, centuries, even millennia to work out ways around whatever safeguards its creators put in place to prevent it from killing you or twist its understanding of its instructions through whatever contorted logic allows it to see "hacking you to pieces" as consistent with "don't kill people."

All of this is assuming that you're just leaving them running indefinitely; you can just like, not do that.

[Psyren]

Disease and the distaste of the living are actually easy to work around. Skeletons can be subjected to disinfection procedures well beyond what a living humanoid could survive. Your average person is hard pressed to recognize a person from their skeleton, so if the process is done out of most people's eyes it should be okay. (Similar to the amount of preparation that goes on in real life funeral homes.) And if people happen to find the sight of farming skeletons distasteful, a necro-industrial culture could keep the farms far enough from major living centers so as to keep the whole thing out of sight and thus out of mind.

Having said all that, I'm going to agree with something Psyren said. D&D devs have added increasing amounts of description to undead saying that they're dangerous and not something that Good characters would want to use. In light of that, I'm inclined to interpret ambiguity in ways that don't make them easy to render safe and controlled. Leaning on the line in Animate Dead about how they follow instructions to say that you can fully defang them by saying "don't be naughty" and "if the spell's control is about to lapse, cleanly and safely self-destruct" goes counter to that.

I find the "antilife radiation" theory to be the most elegant explanation. It solves for several fantasy tropes simultaneously:

- Why undead remain problematic regardless of care exercised, orders given or sanitation procedures.
- Where spontaneous, uncontrolled undead come from.
- Why no printed Good deities / celestials / etc advocate or sponsor their use.
- Why areas where undead are prevalent tend to be more gloomy/dreary... or even vice-versa, why areas that are gloomy/dreary tend to spawn or attract undead.

For me, maintaining those tropes is more important - at least for printed D&D - than enabling Undead Farming Sim type games.

[Hail Tempus]

I see no mention of this in 5e. Do you have a source?

Animate Dead and similar spell take an inanimate object, or pile of objects, and turn them into a Chaotic Evil murder machine. Where before there was zero evil, now there's a CR 1/2 (or whatever) added amount of evil in the world.

The real world equivalent would be taking various electronics and other components and creating a robot whose base programming requires it to kill puppies. Even if you try and build some safeguards into its programming, its default setting will still be "kill Rover."

I don't see how you can reconcile doing something like that as a character who has "Good" on their character sheet.

[tokek]

All your statements are setting specific. In an alternate setting, say one based on Egyptian mythology, a bad person's body may be used by a necromancer in a fight for justice, thereby lightening that person's burden at the time of judgement. The same could be said of returning a soul from the afterlife. A criminal may mitigate his crimes by fighting for good after his death. This is not an evil act, nor is a necromancer that provides this benefit to the deceased performing an evil act.

In this setting, a deceased good person may continue to do good after death in this same manner. So creating or summoning undead as an evil act, or the mere existence of the undead creature being evil is relative to the cosmology of the setting.

The game is built around certain genre conventions and the rules tend to reflect those conventions.

If you play a game in a very distinctly different genre then a lot of any discussion about ethics is of course different but the rules might need a serious review too. Its not entirely a different game but its not really the same game either at this point. Unless the OP stated it was this sort of strong homebrew in a different genre we can't really impose it on the discussion.

[Aeson]

All of this is assuming that you're just leaving them running indefinitely; you can just like, not do that.
Because as we all know humankind has consistently, without fail, chosen good long-term solutions to problems rather than ignoring them or choosing 'quick fixes' that just kick the can down the road for a few years?

Sure, Archmage Bob might have wanted to do the responsible thing and destroy all his zombie-miners and skeleton-farmers and whatever else before he passed, but he died unexpectedly of a heart attack while vacationing in the Everspring Isles, nobody seems to know how to activate the self-destruct that he claimed he'd built into his undead, his heirs decided it'd be cheaper to put up "do not enter" and "trespassers will be eaten" signs than find a permanent solution to a potential but as yet merely hypothetical problem, and anyways it was a month before the first ship bearing news of Bob's demise arrived from the Everspring Isles and nothing bad's happened yet so why not leave well enough alone? Especially if this undead-operated industry has been an economic boon to (an influential or currently-dominant portion of) the city's elite and as such whatever passes for the local government would be rather displeased, to put it mildly, with anyone who tried to kill the golden goose. Or maybe Archmage Bob founded an order of mages to care for his skeleto-industrial complex after his death and ensure that the undead contained therein would never threaten the city/world, but as the centuries pass the old undead-worked mines and forges and whatnot are bricked up or covered over or lie half-forgotten in disused rooms and buildings as they lose their economic viability, the order's interests drift, the rituals Bob founded the order to perform and the purpose behind them are lost or forgotten (helped along, no doubt, by the fires which have consumed portions of the order's library and destroyed many of its oldest documents - including most of the original copies or the most complete and accurate reproductions of Archmage Bob's papers - at various points between Bob's demise and the present day or by successive generations of the order's masters who have been less interested in keeping the order true to its original purpose and more interested in putting its wealth, power, and influence to work for their own ends, whether good or ill), maybe the order itself dies off or at least loses much of the wealth and influence it needs to fulfill its original purpose as the once-great city in which Bob lived goes into a prolonged decline or fades into obscurity or perhaps even myth and legend.

Also, even if this is some idyllic fantasy world where nobody in their right mind would ever pick a cheap and easy short-term solution over a more difficult and expensive long-term one, it isn't possible to plan for or safeguard against every possible eventuality. A cataclysmic seismic event or an angry god or even Archmage Bob's less scrupulous nemesis destroys Not-Atlantis, killing Archmage Bob and entombing hundreds or perhaps even thousands of his undead workers in his skeleto-industrial complex; a thousand years later, a new city has been built over the buried ruins of Not-Atlantis and its memory has faded into legend and myth - and then one day something releases the lost hordes of undead. Some of the would-be apprentices Bob rejected for one reason or another feel mistreated and abused, and one day one or more of them decide to avenge themselves against Bob by somehow sabotaging his safeguards and unleashing his undead upon his unsuspecting city. The gods of magic are fickle, and one day the rules just... change, somehow, and Bob's safeguards stop working - but the undead are still there, and just as murderous as ever. The supposedly good and benevolent gods of the world decide to teach Bob a lesson about wisdom and the hubris of his belief that 'his' undead were perfectly safe and under control despite their malevolent nature. A war breaks out and draws Bob or his successors away from their duties maintaining the safeguards over the undead, or maybe even driving those in power to demand that Bob or his successors subvert those very safeguards - and Bob or his successors, perhaps despite knowing better, give in, for who are they to oppose the supreme authority of the land? Years, decades, even centuries pass without issue and Bob or his successors become complacent and lax in their maintenance of the safeguards placed on the undead, or perhaps Bob just becomes old and senile and starts to forget such things and his apprentices, children, heirs, whatever are too busy between doing what they can to care for him and handling their own affairs to properly deal with something which hasn't yet become a real problem - especially if it was always something that Bob mostly took care of out of their sight and thus isn't really something they think about much, if at all. Maybe something occurs and changes Bob - his favorite apprentice or his spouse or his child dies and cannot or will not be resurrected, leaving him a broken shadow of the man he once was and too despondent to care about the potential consequences of his undead somehow breaking free of the safeguards he placed over them, or perhaps he becomes obsessed with something and as a consequence has little time (or patience) for such 'petty' concerns as ensuring the continued safe operation of his undead-staffed factories, fields, and mines that have functioned without issue for years or decades, even though these things have only been made safe through his vigilance and the maintenance of the safeguards he built around them.

[LudicSavant]

Sure, Archmage Bob might have wanted to do the responsible thing and destroy all his zombie-miners and skeleton-farmers and whatever else before he passed, but he died unexpectedly of a heart attack while vacationing in the Everspring Isles, nobody seems to know how to activate the self-destruct that he claimed he'd built into his undead,

Why does it need to be activated? You can make it automatic.

Like, seriously, you didn't actually give a reason that precautions would fail, you just seem to have assumed there weren't any to begin with. Gross negligence isn't wrong because of animate dead, it's just wrong like... in general.


his heirs decided it'd be cheaper to put up "do not enter" and "trespassers will be eaten" signs than find a permanent solution to a potential but as yet merely hypothetical problem

Cheaper than what? Ordering them to walk into a fire?

[Sigreid]

There's really nothing to stop a necromancer from believing he's the good guy and acting accordingly, regardless whether the greater cosmos agrees with him.

[Aeson]

And given that said precautions kill off Bob's undead in the event of his death, how exactly do the rest of the steps in your post happen?
Which precautions would those be? I haven't seen you suggest any realistic precautions that should actually be allowed to apply to something that's too stupid to adapt to changing conditions and has a very limited ability to obey complex instructions. Undead don't come standard with a dead man's switch; do you really expect Bob to be spending however many Contingency-style spells it'd take to give each and every one of the undead he'd created over the course of his career as Chief Executioner and Zombie-Herder or whatever it is that made it possible for him to amass the small army of undead that you're so insistent won't be a problem when he dies?


Cheaper than what? Ordering them to walk into a fire?
Why would the zombies listen to Bob's heirs? If they were created by Bob casting Finger of Death, they're obedient to Bob, not to Bob's heirs, and your previous suggestion of having a bunch of people attack and destroy the zombies requires having people to do that, which probably means either hiring those people when the need arises or having them on retainer.

[LudicSavant]

do you really expect Bob to be spending however many Contingency-style spells

Not a single suggestion I made involved Contingency.

[Aeson]

Not a single suggestion I made involved Contingency.
Then where is the dead man's switch triggered by Bob's death coming from?

[LudicSavant]

Why would the zombies listen to Bob's heirs?

Any number of reasons. You brought up one possibility yourself in this post. (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25794318&postcount=85)


a standing order like "do whatever the guy bearing the Seal of Zombie-Management tells you to do"

But even if nobody could order the zombie, a zombie with a standing order to be nonviolent (which, again, last even after the caster dies) could just get brained by any passerby.

[Aeson]

You're forgetting an option that you yourself brought up in one of your own posts. (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25794318&postcount=85)
Several of the scenarios that I suggested would make it highly unlikely for the bearer of said seal to be either willing or able to give the self-destruct command; additionally, seals can be lost, stolen, or destroyed, damaged, or otherwise defaced, which may render it unusable, and given that we're talking about something that effectively grants the bearer control over an undead army you'd probably want to have some pretty good safeguards on it, which would suggest that the seal itself isn't going to be cheap and may merit a nontrivial ongoing expense for its protection.

[JNAProductions]

Several of the scenarios that I suggested would make it highly unlikely for the bearer of said seal to be either willing or able to give the self-destruct command; additionally, seals can be lost, stolen, or destroyed, damaged, or otherwise defaced, which may render it unusable, and given that we're talking about something that effectively grants the bearer control over an undead army you'd probably want to have some pretty good safeguards on it, which would suggest that the seal itself isn't going to be cheap and may merit a nontrivial ongoing expense for its protection.

You could have different seals for different zombies.
So any one seal gets you a half dozen zombies at most, even if the full horde is hundreds strong.

[Aeson]

You could have different seals for different zombies.
So any one seal gets you a half dozen zombies at most, even if the full horde is hundreds strong.
You could, but then you'd need to make significantly more seals, which greatly increases the chances of one or more being lost, stolen, damaged, or destroyed and also makes it more difficult to replace a seal which is lost, stolen, damaged, or destroyed. If you want to ensure that any one person can only exert control over so many zombies, you'd also need to find trustworthy bearers or keepers for each seal, which becomes significantly more difficult as the number of reliable trustworthy people you need grows larger, you'd preferably keep the identities of at least some of the seal-keepers secret in some way to protect them from being targeted by someone who wants to gain control of the zombies, and if the seal isn't effectively just a wand of animate dead or similar you'd probably also need each one (or each set, depending on if and how you want to protect against the possibility of a bad seal-keeper) to be unique in some way so that it specifically controls only certain zombies. If the first response to 'loose' zombies is to find a seal-keeper and have them order the zombies back to the factory it may also create response-time issues - though that may not be a particularly significant concern if the society in question doesn't greatly care what happens to people unless it happens to rich/important people.

Additionally, this still doesn't address the scenarios where something either prevents or strongly disincentivizes Bob's heirs and successors or the seal-keepers from issuing the self-destruct order or caused them to subvert whatever safeguards were in place on the undead. The city needed an army and the seal-keepers were willing to be drafted to lead the zombies into battle, but a bunch of them died on or routed off the battlefield and now there's a bunch of seals lost on and likely trampled into the mud of a battlefield haunted by undead whose last received command was something along the lines of "kill anything that's not part of our army" or "protect me" or something else that'd allow the undead to function at least temporarily as part of the army despite the seal-keeper's demise. Many of the seal-keepers are economically/socially/politically dependent on Bob's undead-operated industry and so don't obey his instruction to terminate its operations upon his demise, but over time the seals are lost or forgotten or consolidated into fewer and fewer hands - by means fair or foul - as seal-keepers get on with their lives, are bought out by other interested parties, die, whatever. The city was destroyed in a cataclysm, entombing the zombies and rendering them inaccessible to any surviving seal-keepers, and a thousand years later any surviving seals are for the most part lost, forgotten, or both - but the zombies are still there. The seal-keepers assemble themselves into an order or consortium or whatever dedicated to maintaining and profiting from Bob's zombie-operated industry, but as time passes the industry becomes less viable and their interests - or the interests of their heirs and successors in the order/consortium/whatever - change, and the seals lose their original purpose as the knowledge of it is lost over the generations, becoming simple symbols of office or status in the eyes of those who bear them even as the now all-but-forgotten undead continue on in long-since-exhausted mines or mindlessly working in forges and smithies and factories which were abandoned long ago when they ceased to be economically viable.

[Hail Tempus]

Not a single suggestion I made involved Contingency.

Whether you’re able to “stack” commands to your undead creations is really up to the DM. I wouldn’t allow it, because it goes against the spirit of the spell, IMO.

Certainly, I wouldn’t allow something like “destroy yourselves after 23 hours.”

[Aeson]

Whether you’re able to “stack” commands to your undead creations is really up to the DM. I wouldn’t allow it, because it goes against the spirit of the spell, IMO.
Being unable to stack commands would also likely make a standing order like "obey the guy with the Seal of Zombie Management" or "do whatever the magic mouth tells you to do" infeasible, because the order to obey the designated authority would be superseded by the first command the designee issued.

[LudicSavant]

*snip*

Would you not allow the things specifically given in the book as examples of the kinds of orders the undead can follow?

[Hail Tempus]

Would you not allow the things specifically given in the book as examples of the kinds of orders the undead can follow?

I don't see a problem with an ongoing order to guard a particular room or corridor. "Kill anything that enters this room" is a pretty simple order. But, I don't see anything in the description of Animate Dead that would allow the caster to give the undead a checklist of things to do. A Skeleton has a 6 intelligence, which is pretty dumb, while a Zombie is even dumber at Intelligence 3. They're both simple-minded creatures who, IMO, don't really have the brains to remember more than one relatively simple task at a time. I read the intent of the spell as requiring the caster to supervise the undead if he wants them to change what they're doing from time to time.

The order to destroy themselves after a certain time passes would be well beyond their mental capabilities to understand and implement. I doubt they even have a concept of time.

Also, when it comes to things like using them for mining or farming, it's not even clear to me that the undead have the skills to do that type of labor. There's nothing in a zombie's stat block, for example, that suggests it's proficient in mining or agriculture. And nearly mindless low level undead probably can't learn any new skills.

Trying to stretch the usefulness of undead to create some sort of undead-based workforce is a dicey proposition.

[Anymage]

I'll just note that if your planned necro-utopia relies on Finger of Death for the permanent zombies, you have a few flaws. First is that zombies, due to still retaining their dead and likely decaying flesh, have hygiene and palatability problems beyond those a skeleton brings. Second is that Finger of Death necessarily requires murder to create the zombie. That's going to create nasty perverse incentives right there. (If you try to morally salvage it by only using condemned prisoners, you push that perverse incentive off to the legal system by giving them the opportunity to turn "undesirables" into a useful resource. If you invoke fantasy to have a justice system that's uncorruptible and pure, you'll have a hard time gathering enough prisoners to zombify even if you ignore all the reasons such a justice system might dislike necromancy and the undead.) Most relevantly to the people trying to create a necro-utopia, it requires a seventh level spell slot and a caster capable of casting the same. That's going to be even more rare than a bunch of level 5+ casters willing to maintain Animate Dead regularly.

[Unoriginal]

I don't see a problem with an ongoing order to guard a particular room or corridor. "Kill anything that enters this room" is a pretty simple order. But, I don't see anything in the description of Animate Dead that would allow the caster to give the undead a checklist of things to do. A Skeleton has a 6 intelligence, which is pretty dumb, while a Zombie is even dumber at Intelligence 3. They're both simple-minded creatures who, IMO, don't really have the brains to remember more than one relatively simple task at a time. I read the intent of the spell as requiring the caster to supervise the undead if he wants them to change what they're doing from time to time.


INT 6 is plenty enough to understand instructions. I think the example given is that Skeletons are able to operate siege engines if the caster is around to tell them what to do.

They'd likely be able to remember several simple tasks at once... the thing is, they do not want to.

A Skeleton does what the spell compels them to do, and nothing more.

I would run that the caster can't order their Animated Dead to follow other people's orders, because that's basically giving two orders at once, and as far as I'm concerned the Undead will follow only one order at once.

At my table, the Undead won't listen to a recording of the caster's orders either, because to me you have to use the control given by the spell to order them, it's not a question of them recognizing you speaking.

Otherwise someone could take control of undead soldiers by faking the voice of the caster who made them.

[tokek]

I would run that the caster can't order their Animated Dead to follow other people's orders, because that's basically giving two orders at once, and as far as I'm concerned the Undead will follow only one order at once.

At my table, the Undead won't listen to a recording of the caster's orders either, because to me you have to use the control given by the spell to order them, it's not a question of them recognizing you speaking.

Otherwise someone could take control of undead soldiers by faking the voice of the caster who made them.

I would not allow anything that bypasses or avoids the action economy cost and range limitation stated in the spell. Any instruction or change of instruction requires the caster to be within 60' and use a BA in any game I run. That is a key thing - I refuse to apply "common sense" in any way to spells to bypass a limitation written into a spell.

They don't obey the instructions because they want to. They do so only when they are utterly forced to by the spell within the constraints of the spell description. That means the caster uses a BA while within 60' to mentally command them. At my table no other form of anything can change their current command which they will follow because they are compelled to follow it. They certainly will not use what intelligence they have to be helpful.

[LudicSavant]

INT 6 is plenty enough to understand instructions. I think the example given is that Skeletons are able to operate siege engines if the caster is around to tell them what to do.

Yeah. More specifically, it says that they're able to be given a variety of relatively complex tasks, so long as it has been explained to them how such tasks are accomplished (nothing about the caster sticking around). Performing the numerous steps to operate a trebuchet is among the examples, as is other siege tactics.


A Skeleton has a 6 intelligence, which is pretty dumb

Skeletons have the same Intelligence modifier as orcs.

There is an entire section in their own creature description about what kind of things Animate Dead can and cannot make them do. It says that they follow careful instructions to the literal letter, with a list of relatively complex example tasks that can be explained to them (such as operating a trebuchet or using a shield wall formation). It also emphasizes that they always do what is literally asked with unwavering obedience, and that they never question tasks assigned to them. That is all right there in the creature description.

It also lists the limitations on giving them orders, with the main limitations being that they take everything entirely literally, and that -- while they understand all languages they knew in life perfectly well -- they can't read, speak, or express themselves beyond a simple nod, shake of their heads, or point.

Also notably, the book establishes that they can be told to do X and Y. The 'only one thing' claim has no basis in the text, which repeatedly refers to multiple tasks, orders, or commands -- and that the undead follow them to the best of their ability with unwavering obedience.


I don't see a problem with an ongoing order to guard a particular room or corridor.

Cool. In that case, there should be no problem in giving them a single ongoing order of similar or lesser complexity, which is sufficient for this purpose.

[tokek]

I just want to add one more thing to the Skellie Farmers discussion.

Farming is not simple. It only looks that way from a distance.

I've done more of this in the last year than in the rest of my life - tree farming rather than annual crops but still working on an agricultural scale. Its not simple, you need to adapt to circumstances that are not obvious at the beginning of the day.

As noted in their description
Because of their literal interpretation of commands and unwavering obedience, skeletons adapt poorly to changing circumstances.. I would say that at least half the time if I and the other people working had literally interpreted instructions in an unwavering manner we would have really messed things up and destroyed some of the trees we were trying to grow. Do that with farm animals such as plough horses and you are likely to be killing the animals often enough that the farm will run out of them.

You cannot program your way round that with complex if...else statements unless you can anticipate in advance all the possible problems. Which you can't. So your wizard damn well has to stand in that field all day moving from one group of skellies to another supervising them and changing their instructions in response to events. Or else they will be as much a liability as a help.

Programmed undead would be alright in a very simplified production line environment. Basically anywhere that current generation robots have replaced workers would be a good use for them. But they are too inflexible and rigid to be much general use outside of those constrained environments.

[LudicSavant]

I just want to add one more thing to the Skellie Farmers discussion.

Farming is not simple. It only looks that way from a distance.

I've done more of this in the last year than in the rest of my life - tree farming rather than annual crops but still working on an agricultural scale. Its not simple, you need to adapt to circumstances that are not obvious at the beginning of the day.

As noted in their description . I would say that at least half the time if I and the other people working had literally interpreted instructions in an unwavering manner we would have really messed things up and destroyed some of the trees we were trying to grow. Do that with farm animals such as plough horses and you are likely to be killing the animals often enough that the farm will run out of them.

You cannot program your way round that with complex if...else statements unless you can anticipate in advance all the possible problems. Which you can't. So your wizard damn well has to stand in that field all day moving from one group of skellies to another supervising them and changing their instructions in response to events. Or else they will be as much a liability as a help.

Programmed undead would be alright in a very simplified production line environment. Basically anywhere that current generation robots have replaced workers would be a good use for them. But they are too inflexible and rigid to be much general use outside of those constrained environments.

I think this is an entirely valid point. They may not be as dangerous or uncontrollable as some posters seem to want them to be in order to try to justify calling Animate Dead inherently evil, but they also may not be as useful for certain kinds of tasks as some other posters may assume.

[tokek]

I think this is an entirely valid point. They aren't as dangerous or uncontrollable as some posters seem to want them to be in order to rationalize calling Animate Dead inherently evil, but they also may not be as useful for certain kinds of tasks as some other posters may assume.

As a work multiplier for a wimpy wizard I sort of get it. So long as the wizard is right there to supervise them.

I'm not sure they are that much better than a bunch of ritual cast Unseen Servants to be honest. A bit better and you can supervise more of them at once but not that much better.

In many ways I'd rather turn the farming implements into Tiny Servants and have Unseen Servants do other tasks if I have to have a wizard standing in a field supervising anyway.

[Hail Tempus]

As a work multiplier for a wimpy wizard I sort of get it. So long as the wizard is right there to supervise them.

I'm not sure they are that much better than a bunch of ritual cast Unseen Servants to be honest. A bit better and you can supervise more of them at once but not that much better.

In many ways I'd rather turn the farming implements into Tiny Servants and have Unseen Servants do other tasks if I have to have a wizard standing in a field supervising anyway.
And, honestly, what 5th level spellcaster wants to spend his day supervising skeletons performing agricultural work in some hick town? Even if he doesn't want to continue adventuring, he can make a lot more money with less of a chance of stepping into cow dung by doing something like scribing scrolls. The most you could get paid for your skeleton workers is 2 gp per day per skeleton (assuming they qualify as skilled versus unskilled labor, which is highly debatable).

[tokek]

And, honestly, what 5th level spellcaster wants to spend his day supervising skeletons performing agricultural work in some hick town? Even if he doesn't want to continue adventuring, he can make a lot more money with less of a chance of stepping into cow dung by doing something like scribing scrolls. The most you could get paid for your skeleton workers is 2 gp per day per skeleton (assuming they qualify as skilled versus unskilled labor, which is highly debatable).

Agreed. The whole idea of an undead workforce does not really work for me - the limitations on undead and the actual reality of farming and other jobs not being trivially easy don't work out for me at all. If someone really wants to make that the basis of their game then they can go for it I'm sure not going to stop their fun. But with the rules as they are and knowing how none of those so-called menial jobs are anything like that mindless it does not work for me.

[Psyren]

I'm pretty much with Aeson and Hail Tempus here.


I think this is an entirely valid point. They may not be as dangerous or uncontrollable as some posters seem to want them to be in order to try to justify calling Animate Dead inherently evil, but they also may not be as useful for certain kinds of tasks as some other posters may assume.

Question: why don't you want them to be dangerous? They're not constructs, mechanically or thematically.

[Vahnavoi]

1. That's in an entirely separate paragraph from the "whole body" clause.

2. "Desecration of a corpse breaks the link between body and soul, thereby preventing resurrection" isn't in the spell description, and I don't think it's anywhere else in the rules, either. It might not be an unreasonable interpretation of the "people whose corpses have been turned into undead creatures cannot be raised" clause, but then so is "creating an undead creature imprisons the soul of the creature whose corpse was used and you need something stronger than mere destruction of the undead creature and a Raise Dead spell to free the soul" - and considering that the Raise Dead spell specifies that the soul needs to be both willing and free to return in order for the spell to work but says nothing whatsoever about any kind of linkage between body and soul, the latter is at least arguably a better-supported interpretation.


1. And? Both clauses are relevant. I was summarizing the topic to you precisely because getting all the details involves going over multiple spell descriptions with a fine-toothed comb; I wasn't kidding when I said the clues are scattered. You don't rebuke or even meaningfully engage what I said by stopping at the first paragraph, if combing the rules is what you want to do.

2. Why did you think Raise Dead line of spells is concerned with physical remains of the deceased in the first place? It's all about symbolic connections between the body and soul, as befits sympathetic magic, and cannot be ignored until True Resurrection, where you can substitute it for some other symbol that unambiguously identifies the deceased. Imprisoning the soul is not what's going on here, that's domain of the Soul Bind spell, which uses different language and prevents all forms of resurrection, including Wish and Miracle.

Other clues include the fact that the spell that bolsters Animate Dead, and undead in general, is, well, Desecrate.

[JNAProductions]

1. And? Both clauses are relevant. I was summarizing the topic to you precisely because getting all the details involves going over multiple spell descriptions with a fine-toothed comb; I wasn't kidding when I said the clues are scattered. You don't rebuke or even meaningfully engage what I said by stopping at the first paragraph, if combing the rules is what you want to do.

2. Why did you think Raise Dead line of spells is concerned with physical remains of the deceased in the first place? It's all about symbolic connections between the body and soul, as befits sympathetic magic, and cannot be ignored until True Resurrection, where you can substitute it for some other symbol that unambiguously identifies the deceased. Imprisoning the soul is not what's going on here, that's domain of the Soul Bind spell, which uses different language and prevents all forms of resurrection, including Wish and Miracle.

Other clues include the fact that the spell that bolsters Animate Dead, and undead in general, is, well, Desecrate.

What spell level is Regenerate?

[Vahnavoi]

Regenerate? 7th for Clerics and Healing domain, 9th for Druids.

If that was a typo and you meant to ask for Desecrate, that's 2nd for Clerics and Evil domain.

If you're wondering about some interaction with the Raise Dead line, that's unnecessary, because Resurrection is also 7th level Cleric spell and allows raising of a damaged body. Someone who has been turned into an undead still needs to be destroyed first.

[Aeson]

Question: why don't you want them to be dangerous? They're not constructs, mechanically or thematically.
To be perfectly honest, I'd be fine with at least some kinds of undead as constructs or construct-like things that aren't particularly more dangerous than any other tool. A zombie isn't that different, conceptually, from a flesh golem, for instance - they're both magically-animated corpses with some kind of alien spirit stuffed into them, but for some reason the zombie is a malevolent entity that wants to kill you whereas the flesh golem, despite its animating spirit having more or less exactly as much reason as and probably more capacity than the zombie's to hate and want to kill its creator for imprisoning and enslaving it, just might go berserk if it's damaged/hurt; similarly for undead-skeletons and a skeleton animated any other way.

Of course, that's arguably a better way to take the 'lawful good/neutral good "necromancer"' while remaining more or less within RAW - "necromancer" creates flesh/bone golems (or some other, preferably less expensive, zombie/skeleton lookalikes) instead of zombies/skeletons.


Regenerate? 7th for Clerics and Healing domain, 9th for Druids.

If that was a typo and you meant to ask for Desecrate, that's 2nd for Clerics and Evil domain.

If you're wondering about some interaction with the Raise Dead line, that's unnecessary, because Resurrection is also 7th level Cleric spell and allows raising of a damaged body. Someone who has been turned into an undead still needs to be destroyed first.
The reason to be concerned with the spell level of Regenerate is that Raise Dead explicitly does not repair nonlethal damage or replace nonessential missing parts. You have Bob's corpse, but it's missing an arm and a leg? Raise Dead may be able to bring Bob back, but it's not going to replace his missing limbs - just close up the stumps. That - not some spiritual link between body and soul - is why Raise Dead is concerned with the material condition of the corpse, because you presumably don't want Raise Dead to be a more accessible Regenerate and thereby encourage players to kill and raise people to restore missing body parts if such comes up for some reason after they gain access to Raise Dead but before they can get Regenerate.


1. And? Both clauses are relevant. I was summarizing the topic to you precisely because getting all the details involves going over multiple spell descriptions with a fine-toothed comb; I wasn't kidding when I said the clues are scattered. You don't rebuke or even meaningfully engage what I said by stopping at the first paragraph, if combing the rules is what you want to do.
If the clauses were related, they wouldn't be completely separated. You're reading something into the spell description which isn't there, because it fits your preconceived notion of how the spell works.


2. Why did you think Raise Dead line of spells is concerned with physical remains of the deceased in the first place? It's all about symbolic connections between the body and soul, as befits sympathetic magic, and cannot be ignored until True Resurrection, where you can substitute it for some other symbol that unambiguously identifies the deceased.
Raise Dead and Resurrect want you to have the remains because it fits with sympathetic magic, sure, but Raise Dead is the only one in the line that cares at all about the condition of the remains or whether or not they were turned into an undead creature or slain by a death effect.

Also, once again: If shoving a 'negative energy spirit' or whatever into someone's corpse to reanimate it as an undead creature defiles it in such a manner as to prevent Raise Dead and Reincarnate from working, I do not see any reason why shoving an earth elemental into a corpse to reanimate it as a flesh golem should not do the same. Considering that creating a Flesh Golem specifically requires you to dismember multiple corpses and stitch the pieces of disparate corpses together, I would go so far as to say that creating a Flesh Golem should be worse than creating a zombie insofar as desecration of a corpse goes, and yet Bob being chopped up and incorporated into six different Flesh Golems is less of an obstacle to bringing him back with Raise Dead than Bob being turned into a zombie.


Imprisoning the soul is not what's going on here, that's domain of the Soul Bind spell, which uses different language and prevents all forms of resurrection, including Wish and Miracle.
1. Most undead-creating spells are both more accessible and more generally useful than Soul Bind. If the creation of an undead creature does imprison the soul, it would not be unreasonable for the imprisonment to be weaker than the imprisonment accomplished by Soul Bind.

2. I am not saying that turning someone's corpse into an undead creature must necessarily imprison their soul (although that would be reasonably consistent with a lot of the real-world folklore around various kinds of undead), I am pointing out that it doing so is at least as consistent with the text of Raise Dead as your defilement interpretation. The first paragraph of the spell description gives only two reasons why the spell might not work, assuming that the spell is cast within the time constraint: The soul isn't free to return, and the soul isn't willing to return. Turning a corpse into an undead creature is later called out as something that prevents Raise Dead from working. To maintain consistency with the earlier part of the spell description, then, reanimating someone's corpse as an undead creature must either remove the soul's freedom to return (i.e. it imprisons it somehow) or it must render the soul unwilling to return (the soul rejects the body because it's defiled or something); if the latter, we would expect either a general statement to the effect that Raise Dead does not work on defiled/desecrated corpses, or we would expect that other forms of defilement/desecration - rape, mutilation, chopping the corpse into pieces and incorporating bits of it into flesh golems, shoving various kinds of magic spirits other than negative energy spirits into the corpse and imprisoning them there to animate it, probably casting something like Desecrate over the area containing the corpse, whatever - would also be noted as preventing Raise Dead from functioning, and yet neither of these is the case.

Breaking whatever bond exists between body and soul that allows the dead to be called back, meanwhile, appears to be something only time can do; at any rate, if such a bond could be broken by any other means you would think that that might be mentioned as a reason for the spell to fail (for example, specifying that the soul needs to be both willing and able to return rather than willing and free to return), and you would also think that such damage, if it could be done, would still have some effect on a spell like Resurrection, which still needs some portion of the remains and thus presumably some part of that spiritual linkage in order to function (for example, perhaps a corpse reanimated as an undead creature counts as having been dead for longer than is actually the case, thereby tightening Resurrection's time constraint from 10 years per caster level to something like 5 years per caster level or makes the creature count as having been deceased for five more years than is actually the case or something else like that, because Resurrection would need to undo the damage as part of calling back the soul and restoring the body).

[LudicSavant]

Question: why don't you want them to be dangerous?

Who said I don't? I never said what I want, only what's in the book.

If you want to make animating the dead more dangerous in your game, be my guest. But at least don't go around telling the OP that they can't have a neutral/good necromancer in their world. And if you want to make it inherently evil, at least give a decent explanation for why it's always evil -- the risk that they'll bite people if you let the control lapse is just not sufficient to meet that bar, since that's a problem that can be engineered around. If you're following the way they're described as behaving in the book ('they follow orders to the best of their ability with unwavering obedience, never questioning their orders no matter the consequences'), the engineering problem is trivial. But even if you make the undead far more badly behaved, it could still be engineered around, especially when people are talking about archmage Bob in their hypotheticals. Low CR meatsack undead just are not that hard to ward against (if anything, they're unusually easy to ward against).

Inherently evil is a high bar to meet. To be inherently evil it must be impossible for a thing to be used in any way that's not evil (not even the lowest kind of neutral!), under any circumstances, by anyone, of any level of intellect, magical capability, or moral fiber (including inhuman levels, we're in D&D after all). And D&D zombies are just not powerful enough to escape a well made cage that can zap them to death automatically.

[JackPhoenix]

But at least don't go around telling the OP that they can't have a neutral/good necromancer in their world.

OP isn't the GM, and it's not his world. His opinion on the subject doesn't matter. Neither does ours, but the facts are, RAW: 1) Creating undead is NEVER a good act. 2) Only evil spellcasters use those spells frequently. You can try to come up with whatever justifications or half-assed excuses to the contrary you want, but you can't change those facts.

[Unoriginal]

OP isn't the GM, and it's not his world. His opinion on the subject doesn't matter. Neither does ours, but the facts are, RAW: 1) Creating undead is NEVER a good act. 2) Only evil spellcasters use those spells frequently. You can try to come up with whatever justifications or half-assed excuses to the contrary you want, but you can't change those facts.

It does mean that the default lore is that a lawful good necromancer may *sometime* give a permanent-until-destroyed-if-weak foothold in the world of the living to omnicidal beings who require constant supervision or security measures and who may cause more of said beings to show up just by being here.

EDIT:

The thing with using D&D 5e Undead as labor is a Dyson Shell issue: anyone with the power and means to make it has no reason to make it.

A wizard who spent hundreds of gold or the equivalent in time to become powerful enough to Animate one (1) Dead isn't going to want to use that spell slot to do 2-silver-pieces-a-day work (unless they are somehow convinced it is the way to go to earn money in spite of the fact they must have come across more optimal ways of earning money during their studies). A wizard who spent even more time and money to become powerful enough to Animate three Dead isn't going to want to use that spell slot for 6-silver-pieces-a-day work.

Especially given the security measures you have to set up to avoid your workforce of three to go on a rampage, and the constent supervision they require.

[Vahnavoi]

The reason to be concerned with the spell level of Regenerate is that Raise Dead explicitly does not repair nonlethal damage or replace nonessential missing parts. You have Bob's corpse, but it's missing an arm and a leg? Raise Dead may be able to bring Bob back, but it's not going to replace his missing limbs - just close up the stumps. That - not some spiritual link between body and soul - is why Raise Dead is concerned with the material condition of the corpse, because you presumably don't want Raise Dead to be a more accessible Regenerate and thereby encourage players to kill and raise people to restore missing body parts if such comes up for some reason after they gain access to Raise Dead but before they can get Regenerate.


Your backwards extrapolated game design reason for placement of Regenerate in comparison to Raise Dead is not mutually exclusive with what I said and hence not relevant.


If the clauses were related, they wouldn't be completely separated. You're reading something into the spell description which isn't there, because it fits your preconceived notion of how the spell works.

You're keen to miss the forest for the trees, are you? The clauses are related by what happens when a caster uses Animate Dead. Turning someone into a zombie and especially a skeleton obviously triggers both clauses about why raising is prevented.


Raise Dead and Resurrect want you to have the remains because it fits with sympathetic magic, sure, but Raise Dead is the only one in the line that cares at all about the condition of the remains or whether or not they were turned into an undead creature or slain by a death effect.

Uh, the reason why the higher level spells care less is because they represent increasingly extreme forms of divine intervention, and even True Resurrection requires a person who's been turned undead to be destroyed before the original person can be restored. The level difference between Raise Dead and the subsequent spells is a measure of how badly physical mutilation interferes with divine intervention, it isn't a counterargument.


Also, once again: If shoving a 'negative energy spirit' or whatever into someone's corpse to reanimate it as an undead creature defiles it in such a manner as to prevent Raise Dead and Reincarnate from working, I do not see any reason why shoving an earth elemental into a corpse to reanimate it as a flesh golem should not do the same. Considering that creating a Flesh Golem specifically requires you to dismember multiple corpses and stitch the pieces of disparate corpses together, I would go so far as to say that creating a Flesh Golem should be worse than creating a zombie insofar as desecration of a corpse goes, and yet Bob being chopped up and incorporated into six different Flesh Golems is less of an obstacle to bringing him back with Raise Dead than Bob being turned into a zombie.

Again missing the forest for the trees. As noted before, Animate Dead is part of the requirements for constructing a Flesh Golem, just because the end-result is not an undead doesn't mean the caster isn't desecrating every corpse involved to a similar degree as the base ritual. The idea that being made a part of a flesh golem isn't as bad as being target of Animate Dead is an illusion that comes from selectively ignoring part of the rules. Actual straightforward reading of the rules is that the caster is both physically and spiritually defiling corpses in a way that is equivalent or worse.


1. Most undead-creating spells are both more accessible and more generally useful than Soul Bind. If the creation of an undead creature does imprison the soul, it would not be unreasonable for the imprisonment to be weaker than the imprisonment accomplished by Soul Bind.

The system has a rather standard format for how effects are carried over from lower level spells to higher level ones, and no such relationship exist between Animate Dead and any spell that actually imprisons souls. See below for why this makes your entire line of argumentation odd.


2. I am not saying that turning someone's corpse into an undead creature must necessarily imprison their soul (although that would be reasonably consistent with a lot of the real-world folklore around various kinds of undead), I am pointing out that it doing so is at least as consistent with the text of Raise Dead as your defilement interpretation.

Consistency is not what matters here, amount of textual evidence does. If we were talking of mere consistency, a spell breaking the symbolic connection between body and soul is not mutually exclusive with imprisoning a soul, to the contrary, in a system of sympathetic magic these are mutually reinforcing explanations, the former is why of the latter.

What makes your position odd is that you're criticizing my position for lacking textual support in spell descriptions, but there's more textual evidence for my position in those descriptions than there is for your alternative. Now, as I pointed in my summary, you can find examples of undead who are that way because their soul is trapped, if you go through creature descriptions with a fine comb, but those kind of undead are not the sort Animate Dead deals with.


The first paragraph of the spell description gives only two reasons why the spell might not work, assuming that the spell is cast within the time constraint: The soul isn't free to return, and the soul isn't willing to return. Turning a corpse into an undead creature is later called out as something that prevents Raise Dead from working. To maintain consistency with the earlier part of the spell description, then, reanimating someone's corpse as an undead creature must either remove the soul's freedom to return (i.e. it imprisons it somehow) or it must render the soul unwilling to return (the soul rejects the body because it's defiled or something); if the latter, we would expect either a general statement to the effect that Raise Dead does not work on defiled/desecrated corpses, or we would expect that other forms of defilement/desecration - rape, mutilation, chopping the corpse into pieces and incorporating bits of it into flesh golems, shoving various kinds of magic spirits other than negative energy spirits into the corpse and imprisoning them there to animate it, probably casting something like Desecrate over the area containing the corpse, whatever - would also be noted as preventing Raise Dead from functioning, and yet neither of these is the case.

In the exception-based structure of d20, specific trumps general. This means the specific rule about undead and death effects does not need to be consistent with the earlier paragraph, and can be read as a separate clause. You can construe reasons why becoming undead or being killed by a death effect falls under either of the two reasons in the first paragraph, but that isn't strictly necessary, and doesn't lead to any mutually exclusive conclusion with my summary, as already explained.

As for general clause covering other forms of desecration? Uh, the clauses of a body needing to be whole and a soul needing to be willing to return already cover vast majority of mundane forms of desecration. Undeath and death effects are specifically mentioned because they are considered especially bad by default. You might as well be complaining how Animate Dead has [Evil] tag, while Finger of Death and Soul Bind don't. The default rules have a rather idiosyncratic hierarchy of exactly how bad and how taboo certain acts are and sometimes the details are not where you'd expect them to be. Again, that is why I gave you a summary.


Breaking whatever bond exists between body and soul that allows the dead to be called back, meanwhile, appears to be something only time can do; at any rate, if such a bond could be broken by any other means you would think that that might be mentioned as a reason for the spell to fail (for example, specifying that the soul needs to be both willing and able to return rather than willing and free to return), and you would also think that such damage, if it could be done, would still have some effect on a spell like Resurrection, which still needs some portion of the remains and thus presumably some part of that spiritual linkage in order to function (for example, perhaps a corpse reanimated as an undead creature counts as having been dead for longer than is actually the case, thereby tightening Resurrection's time constraint from 10 years per caster level to something like 5 years per caster level or makes the creature count as having been deceased for five more years than is actually the case or something else like that, because Resurrection would need to undo the damage as part of calling back the soul and restoring the body).

No, time is not the only thing that can break the bond between a body and soul, it's just the one thing that can do so permanently and is mentioned in the basic spell description. Due to exception-based design of d20, this does not preclude existence of other things that are capable of the same - one example that comes to mind is being devoured by a Barghest, which has 50% chance of preventing any kind of resurrection.

As final bit of nitpickery, the distinction you're trying to make in the parentheses between "willing and free" and "willing and able" is without a difference. It exemplifies the earlier issue I pointed out with your line of argument: you are trying to juxtapose two explanations that aren't mutually exclusive and are in fact mutually reinforcing. In context, anyone not free is not able, and vice versa.

[tokek]

It does mean that the default lore is that a lawful good necromancer may *sometime* give a permanent-until-destroyed-if-weak foothold in the world of the living to omnicidal beings who require constant supervision or security measures and who may cause more of said beings to show up just by being here.

EDIT:

The thing with using D&D 5e Undead as labor is a Dyson Shell issue: anyone with the power and means to make it has no reason to make it.

A wizard who spent hundreds of gold or the equivalent in time to become powerful enough to Animate one (1) Dead isn't going to want to use that spell slot to do 2-silver-pieces-a-day work (unless they are somehow convinced it is the way to go to earn money in spite of the fact they must have come across more optimal ways of earning money during their studies). A wizard who spent even more time and money to become powerful enough to Animate three Dead isn't going to want to use that spell slot for 6-silver-pieces-a-day work.

Especially given the security measures you have to set up to avoid your workforce of three to go on a rampage, and the constent supervision they require.

We have negative and positive sides to this and both sort of leave me seeing the whole "its good because it does all the work" argument as pretty hollow

The undead are clearly stated as themselves being evil and anti-life. So they are a very high risk thing to have around needing a lot of care to avoid a rampage - care that might fail in unexpected circumstances typical of a fantasy setting.

They are really not much use. They need constant supervision at which point you would gain most of the benefit from using spells which are clearly harmless and have no negative consequences should you get distracted.

That's before we consider the implication that if Skeletons are intelligent enough to understand language, think through complex instructions and have a moral viewpoint (albeit a horrible one) then using them this way is indistinguishable from slavery.

But more fundamentally - its a genre convention that undead are evil as are those who create them. That's why they are stated as evil on the stat block and that is why the various comments about necromancy being evil are scattered around. We don't need to justify a genre convention - its the bedrock of our story telling within that genre. If you play a homebrew game with a completely different genre then I would suggest you adjust a variety of stuff throughout the rulebooks to adapt for that - and its not really useful for discussion on a public internet forum except if you are asking which rules to homebrew for it.

[Anymage]

If you want to make animating the dead more dangerous in your game, be my guest. But at least don't go around telling the OP that they can't have a neutral/good necromancer in their world.


Skeletons could assist defending the village in a fray, could help kill a bear that was endangering the cattle... if a farmer was laid up in bed, he would ask Altor to revive his deceased brother and have the skeleton plough the field or pick the crops... if a craftsman went on a business trip, maybe his wife asked Altor to raise her mother to help do the chores or run the shop.
Seeing the occasional skeleton doing menial tasks became almost commonplace in the village.

The original idea was not a thought exercise about how the risks of using undead can be mitigated. It centered around the idea that animated dead are giving the body's original owner a temporarily extended lease on existence, where they can act like their original selves and be productive members of the community. A DM is certainly free to decide that's how his world works, which might or might not also contain other risks for breaching the separation between the world of the living and the world of the dead. In this world Animate Dead might not be a morally questionable spell to begin with. By default 5e fluff this is very much a situation that's just asking for the caster to get metaphorically bitten in the butt and other people to be literally bitten in the face. And suggestions were given for ways that a character might call upon the spirits of beloved dead, just not with Animate Dead and not in the way he envisioned.


But more fundamentally - its a genre convention that undead are evil as are those who create them. That's why they are stated as evil on the stat block and that is why the various comments about necromancy being evil are scattered around. We don't need to justify a genre convention - its the bedrock of our story telling within that genre.

It goes the other way too. If undead were described as unfailingly helpful and polite it'd be hard to square that with a line about how only evil characters would animate them. WotC adding details about why undead are clearly and consequentially something that good characters would be very leery of using is them trying to align effect with genre convention.

[Unoriginal]

We have negative and positive sides to this and both sort of leave me seeing the whole "its good because it does all the work" argument as pretty hollow

The undead are clearly stated as themselves being evil and anti-life. So they are a very high risk thing to have around needing a lot of care to avoid a rampage - care that might fail in unexpected circumstances typical of a fantasy setting.

They are really not much use. They need constant supervision at which point you would gain most of the benefit from using spells which are clearly harmless and have no negative consequences should you get distracted.

That's before we consider the implication that if Skeletons are intelligent enough to understand language, think through complex instructions and have a moral viewpoint (albeit a horrible one) then using them this way is indistinguishable from slavery.

I agree with all those points.



But more fundamentally - its a genre convention that undead are evil as are those who create them. That's why they are stated as evil on the stat block and that is why the various comments about necromancy being evil are scattered around. We don't need to justify a genre convention - its the bedrock of our story telling within that genre. If you play a homebrew game with a completely different genre then I would suggest you adjust a variety of stuff throughout the rulebooks to adapt for that - and its not really useful for discussion on a public internet forum except if you are asking which rules to homebrew for it.

This I disagree with, however, and strongly.

We DO need to justify genre conventions. All the stories that form the genre have their own justifications, and quite often the justification is what gives the story its identity/feel.

To say nothing of all the stories that are unequivocally part of the genre yet subvert one of its conventions.

Take for example, the Discworld series. In the setting, Zombies are the result of the person's soul not leaving the body upon dying (generally through having colossal willpower), and they're basically the same as they were in life in term of personality, aside from the change brought by the experiences they unlived through since. Out of four Zombies who appears for more than a chapter, only one could reasonably be called evil, due to taking parts in several plots and schemes that would inflict harm on a lot of people, and it's all-but-stated he was already like that in life. Yet Discworld is still fantasy.


The justification does not need to be particularly complex, but "Undead are evil because the genre says Undead are evil" is not even circular reasoning, it's punctual reasoning (in that, it starts and immediately ends on the same spot).

If the game wants to state that the basic Undead are evil, then it needs to state what makes them evil. Thankfully, 5e does so, and their argument is more than coherent and sufficient.

[Aeson]

As final bit of nitpickery, the distinction you're trying to make in the parentheses between "willing and free" and "willing and able" is without a difference. It exemplifies the earlier issue I pointed out with your line of argument: you are trying to juxtapose two explanations that aren't mutually exclusive and are in fact mutually reinforcing. In context, anyone not free is not able, and vice versa.
If I kidnap you, break your legs so badly that you'll never walk again, and then dump you in a field somewhere, are you free to return home? Yes. Are you able to return home? Probably not without significant assistance. If instead of breaking your legs and dumping you in a field I manacle you to a concrete block in an abandoned factory and then seal the entrance, are you either free or able to return home? No.

If we're on a ship, you go overboard in foul weather, and I cut your lifeline, are you able to get back to the ship? Probably not. Are you free to do so? Yes. If, before you go overboard, I tie you up to prevent you from swimming, are you still free to get back to the ship? Not really.

See the difference?

As you are demonstrably unwilling to listen to my arguments, I see no point in replying to the rest of your post.

[Hail Tempus]

It does mean that the default lore is that a lawful good necromancer may *sometime* give a permanent-until-destroyed-if-weak foothold in the world of the living to omnicidal beings who require constant supervision or security measures and who may cause more of said beings to show up just by being here.
It would have to be a very extreme situation where a lawful good character would be willing to cast that spell. And, a lawful good character should destroy the undead as soon as the extreme situation is resolved, to eliminate any risk to others.

But raising the dead for farm or mine labor? Hard to see any good character being comfortable with that.

[LudicSavant]

The justification does not need to be particularly complex, but "Undead are evil because the genre says Undead are evil" is not even circular reasoning, it's punctual reasoning (in that, it starts and immediately ends on the same spot).

Hit the nail on the head. Well said.


Especially given the security measures you have to set up to avoid your workforce of three to go on a rampage

Eh. The security measures that have been suggested are either A) simple or B) something that high level casters just already put in their homes anyways.

The simplest ones are just to give them an eventually-suicidal order, or an ongoing nonviolent order that prevents them from fighting back against (insert anything that can damage them).

And the option B ones will work even if you contrive to make undead far less obedient than their creature descriptions describe. And again are just the sort of thing I see people putting in the homes and/or dungeons whether they're necromancers or not.


That's before we consider the implication that if Skeletons are intelligent enough to understand language, think through complex instructions and have a moral viewpoint (albeit a horrible one) then using them this way is indistinguishable from slavery.

Slavery is definitely bad, but I'm not actually sure that's the implication from the fluff the books give us. Zombies are described as quote 'devoid of thought and imagination.' And independent (e.g. non-controlled) skeletons are described as having little sense of self and attacking the living not because of any particular opinion, but because they're mystically compelled to do so by residual necromantic energy. And their creature description says that they never question tasks they're given. It kind of seems like they don't mind. Like, I was actively looking for reasons the undead might object to their state, and I couldn't find a single hint of an objection anywhere in any of the 5e books. I couldn't even find a suggestion that they have any kind of self-motivation at all (in fact, I found the opposite; every instance in the lore I could find says that they're mystically motivated by magical forces, even when acting independently).

If the goal were to justify it as evil in and of itself, I'd write fluff more like, say "you painfully trap a creature's soul in the decaying husk of its former body, forcing it to obey your every command until it manages to wrest itself free of your influence, even after which they are tortured by necromantic compulsions to destroy all life, and damage and warp the soul in the process."

[Sigreid]

I think a good bit of the necromancy is evil trope comes from 2 things. First, people are afraid of death and what might happen after. Second, it's hard to see it in a way where you're not desecrating the dead.

[Hail Tempus]

I think a good bit of the necromancy is evil trope comes from 2 things. First, people are afraid of death and what might happen after. Second, it's hard to see it in a way where you're not desecrating the dead.
D&D's take on the undead doesn't exist in a vacuum, either. It generally reflects American media and pop culture views on the subject, drawing heavily on horror movies like Dracula, the Mummy, Night of the Living Dead etc. The shambling, brainless zombie is mostly a creation of US horror films. Certainly, a DM can create a world with its own view of the undead, or look to other cultures for inspiration. But, D&D's take on the subject is pretty familiar to the average American and Western European D&D player who has grown up consuming horror and fantasy media. We all kind of know how the undead are supposed to act, and why only evil or careless people would raise them on a regular basis.

[LudicSavant]

In this world Animate Dead might not be a morally questionable spell to begin with. By default 5e fluff this is very much a situation that's just asking for the caster to get metaphorically bitten in the butt and other people to be literally bitten in the face.

I'm still waiting for even a single suggestion of how all this being bitten in the face is going to happen assuming any of the suggested preventative measures are followed.

[Hail Tempus]

I'm still waiting for even a single suggestion of how all this being bitten in the face is going to happen assuming any of the suggested preventative measures are followed.
Not everyone agrees that your proposed preventative measures are ones the rules allow you to take.

[LudicSavant]

Not everyone agrees that your proposed preventative measures are ones the rules allow you to take.

Please, I'm all ears. Please give a reason why you believe said measures are not allowed by the rules. Please cite an actual rule in an actual book.

For instance, why can't I make Forbiddance blow up zombies?

[tokek]

Please, I'm all ears. Please give a reason why you believe said measures are not allowed by the rules. Please cite an actual rule in an actual book.

For instance, why can't I make Forbiddance blow up zombies?

Given that we agree that they are pretty low-utility unless supervised I think the risk of running amok is basically the risk of something happening that the wizard could not anticipate. Now this is a game of D&D so I damn well hope that things happen pretty regularly that the players and by extension the characters did not anticipate but that is a matter of game style.

[Aeson]

For instance, why can't I make Forbiddance blow up zombies?
1. It has to be cast every day for the first 30 days, so either you need to set the forbidden area up before you start making undead (which could be somewhat inconvenient for moving undead into the enclosure) or you'd better be really certain that you're not going to miss a day for the first month of operations.

2. Forbiddance protects "up to 40,000 square feet of floor space up to a height of 30 feet above the floor," which suggests to me that the space protected needs to be an interior space (outdoor areas don't have floors) and that the undead could get out if a path under or over the protected area became available unless you completely enclosed the space in Forbiddance-protected regions.

3. The spell has material components "worth at least 1,000 GP" which are consumed on the thirtieth consecutive cast. Considering that you're likely making a pittance from your zombie/skeleton workers, this strikes me as cost-prohibitive except maybe if you're working with very large numbers of undead creatures, especially if whatever you're doing covers a large enough area that you have to cast Forbiddance multiple times to enclose it. Granted, our hypothetical necro-industrialist probably isn't concerned with cost or they'd have given the project up as not economically viable even before they got to the protections they'd need to ensure things were safe.

4. It would appear to me that using Forbiddance to prevent undead from escaping a mine would be completely impractical - you'd need to completely enclose the three-dimensional space occupied by the deposit you're trying to extract in Forbiddance zones in order to ensure that undead cannot get out no matter how far they did or where they might break through to the surface, and at that point you'll probably have dug out enough material that you likely would've been better off just extracting the deposit with whatever workforce you're using to create the spaces for the Forbiddance barriers. Similarly for any significant fields, orchards, or pastures if you're trying for a zombie-operated farm.

5. While the spell doesn't describe how you mark out the area to be protected, the combination of a ten-minute casting time and a material component of "a sprinkling of holy water, rare incense, and powdered ruby" makes me think you're meant to walk the perimeter of the protected area scattering the sprinkling as you go (or, since the material component is apparently recoverable the first 29 times you cast the spell on an area on consecutive days, perhaps dragging something that's been treated with the material components instead). This would suggest that the perimeter of the area to be protected cannot be more than about 3200 feet (walking speed of ~3.6 miles per hour * 10 minutes). Given that we'd need to exclude the center and thus need to walk the perimeter twice, the largest circular area a single cast of Forbiddance could enclose would have a radius of about 255 feet - not tiny, but not particularly large for an industrial site, either (assuming a circular enclosure, we're looking at about 4.7 acres or 1.9 hectares).
5a. Personally, I would not allow you to create complex 3D shapes with Forbiddance, so if you wanted to have a fully-contained undead workforce you'd need at least three casts of Forbiddance - one to create the 'wall,' another to create the 'floor', and the last to create the 'roof.' Given that we're limited to 40,000 square feet of floor space protected per cast, this would reduce the size of the circular enclosure to a radius of not more than about 112 feet if we do not want to have to protect more than three regions with Forbiddance to contain the undead workforce.
5b. It's not unlikely that a basic zombie would and just possible that a basic skeleton might survive the first hit of damage from entering the Forbiddance-protected space; if we're extremely unlucky, a basic skeleton could survive the first two hits of damage and a basic zombie could survive the first four hits of damage. We might want to set the minimum width of the space protected by Forbiddance to ensure that an escaping skeleton or zombie has to take at least two hits to cross the area (one for entering, one for starting its turn in the protected space); depending on how large an area we want to enclose and how worried we are about vertical movement across Forbiddance-protected zones, this may increase the minimum number of regions we need to cast Forbiddance on.

6. Forbiddance does not strike me as being particularly safe against malicious actors - it's a sixth-level spell with no particular protection against being dispelled, so it's only DC 16 to remove with base level Dispel Magic, and it covers a large enough area that you're probably not going to be able to prevent a malicious actor from getting into a position which would allow them to dispel it. Additionally, it appears to me as though the Forbiddance barriers can be bypassed with magical travel as the undead enclosure itself would not be under the effect of any of the Forbiddance spells forming the barriers, though of course a malicious actor powerful enough to bypass Forbiddance in this way could probably also just dispel their way through without serious issue.

[LudicSavant]

And the rule you think I'm not following is... what, exactly? :smallconfused:


1. It has to be cast every day for the first 30 days, so either you need to set the forbidden area up before you start making undead (which could be somewhat inconvenient for moving undead into the enclosure) or you'd better be really certain that you're not going to miss a day for the first month of operations.

3. The spell has material components "worth at least 1,000 GP" which are consumed on the thirtieth consecutive cast.

Yeah, and it's the kind of thing that I just habitually put on my mages' houses, like, in general (for reasons entirely unrelated to anything involving necromancy). What's your point?


6. Forbiddance does not strike me as being particularly safe against malicious actors - it's a sixth-level spell with no particular protection against being dispelled

Okay, so someone casts Dispel Magic on Forbiddance. Then what?

[Aeson]

{{scrubbed}}

[LudicSavant]

Are you being deliberately obtuse?

No.


You suggested Forbiddance I did! That seems to be the only bit you got right about what I suggested.


Forbiddance cannot be combined with Contingency

Not a single suggestion I made involved the use of Contingency (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25795016&postcount=94).


Oh, and if you're going to counter with something along the lines of "my wizard is a perfect being who never makes mistakes, divines his/her/its way to perfect foreknowledge of every single possible danger, and is either immortal or has such perfect knowledge of the timing of his/her/its own death that he/she/it can be absolutely certain to cast Forbiddance on the undead workforce and destroy them before dying:" Bull****.

It sure would be nice if you would address a strategy I actually suggested.

[Aeson]

I will ask again: How do you intend to use Forbiddance to control the undead workforce in your necro-industrial complex?


It sure would be nice if you would address a strategy I actually suggested.
Then it sure would be nice if you'd suggest a strategy. "I cast Forbiddance" is not a strategy; at most it's a tactic, and given that it's a tactic that requires your active intervention it's one hell of a bad choice for a failsafe.

[LudicSavant]

Honestly not sure why you're arguing about farms at me. (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25796110&postcount=109)

Anyways:


Bob didn't intend to die unexpectedly of a heart attack when he went on vacation in the Everspring Isles. Bob wasn't planning to get killed in battle during the Wizard Wars. Bob wasn't expecting the Ancient Black Dragon to attack the city and then to shut the magic off when he came out to defend his home. Bob was betrayed and murdered by his favorite student, having refused to see the warning signs as his most prized pupil went bad. Bob hadn't expected that a bunch of evil adventurers would look at his undead workforce, see "free army," and become powerful enough to kill him in his own home in their attempt to wrest control of the undead away from him. So on and so forth.

The entire point of a dead man's switch is that it works when you die unexpectedly.

That said, the last one is worth addressing:


Bob hadn't expected that a bunch of evil adventurers would look at his undead workforce, see "free army," and become powerful enough to kill him in his own home in their attempt to wrest control of the undead away from him.

It's true that a powerful and dedicated saboteur could potentially engineer a way to undo whatever solution you use. The thing is, I could just replace the word "undead" with "legendary magic item Archmage Bob crafted" and the consequences are actually worse for the world if the bad guys steal that than some zombies, and I wouldn't be calling Archmage Bob fundamentally evil for crafting a legendary magic item, or inventing a powerful spell, or anything else that bad guys might kill him to steal.

___

But let's talk about what our strategy actually is, since you seem to have missed that part.

As I mentioned earlier, there are not one but many ways to create one or more deadman's switches (be it a lemming order, a guardian who executes them if you don't return, or a glyph that blows them up if you don't pop by to stop it from doing so each day, or any of a hundred other things), in addition to other potential obstacles to undead actually getting a chance to bite anyone (especially if you're talking about Archmage Bob, who might have them in a basement below a heavily warded wizard tower, or tossed in a demiplane, or any number of things that archmages tend to like to do).

[JackPhoenix]

Forbiddance also isn't on the wizard's spell list, so you either have to be level 17 to get it through Wish, or bother a high-level cleric to do it for you.

[LudicSavant]

Forbiddance also isn't on the wizard's spell list

Animate Dead is on the Cleric spell list.


so you either have to be level 17 to get it through Wish

Why, if Archmage Bob was able to cast 9th level spells, he'd have to be, I don't know, an Archmage or something!


or bother a high-level cleric to do it for you.

So like if you were in an adventuring party or a high magic society or something.

[JackPhoenix]

Animate Dead is on the Cleric spell list.

And? The goalpost was over there, with archmage Bob guarding it. Alice the evil cleric is not in this game.

[LudicSavant]

And? The goalpost was over there, with archmage Bob guarding it. Alice the evil cleric is not in this game.

1) Archmage Bob was mentioned pages after I brought up using Forbiddance. I'm not the one shifting goalposts.

2) Archmages can cast 9th level spells.

[JackPhoenix]

1) Archmage Bob was mentioned pages after I brought up using Forbiddance. I'm not the one shifting goalposts.

And yet you've used him in the discussion. Either way, considering the kind of deities that approve of mass undead creation, somehow I doubt a cleric of theirs would be concerned with safety or maintain good alignment.


2) If Archmage Bob is an archmage, then he can cast 9th level spells.

And if you check an archmage, you may notice neither Animate Dead or Wish appear in its stat block.

And because you've edited your post:

1) You have it backwards; I brought up Forbiddance near the start of the thread, when Cleric necromancers were explicitly being discussed. Archmage Bob wasn't brought up until page 3.

Yes, level 1 cleric dip on a wizard was being discussed. Last time I've checked, 1 level of a cleric did not gave a regular access to Forbiddance.

[LudicSavant]

And yet you've used him in the discussion.

Since someone responded to me talking about Forbiddance by talking about Archmage Bob, I charitably assumed they were talking about an archmage who could cast Forbiddance -- which is, in fact, a thing that is possible to get. And for the record, 9th level spells is only one of the ways to get it.

[Unoriginal]

Hit the nail on the head. Well said.

Thank you.


Eh. The security measures that have been suggested are either A) simple or B) something that high level casters just already put in their homes anyways.

The simplest ones are just to give them an eventually-suicidal order, or an ongoing nonviolent order that prevents them from fighting back against (insert anything that can damage them).

And the option B ones will work even if you contrive to make undead far less obedient than their creature descriptions describe. And again are just the sort of thing I see people putting in the homes and/or dungeons whether they're necromancers or not.

Even if the security measures are simple or expected from high level casters, it still add to the cost of the enterprise, as you have to devote some ressources to this particular task.

Which goes back to the point: anyone who has the capacity to spend the time/power/care required for such a project has no reason to do it for a project that's worth 2 silver coins per day per head.




Slavery is definitely bad, but I'm not actually sure that's the implication from the fluff the books give us. Zombies are described as quote 'devoid of thought and imagination.' And independent (e.g. non-controlled) skeletons are described as having little sense of self and attacking the living not because of any particular opinion, but because they're mystically compelled to do so by residual necromantic energy. And their creature description says that they never question tasks they're given. It kind of seems like they don't mind. Like, I was actively looking for reasons the undead might object to their state, and I couldn't find a single hint of an objection anywhere in any of the 5e books. I couldn't even find a suggestion that they have any kind of self-motivation at all (in fact, I found the opposite; every instance in the lore I could find says that they're mystically motivated by magical forces, even when acting independently).

The MM mentions that a Skeleton is the result of an "hateful undead spirit" empowering the bones, and that they aren't mindless. The Zombie entry doesn't explicitly states the same, but it does say that they can recognize friends from foes and will try to kill any living being they have access to unless ordered otherwise, as the magic that animates them also gives them evil dispositions (while content to just stay in one spot and rot if there's nothing to kill).

I usually describe them as "just sapient enough to be malevolent", and they certainly lack the will or desire to fight against a necromancer's power over them.


I'm still waiting for even a single suggestion of how all this being bitten in the face is going to happen assuming any of the suggested preventative measures are followed.

Personally I'm not saying that preventative measures can't be put in place, but trusting people to follow them is... not going to end well in many cases.

People get regularly harmed or killed because either they or other people didn't follow the security measures, in pretty much all fields and all hobbies.

"The system works so long as everyone follows all the rules" means "the system doesn't work as soon as anyone doesn't follow one rule", when confronted to life.


The thing is, I could just replace the word "undead" with "legendary magic item Archmage Bob crafted" and the consequences are actually worse for the world if the bad guys steal that than some zombies, and I wouldn't be calling Archmage Bob fundamentally evil for crafting a legendary magic item, or inventing a powerful spell, or anything else that bad guys might kill him to steal.

I wouldn't call Archmage Bob evil if he made one magic armor which granted the wearer great tirelessness, but for some reason the wearer had to recite a Paladin's code every 24h or the armor would animate and try to kill its last wearer.

I would question Archmage Bob being a good person if he frequently made and sold those armors

Doubly so if Archmage Bob told the laborers he hired for his fields they had to wear those armors to get their 2-sp-a-day working for him.

[Anymage]

As I mentioned earlier, there are not one but many ways to create one or more deadman's switches (be it a lemming order, a guardian who executes them if you don't return, or a glyph that blows them up if you don't pop by to stop it from doing so each day, or any of a hundred other things), in addition to other potential obstacles to undead actually getting a chance to bite anyone (especially if you're talking about Archmage Bob, who might have them in a basement below a heavily warded wizard tower, or tossed in a demiplane, or any number of things that archmages tend to like to do).

Archmage Bob could very likely work out proper containment procedures if he wanted to maintain an undead-staffed assembly line. Although the daily cost in spell slots and the requirement to get home every day will likely raise questions of whether he'd be better off just paying commoners and doing something more lucrative with his time/spell slots. More on point, a college of wizards might well have a handful of undead with control lapsed, but chained up and with multiple safeguards in case they break free, for testing undead-related effects. Hazardous materials can be contained. And while those containment procedures can be sabotaged, that falls mostly on the saboteur. (Plus, what with Dispel Magic being a third level slot and all, instead of running around trying to dispel the Forbiddance zones our saboteur could just raise his own undead and point them at population centers instead of trying to take down what are hopefully multiple layers of safeguards.)

Altor, a sixth level character, does not have access to most of those safeguard spells. Even if he somehow had access to Forbiddance, he'd be animating the undead to do tasks that their former living selves would have, he'd be doing it at arbitrary places for whatever citizen needs an extra pair of hands in a pinch. This would have the undead randomly scattered around the town instead of in one place that could be safely sequestered by Forbiddance walls. It might have undead wandering off on errands, which might make them tricky to find and thus throw time uncertainty into getting the next Animate off to maintain control.

And finally, even assuming that you can pull off orders that would have undead act like the most kindly and helpful citizens possible (a position that many here dispute) , there's the question of what would happen if you couldn't make it to the daily re-up. Townsfolk wouldn't necessarily know exactly when time is about to run out and they need to start attacking the undead. Even if they did (say, you charitably let Magic Mouth tell time perfectly and allowed it to be cast on an item that would afterwards be given to a creature to wear), townsfolk might well be reluctant to attack what they've come to see as - what Altor told them was - granny coming back to lend a hand. And then when the undead does need to be retired, the undead can't just be peacefully de-animated and re-interred. It has to be destroyed, likely destroying the body in the process. Best case scenario you have a high cliff handy that the undead can suicide off of, although that means that granny's remains aren't around to be further reanimated to lend a hand. Absent such a convenient landmark you have to have people attacking granny and destroy her remains, which is rather unsettling as well as making the remains unsuitable. (They may still count as the "pile of bones" for later castings, but granny's shattered bones are going to be a bit more offputting than her normally peaceful remains.) The only way to keep the townsfolk seeing the undead as continuations of their former selves (making very generous assumptions of what the control allowed by Animate Dead allows to begin with) would require keeping them animated indefinitely. Which is going to be much costlier in spell slots than a sixth level character could cover.

Which is one of the things making the character Altor damnable foolishness. Any reasonable attempt to contain undead requires understanding that they're intrinsically hateful creatures who need to be kept very well secured to minimize their potential for harm. This is incompatible with the character and the people whose loved ones are being animated seeing the undead as continuations of those loved ones.

[LudicSavant]

Archmage Bob could very likely work out proper containment procedures if he wanted to maintain an undead-staffed assembly line. Although the daily cost in spell slots and the requirement to get home every day will likely raise questions of whether he'd be better off just paying commoners and doing something more lucrative with his time/spell slots. More on point, a college of wizards might well have a handful of undead with control lapsed, but chained up and with multiple safeguards in case they break free, for testing undead-related effects. Hazardous materials can be contained. And while those containment procedures can be sabotaged, that falls mostly on the saboteur. (Plus, what with Dispel Magic being a third level slot and all, instead of running around trying to dispel the Forbiddance zones our saboteur could just raise his own undead and point them at population centers instead of trying to take down what are hopefully multiple layers of safeguards.)

Agreed on all points.


Altor *snip* Also agreed that there are issues with Altor under the game's default assumptions.

[stoutstien]

Im just imagining all the deities of a given setting at a salon hashing out the the ins and outs of what necromancy is and when it is considered evil in regards to creating semi mindless undead.

[Aeson]

Since someone responded to me talking about Forbiddance by talking about Archmage Bob, I charitably assumed they were talking about an archmage who could cast Forbiddance -- which is, in fact, a thing that is possible to get. And for the record, 9th level spells is only one of the ways to get it.


1. It has to be cast every day for the first 30 days, so either you need to set the forbidden area up before you start making undead (which could be somewhat inconvenient for moving undead into the enclosure) or you'd better be really certain that you're not going to miss a day for the first month of operations.

2. Forbiddance protects "up to 40,000 square feet of floor space up to a height of 30 feet above the floor," which suggests to me that the space protected needs to be an interior space (outdoor areas don't have floors) and that the undead could get out if a path under or over the protected area became available unless you completely enclosed the space in Forbiddance-protected regions.

3. The spell has material components "worth at least 1,000 GP" which are consumed on the thirtieth consecutive cast. Considering that you're likely making a pittance from your zombie/skeleton workers, this strikes me as cost-prohibitive except maybe if you're working with very large numbers of undead creatures, especially if whatever you're doing covers a large enough area that you have to cast Forbiddance multiple times to enclose it. Granted, our hypothetical necro-industrialist probably isn't concerned with cost or they'd have given the project up as not economically viable even before they got to the protections they'd need to ensure things were safe.

4. It would appear to me that using Forbiddance to prevent undead from escaping a mine would be completely impractical - you'd need to completely enclose the three-dimensional space occupied by the deposit you're trying to extract in Forbiddance zones in order to ensure that undead cannot get out no matter how far they did or where they might break through to the surface, and at that point you'll probably have dug out enough material that you likely would've been better off just extracting the deposit with whatever workforce you're using to create the spaces for the Forbiddance barriers. Similarly for any significant fields, orchards, or pastures if you're trying for a zombie-operated farm.

5. While the spell doesn't describe how you mark out the area to be protected, the combination of a ten-minute casting time and a material component of "a sprinkling of holy water, rare incense, and powdered ruby" makes me think you're meant to walk the perimeter of the protected area scattering the sprinkling as you go (or, since the material component is apparently recoverable the first 29 times you cast the spell on an area on consecutive days, perhaps dragging something that's been treated with the material components instead). This would suggest that the perimeter of the area to be protected cannot be more than about 3200 feet (walking speed of ~3.6 miles per hour * 10 minutes). Given that we'd need to exclude the center and thus need to walk the perimeter twice, the largest circular area a single cast of Forbiddance could enclose would have a radius of about 255 feet - not tiny, but not particularly large for an industrial site, either (assuming a circular enclosure, we're looking at about 4.7 acres or 1.9 hectares).
5a. Personally, I would not allow you to create complex 3D shapes with Forbiddance, so if you wanted to have a fully-contained undead workforce you'd need at least three casts of Forbiddance - one to create the 'wall,' another to create the 'floor', and the last to create the 'roof.' Given that we're limited to 40,000 square feet of floor space protected per cast, this would reduce the size of the circular enclosure to a radius of not more than about 112 feet if we do not want to have to protect more than three regions with Forbiddance to contain the undead workforce.
5b. It's not unlikely that a basic zombie would and just possible that a basic skeleton might survive the first hit of damage from entering the Forbiddance-protected space; if we're extremely unlucky, a basic skeleton could survive the first two hits of damage and a basic zombie could survive the first four hits of damage. We might want to set the minimum width of the space protected by Forbiddance to ensure that an escaping skeleton or zombie has to take at least two hits to cross the area (one for entering, one for starting its turn in the protected space); depending on how large an area we want to enclose and how worried we are about vertical movement across Forbiddance-protected zones, this may increase the minimum number of regions we need to cast Forbiddance on.

6. Forbiddance does not strike me as being particularly safe against malicious actors - it's a sixth-level spell with no particular protection against being dispelled, so it's only DC 16 to remove with base level Dispel Magic, and it covers a large enough area that you're probably not going to be able to prevent a malicious actor from getting into a position which would allow them to dispel it. Additionally, it appears to me as though the Forbiddance barriers can be bypassed with magical travel as the undead enclosure itself would not be under the effect of any of the Forbiddance spells forming the barriers, though of course a malicious actor powerful enough to bypass Forbiddance in this way could probably also just dispel their way through without serious issue.


Are you being deliberately obtuse? You suggested Forbiddance, presumably as means of controlling an undead workforce; Forbiddance cannot be combined with Contingency (it's not fifth-level or lower and it cannot target your person) so it cannot be a deadman switch, it cannot usefully be cast on the area where the undead are active "just in case" because the damaging effect cannot be switched on and off at will or on some trigger other than "creature of targeted type which lacks the password (if any) set at time of casting enters / begins its turn in the affected area," and given its ten-minute casting time and implied requirement to target an interior space it's a pretty bad choice for "oh **** the undead are loose" scenarios. If you're not using it to create a containment zone around the undead, what are you using it for?

And, before you say "I'll just cast it on my undead workforce when I'm ready to retire from my necro-industrialist career," remember: Bob didn't intend to die unexpectedly of a heart attack when he went on vacation in the Everspring Isles. Bob wasn't planning to get killed in battle during the Wizard Wars. Bob wasn't expecting the Ancient Black Dragon to attack the city and then to shut the magic off when he came out to defend his home. Bob was betrayed and murdered by his favorite student, having refused to see the warning signs as his most prized pupil went bad. Bob hadn't expected that a bunch of evil adventurers would look at his undead workforce, see "free army," and become powerful enough to kill him in his own home in their attempt to wrest control of the undead away from him. So on and so forth.

Oh, and if you're going to counter with something along the lines of "my wizard is a perfect being who never makes mistakes, divines his/her/its way to perfect foreknowledge of every single possible danger, and is either immortal or has such perfect knowledge of the timing of his/her/its own death that he/she/it can be absolutely certain to cast Forbiddance on the undead workforce and destroy them before dying:" Bull****.
Because I don't.


As I mentioned earlier, there are not one but many ways to create one or more deadman's switches (be it a lemming order, a guardian who executes them if you don't return, or a glyph that blows them up if you don't pop by to stop it from doing so each day, or any of a hundred other things), in addition to other potential obstacles to undead actually getting a chance to bite anyone (especially if you're talking about Archmage Bob, who might have them in a basement below a heavily warded wizard tower, or tossed in a demiplane, or any number of things that archmages tend to like to do).
...
The entire point of a dead man's switch is that it works when you die unexpectedly.
And the way you're creating it is...?
- Contingency (Forbiddance), or for that matter Contingency (anything), doesn't work.
- Glyph of Warding (Forbiddance) is dubious; the section on Spell Glyphs states "if the spell targets an area, then it is centered on [the creature that triggered the glyph]," implying that the trigger condition has to involve a creature, none of the example triggers listed earlier in the spell description are simple timers or even involve time (that said, as long as it is a creature that trips the trigger, a temporal component is probably within the intended scope of the spell so you might for example have a glyph that can only trigger between dusk and dawn), and Forbiddance has an ill-defined area of effect ("up to 40,000 square feet of floor" instead of e.g. Fireball's "sphere of 20-foot radius").
-- Glyph of Warding (anything other than Explosive Runes, and maybe also that) is dubious when the trigger is a timer as all example triggers are activated by creatures and the spell version of the glyph appears to require a creature to target / use as the origin of the area of effect.
- Standing orders to self-immolate or whatever at sundown unless countermanded are dubious if you want to get any work out of your skeletons and zombies; Animate Dead pretty clearly seems to have the intent of only one order at a time, and while Finger of Death zombies are "permanently under your control" zombies are also quite stupid.
- "Obey the Magic Mouth" seems contrary to the intent of Animate Dead and probably also runs afoul of zombie stupidity when working with Finger of Death.
- A kill-squad of undead with an order like "destroy all undead within the building at sundown" is perhaps workable, but requires creating additional undead and could run into issues with ensuring that all undead are actually destroyed.

Additionally, any safeguard which requires periodic resets, carries a significant cost to maintain, or risks destroying a significant investment if not reset in a timely fashion is likely to run afoul of human nature. Reseting something every day is inconvenient, especially if doing so takes a nontrivial amount of time, while something that needs to be reset every month or every six months or every year is liable to be forgotten; if something hasn't been a problem, complacency may creep in and safeguards may be loosened or dropped; a necro-industrialist has a strong economic incentive to ensure that a failsafe meant to destroy their undead workforce never triggers, but lacks a similar incentive to ensure that that safeguard functions, and depending on just how 'good' our necro-industrialist is that's a conflict of interest that may just be a problem worth worrying about.

[Anymage]

And the way you're creating it is...?
- Contingency (Forbiddance), or for that matter Contingency (anything), doesn't work...


To play devil's advocate, if you have a warehouse out in the middle of nowhere that's surrounded by large permanent Forbiddance zones, you could keep undead in there forever. Then the question is how to keep any people from wandering in and having plans on hand for your eventual demise, but those can be handled. On the same note you could animate an skeleton, encase it in concrete, and shove it into a demiplane that you never access again. Containment is quite doable, unless the DM rules that the process of animating and/or the undead themselves are somehow corrosive to reality.

Of course these measures are fairly costly, on top of the daily slot cost to maintain control, and the undead would be hard pressed to cover the expenses and opportunity costs even in the most optimistic scenarios. So a conscientious character capable of animating the dead is unlikely to do so when better practical options exist. Add in how good characters would find the creation of intrinsically evil and hateful creatures to be somewhat distasteful while evil characters would be more comfortable skimping on safeguards or even ignoring the externalized risks, and that lines up with good characters being unlikely to animate undead, and only evil characters doing so with any frequency.

[tokek]

Slavery is definitely bad, but I'm not actually sure that's the implication from the fluff the books give us. Zombies are described as quote 'devoid of thought and imagination.' And independent (e.g. non-controlled) skeletons are described as having little sense of self and attacking the living not because of any particular opinion, but because they're mystically compelled to do so by residual necromantic energy. And their creature description says that they never question tasks they're given. It kind of seems like they don't mind. Like, I was actively looking for reasons the undead might object to their state, and I couldn't find a single hint of an objection anywhere in any of the 5e books. I couldn't even find a suggestion that they have any kind of self-motivation at all (in fact, I found the opposite; every instance in the lore I could find says that they're mystically motivated by magical forces, even when acting independently).



There is no in-game criteria for sapience that a Skeleton does not pass. They have intelligence, language and alignment. Detect Thoughts works on them just fine as will nearly all telepathy abilities. If a DM tried to pull some stunt where my Detect Thoughts does not work on Skeletons I would immediately regard that as homebrew working directly against the wording of the magic. They are thinking creatures with motivation, evil motivation I will concur, but motivation all the same.

At the point where a character is trying to justify them as sufficiently worthless that enslaving them does not matter they are definitely not in Good alignment territory any more IMO.

We can argue that being under control of Animate Dead spell suppresses their thoughts but I don't think that makes things any better at all. It just opens up all the moral problems everyone has with the Enchantment school of magic on top of ones we already have for Necromancy. Mind controlling your slaves does not make it any less slavery.

[Tanarii]

And, honestly, what 5th level spellcaster wants to spend his day supervising skeletons performing agricultural work in some hick town? Even if he doesn't want to continue adventuring, he can make a lot more money with less of a chance of stepping into cow dung by doing something like scribing scrolls. The most you could get paid for your skeleton workers is 2 gp per day per skeleton (assuming they qualify as skilled versus unskilled labor, which is highly debatable).


Agreed. The whole idea of an undead workforce does not really work for me - the limitations on undead and the actual reality of farming and other jobs not being trivially easy don't work out for me at all. If someone really wants to make that the basis of their game then they can go for it I'm sure not going to stop their fun. But with the rules as they are and knowing how none of those so-called menial jobs are anything like that mindless it does not work for me.

Agreed. In terms of "can I be a good necromancer" a far more interesting scenario would be:
My Wizard wants to work for a military organization, usually as part of an elite strike group (adventuring) but sometimes as backup to the main organization general forces (downtime), that only takes on righteous missions, providing support in the form of a commander of a mobile distributed archery turret (skeletons).

[LudicSavant]

Do you see the word "Archmage" in either of these posts? Because I don't.

You specifically told us (many times, in fact) that Bob, the guy who has a heart attack while on vacation, is an archmage. It was in fact the very first thing you told us about Bob.


Contingency (Forbiddance), or for that matter Contingency (anything), doesn't work.
Glyph of Warding (Forbiddance) is dubious

Where do you get this stuff?

You don't put Forbiddance in a glyph of warding or a contingency, you just use Forbiddance normally.

If you want to use a Glyph of Warding, you don't use it for Forbiddance, you just set it to any spell that will kill your undead (take your pick), set a trigger that will happen in like 18 hours unless you tell it not to, and that's it.

If they somehow survive, they might need to also climb out of a concrete hole without a ladder, pass through a warded mage's tower (with stuff like, say, Forbiddance), and then navigate to find a commoner that they can beat up, before they encounter someone they can't (like, say, a guy on a village watchtower with a bow, or a well-armed guy coming to check up on why they haven't heard from their archmage buddy for their lunch plans). And if that's a zombie, 'running away' is a pretty effective answer, and if it's a skeleton, they've got to also think to get some weaponry and armor or they actually have a decent chance of losing a fight with a peasant. These are not stealthy creatures.

All of this stuff -- the caster dying unexpectedly, one or more deadman's switches somehow failing, nobody being around to notice, escaping a location designed to contain them, navigating to a victim, not encountering a thing that it can't defeat prior to said victim, and then actually defeating that victim -- all needs to happen simultaneously in order for containment to fail. That's why I estimate the risk as low, precisely because so many things need to go wrong at once, and that even if they all do, the worst case scenario is that you get a handful of weak monsters that's pretty tame by 'escaped mage experiments' standards.

[tokek]

Agreed. In terms of "can I be a good necromancer" a far more interesting scenario would be:
My Wizard wants to work for a military organization, usually as part of an elite strike group (adventuring) but sometimes as backup to the main organization general forces (downtime), that only takes on righteous missions, providing support in the form of a commander of a mobile distributed archery turret (skeletons).

I can actually see it if an evil army is ravaging the land and a good necromancer raises some of the casualties of that evil army to defend the innocent. It could be seen as a just punishment for their crimes.


Its not that I can't see any situation where necromancy is valid for a LG character. I just struggle with most of the ideas where its routine and normal for them to raise and use undead. I really can't see the justification of getting them to do menial work - it just has too many issue for me to see that as LG.

[LudicSavant]

Agreed. In terms of "can I be a good necromancer" a far more interesting scenario would be:
My Wizard wants to work for a military organization, usually as part of an elite strike group (adventuring) but sometimes as backup to the main organization general forces (downtime), that only takes on righteous missions, providing support in the form of a commander of a mobile distributed archery turret (skeletons).


I can actually see it if an evil army is ravaging the land and a good necromancer raises some of the casualties of that evil army to defend the innocent. It could be seen as a just punishment for their crimes.

Yeah. There's also the canon example of a nation where the people proudly volunteer to donate their own dead bodies to the war effort.

The risk of damage to civilians is higher because 'escape a location designed to contain them' and 'they need to arm themselves' doesn't occur if you're putting them on a battlefield, and because the chance of sudden death of the caster is significantly higher than a civilian context. However, if you're dropping 30 skeletons in an enemy encampment, and then you suddenly die... they're still non-independent undead for like the next 8 hours. In the middle of a bunch of well armed people who want to kill them. So... eh.

A much more significant risk in my eyes may come not from your zombies biting anyone directly, but instead from the fact that the presence of undead can occasionally cause other corpses to spontaneously animate, and there may well be a lot of corpses on a battlefield.

[Unoriginal]

You specifically told us (many times, in fact) that Bob, the guy who has a heart attack while on vacation, is an archmage. It was in fact the very first thing you told us about Bob.



Where do you get this stuff?

You don't put Forbiddance in a glyph of warding or a contingency, you just use Forbiddance normally.

If you want to use a Glyph of Warding, you don't use it for Forbiddance, you just set it to any spell that will kill your undead (take your pick), set a trigger that will happen in like 18 hours unless you tell it not to, and that's it.

If they somehow survive, they might need to also climb out of a concrete hole without a ladder, pass through a warded mage's tower (with stuff like, say, Forbiddance), and then navigate to find a commoner that they can beat up, before they encounter someone they can't (like, say, a guy on a village watchtower with a bow, or a well-armed guy coming to check up on why they haven't heard from their archmage buddy for their lunch plans). And if that's a zombie, 'running away' is a pretty effective answer, and if it's a skeleton, they've got to also think to get some weaponry and armor or they actually have a decent chance of losing a fight with a peasant. These are not stealthy creatures.

All of this stuff -- the caster dying unexpectedly, one or more deadman's switches somehow failing, nobody being around to notice, escaping a location designed to contain them, navigating to a victim, not encountering a thing that it can't defeat prior to said victim, and then actually defeating that victim -- all needs to happen simultaneously in order for containment to fail. That's why I estimate the risk as low, precisely because so many things need to go wrong at once, and that even if they all do, the worst case scenario is that you get a handful of weak monsters that's pretty tame by 'escaped mage experiments' standards.

Worst case scenario is more "ond of the weak monsters reach an area with dead beings, and due to the weak monster's being around more weak monsters are created, they those new weak monsters reach another place with dead beings and create newer monsters, then...".

Which is pretty on par with the standards of escaped mage experiment.

Undead are not Tribbles, but you don't want any undead near a battlefield or a cemetary unless you want to risk a swarm of them.



IIRC, the Archdevil Moloch can cast Animate Dead at will. That's a pretty terrifying, city-ending power.

[LudicSavant]

Worst case scenario is more "ond of the weak monsters reach an area with dead beings, and due to the weak monster's being around more weak monsters are created, they those new weak monsters reach another place with dead beings and create newer monsters, then...".

Yeah, agreed.

[Psyren]

Who said I don't? I never said what I want, only what's in the book.

If you want to make animating the dead more dangerous in your game, be my guest. But at least don't go around telling the OP that they can't have a neutral/good necromancer in their world. And if you want to make it inherently evil, at least give a decent explanation for why it's always evil -- the risk that they'll bite people if you let the control lapse is just not sufficient to meet that bar, since that's a problem that can be engineered around. If you're following the way they're described as behaving in the book ('they follow orders to the best of their ability with unwavering obedience, never questioning their orders no matter the consequences'), the engineering problem is trivial. But even if you make the undead far more badly behaved, it could still be engineered around, especially when people are talking about archmage Bob in their hypotheticals. Low CR meatsack undead just are not that hard to ward against (if anything, they're unusually easy to ward against).

Inherently evil is a high bar to meet. To be inherently evil it must be impossible for a thing to be used in any way that's not evil (not even the lowest kind of neutral!), under any circumstances, by anyone, of any level of intellect, magical capability, or moral fiber (including inhuman levels, we're in D&D after all). And D&D zombies are just not powerful enough to escape a well made cage that can zap them to death automatically.

Undead increasing "background necromantic radiation" does that though.

Better still, it means that you can have 1 or a handful of minions and potentially still be acceptable (or at least tolerable) in an adventuring context, while larger-scale industrial revolution type efforts will be impossible to offset.

[Hail Tempus]

This thread reminds me of the incident in the 1970's where a teenager tried to build a breeder nuclear reactor by collecting nuclear elements from household sources (such as americium from smoke detectors). He ended up turning his backyard into a superfund site.

How is this the same as our nascent necromancer raising dead for labor purposes? Because both of them were creating something that is inherently dangerous and creating the very real chance that someone would get hurt. That type of callous, thoughtless behavior is, at best, Chaotic Neutral under D&D rules.

The fact that people are coming up with complex ways to keep the undead from killing a bunch of 4 hit point commoners is pretty good evidence that they're too dangerous for something like agricultural work. You don't have to cast a high level spell to keep the new plough horse from eating the other farm workers.

[LudicSavant]

The fact that people are coming up with complex ways to keep the undead from killing a bunch of 4 hit point commoners is pretty good evidence that they're too dangerous for something like agricultural work. You don't have to cast a high level spell to keep the new plough horse from eating the other farm workers.

There were methods suggested for an archmage, and methods suggested for a low level caster with no extra magic at all. There were methods suggested that were complex, and methods suggested that were simple. It seems odd that you just are ignoring the latter and claiming that the former are required, instead of just better, overkill versions of the same thing.

You can make an area designed to reliably contain an animal that's more capable than a zombie pretty easily, with no magic. You can make a deadman's switch with no magic at all, or by giving a lemming order. And nothing happens even with no safeguards at all unless the caster is suddenly and unexpectedly incapacitated with nobody around to notice.

And then when the worst case scenario happens, you're left with a CR 1/4 monster that's weak for its CR, not a nuclear disaster.

[Unoriginal]

Other fun thought:

The MM entry for Zombie states (and the Skeleton one implies) that the presence of Undead causing other Undead to appears can be quite delayed.

I don't know for you, but I personally recall any Animate Dead user taking care of cremating all the bodies of the foes killed in presence of their Undead minions. Nor doing the same to beings who were slready dead when their squad of unalive individuals show up.


How many undead does an undead squad creates? Imossible to say, but lilely non-zero, if you use Animate Dead frequently.

[LudicSavant]

Other fun thought:

The MM entry for Zombie states (and the Skeleton one implies) that the presence of Undead causing other Undead to appears can be quite delayed.

I don't know for you, but I personally recall any Animate Dead user taking care of cremating all the bodies of the foes killed in presence of their Undead minions. Nor doing the same to beings who were slready dead when their squad of unalive individuals show up.


How many undead does an undead squad creates? Imossible to say, but lilely non-zero, if you use Animate Dead frequently.

This is a much more interesting discussion than the one that assumes that a caster's zombies are somehow going to start successfully eating everyone on a regular basis, as though the problem of containing a weak animal so that it can't bite people is some sort of ridiculously complex thing that people could never figure out.

Though like you say, it's difficult for us to tell much here because it's so nonspecific -- the spontaneous animation thing could be a big deal or a little deal, depending on things left unsaid.

[Psyren]

I've been having that discussion :smalltongue:

The fact that it's nonspecific is besides the point - that it happens at all means any reanimation, especially on a large scale, is at best irresponsible.

[Unoriginal]

This is a much more interesting discussion than the one that assumes that your zombies are somehow going to start successfully eating everyone on a regular basis. Though like you say, it's difficult for us to tell much here because it's so nonspecific -- it could be a big deal or a little deal, depending on things left unsaid.

Indeed, but I think the important thing to take from that last sentence is that, big or little, it's nevertheless a deal.

Let's say, for example, that a PC finds some kind of ancient machine in the depth of a dungeon. The machine will produce a 100 gp- worth gem whenever it's activated, but there is a big warning on the machine saying that activating it has one chance in a million of unleashing a group of undead on a random populated village, somewhere in the region. An inspection of the machine reveals it does manipulate undead-animating energy on a regional level, but impossible to say for certain if the one-in-a-million warning is accurate.

Do you think a PC of any of the good alignments would activate the machine?

[Aeson]

To play devil's advocate, if you have a warehouse out in the middle of nowhere that's surrounded by large permanent Forbiddance zones, you could keep undead in there forever. Then the question is how to keep any people from wandering in and having plans on hand for your eventual demise, but those can be handled. On the same note you could animate an skeleton, encase it in concrete, and shove it into a demiplane that you never access again. Containment is quite doable, unless the DM rules that the process of animating and/or the undead themselves are somehow corrosive to reality.
You're trying to use undead as cheap labor; encasing the undead in concrete and shoving them in a demi-plane is right out, and anything that imposes significant transportation costs - like sticking your necro-industrial site in the middle of the Not-Quite-Endless Desert or in a demiplane that takes an eighth-level spell to access any time you want to get stuff in or out - is self-defeating.

Also, I would be rather dubious of the idea that anyone who's creating undead and doing nothing but encasing them in concrete and stuffing them in demiplanes that they never visit again is "good;" even if undead were not inherently malevolent creatures whose creation was evil by RAW, doing something like this has no apparent purpose other than wanton cruelty or maybe as a fairly good shot at keeping someone from being brought back by any means short of True Resurrection. Furthermore, while I'm more than a little dubious that anyone who can cast Demiplane would need to steal an undead army or have issues creating trouble without preexisting undead to set loose, anyone who knows the nature and contents of a demiplane can access it regardless of whether or not they were the one to create it, and security through obscurity is not exactly a strong safeguard.


You specifically told us (many times, in fact) that Bob, the guy who has a heart attack while on vacation, is an archmage. It was in fact the very first thing you told us about Bob.
The reason that I cannot use "Bob" as a generic character name is...?


Where do you get this stuff?
Gee, I don't know, where might I possibly get the idea that in a discussion of "how do I make using an undead workforce safe" Forbiddance is being brought up as a safeguard or precautionary measure of some kind or another.


You don't put Forbiddance in a glyph of warding or a contingency, you just use Forbiddance normally.
Then I will ask you again: How are you using this spell to make your undead workforce safe? You're blowing up the undead? Great. You no longer have an undead workforce, so as precautionary measures go this one stinks. You expect your heirs or successors or someone you hired to cast it in the event of your death? What's keeping the undead off them for the ten-minute casting time? How are you addressing the obvious conflict of interest between blowing up the factory and profiting from it? How are you addressing the risk that whatever rendered you incapable of destroying your undead workforce might also render your heirs, successors, or hirelings incapable of casting Forbiddance?


If you want to use a Glyph of Warding, you don't use it for Forbiddance, you just set it to any spell that will kill your undead (take your pick), set a trigger that will happen in like 18 hours unless you tell it not to, and that's it.
Okay, so now you have how many Glyph of Warding setups to reset every 18 hours or whatever? Spell Glyph cannot target multiple creatures as written, so if you don't want to create a separate failsafe glyph for each of your undead workers you'd have to use an area-of-effect spell or the standard Explosive Runes glyph, but most of your options there aren't going to affect particularly large areas (particularly if we want to avoid using high-level spell slots), and if you also want something that's only dangerous to your undead - because, hey, you might be in the area of effect if it's triggered when you're about to reset the safeguard - then that further limits your choice of spells. A 28'x28' room isn't particularly large - it's roughly the size of a slightly-smaller-than-average classroom - but it's also about the largest rectangular room that can be entirely contained within an area of effect with a 20' radius, and depending on what spell you're using in the glyph, what kind of undead you're working with, and how certain of destruction you want to be you might need several glyphs for each such room in your complex.

Beyond that, what are you using as a trigger condition? If it's something like "there is an undead creature within 20' of the glyph between dusk and dawn," then you have to replace every glyph in or remove your undead from the complex every day; if it's something like "Bob the zombie touches the glyph, and Bob has orders to touch the glyph at sundown," then Bob needs to be able to tell when sundown occurs but also needs to be relatively safe from anyting that might cause the failsafe to fail, and you're probably also going to want Bob to be somewhere that's convenient to reach so that you can countermand the "touch the glyph at sundown" order without too much hassle; additionally, depending on whether your DM allows a trigger condition along the lines of "Bob's glyph has been triggered and..." - which isn't specifically disallowed but also doesn't match any of the example conditions given in the spell description - you might need a Bob for every set of glyph traps in the complex.

[LudicSavant]

Then I will ask you again: How are you using this spell to make your undead workforce safe? You're blowing up the undead? Great. You no longer have an undead workforce Yup, that would be the general point. I'm not sure what part of that is confusing.


Okay, so now you have how many Glyph of Warding setups to reset every 18 hours or whatever? One. You reset it at the same time you recast Animate Dead.


Spell Glyph cannot target multiple creatures as written

"The spell must target a single creature or an area."

[Aeson]

{{scrubbed}}

[JackPhoenix]

Okay, so now you have how many Glyph of Warding setups to reset every 18 hours or whatever? Spell Glyph cannot target multiple creatures as written, so if you don't want to create a separate failsafe glyph for each of your undead workers you'd have to use an area-of-effect spell or the standard Explosive Runes glyph, but most of your options there aren't going to affect particularly large areas (particularly if we want to avoid using high-level spell slots), and if you also want something that's only dangerous to your undead - because, hey, you might be in the area of effect if it's triggered when you're about to reset the safeguard - then that further limits your choice of spells. A 28'x28' room isn't particularly large - it's roughly the size of a slightly-smaller-than-average classroom - but it's also about the largest rectangular room that can be entirely contained within an area of effect with a 20' radius, and depending on what spell you're using in the glyph, what kind of undead you're working with, and how certain of destruction you want to be you might need several glyphs for each such room in your complex.

Beyond that, what are you using as a trigger condition? If it's something like "there is an undead creature within 20' of the glyph between dusk and dawn," then you have to replace every glyph in or remove your undead from the complex every day; if it's something like "Bob the zombie touches the glyph, and Bob has orders to touch the glyph at sundown," then Bob needs to be able to tell when sundown occurs but also needs to be relatively safe from anyting that might cause the failsafe to fail, and you're probably also going to want Bob to be somewhere that's convenient to reach so that you can countermand the "touch the glyph at sundown" order without too much hassle; additionally, depending on whether your DM allows a trigger condition along the lines of "Bob's glyph has been triggered and..." - which isn't specifically disallowed but also doesn't match any of the example conditions given in the spell description - you might need a Bob for every set of glyph traps in the complex.

There's also the fact that for the cost of one GoW, you could've hired an unskilled hireling (still better worker than a skeleton, not to mention a zombie) for 1000 days.

[LudicSavant]

{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}


I read just fine, thanks. Some area of effect spells are capable of targeting multiple creatures, contrary to your claim that glyphs cannot target multiple creatures.


There's also the fact that for the cost of one GoW, you could've hired an unskilled hireling (still better worker than a skeleton, not to mention a zombie) for 1000 days.

And one GoW can serve as a failsafe for a gaggle of undead that never need sleep and never question your orders for an elven lifetime.

[Witty Username]

I've been having that discussion :smalltongue:

The fact that it's nonspecific is besides the point - that it happens at all means any reanimation, especially on a large scale, is at best irresponsible.

Kinda in the same vein as air pollution from the sound of it.


There is no in-game criteria for sapience that a Skeleton does not pass. They have intelligence, language and alignment. Detect Thoughts works on them just fine as will nearly all telepathy abilities. If a DM tried to pull some stunt where my Detect Thoughts does not work on Skeletons I would immediately regard that as homebrew working directly against the wording of the magic. They are thinking creatures with motivation, evil motivation I will concur, but motivation all the same.


As far as I can tell, a skeleton is less sapient than a shield guardian, which has the full mental capacity of the average TV set.

I get some of this, this would differenciate skeletons and zombies some.
But the intelligence side at least, all creatures in 5e have intelligence, even the explicitly mindless ones. And alignment doesn’t mean much, animals and plants are unaligned and fit the criteria of sapience better than zombies.

Can they understand tasks and complicated instructions sure, as can a computer. Are they capable of malus, sure, but I don't see how that gets them beyond virus-riden computer.

[Unoriginal]

I read just fine, thanks. Some area of effect spells are capable of targeting multiple creatures, contrary to your claim that they cannot.



And one GoW can serve as a failsafe for a gaggle of undead that never need sleep and never question your orders for an elven lifetime.

Not needing sleep is an advantage, not questioning orders isn't.

All activities where you create, transport, regroup or manage something (beast, wheat, etc) ned at least *some* capacity for judgement and reactivity to the unplanned, two things (controlled) indeed lack. Is a wizard with enough money to make a GoW going to check the work results of their gaggle of undead and order them to do X,Y or Z without sleep?

[LudicSavant]

Not needing sleep is an advantage, not questioning orders isn't. Depends what you want 'em to do. But yes, it makes them very poor at things that require them to be able to adapt to changing circumstances. (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25796110&postcount=109)

They are not a replacement for hirelings, nor are hirelings a replacement to them. You'll note that I haven't been on board with the farming plan from the start of the thread :smalltongue:

[Aeson]

I read just fine, thanks. Some area of effect spells are capable of targeting multiple creatures, contrary to your claim that they cannot.
Where did I make this claim? If it's this:

Spell Glyph cannot target multiple creatures as written, so if you don't want to create a separate failsafe glyph for each of your undead workers you'd have to use an area-of-effect spell or the standard Explosive Runes glyph,
{Scrubbed}

From the description of Spell Glyph:

Spell Glyph. You can store a prepared spell of 3rd level or lower in the glyph by casting it as part of creating the glyph. The spell must target a single creature or an area. The spell being stored has no immediate effect when cast in this way. When the glyph is triggered, the stored spell is cast. If the spell has a target, it targets the creature that triggered the glyph. If the spell affects an area, the area is centered on that creature.
If your Spell Glyph contains an area-of-effect spell that can target an area, that area is centered on one specific creature; in other words, the Spell Glyph is still targeting that one specific creature despite throwing an area-of-effect spell that could plausibly affect multiple targets. Whether or not the Glyph contains an area-of-effect spell and whether or not that area-of-effect spell actually affects multiple creatures is irrelevant.

If Bob triggers a Glyph of Warding (Fireball), the Glyph of Warding will throw a fireball at Bob, not at an area 10 feet to the right of Bob where it'd be more optimally placed to catch all of Bob's friends as well as Bob himself. If I'm your DM and I allow you to create a Glyph of Warding (Fire Storm), however many ten-foot cubes your Glyph of Warding (Fire Storm) is set to create are either going to be arranged into a preset pattern which must be centered on Bob, or they're going to be arranged into the most compact shape feasible and then centered on Bob, not dynamically arranged in whatever pattern most optimally covers the room or hits both Bob and Bob's companions at the time that the Glyph goes off. If Bob's unfortunate to trigger a Glyph of Warding (Aeson's Firespray), where Aeson's Firespray is a spell that creates 50 individually-targeted fireballs which otherwise function as the spell Fireball and is a spell that my DM for some reason allowed me to put in a Glyph of Warding despite clearly being a spell that targets up to 50 areas instead of an area, the Glyph of Warding (Aeson's Firespray) is going to throw all fifty of those fireballs at Bob regardless of the fact that I could have given each fireball created by Aeson's Fireball a separate target had I cast the spell myself.

The Glyph doesn't care whether the creature that triggered it is all alone or accompanied by a hundred companions; it targets the creature that triggered it, not anything else. Anything else getting caught up in an area-of-effect spell which had been contained within the Glyph is just collateral damage; the Glyph neither targets nor excludes them, it just throws a fireball or whatever other spell it contains at the creature that triggered it.

[LudicSavant]

Where did I make this claim?

You made the claim that spell glyph cannot target multiple creatures here:


Spell Glyph cannot target multiple creatures

Per the general rules, even if the initial target of an AoE spell is a single creature, it can still target multiple creatures during its resolution. Fireball is a perfectly good example of this -- the initial target is a point in space, but it's the creatures in the area that are the "Targets that take 8d6 fire damage." Spell Glyph centers the spell on a single creature, but it can target multiple ones, for the same reason that Fireball can.

[Aeson]

You made the claim that spell glyph cannot target multiple creatures here:
{Scrubbed}

Spell Glyph is not an area-of-effect spell; it is a spell that creates a trap which, when triggered, throws some other spell at the triggering creature, and it does so in a manner that specifically targets the creature that triggered the glyph. Whether or not that other spell is an area-of-effect spell which might affect multiple creatures is irrelevant; the Spell Glyph does not target any creatures other than the one which triggered the glyph, nor does it exclude them from the area-of-effect; as far as the Spell Glyph is concerned, anything beyond the triggering creature which gets caught up in the area-of-effect is simply collateral damage.


Per the general rules, even if the initial target of an AoE spell is a single creature, it can still target multiple creatures during its resolution. Fireball is a perfectly good example of this -- the initial target is a point in space, but it's the creatures in the area that are the "Targets that take 8d6 fire damage." Spell Glyph centers the spell on a single creature, but it can target multiple ones, for the same reason that Fireball can.
Fireball targets a point and affects any creatures within a certain distance of that point; it doesn't actually target multiple creatures.

[LudicSavant]

Fireball targets a point and affects any creatures within a certain distance of that point; it doesn't actually target multiple creatures.

Incorrect.

"A target takes 8d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one."

[Aeson]

Incorrect.

"A target takes 8d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one."
I want to throw a Fireball which will affect Frank, George, and Larry; Frank, George, and Larry are my targets. I pick a point such that Frank, George, and Larry are all within a Fireball's area of effect; that point is Fireball's target. Unless I'm not concerned about exactly where my fireball is going to hit and what's going to be affected, I cannot just say "I throw a fireball at Frank, George, and Larry" - and even if I am unconcerned about where, exactly, my fireball lands or who and what else might be affected, my DM would be entirely within his or her rights to make me pick a target point, because Fireball "sends a streak to a point of your choosing and then [explodes]." "Frank, George, and Larry" or "those goblins over there" are not valid targets for Fireball.

Fireball isn't targeting Frank, George, and Larry; I am. Fireball's targeting a point that I chose such that Fireball would affect my targets. If I chose Fireball's target well, it deals damage to my targets; if I chose poorly, some of my targets might be unaffected, or some things which were not my intended targets might be affected, but Fireball still isn't targeting them - I, Fireball's caster, am.

The only thing that Glyph of Warding (Fireball) actually targets is the creature that triggered the Glyph. Anything else that gets caught up in the Fireball's area of effect is just collateral damage.

[LudicSavant]

AoEs (including Fireball) are frequently referred to as having multiple creatures as targets, including in the sections of the general rules that tell you how to adjudicate areas of effect in the first place.

"A target takes 8d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one."

"If a spell or other effect deals damage to more than one target at the same time, roll the damage once for all of them. For example, when a wizard casts fireball or a cleric casts flame strike, the spell's damage is rolled once for all creatures caught in the blast."

"For example, if a wizard directs burning hands (a 15-foot cone) at a nearby group of orcs, you could use the table and say that two orcs are targeted (15 + 10 = 1.5, rounded up to 2). Similarly, a sorcerer could launch a lightning bolt (100-foot line) at some ogres and hobgoblins, and you could use the table to say four of the monsters are targeted (100 + 30 = 3.33, rounded up to 4)."

"The creature has disadvantage on attack rolls against targets within the cylinder. Targets within the cylinder can't be charmed, frightened, or possessed by the creature."

"Each creature in that area must make a Strength saving throw. On a failed save, a target takes 2d6 necrotic damage and can't take reactions until its next turn."

"A target takes 8d6 necrotic damage on a failed save. or half as much damage on a successful one."

"SAVING THROWS
Many spells specify that a target can make a saving throw to avoid some or all of a spell's effects. The spell specifies the ability that the target uses for the save and what happens on a success or failure."

"target takes 8d6 psychic damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. After a failed save, a target has muddled thoughts for 1 minute. During that time, it rolls a d6 and subtracts the number rolled from all its attack rolls and ability checks, as well as its Constitution saving throws to maintain concentration. The target can make an Intelligence saving throw at the end of each of its turns, ending the effect on itself on a success."

[Psyren]

Kinda in the same vein as air pollution from the sound of it.

Exactly, except far worse - it's polluted air that literally hangs around forever, actively seeks out living creatures to harm, and can make more of itself. Not to mention there being organizations in the world seeking to actively make more of it as their product rather than a byproduct.


Indeed, but I think the important thing to take from that last sentence is that, big or little, it's nevertheless a deal.

Let's say, for example, that a PC finds some kind of ancient machine in the depth of a dungeon. The machine will produce a 100 gp- worth gem whenever it's activated, but there is a big warning on the machine saying that activating it has one chance in a million of unleashing a group of undead on a random populated village, somewhere in the region. An inspection of the machine reveals it does manipulate undead-animating energy on a regional level, but impossible to say for certain if the one-in-a-million warning is accurate.

Do you think a PC of any of the good alignments would activate the machine?

Speaking personally, this is the kind of discussion I'd much rather have than arguing the minutiae of spell glyphs and AoEs.

[LudicSavant]

it's polluted air that literally hangs around forever What's the source for it hanging around forever?

[Psyren]

What's the source for it hanging around forever?

It's an analogy, it's not actually polluted air :smalltongue: I'm saying that undead don't just go away on their own, not without making more anyway. As for a source on them lasting forever, it's in nearly every entry; banshees are "forever bound", wights wage "eternal war", zombies and skeletons last "until destroyed"... are you asking for a source that undeath is permanent? It's sort of implied...

[LudicSavant]

zombies and skeletons last "until destroyed"... are you asking for a source that undeath is permanent? It's sort of implied...

I was asking if their threat somehow persists literally forever. If it only lasts until they're destroyed, then the answer to that would be no.

[Psyren]

I was asking if their threat somehow persists literally forever. If it only lasts until they're destroyed, then the answer to that would be no.

The individual creature can be destroyed, sure. The impact they have on the world until then is another matter (see the zombie quote upthread.)

[LudicSavant]

Speaking of the established lore, a note directed at no one in particular:

There is not one but multiple religions (at least 5 that I can remember off the top of my head) listed in the Player's Handbook alone with the Death domain ("The Death domain is concerned with the forces that cause death, as well as the negative energy that gives rise to undead creatures") that have alignments other than Evil (and at least one of them is Good-aligned). And the lore for some of them definitely involves using Animate Dead frequently, yet the associated beings are not listed as Evil.

[Psyren]

1) I'm not arguing that Neutral habitual necromancers are impossible - only Good ones. The implication is that they are resorting to these measures to combat a discrete greater evil, not to revolutionize society more generally or altruistuically.

2) I count three non-evil Death deities in the PHB (Kelemvor, Wee Jas, Blood of Vol), none of which are particularly helpful. The first two grant the domain but explicitly hate their followers making undead except in extreme circumstances, and the third might be nominally Neutral, but is still widely distrusted if not outright hated in civilized society.

[LudicSavant]

I count three non-evil Death deities in the PHB

Then you missed at least 2.


(Kelemvor, Wee Jas, Blood of Vol), none of which are particularly helpful. The first two grant the domain but explicitly hate their followers making undead except in extreme circumstances, and the third might be nominally Neutral, but is still widely distrusted if not outright hated in civilized society.

Kelemvor is definitely an undead hater, but the same is not so for Wee Jas or the Blood of Vol, and the BoV is widely supported in Karrnath, a civilized society. You may be mistaking them for the Dark Six.

The one that's actually Good (which you missed) is big on mummies and such.

[Psyren]

Then you missed at least 2.

Care to elaborate? And again, the thread is about good necromancers, not neutral ones. Again, I've not been arguing against neutral ones being possible.

[LudicSavant]

Care to elaborate? And again, the thread is about good necromancers, not neutral ones. Again, I've not been arguing against neutral ones being possible.

Anubis and Nephthys.

Edit: Oh yeah, and some other gods in that pantheon are keen on undead too, even if they don't have the Death domain. Osiris is Lawful Good, for example.

[Psyren]

Anubis and Nephthys.

Ah, after the D&D section. My bad.

Were you planning to answer Unoriginal's question?

[LudicSavant]

Ah, after the D&D section. My bad.

Were you planning to answer Unoriginal's question?

Which one? It's a seven page thread.

[Psyren]

Which one? It's a seven page thread.

The one in the post you quoted at the top of this page. But I'm a nice guy so here :smallsmile:


Indeed, but I think the important thing to take from that last sentence is that, big or little, it's nevertheless a deal.

Let's say, for example, that a PC finds some kind of ancient machine in the depth of a dungeon. The machine will produce a 100 gp- worth gem whenever it's activated, but there is a big warning on the machine saying that activating it has one chance in a million of unleashing a group of undead on a random populated village, somewhere in the region. An inspection of the machine reveals it does manipulate undead-animating energy on a regional level, but impossible to say for certain if the one-in-a-million warning is accurate.

Do you think a PC of any of the good alignments would activate the machine?

[Tanarii]

I can actually see it if an evil army is ravaging the land and a good necromancer raises some of the casualties of that evil army to defend the innocent. It could be seen as a just punishment for their crimes.


It's not that I can't see any situation where necromancy is valid for a LG character. I just struggle with most of the ideas where it's routine and normal for them to raise and use undead. I really can't see the justification of getting them to do menial work - it just has too many issue for me to see that as LG.
Given 5e lore, and more importantly an explicit roleplaying rule, I don't feel there's any situation where a good character would regularly create undead via spells. But 5e alignment isn't defined by single acts. Even a good character might find a reason to do it (infrequently), even though it is not a good act.

I'm with you though, I don't see any reason a caster would create undead for menial work purposes. It's a huge investment for very little return.

[LudicSavant]

The one in the post you quoted at the top of this page. But I'm a nice guy so here :smallsmile:

Ah, that one.

Eh, I'd prefer not to get into debating a hypothetical about a black box machine, a gem of unknown utility (other than that it has a 100gp cost in a world that is not even remotely robust in terms of trying to analyze its economy), and possibly-teleporting undead with a (claimed by some random sign on the wall of unknown origin) chance of activating that's somewhere in the realm of the estimated chance of getting killed by a meteorite.

Especially since someone's asking me if I want to jump in on a Level 10 one-shot right this very second, which is definitely more tempting in terms of things I could spend the rest of the night on. :smalltongue:

[dehro]

loving the escalation of the problem, and the escalation of the ways to try and contain the problem or potential ways it could go wrong.... all in all an interesting discussion for so many reasons... The theory crafting about this concept is intriguing as hell :P

that said, to bring it back to Altor.. This is his backstory, his point of origin.. his "How do I get to session 1 and where do I go from there" moment.

Talking about his recent past...he doesn't think on macroscopic level and has no plan to craft an undead army of worker bees.. he's just trying to help out a neighbour at specific times they need an extra pair of hands.. He probably wouldn't be raising skeletons all that often at all, if he can help in other ways first. it's small and self contained and, crucially, he's on top of it. In a way, he's a hands on guy.
Animating his parents happens within the confines of his house and small plot of land.
When he animates the cousin of farmer Giles (to avoid confusion since the name Bob is already taken in the thread) to plough a field, he goes and sits there next to the field reading a book, ready to give instructions if the skeleton encounters a big rock and doesn't know to navigate around it or excavate/break it down it to remove it, to give instructions if the blade of the plough gets detached, to stop accidents from happening should the neighbour kid wander into the field.
He'll be sat there next to the field, keeping an eye on things, and give very clear instructions to minimise the risk of things going wrong should he send a skeleton on an errand outside of his immediate field of vision (really something I don't really see him do all that often anyway). Maybe farmer Giles, with his leg in a cast, is sitting next to that field also, an extra pair of eyes.
Once the emergency situation/needs of the neighbour are met, Altor disposes of the skeletons.

Can this go wrong? hell yeah. he could get a stroke, one of his skeletons might run amok for whatever reasons, an unknowing passersby could see the skeletons and get into a fight with them, get wounded and spread the undead contagion (or whatever). Should he know better than to mess with undead? probably, but he's a peculiar kind of guy who rates result and intent over ethic conundrums. He reads books on potions, DIY manuals on spell crafting, not treatises on the ethics of magic. He was raised by a pig farmer, not a philosopher (yes, one could be both, but this one wasn't because I say so).
We can probably say he got extremely lucky so far, and what happens from now on is entirely dependent on the whim of the DM and the roll of the dice, but this shouldn't invalidate how he got there in the first place.
Most importantly, the people around him are also simple folk, by and large uneducated and really not deep thinkers. Once they see the skeleton has helped farmer Giles and his children not loose their farm, they will accept that the weirdo who lives with the pigs and volunteering in the church's infirmary, is a good sod trying to help.
Crucially, neither Altor nor the people surrounding him are DnD players with advanced knowledge of high level spells and Faerunian cosmology, meta-conscious of how narratives unfold and things can and will go wrong if the DM thinks it's fun (and right).

I can totally see Altor later in the game meeting more civilised/educated people who facepalm when he tells them what he did and explain to him that he wasn't raising his parents but inhabiting their bones with evil spirits (and they would have the level/knowledge to be able to prove it to him) and him spiral into a funk for having abused his powers and desecrated the earthly remains of his parents. He might decide right then and there to forego the animate dead spell and focus on other spells and/or grow as a cleric.
I can definitely see him return to the place of his youth a few years later and find out that the whole kingdom is overrun by the undead, only to be told that his farm was ground zero for the phenomenon and be put on trial and/or tasked to solve the issue.

My intent in theory crafting the character was never to make it so that what he did couldn't fail or turn into a disaster later on, or even make him immune to moral failure or future shifts in alignment.., but merely to give a background concept that could set this good guy necromancer (or at least well intended) on a path of either redemption or utter corruption and fall into the trappings of the classic necromancer... The saying, after all, is that the path to hell is paved with good intentions...think of DC's Mr. Freeze who turns into a villain trying to find a cure for his wife's condition.

So yeah, for things to go wrong and to potentially not be as simple as Altor thinks of them is absolutely fair game.

Could he, as he grows into power, learn how to be a responsible skeleton owner (this reminds me a lot of a Jim Jefferies routine on gun control, which seems to apply to the discussion), maybe, with the use of any and all of the ideas you have posted in the thread.
Would things potentially still go wrong? I kinda hope they would, because the consequences would be fun to play and I would expect any decent DM to take the chance to mess with such a character, and by extension the party, given such material.

Then again, this could also be the first step into Altor becoming full on delusional mad/evil wizard.. I have mentioned Norman Bates before, not by accident. The premise is already that he talks to his dead kin to soothe the trauma of their loss,
much like Norman Bates had the mummified remains of his mother sitting in a chair at home
I figure him as either not being all there all the time, or having just internalised a lot of abandonment trauma... or even, being somewhat on the spectrum in the way that he doesn't really consider, understands or perceive social cues....
He thinks he's a good guy because people around him have complimented him and thanked him and told him so, but maybe he just doesn't have the tools to properly assess this notion when related to himself.
Yes, I realise I am grossly oversimplifying/trivialising the "spectrum" and speaking from a place of mostly ignorance.
No disrespect is meant. What I am getting at is that as a character I imagine him having a big old blind spot when it comes to assessing the impact of his choices in these matters from a moral/ethical point of view, concerning himself with his good intentions and the practical benefits coming from it instead.
If that does end up making him a villain, despite him thinking he's the hero of his own story, that's also a fun development to play through.

[Unoriginal]

Speaking of the established lore, a note directed at no one in particular:

There is not one but multiple religions (at least 5 that I can remember off the top of my head) listed in the Player's Handbook alone with the Death domain ("The Death domain is concerned with the forces that cause death, as well as the negative energy that gives rise to undead creatures") that have alignments other than Evil (and at least one of them is Good-aligned). And the lore for some of them definitely involves using Animate Dead frequently, yet the associated beings are not listed as Evil.

I am not aware of any 5e lore stating that.

It may have been the case in 3.X, where the low-power undead were literally mindless automatons.


Anubis and Nephthys.

If Anubis is anything remotely like his mythological counterpart, he does *not* support undead Mummies.

5e Mummies are all about cursing someone and forbidding them from passing on, and Anubis is about passing on (and being fairly judged in the afterlife).


The Punished. Once deceased, an individual has no say in whether or not its body is made into a mummy. Some mummies were powerful individuals who displeased a high priest or pharaoh, or who committed crimes of treason, adultery, or murder. As punishment, they were cursed with eternal undeath, embalmed, mummified, and sealed away. Other times, mummies acting as tomb guardians are created from slaves put to death specifically to serve a greater purpose.

Part of MM's Mummy entry.

[LudicSavant]

I am not aware of any 5e lore stating that.

Well, it's most definitely there. For example, one of those 5 religions:

"Its followers study the secrets of blood and life, and because they believe that death is the end, they see nothing wrong with using the bodies of the fallen to serve the living. Seekers of the Divinity Within (as the faithful call themselves) are glad to be reanimated after death; at least they can do some good."

[Kane0]

https://youtu.be/YnV-X7fvaew

Relevant?

[Unoriginal]

that said, to bring it back to Altor.. This is his backstory, his point of origin.. his "How do I get to session 1 and where do I go from there" moment.

[...]

If that does end up making him a villain, despite him thinking he's the hero of his own story, that's also a fun development to play through.

"Well-meaning individual who obliviously does something bad and then doesn't stop" is absolutely possible for an undead-animating magic user, but there's two things I don't get in the backstory you present.

1. How does Altor justifies destroying Farmer Giles' cousin's Skeleton, if he thinks that they actually are Farmer Giles' cousin coming back to the world of the living to land a hand to his family and not an hateful spirit whose sole desire is to kill everything within reach?

2. How did Altor became a wizard powerful enough to Animate Dead without coming across any of the information on the kind of creatures Undead are? Wizards aren't known to spare ink when writing about a subject, and even if he cooked up the spell himself he must have had access to necromantic theory to reach that point.

Wizards aren't like Sorcerers or Warlocks, it's very hard for a Wizard to be ignorant about their own magic unless it's willful ignorance. When it comes to established magic, at least.

[Vahnavoi]

Let's say, for example, that a PC finds some kind of ancient machine in the depth of a dungeon. The machine will produce a 100 gp- worth gem whenever it's activated, but there is a big warning on the machine saying that activating it has one chance in a million of unleashing a group of undead on a random populated village, somewhere in the region. An inspection of the machine reveals it does manipulate undead-animating energy on a regional level, but impossible to say for certain if the one-in-a-million warning is accurate.

Do you think a PC of any of the good alignments would activate the machine?

Given this information, most Good aligned people would not do it, because this offer is basically "get 100 gp for being associate to murder". The actual odds would fly over the heads of most and not really affect the outcome.

A highly intelligent Lawful Good character might try to weigh the hypothetical harm against the collective benefit made possible by the gem, which would get them in an argument with Chaotic Good about whether they have the right to make such decisions for others. Neutral Good would note this device seems almost purpose-built to tempt someone to compromise their virtue for material gain.

Situationally, there might be cases where the benefit is worth the risk, and it would be permissible for a Good character to take the gem. The question is whether an individual person would overcome their disgust over the basic concept to rationally get there.

[tokek]

Talking about his recent past...he doesn't think on macroscopic level and has no plan to craft an undead army of worker bees.. he's just trying to help out a neighbour at specific times they need an extra pair of hands.. He probably wouldn't be raising skeletons all that often at all, if he can help in other ways first. it's small and self contained and, crucially, he's on top of it. In a way, he's a hands on guy.
Animating his parents happens within the confines of his house and small plot of land.
When he animates the cousin of farmer Giles (to avoid confusion since the name Bob is already taken in the thread) to plough a field, he goes and sits there next to the field reading a book, ready to give instructions if the skeleton encounters a big rock and doesn't know to navigate around it or excavate/break it down it to remove it, to give instructions if the blade of the plough gets detached, to stop accidents from happening should the neighbour kid wander into the field.
He'll be sat there next to the field, keeping an eye on things, and give very clear instructions to minimise the risk of things going wrong should he send a skeleton on an errand outside of his immediate field of vision (really something I don't really see him do all that often anyway). Maybe farmer Giles, with his leg in a cast, is sitting next to that field also, an extra pair of eyes.
Once the emergency situation/needs of the neighbour are met, Altor disposes of the skeletons.



I like the concept, I'm not sure (as you are not) that it works out LG in the end but its an interesting concept.

As a wizard perhaps he is doing what we see people doing online with this subject - overthinking it. Seeing the warnings in the books that this is evil and will come to harm and rather arrogantly thinking that he can make sure it comes to no harm so in his particular case he persuades himself its not evil. And he really does try to make sure that it comes to no harm, he really tries to avoid the evil consequences. If there is magical pollution from this then he discounts it - until perhaps other undead spontaneously appear from the local graveyard but even then he will probably rationalise it as having nothing to do with him (global warming metaphor alert!).

His precautions and care probably don't really fit with the adventuring lifestyle. That's all fun for the game rather than the backstory.

If you want to go this route then the spell I see being even more central to this would be Speak with Dead. Its such a perfect spell for this. Its creepy AF but it can also be seen as respectful of the ancestors of whom you are asking questions. I would have a lot of his more common magic use being this spell, its actually more useful in a traditional farming community that relies on oral knowledge - the remains of the dead become like a library for the living. Plus this spell is the most Norman Bates thing imaginable.

As I said earlier in the discussion for menial work you get pretty much the same value out of some combination of Tiny Servant and Unseen Servant and other utility spells/cantrips. So to be using skeletons might be because this wizard simply does not know better - the only source of magical knowledge he has is very limited and has a lot of necromancy and not much else. A classic hedge wizard problem.

[Anymage]

Re:Altor, one of the big questions depends on how the DM runs undead to begin with. If you tell a robot to clean your room, it might need the occasional guidance when it's programming doesn't tell it how to process a thing but it'll otherwise stay on task until it's complete. If you tell a small child to clean a room, it will but you'll have to be on hand to keep it on task and it will repeatedly try to go off task and need to be directed back. LudicSavant is backing the idea that undead are robots that just happen to go haywire if improperly maintained. If undead are more akin to small children who just happen to be partial to murder instead of watching cartoons, it's hard to keep himself and the townsfolk thinking they're generally benign.

Also, undead can't just be deactivated by commanding then to rest and they do so. You have to destroy the body. Farmer Giles might we'll be upset that his cousin's remains are now nothing more than bone fragments, especially when everybody has been told that this is just his cousin come back to lend a helping hand. It's hard to see why naive Altor would destroy his undead until one slipped control and went berserk, at which point Altor and the town would stop being unaware of the risks. And Altor would likely become quite unpopular.

Are responsible undead owners possible? A lot of that depends on the metaphysics entailed, and just how well externalities like negative energy pollution can be curtailed. One thing there's nearly unanimous support for in this topic, however, is that the safeguards and opportunity costs of keeping a well contained undead will dwarf whatever benefit might come from their application.


Well, it's most definitely there. For example, one of those 5 religions:

"Its followers study the secrets of blood and life, and because they believe that death is the end, they see nothing wrong with using the bodies of the fallen to serve the living. Seekers of the Divinity Within (as the faithful call themselves) are glad to be reanimated after death; at least they can do some good."

The Blood of Vol are openly described in Eberron books as being patsies of an evil lich, and those more deeply initiated are evil antagonists. A lay worshipper may well be LG, but that's mostly because he's been mislead about the nature of undeath. A necromancer actively engaged in reanimation of the dead will most likely be well aware what's really going on, and the rare clueless ones will quickly learn, at most, the day after animating their first undead.

[JackPhoenix]

2) I count three non-evil Death deities in the PHB (Kelemvor, Wee Jas, Blood of Vol), none of which are particularly helpful. The first two grant the domain but explicitly hate their followers making undead except in extreme circumstances, and the third might be nominally Neutral, but is still widely distrusted if not outright hated in civilized society.

There's also the fact that WotC came up with Grave domain specifically because Death was inappropriate for most non-evil gods it was assigned to, but there was no alternative at the time of PHB's release. Funnily enough, Kelemvor, Wee Jas (and later mentioned Anubis) are mentioned in Grave's description. And BoV used to be LE, not LN, what with being a cult founded by an evil lich...

And, of course, DMG specifically says Death domain is an option for EVIL clerics, and require the GM's permission to play.


that said, to bring it back to Altor.. This is his backstory, his point of origin.. his "How do I get to session 1 and where do I go from there" moment.

he's a peculiar kind of guy who rates result and intent over ethic conundrums.

Well, he's not Good, then. MAAAAYBE, with both eyes closed, he could argue for CG, but definitely not LG or NG.


Most importantly, the people around him are also simple folk, by and large uneducated and really not deep thinkers. Once they see the skeleton has helped farmer Giles and his children not loose their farm, they will accept that the weirdo who lives with the pigs and volunteering in the church's infirmary, is a good sod trying to help.
Crucially, neither Altor nor the people surrounding him are DnD players with advanced knowledge of high level spells and Faerunian cosmology, meta-conscious of how narratives unfold and things can and will go wrong if the DM thinks it's fun (and right).

So, they have a church, but no priest? Because any priest should know how afterlife and related stuff works, and clergy (at least if they are not associated with gods of undead) does have a vested interest in nipping such ideas in bud. And the villagers must be completely isolated from the external world, if they never heard about any evil cults with hordes of undead, vampires, liches and similar crap that's happening on daily basis in FR... that kind of news spreads fast with travelers, because it's interesting.

[Rockphed]

Interesting thread. I happen to agree that a lawful good person is not going to use animate dead as a casual work saving device (even if it was not such a high opportunity cost and actual cost option), and that the artifact that creates gems worth more than most peasants make in their lives but randomly creates undead invasions is a good equivalence to using an undead industrial complex.

Someone brought up some books with evil necromancers and good necromancers. I read some about someone called "Abhorsen" whose job was to put down the restless dead. He used magic to control the dead. On one occasion an undead servant was sent with a message. On another necromancy was used to ensure that a dying soldier would not be brought back as a monster. Magic was used frequently to destroy various undead monsters, albeit mostly the dead were put down with swords that burned with holy fire.

[LudicSavant]

The Blood of Vol are openly described in Eberron books as being patsies of an evil lich, and those more deeply initiated are evil antagonists. A lay worshipper may well be LG, but that's mostly because he's been mislead about the nature of undeath. A necromancer actively engaged in reanimation of the dead will most likely be well aware what's really going on, and the rare clueless ones will quickly learn, at most, the day after animating their first undead.

Not quite.

The roots of the Blood of Vol religion and their respect for undeath predates the lich Erandis d'Vol. By thousands of years, back into the time when the Mark of Death was still a dragonmarked house (before they got genocided for trying to make peace between elves and dragons). And even back into the Age of Giants.

Also, there are totally good npc necromancers who are way past "the day after animating their first undead" in Eberron. You're projecting a lot of assumptions onto the setting that just aren't there.

[Unoriginal]

Interesting thread. I happen to agree that a lawful good person is not going to use animate dead as a casual work saving device (even if it was not such a high opportunity cost and actual cost option), and that the artifact that creates gems worth more than most peasants make in their lives but randomly creates undead invasions is a good equivalence to using an undead industrial complex.

I mean, if we're talking about a laborer with (the equivalent of) 2 sp a day, they would make 100 gp in 500 days.

The problem is, as the Sam Vimes's Boots theory of economical injustice demonstrates, is that the laborer has to spend that money to live.

In other words, assuming the laborer has a squalid lifestyle, works every single day and has no extra expences exhausting their expected earnings, it would take close to three years to *save* 100 gp.

Now the fun thing is, a blank spellbook, which you need to become a wizard, costs 50 gp.

[LibraryOgre]

The Mod Ogre: The Prime Example of a Lawful Good Necromancer is me, as I am stopping y'all from beating this dead horse.