if necromancy evil WHY MY NATION RICHER!?
>>98290764Literal plot from the light novel/anime "Overlord". A dude uses summoned undead as free labor (among other things) after he declares some land a sovereign country and immediately his becomes the richest country on the continent. Like, again, there's more to it. But that's a thing he does.
what if you just consent to having your body animated? like organ donation.
>>98290764>Implying the corpses won't rot and break down faster from overuse>Implying the necrotic magic energy won't seep into the products and services the undead are doing and tainting it>Implying necromancers won't just enslave living beings instead so he can save his magic
>>98290764I like when the whole society does it, and the corpses are worked into literal dust with the souls of the most ancient dead so thick they form a permanent mist over the wheat fields."Only when the living are dead, will the dead be free."
>>98290764What are some ways to make a believable “good necromancer” if such a thing is even possible?
>Stealth Necromancy recommendation thread.I see your game, OP.>>98290852That one manga where the village kid puppets the corpse of the dead hero. "The Legendary Hero Is Dead!" but it's both good guy and bad guy ones.
>>98290828>bs "good" cleric lies wow
>>98290764>all my needs are taken care of by unthinking magical servants? I can study my tomes and ponder my orbs in peace without having to work?>BUT THE ECONOMYWhy are goycattle like this?
>>98290852I could see a detective style character who speaks with ghosts and reanimates intelligent undead to gather evidence for his cases. A lot of settings make necromancy inherently evil in some way though, so it really depends.
>>98290764Why is this implying that the necromancer wouldn't be self aware to begin with
>>98290764> free workHe doesn't know about necromantic pollution
>>98290852Not all that hard when you have a functional distinction between "evil" and "unclean" and the metaphysics don't chain Undeath to declared immorality.Which USED to be the case in D&D before like three people at WotC forced "Undead Evil Bro" through over the course of 3rd edition without ever putting in the work to explain how the fuck that happens with the cosmological backend putting two Transitive Planes between the operating force of Undeath and the operating force of Evil, while other writers filled out seemingly every single function of Undeath itself that might be considered bad in non-[Evil] Necromancy spells. Then whoever was writing Complete Psionic just ignored those guys with direct functional counterparts of some of the [Evil]-tagged Undeath-related spells absent the "it's bad because I say so" descriptor.
>>98290764Improper dispensation of corpses causes many issues. Malevolent undead being merely one of them.
>>98290764Actually, it would make the nation overall poorer. More people wouldn't have jobs, and thus they would be unable to afford anything because they don't have a means to earn money.Therefore, the only solution is to make it a Communist state.
Why skeletons?Why not clay people?There’s more soil than bone
>>98291071You can barter poems and hair dye like the commies want without being an actual communist society
>>98290815There is a lot more to that. Mostly that he was overpowered and most of this upper minions could take on armies on their own. Most of the time he taking over everything via force not via trade.
>>98290870This book is gross and I'm not a prude or pearl clutcher by any means but I almost gagged at a few parts while reading this.It's quite literally the authors barely disguised fetish material that involves rotting corpses.
>>98291146Tell me, how will capitalism work if nobody has any money? How will capitalism work if nothing has any value?
>>98291088We keep making more bone as a byproduct of everything else. Your options are>dig a hole to extract usable resource (clay)>use readily-available usable resource (bone) that you would OTHERWISE HAVE TO DIG A HOLE TO DEAL WITH
>>98290852"Good" necromancy tends to be focused around putting the restless dead to rest. When hauntings and spontaneous reanimations are a "natural" occurrence, a good necromancer would be someone specialized in putting these entities to rest.This usually results in "Good" Necromancy reduces the total amount and strength of the restless dead while "Evil" Necromancy is about increasing the amount and strength of the restless dead.
>>98290852A necromancer that uses their knowledge to help the dead pass on, stop other necromancers from abusing the dead, and stopping evil dead from causing harm to the living.
>>98291168The AI pushers keep telling me to stay tuned to find out.
>>98290852The game, Overlord sort of does this, even though it's premise is the main character being a sauron expy. Essentially there's 7 heroes, they fight the big bad and seal him away, but over time they all fall to the seven deadly sins and being corrupt, debased versions of themselves. You play as an undead necromancer king, ressurected by a necromancer imp to enact your vengeance upon the heroes that killed you. In the process, you have the option to make good and benefitial choices in your conquest, or evil debased choices. Except that's not actually what happened. It turns out you are playing the 7th hero who was backstabbed by the others in a fit of greed, and you have the choice to rectify the evils the others committed.It's roundabout in a way, but the end result of the game is that necromancy was used to right previous wrongs.
>>98291159Not gonna argue that. It's one of the only books I've found very interesting but absolutely gross and sickening, to the point I wouldn't want to eat after any of it. Still, worth reading once IMO.
>>98291168The people with nothing will starve and die while the ones who have capital will live. It's just like a famine back in the day, but you can't farm money.
>>98291217I wouldn't even refer to that as "good" necromancy, would just say it's good "necromancy"
>>98290824Let's say you don't care what happens to your immortal soul. Option 1 is you agree to let some nerd chain it up and use it to animate your corpse at no benefit to you. Option 2 you can sell it to a devil and get a wish granted as a result.
>mfw Necromancy is explicitly evil, but the campaign opens on a disaster so enormous that the Paladin is willing to team up with the Necromancer since his skills are powerful enough to give the forces of reality a fighting chance.Diablo and Grim Dawn did this. It's great. I love when Little Evils are tolerated so the Greater Evil can be vanquished.And before you get philosophical on me, there are still people willing to destroy the Little Evil even when it's being used against the apocalypse.
>>98291323Necromancy just means "Death Speech." Any magic that interacts with the state of death or undeath is "necromancy." Exorcists are therefore using necromancy when they purify or seal ghosts and other undead.If a necromancer finds a tomb filled with the restless dead, if they are "Good" they will attempt to quiet or seal the dead, if "Evil" they might attempt to take control of them or use them to empower a necromantic object, while a "Neutral" necromancer will likely leave them alone unless other factors come into play.
>>98290852I like to tie it to Saint relics.Like rather than entraping and slaving a soul from the afterlife, you ask a saint or loval hero to come down and help you temporarily.I think that is cooler if the necromancer has to carry the body with him, like a giant backpack coffin.
>>98291311Honestly it shocks me more that more fantasy settings AREN'T post-scarcity socialist/communist societies. Create Food and Water is a 3rd Level Spell that produces 45 pounds of food and 30 gallons of water. Sure, the food spoils after 24 hours if not eaten, but if a human eats 3-4 pounds of food a day, one casting can feed 11 people for a day and quench the thirst of about 37 people for a day.Yes, it's bland, but let's not forget there are magic items and cantrips that can change the flavor of food. Infinite spice pouches, Prestidigitation, with 10 undead you're feeding 110 people and creating enough clean water (which can also be purified with magic if it becomes tainted in some way) to quench the thirst of 370 people a day, per casting, and Create Food and Water is an Instantaneous spell. It's incredibly easy to create an endless amount of food and drink in D&D alone. And that's before you look at alternatives like Plant Growth. Plant Growth enriches a massive area for a whole year, which doubles its production. Some druids and necromancers could very easily produce enough food to freely feed entire cities.
>>98290764This is literally the current setting of my 5e campaign and my undead hunting Ranger is the ONLY character that has a problem with it
>>98291489The kind of people ambitious enough to reach 3rd level spells are too ambitious to be a lunch lady.
>>98290764>another fucking necromancy threadMaybe you should kill yourself in hopes of a necromancer reviving you as something useful, you fucking retard.
>>98290764There's no point beating a dead horse,when you can reanimate it instead.
>>98291489>Create Food and Water is a 3rd Level Spell that produces 45 pounds of food and 30 gallons of water.Only in 5e. Prior to that, each casting only feed and watered the equivalent of 3 people or 1 horse per casting. 5e increased the spell performance by a factor of 5.
>>98291489Honestly it's not that shocking, the food has to be moved to the people who need it after it is made. I worked at a donut shop that threw away leftovers, there was a kid who took the time out of his day to package them and bring them to homeless shelters but that is a rarity compared to the people demanding that somebody should do that
>>98291071It only results in the nation at large being poorer if the undead labor scales so explosively and covers things so thoroughly that the vast, VAST majority of the population have NO marketable skills nor the time to acquire them, WHILE the economy is actually dependent on selling to such people. Which is a rather extreme case given the typical breadth of undead labor forces versus the breadth of basically any pre-modern workforce; peasants did a LOT of shit for their little hamlets to be mostly self-sustaining.>>98291168Who said anything about capitalism? Fantasy settings are overwhelmingly quasi-feudal.>>98291362Point me to the Traditional Game that actually has this be how seemingly-mindless-puppet zombies and skeletons work.>>98291385Technically, the player character Necromancer in Diablo is from a weird little cult to a weird Thing who work to maintain Sanctuary's darker-grey operations in the face of the nominally black-and-white Eternal Conflict being rather shitty to humanity on both ends.>>98291489>one casting can feed 11 people for a day and quench the thirst of about 37 people for a day.But far, FAR less than 1/11th of any normal population can cast it even once with the proportion dropping faster than additional uses pick up, so you still need actual food supplies, which scaling out in surplus frees up spells for more important things. You certainly "can" develop a setting leaning into this stuff particularly for rendering laughably-hostile locations inhabited, but what makes it "trivial" is actually long-tail infrastructure with capital expenses reasonably competing with rather more impressive military value to just take other people's shit instead of making your own.
>>98290764
Tourist thread
>>98291489>Honestly it shocks me more that more fantasy settings AREN'T post-scarcity socialist/communist societies.>hrm do I, Wizgrand the Magnificent, prep create food & water multiple times to help dirty peasants who fear my intellectual prowess or fireball, fly and breath water? What to do, what to do...
>>98290764Necromancy isn't just animating dead people for no reason, necromancers specifically require corpses because the spirits of the dead are used to animate them, rather than the necromancer using the bodies as mindless puppets. There is a system which handled this well (maybe it was LotFP?) where the living dead will mostly do what you tell them to but in the most violent and destructive manner possible, or something to that effect. The restless dead aren't going to be useful for much other than killing people and breaking things.
>>98291616or recycled from >>98288225
>>98290852"Negative energy exists, it will exist and be exploited and weaponized regardless of our ignorance of it, so therefore we have a responsibility to abolish thet ignorance and in doing so, learn how to live with or perhaps merely despite it."
>>98291736That is literally the argument that Altman & Co. are making as to why we should give them our drinking water, electricity, and privacy. Don't pretend for a second that they're anywhere north of neutral.
>>98291736>>98291750There's no need to be mealy-mouthed about it to cover up ulterior motives, spontaneously-arising Undead are a thing that pops up all over the place, plenty of which don't involve any Evil inciting incident. It's pretty obvious that Negative Energy is the genuinely-natural stuff of Death as far as the Prime Material in the "default" Great Wheel cosmology is concerned, it's just brainworms about unclean=bad=Evil driving the writers to insist on an obnoxious mess.
>>98291616May as well be a Puckee thread.>I'm going to clumsily riff on some generic aspect of fantasy games!>No I'm not going to actually discuss a system mechanics, spells, or anything else>instead I'm going to impotently snark at everyone who points out that I've made this thread several dozen times already
>>98291647NTA, but honestly this is one of these talking points that rests 90% on the good aligned clerics, since they are literally divinely empowered for tasks like that. A lot of questions of the spell availability get skewed if we remember that a lot of the setting shattering stuff (like Regenerate or Cure Disease) are in the hands of the people with the strong religious conviction to actually use them pretty liberally to help their communities. Or to put it bluntly, Wizgrand the Magnificient doesn't come into consideration when even the average first level cleric can just spam ritual Purify Food and Water to massively improve the agricultural output of his village and actually has all the incentives to do so depending on his god.
Necromancy is a scale in regards to ethnics in my setting using pf2e and the playtest necromancer. You have sangromancers who use their own blood, spiritmonger which more then not just temporally summon spirits or bind them in contacts with an ending and then there there are oseomancers and stereotypical zombie summoners who more like to go off the deep end & seek ever lasting life.
>>98291750Yeah and hitler ate surgar.
>>98291885Here>hrm do I, Clericgood the Beneficent, prep create food & water multiple times to help dirty peasants who sin and fail to uphold the tenants of my faith or glyph of warding, clairvoyance and waterwalk? What to do, what to do...
>>98290828>>98290764>>98291071>>98291146The economics of the necromancy are one of these things that depend 3/4ths on how the undead work within the setting and 1/4th on how the economic structure of them is organised. For some common examples:>Warhammer FantasyThe necromantic undead are leaking cans of dark magical miasma that either go berserk, fall apart or fall into stupor the moment they stop being controlled, making them mostly useless as a labour force unless you have the exceptional combination of skill, power and willing helpers. The Nehekharan undead are restless dead and do actually work to maintain their cities when not marching out against the tomb robbers, but these guys function so well because they have their actual souls, allowed to get out by their deity of the death.>DnDVaries edition by edition. 2nd edition grey necromancers were more visceral golem makers in terms of ethics, 3rd edition were evil pieces of shit by default and undead were stuffed with the negative energy, and 5th edition is notoriously lore poor. Either way, low chances of the successful necro-economy unless you get into whacky stuff like deathless volunteers.>MTGOne block has the undead labour pyramid scheme, pun intended, as one of its major plot points so at least one guy did manage to make it work here.
>>98291647>>98291885It is often overlooked with the quantities of spell effect rather than quality if effects. Create Food and Drink will feed 3 people per caster level in editions other than 5e (which fixes it at 15)*. A 5th level cleric can supply 15 people with food by using their single 3rd level spell while a 20th level cleric can feed 60 per casting. A 5rd level cleric is likely serving a community of at least 100+ while a 20th level cleric is serving a community of tens of thousands. Even spending all 31 of their level 3+ spells on Creating Food & Water, a 20th level cleric can only supply enough for 1860 people per day which is likely only ~15% of the community. *I admit 1 made an error in >>98291532.
>>98290852Necromancer who only uses his power to make himself and his dog live forever and nothing else.
>>98291954See, the difference between a powerful wizard and a powerful cleric is the clerics by the definition followers of their god's dogma and there are many gods that would absolutely want their cleric to not waste their time with waterwalking trips when there are sick villagers to heal, crops to bless and hungry to feed. Priestdecent, cleric of Pelor, would absolutely treat ministering to his community as a priority, because that's literally his dogma.
>>98291954Doesn't work in the 5e context due to the mentioned Ritual casting on a startling number of these spells.>>98291955>3rd edition were evil pieces of shit by default and undead were stuffed with the negative energyMild correction, Undead running on Negative Energy is the initial explanatory process for how healing hurts them and Turn/Rebuke operate, but the writers never really got around to explaining why making a corpse get up with it is Evil yet keeping a dude walking without any normal organ function isn't.
>>98291994Pretty sure they'd want their cleric to go fight evil instead of being a vending machine.
>>98290884your position is wrong, sorry.
>>98291071>the solution to poverty is mega poverty
>>98291489what do the undead have to do with create food and water?
>>98290764This picture is, no joke, the backstory of the apocalypse in the homebrew I wrote.Necromancy that reanimates instead of just healing produces Negative Planar Energy (a concept shamelessly stolen from Spelljammer and Planescape) and eventually it built up so much that Abyssal gates started opening. Now the world is basically Biodome crossed over with the final season of Supernatural with my own little twists here and there.
>>98291999>Ritual casting on a startling number of these spells....really?
>>98291954Tenets.
>>98291994No, he wouldn't absolutely do anything, and no amount of insistence changes the truth value of a statement, and you aren't convincing at all.
>>98291970Finally, a good counter argument to the infinite food part. Still, while the infinite food glitch doesn't work, it doesn't change the fact that there are many setting changing spells a cleric has access to, including all the healing abilities or even the humble Purify Food and Drink which in 5e can be cast without expending spell slots as a ritual.While I disagree with the instant spellcasting utopia scenarios, I still think that the core cleric spell list is enough to still tip the scales when it comes to life quality.>>98292000That's why I picked Pelor for the example, since he's the exact deity to actually expect his priests to serve communities and not become single-mindedly dedicated to fighting. My point is that a lot of DnD clerics, by the explicitly described nature of their dogma, would end up serving their communities. In fact, the high level evil eradicators would likely be exceptions to the local utility minded priests for some of the deities.
>>98290764>good evilWho gives a fuck. Necromancy is theft. My body is my private property, or the inheritance of my family in the case of my absence. If you have not provided ample compensation, your ass is going to super hell where all the tax evaders burn.
>>98292043As >>98292039 has said, it's about their religion's tenets. My reasoning is simple: a god demands clerics to serve their communities, therefore the clerics serve their communities.
>>98292044>pelor Tending to the sick and wounded is important to them but stopping undead evil violently is very much a pelor thing. If you want to pretend you're trying to be realistic about this in some sort of weird pragmatic numbers game way to bck up your surprise about lack of fully automated magical communism, if there's still evil undead, and there certainly are, they're prioritizing fighting that because its much more proactive and can't be let sit while they're making bread out of air.
>>98292044Pelor has regular priests for that. Clerics are militant and should be crusading, ideally with one or two aligned Paladins, but whatever motley crew they can get works in a pinch.
>>98292069I'm not a fan of the fully automated magical communism myself, but I'm also against the idea that presence of DnD style clerics wouldn't fundamentally change the setting with their spell lists. As for Pelor, it's one of the few DnD deities to explicitly have lore about why his clerics aren't supposed to be 100% on the military march and are actively supposed to work on helping their communities. And most of the communities won't be having undead/demon/etc. problems all year around, leaving a plenty of times for blessing the fields, healing the sick and unspoiling the food.
>>98290852MASH unit cleric. Has PTSD and desperately wants to save people. Expert with poisons as a bonus.
>>98292092>And most of the communities won't be having undead/demon/etc. problems all year around,Nah, if you're going to be doing rational maximizer good cleric stuff then the evil ones are cranking out undead monsters and fucking the world up in a very proactive manner. There's going to be constant turmoil and destruction on a scale unimaginable.
>>98292092One thing often forgotten about with things like Neutralize Poison, Remove Disease and Regeneration is the level needed to get these effects. Disease removal requires a 5th level caster to cure 1 person, Poison requires a 7th level caster to cure 1 person and Regeneration requires a 13th level caster. To get a Regeneration you need to meet with the equivalent of the Pope, the equivalent of a Cardinal is needed to Raise Dead, a Bishop too Cure Poison and a senior Priest of a large settlement to cure disease.As for Plant Growth/blessing the fields you need a 5th level caster likely a month to bless all the fields.
>>98290852
>>98290841As I recall from that book, no spoiler warning other than this because it's like 40 years, every dead corpse animated there led to, unknown to the necromancers who knew necromancy was previously forbidden but didn't know why it was forbidden, someone else dying.For those of you who haven't read it, there were like four worlds or something after Earth broke up. They were supposed to be interdependent worlds connected by magical gates but something went wrong and the worlds became cut off. The human subrace who split the world were the same ones who were doing the necromancy but every time one of their subrace was animated, a living one of their subrace died. Because the necromancers were on the fire world they had no idea their own people were dying on different worlds and the other world people didn't know why their people were dying without a cause.
>>98290764ITT wight supremacists who think we don't remember the last time a "good" necromancer tried to do that and "lost control" of the undead once his horde of undead laborers outnumbered the living 2 to 1
>>98290764Age of Wonders ahh OP
>>98290764Traditional games?
>>98292584Hello this is Traditional Games, how may I help you?
>>98290764actually, it turns out the undead are more proficient at writing and painting, so their main application is generating vast amounts of undead-generated art, office jobs and similar mansions. the living still need to do physical work
Undead as robots is the gayest shit.
>>98291955>MTGOh yeah, Amonkhet. The living spent all day training for trials they would perform in the prime of their life, while everyone who died during the trials were remade into undead mummy servants that did everything else so the living could focus exclusively on training.
>>98290764Ask Xi.
>>98290764>gdp goes up>gdpi goes down>only evil wizards get richerAnd after a brief hiccough society comes back around to burning witches again.
>>98290764If one of my friends attempted to destroy the labour market like that the others would just gank him.
>>98290918So pretty much Pushing Daisies?
This is a bad idea in my homebrew setting, and not entirely because each zombie or skeleton animated is leaking some primal darkness into the world. Imagine having shitloads of AI chatbots that can actually go out and do labor, limited by the capabilities of their programmer. That's Necromancy, since the animus pumped into the corpse is inherently lacking the divine spark that makes creativity possible. They're incompetent without a necromancer who can keep them on task and working correctly. When they're destroyed en masse, you also risk shadows, who are the unbound animus, looking for a corpse to inhabit.Shit's even worse when you put that fake soul into a living but braindead creature.
>>98290764One of the Death Gate Cycle books by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman had the people stuck in giant lava caves use necromancy for labor only then it turns out that its a "life for a life" system and they're actually killing other people kept in stasis pods in another part of the world.
>>98290852>if such a thing is even possible?Diablo II has been out for quite a while anon
>>98290852>make a believable “good necromancer” if such a thing is even possible?Loop Hero is a game about one man attempting to restore the world from total destruction by its creator. One of the three classes the hero can be is Necromancer, who battles by raising soldiers and heros who died during the apocalypse so they may fight to save the world once more.
>>98290764A friend of mine I play Oathmark with kindof did something fun I feel>realm is elves>there are so few of them, they just dont have the manpower to build or maintain anything>resort to using the undead>mostly undead now>the entire realm is undead serving the needs of a few high quality elvesOne of his champions is the grandad of another friends prince, which is fun for narrative. Like you can see how its not evil but conflict can still arise when "you took my family tree and now have them 24/7 fanning you cool and serving you drinks pool side, I dont think I like that".
>>98290764That's one of the ancient countries in the game EON. Country's name is Darnath, I believe. The people lived in overflow, but when they die, their bodies belong to the state, who reanimated them for labour and soldiers.
>>98290852You animate wooden mannequins (dead plants) for your labor, being far more sanitary than corpses. Good necromancy would require that you don't actually need to desecrate a corpse or affect someone's soul, and so carved wood should work just as well.
>>98290852The good necromancy can only be justified by video game mechanics. Necromancers are only cool if they are evil and broken. "Good Necromancy" is a product how secular and materialistic modern fantasy writers have become. They can't understand the symbolic and spiritual cost of Necromancy. In the other side, modern sci-fi writers are irrational and idealistic. They evolution as a tech tree and believe in gayshit like multiverses. There is also how they civilization must progress.
>>98290870>The Empire of the Necromancers>Necromancy in Naathonestly just read everything by Clark Ashton Smith
>>98294417>Good necromancy would require that you don't actually need to desecrate a corpse or affect someone's soul"Desecrate a corpse" is deeply relative as basically any analysis of burial practices should show.>>98294654>"Good Necromancy" is a product how secular and materialistic modern fantasy writers have become. They can't understand the symbolic and spiritual cost of Necromancy....The entire idea of "necromancy means enslaved souls and corpse puppets" is itself a secularized and materialized interpretation. The actually historical analogues behind the name are mostly just calling up dead people for info, possibly from a privileged PoV beyond the veil.And the "symbolic and spiritual cost" remains a muddled distention of "dead people icky". Again, once you have a functional boundary between "unclean" and "evil", a "good necromancer" is actually not that hard a construction because you have a very clear and obvious place to stick what makes necromancy "bad" that isn't "evil" putting it in the territory of butchers in Japan or sanitation work in India.
>>98290764These get lower effort every thread.
>>98290815He is also wildly more powerful than about anyone else in the entire world, actual endgame 3.5 wizard thrown into a low-level 5e world.
>>98294741>And the "symbolic and spiritual cost" remains a muddled distention of "dead people icky".NTAThe symbolic cost is that you're exhuming the dead to further your own goals.The spiritual cost is that you're animating a corpse and/or communicating with something that isn't assured to be human.Necromancy isn't just turning a corpse into a puppet. You're summoning something from 'the other side' and sticking into an object you believe is going to help you do things, when it actuality it could just be a demon.
>>98294741Nah, people who keep making a case for good guy Necromancy just want ethical slave labor which they could have just animated golems. Mediums are people who speak to the dead which is the real life equivalent of Necromancy because it is easier to lie about being able to speak to the dead.>And the "symbolic and spiritual cost" remains a muddled distention of "dead people icky".>You will eat the bugs.Necromancy is evil because the aesthetics of evil.
>>98294720>The Empire of the NecromancersI like how specific that one gets about the two eponymous necromancers using the best-preserved female dead as sexbots.>honestly just read everything by Clark Ashton SmithSeconded thoughbeit.
>>98290764>If Necromancy evil why my nation richer>If late-stage capitalism evil then why is the DOW so high?>If $4/gal is bad then why do we have trillionaires?>If nobody can own a home then why is our GDP so great?>If our country is so bad then why does everyone want to live here?
>>98294824The actual definition of Necromancy is as follows;Necromancy is the practice of communicating with the dead or summoning their spirits to discover hidden knowledge, foretell the future, or influence eventsNothing to do with raising skeletons, that was shit added later iirc irl it was used to smear pagan practises, but even if I'm wrong it was definitely added in by fantasy writers.Get off of Gary's cock and accept that people who want a good necromancer are just sick of the whole "magic made from actual physicalised evil" garbage that he popularized.
>>98290852You have to break the meaning of necromancy as undeath in most settings in and of itself uses evil forces.
Fuck being a 'good necromancer', I want to be a 'bad druid' who forces bears and deer to work the plantations and I don't pay them anything
>>98295004Your Evil Druid is reinventing farm animals?
It's been a long time since I read the fluff and they've added a lot more since, but I recall Malifaux having a setup where necromancy comes from the actual spirit of Death which was released as part of a deal to kill off a bunch of godlike super wizards. Didn't even really finish them off since they're super wizards, but dying weakened them enough to be sealed away by other means. Then the queen who made that deal with Death was also locked away because it was killing everyone else, but it still leaks enough to give necromantic powers to people it thinks will help it break out. On top of regular zombies and such, there's a lot of non-necromancy magical constructs and it will make building and animating those very easy if you just include corpse parts and don't mind being manipulated by a thing that wants to end all life.
>>98294824>Nah, people who keep making a case for good guy Necromancy just want ethical slave labor which they could have just animated golems.In my case, it's that I want my settings to be coherent instead of a slapdash mess of vibes. If you want always-evil-even-then Necromancy, you should have to actually sit down and make its metaphysical functions interact with a coherent (set of) ethical framework(s) to give that result. If you do not, then player agency dictates the pursuit of an exception be valid.Warhammer Fantasy does well for this by tying it to adding actively-cruel entropic forces to death, so the fundamental principles of operation do in fact dictate ruining life around the use (...which Age of Sigmar ditched, but there it's a sizable opening for Negash who has a solid claim to the hotly-contested "Biggest Dick To Ever Be Mortal" title). D&D does not, because it is very explicit that Evil and Negative Energy come from different classes of Plane, the spell lists have gotten ridiculously thorough in Undead functions absent [Evil] descriptors, the naturalism bias is split between Druids' flavor of Neutral and Lawful rather than residing on the Good/Evil axis, and the ACTUAL soul in the Outer Planes is explicitly not affected by basic corpse-puppet necromancy.
So most sorts of undead are only going to be useful for basic labor. Now, there is a high demand for basic labor in farming villages (stuff like plowing fields, planting seeds, harvesting grain is laborious but not complicated) so you will have lots of rural people being displaced and moving to cities seeking, trying to find tasks that are too complicated for the zombies or skeletons to do. On the plus side, this could easily lead to an early industrial revolution, and flourishing of art (lots of people trying that since zombies can't carve the cool statutes rich people want on their buildings), but the major downside is that people just don't reproduce very well in major cities. Pretty much every city for the bulk of history has had more people dieing in it than are born, relying on people from rural villages moving to keep their numbers up. That is not an issue when rural farming villages make up most of a country's population, since humans reproduce well in small villages, having ample extra children to go seek their fortune in the city, but if the rural villages all empty out because undead have reduced the need for farm labor by 95%, then that country will see its birth rate collapse below replacement level, setting itself up for extinction in a few centuries.
>>98295158>Pretty much every city for the bulk of history has had more people dieing in it than are bornBollocks.
>>98290764Well, imagine the smell
>>98290764>The plantation owners' argument.
>>98290918>I could see a detective style character who speaks with ghosts and reanimates intelligent undead to gather evidence for his cases.Boy do I have a treat for you.
>>98290999The reason necromancy is evil in AD&D and most other D&D games, is because you are creating a killing machine that will never tire, never die, and never stop. The instant the necromancer loses control, all undead start hunting for things to kill because undead things hate living things, by RAW.In PF they made this even more frightening because 'mindless' undead are self willed (they have wisdom) and they are self aware of their undeath (they have charisma) and they do not like living things at all.
>>98290884>Why are goycattle like this?(((Protestant))) work ethic.
>>98294913This is how a Necromantic kingdom would work and nobody wants to have that conversation. You simply replaced the nobility with wizards whose peasantry is incapable of rebellion. Everyone who can’t use magic are nothing more than thralls and cattle.
>>98295453...No, pre-3.5 the basic Skeleton and Zombie did not have any particularly extensive "default" apathy, even being Neutral Alignment. Even late-3.5, it's scattered and poorly-consolidated. It's only in 5e that what you're mentioning is properly RAW.To quote a particularly important line from page 315 of the 1994 printing of the Monstrous Manual:>Good clerics can make skeletons only if the dead being has granted permission (either before or after death) and if the clerics deity has given express permission to do so. Otherwise, violating the eternal rest of any being or animal is something most good deities disapprove of highly.I suppose that second sentence could be extrapolated to SOME kind of impact on the soul that goes to the afterlife, but it's a pretty clearly explained case of non-Evil skeleton-making.
>>98295675>I suppose that second sentence could be extrapolated to SOME kind of impact on the soul that goes to the afterlife, but it's a pretty clearly explained case of non-Evil skeleton-making.The default position of most religions is that there are correct and incorrect ways to handle the dead, and doing it wrong will often have consequences on the souls of the dead. The Egyptians thought you could actually delete a soul by removing all record of their existence. Many mythological undead are the direct result of a corpse not being properly dealt with rather than someone deliberately trying to reanimate it.
>>98295873Which changes absolutely nothing about the quote being a clearly-explained case of non-Evil skeleton-making.
>>98295914But does explain why you don't really need to extrapolate anything. Good clerics under that system need express permission from the corpse and their god. Ergo, not having permission from the corpse and the god is improper handling of the dead.
>>98295964For Good Clerics; the same source describes Neutral ones making whole-ass armies from dead followers when pressured, so graveyard-drafts are also outside the Evil category. Queue basically anything that causes a genuinely pressing crunch of applicable labor.
>>98295004Fuck that, I'm going to go around casting awaken on farm equipment.
>>98296219We're not supposed to call them that anymore.
>>98290764So what happens when 99.9% of your nation's population are not necromancers and thus have no value for society except as fodder to fuel the "free labor"?
>>98295004My campaign has an evil druid as a villain. He "wild"shapes into monsters and demons and is trying to The Last of Us everyone with a mushroom curse into tree obsessed hippies so he can grow a (((new world tree)))
>>98290852>Taps the signhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnV-X7fvaew
>>98296233Kek
>>98291205Nahhhh. Just use any non-biological material to create a golem, you retard.
>>98290764Considering how many times my necromancer has seen fools try to use the undead as free labor only to act shocked and disappointed their labor force is not only massively energy inefficient compared to the average dedicated construct or goblin pack but also falls apart really fast even when you try going as low as possible by binding some ghosts to tend the fields, she”d probably say “tax evasion” is the reason.
Water wizards already figured out a way to create shapeshifting blobs of saltwater that cater to their every purpose, even surgical purposes.Is bone more abundant than saltwater?
>>98295119>In my case, it's that I want my settings to be coherent instead of a slapdash mess of vibes. If you want always-evil-even-then Necromancy, you should have to actually sit down and make its metaphysical functions interact with a coherent (set of) ethical framework(s) to give that result. If you do not, then player agency dictates the pursuit of an exception be valid.>“What are they complaining about? It’s not like axiomatic leyline paratrigonometrics is hard.”Magic is vibe-based dipshit. That is why is called magic not science.>>98294967So you are just complaining about the name.
>>98296426You don't understand. I'll be a benevolent dictator. It says "good" on my character sheet. Hmm. Maybe one too many "Os"...
>>98296756>We'll rule them like gods! Angry gods...
>>98296426Not an issue, zombies are dogshit for skilled labor, and this kind of thing isn't sustainable on 1% of a population being Reanimators, come on.
>>98296752Not really I'm mostly pointing out that your definition is extremely specific. "the aesthetic of evil" which means what exactly?Countless cultures have considered speaking with the dead as sacred, or at least neutral, and it's really only recently that the term was turned into what you consider part and parcel of it.Oh and also if it's about the name, Necromancy should be used over medium as the term for neutral aligned speaker to the dead as it's like a thousand years older.
>>98296863>Countless cultures have considered speaking with the dead as sacred,Yes, like the culture of people eating the corpses of their relatives.
>>98296879>Yes, like the culture of people eating the corpses of their relatives.What do you think saints are?Or speaking to the dead in Buddhism?Or yes the romani.Or the CeltsOr the RomansYou're so full of shit dude.
>>98290764"hurr durr what if 24/7 labor"Doing what? No, genuinely. What do you have these fumbling creatures do.Finished goods? That's going to require a level of intelligence and precision that you're not getting out of clumsy, mindless zombies?Field labor? What are you going to do? Make the plants grow faster? "Oh but plowing a field is so hard" we've already figured out yoke a plow to an ox. Harvesting? Better hope you're not dealing with food, because otherwise your *economic genius* is going "yeah let's have rotting corpses collect all our food." Doesn't that sounds like something you want? Rotting meat tainting all your food? Yum yum yum.You're imagining a type of mindless menial labor that largely doesn't exist, or is unwise to be done by the living dead.Your SOLE use case is the harvesting of non-edible cash crops. And this is assume that the rot inherent to having dead bodies do the work does not spoil the product.
>>98290852Pathfinder has a White Necromancer third party class that leaned into this. Primarily leaned towards stopping evil undead, speaking with the dead, and in the cases where you did have to raise undead yourself, it was expected that that WN treat them with proper respect, help them with any unfinished business they might have, and once the task they were brought back to accomplish is done that they are promptly put back to rest.
>can't use undead for anything that requires safe sanitary conditions like medical or food preparation>can't use undead for anything that requires fine motor control>can't use undead for anything that requires speed>can't use undead in any service industryUndead are useless for anything but killing and collecting more corpses to build more undead. You're better off animating objects and building magitech machines if you want to exploit magic for industry.
>>98297015Raw mining?
>>98297104NTA, but arguably raw mining is one of the few things that undead can do reliably, as long as you are fine with them stripmining since they are too dumb and usually have too dull senses for any other type of mining. To be entirely honest, most tasks that the undead could do are basically "haul stuff", "push mechanisms like treadmills" and "disassemble these grid coordinates (mining)".
>>98296918>>98297015Skeletons, people, there is in fact a well-established standard of most of what you're saying isn't doable.
>>98296771
>>98296887>Druids don't actually turn into animals.>Wizards can't actually cast fireball.
>>98297427And necromancy has never involved raising zombies so why the fuck are you obsessed with "Necromancy is evil because the aesthetics of evil."
>>98297015>can't use undead for anything that requires safe sanitary conditions like medical or food preparationWhy can't a skeleton just wash its bones and make a sandwich? How is that more unsanitary than a human doing so?
>>98298310>And necromancy has never involved raising zombiesFind me someone can turn into animal.
>>98297015>No you can't sanitize the bodies you raise with magic>I don't care that there's precedent with Prestidigitation stopping meat spoiling and Gentle Repose stopping rot altogether>I have a strawman and I won't have it taken from me
>>98290764If skeletons ruin the economy, why don't golems? Or teleportation? Or anything an artificer can do?>>98291159>>98291299I just skimmed over most of the corpsefucking and child-murdering and brain-eating and such. The book is pretty hilarious, if you ask me, stuff like the ghoul rape scene in particular. Or the whole surreal story about the voyeur who keeps unintentionally eating everyone he spies at, with the story culminating with him murdering his mother in an epic struggle with her giant buttocks. I guess it reminded me a bit of American Psycho. You've gotta read it with the attitude that it's a joke. The whole foreword is even just the author poking fun at himself for writing such trash while saying how glad he is that most of it is now lost to time.
>>98298766>Find me someone can turn into animal.Find me someone who can speak English and isn't a drooling retard who thinks a vague nebulous concept like necromancy looks evil because some guys making extended rules for their wargames paid an artist to draw them with black robes and skulls everywhere.
>>98298847>If skeletons ruin the economy, why don't golems? Or teleportation? Or anything an artificer can do?Because you can't push moral depravity with it. The entire genre of fantasy RPG is designed to justify "Adventuring" as an occupation. By level 1, a fighter is called a "Veteran". Elves and Dwarves live several times longer than humans but humans are dominant force in the world because they have more "ambition". Clerics can regrow limbs and people aren't taking more advantage of that. I get that components are supposed to balance out the economic side of things.People pushing good necromancy are just subversives that want their reddit morality in their fantasy game because Necromancy is associated with evil because it is more effective as an evil force for the setting.
>>98292867Did Aether Drift change anything about that?
>>98291499>The kind of people ambitious enough to reach 3rd level spells are too ambitious to be a lunch lady.You're graduating from the mage university only to discover, you have to work in a fantasy Subway equivalent
>>98299061It depends on the setting and the nature of the necromancy, but in most interpretations it's evil because it's really easy to be evil with it.Enslaving the souls of the dead, needing people to be dead in order for your magic to work on them (pretty big incentive right there), sacrificing people to empower yourself, "negative energy" corrupting the surroundings, etc. Same shit as with "blood magic" or other magics where other living things are the material components of your spells. Well, I guess the dead aren't "living" anymore, but with souls being a real thing that you can directly interact with and even use as a material component, the word loses a bit of its meaning.You could make your rules such that a necromancer always needed the consent of their target, and the target could always revoke the deal, and their spells don't rely on life force (or whatever) as an energy source and don't innately corrupt the surroundings, etc. and it wouldn't be especially evil.Or you could do it something in-between.Ultimately, the nature of the magic decides if its inherently evil or not.
>>98299166>It depends on the setting and the nature of the necromancy, but in most interpretations it's evil because it's really easy to be evil with it.Necromancers are written to be evil because they are more interesting as badguys than goodguys. Earlier I said that "good/nuetral" Necromancy works in video games because the mechanical depth justifies it. This is because the experience is balanced out by the need to micromanage the undead. Take this idea into P&P RPGs and it just slows down the game to snail's pace. Badguy necromancers are cool and make good antagonists. Their powers can be broken and the DM already controls multiple characters.Also, goodguy necromancers sounds like gay Rick and Morty shit.
>>98299260I think >>98299061 summed it up best as "reddit morality".
>>98290764>Thinking being rich = being goodPost your nose
>>98299260>>98299541I don't know about good guy necromancerS, but I think you could attempt a good guy necromancer.I think it would be a big times monkey's paw character, though. Like, he's approached by someone dying from old age or whatever, who begs him to revive them as the undead. So he does but they turn out to be bad news, but he's not a murderer so he won't kill them, but also he can't let them roam freely, so now he's wound up with what's effectively an enslaved undead even though he never wanted that and they literally asked for it, etc. Or, a child tragically dies, its ghost begs him to revive them, so he does but it gradually realizes that it now can't ever do any of the things that life entails like grow up and have a family of their own.
>>98299803That sounds very Lawful Evil. MTG has a Black-White faction of Necromancers focus on debt. It is actually fine being a badguy in fiction. The problem is characters like Isaac from Castlevania cartoons are not written to be evil despite being actually evil.
>>98290764>break the economy>because of a source of free labor Reminds me of how the Spartans didn't have to work because they had conquered and enslaved a group of people to be their labor, making the spartan warrior class more like larping aristocrats in reality. Reminds me of how feudalism is basically a slave society.Reminds me of how the guy who created the cotton gin thought it would help reduce the hardship of slaves who had to pick the seeds out of the cotton until their hands were raw. But what actually happened was it made the cotton industry boom so far more slaves were sent outside to pick cotton in the hot sun.Breaking the economy. The economy of what? Your peasant class is now a middle class with of craftsmen and merchants. If there's a flaw with the system it's in the universe's lore and mechanics of necromancy. If there's no god about to get angry about it then you've just elevated the working class through the power of industry.
>>98290815Overlord didn't invent that fucking idea, people on /tg/ have been complaining about that trope since long before that book even existed.
>>98301651>then you've just elevated the working class through the power of industry.and that's a bad thing
>>98292061A private investor purchases a number of churches and graveyards to convert into overpriced condos. Then, using a shell organization they funded a number of politician's campaigns and requested they pass a bill reclassifying human remains as naturally occuring mineral resources when buried underground for more than a year on private property. Through this legal loophole they're able to claim ownership of all the corpses dug up from their new purchases and the resulting necromantic servants are legally golems which allows them to avoid the nasty taxes on necromancy. So your private property is no longer yours AND is an asset they can use to further avoid paying taxes.
>>98301669only to rich people. But since the working class have to reapply the magic and micromanage the undead day after day, and their bodies are then turned into more undead, then they hold the keys to overthrowing the aristocracy. So you will soon be a one of the first headless undead tasked with turning a pump handle in a dark cellar until your bones turn to dust.
>>98301651>>98301710>implying everyday working people would have the means to have undead servants. It would be purposefully kept expensive to price out poor people while rich people have thousands of poor people killed every year to maintain their undead workforce.
>>98290852It's not. Necromancy is inherently rape coded and desecrating the dead to fulfill your needs will never be seen as good by non-autists (the people who make up the vast majority of society). The only ways to make it less repugnant is if the dead swore something like an oath while they were living (like in Lord of the Rings) or if they sold themselves into undead servitude while they were alive (like the Orzhov church in Magic the Gathering).
>>98301721>have the meansimplying the aristocracy is going to be up to get their hands dirty. For them to pull off what you're suggesting would require the creation of another class, possibly a religious order, that directly serves under the ruling class. And as long as they're allowed a certain level of privilege and the work is not too grimy they might passively go along with the system, however such a faction is the weak point of any system like this. If they become too complacent they are an easy target of an unruly underclass, and most likely they will have pushed off enough of the dirty work onto the masses, wishing to make themselves more like the aristocracy. Handing the keys to their prisoners. Alternatively if they become too greedy and jealous of the ruling class then some fools might decide they're obsolete middlemen, and pass the work, and the keys, down to the underclass. Rich people cutting corners enough to bring about their own execution is pretty common historically. You're basically doing the Dune thing. Whoever controls the necromancy controls the universe. So the question is how much control, by what means is the control, and how many generations until some spoiled rich idiots who don't understand that their authority is based on a tightly bound system completely unwind the whole thing and are dragged to the guillotine by a bunch of skeletons being controlled by peasants.
>>98290999>without ever putting in the work to explain how the fuck that happens with the cosmological backend putting two Transitive Planes between the operating force of Undeath and the operating force of EvilIt is explained though, in the cosmology there's a plane of positive energy and a plane of negative energy. Positive energy is the energy of life and negative energy is the energy of death.When someone casts a healing spell he's drawing upon that positive energy and when someone's animating a corpse, he fills it with negative energy. Which could explain why the undead tend to seek the living to kill them.
>>98301756>creation of another classYeah. The middle class. A group of people payed slightly more then the poor masses who would rigorously defend their position from the lower class. >if they become too complacent they are an easy target of an unruly underclass, and most likely they will have pushed off enough of the dirty work onto the massesLol? They have undead servants to do all the work. The poor would only be allowed to live to provide corpses for labor. Hell I'd imagine there'd be some sort of reverse indentured service/bank loan where you are given a loan that you pay off by killing yourself after x amount of time and the loaner taking your corpse.
>>98290764It's almost like undead labor was one of the very first things people thought up of when they thought up of the concept of undeath.
>>98294967>ackshuallyThe actual definition of necromancy has moved on from your severely antiquated definition. Clark Ashton Smith published a story about two necromancers animating the dead in 1932. Don't feel bad, you're only about 100 years behind the times.
>>98290852You could copy dragonage and have it that bodies of the dead are animated by spirits of concepts rather then the souls of the dead.
>>98301952that's not traditionally what the middle class is, that's just what you've seen the middle class made into in your lifetime. And when they're done away with for greedy and convenience, it just means no buffer against the lower class. >They have undead servants to do all the work. The poor would only be allowed to live to provide corpses for labor.they need to live long enough to be useful corpses. So they would be put to work to be kept in line and kept distracted, or else they would need to be uplifted to a leisure class. And both of those create motivation for revolution. The first because why should they work at all, and the second because why is there a class immune to having their corpses used. It's a forced imbalance.Industry reducing labor leads to uplifting of the classes, and it takes a lot of pressure to prevent that. Pressure that comes undone.
>>98301866But that Negative Energy plane is an Inner Plane like the Elemental planes, with two rounds of transitive plane to get to the Outer Planes where Alignment-stuff is. And the direct Death effects are not [Evil], either, nor are a number of the ludicrously-large-scale indiscriminate mass destruction spells. Killing things only holds Alignment value respective to what is being killed, the game prior to 4th edition actively does not function otherwise thanks to Paladins falling for a single Evil act.
>>98298778>I have a strawman and I won't have it taken from meYou mean those "undead used for labour" threads? Yeah, we have those for longer than you are potentially alive and predating 4chan, too
>>98303333I think you're being way to pedantic about how that works.The positive energy plane is supposed to be the source of the creation of souls and it is hinted that the negative energy plane destroys them. Using those energies doesn't turn you into a fundamentally good or evil being in essence but it would be fairly logical to think that people who tend to often the energy that creates life would be good and people who would often use the energy that snuff it or beings animated by it would tend to be evil. And I'm sure you know there are good aligned undead creatures in 3e and that there's a difference between character alignment and creatures having alignment aura.Murdering a child in 3e might change your player alignment but it doesn't change your essence/aura. Alignment spells won't have any effect.
>>98299166>You could make your rules such that a necromancer always needed the consent of their target, and the target could always revoke the deal, and their spells don't rely on life force (or whatever) as an energy source and don't innately corrupt the surroundings, etc. and it wouldn't be especially evil.Diablo necromancers have a path like this, IIRC. There ARE evil necromancers, but the player character is striking deals with souls to help their kids survive the war between heaven and hell more than they're raiding the local graveyard for grammy's bones (that's what Diablo's mooks are already doing). It works in Diablo since neither heaven nor hell are all that fond of humans, so keeping the balance by any means possible is a big deal and the 'turning to your own' flavor the necromancers have going on fits thematically with humans being caught in the middle.
>>98290884Are you going to spend time instructong your skeleton armies to farm grains so the commoners can eat, or are you just going to ignore the plebs and let them starve until they join your skeleton army?
>>98297150Could probably have the undead harvest lumber as well.
>>98303950Starved commoners produce lower-quality bones
>>98303728>Using those energies doesn't turn you into a fundamentally good or evil being in essence but it would be fairly logical to think that people who tend to often the energy that creates life would be good and people who would often use the energy that snuff it or beings animated by it would tend to be evil.The problem is that post-3e the cosmology stayed the same as this conditional association but the writers increasingly thoroughly insisted on actual cosmological Evil as intrinsic to Undeath.>And I'm sure you know there are good aligned undead creatures in 3eYes, but they became much fewer and further between in 3.5, with the Neutral roster being actively pruned and much of the design space devoured by Deathless for Eberron. >and that there's a difference between character alignment and creatures having alignment aura.It's one of mere degree and maybe a "state of matter" in the cosmology backend. You ping as Evil in both cases (as well as for being an (Evil)-subtype Outsider) because you have measurable Stuff Of Evil in you.>>98303950Assuming the commoners make better carpenters, smiths, tailors, and sundry other artisanal production roles than the skeletons for this to be a net improvement to the skeletons' military efficacy, sure! Especially if I've got one of those rumored higher-level Animate Dead spells that render the skeletons self-reassembling to neuter attrition.
>>98304827>but the writers increasingly thoroughly insisted on actual cosmological Evil as intrinsic to Undeath.How is it a problem? If the purpose of undead in the game isn't as a force of evil you fight in 95% of the cases than you're simply not in a normal fantasy setting. At this point you're a setting with a specific gimmick that completely changes the world.>You ping as Evil in both casesYou really don't though. It's explained that having an aligned aura requires non normal actions like being a priest dedicated to a god, performing rituals, etc etc or being an external
>>98304948>How is it a problem?Because the cosmology requires extraordinary explanations never actually given for it to be the case.>If the purpose of undead in the game isn't as a force of evil you fight in 95% of the cases than you're simply not in a normal fantasy setting.The issue is that it throws up a pile of complications for that remaining 5% for the sake of "baking" the 95% into Alignment in particular, instead of properly tying it to conditional logic external to Undeath itself.>At this point you're a setting with a specific gimmick that completely changes the world....I have literally cited it being the status quo all the way into 3e's Skeleton/Zombie statblock reinforced by a mid-90s AD&D 2e source.>You really don't though.Yes, you do, a 51 HD Red Dragon leaves the same Overwhelming echo on death as an 11th level Cleric of an Evil deity or 21st+ caster level [Evil] spell.
>>98290764Why would wizards choose undead as a labor force, when golems of different shapes and sizes would be just as good but without the rot and the risk of undead corruption?
>>98304998>The issue is that it throws up a pile of complications Bro you're being autistic, there's only complications if you want complications to be there. Otherwise it's pretty fucking simple; Most undead hunt the living because of the negative energy they're made out of therefore they're generally evil. Some others have another sense of purpose therefore they aren't. It's just that fucking simple.That makes a lot more sense than having a world where undead are neutral automatons because the logical conclusion to that is infinite free labor and energy everywhere all the time at a constant increasing rate. Which isn't the D&D world.And I have no idea wtf is an "overwhelming echo on death" but I know for a fact a bandit who effectively murders innocent people doesn't have a magical evil aura whereas the priest of an evil deity or a wizard using sacrifices and torture to cast evil spells does. (in 3e)
>>98305057>Bro you're being autistic, there's only complications if you want complications to be there.No, there are complications if you sit down to think it through generalizing the CHANGE under WotC's hold of the franchise to the setting-scale. Being so thorough in declaring "Undeath Is Evil" according to the Lower Plane energies imposes hoops of why the fuck those energies are so entangled in an Inner Plane-driven phenomenon and thus clearly demarkating Undead who aren't imposes MORE hoops explaining an exception to that entanglement in the back-end.Whereas if you just leave it to conditional logic forming a softer affinity like it was in the TSR days instead of hard-coding the association, none of those hoops have to exist. Thus your non-asshole Wizard can just go right on ahead with the graveyard-draft to deal with the raiding band of orcs without a dozen paragraphs of gymnastics around knee-jerk deontological statements for why this case in particular isn't sending him to Hell.>That makes a lot more sense than having a world where undead are neutral automatons because the logical conclusion to that is infinite free labor and energy everywhere all the time at a constant increasing rate.Control caps and level distribution harshly limiting the coordination by scale of available skilled managers, the reliable-controllable being too dumb for anything but the simplest of manual labor, and not actually having much that muscle-power alone is valuable for. There's a reason the Tippyverse that tries this shit relies on stuff like self-resetting traps and spell clocks, skeleton-spam just isn't very good at "automation" in 3.X due to the guard-rails against adventurer abuse.>And I have no idea wtf is an "overwhelming echo on death"Actually read the Detect Evil spell. It does in fact have a line in its table for creatures who merely have an Evil Alignment, and does in fact have lingering auras.
>>98305242You're 100% autistic and possibly mildly retarded
>>98305316Of course I'm autistic, I'm posting on 4chan about a twenty-six year old version of D&D who's persistent audience is almost entirely driven by its mechanical depth and breadth. I am simply extending the coherence I desire from the rules to the setting the rules describe, which changes throughout the edition in the handling of Undead actively worsened.Had WotC justified this change with some Lower Plane power setting up shop in the Negative Energy Plane like the Princes of Elemental Evil of old it'd be understandable, but they never did. They just declared something previously circumstantially Evil and thus bearing straightforward circumstances to not be so to instead be Evil as a deontological statement of its own, making every single TSR-era use of non-Evil Undead suddenly have a bunch more back-end questions for no logical reason.
>>98303728>The positive energy plane is supposed to be the source of the creation of souls and it is hinted that the negative energy plane destroys them.nayrt That's very interesting. What edition or editions was that in? It doesn't sound like 1e at all so like was it a 2e or planescape idea?
>>98290764Lol
>>98290824>>98291552in planescape the dustmen pay you upfront and then reclaim your corpse after your death to use as zombie labour
>>98290764The only thing you can reliably use undead for are menial tasks in tune of quarrying and mining. Even lumberjacking has the caveat that they might actually taint/rot the wood (depending on how necromancy works).And even if we assume that you have some super-special, non-tainting (both magically and biologically) undead, you are extending that labour into tasks that a crank-operated machines can do more efficiently anyhow. Like you can have an army of undead threshing your wheat (why the fuck are you growing wheat if you have an army of undead?)... or you could just build a threshing machine and make their labour pointless.So you've got an army of street sweepers, carters (as in - pulling the carts) and carriers. Oh wow, think of the possibilities for any given economy! You only need 12 skelingtons instead of an ox to move a cart full of iron ore to the smelter! So unless you don't have an ox or wheat (sounds familiar), they aren't helping at all.tl;dr necromancy for the sake of economy only works if the goal is running a completely undead state that is also on a military expansion to make more undead, regardless of how even specific version of necromancy works
>>98308955No, wait, there is one more thing:If you have an undead economy, you can build massive road systems. God knows what for (since you don't need to transport anything at all over roads, as you might as well just use undead to carry stuff), but you can, in theory, build roads with improved structure (not cobbled, just reinforced and well-rammed with gravel, but not macadam either), because you have zero labour cost and effectively free stone via zero-cost quarries.It's not like your undead soldiers care about the quality of your roads or you can now haul easier foodstuff or commodities nobody is consuming, making it utterly pointless, but hey, you can now build near-free gravel roads.
>>98308955>And even if we assume that you have some super-special, non-tainting (both magically and biologically) undeadThis kind of taint is actually an outlier in actual settings people play actual games in. It is mostly just a canned response from retards falling for bad vibes, not even featuring in the half-assed D&D retcons.>you are extending that labour into tasks that a crank-operated machines can do more efficiently anyhow. Like you can have an army of undead threshing your wheat (why the fuck are you growing wheat if you have an army of undead?)... or you could just build a threshing machine and make their labour pointless.Not really? The relevant point of comparison is living draft animals as competing non-person input power, which usually still have more significant upkeep costs and work-hour limitations, and these labor-saving devices are quite tangential to necromantic research.>You only need 12 skelingtons instead of an ox to move a cart full of iron ore to the smelter!Which won't be costing you food and water overhead, which become quite significant in a lot of mining operations, nor do you have the hoops of wrangling the animal for such a condition which is NOT a trivial order.>tl;dr necromancy for the sake of economy only works if the goal is running a completely undead state that is also on a military expansion to make more undead, regardless of how even specific version of necromancy worksOr you're just looking at capex versus upkeep costs and taking the long bet.>>98308989>God knows what for (since you don't need to transport anything at all over roads, as you might as well just use undead to carry stuff)It still saves time to have clearer paths, and using carts could well be more efficient skeleton-hours even if you need living artisans to make them.>you can now haul easier foodstuff or commodities nobody is consumingIf this is remotely close to being a concern, you're more looking at crushing every market for finished goods.
>>98309192>This kind of taint is actually an outlier in actual settings people play actual games inDnD has itWFRP has itYou now covered 75-80% of all fantasy games and settings people will be using in their games.Here goes it "this isn't real concern in real games">Not really? The relevant point of comparison is living draft animals as competing non-person input power, which usually still have more significant upkeep costs and work-hour limitations, and these labor-saving devices are quite tangential to necromantic research.So you basically said "n-no, it works", without making a statement how?>which become quite significant in a lot of mining operationsWhich you don't need, that's the point, but thanks you keep missing it>apex versus upkeep costsIf you are running an undead economy, you don't have upkeep costs, period. Meaning it's a non-argument. You aren't producing anything that would ever need any upkeep in the first place>It still saves time to have clearer pathsUndead don't tire and don't gain speed due to the terrain being easier to travel>If this is remotely close to being a concernIt fucking isn't, and after summing up two posts, you still didn't get it.In other words:You are incapable of grasping that an undead economy only works as long as you are simply doing what every necromancer ever did - raising more undead, rather than wasting time on endeavours that are utterly pointless. Simply because you no longer have consumption of any kind, taxation of any kind, but also upkeep or budget of any kind. You are just making more undead>b-but...But what?What exactly are you trying to prove here?Food production? You don't need thatFinished goods? You don't nee that, eitherMaterials of any kind? You don't need even that.All you need is just amassing bigger swarm of undead. You are basically trying to do some retarded "you can facilitate undead labour to economy" missing the memo you don't need an economy at all
>>98309261>DnD has itNo, it does not. "Undead tainting things with their presence" is a narrow band of explicit special abilities, never a general rule, not even in the book that gives Turn resistance for density>WFRP has itWhich devolved into a fringe due to abandonment and fuckups due to prior abandonment and fuckups until GW decided to pull the plug with The End Times to reboot with AoS, which has proven noticeably more successful as a game people actually play instead of just shitpost about online yet remains comparatively anemic in worldbuilding and consequent discourse>So you basically said "n-no, it works", without making a statement how?It's more noting you making a category error by comparing "apply magic to generate labor" with "apply engineering to make labor more efficient">Which you don't needWhy not?>If you are running an undead economy, you don't have upkeep costs, period.Only for a PURE undead economy, which is not the premise in question, merely the use of undead as the lower rungs of manual labor. As seen in our world, when you gut that demand, people are rather expedient in figuring out new things to do, so you need either a truly explosive growth of undead labor to outpace that fuck-all rulesets offer or for the undead to be capable of highly skilled labor which generally comes with a measure of their own will spoiling the hypothetical>Undead don't tire and don't gain speed due to the terrain being easier to travelOf course they gain speed with the terrain being easier to travel, unless they're bullshitting flight or you're using ghosts that just phase through everything>It fucking isn't, and after summing up two posts, you still didn't get it.The "concern" to "nobody is consuming" being downstream from "all living work is now pointless", with the follow-on being "then what you're focusing on is nonsense because you're better off replacing the skilled workers first for skeleton-hour income so it looks completely different"
>>98291715It would unironically be better if the surviving villagers, the bulk of them at least, where already in the wizard tower, having broke in to lynch him amidst the chaos and in an effort to shut down the cornfields worth of undead laborers, but instead found him dead with his dick in a bowl of homunculus batter and are now just stuck in his tower playing with his orbs causing havoc in the countryside as they haphazardly and or unknowingly pull levers to pass the time.
>>98290764>Be Necromancer>Use my fearsome necromancy powers exclusively to fuck the walking dead>Only fuck non-humanoidsIf what I'm doing is wrong, the Gods would have stopped me by now.
>>98309401>All those words>To double-down on not getting itLet me simplify it for that thick skull of yours:Once you can have undead, there is no point having an economy or infrastructure or any living creatures at all. There is just no gain in it. You just want to do more undead for maximum gains and benefits, rather than diluting the effect.Any kind of "use undead to help your economy" only ever makes sense if undead are a natural occurence and you can't make more/getting more from killing people.And even then, it's short-changing it, because in the end of the day, skelington maxxing is the only optimal move
>>98309682>Once you can have undead, there is no point having an economy or infrastructure or any living creatures at all. There is just no gain in it.Of course there is, so long as there is any useful task the living can do the undead cannot whether by qualitative limits of the undead's capabilities or quantitative limits of how many can be managed. You're repeatedly asserting the absolute limit case here as a prior in itself, when the primary premise of the discussion is a relatively constrained assumption of just bulk manual labor.
>>98309740I am just repeating that you still don't get it and are basically arguing with voices in your head, rather than the point I am making.So let's try different thing: if you insist that "of course there is", then name me five things you can from still having any living creatures at all once you can just raise undead.You know, you insist you are helping the living with the use of unliving ,this is basically your argument... and you did fuck-all to support it, while also not trying to grasp the point I am making, instead arguing over stuff I never even tried to claim.In other words: you are diminishing my proposition for your inane economy pursuit, rather than me diminishing your use of undead.So to repeat:Living are pointless once you can have undead, and so is anything the living can do, since most of those things are about maintaining a population of living.To quote a great man: a soldier needs to know where to walk, where to shit, have something to eat and have something to shoot with.And with undead, you just removed all four of those out of equation, while still having soldiers.
>>98309785>I am just repeating that you still don't get it and are basically arguing with voices in your head, rather than the point I am making.I am saying your "point" is a bullshit exaggeration of the thread topic amounting to a No Limits Fallacy.>So let's try different thing: if you insist that "of course there is", then name me five things you can from still having any living creatures at all once you can just raise undead.In the rules framework of D&D 3.X, you can't just raise and control undead infinitely. Even the most tricked-out of specialists all the way at 20th only get a few hundred with quite a bit of dedicated investment, and a massive share of that is 1-6 HD Followers via Undead Leadership. Congratulations, your character who COULD have been giving demon lords swirlies instead is the egomaniacal totalitarian ruler of a hamlet, or perhaps a small village. And relying on Spawn chains is a logistical nightmare to work with and begging to be shredded with fuck-all options to repair by an unlucky decapitation strike.>since most of those things are about maintaining a population of living....Which still holds for any domains of productivity only the living access, as well as scales beyond the control cap.>And with undead, you just removed all four of those out of equation, while still having soldiers.Incorrect, having something to shoot with is still really damned useful for all the same reasons it is for living troops. And that means a whole pipeline of normal economic activity, which if there's anything in it your undead can't do requires the whole supply-base for living specialists.
>>98309921>Asked what's the point of having the living>"To have productivity, duh!"... which you need for...Come on mate, this isn't hard, as long as you are answering the questions that are actually asked, rather than doing mental wrestling with voices only you can hear
>>98309785Unless necromancers managing the undead are themselves some sort of lich or what not, they are going to want a variety of goods and services that basic undead can't perform. (And for that matter, even if they are liches they will still want some of this) Skeletons and zombies can haul blocks of stone to the necromancer castle, but can they carve the fancy sculptures the necromancer wants? The undead might be able to harvest cotton, but will they be able manage the whole process of turning that into dyed clothing? I am assuming the necromancers will want clothing. Fine metalwork, for both decoration and practical stuff like buttons, can simple undead to that? Or say some necromancers really like cheese, how well do you think skeletons will do at managing cattle, milking them, and doing the whole cheese making process? And then their is entertainment; even a lich might want musicians, playwrights and actors around for their own amusement.And then of course there is the simple issue of how many undead can 1 necromancer supervise, and how common is that sort of ability? Does it need to be the necromancer who raised the dead controlling it, or can they pass on control to minions?
>>98309921>muh fallacieskwab
>>98309941Why would a necromancer (who would be probably some novice or weakling) want a sculpture, but not being undead themselves? What logic is this?What for would you need that clothing? What for?What for would you need all that fine metalwork?Why would you bother with cheese?Better yet: if one necromancer can't control an entire group of undead or unlimited number of them, then the whole "undead helping the economy" argumentation collapses instantly. If it's just one guy controlling one undead, you have actually HALF the work, because you have two people doing unskilled labour of one person. So you need a necromancer controlling AT LEAST 3 undead to break even with a single labourerBut let's continue. Let me break this down for you, so you truly can see the big picture here.Say you have a warrior, single guy, who is fighting against your undead.He's having a sword or an axe or whatever other weapon someone made. That weaponsmith needed metal he get from someone else.That someone else needed to get ore. It was either collected or mined by someone else.And also fuel, which was provided by someone else.Both the metal worker and the smith needed specific buildings, made by someone else (and likely a group of pople)All of those people need to eat something.All of those people need basic clothing.All of those people need shelters.So suddenly, to have that one guy with a sword or an axe, you have an entire village to simply outfit him.You know what you could have instead? Roughly 100 undead that are now facing against that 1 warrior, all equally competent and whacking at him, but having 1:100 numerical advantage. And unlike that warrior, they never get tired (hell, they don't even sleep), don't feel pain and can't panic, either.Which means you should just slaughter the village whole, raise all the villagers as undead and use them directly, not bothering with ANY economy, because you have zero gain from having one.
>>98309985And of course, there is the obvious:An undead necromancer who just amasses more and more undead and pursuits his goals is far more scary motherfucker than some guy who is running a fromagery house that employs skeletons, since he only cares about having more power and more undead, which is both inhuman (scary) and also super-destructive (instant reason to oppose while it's still possible).Turning undead into just regular estate/state, but with skellingtons is completely diluting both the potential and use in gaming. You just color-swapped, rather than going balls-in for the real potential.
>>98309985>what for what for spoonfeed me pleaseFucking retard.
>>98290852Just using bone as a magical material.Sure you animate skeletons, but who said they had to be human or even all fro mthe same body?Treat the undead more like constructs.
>>98290764If you are using necromancy to help souls pass on then it is good.If you are using it to enslave and purposefully disrupt the natural order for your selfish gains then it is evil (even if those selfish gains are to help others by making the undead do the work for them)
>>98310011>Asked to provide examples for his own case>"Spoonfeeding much, armarite?"So you are saying you have no counter-argument whatsoever? Fucking figures.
>>98309927>... which you need for...Making actual things of practical use, instead of just having endless naked skeletons? Like armor rendering them harder to put down in a fight, or weapons with better reach so more ranks of them can be stabbing opposing armies.>>98309985>Better yet: if one necromancer can't control an entire group of undead or unlimited number of them, then the whole "undead helping the economy" argumentation collapses instantly. If it's just one guy controlling one undead, you have actually HALF the work, because you have two people doing unskilled labour of one person. So you need a necromancer controlling AT LEAST 3 undead to break even with a single labourerWith a couple dozen you're looking at a pretty significant value proposition, but still falling far short of the fuckery you insist upon.>So suddenly, to have that one guy with a sword or an axe, you have an entire village to simply outfit him.No, you need a village to start outfitting guys with swords and/or axes. But the guy using it can be among them when fighting isn't needed, and once you've started making swords and/or axes and armor and so on, that production line keeps running to have more dudes with that stuff. This doesn't take much for not-entirely-shit militias to be a large chunk of the population, such that the actual outnumbering is more like 15:1 if you're especially generous.Except that in actual games with rules for how many undead you can control, to avoid exactly what you're obsessing over being trivial it's more like 2-4:1 for a tiny little thorp or hamlet but you need 10-20:1 for reasonable attrition rates because they AREN'T equally competent at whacking as the dudes with actual equipment and a mind of their own.
>>98310073It's not my case. I'm just calling you an unimaginative retard in a more polite way.
>>98297015Giant hamster-wheel farms for power generation.
>>98310081>Making actual things of practical use... which you need for...Come on mate, how long do I need to drag this on, for you to finally notice what I'm setting up for you here?>With a couple dozen you're looking at a pretty significant value proposition, but still falling far short of the fuckery you insist upon.Because?Other than, you know, you are still trying to use undead to winnow the grain and cut the tinder, rather than figuring out you don't need grain nor tinder if you have undead>No, you need a village to start outfitting guys with swords and/or axesSo there are less villagers to work on supporting more of those guys, because guess what - it takes about 20 years, given or taken, to go from "we need new guy" to actually having a guy.>But the guy using it can be among them when fighting isn't neededSo he isn't even trained in fighting, then? Great, very high value of having him at all then>that production line keeps running to have more dudes with that stuffOf course as long as, say, the village isn't starving, because you burned down their crops and/or murdered half of them. You don't need food, they do.>Except that in actual games with rules for how many undead you can control, to avoid exactly what you're obsessing overIronic, given we are in a thread obsessing over the idea of pushing undead into unskilled labour slots to speed up economy.But somehow, I'm in the wrong for pointing out you get actual value out of undead by saying "fuck the economy" and just slaughtering everyone to get more undead.It's almost, ALMOST as if you are refusing to accept the situation and now frotting your mouth over someone ruining your "brilliant" idea, while tossing at me limitations that others tossed at OP alread.Could it be then that adding undead to the economy is pointless, one way or another?Gee, I wonder
>>98310011>>98310089>Having an actual conversation is retarded, says random faggot with no stakes in it
>>98310102>... which you need for...Trade, bribes, personal treasures, general ostentatiousness, fun
>>98310131... which you need for...Since you somehow STILL don't get it:Imagine you developed a car and can make more at will, setting up a small factory. But instead of making bank on cars, you are trying to use them to make quick deliveries to the local saddle maker, because saddles are profitable business.And you have a car factory.
>>98310145Learn to tell anons apart you autistic faggot. Maybe I just want to sell saddles.
>>98310102>... which you need for...Literally fucking anything that improves the per-skeleton efficacy.>Other than, you know, you are still trying to use undead to winnow the grain and cut the tinder, rather than figuring out you don't need grain nor tinder if you have undeadBut you literally, fundamentally, hard-game-rule cannot have enough undead to make that worthwhile as one dude, no matter how ludicrously juiced you are.>So there are less villagers to work on supporting more of those guys, because guess what - it takes about 20 years, given or taken, to go from "we need new guy" to actually having a guy.Unless you recognize this thing called "cross-training", especially under this principle called "preparing for the future". A whole lot of the time, there'll be non-trivial military capacity just waiting around in case it's needed, even if it's not GREAT, so you are in fact not rolling over shit.>So he isn't even trained in fighting, then?...People can be trained in more than one thing, retard.>Of course as long as, say, the village isn't starving, because you burned down their crops and/or murdered half of them.Unless your piddly level 6 ass's twenty-odd mookest-of-mook skeletons failed against their dozen-or-so militia men because one of those happened to be a nominal near-peer of yours with Great Cleave.>Ironic, given we are in a thread obsessing over the idea of pushing undead into unskilled labour slots to speed up economy.>But somehow, I'm in the wrong for pointing out you get actual value out of undead by saying "fuck the economy" and just slaughtering everyone to get more undead.What the fuck is the value of just having an assload of undead?>It's almost, ALMOST as if you are refusing to accept the situationBecause your situation doesn't fucking work for any actual fucking game that people actually fucking play, you retarded third-world-tier looter.
>trade>diplomacy>send in the skeletonskek
>>98310151Then maybe get into saddle-making business, rather than automobile one?>>98310168>"This idea is great! It's totally going to work! Undead to the workforce!">With enough prodding, proceeds to list reasons why it can't work all on his ownAnd the best part is that you are 200% certain you are winning here
>>98310182But I also like cars.
>>98310182As previously mentioned:>With a couple dozen you're looking at a pretty significant value proposition, but still falling far short of the fuckery you insist upon.The bar for "serious impact on the workforce" is a lot lower than "unstoppable exponentially growing hordes of slaughter and pillaging" on every single pertinent metric.
>>98310168>Literally fucking anything that improves the per-skeleton efficacy.Which has only one actual factor: number of skletons fielded. Because it doesn't matter if they have top of the line weapon or a broken barstool, it has the exact same effect when bashing people who can feel pain, and have internal organs that get hurt and can get concussions and can bleed, and can get sick and can get in shock (physical AND mental one) and so on and forth>But you literally, fundamentally, hard-game-rule cannot have enough undead to make that worthwhileSo you are - once more - confirming that the idea of tossing undead into the economy can't work and is actually inefficient?>Unless you recognize this thing called "cross-training", especially under this principle called "preparing for the future".So you have a 2nd village to support the first one (and the 1st one supporting a 3rd one) while people cross-train in different jobs? Gee, I wonder if skeletons can same, and without neither infrastructure not actually training, but simply doing different things>...People can be trained in more than one thing, retard.Which takes enormous amount of time and resources>Unless your piddly level 6 ass's twenty-odd mookest-of-mook skeletons failed against their dozen-or-so militia men because one of those happened to be a nominal near-peer of yours with Great Cleave.So we just went from the "unlimited, free labour" to "just a tiny handful of skeletons and they are actually pathetic and weak (and also, high level civilians grow free on trees and come by the hundreds)"Tell me, are those militia men part of local lord retinue, counted in thousands and wearing full harness?>What the fuck is the value of just having an assload of undead?Other than having an upkeep-free, infrastructure--free, tireless, restless (literally so) and perfectly obedient and loyal army? You tell me>Because your situation doesn't fucking work for any actual fucking gameHave you read the OP?
>>98310168>Because your situation doesn't fucking work for any actual fucking game that people actually fucking play, you retarded third-world-tier looter.Where do you think you are, asshat?
>>98310218>Because it doesn't matter if they have top of the line weapon or a broken barstoolDo you really think a piece of wood is equivalent to an enchanted sword?
>>98310235Let me answer that with a different question:Do you think getting hit with twenty clubs and improvised hurts less than being sliced open by twenty enchanted swords?
>>98310218>Which has only one actual factor: number of skletons fielded. Because it doesn't matter if they have top of the line weapon or a broken barstool, it has the exact same effect when bashing people who can feel pain, and have internal organs that get hurt and can get concussions and can bleed, and can get sick and can get in shock (physical AND mental one) and so on and forthNo, it does not. They are going to be quicker at taking out living people if they have their own swords and axes compared to random crap. Hence why such things were used by militaries.>So you are - once more - confirming that the idea of tossing undead into the economy can't work and is actually inefficient?I repeat:>With a couple dozen you're looking at a pretty significant value proposition, but still falling far short of the fuckery you insist upon.Your scenario has far higher demands than a mini industrial boom, because you need outright more skeletons under management than living people, whereas mine requires only a few percentile to start seeing rather sizable shifts in relative prominence of sectors.>So you have a 2nd village to support the first one (and the 1st one supporting a 3rd one) while people cross-train in different jobs?No, it's the individuals making up the village who cross-train to fill multiple roles toward the first-defensive-line militia.>Gee, I wonder if skeletons can same, and without neither infrastructure not actually training, but simply doing different thingsHard inability in 3.X ruleset, as the stock skeleton with easy control mechanisms is Mindless.>Which takes enormous amount of time and resourcesWhich fit easily into the lengthy growth periods everyone's already been through, particularly as much of the training is specifically assistance of more-skilled people thus actually adding to available resources. The living society has already met its startup costs.
>>98310245*improvised maces
>>98310245>let me avoid the question
>>98310249>They are going to be quicker at taking out living people if they have their own swords and axes compared to random crap... because?Are you saying random rusty knife or a, say, pitchfork, is worse at killing an unarmed and unarmoured civilian? Or, dare I say it, punching them to death when you can't strain yourself, hurt yourself or get tired?>Your scenario has far higher demands than a mini industrial boom,So you are saying having 100 undead is actually harder than using 10 undead to kickstart industrial boom?>it's the individuals making up the village who cross-train to fill multiple roles toward the first-defensive-line militia.And then they are doing it, between, you know, doing their base job of having a functional village? Do they all drink the time-stretching potion?>Muh 3.X rules!HYTNPDnD?As other anon rightfully noticed, all I did was just listing you top-of-the-head stuff that makes undead such a massive threat in Warhammer. Guess that doesn't count because all you know is 3.5.In fucking 2026.Way to fucking go, buddy.Next time, at least consult current edition, will be less embarrassing >Which fit easily into the lengthy growth periods everyone's already been throughWhere they are, you know, busy doing the default thing?Notice how you shifted your argument from "undead are awesome power multiplier" to basically "HUMANITY FUCK YEAH!" at a drop of hat, all it took was pointing out how absurdly better an army of undead is vs. standard process of procuring a militia out of couple of villages
>>98310263So I guess you do think the enchanted sword hurts more.Figures.
>>98310274You won't always have your awesome amount of undead. People fight back. Would your army of skeletons with sticks perform better against a regularly equipped militia than an army of undead with weapons and armor? No? Weird that you'd say it doesn't matter at all then.
>still hasn't explained why he doesn't need to trade with other places>still hasn't explained how he conducts diplomacy without anything alive>still hasn't said anything other than muh big armyThird worlders have ruined 4chan
>>98310218>So we just went from the "unlimited, free labour" to "just a tiny handful of skeletons and they are actually pathetic and weak (and also, high level civilians grow free on trees and come by the hundreds)"No, "twenty-odd mookest-of-mook skeletons" in the labor market is already a literal ton of simultaneous hauling capacity on shifts that make a mockery of normal dock crews, and I am asserting ONE level six dude who happens to have specialized mook-sweeping knowledge.>Other than having an upkeep-free, infrastructure--free, tireless, restless (literally so) and perfectly obedient and loyal army?For what? Where does this translate back to actual value? What are you DOING with the army that is an actual benefit to yourself?>>98310245Do you think that twenty skeletons with enchanted swords and chain shirts or banded armor are going to clear peasants at the same pace or somehow slower than twenty naked skeletons with clubs and outright improvised crap?>>>98310269>Are you saying random rusty knife or a, say, pitchfork, is worse at killing an unarmed and unarmoured civilian?A well-maintained tool specifically designed to kill unarmored targets is, in fact, going to be better at doing so than attempting the task with no such tool.>So you are saying having 100 undead is actually harder than using 10 undead to kickstart industrial boom?I'm saying that having a procedure to dredge up functionally infinite undead is harder than kickstarting an industrial boom on the back of specialists who offer dozens of times the raw man-hours of grunt labor a normal person would. Your scenario has massive problems if you need to keep a wide base of necromancers coordinated, whereas in mine that's a very natural tendency.>And then they are doing it, between, you know, doing their base job of having a functional village?Do you think the guy making the swords and/or axes does NOTHING but swords and/or axes?
>>98310269>HYTNPDnD?Have you tried playing any game, ever? Because I genuinely can't think of any that have this retarded runaway remotely approached.>As other anon rightfully noticed, all I did was just listing you top-of-the-head stuff that makes undead such a massive threat in Warhammer.The Warhammer Undead that have distinct magical resource constraints and require trained specialists to maintain in the field, thus demanding an actual hierarchy of necromancers, virtually all of whom have dietary needs in direct contradiction of your bullshit because the undead ones are blood-dependent vampires?>Next time, at least consult current edition, will be less embarrassingI use 3.X because it actually gives a fig-leaf in the direction of the subject by having literally any meaningful crafting rules at all to cover the artisans supplying equipment versus trying to use undead for that. It even has spells counteracting these limits, though the very best versions still struggle to reach small city numbers.>Where they are, you know, busy doing the default thing?Learning to do a whole load of things because there's literally more things to do than people in Podunk thorps? Have you literally once looked at the shit that goes into running a medieval farm, and how much flexibility there ends up being due to the seasonal nature of tending crops?>Notice how you shifted your argument from "undead are awesome power multiplier" to basically "HUMANITY FUCK YEAH!" at a drop of hatNo, I remain consistent in my argument that undead are an awesome power MULTIPLIER, and in response to a retarded limit-case am elaborating on frequent constraints with an actual-fucking-game example case for why they're likely to require a living base to be multiplying from.
>>98310294>>98310316The guy is literally acting like a Dhar addled Warhammer necromancer, constantly yapping about how his undead hordes are invincible purely because they don't tire and don't need anything, despite the fact that by his own description they are naked skellies with random crap for weapons, which even in Warhammer means that they are troop by troop, squad by squad less useful than random militia. In fact, having shittier troops than your opponents and being dependent on linchpin necromancers to keep them going is the whole crux of the Vampire Counts strategy with the skellies, so the guy has no idea about the game he's citing. Even 2e RPG rules had some pretty stringent limits on the amount of the directly controlled undead. I'm gonna dig up RPG bestiaries to give more info on that.
>>98310290>Has undead, expects to trade>Has undead, expects to conduct diplomacy>Has undead, plans anything else than bigger army
If necromancy had economic utility and didn't have significant negative consequences than everyone would be using it and there would be no taboo against it in the first place. There's a reason we consider screwing around with corpses to be bad in real life.
>>98310353>>98310269By 2e rules of Warhammer Fantasy Battle RPG, an average skeleton armed with the actual, reasonably crafted hand weapon has Slaughter Margin of routine, meaning that the average soldier of the Empire should almost always beat a skeleton fighting one by one. If we assume that the said skeleton is armed with an improvised weapon, the situation changes completely since the improvised weapons do SB-4 damage, meaning that now most of the strikes won't even damage even lightly armoured opponent. If we are being generous and count some of their weapons count as clubs, that still leaves them with a significant -5% to Weapon Skill for poor craftsmanship, per RAW. And since by your description your skeletons are naked, they don't even get the armour they had on the stat sheet, making them hilariously easy to shatter to pieces.
>>98310423>There's a reason we consider screwing around with corpses to be bad in real life.Partly sanctity of the dead that still emotionally applies even if it doesn't impact the afterlife, partly disease problems that well-cleaned bones or fairly specific kinds of mummified flesh would readily avoid. The latter would be quite serviceable to impose hoops that need jumped through for establishing a stable at-scale system taking millennia for establishing not only the system itself but some way of handling standards to be sure the counters for the problem are dealt with.As for the former... Uh, funerary cannibalism is a thing? If there is not a hard metaphysical issue to "desecrating" the corpse by making an undead out of it, then it's entirely a shift-the-culture problem which can be quite cleanly analogized to the fuckery early medical science got up to for educational autopsies. Complete with some especially greedy fucks doing murders for a quick buck about it.
>>98310436Neither of them, but 2e came out in 1984.Try at least 5e (mid-90s) and above. It's also going to change the outcome edition by edition, too
>>98310465I've meant the RPG ruleset, where 2e was in 2005.
>>98310423>economic utility and didn't have significant negative consequences>there would be no taboo against itThat's very poor reasoning. People and cultures make up taboos all the time. Mixing linen and wool has significant economic utility with only one negative consequence yet a little bronze age tribe banned it. The only negative consequence is>fuck you, yahweh said don't do itand whatever comes from people enforcing that. The only negative consequence for violating the taboo is being punished for violating the taboo.
>>98310459> Uh, funerary cannibalism is a thingSo’s Kuru. Really, pound for pound there is no logical reason to replace your workforce with undead long term unless that’s your kind of kink, and far too many people in this thread are twisting themselves into knots attacking the morality of it when pragmatically you’d get more out of breeding a specialized form of vegan farmer goblins than you would babysitting an undead task force to deal with crop rotation.
>>98290764Can you actually instruct zombie to do go and do a year long cycle of interdependent tasks like farming? Presumably the zombie doesn't know how to do it. How does telling it to go and manage agriculture work? Nevermind more complex tasks. I bet you've got more than 3 INT, but can you make a chair? Even if you can how does the zombie get the expertise to do so? The average human can't even perform a specialised stone-age skill like making a functional clay storage vessel, how do I make a zombie do it? Even if I know how, how does the zombie get the technique required to make a jug that will fire and be watertight? Do you have to teach them? Do they have access to the realm of forms? If I mind controlled you and said "build me a clock" it wouldn't matter how hard you tried if you couldn't already do it. Do people become more skilled when they die?I feel like undead workers would need a lot of micromanaging if they aren't actually sentient.
>>98310824>That's very poor reasoning.This is a perfect reasoning to applies to just about any human activity. Other than you going "nu-uh, not gonna work like that", there is no reason for it actually not working like that.
>>98290852Dr. Orpheus
>>98310824>Mixing linen and wool has significant economic utilityNot at the time it didn't. It was a purely ceremonial practice, and thus rejected by a rival culture seeking to distinguish itself.
>>98290815He didn't use unlimited boneworks undead army to make a binary bone computation system to play video games with inside the video game world he's stuck in, so Ainz is still weak sauce.
>>98310177
>>98311317The point is not that it did when it originated but that it does now yet it remains taboo amongst observant Jews despite earlier anon saying that "something will only be taboo if it has economic utility and no negative consequences". The only economic utility I can see is "I won't do business with you if you mix those textiles".
>>98290852Your control of the undead is more about finding why they are here still and laying them to rest
>>98311862Pigs have great economic utility.They can eat more or less -anything- can survive anywhere there's mud to wallow and garbage to eat, though they prefer to root for tubers and stuff in forest undergrowth.Plus they mature quickly, taste great, and have potential secondary use as truffle hunting animals.Plus they can be friendly and companionable.The problem with suiculture is that if you literally feed them garbage and poop, you will then be eating garbage and poop when you eat them, and that is the keeper's fault, and the keeper's problem.It scarcely bothers the pig.
>>98311862>but that it does now It really doesn't. >"something will only be taboo if it has economic utility and no negative consequences"That's not what I said. I said necromancy WOULDN'T be taboo if it had utility and no consequences. Taboos are created in response to negative outcomes, and will only persist for any meaningful amount of time if maintaining the taboo has no significant opportunity cost and/or there remains a strong rational reason for maintaining the taboo. Consider necromancy. At face value, depending on how it works, it could be an incredible force multiplier, especially in a pre-industrial society. If it had no real negative consequences that couldn't be mitigated (such as my go-to, that necromancy poisons everything it touches with necrotic energy), then societies which allowed necromancy would enormously outperform those where it was banned, and necromancy would become practiced by the most dominant cultures through sheer selective pressure.
>>98310824>Jews were and are retarded, episode 72388417
>>98313277Most of thd old mosaic laws and customs were actually genuinely good advice at the time. The foods which were clean were those that they could actually procure and prepare with decent levels of quality and safety, there are rules regarding land fallowing, food banking, and quarantine procedures for infectious diseases, the criminal justice laws are pretty reasonable. About the only of their customs that was probably a pain in the ass even at the time was having to structure debts around the Shemitah, but even that was probably pro-social.
>>98313329No, they weren't. They are random set of rules that don't help with anything at all nor make their life and survival in their "natural habitat" easier, right down to kosher rules. Most of it is instead bunch of rich people (of the era and in this specific societal context, since even well-off Jews were poor as fuck for the era's standard) telling poor people they are poor, and should feel bad about themselves, for they can't afford "proper" way of living.The only people who insist they are are Jews themselves and their American golems.
>>98313402You should try actually reading the Pentateuch. There are a multitude of provisions regarding care for the poor. Did the israelites follow these rules well? No, generally not (like half the OT is about the consequences of this), but that doesn't make the rules themselves the problem.
>>98313484>They had those great rules>They just didn't follow themFantastic laws, many great ideas
>>98313576>They had those great rules>They just didn't follow themYeah nigga it's the bible. That's what it's mostly about
>>98313152>Taboos are created in response to negative outcomes, and will only persist for any meaningful amount of time if maintaining the taboo has no significant opportunity cost and/or there remains a strong rational reason for maintaining the tabooLots of rational reasons to use certain size spoons for soup and to execute anyone that writes down the emperors name.
>>98313818These have minimal opportunity costs.
>>98315061I don't think you speak english as your first language.
>>98315378I know for a fact you don't, considering you don't know what the word "or" means.
>>98290764Negative energy is sentient and will always subvert any attempt at using it for constructive purposes. It might take time for it to engineer the situation to that end, but all negative energy is the same being, it has a twelve digit IQ, and it exists for the sole purpose of harming living beings.There is no context or circumstance in which negative energy will not attempt to cause harm. It causes harm simply by contacting the material plain, and it will abuse any autonomy given to it to try to cause more. If you bring even one iota of negative energy into the material plain you have committed an irredeemable crime against all life, because that iota WILL eventually find some way to abrade life from the universe and every bit of it contributes to the agency of the manichean force of pure evil that seeks the total domination of all of reality for its hideous ends.You may think that you have found some positive way to use negative energy. You will reanimate corpses to do hard labor, you will construct a rotating wheel skeleton to turn a mill, you will do this, you will do that. History is one massive graveyard of backfired necromancers. That's really all that history is, the tale of one necromancer after another fucking up the universe one reanimated skeleton puppy at a time.
>>98290828Pretty much. It would be like eating food and using tools straight from the radiation center of Chernobyl.The only people who disagree are pathetic desperate necromancer fags who lost out to golems and automatons decades ago and are here coping.Every necromancer who starts talking about using undead for labor or some bullshit is a drop out. He couldn't actually do hard and proper work making automatons like a real magician and had to resort to digging out and reanimating his grandma.
We already use LITERAL necromancy in Real World...
>>98317716It occurred to me recently that in putting a potted plant on a wheeled trolley, I have inadvertently created an unnatural cybernetic abomination.
>>98317492i dont use dnd soo what is this nega energy
>>98317679Oh boy. We're back to the "clean the bodies with magic." argument.
>>983177783.0 and 3.5's name for Necromancy related magic energy.
https://1d6chan.miraheze.org/wiki/Millennial_Kingfrom an older /tg/
>>98317805Yeah, yeah. You dropped out of your golem making class. We get it.
>>98317716Old news oil reserves regenerate over time due to unknown processes, considering the discovery of microbes deep under the earth's crust it's entirely possible oil is a natural byproduct of living subterranean microorganisms.
>>98317836NTA but i make my golems out of bone what now?
>>98317492I bring in a gigathaum of negative energy.I then bring in a gigathaum of positive energy.What now?
>>98318212The kingdom evaporates
>>98290841If i rememeber right that book also ends with all of the animated dead turning on their necromancer masters killing every last(in the literal sense) living soul because of the horror of what they allowed to happen.
>>98290764the whole "necromancy corpse slave labor" thing is an extreme naive understanding of markets. The whole thing wouldn't be that lucrative because there's no one buying goods and no one to sell things to.Also in muh setting necromancy is powered by tortured souls of the dead they aren't automatons and the only reason they don't instantly slaughter the one who raised them is because the compulsion not to is part of the raise spell. Making a spell so they can follow complex orders on top of not killing people under malicious compliance interpretation of orders is impossible.
>>98290764There is nothing wrong with destroying the job market as long as you acknowledge that you need to take care of everyone whose job you just destroyed.
>>98320679You don't need complex orders to get benefit of undead labour. Just have them walk in hamster wheels and use that as equivalent of steam engine and a foundation of your industrial revolution.
>>98317492Read this as "it has a IQ of 12" and now I'm imagining an whole dimension of fungible evil retard constantly trying to fuck shit up.
>>98317836God. It's like a waltz. >Golems>What makes you think Magic can clean corpses>Everyone will be jobless and thus unable to afford all the food that's been made on the cheap!1 2 31 2 3Every point gets refuted and you jump to another point, double back to a previous pont. It's like arguing with a damn brick wall.
>>98320751Isn't that the sleeping idiot god lovecraft wrote?
>>98320707Dave the Barbarian tier villainI mean this as a compliment.
>>98321054Nah, Azathoth is just vastness.And indifference.The world is formed from his very dreamstuff, leaking out of his ponderous subconscious thoughts.When he awakes, his dream ends, and we do not so much die, as the universe zero-sums like a nigga who just achieved CHIM wrong.He is constantly lulled by an army of formless pipers, who are themselves of the stuff of star-gods.
>>98317811sounds retarded
>>98321942D&D cosmology -is- retarded, because it's semi-objective.There are literally planes of positive and negative "Elemental" energy that are adjacent to the material plane and directly influence the moral dispoisition of entities there and in other planes adjoining them.This plane is also the ultimate origin point for all things that are "Evil", and their designation as "Evil" generally grounds them in originating from or being influenced by this plane, directly or indirectly.In D&D Good and Evil are friggin elements like fire and water.They have properties associated with them too; negative energy decays living things, and makes them dead, then with a megadose "un"-dead, shunting them along the spectrum of which "dead" or "inert" is simply the midpoint.One theory is that matter is animated by being strongly charged with positive or negative energy, "living" beings are animated by positive energy, and "unliving" ones by negative energy, which is inimical to the wellbeing and persistence of "Living" things around it, as they are inimical to it.Law and Chaos work like that too, and when you get down to it, it's maddening.
>>98290764This concept works better on the local scale with labor shortages. Grandpa's spirit has fucked off with a burial and everything but his body still helps around the farm until the magic leaves his body. It's just another form of organ donation.
>>98290764Because that incentivizes murder-slavery, which would turn your nation into a lawless hellhole. And a bunch of people would be pissed at you using their relatives as farm equipment. And tard wrangling the undead would still be a full time job that requires years of study and training. It would probably provide some economic benefit, but it would be very difficult to scale up to an economic powerhouse (especially if you have to replace undead as they decay). You would basically have to either oppress your own population into murder-slavery or go to war and murder-enalave other states. Either option will get you assassinated.This is assuming a low magic setting. If a high magic setting where you can easily create intelligent skeletons that require no upkeep, then there still isn't a reason to use necromancy as other forms of magic could derive the same or better economic efficiency (i.e. animated objects, alchemy, etc).
>>98321976>There are literally planes of positive and negative "Elemental" energy that are adjacent to the material plane and directly influence the moral dispoisition of entities there and in other planes adjoining them.>This plane is also the ultimate origin point for all things that are "Evil", and their designation as "Evil" generally grounds them in originating from or being influenced by this plane, directly or indirectly.Incorrect, they're just, roughly, Life and Death. Good and Evil are "driven" by groups of five Outer Planes each (the Upper and Lower Planes) made up of them as literal forces, with Law and Chaos similarly having five at-least-lean-their-way Planes though this is very firmly treated as "secondary" to Good/Evil. There are a LOT of affinities between Positive Energy and Good and Negative Energy and Evil, but on the cosmological level they're separate things and have loads of examples of the Inner Plane energy's use without the Outer Plane's Alignment implication.
>>98322199All planes suffused with negative energy, like the various hells, the "Shadowfell" (bleh) and the Abyss are influenced by the ultimate source of negative energy, which is the negative energy plane.In the beginning, there was only law and chaos, the interactions between law and chaos permutated Good and Evil at right-angles to themselves.Planes composed entirely of abstract elements are intrinsically hostile to organic life forms, which is why they are both underexplored, and underresearched; the hells and elemental planes are composed of the same impure essences that the material realm is, but in differing proportions.My hypotheses are more or less independant from the current or former "arrangements" of the cosmos, be it great wheel or whatever, because they are not commenting on the structure, but the interactions between disparate poles.You cannot separate good from positive energy, life affirming forces, and sustenance for mortal beings, just as you cannot separate negative energy from it's antonym.Say you live in an undead world, formed by negative energy, so your people and animals are all undead, and your crops are undead, and your whole world works on a sort of inverted version of the same principles.Skeletons are your neighbors.They hate and fear fleshy things, because they have the same reaction to seeing a fleshy being walking around, as a fleshy being would a skeleton.It is an intrusion into their world, it is intrinsically antithetical.There can never be peace between man and skeleton.This is why man can never be truly at peace with himself.Because there is a skeleton inside all of us.
>>98315378>no uThird worlders lmao
>>98290764One paladin and priest come around to banish undead
>>98323125>All planes suffused with negative energy, like the various hells, the "Shadowfell" (bleh) and the Abyss are influenced by the ultimate source of negative energy, which is the negative energy plane.The Lower Planes are not suffused with Negative Energy, they are suffused with Evil energy, and the Shadowfell is mushing the Negative Energy Plane and Plane of Shadow together. You demonstrably do not know shit about what you're talking about, consult pre-4e cosmology sourcebooks.
>>98291311Just pay your mercenaries with worthless dollery-dos, goy
