The End of Necromancy

[sun_tzu]

I'm no expert on how magic works in D&D, so my apologies if I'm saying something monumentally stupid here...
But, considering that the undead are powered by negative energy, what would happen if someone, somehow, managed to "lock" the plane of negative energy, even temporarily? Would undead throughout the multiverse crumble to dust?

[Druid]

I don't think thay need a constant link to it. If so then wouldn't undead die within an anti magic field? Incidently, I've always wondered why constructs don't.

[Quietus]

From what I remember, they DO have a very minor connection to the Negative Energy plane. Personally, I'd say that it is similar to food - they can go a certain amount of time without that energy, but if that plane were locked for long enough, they could "starve" from lack thereof. It would also shut down a lot of things like Inflict spells and the like.

[Yuki Akuma]

I don't think thay need a constant link to it. If so then wouldn't undead die within an anti magic field? Incidently, I've always wondered why constructs don't.

Constructs (or, at least, golems) aren't powered by magic. They're powered by bound elementals.

[Quirinus_Obsidian]

Yah; as much as we hate to say it; PCs. NPCs, etc. need negative energy. If the world (Eberron, Faerun, what have you) were filled with nothing but Positive energy; it would end. The center of the Multiverse is supposed to have elements from all of the different energy, alighment, etc planes. Cutting off a Fire elemental from the Elemental Plane of Fire would not kill it; I would rule that it would severly weakn it. Same goes for Undead, Celetials, etc that are "extraplanar".

What's also funny is that if we had an earlier edition game, without Necromancy we would have no healing spells, as they were Necro spells back in the day (as they should be, IMO); not Conjuration (Healing).

[Jimp]

The Manual of the Planes notes that not including certain energy or elemental planes doesn't necessarily mean that spells and effects using them cease working. They just take what they need from elsewhere.
Paraphrased, away from books at the moment.

[BCOVertigo]

Is this purely theoretical or are you planning on doing this as a character or DM?

As I see it you'll have multiple problems to deal with:
A. The whole 'planar imbalance' issue.
B. Every evil diety, undead and necromancer in existance wants you dead. Plus the inevitables.
C. Necromancy's too cool to go down like that. If for no other reason than "It's not Conjuration", you probably can't shut down negative energy everywhere by sealing up the main source of it. And if you (as DM) rule it can, what other processes that require negative energy (being able to die) did you screw up?

All in all it can only work by fiat and will most likely make things worse.

[silentknight]

I would be curious how you could "seal" an infinite plane away from everything else in the multiverse.

It would seem easier, and actually feasible, to craft a spell that locks a target undead away from negative energy. There are probably spells like that already. Does Negative Energy Protection count?

As stated above, I don't think that being cut off from neg energy would really affect undead, though.

[JimmyDPawn]

I'm pretty sure that most undead (at least those that you can easily animate) are like golems; they're just negative energy spirits bound to a corpreal body.

So... no on the sealing?

[Sardia]

I'd say go for it, provided that some degree of Negative Energy is necessary for death as a whole. Cut off the Negative Energy Plane, and nothing dies. Living things might get smashed, slashed, cut into pieces, broken beyond repair, but won't die, nor will their pieces.
This will have insteresting social and medical consequences. Not to mention making adventuring difficult.
"Die, orc! Die! Die! Oh, Pelor, please let the orc die!"

[Illiterate Scribe]

The universe would explode from the sheer awesomeness.

[daggaz]

Die?? Nothing would even get hurt. Everything would just keep expanding and growing until it all exploded. Remember, Negative and Positive is a balanced axiom of the Mulitiverse, just as Good and Evil and Law and Chaos.

[Tola]

Sadists and masochists around the world would dance with glee. No-one's said there's no such thing and PAIN, even if things don't die/get 'hurt'.

[JaronK]

I'd have fun in that situation with the idea that without the negative energy plane to balance things out, positive energy would grow and grow. At first it would be great... everyone gets free fast healing and crops grow super fast. But then lower level people start popping from all the power... death by awesome! It would make a pretty funny campaign if your goal was to save the world by bringing back evil.

JaronK

[Mewtarthio]

I'd have fun in that situation with the idea that without the negative energy plane to balance things out, positive energy would grow and grow. At first it would be great... everyone gets free fast healing and crops grow super fast. But then lower level people start popping from all the power... death by awesome! It would make a pretty funny campaign if your goal was to save the world by bringing back evil.

JaronK

Hey, look what happens to people who decide to travel to the Positive Energy Plane. Your average Commoner explodes quite spectacularly (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/planes.htm#positiveDominant) within twelve seconds.

[JaronK]

Well, right, that's what I was talking about. Over time everything becomes more and more like the positive energy plane. The weaker folks would start popping first, then the more powerful ones.

That's what Death by Awesome is.

JaronK

[Ikkitosen]

Would locking the positive plane kill all living creatures? No. They're here and they're "alive". You might stop more undead from being created I guess. Not my rules strong point though ;)

[JaronK]

Actually, if you locked off the positive plane, you'd likely have the same thing in reverse. After a while, all that unchecked negative energy would likely make everyone sick and cause them to die.

JaronK

[Sardia]

The way I've always thought of it, the game universe is a bit like a bathtub-- the positive energy plane is the faucet of life, and the negative energy plane is something like the ultimate drain. Undead are little vortexes leading on down.
Block the drain and the tub fills...and fills...then overflows.

[Fawsto]

That is mostly correct. Everything that has an origin must have an end. In D&D the origin of Life is the Positive Energy Plane and the end is the big void we like to call Negative Energy Plane.


Altough closing it would harm all the magics that are conected directly with the plane. There are some undeads taht would be instatly desintegrated if the pane is shut, others would keep "alive" for inderteminate time.

I can't remember where I read this, probably in one of those pro-necromancy tomes, but somewhere says that there are diferent times of undead, wach with it's bond to the neagtive energy plane.

[JadedDM]

Personally, I would say that if the Positive Plane was 'sealed', then nobody would be able to heal and no new life could be created (no birth, for instance). If it were the Negative Plane, then nobody could die. Either way, it'd be bad.

[Sardia]

Personally, I would say that if the Positive Plane was 'sealed', then nobody would be able to heal and no new life could be created (no birth, for instance). If it were the Negative Plane, then nobody could die. Either way, it'd be bad.

So if you seal off both?...

[JadedDM]

Total stagnation. Nobody would die, but nobody would ever be born, either. You could still take damage, but could not be healed. It would be...well, a living hell.

[Mewtarthio]

Personally, I would say that if the Positive Plane was 'sealed', then nobody would be able to heal and no new life could be created (no birth, for instance). If it were the Negative Plane, then nobody could die. Either way, it'd be bad.

But people can die in the absence of Negative Energy: Just look at the Positive Energy Plane. You're surrounded by such glorious brightness that you risk going blind, and you get filled with life until you die in a brilliant explosion.

[Weasel of Doom]

That would be so cool. Commoners go BOOM, you could even have the objective of an evil villian to kill everyone by manipulating a good church or party of adventurers into blocking negative energy

[Sardia]

Total stagnation. Nobody would die, but nobody would ever be born, either. You could still take damage, but could not be healed. It would be...well, a living hell.

Now that is a motivation to adventure. But adventure very, very carefully, unless you rule that going into negative hit points without death as an option just means you keep moving around. Perhaps with penalties for losing multiples of your hit points.

[Mewtarthio]

That would be so cool. Commoners go BOOM, you could even have the objective of an evil villian to kill everyone by manipulating a good church or party of adventurers into blocking negative energy

And Death Ward doesn't even protect against it! The only way to protect yourself from Positive Energy Overload is to stab yourself repeatedly! :smallbiggrin:

[Koji]

The planes of negative and positive energy represent greater forces than just magic, and you've got to be careful about how far-reaching this might be. The energy planes were probably left kind of vague and mysterious on purpose, so that different DMs could play with them differently.

The negative energy plane represents entropy, decay, death, and destruction. Mostly, these are good things. Things need to die and decay to give room and sustenance to new life, and you can't create something without destroying something else--digging into a mountain to mine ore, cutting down a tree to make furniture--even taking clay from a river and turning it into a pot destroys what it was.

How does life work? Living creatures (native to the prime material plane, anyway) are supposedly composed of the four elements and powered by positive energy. (Corporeal) undead are composed of the four elements and filled with negative energy.

That said, is this energy "on loan" from its relevant plane? When someone dies, the positive energy leaves their body. Does it stick around, or does it go back to its home plane? Does it disappear entirely?

According to the D&D cosmology, magic that uses these energies generally calls it from their home plane. When you animate a corpse, you're borrowing negative energy from somewhere and putting it in the body. The spell ends and the energy is kept there.

This cosmology suggests that events like supernovas and black holes are
all using this energy. Indeed, what astronomers call "dark energy" is the entropic force slowly pulling the universe apart. That sounds a whole lot like a certain inner plane I know of. What happens to these large-scale events?

There are two options I can think of: Negative energy is shut out and no more can come in, but what's already here is enough to regulate the universe. Magic using negative energy slowly dries up, and while undead don't die, you can't make any more. Every time anyone frees up negative energy (by killing an undead, for instance), it runs "down the drain" and goes out into the universe. Of course, nobody in a medieval setting would understand this, which leads to an interesting idea I'll get to later.

The second option is that all negative energy is screened out, and since this would ruin the universe for everyone, that screen only applies to MAGICAL negative energy. Black holes still work, people die, buildings crumble, but the undead are instantly destroyed and necromancy no longer works.

Going back to the first option, there are some GREAT adventure seeds here: Let's say a lawful good empire or overzealous but well-meaning church finds a way to cut off the negative energy plane's influence. They do some amazing thing (it'd take a lot, considering how big a deal it would be) that ends the threat of the "evil" plane.

At first, nobody notices the change. Necromancers and evil clerics begin to complain that they can no longer channel or manipulate negative energy as well. No new undead show up, and as brave adventurers kill the old ones, things start to look pretty hopeful. What nobody realizes is that this negative energy that's being freed can't go back to the negative energy plane, and it's hovering around somewhere, gathering together in preparation for some dreadful reaction.

The party, being heroic and awesome, would catch wind of this through a series of crazy events, and would eventually have to destroy whatever was screening the negative energy out, or face whatever destructive force choses to take control of this great big ball of destruction.

phew

I didn't expect that to be such a huge post. I just love the energy planes. :xykon:

[Gralamin]

I would be curious how you could "seal" an infinite plane away from everything else in the multiverse.

It would seem easier, and actually feasible, to craft a spell that locks a target undead away from negative energy. There are probably spells like that already. Does Negative Energy Protection count?

As stated above, I don't think that being cut off from neg energy would really affect undead, though.

Insane Eberron ritual using the moon as a material component of course.

Either that are dimension seals...

[Emperor Tippy]

Nah. Just epic ritual magic and an arbitrarily large number of solars.

[Gralamin]

Well thats if you want to do it the non fun way.

[Emperor Tippy]

Or you use the earth as a focus or material component.

[Gralamin]

That would be more fun

Heck why not combine them into a ritual of bringing death by awesome?

[Emperor Tippy]

I jsut realized that you could create a level 0 spell that had the earth as a material component and be fine. Now any first level caster can end the world in 6 seconds.

[Gralamin]

Bah, just crack open a bigger hole to the positive plane, that'd amount to the same thing as sealing up the negative, and is very attemptable pre-epic.

Or, use some sorta modified AMS, like an unholy artifact (a souped up Darkskull (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/wondrousItems.htm#darkskull) comes to mind). Also conceivable pre-epic.

Though any real tinkering with planes would require epic BS or high level divine wierdness (A buncha gods team up to seal some big baddy 'snarl' type away and something goes wrong, etc)

When the planes orbit around the world, it is much easier to keep them away

[JaronK]

I actually had a great campaign idea. Once there was the great evil lich... but some adventurers killed him. There was the great daemon Mephistopheles... but a group of paladins took him out. Black Dragon? Knocked out by crusading monks. Great Red Wyrm? Epic spell bait. Etc. One by one the great evils of the world were destroyed. The forces of good banded together, and with great magic they eradicated poverty and starvation, and made all places wonderful. There was peace and paradise everywhere. Even the lower planes were made good. The 999 hells became a wonderful little vacation spot. And so good was triumphant.

But it was too triumphant. The great victory of good weakened the very fabric of the negative energy plane, and made positive energy flow throughout all the lands. At first it was great, as disease disappeared and even grave injuries healed in seconds. But soon the commoners began to pop. And the great solars and mighty epic wizards realized that they'd made a horrible mistake, and all of existance would soon be flooded with enough positive energy to wipe out everything living. But after so many good works, they were all just too good to do anything about it.

So they went out to find the most evil people left in existance. None of them were super evil mind you, as life was just too good to be really evil, but they found the vilest they possibly could, and told them to wreck havoc and bring evil back into the world, so as to save the lives of everyone.

And those would be the PCs. Saving the world through wanton evil.

Fun campaign idea, anyway.

JaronK

[Tokiko Mima]

I suspect nothing would happen. You would no longer be able to create undead, of course, but the ones here sustain themselves on the energies all ready present on the Prime Material, rather than drawing extradimensionally from the Negative Energy Plane.

My logic is that I can't rationalize all undead having little extradimensional portals to the Outer Planes somewhere inside them. And likewise, it would be silly to assume that blocking the Positive Energy Plane would kill everything living. Positive or Negative Energy is necessary when spontaneously forming an entire being out of nothing, but is probably not needed for keeping them around.

[Sardia]

And likewise, it would be silly to assume that blocking the Positive Energy Plane would kill everything living. Positive or Negative Energy is necessary when spontaneously forming an entire being out of nothing, but is probably not needed for keeping them around.

Perhaps think of positive energy like sunlight-- if you're out of the sunlight, you aren't going to die right then and there...but ultimately the sun is the thing that provides you with the useful energy and heat that enable you to live. Take away the sun for good, and you'll have problems eventually.

[Yuki Akuma]

I actually had a great campaign idea. Once there was the great evil lich... but some adventurers killed him. There was the great daemon Mephistopheles... but a group of paladins took him out. Black Dragon? Knocked out by crusading monks. Great Red Wyrm? Epic spell bait. Etc. One by one the great evils of the world were destroyed. The forces of good banded together, and with great magic they eradicated poverty and starvation, and made all places wonderful. There was peace and paradise everywhere. Even the lower planes were made good. The 999 hells became a wonderful little vacation spot. And so good was triumphant.

But it was too triumphant. The great victory of good weakened the very fabric of the negative energy plane, and made positive energy flow throughout all the lands. At first it was great, as disease disappeared and even grave injuries healed in seconds. But soon the commoners began to pop. And the great solars and mighty epic wizards realized that they'd made a horrible mistake, and all of existance would soon be flooded with enough positive energy to wipe out everything living. But after so many good works, they were all just too good to do anything about it.

So they went out to find the most evil people left in existance. None of them were super evil mind you, as life was just too good to be really evil, but they found the vilest they possibly could, and told them to wreck havoc and bring evil back into the world, so as to save the lives of everyone.

And those would be the PCs. Saving the world through wanton evil.

Fun campaign idea, anyway.

JaronK

Positive and negative energy are not innately good or evil, I'm afraid. That doesn't work logically.

[The_Werebear]

For a campaign I wanted to do, something of the opposite of this was the problem. Some cultists had overlain the Negative Energy Plain with the material, so rather than being an inner energy plain, it was on par with the Plane of Shadow and the Etheral Plane.

The effects were that people spontaneously rose as intelligent undead with no casters about 50% time, rather than the normal negligible rate. Natural lifespans were considerably shorter, with Humans dieing of old age in their 50s, elves in their 300s, and such. Even good clerics channeled Negative energy simply because there wasn't a strong enough flow of Posative to manipulate. Healing spells always did the minimum amount.

So, for positive, I would imagine the effects would be reversed. No spontaneously rising undead at all, save maybe a few raised by casters who would have to expend a considerable amount of energy to do so. People would live far long, and everyone would channel positive energy. Healing would be maximized and Inflict would be minimized.

[JaronK]

Positive and negative energy are not innately good or evil, I'm afraid. That doesn't work logically.

They are associated with good and evil though. For that campaign, you would have to say they're associated enough to cause a severe imbalance.

JaronK

[Mewtarthio]

They are associated with good and evil though. For that campaign, you would have to say they're associated enough to cause a severe imbalance.

JaronK

Not necessarily. Pelor won't disown you if you ask for a Harm or Inflict spell. Only the animation of undead is evil. Additionally, channeling negative energy spontaneously is considered evil, but not necessarily because those spells are themselves evil: Rather, one could easily say that by choosing to channel negative energy instead of positive energy, you are choosing to give up the power to heal others in exchange for increased personal power in the form of rebuked/commanded undead.

[Koji]

Imagine the sun as positive energy and the empty space around it as negative. The sun is a giant furnace of creation and space is an empty void slowly drifting apart.

When you channel positive or negative energy, you're turning your body into a conduit for it to come in. Once it's here, it doesn't need magic to keep it here. That may be why undead don't die inside of anti-magic fields.

[JaronK]

Not necessarily. Pelor won't disown you if you ask for a Harm or Inflict spell. Only the animation of undead is evil. Additionally, channeling negative energy spontaneously is considered evil, but not necessarily because those spells are themselves evil: Rather, one could easily say that by choosing to channel negative energy instead of positive energy, you are choosing to give up the power to heal others in exchange for increased personal power in the form of rebuked/commanded undead.

Like I said, they're associated. I didn't say they were the same. For that campaign idea, you'd have to say the corelation was strong enough to have a significant effect.

JaronK