Good alligned god for a Necromancer?

[Rukelnikov]

I thought it meant the spell detected as Evil when using magic to identify it.

If I'm mistaken, I apologize for it.

It also means Clerics of Good alignment or who worship a god of Good alignment can't cast them.

[Schwann145]

Zombies and Skeletons are explicitly animated by having an evil spirit who desires killing anything that is alive enter a corpse and make it move, sometime pantomiming the person the corpse was a bit.

Whatever sinister force awakens a skeleton infuses its bones with a dark vitality, adhering joint to joint and reassembling dismantled limbs. This energy motivates a skeleton to move and think in a rudimentary fashion, though only as a pale imitation of the way it behaved in life. An animated skeleton retains no connection to its past, although resurrecting a skeleton restores it body and soul, banishing the hateful undead spirit that empowers it.

Like I initially said, it's shaky lore at best because nothing about what animates it is ever clarified. The only description given is "dark necromatic energies," but the problem is that what is "dark necromantic energies" and what is "not dark necromantic energies" is never explicitly stated. Is the entire school of Necromancy evil? Every last bit of it? Is Gentle Repose as evil as Animate Dead? Is Revivify or Resurrection? The spells aren't tagged any longer, so we don't have that to go by. The spell descriptions don't suggest that they're all "dark/evil," and neither does the School description.
So what does that leave us with? Not a lot.

In fact, in 3.X, a good-aligned Necromancer could field whole armies of Skeletons and Zombies without any alignment question (how they acquired the corpses could be in question, but not the part of animating them), because 3.X Skeletons and Zombies were just spooky automatons.

5e changed that deliberately, even with the idea of neutral-to-benevolent Undead and Undead uses being much more common/well-known nowadays that 20+ years ago.

In 3.X the "Animate Dead" had the [Evil] tag, and Clerics could never cast spells of an alignment in opposition to their own, which means Good clerics could never cast Animate Dead in 3.X.
Also, 3.X had *plenty* of non-evil undead options that were available to player characters to create/raise in various ways, *far far far* more than what is made available in 5e.

[JackPhoenix]

Like I initially said, it's shaky lore at best because nothing about what animates it is ever clarified.

A hateful undead spirit. It's in the MM text you've quoted. Not that it matters much.

The only description given is "dark necromatic energies," but the problem is that what is "dark necromantic energies" and what is "not dark necromantic energies" is never explicitly stated.

No, the problem is people not knowing what they are talking about or dragging irrelevant things into the discussion.

Is the entire school of Necromancy evil? Every last bit of it?

No, and nobody said it is.

Is Gentle Repose as evil as Animate Dead? Is Revivify or Resurrection?
The spells aren't tagged any longer, so we don't have that to go by. The spell descriptions don't suggest that they're all "dark/evil," and neither does the School description.

Which part of the spells' descriptions says anything about them creating undead? See above about relevancy to the topic.

So what does that leave us with? Not a lot.

It leaves us with all we need.

[Boci]

It leaves us with all we need.

Not really. In roleplaying games people will often want to roleplay, and part of that can involve pushing and exploring concepts. "Why is X evil?" is a pretty standard thing to explore, and in this area things are rather lacking. Why is making a skeleton evil? Because a hateful undead spirit animates it? Okay. What's a spirit in the context of D&D? And what's hateful about the one that animates a skeleton, given that it does exactly what I tell it to do, nothing more?

[Unoriginal]

For those who missed it:

5e is explicit that necromancy overall isn't any more good or evil than any other magical discipline. It's only creating undead that is not good, and only doing frequently that is evil person behavior.

Not really. In roleplaying games people will often want to roleplay, and part of that can involve pushing and exploring concepts. "Why is X evil?" is a pretty standard thing to explore, and in this area things are rather lacking.

They are not lacking. All this has been discussed over and over and over for a decade, and even before that the MM entries contains every answer you need on the topic of why Skeletons and Zombies are evil.

Why is making a skeleton evil? Because a hateful undead spirit animates it? Okay. What's a spirit in the context of D&D? And what's hateful about the one that animates a skeleton, given that it does exactly what I tell it to do, nothing more?

1) The spirit is hateful as in, it is full of hate. Hate for all that is living, more precisely. A Skeleton in presence of a living thing will immediately do everything they can to destroy said living thing, because they hate life that much.

2) Even if you are controlling the Skeleton and they're doing exactly what you tell them to do, nothing more, their mere existence is enough to cause other corpses to become inhabited by similar evil spirits. And you won't be controlling those.

If someone was dumping an alchemical substance in the river, knowing full well there was a % of chance that the substance would turn ordinary fishes into CR 1/4 people-eating hyper-aggressive monsters, it may be understandable for them to do it a few times if not doing it would be worse in the short term (ex: an evil being was using the substance as a power-up). If that someone was just dumping the substance in the river frequently, they wouldn't be a good-aligned person.

The same applies to Zombies and Skeletons.

[Boci]

They are not lacking. All this has been discussed over and over and over for a decade, and even before that the MM entries contains every answer you need on the topic of why Skeletons and Zombies are evil.

Then what's a spirit in D&D 5e? Seems that's rather important to discuss if you're arguing everything is laid out in the rules. I know what a soul is, because multiple rules reference it and how things interact with it, but spirit seems to lack such details in the rules.

And is it evil to make numerous intelligent undead, who as an intelligent creature, can be good?

2) Even if you are controlling the Skeleton and they're doing exactly what you tell them to do, nothing more, their mere existence is enough to cause other corpses to become inhabited by similar evil spirits. And you won't be controlling those.

So creating undead is evil because that will create more undead which you don't control. Okay, so first of all, why? Can I not make undead in a way that doesn't have that by product? And what about other stuff that indirectly makes evil things? Is running a factory evil in 5e D&D if part of the waste products could be harmful?

This really doesn't seem like a case closed matter.

[Blatant Beast]

What TSR was is not a factor here. WotC doesn't particularly care about following the TSR lore, and even the WotC-era editions don't follow the same lore.

Of course the past of the game is a factor here, as discussing the Lore, is an appeal to historical consistency. Anything that expands through iteration, (including D&D), is strongly influenced by it's starting condition.

The "Explicitly stated thing about undead" you keep quoting, is the legacy of the original design from Wisconsin. Now, as I quoted...the 5e system, also explicitly, states for people to ignore or alter the bits, they explicitly want to. It would, seem, explicitly, that our explicit quotes are at loggerheads.

Dekkion, the Skeletal Warrior, from the old Dungeons and Dragons cartoon from the 1980's, clearly was not inherently evil, which makes it possible for arguably the best story in that show, to be told.

Ultimately, that is my largest quibble, that potentially good stories are being rejected out of hand, due to less than a paragraph's worth of text, when the Monster Manual and other 5e books have stated repeatedly that everything can be changed to suit the game.

[Theodoxus]

5e PHB p. 204..

But like all things alignment related in 5E (and hopefully not to start the 23,948,029,039,402th rabbit hole about alignment in 5E) it's nigh meaningless. Alignment only has as much teeth as a DM gives it (and most I've played under barely gum it). Then there's the whole "frequently" stipulation, which is another highly subjective word. So... again, nigh meaningless.

[RedMage125]

In fact, in 3.X, a good-aligned Necromancer could field whole armies of Skeletons and Zombies without any alignment question (how they acquired the corpses could be in question, but not the part of animating them), because 3.X Skeletons and Zombies were just spooky automatons.

Minor nitpick, but this is incorrect.

Animate Dead is a spell with the [Evil] descriptor, and casting a spell with an alignment descriptor is an act of that alignment.

The BoVD also specifies that Animating the Undead is an Evil Act, regardless of the means used to do so (which is why Animate Dead and Create Undead have the [Evil] descriptor). It's described as a "crime against the world".

A Good character who routinely uses Evil means to accomplish Good ends is committing both Good and Evil acts, and according to the 3.5e DMG, would be Neutral (page 134, under the heading "Indecisiveness Indicates Neutrality"). I've actually got a character concept that is a Lawful Neutral Dread Necromancer that works by RAW, following this principle.

Also, Skeletons and Zombies may have had an INT of "-", but they were still Evil in alignment. Rather than being a violation of the General rule that mindless creatures are always Neutral, it is an example of the more Specific rule regarding creatures to whom Evil is part of their nature (usually fiends, but since, as we just went over, Undead are animated by Evil magicks, evil is part of their physiology). This is further supported in the fact that all Undead, regardless of alignment, ping on a Detect Evil spell (as per the spell description in the PHB).

[Hail Tempus]

Like I initially said, it's shaky lore at best because nothing about what animates it is ever clarified. The only description given is "dark necromatic energies," but the problem is that what is "dark necromantic energies" and what is "not dark necromantic energies" is never explicitly stated. Is the entire school of Necromancy evil? Every last bit of it? Is Gentle Repose as evil as Animate Dead? Is Revivify or Resurrection? The spells aren't tagged any longer, so we don't have that to go by. The spell descriptions don't suggest that they're all "dark/evil," and neither does the School description.
So what does that leave us with? Not a lot.

D&D doesn't exist in a vacuum. The game rules don't need to list out in tedious detail what acts are evil and what aren't. The players, and their PC's, know that the guy who burns down the orphanage and takes the kids hostage is the bad guy in a story.

Now, granted, raising the dead isn't something that can be done in real life. But the players, and their PC's, also know that the guy who routinely desecrates corpses and creates murderous undead monstrosities isn't likely to be the good guy.

What I don't get is why some posters on here want to twist themselves in rhetorical knots to try and come up with a good-guy necromancer. Unless your DM bans evil characters or a necromancer wouldn't fit in with the party, just play a Neutral Evil necromancer and move on with your life.

[Boci]

Now, granted, raising the dead isn't something that can be done in real life. But the players, and their PC's, also know that the guy who routinely desecrates corpses and creates murderous undead monstrosities isn't likely to be the good guy.

Sure, and an archmage someone who routinely fireballs peasants for fun isn't good either, but that doesn't make fire magic evil.

Or enchaner, a really good example of a magic school with a bunch of spells that should probably be considered evil by default.

What I don't get is why some posters on here want to twist themselves in rhetorical knots to try and come up with a good-guy necromancer.

Re-inventing alignments is a common creative exercise. Hell, back when alignment was a more closely tied to mechanic, WotC used to do that to. We got paladin variants of every alignment possible, plus the blackguard and greyguard, an explicitly not evil demon summoner (malconvoker I think), a chaotic monk, a blight focused druid that killed nature and plants, ect ect.

Hell they still do that stuff with oathbreaker paladin, and oath of tyranny and conquest too. Arguably vengeance too, but that one is more questionable.

[Hail Tempus]

Sure, and an archmage someone who routinely fireballs peasants for fun isn't good either, but that doesn't make fire magic evil.

There's nothing in the rules that says magic of any school is inherently evil. No one on here is arguing that necromancy is all evil. The argument is limited to a small subset of necromancy spells which create evil undead monsters through the desecration of corpses. And I can't really understand why some people want to try and come up for justifications as to why dragging grandma's corpse out of her coffin and stuffing an evil, murderous spirit shouldn't result in the townsfolk coming after you with pitchforks and torches.

D&D takes a lot of cues from other media, that we as the players are typically familiar with. What's the first thing that comes to mind when someone mentions a zombie? I'm betting it's not anything good.

[Boci]

There's nothing in the rules that says magic of any school is inherently evil.

I said fire magic, not evocation. I am comparing a whole school of magic to part of another, I'm comparing two significant subgroups of two seperate schools. Fire magic from evocation and undead creation / summoning from necromancer. Or indeed charm / dominate from enchantment.

[Hail Tempus]

I said fire magic, not evocation. I am comparing a whole school of magic to part of another, I'm comparing two significant subgroups of two seperate schools. Fire magic from evocation and undead creation / summoning from necromancer. Or indeed charm / dominate from enchantment.

Sure, there are no fire spells the casting of which, in of itself, is something a non-evil person would avoid doing.

[Boci]

Sure, there are no fire spells the casting of which, in of itself, is something a non-evil person would avoid doing.

Yes, and some people will ask why the same can't be for undead raising spells. Why isn't it possible? Can I not even research a costume variant with sufficient safeguards built in that I can cast however many times without that counting as an evil action.

Basically the answer is "no", and as to "why?" because WotC says so. Some people accept that, great, and other wants to explore this angle more. Also great. With a good and willing fantasy games like D&D can cater to multiple audience and preferences.

[Theodoxus]

D&D takes a lot of cues from other media, that we as the players are typically familiar with. What's the first thing that comes to mind when someone mentions a zombie? I'm betting it's not anything good.

Generally not. There is a whole subgenre (iZombie, Warm Bodies, and similar) where the zombies aren't overly monstrous.

Something like the alchemically reanimated Mountain from ASoF&I isn't quite so murder-rampage-y as a typical zombie. I'd be happy fluffing any artificer's (especially alchemist) animated undead as less life-ender and more mindless automaton.

Then there's the trope of the undead servant. Michon in The Walking Dead with her zombied boyfriend and his friend (brother? been a while). Or the typical physically weak mage who animates a bodyguard or two - stuffing them in plate with great helms. Hopefully taking the time to bleach the bones so there's no smell - just a silent guard that keeps the rabble at bay.

Then of course the whole 'undead workforce' used to keep cities clean, the sewers free of debris, the landfill turned, etc. Jobs people don't want to do and modern society quickly developed machinery to handle instead.

Since animating magic doesn't have a time limit (provided the spell is recast daily), it's even better than modern robots, if similar, for a labor workforce. Seems with a little bit of obfuscation, any society with the ability to create undead would pretty quickly go down the WALL-E rabbit trail.

[Hail Tempus]

Yes, and some people will ask why the same can't be for undead raising spells. Why isn't it possible? Can I not even research a costume variant with sufficient safeguards built in that I can cast however many times without that counting as an evil action.

No, because it's not about safeguards. The undead creatures you create- skeletons, zombies, wights etc. are inherently evil. Just by casting the spell, you're adding an additional amount of evil into the world. It would be like, I don't know, creating a robot that was programmed to default to murdering toddlers if its owner didn't give it instructions to the contrary every day. Can you see a good person doing that?

Basically the answer is "no", and as to "why?" because WotC says so. Some people accept that, great, and other wants to explore this angle more. Also great. With a good and willing fantasy games like D&D can cater to multiple audience and preferences.

No one is saying you can't homebrew a system where undead are created in a non-evil way.

[Boci]

No one is saying you can't homebrew a system where undead are created in a non-evil way.

That seems a weird use of "homebrew". Poison use was evil just by RAW (even though there were good creatures who had poison). Paizo in PF argued slavery wasn't evil, but a lawful act. Were DMs "homebrewing" if they ignored this? Say, for example, because they found them stupid?

[Hail Tempus]

That seems a weird use of "homebrew". Poison use was evil just by RAW (even though there were good creatures who had poison). Paizo in PF argued slavery wasn't evil, but a lawful act. Were DMs "homebrewing" if they ignored this? Say, for example, because they found them stupid?

Call it creating your own setting, if you prefer.

I'm currently running a Conan-influenced setting where slavery is neutral, in the context of the society in that world. But, if my game was set in the Sword Coast of Faerun, slavers would be the bad guys, rather than businesspeople who could be of (almost) any alignment. You can't shoe-horn good slavers into Faerun, any more than you can shoehorn "good" creation of undead.

[Boci]

Call it creating your own setting, if you prefer.

Again, that sounds weird to me at least.

"I created my own setting,"

"Oh cool. What's it like?"

"Oh its Forgotten Realms, only a tweaked a couple of things I disagreed with, like racial demographs, how to handle longer lived races, and some of the prescribed morality me and my group couldn't get behind,"

"Yeah that doesn't sound like you created your own setting,"

Personally I wouldn't call this "homebrewing", or "creating your own setting", I'd call "tweaking minor details (to better suit you and your group)".

[Zevox]

Again, that sounds weird to me at least.

"I created my own setting,"

"Oh cool. What's it like?"

"Oh its Forgotten Realms, only a tweaked a couple of things I disagreed with, like racial demographs, how to handle longer lived races, and some of the prescribed morality me and my group couldn't get behind,"

"Yeah that doesn't sound like you created your own setting,"

Personally I wouldn't call this "homebrewing", or "creating your own setting", I'd call "tweaking minor details (to better suit you and your group)".

I'd call that homebrewing. A small amount of homebrewing is still homebrewing.

[Boci]

I'd call that homebrewing. A small amount of homebrewing is still homebrewing.

Fair. Different people can have different definitions of the same. Its not homebrewing is a science with strict definitions.

[Schwann145]

Are the undead, created by a Spore Druid's Animate Dead spell also inherently evil?
They are, after all, controlled by the spores, no?

Consider a Flesh Golem.
Golem creation is not an evil act. Creating a flesh golem requires the desecration of multiple bodies and the enslavement of one or more elemental spirits.
Not evil.

Enchantment-based mind r@pe? Never inherently evil.

----------

This discussion isn't really about how to skirt around the default expectations in order to justify a good necromancer.
It's a question about why those default expectations exist at all, despite appearing highly contradictory and never being explained in detail for the sake of their justification.

----------

If you want to say, "that's just the way it is in the Realms," well then now you inherit the burden of explaining archliches and balenorn (good undead).
Not to mention other D&D settings with good undead (like the elves in Eberron).

[Theodoxus]

IIRC, balenorn, et al. aren't created using Animate Dead.

Still waiting on the OP to come answer the necessary questions to clarify...

What I don't get is why people are stressing over evil acts. As noted, 5E doesn't have any drawbacks to being 'evil' and exceedingly few ways to know outside of direct observation if someone is behaving in a socially immoral way. WotC has definitely pushed an agenda of moral objectivity with a smidge of 'Do as you wilt, if it harms none' mentality.

It's not a bad plan overall, allowing the gamut of moral structure from puritanism to hedonism at the table level. But equally, that means discussing a general world wide baseline is meaningless and probably harmful, if not to the game, at least to a useful discussion.

[JackPhoenix]

Then what's a spirit in D&D 5e?

Depends on context. It's like asking "what's a creature", it's too broad a question to the point of being meaningless.
As for the specific example of the spirits powering skeletons, they are some kinds of entities that a) may be some form of energy b) are undead c) are capable of feeling at least some emotions (hate) d) have at least some desires (to kill any and all living things they run across) e) have enough moral agency to have alignment, unlike the spirits driving golems, which are unaligned f) are intelligent enough to have some problem-solving ability and g) value their self-preservation to some degree.
If anything, we know more about the spirits animating undead than we know about souls, despite souls having more mechanical interactions.

And is it evil to make numerous intelligent undead, who as an intelligent creature, can be good?

Can it? Fixed alignment has nothing to do with intelligence.

So creating undead is evil because that will create more undead which you don't control. Okay, so first of all, why?

No, it's not evil BECAUSE it can possibly create more uncontrolled undead, but it's possibly one of the factors contributing to the fact that creating undead is never a good act (but not necessarily evil, either). Why? Because the writers said so. It's their right to decide the rules of their fictional universe. Feel free to houserule otherwise, but we're discussing things as they are, not some hypotethical homebrew.

[Ionathus]

I DM for a good-aligned Necromancer PC.

She's a "reformed Kelemvorite" who believes very strongly that you should never extend your natural life or do any funky soul shenanigans.

However, she's also a mortician who believes that bodies aren't special once the soul's no longer in them, and you might as well make use of a useful resource.

It helps that in our version of the Forgotten Realms lore, basic necromancy has a tenuous connection to negative energy at best. It's not explicitly an evil spirit in that skeleton or zombie, it's more like the magic is firing whatever neurons or ghostly energy left in the corpse.

However, higher-level necromancy is fuzzier. She started using Ghouls, which have a bit more sentience than zombies, and it's begun to test the limits of her beliefs. The player is loving it.

[Boci]

Depends on context. It's like asking "what's a creature", it's too broad a question to the point of being meaningless.

Ehh, no. A creature is "anything capable of taking actions (including plants and undead and constructs)". Hence why Haste and other spells specify "creatures" as thing they can effect.

So if "What is a spirit in D&D 5e?" is like "What is a creature?" could you provide a similar answer to the one above?

[Zevox]

What I don't get is why people are stressing over evil acts. As noted, 5E doesn't have any drawbacks to being 'evil' and exceedingly few ways to know outside of direct observation if someone is behaving in a socially immoral way.

How is that something you don't get? Unless you're just playing the game as a war game with no roleplaying involved, how you act during the game matters. If you're playing a character who does evil things, that's going to have consequences at some point, unless the DM goes out of their way to have the rest of world ignore it.

[Schwann145]

D&D is a combat simulator with the illusion of being an RPG.

[Unoriginal]

What I don't get is why people are stressing over evil acts

Because good-aligned gods don't want their worshipers to be doing evil acts.

I DM for a good-aligned Necromancer PC.

She's a "reformed Kelemvorite" who believes very strongly that you should never extend your natural life or do any funky soul shenanigans.

However, she's also a mortician who believes that bodies aren't special once the soul's no longer in them, and you might as well make use of a useful resource.

It helps that in our version of the Forgotten Realms lore, basic necromancy has a tenuous connection to negative energy at best. It's not explicitly an evil spirit in that skeleton or zombie, it's more like the magic is firing whatever neurons or ghostly energy left in the corpse.

However, higher-level necromancy is fuzzier. She started using Ghouls, which have a bit more sentience than zombies, and it's begun to test the limits of her beliefs. The player is loving it.

My question when I read that is: why did the player wanted their character to worship Kelemvor?

As in, in the books, Kelemvor's hatred of undead has nothing to do with them being evil or the like. Kelemvor would be the kind to consider a good-aligned undead being (like Soon and the rest of the ghost-martyrs in OotS) to be on his worshiper's "kill on sight" list.

Again, I'm not saying you're doing badwrongfun for changing the lore regarding undead, it's your campaign world and your players are having fun.

But changing Kelemvor like that means the resulting entity has nothing to do with who Kelemvor is. So I don't understand why someone would want to do that.

Like, it can't be because they want their character to worship Kelemvor as he is presented in the D&D media, since he is presented with his absolute non-acceptance of undeath.

It can't be because they want their character to worship a god of death and Kelemvor is the only option, because there are several other options. Jergal for example would be welcoming this Necromancer happily.

So... they wanted their character to worship a god different from Kelemvor-as-presented-in-D&D, but who's still called Kelemvor?


To re-use my earlier analogy, this is like wanting a character who's part of the Bat-family and going "my character strongly believe in fighting crime and injustice, but they don't see anything wrong with shooting people in front of their kids, and will do so when the opportunity arises".

Because Kelemvor hates Undead as much as Batman hates kids witnessing their parents being shot dead.