Is it even possible to have a good aligned necromancer?

Raising the dead to do your bidding doesn't exactly seem to be a good act - especially when some undead can steal your life-force.

How can you go about making a good necromancer?

I suppose that one could take a cue from the book Necroscope: the "good" necromancers (or 'Necroscopes') use their powers to speak with the dead to help them complete unfinished business or to seek their help in dealing with evils in the world. For example, in that book, the Necroscope had the counsel and accumulated wisdom from countless great minds and personalities from history. I mean, imagine if someone really COULD speak with the dead to settle disputes, identity murderers and finish incomplete works of art, writing and music. The dead can use the Necroscope as a vessel to allow them to do these things.

On the other hand, a Necromancer "forces" the dead to do his/her bidding, even finding ways to torture souls into submission and disturbing or even withholding their rest. They control the dead like puppets, which is kind of horrific, if you think about it.

Good necromancers could be the protectors of cemeteries, aides to law enforcement and detectives.

Of course one would have to change the fluff of what powers lurk behind Necromancy as a source of magic.

It depends what kind of system you use.

In D&D, it seems possible even if I think the kind of good-doer necromancer you talking would more likely be a priest of good aligned god of death.

In Warhammer, the last time I check (and it is WHFRP 1 I talking about), necromancers are evil.

In Palladium/Rifts, they also evil.

May I ask, OHT, what kind of adventure to you want to play with a good necromancer ?

Hey, it's just meat and bone. It's going to rot away, the soul's gone on to its reckoning on another plane — why not put it to good use? Waste not, want not.

Besides, every zombie out there toiling at the fields, building roads or guarding the lord's castle is one less living human being. Like robots, perfectly obedient and eschewing food, sleep, air, comfort, entertainment.

Yes sir, Your Majesty. Undead labor is the future! Just sign here, giving the Cabal of Bone unrestricted access to the realm's tombs, crypts, barrows, mausoleums, necropoli, cemeteries, burial grounds and funerary plots, and we'll take care of everything else. Here, dotted line. No, no blood, ink will do.

Quote from: The Butcher;791947Hey, it's just meat and bone. It's going to rot away, the soul's gone on to its reckoning on another plane — why not put it to good use? Waste not, want not.

Besides, every zombie out there toiling at the fields, building roads or guarding the lord's castle is one less living human being. Like robots, perfectly obedient and eschewing food, sleep, air, comfort, entertainment.

Yes sir, Your Majesty. Undead labor is the future! Just sign here, giving the Cabal of Bone unrestricted access to the realm's tombs, crypts, barrows, mausoleums, necropoli, cemeteries, burial grounds and funerary plots, and we'll take care of everything else. Here, dotted line. No, no blood, ink will do.

There's actually a hammer horror film where the Lord of the manor puts zombies to work in his tin mine. Plague of the Zombies.

It doesn't end well...

On a more serious note, a "good guy" necromancer could be a medium/oracle, exorcist and undead hunter.

Quote from: The Butcher;791947Hey, it's just meat and bone. It's going to rot away, the soul's gone on to its reckoning on another plane — why not put it to good use? Waste not, want not.

Besides, every zombie out there toiling at the fields, building roads or guarding the lord's castle is one less living human being. Like robots, perfectly obedient and eschewing food, sleep, air, comfort, entertainment.

Yes sir, Your Majesty. Undead labor is the future! Just sign here, giving the Cabal of Bone unrestricted access to the realm's tombs, crypts, barrows, mausoleums, necropoli, cemeteries, burial grounds and funerary plots, and we'll take care of everything else. Here, dotted line. No, no blood, ink will do.

What an hideously capitalistic approach of the mortal remains of your fellow humans ! Unionize the restless deads !

Quote from: yabaziou;791944May I ask, OHT, what kind of adventure to you want to play with a good necromancer ?

I was just looking for some ideas and thought there was a discussion to be had!

this would depend on how the afterlife (if any) works in the setting.

if, like the butcher says, "it's just meat and bone", i don't see anything evil about raising the dead. they make great workers or cheap soldiers. the necromancer who raised a horde of zombies from the local cemetery to defend a village from a tribe of orcs might not be loved by the people, but he did a good thing nonetheless.

if the soul is somehow affected, things get a bit hairy.

if certain kinds of undead are always evil and have a will of their own, summonging or creating those would be an evil act as well i guess. if only for the danger of the creature breaking free of the necromancers control.

also, i could easily imagine a frankenstein-like mago-scientist experimenting with the undead without evil intent.

Quote from: One Horse Town;791952I was just looking for some ideas and thought there was a discussion to be had!

That is a fair reason to ask what you asked !

I will repeat myself but I do think that people that are interested in keeping good relations with the restless dead in a RPG setting are more likely to become priests/servants of a good aligned dead god than to become necromancers.

They are lots of social stigmata attached to the trade of necromancer, and people who want to have a good social standingwill prefer embracing religion.

But one can imagine a world without divine power where good necromaners do what death god priests would do.

Or an amoral setting where the restless deads are a workforce like any other like The Butcger suggested.

Or an one of a kind necromancer who is enthralled with dead magic but unwilling to do immoral things and/or is too good natured to giging in the darkest pratices of necromancy. This indivivual may even become some sort of magic detective, speaking with the departed souls in order to solve the mystery of their death.

Quote from: One Horse Town;791938Is it even possible to have a good aligned necromancer?

Raising the dead to do your bidding doesn't exactly seem to be a good act - especially when some undead can steal your life-force.

How can you go about making a good necromancer?

I don't know there's anything inherently evil about it, except that human society tends to find it in bad taste.

The term actually means only divination through communication with the dead. Seances would be a form of necromancy that actually still happen IRL (or so Hollywood would have me believe). The whole "raising the dead" thing is an addition to the term by modern fantasy literature and RPGs.

Well, it depends how you set up magic and your cosmology.

In my main setting, I wanted the whole undead thing to make sense.  Not just drop a set of rules on a table and say, "of course there are wights and ghouls, they are in the Monster Book in our rules", I wanted an underpinning for necromancy (among other things).

SO in Celtricia, spirits have a lot of trouble leaving the Waking Dream.  They can hang around a long time trying to get through the void into the Well of Life.  We call this the Migration of the Spirit, and it is a major dynamic of the game and the psychology of the characters and NPCs.  

Shriving magics, a part of Necromancy, protect the spirit from an unscrupulous Necromancer and can also speed a spirit out of the Waking Dream, much, much faster.  So such Necromancers, who protect and act as gatekeepers could be very good aligned, in an alignment style game.  Due to the way spirits latch onto bodies and more greedy, selfish necromancers use spirits, shriving priests and others who use this side of Necromancy are held in high esteem.  
You can imagine, in areas like the Steel Isle, which is a small Island but an old one, where major battles were fought, the undead have a very high population.    

Many Guilds and Orders learn and use Necromancy because of this.  The Bone Knights of Orcus are a good example of a knighthood that use Necromancy in their fight against the hordes of undead and those who pervert The Cycle.

That's my campaign-specific, but hopefully still useful view on Necromancy and how it can be used for good and for a good-aligned type.

Good necromancers could be, as others have suggested, psychopomps meant to lead restless dead to their eternal home, or bending the wicked dead in servitude to stop their depradations and use them toward a good end.  

The "sin-eaters" of Geist tend toward this kind of benevolent necromancy, when they're not being malignantly necromantic.  Arguably, DC's Kid Eternity was an example of this, as well, able to channel the dead to fight crime and evil.  Death in Darksiders II also fit this bill pretty marvelously, in a sword & sorcery kind of way.  

In the real world, Catholicism has the Intecession of the Saintly Dead, which has always struck me as necromantic, especially because lay folk also tend to ask for intecession by saintly but not yet canonized relatives and holy folks.

I would imagine it's only really intrinsically evil if you have some kind of prohibition of touching the dead, and you have to interact with bones and corpses to successfully be a necromancer -- but the Ouija board and other accoutrements of pop occultism kind of make that potentially moot.  On the other hand, '70s pop occultism (or at least as it's interpreted today) sometimes said that there are no ghosts, just demons, so if you're mucking with the dead, you're really mucking about with the Satanic.  (See The Conjuring.)

There are many cultures and religions in which the dead aren't evil, chaotic (in the sense of 'contravening proper existance'), and so on.

Ancestor worshippers, for example, venerate the dead and consider them 'buds.' Consider Day of the Dead. Let's go have a picnic with our dead ancestors!


A cleric in such a religion might very well have sanction to call on deceased members of the religion under certain circumstances.

SSS had a nonevil city of necromancy (Hollowfaust), where people essentially agreed to become undead when they passed.
At least in part, the Scarred Lands are somewhat post apocalyptic, so extreme survival issues help make 'zombies maintain our walls' a more reasonable proposition.

As other's have said, alternate cosmologies make non-evil necromancy quite possible.  In the straight up D&D, Negative Material Plane type of cosmology, there are quite a few necromantic spells that can destroy or control undead and so might be safe.  Also there are a lot of spells that aren't really necromancy it seems like to me, just have to do with the material of bone, and so get lumped into necromancy even though there is no undead or negative energy involved.  I think in the standard D&D cosmology, creating undead is an inherently evil act.