Quote from: TristramEvans;791957I 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.

As far as I can tell the modern fantasy conception of necromancers dates back to Clark Ashton Smith, who included a rather large number of necrophiliac necromancers.

When I ran rolemaster, I had the Dwarves practice ancestor worship and the clerics would reanimate your ancestors so you could ask them for advice and guidance.

I also I had a sect of (admittedly fanatical) Druids who would reanimate dead animals to drive of the hunters who had killed them.

Quote from: Will;791975Ancestor 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!

I've been told, though, by Chinese friends... that a large motivator in their veneration of ancestors is outright fear of what will happen if they don't.

Are there any systems that have something like a 'Medium' class who deals with spirits of the dead, hold seances, manifest ectoplasm and portents and allow the dead into themselves for certain tasks? Versatile Necromancy that  doesn't involve actual walking corpses?

I never got around to posting my 'ancestor worshipper' background... there we go:
http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?p=791995#post791995

Quote from: Simlasa;791991I've been told, though, by Chinese friends... that a large motivator in their veneration of ancestors is outright fear of what will happen if they don't.

Are there any systems that have something like a 'Medium' class who deals with spirits of the dead, hold seances, manifest ectoplasm and portents and allow the dead into themselves for certain tasks? Versatile Necromancy that  doesn't involve actual walking corpses?

We do have a good amount of nectromantic spells that do some of this, and always more coming.  Really, a lot of that.

Corpse Candle and it's greater variants make an area more attractive to spirits.
Spectral Vision shows how a dead person looked just before they died,
Dark Stream actually hurts undead by affecting the ties to the House of Death,  I mentioned Shrive the Spirit earlier, and Beyond the Call makes it nearly impossible to raise something.  Summon Artisan Soul allows a Necromancer to call up the spirit and knowledge of a certain type of craftsman.

There are many more in the Necromatic spells.  The real nasty stuff is separate, under "death" spell.

Quote from: TristramEvans;791957I don't know there's anything inherently evil about it, except that 21st century Western society on Earth tends to find it in bad taste.

Not trying one of those obnoxious "fixed that for you" bits, but I think that's closer to the mark.  "Good" and "Evil" are very much subjective to individual cultures, and not every human culture considers dealings with the dead to be evil, by a long shot.

For my part, I'm open to the argument that "stealing your life force" is no more or less morally-neutral than killing you by any other means.  I open enough large holes in you with a sword, your life force is going to drain out pretty quickly.

In one of the cultures on my gameworld, the dominant religion has a caste of, well, necromancers (they'd bristle at being called that, though), whose job it is to steal the souls of those about to die.  The faith believes there's a finite number of souls in the world, and the way to best honor your elders is to snatch their souls just at the brink, and to hand those souls off to a separate caste, whose task it is to infuse those souls into newborns, lest the souls of the elders risk dissipating into nothingness.

I had a campaign idea I want to do some day, where there are various necropoli where the dead dwell until they fade away.

And they are guarded by the living and the dead. Occasionally folks cross the border for various reasons.

So you might have an undead ranger or paladin, sent from the land of the dead to hunt down and reclaim some border-crossing undead, or to destroy troublesome undead...

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 think you could have a necromancer who stays away from animating dead bodies but limits himself to things like communicating with the dead to get information that will help others. Using necromancy to fight undead, drain energy from powerful evil people, and to prevent the resurrection of a villain, seem like good things. I think Necromancers do get into some fuzzy territory pretty quickly though. With something like Animate Dead I suppose it is debatable whether that falls immediately into an evil act (I am inclined to determine that based on the purpose of the casting and the circumstances the bodies arose in).

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?

Jesus Christ!

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?

Diablo's necromancer is a good guy, and uses necromancy to pursue "balance"; Priests of Rathma have this power that only the Burning Hells generally possess, they understand the line between life and death, and are upset at the way angels and demons use humanity as pawns.

The Witch Doctors believe in self-sacrifice for the good of their community and the spirit world, up to and including damning himself through cannibalism in the case of the male WD.

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.

This is the distinction that is the critical question depending on setting. There's no 'alignment' in Glorantha (unless Chaos/not Chaos counts) but *usually* creating undead also means binding a soul or spirit against its will to a corpse. In this case the soul is trapped inside a body and is denied an afterlife.

The magician doing something like this is effectively denying Death - this is why Humakt worshippers, a Death cult, are fanatical undead hunters. On the other hand Zorak Zoran, also a Death cult, has a Create Zombie spell as a cult spell. The spell does not need a spirit bound to the zombie - it's mindless and is just meat and bone, most other zombies will have a spirit bound against its will to the zombie body it inhabits.

It's a question of the persistence of personality after death - if your setting has spirits flying around that were once alive then binding them to objects and bodies against the spirit's will is generally going to be seen as a Nasty Thing To Do.

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?

Strictly speaking? Man... that's tough. I've run campaigns where PC's have tried to do it, and I built some infrastructure around it - essentially an order of necromancers that essentially hunted evil necro's down. I think ultimately you can start "good" but will end up "neutral" at best.

Over time I think if you're using your full gamut of abilities and playing your class accordingly, it would be really hard. It's possible, but damn it would be challenging. At least in my campaigns.

Quote from: Phillip;792023Jesus Christ!

  If this were TBP, I'd flag that as resembling a group attack. OTOH, if this were TBP, I'd probably get smacked for taking offense to anti-Christian sentiments. Here, I'll just roll my eyes, mutter something about radical differences between restorations and perversions of natural order and the differences between mortal and Divine power, authority and prerogatives, and move on.

  The moral standing of necromancy is going to require examining your basic setting assumptions about the nature of body and soul, life and death, and how magic interacts with them. If the body's just meat once the soul has departed, and if there's no rules for how to treat it, then you have a hard time opposing the creation of willless, soulless undead on moral grounds. This seems to be a case where D&D's underlying pragmatism and Neutralist Symbiotic Henotheism run up against the older assumptions of the culture that informs the game's myths, and which generally hold that the body has a certain dignity (Christian) and that at the very least, a body is not supposed to be walking around without its soul and proper life functions (practically universal).

Can there be good necromancers?

Sure.

These would be the type who only raise things like automata level skeletons and zombies. The equivalent of robots. They might work with sentient undead but only on an agreement or partnership level. Negotiation and seeking out good aligned undead. Or they may just be the sort that attracts friendly or talkative undead.

And may be adventuring to try and curb indiscriminant or evil uses of necromancy or functioning in a ghostbusting sort of service.

In my own RPG book way back necromancers are charged by Death to go out and re-put down undead animated by various magics Death disapproves of. Namely using the spirit as the animating force instead of magical automata. Especially if it was done by force. Necromancers  there functioned simmilar to a 5e Warlock except that their pact was with various willing undead and their patron entity was Death.

Or in Dragon Storm, initially most PC mages are former Necromancers. The Remorseful Apprentice background. Using their magic now to fight their former teachers and expose the lie. Later were added Spirit Speakers who could talk to and ward against spirits.

Quote from: The Butcher;791949On a more serious note, a "good guy" necromancer could be a medium/oracle, exorcist and undead hunter.

Absolutely! If you look at Clerics of Morr in Warhammer, you can build a cleric of a Death God who uses lots of spells listed in D&D as necromantic. Instead of making undead, the death cleric puts them to rest. The undead are enslaved and the death cleric frees them to go to their afterlife, or to their judgment in the case of self-made undead like liches.

Quote from: Ladybird;792040Diablo's necromancer is a good guy, and uses necromancy to pursue "balance"; Priests of Rathma have this power that only the Burning Hells generally possess, they understand the line between life and death, and are upset at the way angels and demons use humanity as pawns.

Agreed. The Diablo Necromancer is a perfect example of a good and heroic necromancer.

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

Yes! But depends on the setting. I doubt they can exist in a Sword & Sorcery, or Paladins & Princesses setting, but they can rock hard in a Dark Fantasy setting where the enemy of my enemy can be my friend.

Quote from: One Horse Town;791938Raising the dead to do your bidding doesn't exactly seem to be a good act - especially when some undead can steal your life-force.

In Diablo, there is a fight fire with fire aspect to the Necromancer. Even a Necromancer knows he's messing with "things man should not know", but that magic is a desperately needed weapon against the MUCH greater evil of Hell.

I've run a couple Diablo campaigns using a houseruled version of the Diablo II supplement for AD&D 2e released just before 3e came out. If you're not familiar with Diablo, its a human world invaded by demons from Hell.

My take on Necromancers was that even the dead humans wanted to help protect their kin from the scourge of demons and even in death, they lent their power to Necromancers in the fight for mankind's survival.

Quote from: One Horse Town;791938How can you go about making a good necromancer?

You could do the White/Gray/Black magic breakdown of all the spells found under Necromancy in whatever system you are using. Then you could declare that "good" necromancers can only use those listed under White and Gray magic.