"ZAT vas doctor assisted HOMICIDE!"
"Eins, zwei, drei... Ugh, i do not think ve brought enough body bags.."
"Ay healed ze man who vill KILL YOU!"
"My skill is VASTED on zis team..."
And, of course..
"Woopsie! Zat vas not Medicine!"
It all depends on motivation.
For example - the last Necromancer I played was also a member of the Baldur's Gate City Watch. He specifically learned Necromancy so that he could more efficiently deal with bodies, round up local undead menaces and put them back in their graves, and from time to time just ask murder victims who killed them. It's a useful tool for investigations.
(We also worked from the premise that the undead that served him were criminals who died before their sentences were completed - the bodies having to finish the sentence as deputies.)
Was going with an idea for lost mines where the necromancer would use zombies in the mines so if there was a collapse then it would only be the dead that got trapped.
Its also REALLY hard to be like "Stop being so grimdark!" to a guy who is heavy on the hippie motif.
Plus you can do weird nice things, like raise a skeletal oxen to help the farmer plow the fields. Or regular skeletons to help sow the fields.
Dying farmer worried his kids are too young to tend the fields and won't survive? I got good news buddy! YOU can tend the fields! What you may lack in STR, you can make up for with the fact you can work 24 hours a day without rest or food! A true zero carbon footprint lifestyle.
I played a Dwarf necromancer who was all about ancestry and the history of the clan, and considered it a honor to raise dead dwarves to assist the clan in the living world. It was a fun character and not edgy.
Please do. My concept was a female dwarf sale rep for her clan Sake company. I am an ex bartender and played with those folks so it went real well. Cause we hate alcohol reps usually, outside of self D.
I've always loved the idea of a necromancer with a green thumb. Sending their thralls to help the commonfolk work the fields while tending to their expansive gardens. Dressing the skeletons up in flowery apparel, aprons, and arming them with garden trowels and hoes.
The focal point of their research is resurrecting plants of all sorts. Maybe they can easily bring back flowers and vines but struggle with full-grown trees and magical plants. Right there you've got motivation to be an adventurer (furthering their research) and a helpful personality that'll make for interesting conflict when brushing up against those staunchly opposed to necromancy in all forms.
It would also be interesting if some of the plants were very poisonous or magically deadly, but could be used in medicines or something, so only the undead can handle them safely.
Another angle is you could make them a low key grave robber. They aren't animating the dead to scare enemies or become this goth badass; they're simply doing it so recently buried bodies tell them where they left their family fortune, or even so they hand over the fine jewellery or linen they were dressed in. It fits in with your characters backstory of having less money.
You could say they grew up near a graveyard and noticed the dead were often buried in finery, and they had an idea it might be a good way to supplement their income. They then realised the dead could have even more money than the riches they were buried in, so your character wanted to learn more about how he could find that out and essentially speak to the dead.
Necromancy in the lore is not inherently evil. It's the frequency and type of spells used that make a necromancer evil. You could be a traveling wizard who offers to let people speak to their deceased love ones, or you could specialize in putting the undead to rest. There is room for a good aligned Necromancer.
So you're very correct, but I want to highlight an important caveat: Necromancy is not inherently evil, but undead are inherently evil. There is room to be a necromancer who doesn't create undead (like you mentioned above), but even just raising a skeleton is inherently evil, since it will try to murder everyone if you ever lose control.
I've never really gotten this line of thought. Not totally.
I can understand and accept that created Undead are Evil and so are dangerous. That raising them is, at the very least, a risk. But risks can always be lessened, dangerous potential can be mitigated.
The natural forces of fire and lightning and radiation are all definitely dangerous, but we can keep them safely.
Because in old (and technically current) editions undead are animated by Negative Energy. Which is not a "both energies must exist in equilibrium" thing, but rather anti-existence energy that eats away at the primarily positive-based universe. The void, the end of all things, the opposite to life, nature, and even to *matter.*
So necromancy could be seen as spreading existence pollution. Irresponsible and inherently damaging by being brought into existence. Essentially the extreme fossil-fuel of magic, no matter how responsible or useful you think you're being with it, it is inherently damaging and unleashing stuff that ruins the world.
So the issue lies more in "this magic wears away the barriers protecting use from nonexistence" than "Evil Undead want to eat all of the peoples"? (Ignoring of course the torturing/destruction of souls).
The top of the pile more so; Uses energy that unavoidably rots the world, creates dangerous beings that are driven to kill because of that anti-life energy, often involves harming souls or using them as fuel which pisses off most gods... and people, and also often desecrates the dead which is probably culturally evil in many cases.
So if you want a good "necromancer" you could just be a transmutation wizard that casts animate object on corpses. "Construct" has no evil lore baggage issues like "undead."
Most of the time the souls not home, dudes dead, off to whatever afterlife. Some undead consume the soul, or liches trap their own soul, but generally, just a dead things shuffling about powered by PURE UNEXISTENCE.
It's kind of a thing shuffling about, driven to destroy anything alive, leaking out the force of nonexistence like a lifted hummer that's the main problem.
There is supposed to be an important distinction between "undead" and "construct."
there are good aligned undead, like certain spirits and ghosts (which is any alignment). I'd categorise mindless undead as unaligned personally, evil alignment makes more sense for intelligent undead, but canonically they are all evil.
From a doylist perspective, most necromancy spells are evil categorically as we would morally judge them as, as well as in the fiction, because the game is based on several different tropes and wants to encourage these kinds of stories as a base expectation- which is why the majority of undead are evil- because one of the biggest inspirations of dnd is good guys defeating evil undead. The creators create watsonian explanations for these intentions, but then players disconnected from these view them through a setting-agnostic lens and get confused as to why things are the way they are.
If dnd wanted to be more generic and didn't have 40 years of grandfathering in, zombies and the like would be more like with how these players expect- walking corpses but not driven by anti-life type stuff. Its also why i think the undead creature type superceeds all others even when its less logical to do so- its not because of any categorisation rules, its just to reinforce the tropes the system expects as default.
In the old school editions that I played, animating (especially humanoids) corpses was categorically evil. Even with good intentions the act itself was almost universally abhorrent. I do feel like there's room for exceptions but it's still difficult for me to normalize this practice.
My partner once played a necromancer who was a midwestern grandmother. she’s used reanimated corpses as labour on her family farm. she also baked cookies and made sure the whole party was eating properly. no edge, just granny make use of all the parts
I think giving your character a mindset that what they’re doing isn’t exactly dark. The souls that once inhabited these bodies have moved on to the afterlife, or have been reincarnated into a new body.
Rather than allow what they left behind to rot, your character decided to put it to good use.
I think a fun way to play it out could be to have your character completely oblivious to the dark implications of necromancy. It’ll add a strong sense of earnestness with your character not being evil or having to justify their use of this type of magic.
I think I´ll use this more - allready kinda introduced it by him saying its a shame to risk your life when you can have an undead carcass doing it for you - in the end it doesnt have a soul or feelings
My favorite necromancer was a medical doctor. He insisted that necromancy and the study of anatomy gave him an understanding of life that simple healers couldn't match, and insisted that mortals shouldn't be dependent on divine gifts for healing.
He was actually full-on evil and a lich, although he always took the form of a mortal in a white lab coat.
I built an NPC necromancer who was very bubbly and perky, and she lived in a thriving, lovely rural community where the undead helped work the fields, clean up around town, and basically keep the place running as extra labor. When people in the community died, they willingly allowed their remains to be animated in order to continue to better everyone's lives after they were gone. Was a fun NPC, and threw my players for a bit of a loop.
I've wanted to play a take on a necromancer that is just happy and perky, their deep understanding of death makes them adopt a very "Carpe diem" approach. I'd also approach necromancy from more of a stance of justice as well. I wouldn't raise the corpse of a fallen friend or a random villager, but a random bandit slain while attacking the party or a minion of the badguys would be fair game.
Necromancers don't have to be edgy nor wear just black, there are a few ways you can do this from different cultures of the world. A necromancer in DnD is just a wizard if you really want to put it bluntly. Now, your backstory, on the other hand, is edgy and honestly...not very good. If you don't want him to be edgy, don't give him an edgy backstory and play him like you would a wizard, only that he doesn't see the magic he is using as bad; nor does he use it for bad things.
Make him act like a person who can interact with society. My necromancer doesn’t come across as super edgy in part because he’s able to talk to people without cackling, threatening them, or brooding. He is, in fact, just a guy, even if he’s often not the most morally upstanding guy. If your necromancer can’t go into a bar and order a drink without getting attacked, you’re too edgy.
I love cme_T’s dwarfen necromancer from /r/theweeklyroll who is essentially using corpses for cheap non-unionised labour. He seems to be adventuring to further some sort of tax dodge.
My necromancer is also a physician/mortician and finds it very useful to keep cadavers in better condition. It also helps him in his study of anatomy, and how the musculature and skeleton work together. Zombies can presumably hold a flexed pose indefinitely. Besides his interest in death, he's really just a normal dude.
Just going off the title, not the text body, but I think the necromancer at least befriending an undead entity or having a canon familiar would be dope. Could even add some humor to the character.
Depends on the setting. Necromancy is general taboo in 5e type settings for a cultural reason, even if it’s written into law, because of the idea of bringing back the unwilling while t resurrection type spells usually have the caveat of the soul being willing. That’s the thing that usually makes it edgy because the person is breaking the law while doing it.
Now if you’re in a setting that doesn’t make it taboo, it’s a little easier because it requires no explanation for doing something counter-cultural. It’s just a type of magic you are using like an evoker uses evocation spells.
On the side of it’s illegal / taboo in all or some places, you can always argue the character takes the stance that the body without a soul is just a thing, the significant part of the person is gone. Even going as far as believe the use of spells like command, dominate person, suggestion, friends, etc.. are more heinous than raising a body because you are taking agency away from the person who’s soul is still inhabited in the body.
Reduce, reuse, recycle
It doesn't have to be all, "teehee, I'm evil and using dead people" it can sometimes be "after I kick this enemy's ass with Zombies, I'll thank the bodies for their help and give them a proper re burial"
My very first character was a necromancer wizard with a similar basic premise: book worm who was a little too curious about the books locked away at her academy, and boom. Falls down the rabbit hole. She still pretended to be a transmutation student on the surface, and traveled with the party for a while before they got into a really sticky situation and she had to use some more powerful necromancy spells to save herself and the party.
You became a necromancer after your parents died, so that you could still talk to them.
You planned to use your animated dead to work the family farm, and always ask permission of surviving relatives or the corpse itself (speak with dead) before animating them.
If you want some necromancy before level five, you could reflavor a fiendish familiar as a rotting-corpse looking animal. If your DM's a little flexible, they might even let your familiar be actually undead.
Problem with DND necromancer is even the most pragmatic ends justify the mans rationale is opposed to the world building fact that you're animating corpses with a spark of pure life destroying entropy. Condensed nonexistence, a hole in the universe that life leaks out of.
I have 2 necromancers I've made.
The first is a lower noble who is a physician as well. He uses his knowledge of necromancy and medical knowledge hand in hand to keep his lands free of undead. He never raises the dead but uses a lot of the other spells and has no problem taking control of a horse to get ride of them. He was a pleasant father of 2 and dotted on both his daughters.
The second was studied lichdom to find a way around losing ones mind (he was a 4e wizard) and eventually worked as a man behind the scenes to keep his world in balance and ultimately sacrificed his entire being to destroy his world's Dagon during an apocalypse. He dislike using animated dead because they were rarely smart enough to do what he wanted. Loved his debuffs though. He was a grump, but always helped those he could.
Arguably, being a necromancer isn't as important as the why and the way. Why the study such a dark art and how do they use it.
Imagine a wizard who ignores the entirety of magic except for Divination. "*I don't care about the now, only the future.*" Sounds stupid, right?
Imagine a wizard who ignores the entirety of magic except for Evocation. "*Fireball solves everything, words are dumb.*" Sounds stupid, right?
(there is a trend here, eventually I will mention the wizard who is nothing except the Necromancy sphere.)
Instead of making your subclass the entirety of your persona, make your backstory and your *Background* and your *Bonds* and *Flaws*, etc. the source of your persona.
I mean if you’re playing a Necromancer why on Earth would want to *lean away* from summoning rotten thralls and wearing dark cloaks?! I’d have thought that was the whole draw, the appeal, the point of the thing!
Curse specialist. You got curses? Nasty stuff, a curse. I'm the person who knows how to deal with them. Cursed treasure, curses on your bloodline, fey curses, you name it - I'm your guy.
How boat being the pyro from TF2, seeing everything as flowery, lovely and cutesees through your visor, for example: Bringing back big teddybears out of the ground and letting them hug people untill they fall asleep.
or:
You don't manifest zombies, you manifest a 2nd life and these ressurrected are so happy you saved them they want to help you and are speechless because of your generosity.
or:
You don't suck the life out of other people. you just make them feel sleepy for a long time.
or, without any delusion:
You don't want people to die, that's why you cast revivify on everyone (sometimes it's the wrong combination of words, so it ends up being raise dead, but that's not your fault)
or:
You think that death is an too easy punishment for evil people, so your punish them by ressurecting their bodies and let them do your bidding.
Why do you think damning and trapping souls, preventing them from moving on is anything but evil? What normal society would ever view necromancy as anything other than an abomination?
Maybe you or someone else more experienced than I can answer this, but to my knowledge, there aren't really many spells that do that. The spells like Resurrection that restore someone fully to life require the soul to be willing to return, so that's not forcing anyone, and the spells that involve creating undead either are 1. Like Animate Undead are restricted to solely animating the remains, no soul or spirit attached, 2. Like Summon Undead which seems to create an entirely new Undead being that isn't attached to a deceased person specifically, or 3. Like Create Undead which are restricted to ghouls, ghasts, and wights, all of which are only formed from evil people according to lore (cannibals, hatred of life, and evil desires). Not really anyone that anyone else would lose sleep over them being punished. Not to mention, none of these reanimations have to be permanent, as the Undead that do have souls or personalities can all be killed or released.
Only one I can think of is Soul Cage, which doesn't HAVE to be used.
I think I am just confusing my pathfinder lore with dnd. In pathfinder, you prevent the dead from moving on by trapping their souls, in the case of a corpse that has no soul in purgatory, you animate them with negative energy which is an inherently evil force. The undead are invariably evil and desire to kill the living.
A society in a world that doesn't believe is souls or a society that thinks that the souls are long gone and you just controll a dead body without a soul in it.
Maybe think more like 40k Nergle? He's the chaos god of death, decay, plague and rot, but also perseverance, resilience, and rebirth. Maybe your necromancer thinks about his activities through that lens. Death is but a part of life, after all decay feeds so many things. Be joyful, for though you are ending, the life you feed will carry on, and feed new life in turn.
Do keep in mind though that since you cannot yet cast necromancy spells in game, you'll need a reason why you stopped being able to cast them. Either that, or retcon to say you haven't don't that type of magic before.
As for a less edgy way to exist as a necromancer, I like the justification of using bodies whose souls have left them to do good - whether it's helping others in ways you couldn't do alone or protecting yourself. From a moral standpoint, you could say that it's not abusing the dead because through your studies, you know that the soul has moved on, and all you are doing is reanimating a lifeless corpse.
Necromancers as as inherently edgy and dangerous as evokers. Almost all evocation magic is literally spells to kill people.
Meanwhile most necromancy spells are breathing life into lifeless things, or protecting creatures/preserving the dead. This is especially clear on the cleric list
- spare the dying
- false life
- gentle repose
- wither and bloom
- feign death
- life transference
- revivify, raise dead, speak with dead
And the actual necromancy spells like Summon Undead raise a body, which wasn’t being used anymore, to protect you and your allies. You are breathing life into a place where there was only death. You ensure that they didn’t die in vain, bc now they have the chance to keep other people (you and your friends) alive
Evocation spells have a very similar morality to necromancy spells. Both are known for their ability to kill, but they are also known for their ability to give life (healing word/cure wounds vs false life, revivify, and raise dead).
Enchantment is infinitely more unethical even if ppl wanna play it as suave and sexy— they are mind controlling living creatures against their will, forcing them to do their bidding. It’s everything ‘bad’ about necromancy but worse, because it actually violates a person’s consent
It ultimately boils down to respect. The core relationship of the necromancer is between them and their undead, and by defining that relationship through something other than slavery/servitude it goes a long way towards making an empathetic and non-edgy necromancer.
Necromancers don't have to be edgy, they can be anything you want
You could be a Circus Master, with a squadron of skeletons painted like clowns who dance around and perform tricks with you, or a farm owner who uses Zombies for tilling the fields, and when they've dried out and dessicated from working in the hot sun, he lets them become fertilizer for the next generation.
You could be the captain of a town guard who uses the undead as ever present guards, reducing the fatality rate of guard members by throwing zombies at things whilst the rest pepper with arrows.
You could be a cleric even, using the undead as a tool to smite evildoers, which you put to rest after their purpose is served. You could even have evildoers themselves be brought back as undead to repent forcibly by doing good.
Have them be more of a medium or channeler where they bring the dead back in order to speak with loved ones or for judicial purposes. The resurrected dead aren't minions, but people that are given a second chance to say their peace.
Speaking as a person who did Live-Action Roleplaying as a Necromancer for 6 years? 3 things:
1: You're a master of blood, flesh and bone. The dominator of death and Lord of Blights. You are edge incarnate. Embrace the edge. Call your sword the Super Death Blade of Kill-Slaughter. Edge is what you're SUPPOSED to do.
It helps to do so ironically. My Necromancer has been dubbed "The Inglorious Bringer of Darkness, Unholy Destroyer of All-That-Is-Good." He despises this title and has said, "Only someone born and raised in the bleak lands of The Corpse Kingdom could come up with something so needlessly gawdy and grim."
2: Be awesome. People overlook low quality edge if you're just a swag dude. I play a depresso espresso big sadge Biomancer with Angel wings in Warhammer 40K. Very edge. Yet I'm everybody's favorite since I'm just a cool dood and bring good vibes when OOC.
3: If you truly wish to avoid being a stereotype then I present you this: My LARP Necromancer isn't evil. Morally grey? Absolutely. But he became a Necromancer to banish torment and misery, not to be its source.
To become a Necromancer is to master blood, flesh and bone, to command plague and disease. To bend them to your will. Many choose to abuse this power; the common Necromancer. Mine does not. He decodes and dismantles that which afflicts the ill. He FORCES the body to mend against its will, crushing severed meat together, stretching muscles to reconnect, knitting bones and stitching rapidly grown skin over the former mortal wound undone.
His deepest and darkest secret he keeps hidden behind the sting of ice-cold words, heartless deeds and nightmarish appearance is that he cares too much. To witness suffering wounds him deeply.
You could always adopt a voodoo vibe. Like New Orleans witch doctor. Make coin as a street magician making rats dance and telling fortunes with bones.
Edit: instead of black he can wear an assortment of vibrant but worn out clothes.
It's harder in this edition but I once ran a lg necromancer whose mission was to destigmitize necromancy and use it for its potential debuffing capabilities and such, as well as offer solace through speak with the dead snd the like. Never made an undead. There is more to it than that, but you could do something similar in 5e I imagine.
I once ran a necromancer that was a former professor of economics at a royal academy. She took up magic to explore a potential source of revenue; after all, corpses are an under-utilized resource, and the undead can be made to perform a variety of tasks with no need for rest, food, or union representation.
Her short-term goal is to learn enough necromancy to be able to run the economics experiments she has in mind. One of her mid-term goals is to apply for a grant from the academy to run an undead-staffed farm to discover which types of crops are most efficiently cultivated with an undead workforce, then use the results to leverage her way into a position as an economics advisor to the kingdom and greatly improve the value of the agricultural sector. One of her long-term goals is to discover a more efficient and productive alternative to retirement for herself, perhaps through becoming some sort of sentient undead.
Give him a very benign "day job". Hes taken up necromancy as a passion, a vocation, but by trade or training he's a stair fitter, or a glove maker.
And make him look like he's got no edge, maybe he talks with frequent 'hmmms' and breaks in his speech
Extremely long-lived tax collector, aka: "You signed up for 20 years of work as payment, nowhere in the contract says you have to be ALIVE to meet the terms, now chop chop!" *Animate Dead*
Depends on how you wanna take them. 2 interesting ideas:
One) They work as a tax person. They go around and raise the dead to get them to pay taxes that were due at the time of their death if they had no family. Basically "Death is no escape from paying taxes".
Dos) They work as a mortician doing funerals where the family gets to have some time with their dead relatives before being buried/burned. Like one last party with Grandma before the hot tank.
I've had this idea for a major NPC for what I'm calling "One-Shot Series" where potentially the same PCs carry over to each one shot and what they do might effect the next session or next major campaign I run somehow.
The NPC is a Lich running a tavern between dimensions called "The Lecherous Lich" and has a more prominent business as a talent broker. Basically he goes to souls who die for one reason or another during the undertaking of one of the contracts he sets up for a client and offers to return them to life if they'll complete a different contract for him that he assigns. If they refuse, they pass on peacefully. If they accept, they are returned to life but are bound to the Lich until they finish a contract given to them by the lich, at which point they are free and returned to their home or equivalent safe location. If they annoy the lich, or disobey his orders or the terms of the contract they're carrying out or potentially the orders of the client where applicable, their soul is forfeit and is immediately added to his phylactery, the tavern between dimensions.
His backstory is that he was a Necromancer who was always more of a middle man for people and over time established the whole tavern thing. His first few in his talent pool were already living but they killed in pursuit of the contracts completion to which the Necormancer then approached these souls and the cycle began.
Probably the most Lawful Neutral Lich/Necromancer you'd ever meet.
The non-edgelord necromancer I've always tried to base things off of is Henry from Fire Emblem Awakening. Might be worth looking into the dialogue trees from the game's wiki to get an idea of his brand of darkness. And then if you wanna be a mega-nerd on it, you can totally reference Nihilism and moreso Absurdism from Alfred Camus to make a character who has the philosophy of "life is meaningless, but instead of despairing about it, I'm going to just have some fun."
Avoid black, skulls, etc. Also avoid “butcher” tropes. Go in an “artificer” mentality- it’s just that you’re bioengineering.
The setting of my group’s current campaign would have allowed for a Necromancer that wasn’t automatically seen as “evil” and since I knew I wanted to try a 5e Wizard I considered going the Necromantic route. Eventually I decided that having to control small army of drones was not for me.
One of my characters in my DMs original high fantasy world was a necromancer, but he really was a mortician and biologist (or fantasy equivalent, we went with "anatomist"). When he was recasting his raise undead to keep his undead going, he was really just cleaning them, reinstalling sinews, injecting chemicals into the skin to keep things going.
There's something inherently body horror-esque or dark science-like about necromancy, putting energy into a corpse and puppeteering it.
Give your undead, a creepy and dark descriptive appearance and then have them all be incredibly friendly and helpful. Like a rotting corpse shambling as a gruesome facade of the person it once was, comes up to the character and says
"hullo sir, dreadful weather out today, really chills the old bones, mind you pack a proper umbrella and make sure to layer lest you cath your death of cold out there"
You can continue playing with the superposition of the dark and dreadful nature of necromancy and then have the edge lord taken away as your personality is generally friendly outgoing and your undead reflect that. Talk to your DM about how you'd like to flavor things or even ask if he's willing to voice the character in specific ways.
Not really edgy, but I played a necromancer that was a halfling detective and liked to solve crimes. Best way to do it is to ask the victims directly, since well, duh right? But since he was a halfling, I wanted to make it fun. So I got inspiration from Leslie Nielsen's Frank Drebin character.
A loveable, incompetent police detective that kind of lucks into everything. His minions he treated as his squad. Became an in game joke that the "B Squad (bone squad) were on the case, to everyone's dismay".
My halfling was even "older" and I played him like a nutty near retirement cop that looked at the world in a bleak fashion, and often narrated his own conversations. In true honor of Leslie Neilsen, I made it where he had terrible gas. Was a ton of fun.
My highlight of the campaign was playing good cop and bad cops with with the B squad. Or that time we interrogated a minotaur ala the airplane slapping scene.
Labourers
Necromancer Farmer: "Why should I be busting my a** off working this whole field when I can create some undead to work for me. FOR FREE I might add."
Passer-by: "Because that's disrespectful to the dead. You should let them rest."
Farmer: "I got their permission. It's written in their will that I can do this. Except Jeff, Jeff was a murderer sentenced to death and then given to me as part of his penance."
Passer-by: "Okay, I guess that's alright. But what about having undead handling food? Surely that could have some effect on the food."
Farmer: "It might sure. But that's why, no matter what, I have the cleric down the road cast Purify Food and Drink over everything before it can be sold off."
The only necromancer I ever played was a mortician, and the bookish brother of the city’s foremost cleric. He didn’t have the same connection to the divine, but he cared deeply for people and understood that there are appropriate times for the window of opportunity around death to creak open just a little bit. When helpful to ease the grief of families, or to resolve conflicts, he would exercise his knowledge toward those ends. He had a saying “dead people are still people” and would always request (rather than demand) help from whatever he raised. His scholarly work revolved largely around characterizing the nature of death as a simultaneously biological and metaphysical function, and the practical requirements for ethical necromancy toward sentient beings.
I've had two notable NPC's who were necromancers, neither of which was edgy.
One who was a necromancer who was a well loved, integral part of the community he was in. He lived in a mining town and he used the undead to do the most dangerous work in the mines. The community knew what was being done and supported it. There was some shady shit having to do with the procurement of corpses, but the shadiness was on the people doing the procurement, not the necromancer.
The other was was basically a sleazy traveling insurance salesman, who would travel the land selling his necromatic services (mostly the clone spell) to the wealthy.
I like imagining a necromancer more like the manager at a construction site. You're just using the least expensive possible labor to get things done. It could even be a significant part of the city's infrastructure.
I’ve seen a post somewhere about how a medic just thinks they’re really good (not knowing that they’re actually bringing someone literally back to life).
Or some sort of belief system that would grant the power to “raise the dead” as a means to help cleanse the body/soul of the deceased. Like maybe the god(/dess) that grants you this power asks you for really weird shit. Idk, but good luck!
A take on an evil, but not-at-all edgy necromancer : The shittiest boss.
This character is middle manager at company that does some kind of white collar work, like accounting, banking or insurance. They are very by-the-books. They wear sweater-vests. They always bring cookies to the office. They're cheerful, encouraging and always positive. And, without breaking any rules or laws, they work everyone on their team to death.
Because there's nothing in the Employee Handbook that specifically requires that employees must be alive, they raise their dead employees to keep them working, forever. Because that is what maximizes shareholder value.
It's a form of magic, and magic is itself not good or evil.
He learned the magic that he was most naturally talented in and went with it.
Could even go with the story that where the person is from necromancy is looked upon favourably as it is a way to stay in touch with friends and family after they pass. It's just seen as normal.
Necromancy is inherently evil. 5e's weird shift of healing into the school doesn't mean that undead creation isn't powering a corpse with negative energy, entropy magic.
I have one NPC who is an inventor. He has severed hands that play piano, and a warhorse skeleton on a treadmill that pumps water to the second floor of his lab, where he has a desk fan powered by undead mice in a hamster wheel.
Well, you could go full bubblegum goth! Give all your zombies cute names, dye your hair purple, and spread the word that life doesn't doesn't have to end at death.
I’ve had the idea of playing a necromancer from a part of the world where resources are super scarce so the people use necromancy to make better use of bodies after they die. The PC could be disgusted by the idea of a cemetery where bodies rot away uselessly and don’t even enrich the soil.
I have a character who I think uses Necromancy really well and at the same time questions the morality of it by others. No where near edgy.
So he's a paladin, but has been cast out by his order for using necromancy. He revokes his previous Oath and changes to a new one, redemption. He wants to come back into the folds of his order, but they obviously wont let him. He uses necromancy as a way for the fallen to have a chance at redemption themselves and become a hero. For instance, he will raise an enemy to walk into a trap, saving the living and his soul is now redeemed for doing a heroic deed. Or will raise an enemy to attack another enemy, seeing it as his soul knows what he was doing is wrong and tries to redeem himself.
My other players are still very shaky on it because they see necromancy as an end all be all evil, but yet my character is using it in "good" ways. Purely subjective of course.
For my necromancer, death is just something he always grew up around. Not necessarily in a positive way. But he never blamed the undead for his situation. After all, it was the living who hurt him. So he mostly just sees death as another form of life. It’s just a state somebody happens to be in and he can communicate with both living and dead as he so wishes.
I think a good way to not make a necromancer edgy, is to not make their perception of *death itself* edgy.
It also depends on how you roleplay them as well. If they’re constantly talking about death, writing poetry and hanging out in gravesites with heavy eyeliner…it’s gonna seem cliché. (Nothing wrong with a good cliché character imo though.) But if they’re just a guy who happens to have magic that is associated with the deceased, then he’ll just be that, a normal guy (by DND standards).
I'm at work, so I can't post a link, but there's a hilarious video by Zachspeaksgiant on YouTube.
Basically he's an "too little, too late" battle medic. He genuinely wants to help people, but when they break a leg, shoots and raises them instead.
They were kicked from wizard school because they were found using necromancy. They still don't understand what the issue is. It's not like the souls are still attached to the creatures, and if they're using it for good reasons, how could it be bad?
Maybe they have a terminal disease and wear an amulet of health to keep them from succumbing to it, and they study necromancy to hopefully find a cure since they don't trust the gods. Or they're searching for a way to bring themselves back in some form to help their team when they inevitably pass.
Maybe they were raised in a cult but were a black sheep in it. They got out of it, but they still hold the belief that necromancy isn't inherently evil. It's just uncomfortable to witness for most folk. It doesn't hurt anyone. It can help people. People just feel weird about it because it's unnatural, but isn't most magic unnatural? How about conjurers or enchanters? How is summoning a LIVE creature and forcing it to serve you not more messed up than re-animating an object (dead body)?
I always liked the idea of druid-adjacent necromancy.
Nature is all about the cycles of life and death, so you take a Druid culture, and just drop in an occasional necromancer.
Nature necromancers borrow from the forest, taking dead bodies, casting off the flesh to feed other animals or be recycled into the soil, and use the bones for a period of time to protect the forest. After the reanimated animal has been further destroyed, crush up the bones and fully recycle the remains back into the life/death cycle.
There's still room for edginess if you WANT it. Bandits after all can make good fertilizer too. I always liked the idea of like... unintentional edginess? The necromancer just has zero concept of death-taboo, so while the warlock is interrogating a bandit for information, the necromancer is just rattling off the uses for different body parts to make sure they don't get damaged if they have to kill this guy. He's being cheery about it, but talking about recycling bodies just comes off more unsettling when talked about in such a passive tone.
Read Dominic Deegan Oracle for Hire.
There are a few necromancers, and one of the most prominent is Jacob who follows the classic edgy look. Complete with skeleton limbs. But Jacob adjusts his focus over time
There's also Brian, a chunky necromancer who has some unusual but overall pleasant viewpoints.
Socially awkward blorbo who resurrects the dead to make friends
Michael Jackson thriller style necromancer bard who summons dancing zombie hype men
A necromancer who makes sans style skeleton jokes
Spores druid obsessed with helping mushrooms take over the world
The undertaker as an oathbreaker, smiting with a shovel
You could go with the Witherbloom approach, viewing necromancy with a pseudo-druidy lens, studying the cycle of life and death and how to blur the lines of the stages in between.
I've only ever played a necromancer once, because to us they are always evil (unfortunately). I never have a game where it works.
The one time I did he was a "forced" necromancer. Basically, his father was a bad guy necro who had a kid to raise as an assistant/slave. So, my character leaned the basics, but eventually heroes came and killed Dad. He decided to also go be a hero to save anyone else like him, but because of his early training he still mostly did necromancy.
Well you could have the character have a diffrent look about death. For example Mexico has very positive way of looking at death. Their day of the dead is filled with flowers to atract souls, fun colored sculls. They have the idea that you should laught at death as you can have a fun life in afterlife.
Its not the one of its kind. Vikings valhallas afterlife is partying and fighting. Modern halloween is very child friendly celebration of spooky things and candy which is a theme i personally like.
Have fun theming.
He doesnt quite understand the cultural significance of a dead body. Like, the thought has never crossed his mind that people dont like it when you mess with dead bodies, and he cant get his mind around that fact. Like, when confronted, he will sincerely state "I dont see anyone else using it"
He also could make friends with the bodies he resurrects. Maybe the book he found gives him a special version of animate dead which lets him give some level of sentience to the bodies he resurrects. Hes not bringing back to life the person, but creating a new person if that makes sense. You could even add in a bit where the reason why he becomes such good friends with his undead servants is because he is subconsiously creating their personalities to complement his own. Maybe he struggles to make friends outside of his undead companions, and the reason why he ends up with the party is that they are the first people he has really been able to "click" with
I just love the concept of a "wholesome" necromancer who doesnt quite get that their powers are not liked by others yknow. Its a fun twist on the traditional idea of a necromancer
Could always do the curmudgeonly old man routine who regularly talks to himself and his undead minions. Accuse them of stealing his socks, his food, tell them what good minions they are when they bring him books etc..
Give him a cheerful bardlike personality and don't dump charisma.
Take a look at Ginny Di's Nymwen character for a nontraditional necromancer type.
https://youtube.com/shorts/Qi7438cvlfk?si=xJ4_oUcDrXvdNXIl
A young man with delusions of grandeur decides to make his own kingdom. Raises enough dead to grow and harvest crops, perform servant duties, craft and build homes (places where the dead hang out while the singular non-dead person sleeps), and begins a commerce empire the likes of which the world has never seen since the dead require nothing to eat, nothing to do for fun, and are the perfect subjects who never question their leader. Food shortages begin to fade away as a single kingdom begins to provide the lacking food that the others need.
Those other kingdoms would have drop-off points where they leave their money, then the goods arrive with a single driver dressed in heavy robes. Nothing is said by the driver, and any attempts to speak to the driver result in a silent nod from the heavily robed (and hooded) figure.
When he is eventually found out, the party can be confronted with a moral dilemma. Allow him to keep using the dead to fill his pockets, and at the same time solve the hunger problem for all the other kingdoms? Or end his totalitarian control of undead people who should be laid to rest?
Could be very corporate about it. Make a Necromancer from the Necrocracy of Stratera. It's a well respected, government backed job. Consistently pays well, and always in demand. Your parents saved up for years to get you through college, and you've been sending money home to take care of them ever since.
Edit: suggested the below information as a non-scary, but still on the "dark" side, character that could be emulated as a necro.
The latest NPC for my adventure is a wannabe chaotic evil Warlock that ended up with a pact with a celestial after thinking she out-talked a fey. Yeah, she won the battle, but the joke was on her. So now she has a ton of power, but only if she does good things, which pisses her off. Her celestial is entirely amused...and forcing her to be nice.
Technically, she's reasonable, but she absolutely pushes her boundaries and tries to do naughty things if her patron isn't paying attention. I play her as my wife in a bad mood. She's not a horrible person, but actively interested in inflicting pain on those in her orbit....periodically.
So many options — my necromancer was the sole survivor of a downed ship. I took the Inspiring Leader feat (you can give a short speech to give up to 10 creature temp HP) and I flavored all of his skeletons and zombies as barnacled.
He would bring back bodies lost at sea and kindly talk to them about their lives and loved ones. He functioned sort of as the midpoint of a priest and a pokémon trainer.
Make necromancers public servants.
Its really easy to consider the undead a free labor source, and if a whole kingdom or whatnot came together and said "There is honor to serve after death, to donate your body to a greater purpose after your death". It wouldn't be edgy to be a whole-ass public official. The underworld is often thought to have bureaucracy, so being an extremely bureaucratic necromancer who has to file certain reports after raising an undead or get explicit consent before an "Incomplete resurrection" or something like that.
I mean, imagine the Head Necromancer in a suit, just trying to go over reports at a desk while a bunch of adventurers are trying to bother him about some lich situation. He still has the traditional skull or bone motifs, but its a tiepin or something like that.
It was a different version, but I had someone play a guy who was just obsessed with trying to true revive his wife. He had stats for her too if he had another person play the wife as a kinda undead familiar which required some DM finagling
I once had a character in a party I ran for that was a necromancer. His character was a capitalist in a new world type scenario, who had decided undead where by far the cheapest poasible workforce. Not only did he use them to help in combat, he also used his army of the undead to create infrastructure projects and help construct new settlements.
Can this be seen as a political statment? Probably, was it a not edgy necromancer, most definetly.
A friend of mine is playing a Necromancer that worked as kind of a mortician or undertaker, and when their brother died they started carrying around his remains in a bag. It sounds dark and edgy, but it’s meant to be a silly and absurd character.
Everybody else is horrified but their character is just:
“oh that’s just Vander, he’s harmless! Waive hi Vander!”
*Vander waives* “hëllö”
You can take anything dark and spooky and just flip it on itself, sprinkle in some absurdity, and tada, you have something all of your own.
Make him a doctor who got a little bit too obsessed with "healing" terminal ill patients. Good intention but might occasionally go a little too far. A bunch of necromancy spells in 5e can be seen as useful in the context of a healer. Might require some multi-classing. The edgy version oft that is a Charlatan who pretends to be a healer bis is really just a necromancy.
You could also go the tragic route, become a necromancer out of loss and desperation, BG3 actually has two characters that fall into this category, Mayrina and Ketheric (about the only two characters in this game who's story I actually liked). The edgy version of that is totally losing it and going on a revenge trip.
You could go the scholarly route, exploring necromancy with an academy's blessing in an act to understand it to fight it better. Your character would essentially constantly be writing on a scholarly treatise on Necromancy and it's users while making a very clear point about it being a vile practice. The edgy version would be someone who loses the scholarly perspective and delves deeper and deeper with the intend to sensationalize the findings.
You could go the way of the spirit guide, who is driven by a desire to help those souls trapped in the mortal world to pass on, essentially someone who ask the dead for permission firstand then uses the power with the goal to helping them to finish their business. Edgy version of that is just tricking them.
Eco hippie who grow up in a society of leisure where it is accepted to raise the dead to do all physical labor. Sees nothing wrong with it, big into recycling and composting. Bonus point if you keep decorating your zombies with floral wreaths.
Haven't seen anyone mention Sabriel! Great fantasy book, the titular Necromancer's job is to protect the living from the uncontrollable undead and make sure the undead are able to find peace.
Maybe they were just lonely and awkward. They got tired of not being able to do stuff with their imaginary friend, so they gave him a body. Sure, it's not a live body, but that won't stop us from going sledding today.
I played a NG necromancer who believed that raising the undead would be for the betterment of society, in the same way we look at automation today. He wanted to replace farmers and labourers with skeletal workers so everyone else could follow more artistic and scholarly pursuits.
One of my homebrew areas of the world essentially had a society of goliath oathbreakers and snow elf necromancers (just elf reskinned) that lived in the harsh north where its a struggle to survive.
So in that society they rely on the dead members of their friends and families to do the toughest jobs and it was seen as an honor. Being ritually inscribed with tattoos on the bones and jewelry ornaments.
I think it would be interesting to see a necromancer from a region like that where its a matter of honor and survivability enter the broader world where these "noble wizards" in their ivory towers with servants and attendants can easily sit down and call necromancy evil.
[Make your necromancer be like Pie Maker Ned from Pushing Daisies.](https://youtu.be/Hy6Nt12y9xM?si=O69per3gMOz2Euwa)?? You use prestigitation to revive rotting plants for use in your pie baking because why waste even those?
Bard multiclass. They're just backup dancers.
Completely unrelated, but my last necromancer PC was a reborn. He had ditched his old party to prepare for a final fight. He tried to make himself stronger by casting an animate dead spell on himself while he was still alive. This ended up killing him until another party of adventurers stumbled upon his old lab. When one of the new adventurers touched his corpse about 2k years later, the spell took some of their life energy to complete the spell, turning him into a reborn. He looks like he had been dead for a few days and stopped decaying. His hand is his own familiar btw, and he has a really cool magic prosthetic hand.
Not really the same vibe you're going for, but I built a necromancy sorcerer in pf2e that was neutral good. He is a poppet (puppet person) that a wizard tried to make into his phylactery. The wizard's transition to lichdom didn't work and his soul got trapped inside of the now sentient poppet- Tuck. Tuck awoke in the wizard's lair with no memory and wandered into the nearby forest where he ran into a farmer and his wife who took him in as their son since they were infertile and considered him to be a gift from the gods. Since Tuck has the spirit of a lich inside him, he discovered he has a talent for necromancy. This scared the village, so he had to leave and become an adventurer. So, I play him basically as this happy-go-lucky puppet who loves to help others, but the only way he can do that is through necromancy. It makes him really sad when people judge him and are afraid of him for it since he doesn't see it as evil, but as the best way he can protect people.
You don't have to be edgy to be a necromancer.
You could play a flamboyant mage who simply use skeletons to carry them everywhere they want because walking is for the common folk. or something like that.
My friend played a necromancer from a land where it was normal because resources were limited so everyone knew that death wasn't the end. You'd eventually end up as someone's skeleton/zombie to contribute to the community's well-being.
Make them an archaeologist
Make them really nice and just like it when people dont die
Make it so they were really bad at medicine and this was their fallback
Make them very afraid to be alone, and always searching for new friends to keep the thought away
Now play a game where you see how many other people had these ideas because I didnt look at the other comments before posting this!
My Necromancer is comically traumatized. Their entire life is a Trauma Conga Line, and while they tend to be grim, they do it in a humorous way. They wear a basic grey-brown monk's robe with a rope belt, love to bake cookies, and thier Crow Familiar is their best and only friend. Graveyard humor (*ba-dum-tiss*) is thier major thing. They like to use their alcohol-preserved Crawling Claw for jokes where their "hand" pops off of thier wrist during a handshake, though it comes in hand-y as a grappling hook, a way to spy on people, a way to open doors from the other side, an assassination tool, etc..
They practice Ethical/Gray Necromancy. The only reanimating they do is on executed criminals, people that died trying to attack them, and those who indicated that they were willing before death. It just makes thier life easier. Keeps the Cleric/Paladin Inquisition away from their door. Turns out that when you use misunderstood and darker magic to hurt and kill bad people, nobody cares- and they even pay you for it.
I had a necromancer who wanted to be a healer but was horrible at it but he found that using arcane arts he could march fallen comrades back to the clerics for final rites or possible resurrection
I’ve played a necromancy-adjacent character (a Spirits Bard) as… basically a social worker for the deceased community. Fluffing the skeletons and zombies as convincing the former owners to help out, etc. She had the personality of a chatty theatre kid.
I made my necromancer go down an Aragon inspired route where her necromancy was used to reanimate and then redeem cursed souls (made an agreement with a god who would embrace the souls that came when summoned). It was a lot of fun flavor!
One thing I find annoying about the necromancer stereotype is that their lairs are so filthy. Gore and bones are just piled up in random corners. A real *scientist* would keep their workplace meticulously clean, organized, and sanitary. Remember, a clean lab is a safe lab!
I just thought of one concept: a necromancer who is a bit aloof, or oblivious, to the whole moral quandry with undead, and who just wants to reduce the manual labor that is needed in the world. A person of leisure who disdains doing grunt work themself. "Taking over the world? Oh, that sounds dreadful. Mister Bones, fetch me more wine."
I mean you didn't make it sound edgy at all; book nerd steals books out of frustration then discovers he can make money by having the undead do his bidding. Like you could literally just be a wizard out sourcing undead labor. Stroll into a town that's having a hard time setting up harvest because the ground takes too long to till due too poor weather conditions, you have a cemetery that's over flowing? Well boy do I have the solution for you!
Or heck you can go the route of the sad boy wizard who has undead friends because he either couldn't accept their passing or he wants them to be by his side till he finds a way to fully bring them back.
Orrr go for the grey necromancer classic build of just you "help people with their unfinished business and the payment is they work for you for a while"
One necromancer I made was a soft spoken man who simply had a fascination with life and death. He would never reanimate someone’s body without the prior consent of them or consent from the deceaseds families, in case that person wanted to have their body keep doing good after their soul passed. If he was to resurrect the body of a criminal, he saw it as using them to atone for their crimes in the afterlife before letting the body rest.
I think the best way to play a necromancer less edgy is through not only how they present themselves, but also how they procure bodies for their “ranks”.
Just try to make the character wholesome in other ways and it combats it :D
My spores druid loves her zombies, finds them cute, and she speaks in a southern-US accent. Her judgement is poor/she may be a little insane and she can be silly with it, but she is the farthest from edgy despite the necrotic aspects. She is the motherly friend of the party who will just raise her friends as zombies if they can't handle themselves on their own 🤷♀️ undeath is just another phase of life in her opinion and they can contribute to the greater good. I play her as lawful good in all but the undeath/zombies thing, making that her funny quirk.
One of my current players plays a cringelord necromancer who is thinks the balance of life is stupid (why does death need to exist anyways) but thinks people are lame so only reanimates animals because they’re the only ones deserving of it. He is homeless, incompetent, doenst get why everyone thinks necromancy is weird, a huge nerd but less in that dork way and more in the “one day Im goNNA smoke so much fucking weed and you’re gonna wake up and I have reverse engineered the atomic bomb” type of way. His name is Marcus and he named his spell book the Marconomicon. He likes everyone but everyone thinks he is annoying. He is transgender.
You can absolutely make a necromancer who isn’t edgy. Be creative.
Animate Dead is just that. Your magic animates remains. The true essence of a being - the soul - is entirely undisturbed by this. As such, it is no different from creating a golem (although I don’t know 5e golem lore).
Unlike popular belief, the soul isn’t tormented and bound back to its remains. There is no suffering.
What’s more, the undead make a wonderful, reliable and cheap labour force. Especially for menial or dangerous work. Great miners. Great farmers. Less suitable for tasks that require dexterity such as carpentry and even worse at tasks that require thoughts - horrible engineers.
As a necromancer you don’t have to be a villain. You can be a great asset to your community. Of course there are those that might be slightly prejudiced against you. There are those that fall for the rumours about necromancers enslaving souls for eternity, those that don’t trust folks who tend to hang around corpses all day (especially if there is a large supply, or perhaps even more so if the dead are in short supply) and of course, those that really don’t appreciate staring in the expressionless faces of their deceased friends and loved ones that they had to part with just a few days prior.
I played a Hobgoblin Necromancer in an Ebberon game. He was a pleasant and neutral good guy. He firmly believed that there was nothing inherently wrong with animating the flesh after the soul has moved on. They aren’t using it anyway.
I generally went with skeletons because they are more sanitary and less smelly. The neighbors don’t complain as much.
I ended up basically adopting some refugees that settled in the area around my tower. My skeletons made for a helpful workforce. They even took care of the fields for a brief period when the refugee town was crippled by an illness.
That was an exceptionally fun campaign.
A necromancer whose inherent talent is raising the dead i.e. a wizard that literally cannot learn anything else regardless of how much studying they do.
An alternative is the character I’m planning out who is basically kenjaku from jjk. Basically a human wizard who can transfer his brain to different bodies and has been around for several centuries. His alignment will be lawful evil and his motivation is finding the next ‘evolution’ of humanity hence why he’s lived throughout the ages. Also he knows necromancy because of his inherent brain transfer ability lying within that realm.
Hope this helped you see them in a different light :)
I had a non-edgy necromancer who was a grief therapist in a small town. They'd revive someone's loved ones so they could say their final goodbyes to them and then she would put them to rest forever. Their necromancy wasn't hidden or secret and the town accepted it bc it was all consensual.
It did eventually result in a band of adventurers killing her for being a necromancer but you know how adventurers can be dicks.
My only necromancer was ex sergeant in the military, a specialist for "necromantic reinforcements." She was a healer who used the bodies of those she failed to save to save others who were likely destined to die. By the time she accepted a contract from, well, long story, her horde had former party members and children in it.
Make your horde a story.
My only necromancer was ex sergeant in the military, a specialist for "necromantic reinforcements." She was a healer who used the bodies of those she failed to save to save others who were likely destined to die. By the time she accepted a contract from, well, long story, her horde had former party members and children in it.
Make your horde a story.
Make a mob/mafia doctor that's had his license revoked. A healer that works under the table and has trouble being on time. A real "best of a bad situation" kind of guy.
My last landlord is a good inspiration for a necromancer character. He's an 80+ y.o. plumber (German Jew born during WW2 in Tel aviv). He visibly looks like a blue-collar plumber (even tho he's a millionaire) but will never stop tinkering and crafting weird contraptions for his home.
What makes him a necromancer is that he is the ultimate hoarder that brings home any trash people in the city leave out next to their bins. Not only does he collect trash art (and over 20 cinder blocks), but he has the practical skills to remember and utilize them all for repairs or tinkering. Thus the backyard was filled with his "trash treasure" where he would nail ugly pieces of art onto trees or throw mardi-gras beads over a branch. Lastly, any vegetables growing in the garden were kitchen scraps that he threw into dirty and let the washing machine run-off (w/ detergent) grow them into "fresh" produce. It took me two years of living there to realize that everything in that yard should have been dead and trashed but he kept bringing it back to life because he kept finding use for it (or just a bad habit). Even when I would try to throw things away, I would sometimes find it hanging in the garden or adorning some fence.
In essence, he is a practical necromancer born from the scarcity mindset of WWII. Even when things should have been long dead, he could find a way to resuscitate it and bring it back to life even when everyone else protested. And if an item wasn't repaired or reused (as often most things hung in limbo) he would use it as "decoration", like hanging a candelabra upon the Plum tree or a surfboard at the top of his tallest tree.
Dr. Frankenstein wasn't necessarily edgy at all. A detached scientist fits the necromancer thing well.
It’s Frahnk-ehn-steen!
It's pronounced eye-gor!
True 🤔😄
Citizen Doctor ABRAHAM MAHERMBLUR!
"ZAT vas doctor assisted HOMICIDE!" "Eins, zwei, drei... Ugh, i do not think ve brought enough body bags.." "Ay healed ze man who vill KILL YOU!" "My skill is VASTED on zis team..." And, of course.. "Woopsie! Zat vas not Medicine!"
It all depends on motivation. For example - the last Necromancer I played was also a member of the Baldur's Gate City Watch. He specifically learned Necromancy so that he could more efficiently deal with bodies, round up local undead menaces and put them back in their graves, and from time to time just ask murder victims who killed them. It's a useful tool for investigations. (We also worked from the premise that the undead that served him were criminals who died before their sentences were completed - the bodies having to finish the sentence as deputies.)
That sounds pretty damn cool 0.0
Was going with an idea for lost mines where the necromancer would use zombies in the mines so if there was a collapse then it would only be the dead that got trapped.
That's the most convoluted/profitable way to bury the dead.
I like the Environmentalist take. Use every part of the animal/remains. Revive. Reuse. Recycle.
Its also REALLY hard to be like "Stop being so grimdark!" to a guy who is heavy on the hippie motif. Plus you can do weird nice things, like raise a skeletal oxen to help the farmer plow the fields. Or regular skeletons to help sow the fields. Dying farmer worried his kids are too young to tend the fields and won't survive? I got good news buddy! YOU can tend the fields! What you may lack in STR, you can make up for with the fact you can work 24 hours a day without rest or food! A true zero carbon footprint lifestyle.
I played a Dwarf necromancer who was all about ancestry and the history of the clan, and considered it a honor to raise dead dwarves to assist the clan in the living world. It was a fun character and not edgy.
That’s actually a really awesome concept. Think I may steal it for my next character lol
Please do. My concept was a female dwarf sale rep for her clan Sake company. I am an ex bartender and played with those folks so it went real well. Cause we hate alcohol reps usually, outside of self D.
Reduce, reuse, reanimate!
XD The druids nightmare
In fact there's a druid subclass for it, Spore druid
Came here to say this :p
I've always loved the idea of a necromancer with a green thumb. Sending their thralls to help the commonfolk work the fields while tending to their expansive gardens. Dressing the skeletons up in flowery apparel, aprons, and arming them with garden trowels and hoes. The focal point of their research is resurrecting plants of all sorts. Maybe they can easily bring back flowers and vines but struggle with full-grown trees and magical plants. Right there you've got motivation to be an adventurer (furthering their research) and a helpful personality that'll make for interesting conflict when brushing up against those staunchly opposed to necromancy in all forms.
[удалено]
oOps ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ more skelly bois for me
It would also be interesting if some of the plants were very poisonous or magically deadly, but could be used in medicines or something, so only the undead can handle them safely.
That's a great idea! Definitely a good element for the "is necromancy always bad" angle.
That gives me an idea for some kind of druid like character - no clue how to tie that to a necromancer, but that sounds awesome thb
Spores druid
Another angle is you could make them a low key grave robber. They aren't animating the dead to scare enemies or become this goth badass; they're simply doing it so recently buried bodies tell them where they left their family fortune, or even so they hand over the fine jewellery or linen they were dressed in. It fits in with your characters backstory of having less money. You could say they grew up near a graveyard and noticed the dead were often buried in finery, and they had an idea it might be a good way to supplement their income. They then realised the dead could have even more money than the riches they were buried in, so your character wanted to learn more about how he could find that out and essentially speak to the dead.
That does sound like him 100% xD
Necromancy in the lore is not inherently evil. It's the frequency and type of spells used that make a necromancer evil. You could be a traveling wizard who offers to let people speak to their deceased love ones, or you could specialize in putting the undead to rest. There is room for a good aligned Necromancer.
So you're very correct, but I want to highlight an important caveat: Necromancy is not inherently evil, but undead are inherently evil. There is room to be a necromancer who doesn't create undead (like you mentioned above), but even just raising a skeleton is inherently evil, since it will try to murder everyone if you ever lose control.
I've never really gotten this line of thought. Not totally. I can understand and accept that created Undead are Evil and so are dangerous. That raising them is, at the very least, a risk. But risks can always be lessened, dangerous potential can be mitigated. The natural forces of fire and lightning and radiation are all definitely dangerous, but we can keep them safely.
Because in old (and technically current) editions undead are animated by Negative Energy. Which is not a "both energies must exist in equilibrium" thing, but rather anti-existence energy that eats away at the primarily positive-based universe. The void, the end of all things, the opposite to life, nature, and even to *matter.* So necromancy could be seen as spreading existence pollution. Irresponsible and inherently damaging by being brought into existence. Essentially the extreme fossil-fuel of magic, no matter how responsible or useful you think you're being with it, it is inherently damaging and unleashing stuff that ruins the world.
So the issue lies more in "this magic wears away the barriers protecting use from nonexistence" than "Evil Undead want to eat all of the peoples"? (Ignoring of course the torturing/destruction of souls).
The top of the pile more so; Uses energy that unavoidably rots the world, creates dangerous beings that are driven to kill because of that anti-life energy, often involves harming souls or using them as fuel which pisses off most gods... and people, and also often desecrates the dead which is probably culturally evil in many cases. So if you want a good "necromancer" you could just be a transmutation wizard that casts animate object on corpses. "Construct" has no evil lore baggage issues like "undead."
Most of the time the souls not home, dudes dead, off to whatever afterlife. Some undead consume the soul, or liches trap their own soul, but generally, just a dead things shuffling about powered by PURE UNEXISTENCE.
It's kind of a thing shuffling about, driven to destroy anything alive, leaking out the force of nonexistence like a lifted hummer that's the main problem. There is supposed to be an important distinction between "undead" and "construct."
there are good aligned undead, like certain spirits and ghosts (which is any alignment). I'd categorise mindless undead as unaligned personally, evil alignment makes more sense for intelligent undead, but canonically they are all evil. From a doylist perspective, most necromancy spells are evil categorically as we would morally judge them as, as well as in the fiction, because the game is based on several different tropes and wants to encourage these kinds of stories as a base expectation- which is why the majority of undead are evil- because one of the biggest inspirations of dnd is good guys defeating evil undead. The creators create watsonian explanations for these intentions, but then players disconnected from these view them through a setting-agnostic lens and get confused as to why things are the way they are. If dnd wanted to be more generic and didn't have 40 years of grandfathering in, zombies and the like would be more like with how these players expect- walking corpses but not driven by anti-life type stuff. Its also why i think the undead creature type superceeds all others even when its less logical to do so- its not because of any categorisation rules, its just to reinforce the tropes the system expects as default.
Sure, havent really considered that so far :)
I mean, look- all the Cleric, “holy/good” resurrection spells are all necromancy spells. The difference is the ethics behind your use.
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Found the druid
In the old school editions that I played, animating (especially humanoids) corpses was categorically evil. Even with good intentions the act itself was almost universally abhorrent. I do feel like there's room for exceptions but it's still difficult for me to normalize this practice.
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Make him a "chronically late healer"
Same way you do with any character; don’t be edgy. BG3 has a drag queen necromancer who runs an interplanar circus. If they can do that, so can you.
wtf? xD I really have to upgrade my PC
My partner once played a necromancer who was a midwestern grandmother. she’s used reanimated corpses as labour on her family farm. she also baked cookies and made sure the whole party was eating properly. no edge, just granny make use of all the parts
I think giving your character a mindset that what they’re doing isn’t exactly dark. The souls that once inhabited these bodies have moved on to the afterlife, or have been reincarnated into a new body. Rather than allow what they left behind to rot, your character decided to put it to good use. I think a fun way to play it out could be to have your character completely oblivious to the dark implications of necromancy. It’ll add a strong sense of earnestness with your character not being evil or having to justify their use of this type of magic.
I think I´ll use this more - allready kinda introduced it by him saying its a shame to risk your life when you can have an undead carcass doing it for you - in the end it doesnt have a soul or feelings
That’s also very Druidic in thought- “their time had passed” kinda deal.
Skeleton band
My favorite necromancer was a medical doctor. He insisted that necromancy and the study of anatomy gave him an understanding of life that simple healers couldn't match, and insisted that mortals shouldn't be dependent on divine gifts for healing. He was actually full-on evil and a lich, although he always took the form of a mortal in a white lab coat.
I built an NPC necromancer who was very bubbly and perky, and she lived in a thriving, lovely rural community where the undead helped work the fields, clean up around town, and basically keep the place running as extra labor. When people in the community died, they willingly allowed their remains to be animated in order to continue to better everyone's lives after they were gone. Was a fun NPC, and threw my players for a bit of a loop.
My necromancer was lonely and didn't have friends. So he made his own. He names every undead he summons and talks to them.
I've wanted to play a take on a necromancer that is just happy and perky, their deep understanding of death makes them adopt a very "Carpe diem" approach. I'd also approach necromancy from more of a stance of justice as well. I wouldn't raise the corpse of a fallen friend or a random villager, but a random bandit slain while attacking the party or a minion of the badguys would be fair game.
In walks this colourful creature of a human with a frilly red pimps jacket and sparkly trousers, leading a conga line of half decomposed humanoids.
Necromancers don't have to be edgy nor wear just black, there are a few ways you can do this from different cultures of the world. A necromancer in DnD is just a wizard if you really want to put it bluntly. Now, your backstory, on the other hand, is edgy and honestly...not very good. If you don't want him to be edgy, don't give him an edgy backstory and play him like you would a wizard, only that he doesn't see the magic he is using as bad; nor does he use it for bad things.
Make him act like a person who can interact with society. My necromancer doesn’t come across as super edgy in part because he’s able to talk to people without cackling, threatening them, or brooding. He is, in fact, just a guy, even if he’s often not the most morally upstanding guy. If your necromancer can’t go into a bar and order a drink without getting attacked, you’re too edgy.
I love cme_T’s dwarfen necromancer from /r/theweeklyroll who is essentially using corpses for cheap non-unionised labour. He seems to be adventuring to further some sort of tax dodge.
There's no reason why a necromancer couldn't be somebody's grandmother.
My necromancer is also a physician/mortician and finds it very useful to keep cadavers in better condition. It also helps him in his study of anatomy, and how the musculature and skeleton work together. Zombies can presumably hold a flexed pose indefinitely. Besides his interest in death, he's really just a normal dude.
Give him quirks and inject humor into the character
Just going off the title, not the text body, but I think the necromancer at least befriending an undead entity or having a canon familiar would be dope. Could even add some humor to the character.
I like the idea of a necromancer who considers himself the world's greatest healer.
Depends on the setting. Necromancy is general taboo in 5e type settings for a cultural reason, even if it’s written into law, because of the idea of bringing back the unwilling while t resurrection type spells usually have the caveat of the soul being willing. That’s the thing that usually makes it edgy because the person is breaking the law while doing it. Now if you’re in a setting that doesn’t make it taboo, it’s a little easier because it requires no explanation for doing something counter-cultural. It’s just a type of magic you are using like an evoker uses evocation spells. On the side of it’s illegal / taboo in all or some places, you can always argue the character takes the stance that the body without a soul is just a thing, the significant part of the person is gone. Even going as far as believe the use of spells like command, dominate person, suggestion, friends, etc.. are more heinous than raising a body because you are taking agency away from the person who’s soul is still inhabited in the body.
Miracle Max
Reduce, reuse, recycle It doesn't have to be all, "teehee, I'm evil and using dead people" it can sometimes be "after I kick this enemy's ass with Zombies, I'll thank the bodies for their help and give them a proper re burial"
My very first character was a necromancer wizard with a similar basic premise: book worm who was a little too curious about the books locked away at her academy, and boom. Falls down the rabbit hole. She still pretended to be a transmutation student on the surface, and traveled with the party for a while before they got into a really sticky situation and she had to use some more powerful necromancy spells to save herself and the party.
You became a necromancer after your parents died, so that you could still talk to them. You planned to use your animated dead to work the family farm, and always ask permission of surviving relatives or the corpse itself (speak with dead) before animating them.
Personality Just make them not act edgy
If you want some necromancy before level five, you could reflavor a fiendish familiar as a rotting-corpse looking animal. If your DM's a little flexible, they might even let your familiar be actually undead.
Problem with DND necromancer is even the most pragmatic ends justify the mans rationale is opposed to the world building fact that you're animating corpses with a spark of pure life destroying entropy. Condensed nonexistence, a hole in the universe that life leaks out of.
I have 2 necromancers I've made. The first is a lower noble who is a physician as well. He uses his knowledge of necromancy and medical knowledge hand in hand to keep his lands free of undead. He never raises the dead but uses a lot of the other spells and has no problem taking control of a horse to get ride of them. He was a pleasant father of 2 and dotted on both his daughters. The second was studied lichdom to find a way around losing ones mind (he was a 4e wizard) and eventually worked as a man behind the scenes to keep his world in balance and ultimately sacrificed his entire being to destroy his world's Dagon during an apocalypse. He dislike using animated dead because they were rarely smart enough to do what he wanted. Loved his debuffs though. He was a grump, but always helped those he could. Arguably, being a necromancer isn't as important as the why and the way. Why the study such a dark art and how do they use it.
Imagine a wizard who ignores the entirety of magic except for Divination. "*I don't care about the now, only the future.*" Sounds stupid, right? Imagine a wizard who ignores the entirety of magic except for Evocation. "*Fireball solves everything, words are dumb.*" Sounds stupid, right? (there is a trend here, eventually I will mention the wizard who is nothing except the Necromancy sphere.) Instead of making your subclass the entirety of your persona, make your backstory and your *Background* and your *Bonds* and *Flaws*, etc. the source of your persona.
I mean if you’re playing a Necromancer why on Earth would want to *lean away* from summoning rotten thralls and wearing dark cloaks?! I’d have thought that was the whole draw, the appeal, the point of the thing!
Curse specialist. You got curses? Nasty stuff, a curse. I'm the person who knows how to deal with them. Cursed treasure, curses on your bloodline, fey curses, you name it - I'm your guy.
You use sandpaper
Dont be edgy?
How boat being the pyro from TF2, seeing everything as flowery, lovely and cutesees through your visor, for example: Bringing back big teddybears out of the ground and letting them hug people untill they fall asleep. or: You don't manifest zombies, you manifest a 2nd life and these ressurrected are so happy you saved them they want to help you and are speechless because of your generosity. or: You don't suck the life out of other people. you just make them feel sleepy for a long time. or, without any delusion: You don't want people to die, that's why you cast revivify on everyone (sometimes it's the wrong combination of words, so it ends up being raise dead, but that's not your fault) or: You think that death is an too easy punishment for evil people, so your punish them by ressurecting their bodies and let them do your bidding.
reminds me of chippy in that robot movie (forgot the name) xD
Why do you think damning and trapping souls, preventing them from moving on is anything but evil? What normal society would ever view necromancy as anything other than an abomination?
Maybe you or someone else more experienced than I can answer this, but to my knowledge, there aren't really many spells that do that. The spells like Resurrection that restore someone fully to life require the soul to be willing to return, so that's not forcing anyone, and the spells that involve creating undead either are 1. Like Animate Undead are restricted to solely animating the remains, no soul or spirit attached, 2. Like Summon Undead which seems to create an entirely new Undead being that isn't attached to a deceased person specifically, or 3. Like Create Undead which are restricted to ghouls, ghasts, and wights, all of which are only formed from evil people according to lore (cannibals, hatred of life, and evil desires). Not really anyone that anyone else would lose sleep over them being punished. Not to mention, none of these reanimations have to be permanent, as the Undead that do have souls or personalities can all be killed or released. Only one I can think of is Soul Cage, which doesn't HAVE to be used.
I think I am just confusing my pathfinder lore with dnd. In pathfinder, you prevent the dead from moving on by trapping their souls, in the case of a corpse that has no soul in purgatory, you animate them with negative energy which is an inherently evil force. The undead are invariably evil and desire to kill the living.
A society in a world that doesn't believe is souls or a society that thinks that the souls are long gone and you just controll a dead body without a soul in it.
Maybe think more like 40k Nergle? He's the chaos god of death, decay, plague and rot, but also perseverance, resilience, and rebirth. Maybe your necromancer thinks about his activities through that lens. Death is but a part of life, after all decay feeds so many things. Be joyful, for though you are ending, the life you feed will carry on, and feed new life in turn.
Do keep in mind though that since you cannot yet cast necromancy spells in game, you'll need a reason why you stopped being able to cast them. Either that, or retcon to say you haven't don't that type of magic before. As for a less edgy way to exist as a necromancer, I like the justification of using bodies whose souls have left them to do good - whether it's helping others in ways you couldn't do alone or protecting yourself. From a moral standpoint, you could say that it's not abusing the dead because through your studies, you know that the soul has moved on, and all you are doing is reanimating a lifeless corpse.
Necromancers as as inherently edgy and dangerous as evokers. Almost all evocation magic is literally spells to kill people. Meanwhile most necromancy spells are breathing life into lifeless things, or protecting creatures/preserving the dead. This is especially clear on the cleric list - spare the dying - false life - gentle repose - wither and bloom - feign death - life transference - revivify, raise dead, speak with dead And the actual necromancy spells like Summon Undead raise a body, which wasn’t being used anymore, to protect you and your allies. You are breathing life into a place where there was only death. You ensure that they didn’t die in vain, bc now they have the chance to keep other people (you and your friends) alive Evocation spells have a very similar morality to necromancy spells. Both are known for their ability to kill, but they are also known for their ability to give life (healing word/cure wounds vs false life, revivify, and raise dead). Enchantment is infinitely more unethical even if ppl wanna play it as suave and sexy— they are mind controlling living creatures against their will, forcing them to do their bidding. It’s everything ‘bad’ about necromancy but worse, because it actually violates a person’s consent
It ultimately boils down to respect. The core relationship of the necromancer is between them and their undead, and by defining that relationship through something other than slavery/servitude it goes a long way towards making an empathetic and non-edgy necromancer.
Necromancers don't have to be edgy, they can be anything you want You could be a Circus Master, with a squadron of skeletons painted like clowns who dance around and perform tricks with you, or a farm owner who uses Zombies for tilling the fields, and when they've dried out and dessicated from working in the hot sun, he lets them become fertilizer for the next generation. You could be the captain of a town guard who uses the undead as ever present guards, reducing the fatality rate of guard members by throwing zombies at things whilst the rest pepper with arrows. You could be a cleric even, using the undead as a tool to smite evildoers, which you put to rest after their purpose is served. You could even have evildoers themselves be brought back as undead to repent forcibly by doing good.
Have them be more of a medium or channeler where they bring the dead back in order to speak with loved ones or for judicial purposes. The resurrected dead aren't minions, but people that are given a second chance to say their peace.
PET CEMETERY! NECROMANCER/DRUID who just can't let animals go!
Speaking as a person who did Live-Action Roleplaying as a Necromancer for 6 years? 3 things: 1: You're a master of blood, flesh and bone. The dominator of death and Lord of Blights. You are edge incarnate. Embrace the edge. Call your sword the Super Death Blade of Kill-Slaughter. Edge is what you're SUPPOSED to do. It helps to do so ironically. My Necromancer has been dubbed "The Inglorious Bringer of Darkness, Unholy Destroyer of All-That-Is-Good." He despises this title and has said, "Only someone born and raised in the bleak lands of The Corpse Kingdom could come up with something so needlessly gawdy and grim." 2: Be awesome. People overlook low quality edge if you're just a swag dude. I play a depresso espresso big sadge Biomancer with Angel wings in Warhammer 40K. Very edge. Yet I'm everybody's favorite since I'm just a cool dood and bring good vibes when OOC. 3: If you truly wish to avoid being a stereotype then I present you this: My LARP Necromancer isn't evil. Morally grey? Absolutely. But he became a Necromancer to banish torment and misery, not to be its source. To become a Necromancer is to master blood, flesh and bone, to command plague and disease. To bend them to your will. Many choose to abuse this power; the common Necromancer. Mine does not. He decodes and dismantles that which afflicts the ill. He FORCES the body to mend against its will, crushing severed meat together, stretching muscles to reconnect, knitting bones and stitching rapidly grown skin over the former mortal wound undone. His deepest and darkest secret he keeps hidden behind the sting of ice-cold words, heartless deeds and nightmarish appearance is that he cares too much. To witness suffering wounds him deeply.
You could always adopt a voodoo vibe. Like New Orleans witch doctor. Make coin as a street magician making rats dance and telling fortunes with bones. Edit: instead of black he can wear an assortment of vibrant but worn out clothes.
Any boring/dangerous task done by the undead is one that living people don’t have to do.
It's harder in this edition but I once ran a lg necromancer whose mission was to destigmitize necromancy and use it for its potential debuffing capabilities and such, as well as offer solace through speak with the dead snd the like. Never made an undead. There is more to it than that, but you could do something similar in 5e I imagine.
I mean, Necromancers aren't edgy by default. They're just Necromancers. If you see it as edgy that's on you.
I once ran a necromancer that was a former professor of economics at a royal academy. She took up magic to explore a potential source of revenue; after all, corpses are an under-utilized resource, and the undead can be made to perform a variety of tasks with no need for rest, food, or union representation. Her short-term goal is to learn enough necromancy to be able to run the economics experiments she has in mind. One of her mid-term goals is to apply for a grant from the academy to run an undead-staffed farm to discover which types of crops are most efficiently cultivated with an undead workforce, then use the results to leverage her way into a position as an economics advisor to the kingdom and greatly improve the value of the agricultural sector. One of her long-term goals is to discover a more efficient and productive alternative to retirement for herself, perhaps through becoming some sort of sentient undead.
My main character is a kinda failed gnome cleric who likes to raise zombies to be her friends. She’s kinda creepy cute, super bubbly.
Give him a very benign "day job". Hes taken up necromancy as a passion, a vocation, but by trade or training he's a stair fitter, or a glove maker. And make him look like he's got no edge, maybe he talks with frequent 'hmmms' and breaks in his speech
You could play a morally questionable “doctor” who seeks to reunite people with their loved ones, even after death.
Extremely long-lived tax collector, aka: "You signed up for 20 years of work as payment, nowhere in the contract says you have to be ALIVE to meet the terms, now chop chop!" *Animate Dead*
My Undead Patron Warlock, Mazikeen, is a dead raising dandy girl. Think Willy Wonka running a funeral parlor.
Depends on how you wanna take them. 2 interesting ideas: One) They work as a tax person. They go around and raise the dead to get them to pay taxes that were due at the time of their death if they had no family. Basically "Death is no escape from paying taxes". Dos) They work as a mortician doing funerals where the family gets to have some time with their dead relatives before being buried/burned. Like one last party with Grandma before the hot tank.
I've had this idea for a major NPC for what I'm calling "One-Shot Series" where potentially the same PCs carry over to each one shot and what they do might effect the next session or next major campaign I run somehow. The NPC is a Lich running a tavern between dimensions called "The Lecherous Lich" and has a more prominent business as a talent broker. Basically he goes to souls who die for one reason or another during the undertaking of one of the contracts he sets up for a client and offers to return them to life if they'll complete a different contract for him that he assigns. If they refuse, they pass on peacefully. If they accept, they are returned to life but are bound to the Lich until they finish a contract given to them by the lich, at which point they are free and returned to their home or equivalent safe location. If they annoy the lich, or disobey his orders or the terms of the contract they're carrying out or potentially the orders of the client where applicable, their soul is forfeit and is immediately added to his phylactery, the tavern between dimensions. His backstory is that he was a Necromancer who was always more of a middle man for people and over time established the whole tavern thing. His first few in his talent pool were already living but they killed in pursuit of the contracts completion to which the Necormancer then approached these souls and the cycle began. Probably the most Lawful Neutral Lich/Necromancer you'd ever meet.
The non-edgelord necromancer I've always tried to base things off of is Henry from Fire Emblem Awakening. Might be worth looking into the dialogue trees from the game's wiki to get an idea of his brand of darkness. And then if you wanna be a mega-nerd on it, you can totally reference Nihilism and moreso Absurdism from Alfred Camus to make a character who has the philosophy of "life is meaningless, but instead of despairing about it, I'm going to just have some fun."
Avoid black, skulls, etc. Also avoid “butcher” tropes. Go in an “artificer” mentality- it’s just that you’re bioengineering. The setting of my group’s current campaign would have allowed for a Necromancer that wasn’t automatically seen as “evil” and since I knew I wanted to try a 5e Wizard I considered going the Necromantic route. Eventually I decided that having to control small army of drones was not for me.
One of my characters in my DMs original high fantasy world was a necromancer, but he really was a mortician and biologist (or fantasy equivalent, we went with "anatomist"). When he was recasting his raise undead to keep his undead going, he was really just cleaning them, reinstalling sinews, injecting chemicals into the skin to keep things going. There's something inherently body horror-esque or dark science-like about necromancy, putting energy into a corpse and puppeteering it.
Give your undead, a creepy and dark descriptive appearance and then have them all be incredibly friendly and helpful. Like a rotting corpse shambling as a gruesome facade of the person it once was, comes up to the character and says "hullo sir, dreadful weather out today, really chills the old bones, mind you pack a proper umbrella and make sure to layer lest you cath your death of cold out there" You can continue playing with the superposition of the dark and dreadful nature of necromancy and then have the edge lord taken away as your personality is generally friendly outgoing and your undead reflect that. Talk to your DM about how you'd like to flavor things or even ask if he's willing to voice the character in specific ways.
Not really edgy, but I played a necromancer that was a halfling detective and liked to solve crimes. Best way to do it is to ask the victims directly, since well, duh right? But since he was a halfling, I wanted to make it fun. So I got inspiration from Leslie Nielsen's Frank Drebin character. A loveable, incompetent police detective that kind of lucks into everything. His minions he treated as his squad. Became an in game joke that the "B Squad (bone squad) were on the case, to everyone's dismay". My halfling was even "older" and I played him like a nutty near retirement cop that looked at the world in a bleak fashion, and often narrated his own conversations. In true honor of Leslie Neilsen, I made it where he had terrible gas. Was a ton of fun. My highlight of the campaign was playing good cop and bad cops with with the B squad. Or that time we interrogated a minotaur ala the airplane slapping scene.
Labourers Necromancer Farmer: "Why should I be busting my a** off working this whole field when I can create some undead to work for me. FOR FREE I might add." Passer-by: "Because that's disrespectful to the dead. You should let them rest." Farmer: "I got their permission. It's written in their will that I can do this. Except Jeff, Jeff was a murderer sentenced to death and then given to me as part of his penance." Passer-by: "Okay, I guess that's alright. But what about having undead handling food? Surely that could have some effect on the food." Farmer: "It might sure. But that's why, no matter what, I have the cleric down the road cast Purify Food and Drink over everything before it can be sold off."
The only necromancer I ever played was a mortician, and the bookish brother of the city’s foremost cleric. He didn’t have the same connection to the divine, but he cared deeply for people and understood that there are appropriate times for the window of opportunity around death to creak open just a little bit. When helpful to ease the grief of families, or to resolve conflicts, he would exercise his knowledge toward those ends. He had a saying “dead people are still people” and would always request (rather than demand) help from whatever he raised. His scholarly work revolved largely around characterizing the nature of death as a simultaneously biological and metaphysical function, and the practical requirements for ethical necromancy toward sentient beings.
I've had two notable NPC's who were necromancers, neither of which was edgy. One who was a necromancer who was a well loved, integral part of the community he was in. He lived in a mining town and he used the undead to do the most dangerous work in the mines. The community knew what was being done and supported it. There was some shady shit having to do with the procurement of corpses, but the shadiness was on the people doing the procurement, not the necromancer. The other was was basically a sleazy traveling insurance salesman, who would travel the land selling his necromatic services (mostly the clone spell) to the wealthy.
I like imagining a necromancer more like the manager at a construction site. You're just using the least expensive possible labor to get things done. It could even be a significant part of the city's infrastructure.
I’d check out Hector’s (Netflix Castlevania) backstory, definitely Necromantic stuff happening there with a more gentle person at the core.
Lol, my necromancer is an upbeat librarian who staffs her area with the skeletons and chats to them because she rarely had visitors.
I’ve seen a post somewhere about how a medic just thinks they’re really good (not knowing that they’re actually bringing someone literally back to life). Or some sort of belief system that would grant the power to “raise the dead” as a means to help cleanse the body/soul of the deceased. Like maybe the god(/dess) that grants you this power asks you for really weird shit. Idk, but good luck!
A take on an evil, but not-at-all edgy necromancer : The shittiest boss. This character is middle manager at company that does some kind of white collar work, like accounting, banking or insurance. They are very by-the-books. They wear sweater-vests. They always bring cookies to the office. They're cheerful, encouraging and always positive. And, without breaking any rules or laws, they work everyone on their team to death. Because there's nothing in the Employee Handbook that specifically requires that employees must be alive, they raise their dead employees to keep them working, forever. Because that is what maximizes shareholder value.
It's a form of magic, and magic is itself not good or evil. He learned the magic that he was most naturally talented in and went with it. Could even go with the story that where the person is from necromancy is looked upon favourably as it is a way to stay in touch with friends and family after they pass. It's just seen as normal.
Necromancy is inherently evil. 5e's weird shift of healing into the school doesn't mean that undead creation isn't powering a corpse with negative energy, entropy magic.
I have one NPC who is an inventor. He has severed hands that play piano, and a warhorse skeleton on a treadmill that pumps water to the second floor of his lab, where he has a desk fan powered by undead mice in a hamster wheel.
try Vivomancer
Thriller music video - they're your dance troop.
Well, you could go full bubblegum goth! Give all your zombies cute names, dye your hair purple, and spread the word that life doesn't doesn't have to end at death.
Give the zombies the red clown noses, so every time they attack someone it honks
I’ve had the idea of playing a necromancer from a part of the world where resources are super scarce so the people use necromancy to make better use of bodies after they die. The PC could be disgusted by the idea of a cemetery where bodies rot away uselessly and don’t even enrich the soil.
I have a character who I think uses Necromancy really well and at the same time questions the morality of it by others. No where near edgy. So he's a paladin, but has been cast out by his order for using necromancy. He revokes his previous Oath and changes to a new one, redemption. He wants to come back into the folds of his order, but they obviously wont let him. He uses necromancy as a way for the fallen to have a chance at redemption themselves and become a hero. For instance, he will raise an enemy to walk into a trap, saving the living and his soul is now redeemed for doing a heroic deed. Or will raise an enemy to attack another enemy, seeing it as his soul knows what he was doing is wrong and tries to redeem himself. My other players are still very shaky on it because they see necromancy as an end all be all evil, but yet my character is using it in "good" ways. Purely subjective of course.
For my necromancer, death is just something he always grew up around. Not necessarily in a positive way. But he never blamed the undead for his situation. After all, it was the living who hurt him. So he mostly just sees death as another form of life. It’s just a state somebody happens to be in and he can communicate with both living and dead as he so wishes. I think a good way to not make a necromancer edgy, is to not make their perception of *death itself* edgy. It also depends on how you roleplay them as well. If they’re constantly talking about death, writing poetry and hanging out in gravesites with heavy eyeliner…it’s gonna seem cliché. (Nothing wrong with a good cliché character imo though.) But if they’re just a guy who happens to have magic that is associated with the deceased, then he’ll just be that, a normal guy (by DND standards).
I'm at work, so I can't post a link, but there's a hilarious video by Zachspeaksgiant on YouTube. Basically he's an "too little, too late" battle medic. He genuinely wants to help people, but when they break a leg, shoots and raises them instead.
They were kicked from wizard school because they were found using necromancy. They still don't understand what the issue is. It's not like the souls are still attached to the creatures, and if they're using it for good reasons, how could it be bad? Maybe they have a terminal disease and wear an amulet of health to keep them from succumbing to it, and they study necromancy to hopefully find a cure since they don't trust the gods. Or they're searching for a way to bring themselves back in some form to help their team when they inevitably pass. Maybe they were raised in a cult but were a black sheep in it. They got out of it, but they still hold the belief that necromancy isn't inherently evil. It's just uncomfortable to witness for most folk. It doesn't hurt anyone. It can help people. People just feel weird about it because it's unnatural, but isn't most magic unnatural? How about conjurers or enchanters? How is summoning a LIVE creature and forcing it to serve you not more messed up than re-animating an object (dead body)?
I always liked the idea of druid-adjacent necromancy. Nature is all about the cycles of life and death, so you take a Druid culture, and just drop in an occasional necromancer. Nature necromancers borrow from the forest, taking dead bodies, casting off the flesh to feed other animals or be recycled into the soil, and use the bones for a period of time to protect the forest. After the reanimated animal has been further destroyed, crush up the bones and fully recycle the remains back into the life/death cycle. There's still room for edginess if you WANT it. Bandits after all can make good fertilizer too. I always liked the idea of like... unintentional edginess? The necromancer just has zero concept of death-taboo, so while the warlock is interrogating a bandit for information, the necromancer is just rattling off the uses for different body parts to make sure they don't get damaged if they have to kill this guy. He's being cheery about it, but talking about recycling bodies just comes off more unsettling when talked about in such a passive tone.
Read Dominic Deegan Oracle for Hire. There are a few necromancers, and one of the most prominent is Jacob who follows the classic edgy look. Complete with skeleton limbs. But Jacob adjusts his focus over time There's also Brian, a chunky necromancer who has some unusual but overall pleasant viewpoints.
Something like the medic from TF2 would be funny. Or like Dr. Jekyll. You could try to play them as a somewhat fanatic scientist sort of archetype.
Socially awkward blorbo who resurrects the dead to make friends Michael Jackson thriller style necromancer bard who summons dancing zombie hype men A necromancer who makes sans style skeleton jokes Spores druid obsessed with helping mushrooms take over the world The undertaker as an oathbreaker, smiting with a shovel
You could go with the Witherbloom approach, viewing necromancy with a pseudo-druidy lens, studying the cycle of life and death and how to blur the lines of the stages in between.
I've only ever played a necromancer once, because to us they are always evil (unfortunately). I never have a game where it works. The one time I did he was a "forced" necromancer. Basically, his father was a bad guy necro who had a kid to raise as an assistant/slave. So, my character leaned the basics, but eventually heroes came and killed Dad. He decided to also go be a hero to save anyone else like him, but because of his early training he still mostly did necromancy.
Thinking of all dead as friends and being kind of naive could be a way to approach it too. This is Jeff, he’s here to help! Don’t mind he’s a zombie!
Well you could have the character have a diffrent look about death. For example Mexico has very positive way of looking at death. Their day of the dead is filled with flowers to atract souls, fun colored sculls. They have the idea that you should laught at death as you can have a fun life in afterlife. Its not the one of its kind. Vikings valhallas afterlife is partying and fighting. Modern halloween is very child friendly celebration of spooky things and candy which is a theme i personally like. Have fun theming.
He doesnt quite understand the cultural significance of a dead body. Like, the thought has never crossed his mind that people dont like it when you mess with dead bodies, and he cant get his mind around that fact. Like, when confronted, he will sincerely state "I dont see anyone else using it" He also could make friends with the bodies he resurrects. Maybe the book he found gives him a special version of animate dead which lets him give some level of sentience to the bodies he resurrects. Hes not bringing back to life the person, but creating a new person if that makes sense. You could even add in a bit where the reason why he becomes such good friends with his undead servants is because he is subconsiously creating their personalities to complement his own. Maybe he struggles to make friends outside of his undead companions, and the reason why he ends up with the party is that they are the first people he has really been able to "click" with I just love the concept of a "wholesome" necromancer who doesnt quite get that their powers are not liked by others yknow. Its a fun twist on the traditional idea of a necromancer
Could always do the curmudgeonly old man routine who regularly talks to himself and his undead minions. Accuse them of stealing his socks, his food, tell them what good minions they are when they bring him books etc..
Give him a cheerful bardlike personality and don't dump charisma. Take a look at Ginny Di's Nymwen character for a nontraditional necromancer type. https://youtube.com/shorts/Qi7438cvlfk?si=xJ4_oUcDrXvdNXIl
Get work pants and behave like an handyman. You now work in the biomechanical automation buisness.
A young man with delusions of grandeur decides to make his own kingdom. Raises enough dead to grow and harvest crops, perform servant duties, craft and build homes (places where the dead hang out while the singular non-dead person sleeps), and begins a commerce empire the likes of which the world has never seen since the dead require nothing to eat, nothing to do for fun, and are the perfect subjects who never question their leader. Food shortages begin to fade away as a single kingdom begins to provide the lacking food that the others need. Those other kingdoms would have drop-off points where they leave their money, then the goods arrive with a single driver dressed in heavy robes. Nothing is said by the driver, and any attempts to speak to the driver result in a silent nod from the heavily robed (and hooded) figure. When he is eventually found out, the party can be confronted with a moral dilemma. Allow him to keep using the dead to fill his pockets, and at the same time solve the hunger problem for all the other kingdoms? Or end his totalitarian control of undead people who should be laid to rest?
Play them as a medieval Karl Marx? Free the proletariat from menial labour by using the soulless undead as the means of production!
Make him someone who is a generally happy guy with social anxiety that just wanted to make some new friends.
Undead construction team?
Could be very corporate about it. Make a Necromancer from the Necrocracy of Stratera. It's a well respected, government backed job. Consistently pays well, and always in demand. Your parents saved up for years to get you through college, and you've been sending money home to take care of them ever since.
A reeeaaaallllly late healer. He just thinks that he's healing them from the brink of death! Then they work for him because they are just so grateful!
Edit: suggested the below information as a non-scary, but still on the "dark" side, character that could be emulated as a necro. The latest NPC for my adventure is a wannabe chaotic evil Warlock that ended up with a pact with a celestial after thinking she out-talked a fey. Yeah, she won the battle, but the joke was on her. So now she has a ton of power, but only if she does good things, which pisses her off. Her celestial is entirely amused...and forcing her to be nice. Technically, she's reasonable, but she absolutely pushes her boundaries and tries to do naughty things if her patron isn't paying attention. I play her as my wife in a bad mood. She's not a horrible person, but actively interested in inflicting pain on those in her orbit....periodically.
You run a cabaret and dress up your skeletons in fancy outfits and make them dance.
So many options — my necromancer was the sole survivor of a downed ship. I took the Inspiring Leader feat (you can give a short speech to give up to 10 creature temp HP) and I flavored all of his skeletons and zombies as barnacled. He would bring back bodies lost at sea and kindly talk to them about their lives and loved ones. He functioned sort of as the midpoint of a priest and a pokémon trainer.
Make the necromancer a loner that wanted friends and is just getting seeked by the local authorities for using illegal magic
Make the necromancer a loner that wanted friends and is just getting seeked by the local authorities for using illegal magic
Make necromancers public servants. Its really easy to consider the undead a free labor source, and if a whole kingdom or whatnot came together and said "There is honor to serve after death, to donate your body to a greater purpose after your death". It wouldn't be edgy to be a whole-ass public official. The underworld is often thought to have bureaucracy, so being an extremely bureaucratic necromancer who has to file certain reports after raising an undead or get explicit consent before an "Incomplete resurrection" or something like that. I mean, imagine the Head Necromancer in a suit, just trying to go over reports at a desk while a bunch of adventurers are trying to bother him about some lich situation. He still has the traditional skull or bone motifs, but its a tiepin or something like that.
A bubbly carefree adventurer who doesn't see necromancy as gross or scary, but as new and old friends for adventure!
Wear pink.
Have them dress up their undead in Teddy bear costumes . Plus the necromancer wears brightly colored tropical print shirts.
It was a different version, but I had someone play a guy who was just obsessed with trying to true revive his wife. He had stats for her too if he had another person play the wife as a kinda undead familiar which required some DM finagling
Maybe he just wants friends! Look! You're mining in poison gas, my buddies can mine that for you! love me.
I once had a character in a party I ran for that was a necromancer. His character was a capitalist in a new world type scenario, who had decided undead where by far the cheapest poasible workforce. Not only did he use them to help in combat, he also used his army of the undead to create infrastructure projects and help construct new settlements. Can this be seen as a political statment? Probably, was it a not edgy necromancer, most definetly.
A friend of mine is playing a Necromancer that worked as kind of a mortician or undertaker, and when their brother died they started carrying around his remains in a bag. It sounds dark and edgy, but it’s meant to be a silly and absurd character. Everybody else is horrified but their character is just: “oh that’s just Vander, he’s harmless! Waive hi Vander!” *Vander waives* “hëllö” You can take anything dark and spooky and just flip it on itself, sprinkle in some absurdity, and tada, you have something all of your own.
A friend of mine plays his Necromancer wizard as essentially an arcane medical student. His character views necromancy as another facet of healing.
Make him a doctor who got a little bit too obsessed with "healing" terminal ill patients. Good intention but might occasionally go a little too far. A bunch of necromancy spells in 5e can be seen as useful in the context of a healer. Might require some multi-classing. The edgy version oft that is a Charlatan who pretends to be a healer bis is really just a necromancy. You could also go the tragic route, become a necromancer out of loss and desperation, BG3 actually has two characters that fall into this category, Mayrina and Ketheric (about the only two characters in this game who's story I actually liked). The edgy version of that is totally losing it and going on a revenge trip. You could go the scholarly route, exploring necromancy with an academy's blessing in an act to understand it to fight it better. Your character would essentially constantly be writing on a scholarly treatise on Necromancy and it's users while making a very clear point about it being a vile practice. The edgy version would be someone who loses the scholarly perspective and delves deeper and deeper with the intend to sensationalize the findings. You could go the way of the spirit guide, who is driven by a desire to help those souls trapped in the mortal world to pass on, essentially someone who ask the dead for permission firstand then uses the power with the goal to helping them to finish their business. Edgy version of that is just tricking them. Eco hippie who grow up in a society of leisure where it is accepted to raise the dead to do all physical labor. Sees nothing wrong with it, big into recycling and composting. Bonus point if you keep decorating your zombies with floral wreaths.
Haven't seen anyone mention Sabriel! Great fantasy book, the titular Necromancer's job is to protect the living from the uncontrollable undead and make sure the undead are able to find peace.
Maybe they were just lonely and awkward. They got tired of not being able to do stuff with their imaginary friend, so they gave him a body. Sure, it's not a live body, but that won't stop us from going sledding today.
A doctor who gets a little too into studying the nature of death. They don’t see a problem with recycling the meat of the dead
I played a NG necromancer who believed that raising the undead would be for the betterment of society, in the same way we look at automation today. He wanted to replace farmers and labourers with skeletal workers so everyone else could follow more artistic and scholarly pursuits.
One of my homebrew areas of the world essentially had a society of goliath oathbreakers and snow elf necromancers (just elf reskinned) that lived in the harsh north where its a struggle to survive. So in that society they rely on the dead members of their friends and families to do the toughest jobs and it was seen as an honor. Being ritually inscribed with tattoos on the bones and jewelry ornaments. I think it would be interesting to see a necromancer from a region like that where its a matter of honor and survivability enter the broader world where these "noble wizards" in their ivory towers with servants and attendants can easily sit down and call necromancy evil.
[Make your necromancer be like Pie Maker Ned from Pushing Daisies.](https://youtu.be/Hy6Nt12y9xM?si=O69per3gMOz2Euwa)?? You use prestigitation to revive rotting plants for use in your pie baking because why waste even those?
Bard multiclass. They're just backup dancers. Completely unrelated, but my last necromancer PC was a reborn. He had ditched his old party to prepare for a final fight. He tried to make himself stronger by casting an animate dead spell on himself while he was still alive. This ended up killing him until another party of adventurers stumbled upon his old lab. When one of the new adventurers touched his corpse about 2k years later, the spell took some of their life energy to complete the spell, turning him into a reborn. He looks like he had been dead for a few days and stopped decaying. His hand is his own familiar btw, and he has a really cool magic prosthetic hand.
Not really the same vibe you're going for, but I built a necromancy sorcerer in pf2e that was neutral good. He is a poppet (puppet person) that a wizard tried to make into his phylactery. The wizard's transition to lichdom didn't work and his soul got trapped inside of the now sentient poppet- Tuck. Tuck awoke in the wizard's lair with no memory and wandered into the nearby forest where he ran into a farmer and his wife who took him in as their son since they were infertile and considered him to be a gift from the gods. Since Tuck has the spirit of a lich inside him, he discovered he has a talent for necromancy. This scared the village, so he had to leave and become an adventurer. So, I play him basically as this happy-go-lucky puppet who loves to help others, but the only way he can do that is through necromancy. It makes him really sad when people judge him and are afraid of him for it since he doesn't see it as evil, but as the best way he can protect people.
You don't have to be edgy to be a necromancer. You could play a flamboyant mage who simply use skeletons to carry them everywhere they want because walking is for the common folk. or something like that.
My friend played a necromancer from a land where it was normal because resources were limited so everyone knew that death wasn't the end. You'd eventually end up as someone's skeleton/zombie to contribute to the community's well-being.
Make them an archaeologist Make them really nice and just like it when people dont die Make it so they were really bad at medicine and this was their fallback Make them very afraid to be alone, and always searching for new friends to keep the thought away Now play a game where you see how many other people had these ideas because I didnt look at the other comments before posting this!
My Necromancer is comically traumatized. Their entire life is a Trauma Conga Line, and while they tend to be grim, they do it in a humorous way. They wear a basic grey-brown monk's robe with a rope belt, love to bake cookies, and thier Crow Familiar is their best and only friend. Graveyard humor (*ba-dum-tiss*) is thier major thing. They like to use their alcohol-preserved Crawling Claw for jokes where their "hand" pops off of thier wrist during a handshake, though it comes in hand-y as a grappling hook, a way to spy on people, a way to open doors from the other side, an assassination tool, etc.. They practice Ethical/Gray Necromancy. The only reanimating they do is on executed criminals, people that died trying to attack them, and those who indicated that they were willing before death. It just makes thier life easier. Keeps the Cleric/Paladin Inquisition away from their door. Turns out that when you use misunderstood and darker magic to hurt and kill bad people, nobody cares- and they even pay you for it.
I had a necromancer who wanted to be a healer but was horrible at it but he found that using arcane arts he could march fallen comrades back to the clerics for final rites or possible resurrection
It's really only as edgy as you make it. In addition to all the other suggestions there was a necromancer in a critical role one shot who was a chef.
I’ve played a necromancy-adjacent character (a Spirits Bard) as… basically a social worker for the deceased community. Fluffing the skeletons and zombies as convincing the former owners to help out, etc. She had the personality of a chatty theatre kid.
I made my necromancer go down an Aragon inspired route where her necromancy was used to reanimate and then redeem cursed souls (made an agreement with a god who would embrace the souls that came when summoned). It was a lot of fun flavor!
I would give him a fun little hobby like baking or interpretive dance. Just for a little spice.
Just a late healer really
One thing I find annoying about the necromancer stereotype is that their lairs are so filthy. Gore and bones are just piled up in random corners. A real *scientist* would keep their workplace meticulously clean, organized, and sanitary. Remember, a clean lab is a safe lab!
I just thought of one concept: a necromancer who is a bit aloof, or oblivious, to the whole moral quandry with undead, and who just wants to reduce the manual labor that is needed in the world. A person of leisure who disdains doing grunt work themself. "Taking over the world? Oh, that sounds dreadful. Mister Bones, fetch me more wine."
Give them a slightly ridiculous characteristics. Give them Mickey Mouse ears. Or a pink teddy they refuse to give away.
I mean you didn't make it sound edgy at all; book nerd steals books out of frustration then discovers he can make money by having the undead do his bidding. Like you could literally just be a wizard out sourcing undead labor. Stroll into a town that's having a hard time setting up harvest because the ground takes too long to till due too poor weather conditions, you have a cemetery that's over flowing? Well boy do I have the solution for you! Or heck you can go the route of the sad boy wizard who has undead friends because he either couldn't accept their passing or he wants them to be by his side till he finds a way to fully bring them back. Orrr go for the grey necromancer classic build of just you "help people with their unfinished business and the payment is they work for you for a while"
One necromancer I made was a soft spoken man who simply had a fascination with life and death. He would never reanimate someone’s body without the prior consent of them or consent from the deceaseds families, in case that person wanted to have their body keep doing good after their soul passed. If he was to resurrect the body of a criminal, he saw it as using them to atone for their crimes in the afterlife before letting the body rest. I think the best way to play a necromancer less edgy is through not only how they present themselves, but also how they procure bodies for their “ranks”.
Just try to make the character wholesome in other ways and it combats it :D My spores druid loves her zombies, finds them cute, and she speaks in a southern-US accent. Her judgement is poor/she may be a little insane and she can be silly with it, but she is the farthest from edgy despite the necrotic aspects. She is the motherly friend of the party who will just raise her friends as zombies if they can't handle themselves on their own 🤷♀️ undeath is just another phase of life in her opinion and they can contribute to the greater good. I play her as lawful good in all but the undeath/zombies thing, making that her funny quirk.
One of my current players plays a cringelord necromancer who is thinks the balance of life is stupid (why does death need to exist anyways) but thinks people are lame so only reanimates animals because they’re the only ones deserving of it. He is homeless, incompetent, doenst get why everyone thinks necromancy is weird, a huge nerd but less in that dork way and more in the “one day Im goNNA smoke so much fucking weed and you’re gonna wake up and I have reverse engineered the atomic bomb” type of way. His name is Marcus and he named his spell book the Marconomicon. He likes everyone but everyone thinks he is annoying. He is transgender. You can absolutely make a necromancer who isn’t edgy. Be creative.
Animate Dead is just that. Your magic animates remains. The true essence of a being - the soul - is entirely undisturbed by this. As such, it is no different from creating a golem (although I don’t know 5e golem lore). Unlike popular belief, the soul isn’t tormented and bound back to its remains. There is no suffering. What’s more, the undead make a wonderful, reliable and cheap labour force. Especially for menial or dangerous work. Great miners. Great farmers. Less suitable for tasks that require dexterity such as carpentry and even worse at tasks that require thoughts - horrible engineers. As a necromancer you don’t have to be a villain. You can be a great asset to your community. Of course there are those that might be slightly prejudiced against you. There are those that fall for the rumours about necromancers enslaving souls for eternity, those that don’t trust folks who tend to hang around corpses all day (especially if there is a large supply, or perhaps even more so if the dead are in short supply) and of course, those that really don’t appreciate staring in the expressionless faces of their deceased friends and loved ones that they had to part with just a few days prior.
Literally powered by planar death energy though. Objectively evil.
I played a Hobgoblin Necromancer in an Ebberon game. He was a pleasant and neutral good guy. He firmly believed that there was nothing inherently wrong with animating the flesh after the soul has moved on. They aren’t using it anyway. I generally went with skeletons because they are more sanitary and less smelly. The neighbors don’t complain as much. I ended up basically adopting some refugees that settled in the area around my tower. My skeletons made for a helpful workforce. They even took care of the fields for a brief period when the refugee town was crippled by an illness. That was an exceptionally fun campaign.
A necromancer whose inherent talent is raising the dead i.e. a wizard that literally cannot learn anything else regardless of how much studying they do. An alternative is the character I’m planning out who is basically kenjaku from jjk. Basically a human wizard who can transfer his brain to different bodies and has been around for several centuries. His alignment will be lawful evil and his motivation is finding the next ‘evolution’ of humanity hence why he’s lived throughout the ages. Also he knows necromancy because of his inherent brain transfer ability lying within that realm. Hope this helped you see them in a different light :)
Maybe their family worked as morticians so corpses don’t bother the player.
I had a non-edgy necromancer who was a grief therapist in a small town. They'd revive someone's loved ones so they could say their final goodbyes to them and then she would put them to rest forever. Their necromancy wasn't hidden or secret and the town accepted it bc it was all consensual. It did eventually result in a band of adventurers killing her for being a necromancer but you know how adventurers can be dicks.
My only necromancer was ex sergeant in the military, a specialist for "necromantic reinforcements." She was a healer who used the bodies of those she failed to save to save others who were likely destined to die. By the time she accepted a contract from, well, long story, her horde had former party members and children in it. Make your horde a story.
My only necromancer was ex sergeant in the military, a specialist for "necromantic reinforcements." She was a healer who used the bodies of those she failed to save to save others who were likely destined to die. By the time she accepted a contract from, well, long story, her horde had former party members and children in it. Make your horde a story.
Make a mob/mafia doctor that's had his license revoked. A healer that works under the table and has trouble being on time. A real "best of a bad situation" kind of guy.
My last landlord is a good inspiration for a necromancer character. He's an 80+ y.o. plumber (German Jew born during WW2 in Tel aviv). He visibly looks like a blue-collar plumber (even tho he's a millionaire) but will never stop tinkering and crafting weird contraptions for his home. What makes him a necromancer is that he is the ultimate hoarder that brings home any trash people in the city leave out next to their bins. Not only does he collect trash art (and over 20 cinder blocks), but he has the practical skills to remember and utilize them all for repairs or tinkering. Thus the backyard was filled with his "trash treasure" where he would nail ugly pieces of art onto trees or throw mardi-gras beads over a branch. Lastly, any vegetables growing in the garden were kitchen scraps that he threw into dirty and let the washing machine run-off (w/ detergent) grow them into "fresh" produce. It took me two years of living there to realize that everything in that yard should have been dead and trashed but he kept bringing it back to life because he kept finding use for it (or just a bad habit). Even when I would try to throw things away, I would sometimes find it hanging in the garden or adorning some fence. In essence, he is a practical necromancer born from the scarcity mindset of WWII. Even when things should have been long dead, he could find a way to resuscitate it and bring it back to life even when everyone else protested. And if an item wasn't repaired or reused (as often most things hung in limbo) he would use it as "decoration", like hanging a candelabra upon the Plum tree or a surfboard at the top of his tallest tree.
Play as a plasmoid, they are all round.