Sample file 1 Sample file The True Necromancer Class And a Brief History of Undeath Index: Chapter 1. How to Incorporate a True Necromancer Into Your Adventures Chapter 2. Creating a True Necromancer Chapter 3. Dark Designs. Chapter 4. True Necromancer Spell List Appendix A: Undead Servants Appendix B: Magic Items Appendix C: Rites of Undeath Credits Written by Nausicaä Enriquez (@shipburner) & Travis Vengroff (@VenTravis) Co-Designed by Kai Linder (@Paradoliak) Art by Marcel Mercado (@MarcelEMercado) Additional Art provide by Brian Snoddy, Casey Bailey, Dean Spencer, the DM’s Guild, and Creative Commons Works Symbols by James Adam Cartwright (created for Dark Dice) Formatting by Zach Hero (Parcel Studios) Created by Fool and Scholar Productions as part of the Dark Dice podcast Playtesters via The Fool & Scholar Productions Patreon Content Warnings: This supplement includes themes This book draws on material from Eberron: Rising from of death, mortality, undeath, and body horror, and the Last War, Exploring Eberron, Guildmaster’s Guide mentions cannibalism, desecration of the dead, physical to Ravnica, Heroes of Horror, Memorial Pages “Facts: and spiritual torture, and possession. What Happens To A Body After Death”, Ravenloft Campaign Setting: Red Boxed Set, Sword Coast Special Thanks: Audsbot for talking about the ethics Adventurer’s Guide, Unearthed Arcana “The Mystic”, of necromancy, Hyacinth Davidson, Alastair Lloyd, and Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, and Xanathar’s Guide the Excarnate system for being my wonderful motivating to Everything. bone emperoxes, the Deimos Jazz Club for being great friends Sampleand gaymers, Ripley McArthur as consultant file from the undead-American community, James Mendez Hodes for his article on anti-Asian racism in games, Kate Bullock for her article on consent and charm spells, the Fool & Scholar Patreon team, and Tamsyn Muir for inspiration. The True Necromancer Chapter 1. How to Incorporate a True Necromancer Into Your Adventures A tiefling brushes a sweat-slicked curl from her face, panting behind an interlocked wall of scapulae. The colossus hammers at her defenses, and she smiles. Every bone splinter lodged in its flesh is one more seam along which to tear it open. The tyrant’s knights line up across the field, armor and weapons gleaming, horses snorting. They laugh and jeer at the lone halfling who strolls out to meet them, whistling. He raises his hands: the earth erupts with small, twisted figures, and in seconds his fallen friends and family get their grim revenge. Rain beats down around a half-elf in gray, hunched over a corpse. Another day in the City of Towers, another murder -- but where other inquisitives might scrape blood into a vial and begin unpicking the puzzle, they swing a crystal back and forth. Their eyes fill with blue light as they start getting the victim’s side of the story. ny dilettante with the right grimoire can claim to be a necromancer, but true necromancers don’t just study the secrets of life and death – they command them. True necromancers manipulate the flow of positive and negative Aenergy in the world to control magic, redirect vitality from their enemies to their allies, call on their own vitality to raise dead bone and tissue to life, or beckon the souls of the deceased back into the world. At the apex of their power, true necromancers begin to resemble the undead themselves, and can even work their worst magic on the living – after all, inside every living person, there’s a skeleton waiting to get out. In Dying, Life For spellcasters, true necromancers are intensely practical. Raw talent can only give you so much power, arcane theory can only get you so much control – to blend them together, you need to know what grave dirt feels like under your fingernails, what the pop of wrist joints clicking into place sounds like, and the numbness of life slippingSample out from your own body into that of file somebody else. The twin forces of growth and decay suffuse the world, which the true necromancer controls through tactile intuition and brutal force of will; many true necromancers compare it to muscle memory, or the Necromancers, like undead, can take any form and work with any medium of life. 4 Chapter 1 | Incorporate a True Necromancer Into Your Adventures Monks, Ancestors, Zombies, and Non-Western Fantasy Nausicaä here -- the monk as written in the Player’s it more in line with real-world traditions, but this isn’t going Handbook perpetuates a number of harmful Asian to be available to most new players. stereotypes and misrepresents the concept of qi. As Second, operating with a purely Western attitude towards someone with Asian heritage, that deeply lessens my the (un)dead limits the number of stories that you can tell enjoyment of the game. with a true necromancer character. While most real-world James Mendez Hodes’ article “Asian Representation and societies would agree that animating a human corpse is the Martial Arts” goes into detail about the racism aspect desecration of the dead, not all of them find inherent fear but it warrants being mentioned here for reasons explained in the use of bone tools (especially animal bones), nor below. “Monk” is a misrepresentative term. You don’t need in the idea that the dead are still with us. To stay on the to be a member of a monastic order in order to attain Asian theme, Kongzi (Confucius) and Mozi both discuss singular control over your own body, which is what the fear of ghosts, but the fear is not one of violating the mechanics of the class actually represent. These concepts boundaries between life and death: it’s the fear that your are based on the flawed assumptions that Asian martial ancestors disapprove of your actions and are punishing arts are inherently spiritual and that Asian spirituality you for them. A true necromancer from a society where inherently incorporates martial arts. These are hurtful the ancestors are part of life (as seen in many of Eberron’s stereotypes that lend to additional racist characterizations. necromantic cultures) will be very different from one My personal preference is to let individual players call their where the dead are taboo -- the horror isn’t that they’ve class whatever they want -- character classes aren’t in- ripped your grandmother’s spirit from the afterlife, it’s that universe distinctions -- but for general use at your home they’ve called her here to look at what you’re doing and table or in future supplements, I recommend terms like she’s disappointed in you. “adept,” “martial artist,” “remade,” or so on. As a final note on zombies: Travis and I would like to offer The precise nature of qi also varies depending on the a different perception of zombies that differs from their philosophy, but in most philosophies, it’s simply a repetitive mainstream depiction as acceptable targets for property shared by all moving entities (and, in Zhu heroic violence. D&D usually presents zombies as the Xi’s syncretism, the basic building block of matter in a servants of evil mages, as depicted in their native Haitian formulation reminiscent of e=mc2). Saying that a monk’s folklore. Since “zombie” refers to a specific myth, we use powers come from a mystical force called “ki” is about the term “corpse servants” in this project to give the true as ridiculous as saying that a rogue’s sneak attack comes necromancer a broader folkloric palette. In roleplaying and from some mystical force called “motion.” To explain the in video games, cannon-fodder zombies and skeletons obviously supernatural elements of a monk’s powers, D&D often harken far more to the uncontrolled hordes of a already has the nonspecific forces of magic and psionics. zombie apocalypse fiction that let the protagonists kill Daniel Kwan, in “The Book of Inner Alchemy” in Candlekeep with impunity. This ignores that the initial horror of the Mysteries, offers the idea that D&D ki is tied to elemental zombie is not of fighting one, but becoming one! Can you air, “for breath is what connects one’s soul to one’s essence imagine a more terrible fate for a friend or loved one than (body).” an eternal slavery inescapable even in death? By shifting Why is this relevant to the true necromancer class in your perceptions of what a zombie is and isn’t, you may the first place? First and foremost, it’s important to find your party mourning the undead they fight, showing acknowledge that while the true necromancer fits into respect to the desecrated corpses after battle, and vowing preexisting Dungeons & Dragons conceptions of magic and revenge for each body between your heroes and the vile foe the body, the Player’s Handbook presents those concepts in who animated them. a way that falls in line with those racist stereotypes. Kwan’s redefinition does a good job of redefining D&D ki to bring way confidence breeds further confidence. a true necromancer views that magic in terms of If called upon to explain the theory behind their magic, creation and destruction, and finds power in imbalance. true necromancers have something in common with Whether they refer to it as positive and negative energy, monks. SampleBoth recognize that vital, magical forces order and entropy, radiant andfile necrotic forces, spiritual pervade the world, especially living bodies, and use and resentful energy, or just life and death, a true spiritual and medical training to harness them. While necromancer’s work is based on altering the flow of the monk views that magic in terms of the physical and these energies, restoring life to bodies that lack it, or spiritual souls and seeks to bring the two into harmony, pulling it from bodies that have it.