NECROMANCERS...
(This is a legacy post from my old website, so there may be some formatting issues. Feel free to email me if you notice anything out of the ordinary. Thanks!)
Sometimes an individual, maybe a well-meaning town hero or a misled scholar, will come unbidden to the study-hall of a necromancer. He will find bloodied experiments, the walking bodies and half-dead fauna, he will see monsters cobbled from pieces of cadavers. Then, in his shock, he will think that the necromancer hates him. He will think that she turns the sanctimonious form ruinous, that she wants to defile him because he is alive. But he is wrong.The necromancer loves him. She loves his body. She adores flesh with impassioned drive. She loves skin and blood, the way the chest rises and falls. The way that the eyes narrow and widen in frustration or fear. The necromancer adores life wholly, without moderation. But she knows something the layman does not. In order to truly love something, in order for it to be understood, it must be dissected, deconstructed, and observed in it's entirety.
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| The Shade of Samuel invoked by the Witch of Endor |
Necromancers are not scepter-wielding overlords of undead armies. The first necromancer was just a medium, someone who could reach out and pull the dead back to earth (albeit in a purely metaphysical sense). This type of magic was just a rudimentary manipulation of the souls of earthly decedents, which would usually only manifest as minor visual or audio hallucinations or, more rarely, in intense physical phenomena (major gusts, brightened flame, manipulation of the material world, etc.)
These early experiments laid the groundwork for more advanced procedures, involving manipulations of spirits between cadavers, meaning that modern students of the necromancies are not only magicians, but often adept biologists and medical scientists as well. Of course most common of these is the process of "reanimation" by which life is returned to a corpse, allowing for commands to be issued with varying complexity. The most well-studied of modern necromancers can even manufacture their own bodies for spirits to inhabit. These fabricated "homunculi" can vary greatly in their form, from composite corpses to magical constructs.
Although most practitioners may diverge in their execution, what unites all necromancers is their fascination with the biological and spiritual functions of the individual. They are determined to poke and prod at sciences hitherto completely unexplored. It is this obsession with the unknown, with the mysterious practices of both magic and medicine, that truly characterizes the necromantic arts. Necromancers are not normal. When you're so dedicated to one specific study, the minutiae of polite society become naturally secondary. It is for this reason that the image of the necromancer is often one of isolation. Most are hermits, witches, traveling doctors, or outcasts, most do not have the means to further pursue the study. Those that do are often consumed entirely by this study, constructing towers or establishing hidden hovels and covens, and therefore tread even further from normality.
I think it is very fun to demystify these magical practices in your games so you can explore them more thoroughly. Ironically, I think you can add a lot of mystery back into magic by attempting to explain it. Players can very often get stuck in their assumptions about how a fantasy world works, often to them, no matter how hard you try, dragons are greedy, dwarves are rowdy, elves are stuck-up, etc. Mostly I think necromancers are concerned with similar things as normal people: finding fulfillment, so their day-to-day tasks for their creations might be more like "carry this letter to my friend", "hang this painting in the library", or "bring me this cool thing" even if the vast majority of their time might be taken up by study of the occult. I would find it personally humorous if the PCs climb a tower in a smoldering swamp, patrolled by walking skeletons, only to find an unwashed freak sitting alone in a room like this.
I think it can also add a lot of depth to encounters. As I mentioned earlier, most necromancers' ultimate objective is not "wipe out all life on the planet." Or, imagine a locality taking up arms when they see an approaching legion of skeletons, only for them to receive a message asking for a particular piece of art or literature, maybe as tribute or trade. To switch things up in an unexpected way, don't have a traditional "mad wizard" or "minion summoner" boss fight, and instead have an encounter which consists of the party having to chase "Slippery Jimmy" out of his tower, and then try to catch him before he find any more graveyards or old battle-sites where he could cause more problems
You can experiment a lot with this framework. You can have necromancers who embed human souls in constructs like golems or magical crystals, maybe those who summon surrogate souls like evil spirits or demons from other worlds, or you can also have necromancers whose desires are entirely alien, who just make meat-creatures and flesh-chimeras because they find it amusing to watch them run around.
I don't know! I just think it is fun to think about.