Necromancy

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 5:54 pm

Which games give you an option of playing a necromancer, and how well is that option realised?

I know you can play one in Exalted, but that has an intrinsic problem of you plaing Exalted. Clerics and Oracles can be necromancers in PF, but I don't have experience with either of those.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 6:42 pm

DnD (http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards ... topic=5584) makes it work surprisingly well, though many things are really poorly defined. K's handbook neatly encapsulates that with "there is no guideline for 'available corpses by level'." Libris Mortis, HoH, and CArc are your bread and butter there.

Iron Kingdoms seems to have a very solid system. It's hard to say for sure, because I don't know how the rest of Iron Kingdoms works though. From an earlier thread here, the necromancy option is individually strong, and only available to a class that was already overpowered.

Exalted is quite good, but icky. Like anything else in Exalted, focusing on your crafting specialty to the exclusion of all else leads to Real Ultimate Power, and also deep into the territory of Logistics & Dragons.

Savage Worlds does okay, but (A) doesn't devote enough space to it to really have an opinion, and (B) is heavily overwritten by specific settings anyway.

The Necropunk setting for PF promised to be good, and I really wanted it to, but their previews were full of feats that offered situational +2s, so I haven't had the heart to read the pdf I bought from them. If I don't know it's bad, there's still hope, right?(https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/12 ... gn-setting)

GURPS probably has a way to make it work as well as anything GURPS ever works.

I think In Nomine had a fairly robust system, but I've never played.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 7:25 pm

Iron Kingdoms? Isn't that the setting where the publishers openly admit that they don't make balanced games and if you don't like it you're not man enough or some shit like that?

In Nomine has rules for necromany but I wouldn't suggest it. It's a very, VERY different beast from what you're probably looking for.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 7:36 pm

You can play a Necromancer in Shadowrun.
And it works remarkably well inside the rules.
It's just the problem that your own team is gonna put several bullets into your back at first chance usually, if you actually do stuff like that.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 8:18 pm

TheFlatline wrote:Iron Kingdoms? Isn't that the setting where the publishers openly admit that they don't make balanced games and if you don't like it you're not man enough or some shit like that?

It is. But necromancy system is surprisingly nice Lego. Which, of course, is restricted to one class, the members of which are more or less "wanted dead" people.

TheFlatline wrote:In Nomine has rules for necromany but I wouldn't suggest it. It's a very, VERY different beast from what you're probably looking for.

Please, elaborate.

Zaranthan · Post by **Zaranthan** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 8:49 pm

Stahlseele wrote:You can play a Necromancer in Shadowrun.
And it works remarkably well inside the rules.
It's just the problem that your own team is gonna put several bullets into your back at first chance usually, if you actually do stuff like that.

The key to getting away with this is to play it off as "He Who Fights Monsters". Explain that before they became voodoo zombies, your minions were a BTL dealer, a child labor trafficker, and a "hiring manager" for a bunraku parlor. Very few runners will geek you for that sort of karmic justice. (At least, until the parlor's owner tracks you down and offers your teammates an assassination contract, then you're up shit's creek, chum.)

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 8:55 pm

i guess hefting a shovel looking up the nearest cemetary and saying i need some more work force was in bad taste . .
but i still don't think it warranted being shot in the back several times damn it <.< . .

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 8:56 pm

World of Darkness had a bit of advantage, in that several of their games (Vampire, Wraith, Mummy) focused on or around the dead and undead, so they had a relatively robust cosmology and metaphysics in place. The result was a bit of an explosion of Necromancy - practically every flavor of supernatural in the oWoD had some ability in it if they chose, and the Kindred had a highly developed and diverse system of blood sorcery by the end, not counting the really weird shit you could get away with using bloody rune magic.

Then came nWoD and...well, it all went to shit, frankly. For Vampires, what was one rather sprawling magical discipline with a bunch of paths became 4-6 independent disciplines with overlapping abilities, so you could never get one vampire necromancer with all the tricks. Most of the other sets didn't fair much better, because the nWoD ceased reinforcing the same metaphysics and cosmology, so everybody was off doing their own thing and it became rarer that a werewolf might have to deal with a ghost, not to mention the stranger crap they drug out in the shovelware books.

That said, in most cases Necromancy wasn't quite the Warhammer Fantasy Battle "raise an army of corpses" kind of thing - the best puissant Vampire necromancers could manage a dozen or so without any issue, but more than that would take time and resources to pull off. nMage metaphysics just got weird.

Zaranthan · Post by **Zaranthan** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 8:58 pm

Stahlseele wrote:i guess hefting a shovel looking up the nearest cemetary and saying i need some more work force was in bad taste . .
but i still don't think it warranted being shot in the back several times damn it <.< . .

See, that's a prime example of doing it wrong. You need to IMPLICITLY assure your fellow runners that they don't ever have to worry about seeing their dead sister shambling along behind you. The folks you bodysnatch have to come from the pool of "people nobody wants walking around". And while I'm sure even child soldier recruiters have families, most runners have enough cognitive dissonance to place those people outside their monkeyspheres.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 9:04 pm

Probably. They also did not think it funny when a guy our samurai had previously killed started moving again suddenly. I thought it was hillarious.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 9:13 pm

TheFlatline wrote:Iron Kingdoms? Isn't that the setting where the publishers openly admit that they don't make balanced games and if you don't like it you're not man enough or some shit like that?

That's the one! But as Longes said the Necromancy system is this weird diamond in the rough. I cover it a bit in this post and the full rules are in their Urban Adventure book. They are really good and fun but they do allow you to make hordes with no size limit other than the number of bodies you have and the amount of time you're willing to put in. I don't know if that's a positive or a negative. I don't know if Necromancy rules should be able to support the concept of a Undead Lord leading an army of the undead or whether they should relegate themselves to creating quantities of troops that are more manageable for the skirmish warfare setups that TTRPG's prefer.

A Man In Black · Post by **A Man In Black** » Mon Feb 03, 2014 6:43 am

Longes wrote:Please, elaborate.

In Nomine is WOD-alike game with angels, demons, and the war between Heaven and Hell in place of vampires and vampire politics. It's interesting but definitely not the sort of game where you run around with a gaggle of zombies.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Mon Feb 03, 2014 8:57 am

A Man In Black wrote:
Longes wrote:Please, elaborate.
In Nomine is WOD-alike game with angels, demons, and the war between Heaven and Hell in place of vampires and vampire politics. It's interesting but definitely not the sort of game where you run around with a gaggle of zombies.

I dunno. A Saminga demon with the Zombi attunement can probably get a new servant every week even without bothering with Rites or Reliquaries, so long as you either keep feeding them whatever strange diet they need or accept that your army will deteriorate. Unfortunately, they have to be only a few hours dead for that to work, but you're a demon serving one of the few Princes who cannot ever be portrayed as even Neutral, so you can just go make some.

Non-Saminga people can take Necromancy/6, Enchantment/6, and be prepared to waste twice the target's Forces in Essence, but have a slightly longer time window and are allowed to not be Death demons.