The Mythcreant Podcast 498 – Bringing Necromancers to Life
Rise, podcast episode, rise from an auditory grave and do our bidding! Muahahahahaha! Necromancers are a staple of speculative fiction, whether they use arcane arts or a spooky lab. They’re absolutely always evil, or are they? Perhaps they’re just misunderstood, even if some of their practices are a bit unsavory. That’s what we’re talking about today, plus a return of everyone’s favorite dystopian setting idea: the necro-industrial complex.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Phoebe Pineda. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is—
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: —and—
Oren: Oren.
Chris: Now, listeners, you’ve only heard our voices. You don’t know that we’re really alive. Perhaps someone used magic to reach beyond the grave. Someone who shall remain nameless but is definitely Bunny.
Bunny: [laughs] Ooooooooh.
Oren: Ooooooooh.
Chris: Why did you do it, Bunny? You know there are consequences for violating natural laws.
Bunny: Natural laws? I’m above such things. [evil laugh] Nature bends to my whims, and by nature I mean podcasters.
Oren: Yeah. Consequences typically for violating the laws of characters being dead, because when we want characters to die, it needs to be dramatic, and if we could bring them back, that would be a problem. Other natural laws, like not being able to throw fireballs, it’s perfectly fine to violate those. No problem.
Chris: It’s hard to have stakes if you could just bring everybody back to life exactly as they were.
Oren: It really is.
Chris: Do you hear that, DnD players slash writers? Yeah. I understand why it’s useful for an actual tabletop role playing game where people could die on accident to get resurrection, but it is not great for a story you plan ahead.
Oren: The worst one, if we’re talking about RPGs, is Eclipse Phase, where everyone is just digitally immortal and as long as you have money, you can just print a new body and download yourself into it. It is so hard to create stakes in that setting. You can do it, but you are working against all of the gravity of the world because it’s a combat game, right? It’s not like a political drama game. You’re supposed to spend most of it shooting guns, but you can’t die. So [stressed noise].
Bunny: Dying is like nicking your finger.
Oren: Yeah, it’s a little annoying. You have to pay to get a new body, and if you’re a successful adventurer, that’s not hard.
Chris: I guess, first rule of necromancy is, your necromancy can’t just bring all the characters back to life. No problem.
Bunny: Okay. I was thinking about—this is like, full on resurrection. Do we count that as necromancy? Does that seem like it’s a necromancy type thing? It seems adjacent.
Chris: I think we should have an expansive definition of necromancy because we need to keep it fresh and just doing the same very narrow thing over and over again just makes it get old.
Oren: No, it’s gotta be bones and rotting flesh, or it’s not necromancy. It’s gotta be like a creepy green, or—
Bunny: It has to be purple.
Oren: It could be purple. I’ll allow purple, but the natural color of necromancy is green. I’m sure we’ll all agree.
Bunny: It’s the color of the slime from Ghostbusters, which is fitting ’cause ghosts.
Chris: Yeah. I think it needs to be black with green accents to be precise.
Oren: That’s fair. That’s fair.
Bunny: It’s like an eyeshadow palette.
Oren: But necromancy in most settings tends to be flavored evil and bringing people back from the dead perfectly intact and normal is usually considered a good thing. So even though logically that would be a kind of necromancy, socially speaking, it’s not usually qualified that way.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, you could potentially have another consequence where you bring somebody back perfectly intact and then something else really bad happens.
Bunny: Yeah. There’s ways to flavor that if you want it to be dark.
Oren: Yeah. If there’s, like, negative consequences, you’re more likely to call it necromancy.
Bunny: Yeah.
Oren: But of course, that’s just an expectation, right? There are plenty of stories—especially now ’cause people love to be counterculture and stuff.
Chris: I think when any villain or monster starts to get well enough used, right, it becomes really fertile ground to make it into protagonists and good guys.
Oren: Sure.
Chris: Because that adds some novelty that is lost just by again, being used for villains over and over again. Not that you can’t have good necromancer villains in your stories, it’s just you have to do a little bit more work at this point to make them cool and scary. Whereas if you turn them into a protagonist, then you know there’s already a little more novelty to that. It won’t last forever. But right now.
Bunny: Oh, so you could say, you either die a villain or live long enough to see yourself resurrected into a hero?
Oren: Well, there’s also just an element of, wow, okay, so necromancers are classically evil, but that’s largely aesthetics-based.
Bunny: Yeah. Let’s throw some bones on it.
Oren: People reasonably ask, okay. Is there anything inherently wrong with animating a skeleton to do stuff? Does it not matter more what the skeleton does than that it is a skeleton? And the answer to that is a little more complicated than I think some fantasy fans are willing to admit. We also generally understand that a person’s remains—we have at least some responsibility to leave them as the person wanted them to be left, and that probably didn’t include being made into a skeleton and dancing around for amusement.
Chris: Yeah. You could create a culture where everybody’s like, yeah, no. The ultimate death is to have my skeleton walking around.
Bunny: Yeah, I once wrote a flash fiction piece where if you were convicted of certain crimes, then you would be sentenced to—essentially your body would be used for necromantic labor.
Chris: So now was this, they executed and then it’s used from necromantic labor? Or is it just like eventually when you die?
Bunny: In this case, I think they were executed because I was being edgy, but…
Oren: Ooh, so dark.
Bunny: It was so dark.
Chris: Yeah. Honestly, being like, “yeah, someday when you die, we’re gonna use your skeleton for labor” does not sound like a great deterrent when it comes to crime.
Bunny: No. I think at that point you’d be like, oh, I don’t give a crap.
Chris: Yeah. I would love to see a protagonist who is a skeleton and they have to like, somehow regain their health and get free of the necromancer master. Hmm. I think we could do that.
Oren: That’s another one, right? Is that the trope, the default is that any undead you create are basically mindless. And if they’re conscious, that’s certainly a lot more complicated.
Bunny: Yeah, it’s a lot more interesting and it’s a lot more interesting than having just like zombies, but they’re controlled by someone. Distinguish yourself from those zombies a bit. Be a bit more nuanced with it. Don’t make it just like basically a robot or a golem, but it’s a corpse because spooky. Like, you could do more.
Chris: I also do think that if you are gonna make your necromancer a protagonist, one of the tricky things is that having undead minions is inherently a pretty powerful magical ability. And it’s great for villains, right? ’cause they automatically have minions that your protagonist can fight first before they get to the final boss. That’s very useful. But if you have a protagonist, you have to make sure that they’re not too powerful. If they’re like, raising lots of minions everywhere.
They could have really big obstacles. Well, honestly, at that point I would [be] inclined to—how about, like, a newbie necromancer? A wannabe necromancer. They’re just getting started. They can raise one finger from the dead and the finger will crawl along and try to do their bidding. It’s the ultimate pull my finger.
Oren: Once you take the magic and give it to a good guy, you have to start thinking about limits that were less important when a villain had it. Or I guess you could just do Gideon the Ninth and just have everything be super bombastic and powerful and, uh, not have to worry about that part. But…
Chris: Yeah. But Gideon is not a necromancer herself.
Oren: That’s true.
Chris: And I think that’s important. Again, we can talk about other stories like Three Parts Dead, where the main character is a necromancer and can just do who knows what
Oren: Sort of.
Bunny: Yeah. Kind of. There is a skeleton in that one.
Chris: Yeah. But in Gideon, again, there’s another character. Even Gideon’s ally, Harrow, is semi antagonistic. So again. There’s tons of necromancy everywhere, but we know what Gideon can do and that is hack at things with a long sword.
Oren: And before anyone emails us, yes, we do know that Harrow is the protagonist of the next book, but we haven’t read that one, so we can’t comment on it.
Bunny: I don’t want to ’cause I don’t like Harrow.
Oren: Yeah, that’s the reason. You solved it. We’re all on the table now.
Bunny: You’re just prejudiced against necromancers.
Oren: Uh, everyone knows the best necromancer good guy was a DnD character that I played back in college because I found this absolutely busted ability in one of the Unearthed Arcana books for 3.5 that let me exchange my familiar for a skeleton warrior who got stronger as I leveled up and was actually a better fighter than the fighter in the party.
Chris: Oh, no.
Bunny: Oof.
Oren: Oof.
Bunny: I feel bad for that fighter.
Oren: I felt a little bad, but not bad enough to stop.
Chris: Isn’t that how it always goes?
Oren: And then I went around and I actually read the rules on how to raise undead in 3.5. And they were a little busted. They were like, primarily limited by how many opals you had access to. ‘Cause that was the material component for raising undead and wasn’t that hard to get opal. So I ended up with a lot of minions and then I made my GM play—we were doing a little strategy game instead of DnD ’cause okay, the enemy rolls up and it’s like, all right, I position my five giant undead shrimp on the ridge here.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, okay, so besides having a necromancer who is a villain or protagonist, necromancy can be used in other ways. You can have it as more of a cosmic-horrory thing, like a temptation for your characters. “Don’t resurrect your loved one. Don’t do it, Dawn. You hear me?” Yeah, and what can be there is just something that people shouldn’t touch in the dark book or whatever you have, or it can be a part of your world where there’s not necessarily lots of necromancers that are famous, but the actual magic itself is used often.
Which I feel like should lead us to the Necro Industrial Complex.
Bunny: We knew it was coming.
Oren: It’s been a while since I’ve talked about the Necro Industrial Complex. For anyone who hasn’t listened to our old episodes, this was a concept I came up with, uh, from reading the 3.5 rules on skeleton raising ’cause in Fifth Edition, there were pretty strict limits on how many skeletons you can control. But those didn’t really exist in 3.5, at least not by my reading of the rules. It was basically just again, how many opals can you afford? And it occurred to me that these skeletons can basically do everything a human laborer can do, but forever. And they never tire and they don’t need money and they don’t need food and they don’t rest. So the amount of things you could do with them, like you could have a bunch of them turn a crank and start the Industrial Revolution with skeleton power.
But skeletons are also powered by negative energy, which is established in some other parts of the book as having bad effects on stuff and turning everything more evil. So no, I figured that no process is a hundred percent efficient. So some negative energy must leak out of the undead over time, and if you have enough of them, you get Global Negative, Inc. And that’s a problem.
Bunny: The hole in our optimism layer.
Oren: That could be an interesting story, I suppose.
Chris: Yeah. If you did have a world with lots of necromancy, it seems realistic that you would have a lot of labor offered by necromancers and everybody has their own skeleton servant.
Oren: Yeah, but hang on, they gotta license those skeletons. You can’t just scrape everyone’s skeletons out of the ground. People whose skeletons those were deserve to profit from them. So you gotta pay a licensing fee.
Chris: I don’t know. They were out there just like in an open graveyard that was open to the public. Does that mean that it’s free for me to just scrape them and use them for my own skeleton training purposes?
Oren: Yeah. I wouldn’t wanna inhibit progress.
Bunny: Yeah. Can’t stop innovation with too much regulation. I mean, in some places there’s—I’m pretty sure here in the US we think you put someone in a grave and they stay there forever. But you know, in some places in the world, it’s actually pretty common that you’re essentially leasing the grave. Like, your loved one will stay there for maybe five years and then they’ll get moved and someone else will take the grave. I think they get moved to—I don’t remember what they’re called, but it’s like they’re all stacked in like a building. It’s—
Oren: Like a crypt?
Bunny: More serious than that, I guess. Like a crypt or something. I forget. But at that point, why not just cremate everybody? Maybe they do get cremated, I forget, but I don’t think they just get cremated. I should have done my research on this.
Oren: There are a lot of different burial rights and a lot of different funeral customs, right? You do have cremation. The reason why they might not do cremation is that’s actually hard. Cremating a body in a meaningful way without modern technology is difficult and resource intensive. Like, you can do it. You don’t need a blast furnace, but just doing it with whatever you happen to have lying around is not easy. So that might be a reason.
Bunny: Yeah. But I feel like this happens in European countries and stuff, like thoroughly developed countries like Germany or something.
Oren: I would imagine it’s a tradition at this point, right? It’s probably not.
Chris: I think that what this means is that we all need an urban fantasy setting where Necromancers run all the funeral homes.
Bunny: Yeah.
Chris: And take care of your dead for you. And some of them may be on the side, animate some of those dead, but they’ll deny it if you ask them.
Oren: Going back to the fantasy side of it, that is an interesting thing you can do if you wanna play with the morals of necromancy. Maybe necromancy isn’t inherently evil, but there’s a good chance depending on how your necromancy works, that your characters are like—any necromancers are directly benefiting from death.
They either—it gives them more bodies to raise or it gives them more death energy to power their spells or whatever. And sure, people die all the time naturally on their own, but if you get power directly from that happening, you have a pretty strong incentive to move things along. So that could be interesting. You could play with that.
Bunny: Yeah. If you wanted to get a little silly with it, it could also be like organ donation, right? I don’t know. Like you will your body to this necromancer, “this underserved industry needs more workers. Be generous. And will your skeleton to Nursing Homes Incorporated” or something?
Oren: Look, if they’re gonna profit from my skeleton, again, I’m going to need a share. Please send money to my heirs for all the work my skeleton does.
Chris: I wanna earn above minimum wage. Oh man. Can you imagine having some families just be inherently richer than others because they have a long line of skeletons that they still profit off of? Because they have a long family history with lots of people.
Bunny: Oh, I’d read that. That definitely gives nouveau riche a new meaning.
Chris: And then the orphans are extra poor ’cause they have no family connections and therefore are not making passive skeleton income.
Bunny: Oh.
Oren: Oh no. Oh my gosh.
Bunny: This is how you have a four hour work week, is that you have all of your ancestors working in the mills.
Oren: Big oof.
Chris: I do think it’s worth talking a little bit more about what kind of powers, right? Obviously we’ve talked about skeletons a lot and there’s so much rich material that has not been tapped there. But again, I do think it’s worth broadening what powers might be considered necromancy, just a little, so that you can come up with more interesting things.
And of course it always can be a combination [of] things, like, you can always include reanimation if you want to. So we talked about having intelligent undead, or [were] talking about, I think it’s Magic Bites that has—vampires are raised by necromancers, but for some reason that means they’re just mindless corpses.
Oren: I hated that, I did not like that part of Magic Bites. For one thing, the necromancers are called the People, which is the worst name for them, like, they’re not even communist. You would hope they would be communists with a name like that, but no. They’re just a group of necromancers, so it’s such a generic name that I had to keep reminding myself who they were talking about when they said the People.
Bunny: Those ones over there.
Oren: Then also the vampires are just, yeah, we have vampires, but they’re really just flesh golems that our necromancers pilot around, which is—why call them vampires at that point? Is it just to give a little middle finger to any vampire fans who read this book and were hoping for real vampires?
Bunny: Yeah, I’d feel cheated.
Oren: It’d be like if you had a, “Hey, we have werewolves in this setting,” and it’s just like a dog that sheds all its hair once a month. And we call them werewolves. That would be disappointing, right? It’s a weird thing to lead people on about.
Bunny: Disappointing to us and disappointing to the rug.
Chris: But you could have a situation where necromancers do create vampires and then maybe the vampires are self-sustaining after that, but they have an interesting relationship with a necromancer who started the line, for instance?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: That could be a thing.
Oren: I’ve seen fantasy stories before [where] that’s the origin of vampires, is that they were originally created by some powerful necromancers, such and such.
Chris: And maybe they’re beholden to them or they have to like, they’re indentured for a while or something like that. Obviously there’s Talking to the Dead. I don’t feel like I see enough necromancers doing things with ghosts.
Bunny: [spooky voice] Ghosts!
Chris: Instead of just zombies.
Bunny: [spooky voice] Ghosts!
Oren: Oh man. Getting flashbacks to every Mage campaign I’ve ever run where we have to have a huge argument about whether or not ghosts fall under death or spirit.
Bunny: I think the answer is just yes.
Oren: And that’s one of the reasons why I don’t like the changes they made in Mage: the Awakening. ‘Cause they added death as a type of magic, which hadn’t existed before in Ascension. And it just has a lot of weird overlaps with the other types of magic and it’s confusing and I did not love it.
Chris: You could have a necromancer that deals with living spirits as well as the dead, or does things like steal souls from people’s bodies and swaps their bodies, or maybe even temporarily, somebody’s on their deathbed. It’s like, okay, we need to get some information on this person. I can keep them from crossing over for a little while.
Oren: For me, I think what it comes down to is like you want it to feel like it’s its own thing and not just a reskin of another type of magic, and there’s always gonna be some gray areas, but if you want your necromancer to have like offensive spells, I think you can do that. I would just like them to be more in theme with like death or maybe even like vitality forces than like, for shooting a green ball of fire and saying that’s necromancy.
Bunny: Or purple.
Oren: I find that kind of boring. DnD does that sometimes. Like a bunch of spells or—they have a lot of damaged spells, but this one’s necromancy. For whatever reason, we said this one was.
Chris: That does sound like something that would happen in a game where somebody’s trying to manage the mechanics and doesn’t want to create all new mechanics for raising skeletons, right?
Oren: Yes.
Chris: Instead of just casting a fireball.
Oren: Correct.
Chris: I think another one that’s really good is having your necromancers travel to the underworld, like Sabriel was probably one of the coolest depictions of necromancy I’ve seen, where she got her bells.
Oren: I love the bells. Those are so cool.
Chris: And they take her to different levels of the underworld and kind of command things. Very cool.
Bunny: Underworld is just inherently cool.
Chris: And of course, immortality. Powerful mages gotta have immortality.
Oren: Immortality is definitely one of those things that like, depending on how you flavor it can be necromancy or it can be something else.
Bunny: Yeah, I feel like flavor, as we’ve been talking around, is a very important part of what makes something necromancy or not, like a Frankenstein’s monster type of creature is flavored as science rather than magic. So we probably wouldn’t think of it as necromancy, even though it’s pretty much necromancy.
Oren: I was gonna list one of those actually.
Bunny: Okay, maybe I’m wrong.
Oren: Frankenstein and Reanimator. I mean, we don’t call them necromancy, but I think a lot of the same tropes apply. Right? You are bringing to life something that was dead in a weird way. Things don’t go great when either Frankenstein or Herbert West does this. So that falls under the same milieu as it were.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, it is interesting that they are given—some science aesthetics are put in there, but they’re also aesthetics like seeing bodies sewn together in the green color of Frankenstein’s monster and a lot of popular depictions that feel similar to magical necromancy.
Bunny: Look, science is also green.
Oren: Science is often green. That’s true.
Bunny: I think you could also do something interesting with the necromancers if instead of focusing so much on like, just death, you could do more with Chris mentioned earlier as well and focus on like, vitality and the transfer of like vital forces and stuff like that because as much as it’s about death and that is, I would argue one of the important parts of necromancy, you could do more with the other half of that equation.
Oren: Yeah. I’m a big fan of necromancers that just drain the life from other people to fuel themselves. I like to literalize the metaphor of the powerful draining the life from the less powerful. It’s a lot more fun with magic.
Chris: I also think you can get more novelty if you focus more on non-humans. So you got your skeletal or zombie dragons, or—
Bunny: Yeah.
Chris: —perhaps your necromancers are just like all the plants around where they walk, die. Right, as [you] draw the life from them. And maybe you have weird skeletal trees, right? So you can—doesn’t always have to be humans and undead humans all the time.
Bunny: The trees are necromancers.
Oren: There’s a very fun moment in the Dresden Files where he is like looking at the rules against necromancers and he notices the law only technically applies to human remains. So he like, summons a zombie T-Rex from the museum. I don’t remember if the book acknowledged the fact that the dinosaur on display is probably a plaster mold and not the actual bone, but I was willing to give him a pass on it.
Chris: Yeah, that’s cool enough. If you believe hard enough that it’s bone, it’s bone. Was there an explanation for why it’s not allowed with humans? Is it just we’re being disrespectful to dead bodies, or was there something inherently harmful?
Bunny: Skosh.
Oren: I’m pretty sure—okay. If I remember correctly in the books, it’s been a while. There was an implication that necromancers are inherently evil, but it was never really explored. Dresden does that and he doesn’t suffer any negative effects. He doesn’t become corrupted from using necromancy to bring back a T-Rex. It’s possible that it was supposed to be like a closed-minded law, or maybe we were just not supposed to question it, and we assumed that it would be evil to bring back a human who knows.
One thing that I was surprised by is from reading a couple of books with necromancers in them, I think people maybe have a stronger sense of like necromancer costume aesthetics than I did. Like in Three Parts Dead, there was this thing about necromancers wearing skull caps, which is a pun obviously, but also literal. The character Tara was playing against type by not wearing a skull cap, like a literal skull cap, not a figurative one made of a skull. I was really confused by that. Is that a thing? I try to think of all the necromancers I’ve seen and I don’t remember them having that outfit.
Chris: Yeah, that’s news to me. That must be just—I would’ve not thought of them wearing skull caps.
Bunny: That must just be like a Three Parts Dead thing. If I had to guess. I don’t know.
Oren: Gideon the Ninth did the same thing too, where it was like, ah, necromancers, and their like goth punk aesthetic with lots of spikes and stuff.
Chris: Was that all of them or was that just like the Ninth House that wore the like skull face paint?
Oren: At least like the skull face paint. Okay, sure. Skull is bones and stuff. They do that. But I swear they had like silver studs and stuff. Maybe I’m making that up.
Bunny: Did they also have skull caps?
Chris: I don’t think so.
Oren: Not that I remember.
Bunny: Okay. Okay. So that’s not a universal part of the aesthetic then. I was gonna say, I feel like. Yeah, I would be very behind if I’d learned that right now.
Chris: Yeah. The most aesthetic thing, I think about Three Parts Dead of Tara is just learning that even though they seem immortal and unaging over time, they do wither away into like skeletons themselves. So that was a neat detail. Other than that, it was interesting ’cause she seems a lot more like a magical lawyer than she does like a necromancer for most of the book.
Oren: Yeah. She is only a necromancer on a technicality. What kind of magic can Tara do? Yes.
Bunny: Face removal magic.
Oren: Yeah. She just has, among other things, a spell that lets you take off someone’s face and keep it in your bag. And they are, of course, they cannot be harmed while their face is removed. Obviously. You can’t be hurt without a face.
Chris: But removing somebody’s face while leaving them alive does seem appropriate because it sounds like next to manipulating death, but not exactly traditional necromancy. So I like that one. But yeah, most of what she does, it sounds like all magic in that setting is just powered by souls.
Oren: Maybe. The book is vague about what powers a lot of magic.
Bunny: The stars.
Chris: Oh, that’s right. I forgot. That was very strange. I guess I just wanted it to all be powered by souls because that would make it feel more cohesive.
Bunny: That’d be thematically cohesive. The star thing is…
Oren: That was one of the things that bothered me about that book series is that it was like, Hey, magic comes from people’s life energy. And so you get magic by convincing a bunch of people to give you some of their soul or life energy or whatever. Or also you can get it from the stars, I guess NBD.
Chris: It’s like, what?
Bunny: But not if it’s Cloudy.
Chris: So last thing I might mention is. Again, should you have other forms of magic besides necromancy in your setting? Three Parts Dead has just divine magic and necromancy. All the mages, as far as I know, are necromancers I think, and that can depend on if you want a setting that’s really horrific and you want magic to feel horrific, it can actually be better to not have any other form of magic. Because this disempowers people and makes it a bigger temptation to use necromancy.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Because there’s nothing else. And that’s very creepy and can be very cosmic horrorish. Whereas if you add other kinds of magic, that will, again, empower people and give them magic to fight necromancers. That is not evil, but you can make aesthetic contrast that way. You just, as Oren said, don’t just have the fireball be different colors. You want it to feel like a different type of magic, but at the same time you can have your golden rays of light and plants blooming and other things that are meant to contrast with your darker necromancy magic.
Oren: All right, with that, I think we will rebury this podcast ’cause the energy animating it is starting to fade.
Bunny: No, [it’s] not starry enough to sustain my power.
Chris: And if this episode helped bring you back to life, then consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Slash Mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to invoke the spirits of some of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
Chris?: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Colton.