Best necromancies in RPG's.
SorcererV1ct0r
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in Off-Topic
IMO a good necromancy in a RPG needs to
Examples of games with amazing necromancy.
Arcanum - you can even talk with dead npc's to solve some quests in different ways and get info. Can create undead from nothing and reanimate corpses and has OHK spells. Despite necromancy black having only 5 spells, they are amazingly made
NWN WITH PRC - NWN doesn't follow the P&P rules, limits you to only one summon that doesn't scale and the opposite school to necromancy has the best spells. Pale masters doesn't give +CL and thus are useless levels spended. But PRC makes the game far more P&P like, in other words, caster level gain, multiple summons, and OHK spells that the base game has.
NWN2 with mods are amazing too. Warlock reworked, spell fixes and dread necromancer makes the nwn2 more pnp like just like PRC.
GOTHIC 2 - RETURNING Despite Xardas teaching circle 6 magic to the hero in G1, on base G2, you can't learn magic from him by no good reason, but can summon undead by being a fire magician(Something that makes no sense since Innos hates undead), Returning fixes it and makes you able to become a necromancer if you ask Xardas for apprenticeship.
The offensive spells of necromancy generally aren't the best in damage but they or reduces target armor(deathball) or heals the caster(swarm - roy) and the summons are amazing
Summons has no limit but has a constant mana upkeep similar to Arcanum. You can use necromancy to threat NPC's. I loved the mod
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcknCwLdbCg
Pathfinder Kingmaker
there are no artificial limitation in how much summons you can have and animate dead allow you to create a lot of undead. Most necromantic offensive spells has FORT save, a amazing save considering that most enemies are fey with poor FORT save. Unfortunately you can't become a undead without mods, despite the undead template being applied to a companion
Be evil also changes the story and some quests.
Might & Magic VIII - Day of the destroyer
On Mi&MVIII, you can nuke cities out of existence, reanimate enemies tied to your dark magic skill, first , only bandits but in end game even dragons, can cast all types of uility spells, enchant a weapon to suck enemy lifeforce, pain reflection to make the enemy damages himself, make enemy casters useless with Dark Grasp, the unique critique is the lack of Finger of Death from M&M VI and the fact that instead of some dark magic spells dealing poison, some magical, etc; all spells on M&M 8 deals "dark" magic.
M&M VI is the best game BUT M&M VIII has the best necromancy by allowing the player to obtain Lichdoom.
Diablo 2
Amazing. Start with a single weak skeleton and end the game with a army of skeleton, skeleton mages, reanimated creatures and even a living fire. Be able to cast tons of nasty curses into the enemy, D2 necromancer is the best among the looter focused isometric arpg SUB genre.
Two games who IMO has the worst necromancies are Elder Scrolls Online and Dragon Age Inquisition but i don't wanna rant, so i will not enter in much details.
- Be distinct mechanic and lore wise than regular magic
- Allow you to feel like the master of life and death itself
- Allow multiple summons and a progression on summons
- Put nasty curses on the enemy or "debuffs"
- Become inhuman. Vampire or Lich preferentially
- Able to use enemy lifeforce against itself
- Have impact on NPC interactions
Examples of games with amazing necromancy.
Arcanum - you can even talk with dead npc's to solve some quests in different ways and get info. Can create undead from nothing and reanimate corpses and has OHK spells. Despite necromancy black having only 5 spells, they are amazingly made
NWN WITH PRC - NWN doesn't follow the P&P rules, limits you to only one summon that doesn't scale and the opposite school to necromancy has the best spells. Pale masters doesn't give +CL and thus are useless levels spended. But PRC makes the game far more P&P like, in other words, caster level gain, multiple summons, and OHK spells that the base game has.
NWN2 with mods are amazing too. Warlock reworked, spell fixes and dread necromancer makes the nwn2 more pnp like just like PRC.
GOTHIC 2 - RETURNING Despite Xardas teaching circle 6 magic to the hero in G1, on base G2, you can't learn magic from him by no good reason, but can summon undead by being a fire magician(Something that makes no sense since Innos hates undead), Returning fixes it and makes you able to become a necromancer if you ask Xardas for apprenticeship.
The offensive spells of necromancy generally aren't the best in damage but they or reduces target armor(deathball) or heals the caster(swarm - roy) and the summons are amazing
- Circle 1 - Summon a skeleton
- Circle 2 - Summon a zombie, slower but far more resistant
- Circle 3 - Summon a skeleton with weapon proficiency so he can combo and crit
- Circle 4 - Summon a demon. Requires learning demonology and preferentially demonic language too. Feeding demon essences to the spell rune allow you to create more powerful demons than the starting lesser demon
- Circle 5 - Army of darkness - it summons 3 skeletons, 2 skeletons warriors and a skeleton magician with the circle 3 spell spear of darkness
Summons has no limit but has a constant mana upkeep similar to Arcanum. You can use necromancy to threat NPC's. I loved the mod
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcknCwLdbCgPathfinder Kingmaker
there are no artificial limitation in how much summons you can have and animate dead allow you to create a lot of undead. Most necromantic offensive spells has FORT save, a amazing save considering that most enemies are fey with poor FORT save. Unfortunately you can't become a undead without mods, despite the undead template being applied to a companion
Be evil also changes the story and some quests.
Might & Magic VIII - Day of the destroyer
On Mi&MVIII, you can nuke cities out of existence, reanimate enemies tied to your dark magic skill, first , only bandits but in end game even dragons, can cast all types of uility spells, enchant a weapon to suck enemy lifeforce, pain reflection to make the enemy damages himself, make enemy casters useless with Dark Grasp, the unique critique is the lack of Finger of Death from M&M VI and the fact that instead of some dark magic spells dealing poison, some magical, etc; all spells on M&M 8 deals "dark" magic.
M&M VI is the best game BUT M&M VIII has the best necromancy by allowing the player to obtain Lichdoom.
Diablo 2
Amazing. Start with a single weak skeleton and end the game with a army of skeleton, skeleton mages, reanimated creatures and even a living fire. Be able to cast tons of nasty curses into the enemy, D2 necromancer is the best among the looter focused isometric arpg SUB genre.
Two games who IMO has the worst necromancies are Elder Scrolls Online and Dragon Age Inquisition but i don't wanna rant, so i will not enter in much details.
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As for summon limit on IE, my problem is that the game makes no distinction between a Efreet or a 1 HD Skeleton... Icewind dale 2 has a similar summon limit(your CL * 2 worth of hit dices) so a lv 9 sorcerer can have a Efreet(10 hit dices) and 8 1 HD skeletons but he can't have 2 Efreets.
Summoning the walking dead out of thin air = bad design
Finding a corpse and then reanimating it via rituals/pseudo-science executed by the player = good design
Being limited to the deaders summoning spells give you = bad design
Being able to fleshgraft and/or combine undeads to give rise to new vile creations = good design
At least WotR does allow for the second part. I have high hopes for their new take on a playable undead faction.
Iratus: Lord of the Dead was also rather decent in that aspect as well. Even has skellies not popping out of thin air.
I remember that NWN1 had this AMAZING mod called "Thanaturge: Art of the Necromancer", that revolved around you obtaining bones and other body parts to animate undead to do your bidding and defeat your enemies (which, because there weren't any companions in the mod, was essential else you'd be quickly overwhelmed). There was a lot of flavour too in the parts you could acquire, such as "A skull from a madman who ran naked into the woods before being devoured by wolves", which when used in the animation ritual, would create a more powerful skeleton, but also was more difficult to control due to the previous owner's madness. You could also gather parts like claws and skulls from beasts and fuse them together to create skeletons with different combat abilities etc.
You didn't HAVE to be Evil in this adventure either (although you couldn't be Good); there was one excellent encounter where you meet this Priest who's convinced you're a spawn of Evil, and you grab his holy symbol from him and he's astounded that the symbol doesn't burn you (which it WOULD, if you were actually Evil aligned.) I had a lot of fun playing through the module trying to balance between Good and Evil despite the grim realities of what you were doing.
Sadly, the mod never got a sequel and so the story remains incomplete.
Yea, summoning spirits to foretell the future, not 3/4 the things people believe necromancer's do thanks to rpgs.
With that said are you saying corps e can't exist on other planes? There is nothing saying a necromancer can't pull a corpse from another plane while reanimating or before reanimating it.
Personally I'd rather see necromancer's dealing more with spirits and less with skeletons and zombies.
If is like Arcanum where you can create undead, you can reanimate corpses, you can damage enemies and can talk to spirits, then it will be amazing.
That's true. And I think if you create that lore in the game you're fine. What I mean is I agree with this:
Summoning the walking dead (as in, non-spirits) from nothing without the lore to back it up makes for a less interesting necromancer, at least to me. But I do find undead from monsters and non-human races interesting, so extending that to other planes and including diverse humanoids and creatures would be awesome.
On Gothic 3, army of darkness bring undead from beliar's realm.
On Gothic 2 - Returning (non vanilla), summoned creatures are temporary lifeforms that requires a constant upkeep of mana to maintain his existence. You need a lot of ingredients to be able to create demons and feed mana essences to upgrade to higher demons.
Not all spirits are the same, the spirits of the dead aren't the same as the spirits of nature. Vodun priest in the Vodun religion technically deal with two types of spirits, those of the dead and those of the Lao...
As far as interacting with incorporal undead goes: I loved how Icewind Dale II handled The Weeping Widow quest. While it's neccesary to be an evil aligned Cleric and not a Necromancer, the game allows you to actually break the will of the ghost via dialogue - forcing her to do your biddings. I really wish such interactions would be more common in RPG's. Beats summoning spectres out of thin air any day of the week.
That said, I like how Pathfinder actually gives Necromancers the Power over Undead ability. Now they don't need to multiclass into Cleric to command/turn undead.
About Gothic 2 returning, here is some screenshots
More screens https://imgur.com/a/T4a1ZMX
They command powerful undead armies and magic, and through their many philosophical discussions as Sveltana mentors Anastasya in the ways of necromancy during her campaign, I was able to see necromancy as a neutral, non-evil thing in the Ashan setting, that can sometimes even be used for good.
This was the first time in any rpg I didn't immediately want to react in angry, indignant disgust and hold up my holy symbol for immediate smiting and turning when presented with fantasy necromancy.
In fairness to the DA universe/games though, true undead (as we typically think of them) don't exist in Thedas. While there are such creatures such as skeletons and zombies and more powerful "undead" to vanquish, they are the result of demonic spirits possessing corpses (the more powerful the demon, the more powerful the "undead" created). Even creatures such as ghosts are only able to exist in areas where the Veil (the barrier between the physical realm and the Fade, the world of dreams) is thin or sundered. As far as we know, there is no magic powerful enough to actually bring back the spirits of the deceased or to grant unlife to previously dead creatures.
That said, I do agree with you that the Mortalitasi in Inquisition felt like a very watered down version of the Spiritualist concept. :P Fits the setting, mind you, but not terribly exciting to play.
On origins, there was animate dead spell https://dragonage.fandom.com/wiki/Animate_Dead
It was limited to only one summon and was not that great but was better than DA:I. DA:I class is just a spiritualist without any good or interesting spell. When you consider that they took off Blood Magic to put this """"necromancer"""", i makes me hate even more, because they traded something who barely exists in modern games for the worst iteration of necromancer.
Not saying that DA:O was perfect on this regard. Be able to use blood magic in front of templars without any consequence makes ZERO sense. Cooldowns makes zero sense too. VtMB blood magic(thaumaturgy) should't be used in front of kine or is a masquerade breach that can lead to awful consequences.
Other problem is the spells scaling with weapon damage when one of the starting dialog options is "i don't need a staff to be deadly"
Among modern games, pathfinder kingmaker is the UNIQUE game with decent necromancy.
I bame you for this one, because I was going to try and avoid that game discussion. But lets doing it...
Definition of undead
: not dead : returned from or as if from death
Literally by MW definition, anything is undead as long as it not living and not dead, its creation isn't that important to being undead. So yes, the undead in Thedas, is still "undead" as we think of them because even if they are possessed by twisted spirits (which are what demons are in that series, spirits forcefully twisted to do things outside of their purpose aka against their will until it basically kills them) Those demons are still reanimating those corpses, thus they are undead.
Now we are talking about the bare bones of the definition here, now if start bringing in all the infinite categories of undead than we have various different arguments; vampires, banshees, Liches, etc.
In Origins, the entire enthropy try is basically a necromancer tree seeing how Necromancers as we view them today are more than just "raise dead" Raising the dead is just their primary troup, they had a variety of other "dark" magic for death and decaying. (guess which tree my warden always focused on
Now at this point for clarity sake I must emit, Necromancer is by far my favorite type of mages. I was even working on a comic about one in high school where necromancy was divide into four schools, Death (reanimating corpses, summoning spirit, reviving the dead) two variations of blood magic: One using blood as a conduit to manipulate the mind (yep Bioware ripped me off lol), and one where you physically control blood to use as a weapon either fluidly or shaped it into blades and such), Fleshcraft: where you basically manpulate the flesh and can turn it into a weapon, use for defense, turn people into walking bombs (yep, bioware stole that from me to lol) and bonecraft if I remember correctly.
Blood magic in DAO I never viewed to be as "the" necromancy magic, seeing how its biggest fears from people was manipulating the mind and summoning spirits... and again we basically already had a necromancy tree that literally let us animate corpses around us, feed of corpses to heal ourselves and restore mana and even outside of the circle these weren't the things we mages were feared for. Now note, I haven't read any of the books, my only knowledge are the primary 3 games and some dlc.
Skipped D2 because I literally hated it and remember almost nothing about it outside of the primary plot and they got rid of shapeshifting and I remember blood magic being ungodly weaker. Wait, now I also do remember the thing with Hawke's mom being stitched apart of a corpse and reanimated...
I'm currently playing DAI now...
Ignoring the infinite amout of complaints I'm currently having, especially about the tactics system... and the tactical view... so much hate...
The mage class is the single biggest letdown to the point I'm slowly feeling like its a chore to try and finished and I'm only Level 13 with the maxed out necromancer specc... WHICH ALL THEY FREAKING DID WAS TAKE THE ENTHROPY SCHOOL, TOSSED IT THERE AND NERFED THE FREAKING ABILITIES!
Ok, animated dead was not perfect in DAO, but atleast it freaking worked... atleast I could freaking control it, atleast it freaking followed us, ATLEAST IT LASTED INDEFINITELY! Igod they broke my heart with this game, it isn't bad enough that almost literally every single mage plays literally the same way since their seem to be little variation in the builds The necromancer spec out of all of them seem to have the most refined and detailed lore, especially in separating it from blood magic.
ugh sorry for the rant...
The poor necromancy is just one of the many flaws that this game has. I decided to test this game one more time since i got stuck on chapter 5 of Gothic 2 - returning and maybe it was not bad as i remember but no. The game is awful. When i play Gothic 2 Returning as a necromancer, from the moment that Xardas accepted me as a apprentice to when i stopped playing, i felt like i an a necromancer in another world. On DA:I, always felt like i an doing a boring work and i NEVER fell like i an part of the fictional world. DA:O was not good as old school RPG's, but was far better in any aspect.
I will go play VtMB with Antitribu mod to play as Lasombra and giovanni. I give up on modern games. They are just boring unimersive consequenceless work. Not living breathing worlds where you can "escape" and fell immersed.
All that i have said about returning? Using google translator on rpg russia can help you a lot with questing
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://rpgrussia.com/mod/returning-online-2.0/index.html?quests_story_26.html
My stats
On Gothic 2 - returning 2.0, in order to become a necromancer, you need to ask for apprenticeship from Xardas, get 30 INT(very hard), and do a quest involving killing a "sheep of innos". After it, you can learn runes. There are no hard caps on how much creatures you can animate BUT each creature that you maintain has a mana upkeep and without the alternative balancing, most low tier summons are banished from boss battles. You can also learn unique skills like a skill who allows you to spend your own lifeforce(much greater than your mana) to maintain your army of darkness. You can also learn demonology. Demons in gothic universe are not creatures of fire, they are creatures of darkness.
In general, necromancers are really powerful and I recommend returning 2.0 for those who enjoy necromancy.
The game also has unique dialogs based on your class.
Here is a gameplay on chapter 4
And a gameplay on the last chapter.
Their 10th level ability is a bard song that automatically casts animate dead on everything around you and they persist as long as you perform. So you could activate it, and as you slay enemies they would automatically rise to serve you.
Warcraft 3 also has fantastic Necroamncy with both raising generic skeletons and Death Knights being able to animate the actual units you kill.
Total War: Warhammer 1 & 2 has decent necromancy. In combat it's mostly a healing spell that raises your own troops, but out of combat, the larger the battle the better undead you can raise on the world map. You also get two flavors with Vampire Counts and then Vampire Coast, aka vampirates.
The Ordinator Mod for Skyrim overhauls the perks and you can raise what you kill like in the base game but you can also collect bones from fallen enemies to create semi-permanent skeleton followers. Their number is limited by your maximum magicka.
Most games doesn't have in depth corpse mechanics. However, as longs is not something AWFUL like only one single summon limit, I an fine. And note that necromancy is not only about controlling undead. Speaking with the dead, casting curses, and throwing negative energy is part of the necromancy.
In some settings like Gothic, demonology is also part of necromancy.