Summoning temporary undead is such a turnoff for the necromancer fantasy IMO. Also, Occult seems straight up wrong for the master of life and death. Divine is right there. But like, if they kept all of the mechanics and design direction for this intact but called it an Illusionist, I’d be all over it.
I think modern TTRPGS in general steer towards things like temporary summons because of how it lets the players actually use them in combat. Nobody wants to play the necromancer who is suddenly just some guy because there are no corpses available where the battle kicks off.
I have an enormous soft spot for narratively putting in the legwork to assemble your undead hordes, and when I’m the GM, I’m always keen to set up good moments for the necromancer to build an army, but it’s so easy for that to set up a situation where a player doesn’t get to actually use their features. Making them temporary summons from nowhere in particular is the easiest fix.
Divine magic is drawn from the gods, while creating false life is a perversion of the gods’ natural order. It’s very explicitly anti-divine. Meanwhile, Occult magic is about Fucking Around and hoping to not Find Out. Bending or breaking the divine order is exactly what it’s there for.
Interesting. I wonder if you could elaborate on both of those points?
To me, them being temporary is actually really good for the fantasy. You’re not a cleric reviving people, you’re a necromancer reanimated dead bodies to perform a job. I could see a place for more permanency at very high levels (to be able to do something like this story from !rpggreentext@ttrpg.network, but for what’s actually useful over an adventuring campaign, a more utility-focused summon makes a lot of sense to me.
And occult works for me exceptionally well. Divine would be real resurrection, but raising undead is like the definition of the occult, to me.
re: spell schools
eh, hard disagree. The evocative name aside, Occult is pretty much all spirit and mind effects, it’s more the ‘Bard’ school to me. I could definitely see the ghost hoarder subclass have a strong occult lean, but the whole class? nah.
Divine (and previously, the cleric list in 1e) has always been the poster child for Death magic. Void in 2e is most well represented by that tradition, even if Vitality is something it represents too.
So I’ll admit, I’ve never actually played Pathfinder 2e. I’ve been GMing it for over a year now, but I’ve never seen it from in front of the GM’s screen. So my knowledge of things that primarily affect players, like what spells are on which spell list, is not as strong. But I did look up the official descriptions, which are:
Divine The power of the divine is steeped in faith, the unseen, and belief in a power source from beyond the Material Plane. Clerics are the most iconic divine spellcasters, beseeching the gods to grant them their magic. Divine sorcerers can use the blood of their celestial or fiendish ancestors as a divine conduit, and champions call upon their gods to grant them martial prowess through divine guidance.
Occult The practitioners of occult traditions seek to understand the unexplainable, categorize the bizarre, and otherwise access the ephemeral in a systematic way. Bards are the most iconic occult spellcasters, collecting strange esoterica and using their performances to influence the mind or elevate the soul, and occult sorcerers strive to understand the mysterious power in their blood.
Which definitely reinforces my belief that a necromancer should be occult. They don’t beseech the gods anything, they learn to manipulate magic to do their bidding in strange ways.
I don’t put much stock in tradition with spell schools/traditions. I have never liked that raising undead is so often treated as the same type of magic as bringing your allies back to life.
Conjuring up the dead has nothing to do with what I want from a necromancer. if you’re not pulling in literal ghosts from the boneyard, it just looks like a summoner with a thanatopic hyperfixation; indistinguishable from the undead eidolon summoner. It lacks the spirit and function of an opportunistic recycler.
I want a necromancer to be closer to a blue mage than a conjurer, pulling up a frankenstein of a minion from the component pieces of what they find on their adventure.
Pulling up super flimsy figments with limited ability to interact with things around them, then popping them to create strange and quasi-real effects though… that’s an incredibly appealing idea for an Illusionist. Pull a rabbit of caerbannog out of a hat, then toss it for your next trick. Trick an enemy with illusory soldiers tossing a spear their way.
I think the class has juice, but doesn’t necessarily fit the bill.
Also, I kinda hate that the thralls explicitly can never take actions. Limiting the to in-combat utility is pretty uninspired, but I wouldn’t mind as much if they weren’t strictly real.
Conjuring up the dead has nothing to do with what I want from a necromancer
Ok, that’s wild to me. To me that is, like, the core of the necromancer.
I want a necromancer to be closer to a blue mage than a conjurer
I’m afraid I’ve never played Magic, nor had any interest in doing so. So I don’t really know what the different colours represent.
pulling up a frankenstein of a minion from the component pieces of what they find on their adventure
Oh that’s interesting. It sounds to me more like a kind of magi-tech character that might fit something like an artificer. Because it seems like an interesting idea, but it’s not the core of a necromancer to me, and even though it does technically involve reanimating the dead, it’s an almost mutually-exclusive concept with what I think of as a necromancer.
I find this fascinating overall, because it sounds like there are two entirely distinct concepts of what it means to be a “necromancer”.
I kinda hate that the thralls explicitly can never take actions
Yeah ngl I agree with this 100%. Definitely want to be able to use those temporarily-raised undead to actually do things.
