Describe a setting where necromancy isn't frowned upon.

>>49914922
Religious embalming plus ancestor worship transitions into taxidermy, but necromantic technology only permits the most halting speech and movement. Preservation techniques have advanced to allow the departed to look much as they did at the end of their life. Attacked by the rebel fedora-wearers because religion poisons muh errthing

I think there's a faction in Eberron that does the non-evil undead thing, but I haven't really looked into it because of other things about the setting I don't particularly like
The idea of animating corpses with little to no consequences bothers me on a setting design level though

>>49915059
The Deathless use positive energy and run an island paradise full of elves by being obnoxiously conservative super elves, to the point that a bunch of fucking ELVES got tired of waiting for things to change and fucked off to the mainland to breed horses and fuck up the neighbors with swords.

The Blood of Vol cult plays it much more traditionally, wanting to make all the cool people immortal vampires and all the uncool people bloodbags, and they chatted up the leadership of not-russia and made him a vampire, then he realised they were dicks and broke out, banned them from the country, but kept all the cool necromancy shenanigans. Karrnath is maybe not "good", but the undead levies are tradition now and Kaius I is devoted to protecting the peace in Karrnath.

Ironically, he's opposed by the youngish CG queen of notamerica, who wants to restart the last war because "We wuz winnin!"

>>49914922
It a keeper job to make sure the dead stay dead and take care of their grave. There will be a corpse of list for people in the street generally unless they are not documented. They would also be Corpse collecting, ancestral communication, internal loyal troops guarding an old ruler, use of necromancy to solve cases, spirit gathering into a place waiting for the angels to take them so they don't wonder around and Spook people.

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>>49915143
I came here to post this.
Eberron a best.

>>49914922
google Tevinter Imperium.

>>49915143
Can we just take a minute and talk about Vol, and how brilliant her existence is?

First off, she's a Half-elf, Half-Dragon hybrid, and born with the Siberys mark of Death, said to have untold power over necromancy. Then, because she was absolutely hated by both races that spawned her, her entire clan was erased from the face of the earth, and she only survived by becoming a Lich,
Losing the ability to use her mark in the process, and becoming the head of a major necromantic cult.

In other words, she's the biggest Mary Sue Ever.

Now, where it gets brilliant is that any That Guy trying to become an Evil Necromancer will probably have go be a part of the Blood of Vol to do it. In other words, you either decide you'd rather not worship a Mary Sue, or if you do your DM has a plausible enough reason to kick you straight out of the group for having shit sense of storytelling.

Eberron does this two different ways.

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>>49914922
Zombies were originally created for war, but now their use in combat is banned and they're only used as labor. They're magically controlled by handlers, and the resurrection process not only makes them mindless but they also all look identical so you won't recognize grandma's corpse walking around. Only government mages can create the zombies, and they're all owned and used by the state. Most people don't exactly like the zombies, but it's eliminated the need for slave labor, so people generally tolerate it.

>>49915201
That's one way of looking at it.
She was the result of the efforts of the House of Vol (elven house with the dragonmark of death) and some rogue dragons who wanted the ancient war between elves and dragons to stop. They thought that if they could create a hybrid, it would be a metaphorical meeting point for the races. Unlike most settings, you can't just bone a dragon, so they had to do some serious alchemical fuckery to produce the setting's only half-dragon to date.
They showed off their new little girl, at which points both sides of the war decided to cease fighting in order to purge the abomination in tandem. The House of Vol was destroyed entirely, and the rogue dragons eliminated, and eventually the war ground to a halt and was shelved.
But Vol survived, having greatly heightened magical power and the mark of death, by turning herself into a lich. Ironically, this ended the mark of death's lineage for good. She founded the Blood of Vol cult, creating from scratch what would become a major religion in a setting with subtle gods and laying tracks through all civilization. Most members of the Blood of Vol have no idea about vampires and liches, they're just ordinary citizens going about their lives and occasionally donating blood to holy rituals, and believe in the divinity of blood and undeath.
And even though Kaius I(II) is trying his best to purge the cult from Karnnath, it is totally dependent on its undead reserved for defense, and many citizens are devoted to it without knowing what it really means.

>>49914922
Necromancers are usually trained since birth to maintain the graves and crypts since wayward rogue magic does funky things to corpses, usually trained in precision combat since they are not to destroy the undead, simply stop them and unanimate them, sever the magic links that keep them going while keeping the body intact.
They're not big on the actual reanimating, its just a thing they need to know to prevent it at a larger, better scale.

They are thought of much like one would think of firemen in today's world, an exciting heroic job where you get to contain catastrophes and wear funky armor. It also helps their legislation also covers burial, home decoration (which most are trained in, since nobody wants to go to an ugly burial, nobody deserves to go to an ugly burial), Seances, marriage and blessing ships. They are usually also always with during military campaigns as battlefields have a good chance of having magical fallout from battlemages, hordes of armored zombies after a battle is not pleasant to deal with.

There's of course always black sheep, some who run away at an early age with the basics or those who turn against society. Common causes are finding out about lichhood and more darker necromancy and being enticed and feeling wronged about keeping such information from them, never realizing the reasons for being locked away.

Other societies that burn or simply accept the undeath as a part of life will of course frown upon them, why teach jackasses how to raise them when simple auras of wandering magic can do so much damage, that's just reckless and dangerous. Morally it also depends on the religion of the place, usually none of the gods care but sometimes the more flesh and body related gods get uppity which can cause a whole lot of awful things. A good lot of lynching has been done in the name of love and healing gods.

>>49914922
It's really fucking rare. Let me explain why:
Your own body consumes a shit-ton of food and energy to even exist. Human organism is really damn complex thing. Now, go ahead and try to build a magic simulacrum of muscles, brain and supply this stuff with enough magic power to keep functioning (enough slaves to eat their souls or a small portable hole to Mageblaze dimension), and some shielding to prevent random apprentice with Dispel one-shot all that effort. Quite a job, eh? That's why the whole orcish race has only eight Immortal Elders, for example

>>49914922
Guild Wars had necromancy treated as a respectable form of magic on par with everything else.
Though separating spellcasters to professions the flavour was more that magic itself was treated as four schools (destruction, aggression, denial, preservation) and all professions had something to do with each of them.
Also you played humans and humans had a just but gentle god of death so being a necromancer wasn't even considered creepy.
Sure you cast curses and literally rot your enemies to death but then again, mesmers would mindrape their foes and elementalists destroy with their elements in quite creative ways so it's more about how you want to go about doing harm or helping your allies.
I miss Guild Wars.

>>49914922
Pretty simple. Necromancy is just magic related to the dead, and there's no inherent taboo involved, so the setting can really be nearly anything.

Only 5 IQ deendee-rones will have a problem with this, as they cannot understand that their worthless trash isn't the only game around, and also fail to understand that alignment is a stupid, still-equally-subjective scheme which can only condemn things according to GM preference.

Since there are no gods, the dead have no where to go and so are bound into the service of guilds known as the Undying Lords who perform more morbid services like butchers, although their mercenaries aren't too bad either. Undead bound into flesh but given no purpose imitate life poorly, and become akin to homeless or vagrants as they rot.

Yeah, yeah, we know the drill, 'good necromancer' and all that happy horseshit you guys try and feed us.

Read the shattered world for a perfect example of good necromancy. Everything else is "muh justification" and a load of crap that leads to horrors and monsters.

>>49916179
No, most sane people who don't like the idea of undead things wandering around destroying the populace and countryside and the people in it will be against undead things wandering around and doing just that.

There is nothing good, nice or even helpful about dead things bothering living people.

>>49914922
Came up with an alternative undead idea for a setting, alongside the usual d&d kind. Basically it works by combining positive and negative energy on a subject that willingly went through a special ritual beforehand. Their soul would find peace in their afterlife, but their bodies would be animated and programmed with some of the knowledge and skills they knew in life.

They would continue to function in the careers they lived doing, serving the royalty and religious orders that animated them. Their bodies would be resistant to wear and tear and wouldn't rot or even look that unpleasant, but there'd be no recovery from damage they might take. Their movements tend to be slow and deliberate and don't respond well to stimulus, so they don't see use as guards or the like.

The insular society they arise from depends on these skilled undead to supplant their limited numbers, and they even earn wages for their surviving relatives. They fall short of ancestor worship but these bodies are still revered and their willful destruction is treated as abhorrent as any other cultures desecration of the dead.

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>>49914922
>Reanimating the dead is an evil act because it's a mockery of life
>Trapping the souls of the living is evil because it condemns one to an eternity of suffering and solitude
>Resurrection is considered good because it restores life

Alright moralfags, riddle me this:
>A little girl is terminally ill
>Snap her neck
>Trap her soul in a soulstone
>Reanimate her corpse
>Place the soulstone inside the corpse
How exactly is this different from resurrection?

>>49917925
The magic used for instance. Reanimation might command a different power than true resurrection.
Depending on the setting the magic used may be seen as inherently wrong.
Contrast forcibly making something living again, even if for benevolent reasons vs. giving back life with the grace of a deity because you've a rapport with them.
Just one example. I dislike in general 'x magic is always bad'. The use of the discipline should be what dictates the morality.

>>49914922
It's the middle of an ice age. There's not enough land for thousands of peasants to farm on unless they spend all day clearing snow off it.
And the streets have to be kept clear of snow, buildings de-iced, etc. Most of the horses starved to death a couple of centuries ago, so beasts of burden are undead as well unless you're REALLY rich.
The harbour is kept clear by a giant heating plant, fed by the undead with deep-frozen forests mined by the undead.
In life, you borrow against your body's value in death. You default, they take it.

>>49917925
You've made her body far less pleasant to be in, and who knows the condition of a soul in that situation. Depending on the details, you've probably doomed both her spirit and body to a slow wasting. Trading a short term unpleasant fate to a slower, worse one. Even if it didn't degrade it can still be a strange twisted life.

If somehow it was a perfect reanimation, the soul suffered no ill effects and the whole thing didn't do anything weird then sure maybe it's a viable thing to do. But that isn't standard and where it's possible it'd likely be easier and less traumatic just to heal her normally. Also, in a setting with a confirmed afterlife dying isn't necessarily all that sad.

>>49914922
Anita Blake.

Raise people as zombies, for the police, before their brain has deteriorated too much to ascertain how they died.

>>49914922
A setting where they either don't believe in an afterlife, don't hold life sacred, or believe that the soul departs the body the moment of death and cannot be re-tethered to it.

>>49917925
>A little girl is terminally ill
>Snap her neck
>How exactly is this different from resurrection?
well for starters, resurrection doesn't involve killing people in a misguided attempt to "fix" them

>>49918662
>Snapping someone's neck is evil if the end result is them living a healthy, happy life
I bet you think it's also an act of evil to push a needle into a defenseless child's flesh, or to cut a sick man's chest open.

>>49918737
>a healthy, happy life
Nah you ended their life, and brought them back into some kind of damned half-existence.

>>49917925
Congratulations, you turned a little girl into an undead abomination. The body is DEAD, there is no life in it, it is a corpse. It will not grow, change, live, breathe, desire, or want.

She'll go insane inside of a week.

>>49918737
you feel your heartbeat? You breathe? You feel how your flesh moves?

She won't. She's a soul trapped in a lifeless corpse. That sure as FUCK isn't resurrection.

And comparing what you did to surgery or medical procedure? That's just laughable.

>>49914922
Divine magical healing just speeds up the body's regenerative processes. This is because the gods worked hard on their creation and prefer to keep things as close to "natural" as they can. They can save you in case of a mortal wound, reknit bones and limbs as long as they're mostly attached, and even resuscitate someone if you get to them fast enough.

However, this power is only given to a fraction of people, who are specifically ordained by their god. Except in cases where the gods have chosen someone to basically be a messiah, this magic can't regenerate lost body parts, it can't restore damaged nerves, and it doesn't even magically make infections go away. That would all violate the natural laws the gods set down, and their divine intervention will generally not allow that.

The Foundation for Responsible Necromancy is a scholarly group of wizards who are trying to find ways to do what divine healing cannot. So far, they've figured out how to create grafted undead prosthetics for some lost limbs, mimic the processes of nerve function, and even instantly sterilize a wound. The Foundation works closely with priests of all stripes in order to maximize the benefit of their necromancy.

This has the advantage of being something that anyone can learn to do if they put in the time and effort, as well as not requiring the gods to break their own rules.

These used of necromancy have had a mixed reception, as necromancy has not historically been used for nice purposes, and there is concern about violation of the natural order. For these reasons, the Foundation has to answer to ethics committees chaired by high priests, grey necromancers (the guys who specialize in preventing undead incursions and the like), experienced Foundation members, and appointed representatives.

In my primary fantasy campaign, there's a group of necromancers that have eked out an existence by providing their magic to people at low cost. Whereas churches demand tithe, and wizards demand payment for services, the necromancer guild explicitly allows you to make payments in corpses. This, a hunter can go out and grab some game, or an impoverish family can bring miscarried babes and dead grandparents to Patty the fees.

Furthermore, some necromancers do it out of good will. One village in the setting has a powerful enchantment on the forest around it, so that any corpse within reanimated and guards those that live in the village. So the village took up the tradition of just dragging bodies into the woods rather than being them. And not many dare to fuck with the village.

>>49918737
hello, strawlad, what are you doing on /tg/? this isn't your usual haunt.

>>49918737
>>49919296
As a general rule, the same people who would disapprove of uploading someone's brain to a computer or robot body would also disapprove of undeath as a form of life prolongation.

In both cases, they'll say it doesn't really count as living. Nothing you say will shake their opinion of this.

>>49919350
Liches4unlife

I think it's fucking dumb to read your morality into a fantasy worlds morality. With no basis of knowledge about how Necromancy works and what properties it imbues the body/soul/whatever with. As far as we know Necromancy could be all rainbows and magical unicorns which allows the (in this case) little girl to exist on past death, let her feel and have emotions etc. Grow emotionally and have a fulfilling and productive happy life. Everyone is arguing over details that are completely subject to the whim of the setting.

Suffice it to say, shut the fuck up about Necromancy being Evil. The thread is about coming up with a plausible reason for Necromancy to be used in a society and it's effects on how that culture operates and views the dead. And it's economic and cultural effects.

If you don't want to contribute to the threads stated purpose then don't. But why come in to crap your biased morality all over the thread? Other than just to shit up the board.

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>>49914922

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>>49919745

I'm amazed nobody said anything about Sanctuary yet (a.k.a. Diablo's world)
At Sanctuary, necromancers are priests, their religion follows the word of Rathma that believed that life and death are only separated by a thin layer that magical training can easily manipulate.
According to the game's lore, necromancers are seen with distrust because their spells create effects similar to demonic magic, though nobody have reasons to be suspicious of the church of Rathma activities (they are mostly helpful to the community) people at Sanctuary have very few contact with magic, so there is always distrust and superstition

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>>49914922
Zelfor the Necromancer / Lord of Bone / Lord of the Dead

When Zelfor's powers to control the long dead became apparent, it did not take long before the easy to convince dead rose out of the graveyards throughout the Monarchy. The massive, rampant, but under-equipped army of undead was the first close contact with a corruptive power that many commoners had, especially those on backwater planets. It did not take long before cremation was mandatory throughout the Monarchy. Zelfor responded by simply using his minions to strip the live or newly dead of their flesh. It appeared "long dead" was not a strict requirement, as the process could be accelerated. Combined with the other threats to the Monarchy, it looked as if his skeleton hordes could tip the scales. But, just as the dead were easy to control, it turned out that Zelfor himself was easy to control. After a daring raid, the entity was captured and forcibly tamed by a Retinue member with great mental abilities. The new "alliance" with the dead has made people uneasy to say the least, but there has also been cases of people volunteering their bodies for service after death, and it might even become mandatory in the near future.

Even now, a large chunk of the Monarchy's forces consists of the skeletal dead. All processed skeletons are impregnated and coated with an 8mm layer of Plasteel, increasing their durability greatly. The plasteel is mostly bone colored, but some factions use red, blue, black or even silver pigments. Veteran skeletons are marked with colored stripes on the femur and head. When resources are available, skeletons can be augmented by an outer layer of motorized armor and turned into a Bone Cyborg of some sort. The rarely encountered child skeletons are always turned into Lindebarn, a form of cybernetic scout unit.

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>>49921214
taken from; androidarts.com/starsword/starsword.htm

>>49918780
>damned
God is not real.
>half existence
Nothing "half" about being able to do everything a normal girl could do and then some.

Of course this all depends on the setting, but deendee-rones have no conception of a world outside their shallow wargame.

>>49919350
I disagree with mind-uploading on the grounds that it doesn't provide what proponents promise: you're not the one that gets to benefit from immortality. Your clone is. Undeath is fine though.

>>49914922

Fire Sea, from the Death Gate novels, described an environment so harmful to the living that the ongoing magical cost of staying alive was far greater than the one-time magical cost of animating the dead. The mindless undead could continue contributing to society after their passing, and society adapted to consider this whole process a good and natural thing.

Sentient undead would be regarded as abominations on a level akin to an H. P. Lovecraft story.

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>>49917925
>snapping necks when all you have to do is get a zombie's tooth

Also, Yuuhi is never going to grow up. She's stuck as a kid forever, and like Zombina she'll eventually have to start sewing herself together. Maybe that's better than death, but it still kind of sucks and is clearly not a resurrection.

This isn't something you want to do when a real resurrection is available.

>>49922746
>duplicate of your mind is exactly the same as an identical twin
See what I mean? Nothing can shake this crazy.

>>49924060
Your actual mind, however, still dies.

Your version of immortality is not immortality at all, just a different kind of legacy.

Just like everyone who steps through a stargate, or gets beamed up, dies in the process.

>>49924128
>>49924128
>Just like everyone who steps through a stargate, or gets beamed up, dies in the process.

Or anyone that ever sleeps or otherwise loses consciouness.

>>49924256
A consciousness undergoing a change in mode is not the same as a true disconnect. The mind is still there.

>>49924256
You're telling me that every time I sleep, all my brain matter is disintegrated, and an exact copy is made out of different atoms in the same arrangement?

>>49914922
An ancient war of the gods destroyed the afterlife.

Tethering souls to fuel automatons ensures they won't spontaneously form monsters.

>>49924329
Except all the physical shit changes too. Your mind is only uniquely yours for a single discrete moment before it has been passed on to an imposter/clone.

What ties it together is your subjectivity, or ghost. Now some things are genuinely going to separate them, like cloning your brain and sticking it in a computer will not change that your subjectivity is tied to your body, but something like teleportation (esp. in SG, where consciousness is explicitly preserved) is like sleep or being knocked out.

The honorable dead are not gone. Treat them with respect, as you would have in life.

The dishonorable dead can abused as they deserve.

>>49917925
Well for one, resurrection actually resurrects the body, not putting it into a sluggish, numb and smelly body which body functions mostly don't work.

Also while her spirit may grow her body wont. While this might seem good to the ugly neckbeard who wants to tranny themselves since highschool. Most people actually look foreward to growing up since they have actual life ambitions.

Industrial revolution Style, but full of magic. The sauvy capitalist-lord raises the dead whererver they can be purchashed to turn dynamos or other machinery. When they stop working they turn into fuel for the blast furnaces.

>>49924402
>You're telling me that every time I sleep, all my brain matter is disintegrated, and an exact copy is made out of different atoms in the same arrangement?
Not quite.

When you shift to deep sleep, your brain shuts down all conscious processes. There is little mental difference between you and a braindead vegetable, other than the fact that your brain is functional enough that it can kick back into a conscious state at some point.

If your consciousness defines your existence, then you die every night. If not, then there's little more defining "You" as separate from a mental backup than the fact that you retain the same continuous autonomic system (the non-intelligent lower parts of your brain that everything back to fish share).

I don't define myself based on simple brain processes, because I'm not a pussy-bitch afraid of the future.

>I rise, for I am worthy.
>I am Ultimate.

>>49924720
Childish understanding of the brain and the you.

To put it so you understand, think a computer, it shuts down. This however does not mean that the files are gone, it simply is not active.
Body changing is more akin to copying the files to another computer. Its the same data but your old computer still sits there.

You are still you when you wake up, there was no true removal of your thinking.

>>49924786
>Childish understanding of the brain and the you.
I agree. You honestly think that if I copy a file from one computer to another, it becomes a completely unique file with no inherent tie to the original.

Yet any idiot with a basic understanding of version branching knows that even if a file is changed down the line, it is still inherently some version of the same thing, albeit not identical. And identicality is the shittiest way to define the mind, considering it's ever-changing.

You're arguing that my version of Windows 10 is not really Windows 10 at all, but an independent twin of the original Windows 10 that must exist on some computer at Microsoft.

I'm arguing that's stupid as hell, they're all Windows 10, and the tiny differences in personal settings and shit isn't adequate to call it wholly new software.

>>49924914
I'm not arguing that a clone isn't a clone and isn't you I was saying that sleep does not kill the You. It'd be impossible or we'd be facing brain death from having to "rewrite" all the same. The mind is made out of sturdier stuff, it can pause the You and then keep going with the same program.

And lets not forget, one of the bigger hindrances in cloning you is that we have no idea how the fuck our minds actually do us as a person, the rest is of course that we have no idea how the brain works outside some simple biology.

>>49925192
>And lets not forget, one of the bigger hindrances in cloning you is that we have no idea how the fuck our minds actually do us as a person, the rest is of course that we have no idea how the brain works outside some simple biology.
I never said I was standing in line at a brain upload facility. I'm just saying that my definition of "me" takes into account my brain and any future forks of my brain... I do not consider them separate entities, but multiple incarnations of a singular entity.

>>49917925
Her body is rotting?

>>49924720
My consciousness does not define my existence. The combination of My physical brain matter and my identity (the data stored on it) (conscious or unconscious) does. If it's destroyed, I'm dead. If you copy my consciousness and then kill me, the copy is not me, but a copy

>>49925891
Hence legacy.

Arguably still a good thing to spit out before you die if you're looking to continue to impart more change on the world, and wouldn't trust anyone else to get the job done, but not immortality.

>>49925891
Far as I'm concerned, I'm just the data. Put it in another piece of hardware, and I live on. That this specific installation gets destroyed bothers me little, so long as I have a chance to place a copy on different hardware.

And ultimately, the difference between our views is one of self-definition. Which is relevant when discussing whether undeath is really continued life, our or a facsimile thereof. It'll mostly be about how the subject feels, in the end.

>>49925274
>multiple incarnations of a singular entity

And where is this "singular entity" stored? Even in a computer, multiple copies of the same file are completely separate things. Unless there's some sort of correspondence between the brain and its uploaded copy, they may as well be two completely different people who happen to have the same memories and thought processes. There's nothing linking the ongoing experiences of one to the other.

Yes, you could talk about some way to connect the two, but that never gets brought up.

>>49926586
>>49926586
>And where is this "singular entity" stored?
The same place any singular network is stored; within all its containing nodes.

>Unless there's some sort of correspondence between the brain and its uploaded copy, they may as well be two completely different people who happen to have the same memories and thought processes.
Beyond any sort of fork-merging, we would already have a natural way for me and my forks to share data between one another.

It's an ancient technology called "talking".

>>49914922
The other side is a horrible empty black void lacking any sensation other than the blindingly black sheer oppressive silence, rotting away as a corpse or being made of bone is a haven compared to that eternal silent sleepless solitude.

>>49926380
>Which is relevant when discussing whether undeath is really continued life, our or a facsimile thereof. It'll mostly be about how the subject feels, in the end.
I feel like you are missing the most important part, if you're not experiencing the life you are having, what is the point?

>>49927020
>I feel like you are missing the most important part, if you're not experiencing the life you are having, what is the point?
This makes two assumptions:

1. That my life now is identical to the life I led previously, as opposed to a series of ever-changing circumstances (the change or addition of a body being just another of these circumstances).

2. That a version of me in a different body experiencing life is not "me", for the arbitrary reason of having different hardware.

I ascribe to neither of these. You might as well be asking me if I'm really living without sucking dick. I've never defined my life by the taste of dick, the body I exist in presently, note the qualia of continuity.

As long as some version of me continues on, I continue on.

>>49914922
In the setting I'm running, souls aren't a thing.

Once your brain activity stops, you cease existing forever (I guess unless you took a snapshot of the brain before death and used that, but magic is nowhere near that advanced a this point in time).

Necromancers just use bodies because it's a lot easier than building a body from scratch (kinda like building a robot from a kit is easier than machining everything from scratch), and magic interacts with organic tissue better than with non-organic tissue.

Now, what they do with that zombie/skeleton is what matters.

>>49927047
>As long as some version of me continues on, I continue on.
Ah so you assume you are a god and that if that one of your minds exist you would simply wake up from the bad dream?

Besides if such "immortality" excised then we'd already solved it, children carry parts of your data, no matter how much it changes.

>>49926979
Talking is not the same as literally sharing experiences. You and your upload may each believe you're still the same person, but you wouldn't necessarily be any more connected than you would with a sibling.

Sure, you can say "my conception of personal identity includes all copies of me as well", but that just comes across as you denying the possibility of a problem. Specifically, that an upload of you is still you, and not a completely separate entity that shares memories with you.

>network
Again, that'd be a good answer if experiential information could be freely shared between you and your copy. However, I'm not convinced that regular tea-times together would count.

>>49927105
But while they might be epistemologically correct, wouldn't people still frown on it? I mean, we don't have any evidence about the existence of souls and I bet religious folks would be opposed to the actual practice of necromancy.

>>49927047
>for the arbitrary reason of having different hardware

You and everything else is made up of matter and energy. "Information" is just the patterns in which this matter and energy are moving. As far as we know, you and I are nothing but the hardware, and all the mental stuff is an abstraction of physical processes.

>>49927116
>Ah so you assume you are a god and that if that one of your minds exist you would simply wake up from the bad dream?
No, because that's childishly retarded.

I believe I am a complex panoply of biological processes called a "body", guided by a smaller subset of biological processes called a "mind" that uses an illusion called "sense of self" to keep tabs on its holistic integrity. Because I am aware that this is an illusion, and that fears of bodily destruction are an instinctive drive intended to help with my survivability. However, I also know that life is change and adaptation, and that sometimes the best way for an organism to improve it's capacity to survive is to adapt a new survival strategy.

Forking one's mind into multiple branches is just another new potential strategy, and one I will gladly adapt to when the opportunity arises. That you feel my views are weird is just your psychology adhering to your current method of survival, while being unable to comprehend a new one.

What does that mean I see myself as?

>>49927261
>What does that mean I see myself as?
Euphoric?

>>49927192
It really depends on the time period and the culture involved as with everything. I couldn't just make Necromancy universally accepted, because that didn't feel realistic, so the best I could do is make sure that it's not universally evil (like D&D).

So more advanced societies, with more profound knowledge of life and magic would have little reason of frowning upon necromancy, particularly if it was a cleaned and armored skeleton for example, instead of a shambling zombie.

In the game I'm running now it's a non-issue, really, since it's set in my setting's equivalent of the Late Bronze Age, so the sentient races haven't yet discovered how to consciously use magic.

I imagine a society like Rome wouldn't frown upon Necromancy for practical reasons, and a society like Carthage (or atleast the Roman view of Carthage) wouldn't frown upon Necromancy for religious reasons.

>>49927308
>Euphoric?
Who said I was a fedora-tipper?

>>49927311
Ancestor-worship might get in the way, v-a-v Rome, but I get what you're saying. What I'm interested in is, in your thinking, given that there are no souls, how would an increased understanding of life/magic show that there are no souls?

It's perfectly conceivable to imagine a magocratic rather than theocratic philosophical underpinning for medieval European-esque societies, which could take some of that tension away, but it seems to me that there is a very enduring characteristic in people to squirrel the unknown supernatural into what we don't yet entirely and fully understand.

>>49927342
Your optimism that scifi tropes will one day become reality and your rejection of concerns raised by modern understanding of actual science gave you away.

>>49927378
>increased understanding of life/magic show that there are no souls
It wouldn't, generally. People will come to believe whatever suits their needs in the end. The point of specifically making it so that there are no souls is both make true resurrection impossible (I wanted perma-death in the setting, and the players agreed) and also to make sure that nobody could conclusively prove that there are souls (since there aren't).

If there were souls (or any kind of life after death) and you could prove it somehow, then that's that. If there aren't any souls, then you can never prove their existence, and thus people will choose to believe whatever they want.

If a society finds raising the dead useful, then their whole religious institution will spin everything in a way makes sure that raising the dead isn't evil. And if those people spend a long time studying the dead, the living and the process of death, as well as attempt to bring their loved ones back to life (and failing), they'll naturally reach the conclusion that souls must not exist. Kinda the same way large segments of our society have come to believe that souls don't exist. Only with the presence of magic, that process might go faster, since they would have more tools to study the process of death.

>>49927385
>Your optimism that scifi tropes will one day become reality and your rejection of concerns raised by modern understanding of actual science gave you away.
Who said anything about optimism? I never said that I know for a fact that these things will happen in my lifetime. For all I know, I'll will be dead long before these things come to pass. There's a reason I want to have children; it's the traditional long-term human survival strategy.

But should it happen, I'm already mentally accommodated to the possibility. Just as I totally plan to exercise more when I purchase a VR set; still don't have the money now, nor do I know when I will. But I can still state my plans for if that should happen, no? That it may never happen is not a reason to avoid pondering on it.

>>49927473
I think the only disagreement I have with that, and it may not really be disagreeing really, is that I'd see the prerogatives of society shaped less by what's actually helpful to the society and more by what is most helpful to the ruling class.

So, in a society that mistrusts magic and magicians, necromancy is an easy scapegoat for a ruling class. Alternatively, a Thane or a Merchant Prince may employ necromancers (probably under a friendly handle of some sort - like the way animancers are referenced in Pillars of Eternity compared to necromancers) because they recognize the profit in it, though they may not if it would de-legitimise their clan or family's power by way of the local theocracy's decree.

>>49927473
As an addendum to >>49927561 , this is more about societies that don't have necromancy as a legitimate cultural or religious tradition. Obviously, some cultures in the vein of Indian caste systems or powerful autocratic systems (Imperial China), and religions that espouse necromancy, wouldn't have these sorts of tensions.

>>49927561
>>49927624
Sure, I agree with you, all of that is entirely possible. Certain societies really put a lot of importance in their belief system and adhere to it rigidly, even to the detriment to their own success. Other societies, like later Rome, for instance, tend to be a bit more flexible with their religion and their beliefs, and frequently employ them as a tool for social control.

I could also, for example, envision a society that accidentally stumbled upon the method to animate corpses by accident (or lived in an area where natural animated corpses are possible) and their belief system and religion formed around that. Something like "Out ancestors come back to protect/punish us" or something. Of course it would be a natural phenomenon, but since there's no way for any soul or anything to come back and correct them on their misconceptions, they'll go on believing what they want.

This is what I enjoy most about world building, coming up with a couple of rules and premises, and then thinking about what kind of societies could form around those premises.

>>49927495
There's a difference between being mentally accommodated to something, and denying the very real possibility that that something is not what it's hyped up to be. My concerns are the same as the guy that first brought this up. I do not experience the things an uploaded copy of me will. When I die, I will not experience the life that my uploaded copy will have.

If you are content with such a situation, for the reasons you've shared here, that's great. I do not feel the same way, and I do not believe that I can ignore these concerns because sense of self is an illusion. I have always been under the impression that immortality is desirable because it extends that very same illusionary sense of self through an arbitrary long time.

Don't get me wrong. If mind uploading became accessible to the public tomorrow, I'd be the first in line, and try to have several copies uploaded. I would not believe that this extends my life or my identity at all. Rather, it'd be like leaving a legacy. Also, there's the possibility that my virtual duplicates could be leveraged to my own benefit somehow. That's the major reason.

>>49927643
Agreed. I like to have fairly flawed societies in a lot of my settings, personally, because it gives a lot of room for players to step in and change things or solve problems. It also provides for some of the intra-societal tensions we've been talking about.

I like that scenario, too, recalls some of the fear-worship of the fey.

Wish these boards could be more like this.

>>49916129
I fucking loved Guild Wars. So much fun creating your build and designing the skillsets for your team of heroes and such. It did so much right- neat lore that wasn't spoonfed to you and left some to the imagination, amazing setting design and art design (seriously, how great was the Jade Sea? Where else can you walk out into a petrified whirlpool, and see frozen splashes and permanently part-sunken ships?), very little grind (getting to max level took what, a few days?), the elite skill mechanic where you had to go slay a boss that had the skill you wanted and absorb it from them, build design/teambuilding, items that were pretty well entirely cosmetic (every armor set, assuming you bought the top tier one, had the same stats for a given profession; every weapon type had certain cap stats that every skin stuck to, you could change the bonuses on a given weapon to whatever you wanted through weapon mods), instanced PvE that actually made the game feel like you were the hero rather than just one of thousands of equally powerful do-gooders...

Seriously, they did a lot right. The game even looked incredible when it came out.

>>49927751
I do not experience the things an uploaded copy of me will. When I die, I will not experience the life that my uploaded copy will have.
That's fair. But as for me, I just see it as the cessation of the origin node for My mind's network. That's only death if I never produce another node.

As long as any of my nodes have experience, I see myself as having that experience.

>I do not feel the same way, and I do not believe that I can ignore these concerns because sense of self is an illusion.
Also fair. I know that love and lust are just illusions intended to give me social bonds and encourage procreation. I still enjoy the shit out of them.

>I have always been under the impression that immortality is desirable because it extends that very same illusionary sense of self through an arbitrary long time.
I've always felt that immortality is just an imaginary goal produced by our innate survival instinct. We are not programmed to desire death (under normal circumstances, excluding depression and such), often even when it would be logical to do so.

Could you imagine what the mindset of folks would be in a setting with frequent copying and transportation and backups of consciousness would be like? Life is cheap, legacy is everything.

>>49928155
>Life is cheap, legacy is everything.
Life will never be cheap, because living things are innately selfish.

We will either arbitrarily inflate the value of life (by psychologically devaluing our forks and backups), or we will change our definition of life.

>>49928155
Personally I'd be more inclined to want regular backups in case of emergency, like, if I had a stroke, and they're able to repair the physical damage, restoring any missing data.

As for the cloning? I don't think it would catch on with most. I really think most would not consider it continued life, but instead, having someone to replace you after your time.

While some would certainly go for that, I suspect most would only be interested in extending their time. Stuff like, synthetic bodies and organs so they aren't subject to organ failure like people get now, and then medicines to extend the life of the brain further.

This discussion makes me think of that schwarzenegger movie.

>>49928155
Eclipse Phase.

>>49914922
Ghost whispering. A necromancer could speak with the dead and help people out with finding where the money was hidden or what he really meant with "Zappy babby boodie" before he died.

>>49927261
>I will gladly kill myself for "muh species"
Hop to it then, son.

>>49931728
>adapting a new sense of self to adapt a new strategy for self preservation is caring for your species
Nah, breh. I can give two fucks about most people.

>>49931815
Then you are simply ignorant. You are not and never will be your own clone.

If you die in this state you will have left only siblings or children. There is nothing for you but death.

>>49931957
>I don't know what a clone is.
Then shut the fuck up. A copy of your mind isn't a clone. A copy of your body is. Identical twins are clones, but they don't have the same mind.

Learn what you're talking about before you talk, jack ass.

>>49927921
Graphically speaking, Guild Wars 1 still looks impressive. A lot of its environments are top notch and its art style is still very distinct. Guild Wars 2's art style tried to go through a paint brush aesthetic which ended up looking really bland and overly relying on having a billion particle effects.

It still hurts.

>clean the corpses to leave only bones to eliminate body horror, putrefaction and the awkardness of dead relatives walking around
>raise executed criminals as undead to make them work for society
>raise people who specifically ask for it upon their death, basically the same idea as giving your organs upon death
>menial and inhuman labor is done by untiring skeletons
>animating fully sentient undead is frowned upon, as the psychological problems of eternal unlife have been made apparent in the past
>people live easily thanks to undead labor but it is also deemed honorable to ask to be raised after death, because it is seen as a way of giving back and thanking society for your easy life
There, done

>>49915246
>>49915201
Vol's blood as a religion is essentially a sort of slight /pol/ "believe in the purity of your blood" mixed with teachings that tell you to find divinity in yourself, rely on yourself, and generally, just be your own person (even going as far as not having really having a unified a holy symbol; priests of Vol's blood use whatever symbol _they_ have a connection to, which means they can infiltrate anywhere). They just don't advertise that the final step/reward in this path of self improvement is becoming a vampire.

Also, Vol had stopped giving a fuck about them years ago. Most of the church goers don't even know who Vol is, and Vol has only inklings of what the higher echelon of her own church is actually doing, since they have already served their purpose and she had discarded them.

>>49932031
But you're not sharing a mind, as you said you are simply two different instances of data. Identical, but separately running and soon enough no longer the same.

>>49914922
Thing is, normies don't like corpses, we naturally register decaying humans and the human skull, it spooks us.

>>49932454
>But you're not sharing a mind, as you said you are simply two different instances of data. Identical, but separately running and soon enough no longer the same.
Give me a couple years and I'll be no longer the same as I am now, anyways. Why should the development of a fork terrify me any more than the development of my current mind?

And why do you give such a massive fuck about identicality, anyways? Why does that shit honestly matter to you? Do you refuse to replace car parts because the car won't be the same afterwards?

Change is always inevitable. Stop being scared of it.

>>49932559
Well it started over some asshole saying you die every time when you go to bed and it just went on from there.

Honestly we've kept this thread alive more than it needs to, its not even a thread about how to make the dark arts socially acceptable, its some cunt asking for a setting.

>>49914922
During a long and tumultuous period when anything goes as long as you're on the same side. Like, were the armies of Rohan really upset when Aragon Gimli and Legolas summoned them? Nah, it was awesome and useful.

>>49914922
A massive necropolis type city where the entirety of the working class and standing army is made up of the undead. Sentient undead are strictly forbidden unless you devote your life to the Church where, after years of servitude and learning, you may be allowed to live forever as a lich. The liches of the Church create, control, and maintain the work force of zombies and as such are treated to lavish lives of luxury fitting for those in such an indespensible position of self sacrifice. The rest of society works service sector jobs such as cooking or running shops, basically anything you wouldn't want or couldn't get an undead to do. Basically everyone is super happy, nobody works hard, everything is extremely cheap, and the perfume business is booming beyond compare.

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>>49917098
>wandering around destroying the populace and countryside and the people in it will be against undead things wandering around and doing just that
same about humans wandering around and killing things, no?

>>49932695
Yes and just like undead we send specially trained men to kill them and then stand on a tall pedestal, holy light shining over you as you declare what they did or was heretical and foul.

>>49932602
>Well it started over some asshole saying you die every time when you go to bed and it just went on from there.
You're gonna blame this discussion on Mahatma Gandhi and ancient Greek philosophers? That argument is as old as dirt. Or at least solipsism.

>>49932747
Stop looking for a fight fagget, if you are talk about undead.

Cunt.

>>49917098
you just gave me an idea
>after decades of bands of mindless undead wandering around destroying the countryside, most kingdoms have now replaced their rural workforce with undead bound to the will of local necromancers, as mindless undead will not attack other undead

>>49917925
>Terminally ill daughter
>Welp shit can't pay the ressurection or cure cost
>Better snap her neck and take her to that faggot creep who lives up in the caves
>Guy is autistic as hell, poops his pants constantly, but he knows necromancy and will do it for free
>Daughter is now basically got CP and mental retardation, constantly tries to eat you and will start to rot from most of her organs being inactive
>I am a good father

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>>49932793
Why so salty? Because someone called you out on how shitty your argument is?

That whole discussion spawn off of people claiming that undeath could never be a form of resurrection. It was topically relevant until the butthurt started.

But I'll stop the fight. Just here long enough to deliver the (You) that you crave.

>>49915232
>Unsounded.

Mah nigga.

>>49920208
Underrated Post

>>49914922
Warrior society. Tribal.
Warriors of old can be called to fight again if the situation is dire enough (Read: Rise Undead)
The spiritual leader can be any kind of magic user or wise man. The only actual requirement, apart from advising the actual leader, is being able to complete a necromantic ritual powerful enough to recall these warriors.
That and healing, divining, teaching, that kind of stuff.

People outside of the community see it as desacrating the dead, with varying reactions. Most people can look the other way if situation can be justified and the corpses being raised aren't from people they particularly care about.
There has never been a massive necromantic invasion, so most people treat necromancers with just slighty more derision than the wizard that flings fire so recklessly, or the conjurer that brings beings from who knows where, or even the sorcerer who transforms things into other through methods beyond their comprehension.
Like a nation who has never heard of orcs or been attacked by them. They'll be wary of the unknown creatures and will act according to how they precieve thse newcomers, but probably won't attack them on sight.

So, their reaction will be a mix between how much of a crime is the rising of corpses + the attitude of the necromancer + their views on magic in general. Without a heavy predisposition to see them as evil outside of that.