Necromancy Ideas

[Hick Jr]

Hey! I'm putting together a Necromancer of the non-Kemmlerian sort. Don't worry, he has a custom Sponsored Magic that grants Necromancy and the like as Evothaum. The problem i'm running into is stuff to do with it beyond boring things like zombies or spectres. Binding the screaming souls of the long dead from alternate timelines into normal ghosts, turning them into desperately suicidal killing machines has proven to be cool, but i'm hitting a brick wall here. And so I come to the boards for help- what kind of cool things can be done with Necromancy, evothaum and otherwise?

[Deadmanwalking]

Well, various manipulations of the soul. Body jumping, forced possession or body swaps. Eating souls for power. Shoving your enemies souls into objects to empower magical items. All that kind of thing.

Alternately, playing with the raw energy of death. Willing people to die. Wiling them not to die. Infusing death energy into people or objects with interesting results. Again, all that sort of thing.

[Mrmdubois]

Keep a library of ghosts, start twisting the nature of some spirit or other, create a disease, lift information from dead brains, soul gaze detached eyeballs, implant undead material either into yourself or others, don't make regular zombies make hybrid zombies from different dead stuff, learn to demanifest, flesh and bone golems, try to develop a pseudo-threshold for houses of the dead, get a horde of undead to try and dig to China, borrow skills and powers from corpses and ghosts, force possessions on people via ghosts, weaken the border of the Nevernever and reality, there are way too many options.  It gets even longer if you start messing with metaphorical death...

[Hick Jr]

Wow.

And now I have a half-hundred cool ideas. Thank you, Dubois. That seems to run the spectrum of Thaumaturgy pretty well.

And the soul thing was where I was hitting a brick wall. I'm doing a "Powers via Tags" ritual where I basically do a mini-Darkhallow, but now I have an interesting "healing" spell idea. I'd prefer to avoid the human sacrifice thing for as long as possible, if only because it's broken.

[Mrmdubois]

Oh, don't forget that you can get ghosts to manifest via all kinds of weird materials, like that one who made a body of spent bullet casings in Grave Peril.

Make multiple versions of yourself as a ghost to accomplish missions for you.  You can probably get yourself any of the ghost powers from Ghost Story.  Make a phylactery and store your soul in it, thus becoming almost immortal.

[KOFFEYKID]

I've actually been playing with a few necromancy ideas myself recently, I'm thinking of compiling them all into a refresh 18 or so big bad just to show off what a necromancer can do with some creative thaumaturgy. Unfortunately a "Passable Evil" necromancer is a bare minimum of 15 refresh (7 for Wizard, 2 for Kemmlerian Necromancer, and 6 for all the lawbreakers).

I was considering ideas like:

Using Ritual Murder to ensure the creation of your ritual victim's ghost, and then binding that ghost into their body (extra points if you keep the body just between life and death for the ritual, then swing the tiller back to life. Now you have a ghost possessing a "braindead" but living body. Should make for great long term servitors.)

A "Youth Stealing" ritual coupled with potions which "burn youth" for short term access to powers (Inhuman Speed, Strength, Recovery, etc).

A "Soul Shrouding" ritual which lets you wear somebody's soul for purposes of thwarting The Sight (not sure how well that would work, may require you to hidey hole your soul somewhere else to minimize Interference from your own soul.)

A Potion with a zone wide "Instant Zombie Army" effect, would require a ton of shifts to pull off well though.

[Hick Jr]

Wow. I need to reread Grave Peril, apparently. The character uses the custom Curse of the Seven sponsored magic. He can't get Lawbreakers because he's a marid. So immortality is a nonissue. I am interested in the ghost powers, but a few of those I have no idea how to mechanically represent.

[Mrmdubois]

Ghost Story had, teleportation, that's on the custom list, simply ignoring hindrances to vision can be covered by supernatural senses, invisibility when demanifested, perfect memory recall...that one I'm not sure how you would handle, same for the ability to control heavy machinery like cars.

Soul jars for storing the universal currency of demons, transformation effects to render people temporarily dead (a bit niche, but gotta be handy for something), divinations on cause of death, hide, destroy or alter evidence of death, groom your nails and fingernails, for that matter control hair and fingernail growth on others (it's technically dead already after all), foretell dooms, enslave and/or destroy black court vampires, whistle up Kemmler and get some ideas from him (the first thing I'd do if I turned necromancer), preservation spells, torture and madness spells.

[Dracorex]

Though if you want to do the 'whistle up Kemmler' bit, any sensible GM ought to see that as prime opportunity for taking leaves from Corpsetaker's book to write trouble for the player doing so - heck, Corpsetaker probably learned her gimmick from Kemmler in the first place.

Might be that having budding necromancers whistle him up is part of why the White Council had to kill him so many times.

[Gilitine_Memitim]

Could it be possible to use necromancy to modify your own body with the dead? Kinda like how a True Necromancer in D&D 3.5 would graft dead body parts onto them to make themselves stronger and harder to hurt.

[Dracorex]

I don't see why not. It's just thematically different from the prosthetic arm/focus item Wyntonian's character has, and the one my character had what inspired his.

Mess around with the enchanted/focus item rules and/or (custom) Stunts and/or Powers to achieve a kind of composite effect. Your RPing narration will be more interesting, at least, even if the actual effects aren't all that different from standard stuff.

Wynt's character has Inhuman Strength with the Catch that it applies only to the metal arm, not the rest of him. I guess that 'make yourself harder to kill with grafted body parts' thing would be similar, but with Toughness Powers.

[Mrmdubois]

Though if you want to do the 'whistle up Kemmler' bit, any sensible GM ought to see that as prime opportunity for taking leaves from Corpsetaker's book to write trouble for the player doing so - heck, Corpsetaker probably learned her gimmick from Kemmler in the first place.

Might be that having budding necromancers whistle him up is part of why the White Council had to kill him so many times.

I never said any of my ideas were good ones.  Just that you could do them.