r/worldbuilding • u/NymisxzYT • 1d ago
Prompt Does necromancy differ than the usual, in your story?
If you don’t know what Tower Dungeon by Tsutomu Nihei is, I suggest you go read the 14 chapters right now.
But, I wanted to say the way they do necromancy is pretty cool, necromancers create “larvae” that infect and then control corpses with these worm like beings.
Does your necromancy differ than the usual covered in skulls and controls skeletons cliche we see?
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u/Betadzen 1d ago edited 1d ago
tsutomi nihei
WAITAMINUTE, ANOTHER MANGA BY THE MAESTRO?
edit pending:
So, in Sensendo necromancy was WELL spread worldwide. To put it simply - the religion of one dominant nation made it so people stopped seeing this as a crime.
So sending off your dead parent to feed yourself as a child, while taking care of their preserved carcass (usually done by the morticians similar to the car maintenance) is a nice way for a child to survive with a dead family. Hell, some people even made a fortune with their family suddenly wiped out by the wars or plagues.
The process itself usually is not so gimmicky. In the most simple version you cast kinetic pull or push on a properly marked tendon or a bone and the bodypart moves. Marking may be done by several ways, some involve concentration and knowledge of a thing being in it's place (for example one needs to see and concentrate on a sigil drawn on one's dead hand to move it), while others include small magickal markers that look like beads of stone, metal or other suitable material being placed in a proper manner.
So when you mark several body parts you may make them move. But it will be a literal meat puppet. Such were usually used as the parts of the mechanisms made of the most rotten dead. Ever wondered what skeleton key actually meant?
But the true necromancy is about possession. Same for making golems actually, because it is essentially the same thing. Though you need to craft the golems to make them move, and bodies are generally well crafted enough to make it more popular. So you have a vessel, now you need something to drive it. While there are ways to do it via parasites and so on, let us focus on the most common ways - the godly/demonic possession and spellbinding.
The godly/demonic possession differs only on the point of view. One's god is the other's demon. Some cultures create, or rather manifest gods that may take control of a vessel. Usually those are inhabited by the half-regurgitated souls of the faithful ones (not good, not bad for the souls by the way). Those souls get stripped of the most of their memories and individuality, with mostly the god's traits being left in them. Such undead are usually smart enough to be companions or even traitors rather than servants, though their will is aligned with the will of their deity.
The spellbound undead are controlled by the complex spells that make them automatons rather than sentient beings. Those spells are pesky too, and some of them are even sentient. They lack any kind of the previous life memories, but they may have skills that are embedded in the spell that controls the vessel. For example it was common for the firefighting undead to be immune to fire, or the recycler undead to have the immense hunger that didn't allow vultures to feed on the battlefields.
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u/Login_Lost_Horizon 1d ago
Wait, what? How did i missed HIS f.......g name!? Did he just woke up from slumber and resurfaced with new real stuff for us to read, and nobody f.....g rings any alarms!?
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u/Login_Lost_Horizon 1d ago edited 1d ago
Well, in a way that necromancy in Aramoris is more akin to an edrich radiowave, that channels the conceptual idea of "being dead", which is impossible to comprehend by humans and therefore extremely paradoxal in nature. Corpses rise not because necromancy revives them, but because corpses are naturally trying to be dead, but nobody who has ever lived can comprehend what it is like, and nobody ever died exists to tell the tale (no spirits and afterlife, you dead - you dont exist). This dissonance between presence of the very strong idea of what there is after death, combined with complete inability to subjectively feel it, is what forces corpses to kinda hang there in between, function both as inanimate bodies and "living" creatures.
Basically necromancy is more of a naturally occuring memetic plague, than a magical discipline.
Sometimes it does infect people, usually at birth, which leads to them being unable to die unless the difference between their supposed point of dying and the point where they are becomes too large (in other words - you need to damage someone infected by necromancy really hard to actually kill them). As a curious side effect - by being unable to comprehend dying, necromants are completely devoid of fear, because fear is a tool created by evolution mostly to prevent dying. Non-existance of death for necromancers is as obvious and natural as breething air. No matter how hard you try to explain them what dying is - they could never understand why someone would lie in the grave forever, instead of just not doing it.
Both undead and necromants spread the plague of necromancy, acting like retranslators for eldrich radiowave, and thus are all universally dangerous and hunted down.
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u/NymisxzYT 1d ago
Hmmmm very interesting, I think in tower dungeon it’s more like a bloodline of necromancy, and this family grants their humans the ability to somehow spawn these
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u/Akhevan 1d ago
The magic doesn't know shit, it's a mindless cosmic force. You want to reanimate a corpse? You better program it how to move and perform commands, since, you know, it's dead. Inanimate matter doesn't exactly run around on its own. Necromancy largely amounts to magical fantasy cybernetics, and thus each construct is a carefully engineered, one of a kind work of art.
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u/Useful-Conclusion510 1d ago
Necromancy is a practice of dark magic that uses fire as a foundation because fire is life.
However, unlike fire's ability to heal and mend, necromancy leaves corpses mindless, rotten, hateful and enslaved. This is because Adramalech- the god of darkness- is mocking the fire goddess Oriane (shes dead tho so now hes mocking fire god Silvath) by fucking up her way of using fire to give life with his own dark magic.
So its actually healing magic if anything.
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u/Gone_Rucking Indigenous Fantasy 1d ago
Necromancy is actually something I need to work on figuring out in my system. Technically it would have to function as a discipline within the wider field of alchemy since that and divination are the only forms of magic.
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u/NymisxzYT 1d ago
What’s the difference between disclipline and divination? I heard the last word being thrown out alot
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u/Gone_Rucking Indigenous Fantasy 1d ago
A discipline is a sub-field of a wider range of study. So real world there’s physics which is a field, but within it there are disciplines such as astrophysics, nuclear physics, quantum mechanics etc. Divination is just a type of magic that relates to telling the future. So possible disciplines within it in a fantasy setting would be tarot, astrology, trances and more. The words divination and discipline don’t really have any special relation to each other.
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u/ElysiumPotato Cold Frontier / Final Sanctuary 1d ago
I have a culture / speciales that revolves around monks and their pursuit of leaving as good a body as possible so it can provide most labor
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u/NemertesMeros 1d ago
Yo I didn't know anymore chapters for tower dungeon had came out, I'll definitely have to check them out.
In my world, necromancy is a sub-branch of Outer Dark Shamanism, where a Shaman will reach out into the depths of the Outer Dark to make contact with a specific kind of very dangerous spirit, a sort of jellyfish thing that possesses the dead to enter the world. Like all entities of the Outer Dark, they are very, very desperate to enter what they call the "world of light" and if a Shaman calls them down, they very much have the ability to make a corpse to inhabit. So the process of necromancy is something like bullfighting, where the necromancer has to survive an encounter with a rampaging half-there thing made of grasping fingers and flailing trendrils that attack the mind itself. If the necromancer can manage to tire out the thing and coax into a body they've prepared, congratulations, you've necromance'd.
That aside, I think the most unique thing about Necromancy in my setting isn't really how it's done, I think the having demons possess a dead body thing has been done before, but the actual use and social dynamics of it. Necromancers are actually typically well respected members of their tribes and an integral part of their society, fulfilling a broad variety of other more typical shamanic roles, and primarily resurrecting animals to be used as tools by the tribe rather than evil overlords raising armies of zombies.
Also, they apply necromancy in creative ways. They aren't just taking a corpse and bringing it back to life, they're often getting multiple "minions" out of every animal, resurrecting the hide separately from the skeleton, and sometimes using selected parts of the skeleton to make stuff and then animating that. A very common utilitarian example are self assembling tents, where a living bone frame will construct itself, and then the hides all the necromancers are wearing will stretch themselves across the frame to make big communal tents that can be put up and taken down with very little effort. Resurrected Hides are also an important part of necromancer fighting. If you're familiar with cape and knife fighting imagine something similar, but the cape is alive and can jump off the arm to act on it's own, and the other hand is wielding a short spear or other short polearm in an overhand reverse grip (or they have a gun. Necromancers have fondness for shotguns since they're also hunters)
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u/IndianGeniusGuy 1d ago
I fucking love this manga, man. Personally, I am a fan of having necromancy be the product of dividing the user's own soul and binding it to corpses rather than the product of forcibly binding the dead's souls. I feel like it makes their gradual loss of humanity as necromancers feel more palpable.
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u/Evil-Twin-Skippy 1d ago
Yes. Because Necromancy is also the source of all but the most basic of healing spells. Rapid healing requires drawing life force from some other source.
Healing potions exist. But they have a tendency to cause undeath if you overdose.
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u/raven-of-the-sea [Edit This] 1d ago
Necromancy in the Waking World summons Dreamsand to either reanimate dead flesh, or to communicate with echoes of a dead soul. The Sand is almost never all the same Sand they were linked to in life, so there will be errors. The movements might be off. The reactions to certain questions or situations may be uncharacteristic.
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u/fish-jumping-pit 1d ago
Necromancy is done by channeling the essence of the First Slain (now god of undeath, sterility, and bees; previously god of the dead) used to be divination with the dead, thus knowing more about the mysteries of the afterlife. After a war between the First Slain and the top goddess, his domain was purposefully displaced and undeath was brought into the world (the knowledge about the afterlife was lost).
Now, the usual depiction in my world is reanimating the dead, but it is more commonly used to forcefully keep the soul of the dying to their body until they can be healed in battlefields or from grievous injuries. Other usage was binding souls to another individual or vampires to give them special abilities or keeping their hunger in control, respectively.
Necromancy is seen as the Gate of Divinity as those who can master it tend to become physical gods.
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u/salmonellatuna 1d ago
Since you're reanimating a dead body, necromancy requires the caster to create an "artificial soul" known as a mana core for the body that holds the mana keeping the construct alive, sort of like making a golen. Also instead of being treated as a dark art you should never dabble in, you have to apply for a government form for legal necromancy and receive consent forms from either a person before they die or their family to use their body for undead labor (undead soldiers and other more offensive based undead forms are restricted to military use only) (yes necrophilic usage is banned)
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u/HCLwriting 1d ago
I mean the necromancy in my world is literally just the control of dead bones so i guess it's just even more cliche than the normal necromancy.
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u/NymisxzYT 1d ago
lol it is what it is, you could put a twist on it
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u/HCLwriting 1d ago
I mean zombies act like video game enemies cause making undead is just like coding an npc.
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u/mgeldarion 1d ago
Define "the usual".
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u/NymisxzYT 1d ago
Cliche necromancy you know it, the staff with the skull on it, the purple magic that raises up bones
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u/mgeldarion 1d ago
Mine's different - sorcerers summon spirits to possess bodies and hold the risen corpses together with magic.
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u/Carminoculus 1d ago
If you don’t know what Tower Dungeon by Tsutomu Nihei is, I suggest you go read the 14 chapters right now.
If that page is any indication, I will :)
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u/Hedgewitch250 1d ago
Necromancy is working with death. It’s not just let me summon a corpse but being able to sense life and bend it. One of my OC is a witch who’s powers make her a psychopomp menaing she guides the dead to their destination. It’s not a dark or corruptive job just a natural part of the world. This extends to guiding the living from one stage to another like knowing who gonna betray whom or going through a great transition. She can create husks which is life born from death. An example is planting a corpse in the ground (this required other MC at that course in her training). A normal mandrake twists around the bones creating an entirely new being either born with its own purpose in the cycle of life or a vessel to house another being.
Her biggest act of “necromancy” was on herself. After dying she came to first end (the domain of death itself and the first place where something transitioned to it). Thanks to a bramble bush infused with her blood she infected her murderer. Her killer continued life leading a cult meant to worship her eternal life. She latched onto her essence and like a parasite used her body as a chrysalis to rebirth herself. Believing she could kill OC by summoning death she fell right into the trap and made her cult pull OC from first end while killing her by bringing her unnatural existence to deaths attention. Rapidly growing she ripped herself out from her killers body returning to life with a new understanding of death and power along with stealing her cult.
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u/Sov_Beloryssiya The genre is "fantasy", it's supposed to be unrealistic 1d ago
Necromancy in Aquaria is the ability to interact with the other side, mainly through negotiations, to settle things between the living and ghosts. They perform rituals to deal with lingering spirits, from helping them pass on to take out dangerous specters. Controlling corpses is only a small portion of it. A proper necromancer would laugh at anyone who can only raise corpses and call themselves "necromancer", then send an army of ghost soldiers, movie!ROTK-style, to get their ass. The power of words is tremendous.
To begin with, raising corpses was not even used as an offensive but a way to transport them over great distances for a burial at home.
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u/Early_Conversation51 1d ago
For my urban fantasy death magic is in two groups, the classic reanimation of bones and the talking to the dead. Only a handful of people across the entire world have this magic, and unlike the other kinds of magic out there, it’s hereditary and tends to skip generations.
Users of both kinds are able to sort of astral project into the spirit realm. It’s how they learn they have it in the first place. Usually at roughly 10 years old or so, they have lucid dreams that then leads them to the realm. Only the second group is able to speak to any spirits however, the first group is only able to talk to already dead users, and everyone else looks like skeletons.
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u/Pangea-Akuma 1d ago
Necromancy is not a thing, not how people define it anyway. There is Magic that deals with Life and Death, but it's called Vita-Morta Arcana.
Undead are animated Corpses that cause unending pain and torment to the soul trapped within, while having the body taken over by a twisted mimic of said soul.
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u/Writing_Dude_ 1d ago
Necromancy in my setting is definided as the magic concerning the dead. It's definition is more due to make ethics and politics then due to actual magic tho. For this reason, necromancy spans multible disciplines from golem magic to artificing to summoning, transdimensional communication, healing magic and so on.
Basically, people put all forbidden magic that is connected to the dead in some way into a bucked without knowing the actual workings behind it.
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u/ImBastard 1d ago
In the Six Cities setting necromancy is not controlled by mortals. In fact certain cultures find it perfectly normal, and the undead have their own niche in society. When one of the planet’s six moons, The Waking Moon, is the only one full, any corpses its light touches will be restored to life, soul and all. It is unknown to academics how long a corpse can be dead before reanimation is impossible, and the whole process is unpredictable. The undead in the city of Modren have a union of sorts called The Poor Dead Bastards Club. Some look as though they’ve just died, and some are full-on skeletons.
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u/nascentnomadi 1d ago
All living things have a natural resistance to spiritual energy outside of itself. This effect remains even in death as the body has remnants of the soul that use to inhabit it. When a necromancer raises a corpse they are effectively using their own soul as the driving energy to animate it which is not at all easy to do unlike an artificial body made to be use as a puppet/golem.
As such, the remnants in the corpse become somewhat active which means you can access some actions the individual may have done in life (i.e. you need a code to enter a door, and the guy who knew it is dead. You raise them and have them go through the actions of entering the password). That said, if you try to make the body do something they wouldn't have done if they were alive they may hesitate or intentionally fail to do it as much as they can do so or until your connection to the body burns out.
This is only an aspect of it not including actually speaking to spirits/ghosts and other applications of it. As a result, people who do use necromancy also have a particular aura to which some people can discern as a sort of stain from messing around with dead things.
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u/BigBadVolk97 1d ago
In Elhyrissian, necromancy comes in at least [for now] in three different forms. There is the basic necromancy of Dusk maghia which involves the necromancer binding the dead to their will, with a price of shouldering the Thirst for the Sleep, which can come in many forms. Sometimes fits of rage comes them over, or a melancholy where they long over something of the deceased or from their own life overlapping.
Then there is the necromancy of Dawn Maghia which produces the more pop culture like hateful undead as their shackled souls are burning with the prima materia of light/dawn, keeping them from passing on to the Gray City of Asphodai. Usually Dawn Necromancers do not shoulder the Thirst for the Sleep, but on the other hand their undead can break free as the "contract" is weaker as undeath, death is in the domain of Dusk, Dawn just borrows it.
Lastly [as of now] "mind" necromancy which, well involves the magical aspect of mind. Though it is a faux necromancy as it simply involves creating a quasi-consciousness and placing it into an animated corpse, a bit similar to golem creation.
And lastly, necromancers can combine these magical aspects, for example Dusk Necromancers tend to induce a similar rage to dawn necromancy in their undead through mind magic. Though they usually only do so for lesser undead who often act as the first wave against the Empire's Legions.
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u/steveislame Fantasy Worldbuilder 1d ago
magic temporarily calls the deceased soul back into their corpse or into a vessel. no bugs.
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u/Dinosaur_Paladin 1d ago
necromancy in my world is used by bending arcane energy to reanimate corpses. it’s less bringing someone back to life as a living corpse and more of turning someone’s corpse into a nonsentient, destructive slave.
considering every culture has a variation of the belief of “the dead need to stay dead”, every culture and non evil deity consider the use of necromancy as the ultimate taboo.
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u/BiosTheo 1d ago
It isn't "automatically evil because reasons" like in forgotten realms or galorion. I'd be more accepting of it if it weren't just cuz
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u/Spring_Tag 1d ago
Necromancy for my story is a rare occurrence that can only happened through divine retribution. If you were such a bad boy or girl in life then the gods would simply not accept you to any afterlife. You are not deserving of a rest in the torturous afterlife or the void that consumed all. You are reawakened and the only way to be permanently dead is to be wrestle in your resting place or decapitated.
This divine retribution isn't just for the dead but the living. Sometimes you would be reawakened once again to carry out a punishment. Hunting, seeking and calculating. Once again you must be wrestled in the grave to be laid to wrest, decapitated or complete your punishment. Very few undead lived to modern times due to preventative measures and people being weary of curses and stories. The only living undead is Runar the Troll who lived for too long to even remember his original sin. Wandering and killing to pass the time.
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u/TheSacredOntarion 1d ago
There's a difference between full resurrection and raising the dead in my world. Full resurrection is extremely hard to do and needs a powerful necromancer because it means taking someone's soul from the underworld and placing it back into their body while also healing it in the process. Raising the dead is simply animating corpses of the fallen without messing with souls and is easy to do for a necromancer.
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u/Chimney-Imp 1d ago
I am actually working on two different worlds. Both of them have their own flavor of necromancy. In one it is treated more like a science. The main character is a forensic necromancer - she uses necromancy to solve crimes.
In the other world necromancy is based around magic fungi. A person infected with this will eventually become a mushroom zombie. As the infestation progresses, the body is consumed completely, but the mind is preserved. They aren't necessarily evil. There are colonies of these mushroom zombies all over (this world is entirely subterranean). Many of these colonies have good relationships with surrounding states. People infected have a weird form of immortality since the mind is always preserved by the collective fungal network. Even if the body is destroyed, the mind will live on.
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u/Demiurge_Ferikad 1d ago
One version, in one shared setting, is the stereotypical death mage that you see in a lot of pop fantasy settings.
My other, older, setting (that I’ve started developing again) has more of the classic “divination/seek advice from the dead” type of necromancers. They’re also the dark mages of the setting, in the sense that they manipulate elemental darkness.
The setting is balanced between Light and Darkness, where each embody various traits or concepts. At their simplest, Darkness is the passive element, Light, the active.
When someone dies, the Light that makes up the majority of their metaphysical makeup returns to the primordial Darkness from whence it came, and merges with it. Those who can use Darkness-based magics can pull these dimmed spirits from their rest in order to make use of their skills and knowledge, scout for information, or simply help put their grieving loved ones at ease.
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u/JessHorserage 1d ago
Completely neutral, and is the fundamental core of the universe and half of the themes. Everyone being immortal, and all that.
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u/locomocomotives 1d ago
"Necromancy" is used as a broad term for magic dealing with decaying energy. Necro-magic is actually extremely common, because it's main use is in Cheese and Wine-making. The people who revive/heal dead people back to normal are reverse morticians working on a crunch timer to stop bugs and bacteria breaking down the body. And only the real mad scientists start ressurecting and piloting dead things.
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u/Cookiesy 1d ago
I'm not a huge fan of necromancy, it's a bit niche for being a major school of magic.
Death is death you can't negotiate with it in my setting.
You can animate skeletons but they are just bone golems, it does have natural channels for magical energy within but you still need to treat and maintain it so the bone doesn't rot. Skeletons can be manipulated with different forms of magic so that is why they are used.
Specters are just spirits born of memory and emotions, usually bound to a place or vessel, some of them might create a believable mimicry of a past person. Spirits can kinda form inside or around many things after all, tools or even spells. They are magics dedicated to manipulating, summoning and quelling spirits.
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u/azrael4h 1d ago
I went with being more 'dealing with the dead' than 'evil wizard making armies of skeletons because he was an emo kid who couldn't get a girl'.
More specifically; shit happens, someone has to deal with it, and who're you gonna call?
'Creating' zombies and skeletons is able to be done, but isn't actually part of the subset of magics that necromancers use, but enchantments. Most of the zombies and skeletons are created without direct involvement of people, as a function of how various forms of undead and undead adjacent work. As a result of the widespread presence of ghosts, specters, spirits, and other associated types of undead or undead-like entities (there is a distinction, but I'm not getting into the classifications of spiritual creatures here), necromancers are generally a respected and well paid profession. And yes, they do have the option to zap 'em and trap 'em if they either won't go away or aren't intelligent.
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u/Mancio_Luke World of labirith 1d ago
In my setting necromancy is known as the school of flesh tainting
It works by assimilating the remains of the dead in your body, causing your body to mutate giving you their abilities, but also assimilate their souls and mind
Fleshtainters are usually looked down by the normal people, due to the fact that their magic makes them look like horrible monsters,
A side effect of flesh tainting is the toll it takes on the user mind, slowly causing them to go insane
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u/MrNobleGas Three-world - mainly Kingdom of Avanton 1d ago
Yes. I use the word necromancy in its original sense - telling the future by means of communing with the spirits of the dead to ask for advice. This practice and this term goes all the way back to ancient Greece in the real world, where a fairly well-known temple to Hades in Epirus was known as the Nekromanteion - the place of divination by speaking with the dead. This is the practice in which Odysseus engages in one chapter of the Odyssey, when he descends into the underworld to speak with the spirit of the dead prophet Tiresias. That is what necromancy is to me and that principle is what any "-mancy" boils down to. People in my world do resurrect the dead and animate corpses and take control of wandering spirits and manipulate people's life force and stuff like that, but it is very explicitly not called "necromancy". You may call it "necrokinesis" if you wish.
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u/NymisxzYT 23h ago
Well yes the practice was used by all civilization back then and even before Greece, in Africa it wasn’t coined necromancy but its was just talking to your ancestors.
And I like the use of the literal term instead of yk, the expected outcome when someone says necromancy
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u/MrNobleGas Three-world - mainly Kingdom of Avanton 23h ago
Right, I should have specified that the practice has been very widespread and is incredibly ancient, but the term was coined by the Greeks and is quite literal.
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u/SafePianist4610 18h ago
In my stories, necromancy is either played straight as it normally is seen in modern fantasy or as a complete pseudo-magic where higher powers are cruelly toying with desperate mortals.
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u/Ben0Crimsons Writer and Worldbuilder of The Niclas Hopper Saga 5h ago
Well, really, there are only two ways to summon the dead in The Seven Worlds.
Either you ask a god to do it, because some gods are able to do that. Gallus(the creator god and god of earth) for example ressurects people in the latter half of The Twelve Kings(the sequel series to the Niclas Hopper Saga, which is the book series I'm writing right now), and it works out well(for the ones who don't die before the last book ends).
Or you can magically create a tomb, which can ressurect people as zombies, but this takes a lot of time, not only do you need to make the tomb itself, which requires a great knowledge in almost all types of magic, but you also need a magical object to power it, which is almost impossible on its own, because the one time this was done, it needed one of the four most powerful weapons in all of creation, the Wand of Winter, which a normal person could probably not even hold without death or irreversible damage, even if they are one of the Winterfolk. Also, this version only summons mindless zombies, that in most situations would be weaker than a human.
There may even be more ways to do this, but it doesn't really matter, since these two are the only ones that are used in the actual story.
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u/Oethyl 1d ago
It's actual necromancy (divination through the dead) instead of the ability to make undead. The undead exist, but are generally not made by wizards but rather a (super)natural occurrence.