Porting from rpgnet, to see what perspective I can get over here for this topic:
When I think
necromancer, I think of someone like orochimaru in the naruto manga/anime with its
Edo Tensei (which is pretty freaking cool) which can bring someone back as a unkillible/regenerating zombie with all their skills, abilities, personality, and knowledge intact, but forced to do the bidding of the summoner/necromancer. However, many games just have you reanimate dead rotting bodies or dumb skeletons as fighting fodder and/or you just have a lot of curses spells at the near height of the necromancer powers. Which always made me go "Really? Thats it?".
I think one the cooler necromancers I have seen were the harvesters (pg 15-24) in the palladium world book12 psyscape. They could steal souls to increase their powers and use their(victims) magical abilities, they could bring back xombies which were leveled up regenerating tough zombies filled with the essence of the alien AI. Sadly, I have not seen any books that allowed for bringing back a reanimated person as a thrall with their abilities intact.
Someone in the other forum did mention the sorcerer RPG, which did have a cool token that could be used for a variety of things in necromancy which I liked.
Any games where necromancy is actually really cool? Powers and abilities wise?
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Quick Update:
I am still busy, but I want to do a quick compile of everything I have seen from this and other sites, suggestions, etc. Thanks for all the input everyone. I also want to add that it does not have to be limited to rpg games, it can be any other media (books, movies, etc) which has some good references or ideas are welcomed as well. It also does not have to be limited to just magic; science, alien, etc is all fair game also. *going to copy/paste this part to save retyping it over for other threads)
Lets see what we have so far:
RPG Books
PB rifts: psyscape: harvesters are pretty cool, you worship an alien intelligence, you get the usual standard necromancer powers, BUT you can absorb the souls of sacrificial victims which makes you more powerful, you also have access to their spell list/powers. You can summon the AI to create xombie’s which suck out souls of victims and replace it with part of the AI’s essence which makes them super strong and regenerative zombies.
Sorcerer RPG (Sorcerer & Sword supplement): Pretty neat idea of using tokens to store sacrifice/energy for anything from creating a super zombie or bring back an army of undead.
Runequest: Necromantic Arts
Warhammer Fantasy: Night's Dark Masters
Earthdawn
Ars Magica
Adventurer Conqueror King System
Migration of the spirit
Exalted
Crimson Exodus
Conan: Mongoose d20
Geist: Sin Eaters
Burning Wheel: Magic Burner
deadlands
Talislanta
warhammer 40’k necrons - ok, technically robots that are shaped as skeletons with living steal. However, they are still pretty bad ass, just needs to be changed up, I never played the RPG, but I did play the dow PC game and loved them. I love the pyramid of uber death + advanced tech, just need to mix them up a bit so instead of alien robots, just have a Borg + dead space where the soldiers are the reanimated dead.
Books:
necroscope series(at least before vampire world, have not read vampire world or up yet): So the main character can talk to the undead and convince them to rise up and fight for him as a walking corpse (meh, nothing special about that), but the necromancy that is used by the bad guys isn’t about bringing the dead back, but by getting the dead to release its secrets by torturing the remains of the dead to force it to give up all it knows. It was an interesting way to get the information to say the least.
Manga/Anime:
Naruto (anime/manga): Orochimaru’s Edo Tensei is probably the gold standard of what I think is cool necromancy. You can bring someone back from the dead with all their skills/abilities, they are pretty much indestructible with super regeneration, and you can “upgrade” their bodies to make them more powerful.
Games:
Dead Space: Necromorphs were cool, Like the idea of aliens reshaping the dead into monsters/tools
Resident Evil: Ok, general zombie Apoc game, but the virus was neat because besides just bringing zombies back, it mutated them also.
Movies/tv shows
Phantasm series - a mortician is resurrecting the dead and shrinking them to dwarf size to be used as slave labor and as an army to take over other dimensions. Yes, you read that right.