Necromancer

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Necromancer Guild
Image copyright of Simutronics Corporation
Primary Skillset:	Survival
Secondary Skillsets:	Lore, Magic
Tertiary Skillsets:	Armor, Weapon
Special Abilities:	Risen
Mana Type:	Arcane
Barbarian - Bard - Cleric - Commoner - Empath - Moon Mage Necromancer - Paladin - Ranger - Thief - Trader - Warrior Mage

Roiling, tenuous shadows pour from the very depths of the eternal abyss. Their aim is to consume all life, to reduce the very earth to ash and ruin. Few are those willing to stand in the face of such evil. Fewer still are bold enough, twisted enough, and ambitious enough to dare attempting to control it.

In this time when the Holy Church is screaming murder at the faintest hint of Necromancy, will you be able to keep your own dark secrets? Will you be able to bear the danger, the scorn, in return for the power? The table is being set, and the hour that the banquet will arrive is close at hand.

Will you be ready?

-GM Abasha (Necromancer Guild Advocate)

The Necromancer Guild is intended, by design, to be an advanced option. It is intended to be there for players who are already familiar with the game and want to try a profession that includes some novel and difficult permutations on the normal play experience.

Official Information

Skillset

• Survival Primary
  
• Magic and Lore Secondary
  
• Armor and Weapons Tertiary
  

Necromancy Spells/Progression/Spell Books

• The official Play.net spell list

Consent

1. Basically speaking, Necromancers will operate under current Consent policy.
2. Necromancer Risen are fair game to attack by anyone, regardless of the status of the Necromancer.
   • If you attack a Necromancer's Risen, the Necromancer has consent on you.
   • If a Necromancer kills you for attacking their Risen, consent is ended between the two of you. You may not then go after the Necromancer. If you win the conflict when the Necromancer attacks you, it's also over. The Necromancer doesn't get another shot. C'est la vie.
3. Some activities a Necromancer may partake in, in Town, can get them flagged Open for some period of time. These will be related to Social Outrage in some way, and smart Necromancers can avoid them. We like to punish stupid Necromancers.
   • ACCUSE NECROMANCER will not give consent to any party, Necromancer or otherwise.
   • A successful ACCUSE will cause the Necromancer to be forced PvP Open.
4. Additionally, Necromancers may not be PvP Closed. If you are squeamish about the prospect of player combat, apply elsewhere.

Both points 3 and 4 go into 1. Randomly ganking Necros isn't going to be an option for anyone, unless they want to allow that (Open stance). However, Necros are going to have slightly less leniency overall, by picking the Guild we are expecting that you acknowledge the potential for PvP interaction is higher than other guilds. However, you're still just being held at Guarded responsibility.

Accuse Necromancy

In following the social outrage that being a necromancer causes, numerous additions to the accuse system have been made to allow the populace to alert the town's authority of the presence of a necromancer. A successful accuse has various requirements on the necromancers part, and can provide certain rewards (such as in wealth or a bonus to a reputation).

• See accuse for more information.
  

Note: Even with capped Charisma, the chance of a successful accuse is 10%.[[1]]

Guild Abilities/Systems

Thanatology

Necromantic rituals used on corpses.

Outrage

The "necro-meters."

Risen

Long-term minions.

Circle Requirements

Circle	Light Edge	First Armor	1st-2nd Survival	3rd-4th Survival	5th-6th Survival	7th-8th Survival	Skinning / Evasion	First Aid	1st Lore	2nd Lore	Thanatology	1st Magic	2nd Magic	3rd Magic	4th Magic	5th Magic
1-10	1	1	4	3	3	2	2	2	2	2	3	3	3	2	2	1
11-30	2	2	4	4	3	3	2	2	2	2	3	4	3	3	2	2
31-70	2	2	4	4	4	3	3	2	3	2	3	4	4	3	3	2
71-100	2	2	5	4	4	4	3	3	3	3	4	5	5	4	4	3
101+	2	3	6	5	4	4	3	3	3	3	5	6	6	5	5	3

• it appears that skinning, evasion, and first aid are included in the 8 survival skills. You do not need 11 survivals.

Miscellaneous Information

Mana Type

• Necromancers will have a certain mana type that they perceive as (pre-outrage getting to the point of them showing up corrupted). This will be static per the necro in question, and is determined randomly by character flag, sort of like the bard voice thing. Holy will not be one of the types a necro can show up as having, but everything else is possible. This mana type will be reflected in the character's default spell prep, as well as messaging for AP spells.

• ICly, a budding Necromancer probably wouldn't even know they can get away with pretending to be another type of caster (Lyras and company certainly don't), and certainly wouldn't make any long-term plans until after they attained attunement and figured out what was going on.

• Your "mana flavor" is with you and easily discernible right at 1st circle: toss an Energy Bolt at something and look at what color it is.

• As your Divine Outrage and the necromantic corruption of your body increases, this becomes pretty dodgy and eventually your attunement to the Arcane overwhelms any affinity you have to the conventional mana frequencies. The Perverse would argue that's the point you become a real Necromancer.

• There's four reasons why they did it this way.
  1. The fiction around Arcane mana and how Necromancers are doing what they do strongly encourages it.
  2. There's far less technical overhead.
  3. Being able to choose "flavors" would just lead to people wanting backsies on any choice, which generally annoys me and is contrary to the fiction of how attunement works.
  4. Even if you had the ability to switch "flavors," it would do nothing but hurt your chances to pass yourself off as Not a Necromancer.

• This is not part of an elaborate Necromancer disguise system or a meaningful statement about your character's Ultimate Magical Destiny -- it's an incidental form of misdirection that's merely meant to allow you to walk around the street and get some TM ranks without screaming out you're a Necromancer (Outrage notwithstanding).

Arcane Mana

Attunement to Arcane mana involves some pretty substantial changes to how a Necromancer's nervous system works (in ye olde days, the Imperial Healers' Guild hypothesized that the social deviance of sorcerers was somehow linked to these changes to the brain -- fortunately, no one knows or cares about their pesudo-magical theories anymore). The goal of the procedure is to produce a magician that can see and operate with multiple types of mana at once.

It... doesn't quite work. Perhaps their method is still too crude and faulty, or perhaps the prohibition is wired even deeper into how the brain works than even they can manipulate, but the attempt always goes wrong. Even attuned to multiple mana types, in the Necromancer's perceptual sphere they superimpose upon each other into this freakish, aggregate, other kind of mana that does not really exist.

Necromantic spells are written to account for deranged movements of this "fifth frequency," but the lack of true multi-attunement perception means they can suffer like other people when casting outside their normal environment.

Sorcery

• Necromancy is a subset of Sorcery. Sorcery is dangerous and unstable magic that society abhors and that may or may not have some intrinsic evilness about it. Blackfire is an example of this. Necromancers are as free to dabble in Sorcery as any other guild, but they will not have any special access to the non-Necromatic parts of it.

• Necromancy is created by mixing Life mana with either Elemental or Lunar mana. Life mana is always used in the mix, by definition.

• While AP spells are legal according to society, a Necromancer's AP spells are still considered sorcery for purposes of spells that defend against it, such as Protection from Evil.

Casting Backlash from scrolls

Because Necromancers utilize a complex mixture of various mana types, they have certain reactions to scrolls that contain spells that use one particular mana.

• Arcane spells = Necromancers may (temporarily) learn arcane spells, and cast them with greater ease than other guilds, avoiding risk of physical harm entirely. This, however, does not include Teleological or Blackfire sorceries.
• Lunar, Elemental, Life = Low risk, equivalent to any other guild's best combination.
• Holy = Considered extremely dangerous on the Necromancer's behalf.

See Also

Necromancer History

A brief timeline.

Necromancer Ideologies

• The Perverse
• The Redeemed
• The Philosophers of the Knife

Necromancer Sanity

Let's step OOC for a moment, and discuss this in terms no character should ever use (though inevitably will, since I now just said it).

The attunement process for Arcane mana involves substantial changes to your character's neurobiology in a setting so far removed from modern science and medicine that this is completely not understood or remotely accounted for. You are seeing what Man Mustn't See not because of occult hoodoo but because your character's brain is no longer firing like it used to.

The madness of the Necromancer is, first and foremost, neurological. Schizophrenia, affect disorders, clinical depression, etc. Cthulhu-analog certainly plays a part in how deeply boned Necromancers are, but at the front lines of the Necromancer's soul, his major demons are all personal.

In practice, these are not going to be balls-to-the-walls-mad people. The Philosophers aim at creating functional sociopaths (though they'd never think of themselves in those terms), and anyone who exhibits outrageously broken cognition after the attunement will be used for parts as a failed attunement. The intention is a creeping fear that the Necromancer's ego (you, basically) isn't in full control of the vehicle.

And if Lyras is any indication, sometimes he isn't.

Moving toward the supernatural, we arrive at a point where I want to keep a certain level of mystery in the story. Hallucinations certainly fit (bearing in mind that someone who's constantly seeing purple skyway Nevada is going to find his spleen appropriated), but there is the Hunger sitting somewhere within the Necromancer's frame of reference.

Sometimes a Necromancer might catch a glimpse of... something, just as in real life sometimes our pattern recognition will turn the shadows in the corner of our eyes into something else. It's probably "innocent" madness. Sometimes, though, that seems very unlikely.

-Armifer