Summoning temporary undead is such a turnoff for the necromancer fantasy IMO. Also, Occult seems straight up wrong for the master of life and death. Divine is right there. But like, if they kept all of the mechanics and design direction for this intact but called it an Illusionist, I'd be all over it.
Divine magic is drawn from the gods, while creating false life is a perversion of the gods' natural order. It's very explicitly anti-divine. Meanwhile, Occult magic is about Fucking Around and hoping to not Find Out. Bending or breaking the divine order is exactly what it's there for.
urgathoa: am i a joke to you
Interesting. I wonder if you could elaborate on both of those points?
To me, them being temporary is actually really good for the fantasy. You're not a cleric reviving people, you're a necromancer reanimated dead bodies to perform a job. I could see a place for more permanency at very high levels (to be able to do something like this story from [email protected], but for what's actually useful over an adventuring campaign, a more utility-focused summon makes a lot of sense to me.
And occult works for me exceptionally well. Divine would be real resurrection, but raising undead is like the definition of the occult, to me.
Conjuring up the dead has nothing to do with what I want from a necromancer. if you're not pulling in literal ghosts from the boneyard, it just looks like a summoner with a thanatopic hyperfixation; indistinguishable from the undead eidolon summoner. It lacks the spirit and function of an opportunistic recycler.
I want a necromancer to be closer to a blue mage than a conjurer, pulling up a frankenstein of a minion from the component pieces of what they find on their adventure.
Pulling up super flimsy figments with limited ability to interact with things around them, then popping them to create strange and quasi-real effects though... that's an incredibly appealing idea for an Illusionist. Pull a rabbit of caerbannog out of a hat, then toss it for your next trick. Trick an enemy with illusory soldiers tossing a spear their way.
I think the class has juice, but doesn't necessarily fit the bill.
Also, I kinda hate that the thralls explicitly can never take actions. Limiting the to in-combat utility is pretty uninspired, but I wouldn't mind as much if they weren't strictly real.
re: spell schools
eh, hard disagree. The evocative name aside, Occult is pretty much all spirit and mind effects, it's more the 'Bard' school to me. I could definitely see the ghost hoarder subclass have a strong occult lean, but the whole class? nah.
Divine (and previously, the cleric list in 1e) has always been the poster child for Death magic. Void in 2e is most well represented by that tradition, even if Vitality is something it represents too.
I think modern TTRPGS in general steer towards things like temporary summons because of how it lets the players actually use them in combat. Nobody wants to play the necromancer who is suddenly just some guy because there are no corpses available where the battle kicks off.
I have an enormous soft spot for narratively putting in the legwork to assemble your undead hordes, and when I'm the GM, I'm always keen to set up good moments for the necromancer to build an army, but it's so easy for that to set up a situation where a player doesn't get to actually use their features. Making them temporary summons from nowhere in particular is the easiest fix.
