Necromancers are a spellcasting class in Dungeons and Dragons (DND) that specialize in death magic. They possess a deep understanding of the forces of life and death, manipulating them to their will. Necromancers can create and manipulate the forces of life and death, bending the undead to their will and drawing hushed whispers and terrified stares wherever they go.
In DND 5e, a necromancer wizard can have 17 spells prepared and 5 cantrips. The number of spells a character can prepare is equal to their level + spellcasting modifier (in this case intelligence). For example, a level 7 wizard with an Intelligence of 16 can prepare up to six 1st or 2nd-level spells from their spellbook.
The Order of the Necromancer Spellcasting table shows how many spell slots a character has to cast their spells of 1st level and higher. Necromancers cast spells through the exercise of knowledge and will, preparing them by studying their spellbooks. Clerics can cast Animate Dead but have no special advantages like the necro-class.
In conclusion, necromancy is a school of magic that focuses on creating and manipulating the forces of life and death. Necromancers possess a deep understanding of the forces of life and death, allowing them to manipulate the forces of life and death to their advantage.
📹 How to Play a Necromancer in Dungeons and Dragons 5e
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I played Curse of Strahd as a necromancer who wanted to become an arch-lich (good aligned lich who does it by sheer will power, yes its real), and lost his whole family to a plague. So his skeletons were his family. My DM let me equip them, and said that they all had proficiency with horns. In the end like three of them had half plate, and two were children that wielded scimitars and climbed on enemies. Had the same ones for the whole campaign, and they all had stat sheets and names.
I am currently playing a Forest Gnome Warlock of the Undying named Tilli Billiwix. Her patron is a hag that she refers to as “Grandmother”, and through praying to that hag amidst a circle of dead and rotting things (one of said things being a dead party member) the DM allowed the dead player to raise as a ghoul and he is now playing a warrior sidekick character with ghoul stats. Also, Undying Servitude from Tasha’s lets me cast animate dead once per long rest without a spell slot. When Tilli does so, she conjures a large, pink ethereal butterfly that comes down and gently lands on the corpse/bones. Then, the butterfly begins crawling inside, audibly snapping bone and muscle alike as the body begins twitching and squirming in unnatural ways. Then, finally, when the zombie/skeleton stands, the wings of the butterfly pop out of the corpse’s back, leaving a shambling horror with big pink butterfly wings. Not a hardcore, raising armies necromancer, but still a necromancer all the same.
I’m a level 6 Cleric/Death Domain Necromancer. My teammates are a Rogue and a Wizard. I have the healing abilities, high AC and high health to be act as a tank class while healing friends. With the high damage touch spells. The Rogue always carries some black powder. This way we turn the enemies former comrades and turn them into suicide bombers. Useful against high level or boss characters. We stay hidden and let the freshly dead patched up zombies walk up to the boss. If they become suspicious. I have Thaumaturgy and the Wizard has the Staff of Bird Calls. Both which can project sound. Good distraction.
My Necromancer first learned the craft while working as a mortician for a small town, and the mayor’s daughter was brought in one night and rather than doing an autopsy, he fell in love and raised the girl to be his bride. he misjudged how the town would react and he ended up on the run. my GM even managed to bring my back story into the campaign in a creative way. the first indication was we found wanted posters but nobody in the party knew my real name so I was able to keep it a secret for a while. lol
I don’t have a necromancer I’ve played, but in the campaign I’m running I had my players run through a tower made of human bones (yes, there were a lot of jokes). It was created by a necromancer who tried to use necromancy to protect her home town. One of her first resurrected bodies was her own husband. Basically her story was the tragedy of good intentions. She wasn’t by any means a bad person, but her magic ended up alienating her neighbors from her and even causing an emotional rift between her and her son. And her story ended with her witnessing her son’s death in battle and using magic that killed the entire battlefield. She created the tower as a monument, and a warning, of her perceived failures, her spirit trapped in it from the mixture of grief and guilt for failing her son and destroying the life around her. My players loved it and they managed to release her by one of them posing as her son and telling her it was time to move on and rest, that he forgave her. Then they had to find a way out of the tower as it collapsed around them before it took them down with it. I’ve never been interested in playing a necromancer before, but if I were to play one, I’d definitely want a character like her. Someone who uses necromancy with the intention of protecting the life around them, and whose flaw is they are so certain in their actions they struggle to listen to the concerns of others and communicate their motives, which is what causes the conflict with those around them in the first place.
You know who’s also a well written necromancer? Dr. Henri Wu from Jurassic Park/World. He and his group of scientists are known for “bringing extinct animals back to life”. I remember a spell called “Clone”, which, by using a bit of flesh and stuff from an entity, you make a copy of that being, but it’s just the body. So let’s say a necromancer finds a bunch of raptor fossils, and uses the preserved blood inside the bones as that bit of flesh needed for making a clone. Would said creature come back to life just because Clone, or would you need to kill the body and then Revivify it? Edit: John Hammond is the best necromancer, hands down. pinterest.at/pin/383791199480943854/
My idea for a necromancer is he was a village doctor and one day his family was hit by a plague and he and his brother went on to be adventures but his brother died to bandits and before his brother died he said i will always live ob in your heart and the character was like yea you will always live on
My friends and I decided to run an “advanced campaign.” Where we all created 10th level characters. I played a lawful good necromancer. Who had in essence created an entire town of living skeletons and had created a bustling economy within his town, through trading, farming, and simple tool crafting. His reasoning was cheap, efficient, utterly loyal labor. Allowing him to just lay back and collect his coin.
I played a highly intelligent wizard who as a kid spent years ina remote monastery by his rich fathers tutors. One of them was a man named tiatus who taught my character that life and death are not separate but infact a cycle and using necrotic spells are not evil but using the cycle of the magic weave to stop truely evil creatures from disrupting the balance of the world. By the end of the campaign i had 2 wights report to me and had a small army that i used to storm the dungeons with. I spent 2 days preparing in the final battle i stormed a dragons den with 3 wights, 48 skeletons, 9 zombies, and i had a few copies of finger of death scrolled away for private use for the fight. It WAS HILARIOUS, to save time i rolled my characters attacks, my wights, the skellies, and the zombies grouped up into 4 rolls. I had my undead legion create a underground nexus at our base of operations and used a teleportation circle to transport my armies out of the town who had no idea i was even commanding a undead legion they all thought i was JUST a wizard .
I created a pretty interesting Necromancer that isn’t exactly the menacing figure we all assume one to be. My Necromancer (sloth) is a crippled child who taught himself the basics of the only magical scripts he could find to get him out of slavery. Though Sloth was a good natured kid who always wants to do the right thing, he fully embraces necromancy as his way in getting back at those who sold him to slavery and stopping them from abducting any more children. He also naively plans on trying to raise his mom from the dead and be a family again. Sloth is aware that his undead minions will cause panic in towns, but Sloth can’t walk. He is crippled and his legs are completely dead. He walks around piggy-backing on an undead minion with a giant robe over himself. Like a kid trying to pretend he is an adult. I also have many plans for him to get into a much darker and more evil mindset once he actually confronts those responsible for selling him to slavery and pillaging his town. But overall I want him to be a damaged kid, who is trying to regain his innocence.
I once played a Necromancer in an earlier edition. Everyone THOUGHT he was a Cleric because he healed the party etc. At night, he would create however many Undead he could while on watch and send them toward a ruined castle in the hinterlands of the map. Two game-years later, our leader suggested we go check out the ruins. It was a whole county populated by happy people who just happened to be guarded by the Undead. We headed to the castle, which was repaired and not a ruin at all, and were invited in. We went into the throne room and saw a bone throne atop a raised dais. While the rest of the party looked around, I strode up and sat down on the throne. The Vampire just to my right bowed and said ‘Welcome home Master.’ The party never knew it was me until the very end…
An idea I had was for a high level Necromancer to raise a ton of undead at like a battlefield or something then shove them all into a Demiplane. When you need an instant army and don’t care about collateral damage just summon them out using Demiplane again and then Misty Step on top of something tall and distant and on your next turn set up a lawn chair and watch the carnage.
Ok but here’s the best thing you could do. Over the course of your adventure raise skeletons and cast command dead to keep them under control indefinitely. Once they are under your control stuff up to 20 in a bag of holding. Use something like mage hand to fly your skele-bag over the enemy and then spill the bag on them. Boom, instant skeleton army.
I kinda want to run a necromancer that only raises animals, because he couldn’t bear the thought of parting with his pets. I wonder how well that would work? Just always has a skeletal hound chilling with him, maybe a skeletal crow or raven perched on his shoulder, has a home mausoleum named the Pet Semetery…
I don’t know if 5the edition allows new spells . If you can do so, try putting a listening spell on your undead allies, see if you can overhear your opponents plans. Moreso if you give your undead allies a human face, in city, you have hidden allies, and catspaws. If necromancy allows stat attacking, attack the appropriate stat. Attack the strength of a Bard, the charisma of a warrior, you won’t kill them if you attack to a characters strengths. Chain scry spells to your undead seagulls. Use taxidermy and illusion to help make them passable. Tie chained, delayed action fireballs to your flying friends, or rats. Create spells that will help you teleport from one end of an undead formation to another. Or swap position with undead allies. Enemy closes in, and pop goes the vampire. Also, think three dimensionally, perhaps your summoned zombie hippo can be dropped vertically on an enemy from a height, and even if the Fall destroys it, they still have to bench press a Hippo. A Hippo! Chain conjuration effects to your pawns. Nothing like closing in to a squad of ghasts, which suddenly start vomiting undead Badgers. If you have a really big skeleton, like an ogre, animate him, and use him as power armor for you, or a friend . Smelly, gross, and safer. Likewise, an undead mount, especially a big one, can help on the battlefield, and off. Smaller undead could be used to block a few melee attacks. Cast an illusion of yourself on an undead lieutenant to split enemy fire. Use super glue on your grappling zombies, make you’re opponents carry them, even if rendered dead, again.
@Dungion Dudes, someone probably mentioned this but actually necromancers in Diablo aren’t evil. They preach balance between life and death (for referance Sin wars). They summon the souls of the dead around them and ask for their help, then they reanimate. They are just persived evil or… are found distasteful ( Sanctuary has seen a lot from mages, let’s leave it at that)
I don’t want to side-track the focus here but I wanted to mention, that I’ve read Shelly’s “Frankenstein” a few times and seen the original Whale film multiple times and oh, man, the whole concept of bringing a body to life through your own (scientific?) knowledge, is creep factor cranked up to 11. To be a Necro in D&D, ramps this up multi-fold and though yes, I’ve played a Necro in Diablo 2 more times than I can count, D&D can be REALLY “go to town” with the concept. In some older Black Isle PC Games (i.e. Icewind Dale, NWN) we could go pretty much crazy with the level of critter summoning available (like, a Lich, I could summon a damn LICH!) so I’m glad in this respect, 5E hauled us back in a bit, heh. Still, we can bring forth some pretty robust uglies to play with I’m happy to see and I’ve created a Necro in a few games. Awesome PC!
Is there anyway to make a necromancer like in diablo 3? Not the minion horde but but using the corpses Around you to launch bones at your enemies and surround yourself in a cocoon of the dead to protect yourself from attacks and having a vortex of bone fragments surround you and your party so nothing can get close
Even though this a 3yr old article it gave me an idea for a pretty unlikely combination. The combination being a Wizard class with the Dragonborn race of the green variety for that free poison breathe weapon. But then again dragonborn aren’t really meant for Wizards aren’t they? Well at least it some sort of vibrant variety idea.. actually now that I think about, people probably already thought of this and I just never saw the comment about it.
So how well would a necromancer, paladin, cleric, and moon druid(shifting/elemental) work together? So you would have your front line be the paladin and undead from necromancer, and then have the druid cleric and Necro in back. Necro using combos listed in article. Druid primarily using elemental magic untill the pally gets pushed back or the skellys start to drop and then shifting into wild form and joining the front line while the cleric does his healing mojo and other things they are known for, not sure what else they do never played with a cleric in party before.
Many nice tips to play a necromancer in a miniatures wargame, but to max out roleplying better give the necromancer free permanent non-combat abilitiea like speak with the dead, detect undead, undead affinity, disease and poison lore, authopsy, ancient heraldry and bloodlines lore and so on. In fact, I always give free permanent non-combat abilities to each class and having those always available makes classes really stand out and players resort to more original non-combat approaches much more often
Just super quick fyi (unless you know this) Necromancers in the Diablo series are more akin to spirit guides that makes sure that the dead stays dead, and the reason they fight against Diablo is because the forces of hell are disrupting the deads eternal slumber, which is why they even raise the dead to fight as those undead are kind of willing warriors to fight back the hordes of Hell.
Animate Dead is a great spell, OP for its 3rd level slot. It can also be widely misunderstood, miscalculated and mismanaged by so many players and DMs, and can cause a lot of contention at the table when Wizards try to max out the numbers of undead they can have under their control. Our current DM insists that my 3 spell slots would max me out at 9, I put the question to reddit and the answers I got there are either 16, 17 or 24. Despite how clear I think the answer is and what I think I should be able to do with it, I’ve just stopped taking it.
I played a necromancer that saved a village by raising their dead at night to plow the field and taking care of their crops since after an attack a lot of villager were killed and put in a common grave, the villager got their crops done in time … The paladin did not know what to do whit me so i proposed to help them … It was a wierd team up but realy fun.
My DM is using the rules from “Kingdoms & Warfare” so my Undead Warlock was able to become a Necromancer by geting the Medium rol in the party (he can lear every necromancy spell). I never have more than five or six undeads in the battlefield because I don´t want to be that person that breaks the encounters all the time and has an nevereding turn, but his unit of soldiers it’s made from zombies and the guards from our Adventurers Organization it’s made from his skeletons.
I just made a neutral evil necromancer who has no interest in taking over the world. He’s a researcher focused on ancient, fallen civilizations, and he just brings back the dead to get information about how they lived. So he will summon skeletons and let their control lapse to observe how they acted when alive. Neutral evil because he puts his research before the lives of the average person. Main reason was to have an evil necromancer who wasn’t interested in raising an army. Also, shove & grapple is a stupid combo for even low level creatures to use. Enemy can’t get up unless it has speed, and grapple reduces speed to 0.
One of the scariest things you can do is make an elf necromancer because of one thing. Trance. It lets your character rest 4 hours and get the benefits of 8. You can raise an undead army, long rest, get up while everyone’s sleeping to reassert control and make new undead, then get tired, sleep again, and wake up with a horde and a full arsenal of spell slots. Rinse, repeat, and watch the horror show unleash!
In the next game I’ll play a Necromancer Cleric; however, I’ll limit my amount of skeletons to a small troup (4-8 archers depending on the difficulty of the campaign), so i have some spell slots for healing, utility and blasting, as well as to not create excessively long turns. I always liked the version of necromancy where the necromancer has a fitting spell for any occasion – be it life drain, curses, dark energy bolts, debuff auras or the perfect minion – the most. Similar to the Diablo 3 version of the necromancer. He might be able to command an army, but that is by far not all he can do. And instead of a massive army of 50+ he has fewer, but much stronger, undead. Too bad only wizards get to boost their minions… And the summon undead line of spells not existing in 5e is quite a bummer as well. Also I really wish you could turn normal animals. A Necromancer running around with a bunch of zombie wolves is a lot easier to stomach by the general population. Also I really need to try and ask the DM to allow me to replace one of the 5th level Death domain bonus spells with danse macabre…
I’ve never been a fan of negative energy being automatically evil. last I checked both positive energy and negative energy planes will both kill the party without protection. as for evil undead creatures. well of course we consider them evil, we are their prey. I’m pretty sure there is some animals that would consider humans evil as well if they were capable.
Another question. with the limit on commands at a time to groups of undead, what would happen if say you had a batch of skeletons, and a batch of zombie. the skeletons are intelligent and can use basic tactics. Now what if you’re a 3 dip Chains warlock, Necromancer wizard, and you take a sprite as your Chains familiar. it has an int of 14, can speak, and you can communicate with it telepathically and share senses with it at any range on the same plain if needed, (provided you take the chains invocation for it in XGTE) . Can you use your first command to order all the skeletons to follow the sprites directives as their general, while the following rounds you use your commands to order the zombies. This way you have two active tactics going on?
In a campaign, I was playing a Necromancer: Cleric 1 / Wizard 9. Thats was funny. My PC was an older senile human that lost his love in a group of witches’ attack, so he turn back his and his lost love faith to study necromancy in order to recover her soul from the witches, but with the time, he begun to forgot about her and his reasons to study necromancy, only remembered that he need to create a method to recover a soul from a witch, wherever that soul be. The DM allow me to use only 1 spell from my cleric lvl, and that spell was Cure Wounds, because his love one teached it. The faces of my party when the senile old necromancer cure a member with divine magic… I never forget about it in my life.
I just thought of a great one, base race wood elf, one of your parents is half celestial so then you are too, be a necromancer, who gets bitten by a vampire and survives and becomes a vampire, when becoming a vampire as a half celestial the god of the dead decideds to turn you into an aasimar of the god of the dead while remaining a vampire and wood elf and half celestial then you have a flight speed of at least 70 and turn into a bat or mist or even a wolf of the dm is okay with it, and gain more land speed and more strength and dex, plus for back story reasons you’d have more knowledge of the dead and could possibly be able to control lower ranking vampires because you’re a vampire and a necromancer, and then you could summon up an army of vampires at level 12 and if each of them can summon zombies or skeletons plus you have a 1 or 2 whrits or however its spelled then you’ve got a pretty unstoppable army you aren’t even level 15
I’m currently playing a half-undead/half-construct changeling (our DM wanted a high-powered campaign so gave us a free template or 30 RP to build a custom race) necromancer who (being a changeling) can’t procreate so has shifted her arcane studies in the direction of raising undead as her children. She has a fairly low wisdom to account for a smidgen of her cluelessness about the moral stigma around her practices, but at the end of the day it’s more about her not being completely well in her little half metal/half negative energy infused head 😛 Currently she has a single intelligent skeleton minion as a main stay who the DM and I play in tandem – we have agreed that he’s obviously lusting for the blood of the living but as he’s under my control as long as I command him he needs to do what I say. He is however following my commands to the letter, often finding loopholes to mess with myself and the party. I often need to scold the poor dear, but obviously know that he’s a kind and sensitive soul in his core ^^
Lovingly disguise the controlled thralls as nobility with heavy makeup. Call each of them by name, only reanimated with consent, treat the bodies as if they were still the individual. when a thrall perishes, hold a memorial service thanking them for lending their body to your service long after their soul had lain to rest. As a DM, even pausing to include communities which have religious views on death which coincide with an acceptance of necromancer helps to grey that line of “this is evil” will help that too.