Parties in and among themselves, necromancers use magic to raise and command undead and manipulate dead material. They walk around with a group of undead creatures and bag of corpses. A necromancer is not inherently evil, but many societal customs find walking corpses hard to accept and often disrespectful.
For those that know about necromantic magic, distrust is somewhat more understandable. An undead’s instinct rejects life; and for the majority of near mindless undead, a careless command or loss of control can quickly release a deadly monster’s hunger.
The LARP variation of this legacy can be found HERE
Playstyle
A necromancer’s main focus is on the company they carry. Specifically, a necromancer commands a, normally small, hoard of undead. Play a necromancer if you want to directly manage loyal but dangerous minions which can only act under the orders you have given.
Visual Identity
WIP: gravekeeper, medic, grim reaper
Signature Ability: Raise Dead
With an infusion of magic, a necromancer can raise a creature’s corpse into an undead. The player rolls an action check to piece the body together. Without further enhancement, a success (glance or hit) will create a an undead which is only barely held together – signified by a single box track. The undead can only act with limited intelligence – only able to understand single commands and only able to follow 1 command at a time. If not busy or commanded not to, the undead will seek to snuff out any nearby life.
A necromancer can Claim undead to actively control and command them. They can only have up to 5 undead claimed at any time, though other undead of low intelligence or real loyalty may still follow older orders even after they are no longer claimed. Commands are spoken and the strict wording matters, especially for unintelligent undead. Undead under your control are loyal to a fault and will attempt to carry out your latest spoken command as however capable by their intelligence. They can be tracked in the temporary merit section of the character sheet, but only take marks when damaged (not when benefitted from). A necromancer’s power can only control undead that do not have their own will.
Claimed undead act similar to companions. The undead start with a base pool of 1 to actions that they take (assuming they can take the action). If the necromancer also has a skill of any level which could apply for the action, then the companion gets an additional +1 bonus to the check. Companions can get further bonuses just like other characters (risking esoterics, using a scene aspect, using a miss-fortune).
Using multiple companions at once can improve the effect of a single action check – they don’t each make separate checks.
When attacking, most undead will only have an action pool of 2 and deal a single point of harm, but acting with other undead can increase the harm by increasing the effect, and undead can also get an additional bonus to their pool by using things in the scene to their advantage (using a scene aspect).
Claimed undead act after your own action or turn, following the most recent command they were given or attacking the nearest living creature other than their master if they fulfilled their latest command. A necromancer can only give 1 command per action.
What is an Undead?
An undead is something once living, then dead, and then reanimated as though it had life once more, but only for as long as magic infuses it. Most notably, an undead’s body continues to decay. It can only move and think due to the magic animating its body and thought processes. Most undead are barely intelligent enough to plan a single step ahead or follow more than a basic command, but there are some, such as vampires, which have a much deeper intelligence.
The magic fueling an undead courses through its body. Destroying an undead means dealing enough damage to disrupt the magic’s course. Their undead nature also means they do not need food, sleep, or air to survive, though the process of consuming life seems to fuel their undeath.
Disadvantage: Undead Hunger
A necromancer’s undead, though loyal, seek to destroy the life of anything other than their owner. If not kept busy, they will pursue this drive. Only intelligent undead can resist the urge, if they wish to do so. Unclaimed undead cannot resist the urge, though intelligent undead may go about their destruction of life in more subtle or ambitious ways, or even attempt to avoid and mitigate their destructive urges.
Merits
Merits represent the core characteristics, traits, gear, and companions that a character has at their disposal. Merits Tracks represent a form of character health, merits help make actions easier to perform, and many merits provide unique powers and abilities for a character to take advantage of.
Each legacy has 1 signature merit (underlined below), a powerful and complex merit that provides the core ability characters within that legacy are known for. Signature merits can be further enhanced with the meta merits of the same legacy, up to the number of Meta Slots the signature merit has (see the following list after regular Merits).
| Signature Merit | Effect | Track | Meta Slots |
| Raise Dead | You can make an action check to create an undead out of a dead corpse. On a success (glance or hit), you create an undead with 1 track. Spending an esoteric increases its track by 3. Mark to claim an undead. You can have up to 5 undead claimed at any time. Claimed undead will obey your spoken commands directed at them to the best of their intelligence. They are completely loyal to you. You can abandon your claim of an undead at any time. Abandoned unintelligent undead will still follow the last command given until it is fulfilled. You cannot claim undead that have their own free will or that are clamed by another necromancer. |
3 | 2 |
| Description TBD | |||
| Elemental Merits | Effect | Track |
| Stitcher’s Kit | With a touch you can transform and restructure the bones and flesh of inanimate dead material and any undead under your claim. This can alter the type of harm it could deal or make it more effective for specific types of tasks. | 3 |
| A medical bag with old tools and too thick twine. | ||
| Ghastly Breath | As long as you are able to touch a dead body, and its head is still attached, you can learn the cause of death without needing a check. | 3 |
| A vial of ectoplasmic liquid that can be poured into the throat of the dead to highlight their final wounds and reveal a blurry scene behind them. | ||
| Putrid Explosives | You can explode nearby corpses or claimed undead, dealing 1 additional mark of blast harm to all creatures beside the body (using the blast side-effect extends the area to anyone beside the initial creatures hit). This destroys the corpse or undead. Mark to deal an additional mark of poison harm to all hit targets. | 4 |
| A collection of tiny, pulsing pustules that vanish from your hand into nearby corpses; only to quickly swell and explode. | ||
| Bone Runes | Mark to levitate and control nearby small amounts of exposed bone (no more than the character can lift) | 4 |
| Rounded bones engraved with runes | ||
| Deathly Aura | Spend 1 esoteric to activate a deadly aura that saps life out of everything adjacent to you. Living creatures around you take 1 stress harm every minute until you take an action to turn the aura off. If there is no life to sap, take the harm instead. | 3 |
| Description TBD | ||
| Feign Death | Mark to gain the visage of a corpse for the remainder of the scene. While you have this visage, you do not need to breath , have no aura, and can stay perfectly still. You can slightly alter your appearance to show false wounds or decay. | 4 |
| A small makeup kit and some medical vials containing vile pills. | ||
| Phylactery | When you fully mark a merit, you can mark this to vanish from reality, only to reappear beside your phylactery 24 hours later. You can mark an additional box to reduce the time from 24 hours to 1 hour. | 3 |
| A hollow container kept far from your person | ||
| Necrotic Traversal | You may enter a fresh corpse of your size or larger (no more than 24 hours old) and burst out of any other fresh corpse, of your size or greater, that you are aware of. Alternatively, you can use a claimed undead instead of a fresh corpse, destroying the undead when you use this ability. | 3 |
| A pair of electric rods | ||
| Dead Weight | Mark to create a dead body, with mass up to a single human-sized body. | 5 |
| A set of metal standard weights, hollow with bone dust inside. | ||
| Ghoul Jaw | You can take an action to consume a corpse and recover one marked box on any necromancer merit. | 3 |
| You have tusks and bone-like plating defining the outside of your jaw. | ||
| Grave Shadow | You can transport your claimed undead and up to 3 dead bodies within your shadow or a small container. It takes an action to let 1 claimed undead step in or out of your shadow/container or to take out a dead body. | 3 |
| Your shadow twists and moves similar to your actions, but slightly different. | ||
META Merits
Meta Merits alter or enhance a legacy’s signature merit and automatically extend that merit’s track with their own. Meta merits are unique to their legacy and cannot enhance any merit other than the signature merit of the same legacy.
| Meta Elemental Merits | Effect | Track |
| Intelligent Creations | When you create an undead and spend an esoteric during its creation, give the undead intelligence matching what it had in life. It gains its own will but can still be claimed by you. It does not have memories of its former life. | – |
| Grave Manners | When you create an undead, give it a skill specialty skill of its own at level 3 based on its base form. Intelligent undead may have specialties based on their past, living experiences, even if the memories of those experiences are unavailable. | – |
| Hearty Hearts | When you create an undead by spending an esoteric, you can choose to mark the undead as a golem, making it large in size and giving it an additional “2nd life” track of 5, in addition to the track of 3 for spending the esoteric. You can only claim 1 undead golem at a time. | 1 |
| Infectious Cravings | When an undead you created kills something that was living, the creature reanimates as an undead with 1 track. (or a larger track if the GM finds it appropriate). | – |
| Perceptive Sockets | Mark to experience the world through the senses of one of your undead until you wish to end the effect. | 1 |
| Mental Orders | When giving commands to your claimed undead, you can do so without speaking and across any distance. | – |
| Skeleton Crew | Instead of having up to 5 individual undead, you may have up to 5 undead crews. When you claim an undead, add it to a crew, combining its track with any existing undead within that crew. All undead within a crew follow commands as a unit, with very limited ability to take actions independently. | – |
| Blush of Life | When creating an undead by spending an esoteric, you can choose to close up any wounds on it and give it the illusion of life; a warm body with a pulse that does not decay over time. | – |
Alternative Concepts
TBD