The Shrine

I was reading some blurb out of the lore in WoW's new patch and it's like 'well yeah you're like killing your best heroes for no reason but they want to make sure they really have the elite because you don't want the weak guys get raised as enemies.' That's fair enough for an argument, and I can think of at least 10 other games that basically makes the same argument "This guy is tough because he can raise the dead!"

But really, why is the ability to raise the dead so powerful? I'll first assume that you're never talking about a case where necromancy equates to immortality. That is to say you don't just have any kind of story that involves where you spend all your time fighting the bad's guy head undead, kill him, and then it instantly comes back because it's already dead. As far as I know most undead stuff tends to stay dead once you kill it, which basically makes them no different from living beings. Note that if this is not the case, then all you need is like 1 or 2 really powerful Undead and then you'd be set if the guy is totally unkillable. No need for an army except for perhaps issues of efficiency.

So I guess the origin of this starts with exponential growth. If I kill a peasant and raise that guy as a zombie or a skeleton, presumably that guy is a little bit more powerful than he was as a peasant. Then I can command the said undead to kill another peasant and get 2 zombies, and so on. Eventually I might have enough zombies to kill things that are actually powerful, and then maybe I get greater zombies when I raised those dudes, and this cycle multiply indefinitely until I have an unstoppable army.

Now that's all well and good, but clearly in just about every fiction out there, the quality of your undead is clearly related to what living being you raised the dead out of. You're not going to raise a peasant into a Death Knight. Heck, if you go to WoW, DKs are not only heroes in their previous life (granted, heroes are dime a dozen), but they have to go through extensive training to make it through the equivalent of DK school. So if I'm just raising an army of skeletons, that's not going to help much when your local Hero comes around. Now what if you raised a Hero? But if you assume in any world the number of true Heroes can be counted on one hand, that'd mean if you could kill even 2 Heroes you probably are close to conquering the world (there can only be at most 3 Heroes left!) If you can happen to raise them and get some of your investement in army back, I guess that's an extra bonus.

But here is a chiken and the egg problem. You got to have some kind of Hero-level undead on your side to kill your hero, because I've never heard of any Hero overwhelmed by a few hundred or thousand skeletons. But you got to kill a Hero to create such an undead. I suppose it's possible you might find some grave of ancient Heroes, but generally undefended source of bodies never make the most powerful Undead you can. For Necromancy to matter, you'd have to have already control 1/2 + 1 of the world's power assuming your enemies are smart enough to band together against you, but of course in that case you are already stronger than the rest of the world put together so you should've already won in the first place. Anything less than that you'd probably end up in failure because your army will lose, and presumably whoever the most powerful guy in there will kill you before you can raise the most powerful guy you managed to kill.

It seems to me even in the world of fiction, Necromancy is just a nice 'side effect' ability to have, but I really don't recall any evil being whose claim to power is solely the ability to raise the dead. Yet this ability seems to be always cited as the reason why Undead are scary.

because Zombies will fuck you up man....especially when they are like this....













Necromancy can cause a lot of problems

Merlin is often described as a necromancer in literature, he obviously has other powers too such as the ability to shapeshift. Sauron in The Hobbit is referred to as the Necromancer of Mirkwood who also had a shapeshifting ability. Both Merlin and Sauron were great tricksters. Sauron, for example, disguised himself as an elf-like figure by the name of Annatar; under which form he delivered rings to kings of men. These rings converted their wearers into undead Wraiths (A powerful undead creature created by Tolkien) who were exceedingly powerful; Gandalf the White proved to be inneffective when challenged. Of course, it seemed easier for Sauron to breed hundreds of thousands of orcs (more creatures created by Tolkien; easily bred, and live for combat) instead of raising vast armies of zombies.

Anyway, my point is that traditional Necromancers have other means of power as well; though the undead creatures are invaluable totheir operations.

Necromancy seems to be a very good side ability to have but generally you got to have some other primary ability besides that to make it through in the world of fiction as a villain.