Perhaps I’m confusing things a bit. It says in chapter 3 that elves who practice necromancy are ostracised, but then goes on to say that elves hunt down those who damage nature - I may be assuming a connection between these two that does not exist. Fair enough.
Elves are creatures of nature. Heck, in 3E terms they could quite easily have the monster type of Fey. They more than revere nature, they essentially are a part of nature.
Arguably, so are druids. Fair? Druids have a few necromancy spells on their list, including death magic.
Now, obviously it can be argued that elves are even more in tune with nature than druids. I won’t dispute that directly, but rather I’d ask a more general question: are elves unique amongst nature lovers in abhorring necromancy? Would a centaur druid, for example, have a similar prohibition? How about a nymph?
If it is the case that necromancy is something that fey-like creatures abhor - which sounds like what you’re suggesting here - would it be so terrible if (say) fey creatures got something like a +2 DC to all their enchantment school spells?
Understand that it is not the idea of removing spells I object to per se - it is the lack of compensation. If you take something away, you should give something back. I can’t believe that there’s no mechanic you could implement to compensate for this that wouldn’t violate the setting - there must be some middle ground here.
By that logic, the elves never would have gone to war with the humans thousands of years ago. Even with the humans destroying the forests, the elves would not have gone to war, because stopping the humans would be ‘imposing a restriction’.
Hmm.
One of the reasons I don’t use alignments in my campaign is because everybody has a different idea about what they are.
But it sounds in this case that you’re arguing chaotic good means “do whatever you like as long as it doesn’t interfere with others” - a perfectly reasonable definition; I’ll get behind that.
Unfortunately, this therefore begs the question: what harm does necromancy (et al) do? The way it is expressed at the moment it looks like purely a personal preference - and coming down on someone’s non-harmful different beliefs is definitely not the sort of thing that falls under a chaotic alignment. I’m cool with the idea that elves would oppose necromancy if it is harmful to others (the same way they went to war with humans, and so forth); I’m just not clear on what harm it does. It surely has to be more than “I don’t like it” in order for a chaotic being to shun another for using it.
To use a real world example here: let us assume, for the moment, that the use of marijuana is completely non-harmful to others. (Whether or not you believe that is an interesting side argument, but not relevant for the purposes of this discussion). I can see a lawful person crusading to have it banned despite this, but I would say that individuals who personally didn’t like the idea of the drug and yet opposed it’s ban would be classically chaotic (probably chaotic good).
On the other hand, the most chaotic good hippy in the real world isn’t going to protest that murder should be acceptable.
The analogy is this: it looks to me that practicing necromancy is like taking marijuana - distasteful, but not harmful. But for elves to be opposed to it implies that it is harmful, and it is known to be harmful. So what harm does it do?
Well, that’s true. Most elves won’t cast any spell that hurts nature. But some schools are more damaging to either nature or their own nature for various reasons.
And that’s the point: I want to know what damage they do, so that I can understand those reasons.
I fail to see how Blindness/Deafness harms nature. It’s tricky to see that Finger of Death does (assuming you aren’t using it on a treant or something). Wall of Force doesn’t seem to make Tinkerbell die.
Certainly I can see that virtually any use of Animate Dead would be an affront to nature. So might using Burning Hands to burn down a forest, or Control Weather to impose a drought. But I would say that Animate Dead is bad because it creates undead (which are non-natural) rather than because it’s necromantic; I would also argue that despite the fact that Burning Hands and Control Weather are transmutation, they are still bad if used in that fashion.
Being creatures of nature, necromancy spells are totally repugnant to elves. It’s a complete perversion of their very being. Necromancy to an elf is like a water elemental on the plane of fire.
Even spells like Blindness/Deafness? Not all necromantic spells are death magic; not all necromantic spells are evil. And frankly, I could totally get behind a concept such as “elves don’t cast spells with the death descriptor” or even “elves don’t cast spells with an alignment descriptor”. Both of these seem to fit; alignments are “unnatural” (animals don’t have them), and snuffing out someone’s life force sounds pretty unnatural as well.
Conjuration itself isn’t bad, but the sub-type of Summoning conflicts with the elven nature of free will. So it’s not liked either, but not as seriously so as necromancy, and can be practiced without worry. Consider it a `shady’ school.
The issue here is one of consistency - the sanctioned variant adds Shambler to the elven arcane spell list. In any case, I assume what applies to Summoning would apply even more to Calling spells.
To be frank, the loss of the Summoning school isn’t really much of a problem to most wizards, as the Summon Monster series of spells are not particularly potent. Calling spells mean that you miss out on Gate, but many DMs (myself included) ban that spell completely anyway due to its tremendous potential for abuse.
If other conjuration spells (healing, creation, teleportation) are OK, then great. This is exactly the sort of answer I’m looking for - it would seem that the inclusion of Shambler is incorrect, in this case.
Evocation is not well liked, because it’s too overt and obvious use of maebhaigl for most elves. But it’s not a shunned school or anything. This is mostly just a non-preference among elves.
OK, so using evocation is more a sort of “Oh look, what a loser” rather than anything more serious. That’s cool too.
This is the sort of thing I was after - thank you. I think, under the circumstances, that I am still of the opinion that elves are getting mechanically screwed over here, but I also think this can be rectified. Something like a bonus to enchantment/charm spell DCs (which would be in keeping with their fey-like nature) would probably go some way towards alleviating this. It does mean that virtually all elven wizards would become specialists, of course, but that’s not a terrible side effect.
It might also help to have some specific social penalties applied to elves that break these rules. Would it be enough to simply apply the usual -4/+4 that they get with other races to elves as well, or should it go further than that?
- they lack sufficient clarity. I still have absolutely no idea what evocation spells or conjuration spells are allowed. Assuming I wanted to run a “setting compatible” game of Birthright, what do I tell the player who wants to play an elven sorcerer or wizard?