[RPG] Can a Good-aligned ‘Necromancer’ cast the Animate Objects spell on a bunch of corpses

alignmentanimated-objectsdnd-3.5espellstargeting

  1. Is there anything stopping you using Animate Objects, with or without Permanency, to affect a bunch of corpses? If so, what? And would that qualify as an Evil, Chaotic, or Neutral act?
  2. Have you ever heard of this being done?

Best Answer

is there anything stopping the Good-aligned 'Necromancer'?

There shouldn’t really be one anyway.

Is there anything stopping you using Animate Objects, with or without Permanency, to affect a bunch of corpses? If so, what? And would that qualify as an Evil, Chaotic, or Neutral act?

I believe corpses are objects, on the basis of the definition of an object (something without a Charisma or Wisdom score) and what it means to have or not have those abilities:

Any creature that can perceive its environment in any fashion has at least 1 point of Wisdom.

Any creature capable of telling the difference between itself and things that are not itself has at least 1 point of Charisma.

Since a corpse is neither self-aware, nor aware of its surroundings, it should not have Charisma or Wisdom scores, and therefore should be an object.

Moreover, a creature (that is, a not-object, since in game terms everything is either a creature or an object), requires being “alive or otherwise active,” which a corpse isn’t generally.

That said, the game never comes out and says that corpses are objects, and several spells that specifically target corpses lack the (Object) notation that they should have (including some that allow saving throws). Finally, a lot of object-targeting spells were most likely not written with corpses in mind. The mending spell, in particular, seems problematic (since it means a cantrip can do what a higher-level spell, gentle repose, does, and that’s not supposed to happen).

Anyway, point is, if a corpse is an object (and I think it is), animate objects seems (oddly enough) legit. The animate objects spell isn’t inherently Evil like animate dead, nor will your animated corpse involve a soul forcibly bound to it or whatever it is that makes animate dead evil in the first place. Depending on your setting, desecrating a corpse may be considered Evil or un-Lawful.

Have you ever heard of this being done?

No, I have not.