Kindly Necromancers

[Kromm]

One thing that came up in a past fantasy campaign was the party necromancer who used the Zombie spell as "Resurrection Lite." The PCs were capable of hiring someone to cast the Resurrection spell but not of casting it themselves; so when somebody died on a quest, a quick casting of Zombie let that person get up, carry their own gear, help out in fights, and eventually drag their corpse back to town to be raised from the dead. The cadaver wasn't dead weight, pardon the pun.

Strictly speaking, this was 100% by the book: The Resurrection spell does not specify that the dead body can't have been previously reanimated by necromancy. The Zombie spell does not state that it prevents later resurrection. In fact, both spells have roughly the same requirement: a relatively intact corpse.

As the GM, I was open to this because it was clever. I let the player of the dead PC control the zombie because, on the meta level, it kept that player engaged and presented an interesting roleplaying challenge: Plenty of gamers secretly love the idea of playing a creepy, amoral monster that goes around saying, "Braaaaains!" . . . for a short time. I even house-ruled that the Resurrection penalty was at -1 per two or three days spent as a zombie, not the usual -1 per day since death.

Anyway, the point is that the necromancer was generally seen in a good light because that person helped ensure that dead friends got back to town with all their equipment, and eventually resurrected. Of course, once that character learned the Teleport spell and could shuttle people to and from town (Heavy encumbrance is pretty forgiving), people did prefer "Teleport back to the temple, pay for the Resurrection, and return to the adventure."