A Treatise on the Efficacy of Golemancy as opposed to Necromancy - A Dark Lord's How-To

[GlassRose]

This is why Maldex the Ever Blackest's Primer on Dark Magic should be mandatory reading for any aspiring Dark Magician. It contains the very basic information so many upstarts these days seem to have missed. Here are some highlights for those that don't have the time.

The primary values in undead servants aren't their individual viability as workers, combat units, artisans, or lieutenants, as these are all qualities you yourself possess or have more permanent and competent minions for, it's affinity, sustainability, and style, or ASS for short.

Affinity: As a Dark Magician, you will inevitably be pursuing immortality should you not already possess it for whatever reason (git gud), and even if you are you will eventually be pursuing it anyways to maintain the lives of your most valuable minions and your captured princesses (once they inevitably fall for you). In so doing, you will turn to Necromancy as a means of sustaining life while preserving mental faculty or physical appearance, resulting in a high degree of affinity with the undead. This affinity will provide you with an increased understanding of your undead minions, and could potentially lead to an evolution in the nature of your undead minions, such as them developing sentience from spending time around other sentient undead like liches or others preserved immortally by Necromancy, a flat impossibility with Golemancy.

Sustainable: As a Dark Magician, you will inevitably be pursuing immortality should you not already possess it for whatever reason (nerd), means the long term viability of your eternal empire is incredibly important. In this regard, Necromancy, as an extension of the magic of the cycle of life and death, offers vastly superior options to the realm of artifice in which Golemancy resides. Not only are undead servants more economically viable, taking a tenth of the time and effort to create on average, non-minion focused necromancy can further solidify this economic viability. Necromancy spells originally designed to cause harm to the living by rotting people alive can instead be purposed to increase soil fertility by walking many corpses of your enemies to the fields and rotting them to fertilizer where they lay, ensuring prosperity for your willing subjects - a benefit Golemancy cannot provide. This is only one of myriad applications for Necromancy that Artifice cannot replicate.

Stylish: As a Dark Magician, your appearance matters. Fear, awe, admiration, respect, competence, and power are only some of the traits the appearance of you, your magic, and your minions must maintain in order to ensure your reign is as peaceful and fulfilling as possible. Pursuant to this, the magic of Artifice only offers you only falsehoods, that once seen through, lose all aesthetic value beyond the technical details of construction, something your average subject won't understand. While the average peasant girl under your rule may be awed by the size, shape, and animacy of Golems, and perhaps even respectful of your power over them, you will fail to impress her more primally with this display. Undead, despite requiring less effort and time to create, evoke more primal, emotional responses in your subjects. You may make a peasant girl squeal in fear over a single, well equipped and groomed zombie less than half the size of a titanic golem, purely by engaging your superior style and skill with an art form more receptive to such endeavors. Better yet, a skeletal legion, equipped with the finest armor and weapons you can commission and enchant, will serve as a testament to your skill and influence, as well as demonstrating your finesse and leadership acumen. In addition to this, the living feel instinctively uncomfortable around the undead, heightening their already superior stylistic impact.

Remember, Up-and-coming Dark Magicians, undead are ASS.

Blatant propaganda and falsehoods!

The degree of skill with necromancy to make undead of sufficient pleasantness, longevity, and intellect is comparable to the level of skill required for a golemancer to create golems that can experience all the finer pleasures of life while still maintaining the advantages being a golem imposes, making it the far superior method of immortality. Immortality via necromancy is inherently flawed because how can one transcend mortality if you still cling to your weak mortal flesh?

And the advantages in the progression of your undead that you suggest, doesn't even bring the undead up to the level golems started at.

For your points as to sustainability, the undead are actually less sustainable than golems. Undead body wear out, eventually becoming incapable of maintaining animation, and then you need more corpses, which are harder to obtain outside of war time. Golems, however, can be smelt back down and reforged, good as new, with very little waste. And golems, once advanced enough, become superior to the living in every way, meaning one doesn't have to care about the fertility of the soil, because one doesn't have to eat. Not to mention that necromantic spells don't actually help the soil that much. They may speed up the rate of decay, but that doesn't add new nutrients, and the same effect could be acquired by spreading compost the normal way. The labor not being a concern because it could be handled by golems, whereas a necromancer would be required for that spell, meaning an intelligent undead or living human, who's time could be better spent elsewhere.

For your points on style. What do you gain by scaring the little village girl? What does the fear of such an insignificant life matter? What one must seek to terrify are the soldiers. Soldiers who, by their very profession, are already familiar with and desensitized to the dead. Perfect killing machines, lethality evident in their very form, will be of more terror to the targets that matter, than shambling corpses.

A skeletal legion invokes none of the sense of skill or leadership you suggest. You are a scavenger by nature as a necromancer, so that is all your enemies will see. And humans are afraid of many things. They may feel uncomfortable by the presence of the undead, but just as well are they afraid of things that appear unnatural, by things they can't understand, that don't fit into what they know. And golems lean into this quite well. Furthermore, it is harder to attribute emotion to a golem. Humans attribute malice to the undead. It allows them to feel like they understand the enemy, it makes them secure. A golem can not be so easily understood. They are beings that humans fundamentally can not understand, and so they shall feel fear.

And the cold shine of lethal steel is far more pleasing to the eye than the half-rotten flesh and bare bone that comprises the majority of a necromancer's army.

Besides, it's well known that 'Maldex the Ever Blackest' is just a chuunibyou. And his real name is Jimmy.

 

[Thraben]

For your points on style. What do you gain by scaring the little village girl? What does the fear of such an insignificant life matter? What one must seek to terrify are the soldiers. Soldiers who, by their very profession, are already familiar with and desensitized to the dead. Perfect killing machines, lethality evident in their very form, will be of more terror to the targets that matter, than shambling corpses.

I see the dick joke didn't work... Sad. That usually gets em.

Blatant propaganda and falsehoods!

DASTARDLY! Maldex the Ever Blackest would never lie, or cheat, or propagandize, or gaslight, or gatekeep, or...

For your points as to sustainability, the undead are actually less sustainable than golems. Undead body wear out, eventually becoming incapable of maintaining animation, and then you need more corpses, which are harder to obtain outside of war time. Golems, however, can be smelt back down and reforged, good as new, with very little waste. And golems, once advanced enough, become superior to the living in every way, meaning one doesn't have to care about the fertility of the soil, because one doesn't have to eat. Not to mention that necromantic spells don't actually help the soil that much. They may speed up the rate of decay, but that doesn't add new nutrients, and the same effect could be acquired by spreading compost the normal way. The labor not being a concern because it could be handled by golems, whereas a necromancer would be required for that spell, meaning an intelligent undead or living human, who's time could be better spent elsewhere.

I think this is actually the first place you're objectively wrong. Necromancy as a school of magic is quite literally 'the school of sustainability'. No other school of magic can do sustainability better than it. Sure, undead MINIONS aren't particularly sustainable, but the rest of the school of magic is THE school for sustainability, that's the point I'-Maldex is trying to make. This is the only objectively wrong thing I've seen so far.

A skeletal legion invokes none of the sense of skill or leadership you suggest. You are a scavenger by nature as a necromancer, so that is all your enemies will see. And humans are afraid of many things. They may feel uncomfortable by the presence of the undead, but just as well are they afraid of things that appear unnatural, by things they can't understand, that don't fit into what they know. And golems lean into this quite well. Furthermore, it is harder to attribute emotion to a golem. Humans attribute malice to the undead. It allows them to feel like they understand the enemy, it makes them secure. A golem can not be so easily understood. They are beings that humans fundamentally can not understand, and so they shall feel fear.

And the cold shine of lethal steel is far more pleasing to the eye than the half-rotten flesh and bare bone that comprises the majority of a necromancer's army.

The style bit, again, was all just setup for the village girl dick joke, but taking it more seriously, I believe the cultural and artistic impact of some of the most popular media of all time speak for themselves here. There's a reason that even Terminator, ostensibly entirely about murder-machine golems, uses the imagery of human corpses and organs in their designs to evoke emotional responses. Less specifically, death-related iconography and imagery is broadly more impactful on the average audience than artifice is. There's a reason we call mid-late 2000s movie antagonists "the big grey blob problem" while comparatively fewer criticisms are levied against the plethora of death, undeath, or corpse and morbidity flavored stuff

 

[GlassRose]

I think this is actually the first place you're objectively wrong. Necromancy as a school of magic is quite literally 'the school of sustainability'. No other school of magic can do sustainability better than it. Sure, undead MINIONS aren't particularly sustainable, but the rest of the school of magic is THE school for sustainability, that's the point I'-Maldex is trying to make. This is the only objectively wrong thing I've seen so far.

No.

If we want to talk about what necromancy 'literally' means, then it mean divination via the medium of death, coming from the roots 'necro-' meaning death, and '-mancy' meaning divination. In modern times, '-mancy' has grown to a slightly different meaning, either that of manipulation, or an otherwise broad and nebulously defined 'magic'.

Necromancy, by the word itself, is the magic of death. Death is the ending of life. It's the complete opposite of sustainment.

Necromancy by the pop culture idea of necromancy, is the art of reversing death, or the creation of the undead, or just magic relating to the undead.

Death isn't a real, fundamental thing. It's an idea, a process. It's not something that can, itself, be manipulated. Logically then, Necromancy is magic that focuses on the physical process of dying, to stop, cause, or reverse it. It's really only tangentially related to sustainability, in so far as sustainability relates to life. It has no effect on that which does not live in the first place. And nothing about the magic itself is inherently sustainable at all. The only relation necromancy has to sustainability, is sustaining life, or a facsimile of it.

And neither is necromancy an extension to the cycle of life and death. It's a stopping block, it's a clot, it's the grey zone in between, and that position is inherently unsustainable, it's unnatural, the natural state of things is either wholly dead or wholly alive. So the magic of necromancy is the only thing keeping things in that state, and it's fighting against the cycle of life and death. And it will inevitably lose, at some point.

And your example for one of the things necromancy could do that golemancy couldn't, that you tried to use to support the idea of a myriad of unnamed applications of necromancy that golemancy can't supplant, was exactly something that golemancy could do, just by carrying corpses and letting them decay the natural way, resulting in an identical effect without the need of the direct interaction of a mage. And in no way did your claim support the idea of necromancy being the magic of sustainability to begin with. It felt shoehorned into the category.

But hey, we can agree on one thing: Undead are ass.

 

[Rhaps]

Nah, I'd go with Necromancy with this one. I got ptsd from one of the "Pregnant Women Powered Death Machine" which utilizes pregnant women as battery for Golems.

 

[Thraben]

No.

If we want to talk about what necromancy 'literally' means, then it mean divination via the medium of death, coming from the roots 'necro-' meaning death, and '-mancy' meaning divination. In modern times, '-mancy' has grown to a slightly different meaning, either that of manipulation, or an otherwise broad and nebulously defined 'magic'.

Necromancy, by the word itself, is the magic of death. Death is the ending of life. It's the complete opposite of sustainment.

Necromancy by the pop culture idea of necromancy, is the art of reversing death, or the creation of the undead, or just magic relating to the undead.

Death isn't a real, fundamental thing. It's an idea, a process. It's not something that can, itself, be manipulated. Logically then, Necromancy is magic that focuses on the physical process of dying, to stop, cause, or reverse it. It's really only tangentially related to sustainability, in so far as sustainability relates to life. It has no effect on that which does not live in the first place. And nothing about the magic itself is inherently sustainable at all. The only relation necromancy has to sustainability, is sustaining life, or a facsimile of it.

And neither is necromancy an extension to the cycle of life and death. It's a stopping block, it's a clot, it's the grey zone in between, and that position is inherently unsustainable, it's unnatural, the natural state of things is either wholly dead or wholly alive. So the magic of necromancy is the only thing keeping things in that state, and it's fighting against the cycle of life and death. And it will inevitably lose, at some point.

And your example for one of the things necromancy could do that golemancy couldn't, that you tried to use to support the idea of a myriad of unnamed applications of necromancy that golemancy can't supplant, was exactly something that golemancy could do, just by carrying corpses and letting them decay the natural way, resulting in an identical effect without the need of the direct interaction of a mage. And in no way did your claim support the idea of necromancy being the magic of sustainability to begin with. It felt shoehorned into the category.

But hey, we can agree on one thing: Undead are ass.

TL;DR

D&D3.5e, the place Maldex is coming from.

The summation of the point I'm trying to make is simple

Undead minions are *Fucking worthless* at the powerscale we're talking about, but that's ok, because golems are worse.

---

Hey man undead minions ARE garbage. They're not great. Awful, even, but I'm talking about D&D magic, or more specifically 3.5e which I'm using to make Maldex's arguments, they're probably even worse in reality than both of us are assuming. What is true though, is that in D&D, Necromancy is magic that manipulates life and death, whereas Golemancy isn't a school at all. It falls under magic item creation or the various animacy spells in Transmutation and Conjuration's 'Creation' subschool.

The rules of what can and cannot be a golem are VERY strict, they're very expensive, require an XP cost (meaning for our purposes each golem you create permanently weakens you - even if it dies in battle immediately), and all have very common weaknesses. Hell, the arguable best player craftable Golem is the Undead themed one, precisely because the limited set of undead traits it inherits and its cheap construction material (humanoid corpses) make it the only one WORTH crafting without an arbitrary amount of money and XP. Making such golems is slow, prohibitive, and because of how action economy works will be less effective in combat that a comparable amount of HD worth of undead. The only benefit to golems are their minor magic immunity passive (quite good) and the fact that you can buy them (also notable).

By contrast, D&D undead are CHEAP, and behave like it. There's a reason my joke is that they're ass. Each individual zombie can choose BETWEEN moving or attacking each round, and they can't multiattack. Skeletons are better, not having a mobility restriction in exchange for being much less tanky, but they're generic trash mobs. That is, until you realize that you can create a functionally arbitrary amount of undead for virtually free*, the only limit is how many you can actually control. The limit there is 4 x Caster Level HD, or FUNCTIONALLY 16ish x Caster level with a Very specific build designed for exactly that purpose. You don't need me to point out that a level 7 amateur Wizard with 28 Skeletal longbowmen is a more significant threat than a level 8 wizard that can't afford to make or buy a golem.

Furthermore, the Creation subschool of conjuration is objectively the worst Conjuration subschool to be thematically for minions, nothing you can create other than Golems work as minions, but you're one of the best spell schools at being a straightup magical duelist and combat control caster. AND you have Gate, the best spell period. Funny, that. Also, you have complete Ex Nihilo matter creation that only costs XP to do, which means you can straightup trade your magical power for arbitrary amounts of any creatable material lmao. Why do you want minions? You don't need minions, you have GATE. If you want to go further, you're already in CONJURATION, the summoning subschool is right there, offering you far more combat effective and economically efficient minions than Golems and Undead combined. Why not be a summoner with Creation as a backup for dueling and controlling the battlefield for your summons?

Necromancy is a lot less focused on undead minions than people realize. The sole benefit to undead minions is that undead are the dedicated 'horde' type monster you can control, discounting swarms***, you can get more undead cheaper and earlier that any other type of minion, and they don't need to be individually good when you have 30 of them with longbows without needing to cast a single spell during an actual fight like the summoner does and without needing arbitrary amounts of money like the golem guy. One skeleton will beat 1 common soldier in a fight, too, so it isn't even like that part is really your concern. The problem with undead is that... well, they're ass. That's all they do, horde shit units with zero upkeep cost that are just good enough to justify their existence, nothing more. Better than golems, 100%, since a horde of 32 skeletons with weapons is both cheaper and more combat viable than the cheapest available golem at the same level, but the moment you face them against a target that can't be beaten by horde strategy (such as a singular fireball) they fold.

No, Necromancy's strength is stuff you don't usually think about. A mountain of debuffs that work on almost everything and that cost nothing, myriad ways to make corpses useful to you even without undead, a whole host of passive defensive feats that make you basically immune to half the debuffs in the game, and of course, the best instant death effects. All of this at material costs ranging from 'Free' to 'Pocket Lint'. That's without going into the non-combat catalogue or even mentioning the various necromancy spells that are just 'other spell school's spell but bone or corpse themed'.


Necromancy thematically is the school of making literally everything useful, so long as it is fleshy. It kills without waste, recycles the corpses, and efficiently and effectively performs all tasks asked of it. It's a workhorse school and style of magic, very no-nonsense. It has 1 job: Do things efficiently and sustainably, and it does that job. It is, however, DOGSHIT at minions if you goal is and endgame army of anything, be it soldiers or laborers. It's genuinely more effective to just hire real people to do your working for you and to fight your wars yourself, you have some of the strongest AoE 'kill everything in this location' spells in the game, Horrid Wilting and Wail of the Banshee, and you also have Clone. Which is Clone.

Golems are inefficient wastes of money, time, and power (because again they cost a permanent resource you can't circumvent even with infinite money) for a minion succinctly summarized as 'A big fucking guy'. In a world with magic, 'A big fucking guy' does not solve many problem, but Golems do have one niche as vanity projects that double as a 'build your own barbarian'. The magic that informs Golems is much better at doing other things, and is even then much better suited to performing other functions within its subcategory.

Summons are THE gold standard of minion. They're free, easily buffable by a million different things, completely disposable, quite competent even without buffs (8th level summon builds can achieve strength rivalling entire adventuring parties by themselves if they know how to wargame), and have plenty of endgame options to shore up the limited weaknesses they do have, such as time restrictions and weakness to banishment.


Conclusion: Yeah. Undead suck as minions. Golems do too, just in a different way. It's an argument between the recycling horde strategy or the big dumb expensive idiots strategy, and surprise surprise neither is very good. Minions as a concept are more of a style thing than a function thing anyways, at the level of power we're talking about, the theoretical caster we're referring to has no need for minions other than style.


*Compared to Golems. A Flesh Golem with 10HD costs 10,500 GP and 780 XP, or 1050 GP and 78 XP per HD of Golem. Animate Dead costs 25GP per HD of undead, regardless of if you create Skeletons or Zombies. It isn't a question.

**Excepting the number of combat spells like Acid Arrow/Fog, Cloudkill, etc. Creation is a weird school

***Swarms are functionally single entities that 'float' into being a number of much smaller and weaker entities after taking a sufficient amount of damage.

****Clerics are also the best undead users. In fact, Cleric is HOW you get that 16HD/Caster level undead army.

 

[TheEldritchGod]

Fools!

Both sides are wrong! You clearly have not learned the truth that has been hidden from. You by the uniparty that is the necro-golem-industrial complex!

OOZE ARE THE SUPERIOR SERVANTS!!!

YES, With the newly developed ooze puppet spell, and a simple expenditure of experience through the permanency enchantment, you can have an eternally loyal and virtually unstoppable killing machine that is infinitely adaptable!

Oozes are mindless, thus that pesky free will is not an issue. They come in a wide variety of forms to serve your every need! Brown mold for waste heat management! Ocher jelly for metal clad heroes come to invade your Sanctuary! Why just the other day I found an infestation of mind flyers in the lowest level of my lair.

Their electrically powered elder brain was no match for Hot Dog, my pet mustard jelly that gains mass when hit with lightning!

They don't sleep. They don't age. They never talk back. And most importantly, they won't go running off with the bard just because he's got an 18 charisma even if you forgot their birthday for the third time that's no excuse to go running off and whoring it with the rest of the adventuring party, JANET!!!

Undead is the superior minion?
Superior food for my slimes, you mean!

Golems are unstoppable killing machines?
Tell me, among their many resistances, did you remember to pick up immunity to DIGESTION?

I didn't think so.


OOZE MASTER RACE FOREVER!!!

 

[Thraben]

Fools!

Both sides are wrong! You clearly have not learned the truth that has been hidden from. You by the uniparty that is the necro-golem-industrial complex!

OOZE ARE THE SUPERIOR SERVANTS!!!

YES, With the newly developed ooze puppet spell, and a simple expenditure of experience through the permanency enchantment, you can have an eternally loyal and virtually unstoppable killing machine that is infinitely adaptable!

Oozes are mindless, thus that pesky free will is not an issue. They come in a wide variety of forms to serve your every need! Brown mold for waste heat management! Ocher jelly for metal clad heroes come to invade your Sanctuary! Why just the other day I found an infestation of mind flyers in the lowest level of my lair.

Their electrically powered elder brain was no match for Hot Dog, my pet mustard jelly that gains mass when hit with lightning!

They don't sleep. They don't age. They never talk back. And most importantly, they won't go running off with the bard just because he's got an 18 charisma even if you forgot their birthday for the third time that's no excuse to go running off and whoring it with the rest of the adventuring party, JANET!!!

Undead is the superior minion?
Superior food for my slimes, you mean!

Golems are unstoppable killing machines?
Tell me, among their many resistances, did you remember to pick up immunity to DIGESTION?

I didn't think so.


OOZE MASTER RACE FOREVER!!!

You fool! Oozes are powerless against my RUBBER VEST

 

[TheEldritchGod]

Bah!

You furken glumpsuckers don't have a frugin clue.

If yer gonna be making an army, you just can't go wrong with hand crafted dream chimera. When you craft with dreams, the sky's the limit! Literally! I made a giant death broggle out of sky, moonlight and the tears of a swan. It was five hundred feet tall and had cannons that could shoot smaller cannons as ammunition!

Okay okay okay, disbelief and banality are a concern, but us supernaturals don't go fighting in front of the normies, do we? As long as there are people with hopes and dreams to strip mine, there will always be material to make an army of dream creatures that can do anything you can imagine.

Undead. Golems... bah. Where's the walking tanks? Where's the flash? The style? If your army of minions is faceless and stinky, does winning really matter?

You lost before you even begun.

Don't settle for second best.

Knocker constructed dream chimera is the only way to fly!

You fool! Oozes are powerless against my RUBBER VEST

Gah! Baking soda! My one weakness!
....

**The vampire cloaked in living shadows raised an eyebrow**

What the hell is this shit?

Look, here's what you do. You and your pack roll into a small town. Capture everyone. Keep half as food, the other half to drain dry and bury in a pit. Those who manage to climb out of their own grave are worthy of being one of the Sabbat.

Feed their friends to the new fledglings, then use the Viniculum to bind everyone to one another by unshakable bonds of blood.

Then just unleash five hundred of these guys against your enemies and anyone who survives gets to join the upper ranks. Survival of the fittest.

You talking about those iterationX idiots with their HITMarks? Those terminator golems are a joke. Yeah, they can take a hit, but a little potency, a little celebrity and a titanium chainsaw and they're just so much scrap.

As for that Giovanni/Samedi/Tremere undead zombie crap, a shotgun fixes those rotting freaks easily enough.

If you want minions, a pack of bloodbound feral fledglings straight out of the grave beats all that magic shit.

 

[GlassRose]

TL;DR

D&D3.5e, the place Maldex is coming from.

The summation of the point I'm trying to make is simple

Undead minions are *Fucking worthless* at the powerscale we're talking about, but that's ok, because golems are worse.

---

Hey man undead minions ARE garbage. They're not great. Awful, even, but I'm talking about D&D magic, or more specifically 3.5e which I'm using to make Maldex's arguments, they're probably even worse in reality than both of us are assuming. What is true though, is that in D&D, Necromancy is magic that manipulates life and death, whereas Golemancy isn't a school at all. It falls under magic item creation or the various animacy spells in Transmutation and Conjuration's 'Creation' subschool.

The rules of what can and cannot be a golem are VERY strict, they're very expensive, require an XP cost (meaning for our purposes each golem you create permanently weakens you - even if it dies in battle immediately), and all have very common weaknesses. Hell, the arguable best player craftable Golem is the Undead themed one, precisely because the limited set of undead traits it inherits and its cheap construction material (humanoid corpses) make it the only one WORTH crafting without an arbitrary amount of money and XP. Making such golems is slow, prohibitive, and because of how action economy works will be less effective in combat that a comparable amount of HD worth of undead. The only benefit to golems are their minor magic immunity passive (quite good) and the fact that you can buy them (also notable).

By contrast, D&D undead are CHEAP, and behave like it. There's a reason my joke is that they're ass. Each individual zombie can choose BETWEEN moving or attacking each round, and they can't multiattack. Skeletons are better, not having a mobility restriction in exchange for being much less tanky, but they're generic trash mobs. That is, until you realize that you can create a functionally arbitrary amount of undead for virtually free*, the only limit is how many you can actually control. The limit there is 4 x Caster Level HD, or FUNCTIONALLY 16ish x Caster level with a Very specific build designed for exactly that purpose. You don't need me to point out that a level 7 amateur Wizard with 28 Skeletal longbowmen is a more significant threat than a level 8 wizard that can't afford to make or buy a golem.

Furthermore, the Creation subschool of conjuration is objectively the worst Conjuration subschool to be thematically for minions, nothing you can create other than Golems work as minions, but you're one of the best spell schools at being a straightup magical duelist and combat control caster. AND you have Gate, the best spell period. Funny, that. Also, you have complete Ex Nihilo matter creation that only costs XP to do, which means you can straightup trade your magical power for arbitrary amounts of any creatable material lmao. Why do you want minions? You don't need minions, you have GATE. If you want to go further, you're already in CONJURATION, the summoning subschool is right there, offering you far more combat effective and economically efficient minions than Golems and Undead combined. Why not be a summoner with Creation as a backup for dueling and controlling the battlefield for your summons?

Necromancy is a lot less focused on undead minions than people realize. The sole benefit to undead minions is that undead are the dedicated 'horde' type monster you can control, discounting swarms***, you can get more undead cheaper and earlier that any other type of minion, and they don't need to be individually good when you have 30 of them with longbows without needing to cast a single spell during an actual fight like the summoner does and without needing arbitrary amounts of money like the golem guy. One skeleton will beat 1 common soldier in a fight, too, so it isn't even like that part is really your concern. The problem with undead is that... well, they're ass. That's all they do, horde shit units with zero upkeep cost that are just good enough to justify their existence, nothing more. Better than golems, 100%, since a horde of 32 skeletons with weapons is both cheaper and more combat viable than the cheapest available golem at the same level, but the moment you face them against a target that can't be beaten by horde strategy (such as a singular fireball) they fold.

No, Necromancy's strength is stuff you don't usually think about. A mountain of debuffs that work on almost everything and that cost nothing, myriad ways to make corpses useful to you even without undead, a whole host of passive defensive feats that make you basically immune to half the debuffs in the game, and of course, the best instant death effects. All of this at material costs ranging from 'Free' to 'Pocket Lint'. That's without going into the non-combat catalogue or even mentioning the various necromancy spells that are just 'other spell school's spell but bone or corpse themed'.


Necromancy thematically is the school of making literally everything useful, so long as it is fleshy. It kills without waste, recycles the corpses, and efficiently and effectively performs all tasks asked of it. It's a workhorse school and style of magic, very no-nonsense. It has 1 job: Do things efficiently and sustainably, and it does that job. It is, however, DOGSHIT at minions if you goal is and endgame army of anything, be it soldiers or laborers. It's genuinely more effective to just hire real people to do your working for you and to fight your wars yourself, you have some of the strongest AoE 'kill everything in this location' spells in the game, Horrid Wilting and Wail of the Banshee, and you also have Clone. Which is Clone.

Golems are inefficient wastes of money, time, and power (because again they cost a permanent resource you can't circumvent even with infinite money) for a minion succinctly summarized as 'A big fucking guy'. In a world with magic, 'A big fucking guy' does not solve many problem, but Golems do have one niche as vanity projects that double as a 'build your own barbarian'. The magic that informs Golems is much better at doing other things, and is even then much better suited to performing other functions within its subcategory.

Summons are THE gold standard of minion. They're free, easily buffable by a million different things, completely disposable, quite competent even without buffs (8th level summon builds can achieve strength rivalling entire adventuring parties by themselves if they know how to wargame), and have plenty of endgame options to shore up the limited weaknesses they do have, such as time restrictions and weakness to banishment.


Conclusion: Yeah. Undead suck as minions. Golems do too, just in a different way. It's an argument between the recycling horde strategy or the big dumb expensive idiots strategy, and surprise surprise neither is very good. Minions as a concept are more of a style thing than a function thing anyways, at the level of power we're talking about, the theoretical caster we're referring to has no need for minions other than style.


*Compared to Golems. A Flesh Golem with 10HD costs 10,500 GP and 780 XP, or 1050 GP and 78 XP per HD of Golem. Animate Dead costs 25GP per HD of undead, regardless of if you create Skeletons or Zombies. It isn't a question.

**Excepting the number of combat spells like Acid Arrow/Fog, Cloudkill, etc. Creation is a weird school

***Swarms are functionally single entities that 'float' into being a number of much smaller and weaker entities after taking a sufficient amount of damage.

****Clerics are also the best undead users. In fact, Cleric is HOW you get that 16HD/Caster level undead army.

Okay but who's talking about D&D, I'm talking about magic. D&D's magic isn't in any way reflective of anything even somewhat applicable to what makes sense as magic, it's balanced to be a game, not to reflect the realities of what it would be like were magic truly real.

D&D magic shouldn't even be in the conversation. D&D lore has its place, but D&D magic doesn't belong in conversations of the minutaea of the way magic works because that's completely not the context that D&D magic is operating in.

Fools!

Both sides are wrong! You clearly have not learned the truth that has been hidden from. You by the uniparty that is the necro-golem-industrial complex!

OOZE ARE THE SUPERIOR SERVANTS!!!

YES, With the newly developed ooze puppet spell, and a simple expenditure of experience through the permanency enchantment, you can have an eternally loyal and virtually unstoppable killing machine that is infinitely adaptable!

Oozes are mindless, thus that pesky free will is not an issue. They come in a wide variety of forms to serve your every need! Brown mold for waste heat management! Ocher jelly for metal clad heroes come to invade your Sanctuary! Why just the other day I found an infestation of mind flyers in the lowest level of my lair.

Their electrically powered elder brain was no match for Hot Dog, my pet mustard jelly that gains mass when hit with lightning!

They don't sleep. They don't age. They never talk back. And most importantly, they won't go running off with the bard just because he's got an 18 charisma even if you forgot their birthday for the third time that's no excuse to go running off and whoring it with the rest of the adventuring party, JANET!!!

Undead is the superior minion?
Superior food for my slimes, you mean!

Golems are unstoppable killing machines?
Tell me, among their many resistances, did you remember to pick up immunity to DIGESTION?

I didn't think so.


OOZE MASTER RACE FOREVER!!!

Slimes are slow. Dumb. Hard to control in large quantities. Pretty susceptible to magic. Digestion is just acid, and not every type of metal or other golem material is vulnerable to that. Plus a thin mana shield is enough to render the acid useless, by virtue of just not letting it get close enough to react with anything. You have to feed them and train them. Very easy for them to just ignore your orders and eat you.

Nah, I'd go with Necromancy with this one. I got ptsd from one of the "Pregnant Women Powered Death Machine" which utilizes pregnant women as battery for Golems.

That is so inefficient. Just goes to show that there's wackos in any group.

Necromancy's not much better in that case anyway, what with raising the corpses of a pregnant woman and her baby very much being on the table, and incentivised for the necromancer for the horror factor.

 

[TheEldritchGod]

D&D magic shouldn't even be in the conversation. D&D lore has its place, but D&D magic doesn't belong in conversations of the minutaea of the way magic works because that's completely not the context that D&D magic is operating in.

You know, I've tried to be light hearted about this, but I'm done.

1. YOU DON'T SET THE RULES - Nobody died and made you boss. We are talking about FICTION here and you are creating arbitrary rules. You have your headcannon of what necromancy is and what Golemmancy is, but that is just that. YOUR. HEADCANNON.

Necromancy is contrived and inefficient. It's more about the aesthetic of being a necromancer than any practicality, no self-respecting mage or aspiring conqueror would devote themselves to necromancy, it's only the edgy, delusional, wack-jobs who would engage is such a worthless art. Unless the magic system is specifically enabling necromancers for some reason, there is no reason for someone to practice it.

Your EMOTIONAL bias shows through. It's nice to see your PREFERENCE but if you are actually trying to have an argument, this has no place. You didn't even DEFINE what necromancy and Golemancy is, so how the bloody FUCK can you make the claim that D&D doesn't belong here?

AT LEAST D&D HAS A FRAMEWORK WITH WHICH ONE CAN MAKE AN ARGUMENT.

That's why people default to using it.

I tried to, in a round about way, show that actually it all depends on the system. Necromancy and Golemancy would be IDENTICAL with no difference save special effect if you used Hero System. Both exist in WoD, but it DEPENDS on which SUBSYSTEM you are using. Changeling and Mage are the best for making golems as You see them, but there are actual RULES on making ACTUAL GOLEMS with Hunter's Hunted.

BTW, none of the golems you describe are golems. They are animated objects. ACTUAL GOLEMS are made of clay and have EMET on their forehead. PERIOD. If you aren't using D&D, then there are no other Golems. The "Alternate" golems in D&D are just shit Gary Gygax pulled out of his ASS. Even they aren't "Real" Golems.

Why bother raise corpses? Golems work better. Even for raising up armies with magic, self-replicating golems are more durable and there's no need for sourcing corpses, there's dirt and rock and wood everywhere. Can have them run smithies too to make 'em out of steel. And liches? Are better as golems. Why puppet a flimsy skeleton with your immortal soul when you could be piloting an armored behemoth of a golem made of solid steel (or, an outer layer of steel with a wooden or hollow core for reduced weight). And as a golem, you could integrate useful tools and weaponry and spells into your own body, far easier that a skeleton or undead flesh bag. Any being aiming to become a pinnacle life form would choose the perfection of steel over the weak and rotting flesh, or naked bone.

Making a whole lot of assumptions there, pal. Ash Oak is a tree that grows in graveyards and has the same properties as bone for the purposes of being enchanted by Necromancy. Just carve yourself a Skeleton and cast animate dead. BAM. Skeleton without a corpse.

THE SYSTEM DETERMINES THE RULES. You want to argue about how Necromancy sucks, and how it is evil, well, WHY IS IT EVIL? In WoD, it's just magic. In Hero, it's just magic. In D&D, there is actually EVIL ENERGY, so you can make that claim, but the SPECIAL EFFECT that NECROMANCY IS EVIL is just that, SPECIAL EFFECT. It is simply the Skin that you are putting on the framework that is "necromancy".

Technically speaking, bringing Jesus back from the dead was necromancy. Would you say THAT was evil?

Unless your framework comes with OBJECTIVE GOOD AND EVIL, then you can't really make an absolute moral judgement, can you?

Golems, like undead, never sleep nor tire, they are relentless. Damage to the frame means nothing so long as the core is intact. With undead, the core tends to be the head. Exposed, brittle, weak. A golem core tends to be in the chest, where it lays behind layers of steel. Golems are far more durable than the undead, because you can make them solid all the way through, whereas flesh is squishy and easily cut, and bones are relatively thin (in relation to a golem's limbs) and thus more susceptible to blunt damage. Undead are pungent, ugly, disgusting, and a vector of disease. They are a hazard to any living followers you may have, as well as yourself if you are not also undead. And who wants to be undead? Disgusting disgusting disgusting, a living hell, you take all of the vile traits of flesh and then multiply them. And you may suggest that undead being plague bringers is a good thing, weakens the enemy, but waiting is a disadvantage for an army of undead because during that time you aren't increasing your numbers, making you weaker to a direct attack (compared to a golem army), not to mention that an undead army will continue to decay. A golem army however, increases in numbers while waiting, and each individual is stronger than an undead soldier, on account of having more mass. A golem charge will not be stopped. A golem shield wall will not be broken. Whether a golem army is waiting, attacking, or defending, they are advancing their win condition. And they will outnumber an undead army.

Unless they are warforged brand golems, then they CAN get tired.

If you want to have an argument and make your case, FINE, but don't tell people "NUH-UH! I WON'T ALLOW YOU TO USE THOSE RULES!"

Rules, frameworks, systems, and "cannon" are all things that people use in order to argue about things THAT DON'T EXIST. Since these things don't exist, we need a common point to work from.

YOU FAILED TO DEFINE A COMMON POINT.

So other people, in the spirit of your thread, PICKED A POPULAR SET OF RULES and proceeded to argue, using THOSE DEFINITIONS.

You want to use DIFFERENT DEFINITIONS?
FINE.

DEFINE THEM FIRST, THEN YOU CAN TELL PEOPLE WHAT IS AND ISN'T ALLOWED. Because if people don't like how you define things, they won't play along and ignore you.

Undead armies start small and build up momentum. A golem army can be built up long before anyone has any idea that such an army is being built, at exponential rates, not dependent on how successful they are in battle (or more specifically, how many casualties they induce). By the time people are aware there's an army, they've already stormed the strongholds and capital.

And I would like to point out that the very concept of the video game Horizon Zero Dawn was what happened when someone made self-replicating "golems" and they killed all life on the planet.

 

[Thraben]

YOU FAILED TO DEFINE A COMMON POINT.

So other people, in the spirit of your thread, PICKED A POPULAR SET OF RULES and proceeded to argue, using THOSE DEFINITIONS.

You want to use DIFFERENT DEFINITIONS?
FINE.

DEFINE THEM FIRST, THEN YOU CAN TELL PEOPLE WHAT IS AND ISN'T ALLOWED. Because if people don't like how you define things, they won't play along and ignore you.

Thank you for pointing out the bad faith arguing Op was engaging in.

 

[Cipiteca396]

Maldex the Ever Blackest's Primer on Dark Magic

Link.

You don't need me to point out that a level 7 amateur Wizard with 28 Skeletal longbowmen is a more significant threat than a level 8 wizard that can't afford to make or buy a golem.

A level 8 wizard that hasn't wasted all their spell slots on animate dead is significantly more threatening than a level 7 necromancer...

Thank you for pointing out the bad faith arguing Op was engaging in.

Tbf, you directly tried to limit the rules to DnD first. It's fine if you want to use dnd rules for your side of argument, but not for you to limit the other side to dnd. That's just as "bad faith" as saying DnD isn't allowed at all.

That said, I would never in a million years play either a necromancer OR a golemancer in DnD. Not unless I was the DM, I suppose. It's just not designed for players to be able to do that.

 

[Thraben]

Link.

A level 8 wizard that hasn't wasted all their spell slots on animate dead is significantly more threatening than a level 7 necromancer...

Tbf, you directly tried to limit the rules to DnD first. It's fine if you want to use dnd rules for your side of argument, but not for you to limit the other side to dnd. That's just as "bad faith" as saying DnD isn't allowed at all.

That said, I would never in a million years play either a necromancer OR a golemancer in DnD. Not unless I was the DM, I suppose. It's just not designed for players to be able to do that.

Haven't written it yet. Maldex is just the name of a recurring NPC wizard in my campaigns that self styles as an 'end boss wizard'. I'll write the book one day.

That undead wizard doesn't need to have spent the slot THAT DAY, they could've done so six years ago and put the skeletons in a box, they'd be just as effective by the time he actually wants to use them. He gets to run his full complement of spells AND 28 minions. Definitely better than the other guy's zero minions, if only margainally.

I was more referring to OPs general attitude towards viewpoints from all commenters, not myself. He never established any sort of basis for his own claims but relentlessly tried to discredit the validity of other's arguments.

I have played Necro both as Wizard and Cleric, Golems/Constructs theme as a Wilder(Psychic Sorcerer), and many different variants of summoner. I can definitely understand why you wouldn't want to, I didn't either after the Wilder campaign. When I was in high school, I thought managing an army of units mid session was badass, and I was right, but now that I'm primarily a DM I would never willingly go back to being a player doing that stuff.

 

[GlassRose]

Thank you for pointing out the bad faith arguing Op was engaging in.

To be fair, I did make it fairly clear from the beginning that I was arguing in... less than good faith. 'If you think I'm wrong, you're wrong' and all.

You know, I've tried to be light hearted about this, but I'm done.

1. YOU DON'T SET THE RULES - Nobody died and made you boss. We are talking about FICTION here and you are creating arbitrary rules. You have your headcannon of what necromancy is and what Golemmancy is, but that is just that. YOUR. HEADCANNON.


Your EMOTIONAL bias shows through. It's nice to see your PREFERENCE but if you are actually trying to have an argument, this has no place. You didn't even DEFINE what necromancy and Golemancy is, so how the bloody FUCK can you make the claim that D&D doesn't belong here?

AT LEAST D&D HAS A FRAMEWORK WITH WHICH ONE CAN MAKE AN ARGUMENT.

That's why people default to using it.

I tried to, in a round about way, show that actually it all depends on the system. Necromancy and Golemancy would be IDENTICAL with no difference save special effect if you used Hero System. Both exist in WoD, but it DEPENDS on which SUBSYSTEM you are using. Changeling and Mage are the best for making golems as You see them, but there are actual RULES on making ACTUAL GOLEMS with Hunter's Hunted.

BTW, none of the golems you describe are golems. They are animated objects. ACTUAL GOLEMS are made of clay and have EMET on their forehead. PERIOD. If you aren't using D&D, then there are no other Golems. The "Alternate" golems in D&D are just shit Gary Gygax pulled out of his ASS. Even they aren't "Real" Golems.


Making a whole lot of assumptions there, pal. Ash Oak is a tree that grows in graveyards and has the same properties as bone for the purposes of being enchanted by Necromancy. Just carve yourself a Skeleton and cast animate dead. BAM. Skeleton without a corpse.

THE SYSTEM DETERMINES THE RULES. You want to argue about how Necromancy sucks, and how it is evil, well, WHY IS IT EVIL? In WoD, it's just magic. In Hero, it's just magic. In D&D, there is actually EVIL ENERGY, so you can make that claim, but the SPECIAL EFFECT that NECROMANCY IS EVIL is just that, SPECIAL EFFECT. It is simply the Skin that you are putting on the framework that is "necromancy".

Technically speaking, bringing Jesus back from the dead was necromancy. Would you say THAT was evil?

Unless your framework comes with OBJECTIVE GOOD AND EVIL, then you can't really make an absolute moral judgement, can you?


Unless they are warforged brand golems, then they CAN get tired.

If you want to have an argument and make your case, FINE, but don't tell people "NUH-UH! I WON'T ALLOW YOU TO USE THOSE RULES!"

Rules, frameworks, systems, and "cannon" are all things that people use in order to argue about things THAT DON'T EXIST. Since these things don't exist, we need a common point to work from.

YOU FAILED TO DEFINE A COMMON POINT.

So other people, in the spirit of your thread, PICKED A POPULAR SET OF RULES and proceeded to argue, using THOSE DEFINITIONS.

You want to use DIFFERENT DEFINITIONS?
FINE.

DEFINE THEM FIRST, THEN YOU CAN TELL PEOPLE WHAT IS AND ISN'T ALLOWED. Because if people don't like how you define things, they won't play along and ignore you.




And I would like to point out that the very concept of the video game Horizon Zero Dawn was what happened when someone made self-replicating "golems" and they killed all life on the planet.

I won't argue against the claim that I failed to properly define the rules I was playing by, very true. This is only my second post (thread? discission I went and made? Idk the lingo), I'll do better next time (hopefully. If there is a next time, and if I remember). This started with a half-serious post in another thread that turned out long and I thought was interesting so I turned it into a post of it's own to faff about with.

I will point right back at you though when you say the golems I described aren't golems. By your own words, you don't set the rules.

I said nothing about necromancy being evil? So I don't know where you're coming from with that whole tangent. I said it's worse than golemancy, and have been dissing it in general. I actually quite like necromancy, but struggled to find a way to incorporate it into my world and make it make sense.

Yes, that's just my magic system, other magic systems can enable necromancy much more. With my particular magic system and the way I see magic, necromancy is inefficient, primarily because I don't see 'Death' as element, as something that exists beyond simply life stopping, that can be manipulated. I don't see 'death energy' as something that exists in reality, and I wanted my elements to all reflect fundamental parts of what exists in our reality. Which means you have to go out of your way to raise the dead, and it's roughly the same difficulty as making a golem. You're attaching a soul to a rock or sack of flesh and then setting up spells to let it move. And more to make it follow orders. So that's where I'm coming from, I defined this poorly, I forget sometimes that other people don't see things the same way as I do.

The thing with ash oak is pretty out of nowhere (I'm assuming a D&D thing?), but even if it did work like that, doesn't necessarily solve all the issues with undead. Trees grow slowly. But, with enough prep, could work well enough to solve the renewability problem at least. Depending on the lore for why it works like that, anyhow.

My problem with D&D was not someone bringing up a different ruleset than the one I was using, I would be perfectly happy to adapt to another's ruleset for a discussion like this (or more specifically, their view of necromancy, contested by my view of golemancy). My problem is that it's D&D specifically that's being referenced. Or rather , the context behind what it is. It's a table top game. Spells and what's possible in D&D are not based on what would make sense if magic was reality, if it were a science. They're based on what makes a fun game. What they can and can't do is somewhat arbitrary, made for game balance purposes and fun and there's nothing wrong with that, but D&D is still probably the last place you should reference when talking about how magic would actually work.

In D&D rules-as-written, you can, without a speck of magic, move a hand-held object an arbitrary length of distance in just six seconds, potentially breaking the speed of light (theoretically. Would take too many peasants probably to actually do unless you were trying way to hard) if you line up enough peasants, and then if that last peasant were to throw it, it would lose all momentum and you'd roll damage as though that peasant were just tossing an object normally. D&D is not a reality analogue, whereas most stories try to adhere as close to what makes sense in reality+magic as they can, and their magic systems reflect that.

And I would like to point out that the very concept of the video game Horizon Zero Dawn was what happened when someone made self-replicating "golems" and they killed all life on the planet.

I can see that happening, yup yup, good times good times. Remind me why that can't happen if you have an undead army that can turn those they kill automatically? Or if it has intelligent undead that also happen to be necromancers?

 

[Lloyd]

There is no reason for golems to be more rebellious than undead. If anything, they'd be less rebellious because they never were alive in the first place, whereas with undead you may have traces of the original personality hanging around that can fight against your control. Especially common when you send one to fight against it's former companions.

An ensouled golem can have a soul consisting purely of the parts needed for physical function, and processing orders. The rest can be devoted to an expanded mana pool and mana well, mitigating the issues of requiring more energy to power.

You can also program your golem to be constantly training and expanding that mana pool, an instinct hard-wired into it's soul, whereas with undead you have to fight against the individual to make commands like that go through.

Necromancy maybe be a useful start-up skill depending on the setting, I will concede. And a good gateway into animancy (soul magic), which is by far the best way to make golems.

If that were possible, then resurrection would be super common in that world, and that is an uncommon trait. Usually, either undead have degraded intelligence (without careful prep and ritual, like to make a lich, which is also typically very expensive) due to the soul somehow degrading, or the soul itself already passes on and the undead is functioning off of little bits left behind, the imprint of the soul rather than the soul itself. Makes the undead a very unreliable witness.

Why would a metal golem be weak to lightning? Sure, it might conduct the electricity, but what damage does that actually do? Especially if the inner core is insulated. But even if it weren't, electricity damages organics because it messes with nerve signals, and because organics aren't great conductors so a lot of the energy is wasted as heat, which is damaging to organics. But metal passes electricity without being damaged just fine, that's why we use it to, transport electricity.

And yeah dirt golems are definitely sub-par, they're quick and dirty to make. They don't last long. However, they are still highly effective against common soldiers, even though they are weak to mages, making them good if you need to quickly throw together a force to quell an uprising without devoting more valuable resources.

Wood is not as bad as you think, it can be treated, and layered under either dirt or metal to protect it from fire and other environmental conditions. It's not really the best for combat, it's for scouts.

And if fire is equally effective against golems an undead (slander, golems can tank it way better), then the point still stands that golemancy > necromancy.

Nope. Quite the contrary, I was once an aspiring necromancer. But trying to apply it practically, at every step I found that a golem could do it better. It start simple. You make a few bone constructs, not an animation of any one living thing, but a special, custom-designed amalgamation. You convert your armies to just skeletons. You carve magic into all of their bones for an edge. You encase all of their bones in earth for extra defense. You're waiting out a siege, no new bones on their way, so you say, fuck it, why do I need the bones in there anyway? It's not like the bone constructs were controlled by a once living soul anyway, it would get too confused as to how to move. You know how souls work, you've been working with them all this time. You know how to recreate the parts to control locomotion, you're already an expert at subverting mana pools to power the spells, and it's not that hard to get a rough imprint of your own soul's intelligence to allow it to understand orders. And before you know it, you've made a golem.

And then you do it again. And again. At some point, you realize that if you transfer your own knowledge of golem making to your older golems with developed mana pools, they can make golems for you. They can make more golems, that can make more golems. Your undead army is long since forgotten. Chewed up and spat out, defeated by a coalition of the remaining kingdoms. It doesn't matter, you're already long since in hiding, underground in the far wilderness, watching your golem empire grow as they replace sodden dirt with cool steel. Your soul has long since been transferred into steel as well. You tunnel below your enemies, and one day, you surface. An unending horde of golems pours out from the underground, to take what's yours.

Oh, and, hard disagree. Undead only have the grisly horror thing going for them. Golems have that cold, unfeeling, unrelenting, foreign horror to them, a being that can not be related to by any living thing. They can have the cool factor of a knight, completely clad in armor and moving down hordes, the cool factor of 'big robot!', the cool/horror factor of many-legged spider-adjacent monstrosity (the legs are blades!), the coolness of a walking siege weapon, or fortress, or really anything else one can make, because they're just so customizable.

And becoming a golem is cool because you can make whatever body modifications you want, hell you could change things regularly! For any situation. And you can integrate spells and tools.

Becoming an undead is just kind of a self-inflicted nightmare, your soul is stuck to this rotting corpse, you've lost everything that made keeping the human form a worthwhile idea in the first place and now you're stuck. It's just a pathetic, failed attempt at achieving true immortality while maintaining your original form. If you were going to do that, you might as well have just made yourself a golem from the start.

I mean, if you wanna wallow in angst, then go ahead, become an undead, but if you're seeking ascendence, become a golem.

The origin story of the golem is that they rebel against their master.

There is no reason for golems to be more rebellious than undead. If anything, they'd be less rebellious because they never were alive in the first place, whereas with undead you may have traces of the original personality hanging around that can fight against your control. Especially common when you send one to fight against it's former companions.

An ensouled golem can have a soul consisting purely of the parts needed for physical function, and processing orders. The rest can be devoted to an expanded mana pool and mana well, mitigating the issues of requiring more energy to power.

You can also program your golem to be constantly training and expanding that mana pool, an instinct hard-wired into it's soul, whereas with undead you have to fight against the individual to make commands like that go through.

Necromancy maybe be a useful start-up skill depending on the setting, I will concede. And a good gateway into animancy (soul magic), which is by far the best way to make golems.

If that were possible, then resurrection would be super common in that world, and that is an uncommon trait. Usually, either undead have degraded intelligence (without careful prep and ritual, like to make a lich, which is also typically very expensive) due to the soul somehow degrading, or the soul itself already passes on and the undead is functioning off of little bits left behind, the imprint of the soul rather than the soul itself. Makes the undead a very unreliable witness.

Why would a metal golem be weak to lightning? Sure, it might conduct the electricity, but what damage does that actually do? Especially if the inner core is insulated. But even if it weren't, electricity damages organics because it messes with nerve signals, and because organics aren't great conductors so a lot of the energy is wasted as heat, which is damaging to organics. But metal passes electricity without being damaged just fine, that's why we use it to, transport electricity.

And yeah dirt golems are definitely sub-par, they're quick and dirty to make. They don't last long. However, they are still highly effective against common soldiers, even though they are weak to mages, making them good if you need to quickly throw together a force to quell an uprising without devoting more valuable resources.

Wood is not as bad as you think, it can be treated, and layered under either dirt or metal to protect it from fire and other environmental conditions. It's not really the best for combat, it's for scouts.

And if fire is equally effective against golems an undead (slander, golems can tank it way better), then the point still stands that golemancy > necromancy.

Nope. Quite the contrary, I was once an aspiring necromancer. But trying to apply it practically, at every step I found that a golem could do it better. It start simple. You make a few bone constructs, not an animation of any one living thing, but a special, custom-designed amalgamation. You convert your armies to just skeletons. You carve magic into all of their bones for an edge. You encase all of their bones in earth for extra defense. You're waiting out a siege, no new bones on their way, so you say, fuck it, why do I need the bones in there anyway? It's not like the bone constructs were controlled by a once living soul anyway, it would get too confused as to how to move. You know how souls work, you've been working with them all this time. You know how to recreate the parts to control locomotion, you're already an expert at subverting mana pools to power the spells, and it's not that hard to get a rough imprint of your own soul's intelligence to allow it to understand orders. And before you know it, you've made a golem.

And then you do it again. And again. At some point, you realize that if you transfer your own knowledge of golem making to your older golems with developed mana pools, they can make golems for you. They can make more golems, that can make more golems. Your undead army is long since forgotten. Chewed up and spat out, defeated by a coalition of the remaining kingdoms. It doesn't matter, you're already long since in hiding, underground in the far wilderness, watching your golem empire grow as they replace sodden dirt with cool steel. Your soul has long since been transferred into steel as well. You tunnel below your enemies, and one day, you surface. An unending horde of golems pours out from the underground, to take what's yours.

Oh, and, hard disagree. Undead only have the grisly horror thing going for them. Golems have that cold, unfeeling, unrelenting, foreign horror to them, a being that can not be related to by any living thing. They can have the cool factor of a knight, completely clad in armor and moving down hordes, the cool factor of 'big robot!', the cool/horror factor of many-legged spider-adjacent monstrosity (the legs are blades!), the coolness of a walking siege weapon, or fortress, or really anything else one can make, because they're just so customizable.

And becoming a golem is cool because you can make whatever body modifications you want, hell you could change things regularly! For any situation. And you can integrate spells and tools.

Becoming an undead is just kind of a self-inflicted nightmare, your soul is stuck to this rotting corpse, you've lost everything that made keeping the human form a worthwhile idea in the first place and now you're stuck. It's just a pathetic, failed attempt at achieving true immortality while maintaining your original form. If you were going to do that, you might as well have just made yourself a golem from the start.

I mean, if you wanna wallow in angst, then go ahead, become an undead, but if you're seeking ascendence, become a golem.

Okay you don't know anything about Golems at all. Golems originate from the esoteric jew magic kabbalah and they pretty much always turn on their masters.

 

[GlassRose]

The origin story of the golem is that they rebel against their master.
Okay you don't know anything about Golems at all. Golems originate from the esoteric jew magic kabbalah and they pretty much always turn on their masters.

Okay but just because it was that way in myth doesn't mean it's that way in fantasy. Like, elves and goblins in fantasy are completely different than how they were described in folk tales. And in a fantasy context, there's no reason functionally that would cause a golem to be more rebellious than a zombie (in most settings).

I mean, depending on the golem, there's the risk that is kind of inherent to robots, that you have to give your instructions very specifically in a way that they can understand and if you mess up it can move unpredictably and be prone to causing an accident, but that's not rebellion, it's a miscommunication.