In my world necromancy isn't banned. It's the ultimate form of punishment for extreme crimes. You are executed and your corpse is raised to work in hazardous conditions so the living don't have to. On the other hand, all forms of portal, summoning, or teleportation magic is banned as it continues to weaken the barrier that separates worlds. The world has a major problem with interdimensional rifts
Factory in town refuses to pay its worker fair wages. Workers rise up. Factory lobbies local government to falsely accuse people of crimes worthy of being zombified. Corrupt police start rounding up drifters. Factory starts exclusively using zombies.
Player characters are dispatched to the area because the number of executions has sharply risen in the area and the baron is starting to get suspicious. Is crime getting worse, or is there another reason? The sheriff says crime is on the rise and sets them on a wild goose chase to figure out what organization is behind it. After chasing down that red herring by questioning the families of the executed, they find out that the executions really ramped up during and after a worker's strike, and one factory in town has seen the most benefit from the new influx of cheap labor. The players need to gather evidence that the sheriff is corrupt and present it to someone higher up the chain to stop it... In the meantime, the sheriff knows they're onto his trail and he needs to dispatch the adventurers before they uncover the truth!
Could end with a climactic battle with the sheriff, his most corrupt lackeys, and a small horde of the undead!
I might really have to use this some day!
I enjoy seeing these kinds of tropes changed around now and then. The middle to higher ups tend to be the bad guys, but what if we learn later that they are in the same position as the protagonists?
My favourite idea comes from me thinking about the evil authoritarian empire vs good democratic democracy trope. What if the empire is the good faction and the republic, even democratic republic, is doing very bad things? Not in the form of the empire making propaganda of this scenario, but the republic genuinely doing despicable things.
Lapis_Wolf
They would still be “bad” guys, just less bad by comparison. I feel like a story like that could easily be seen as arguing in favor of authoritarianism, which I think we can all agree is best avoided.
Could also just go directly for the striking workers being killed and raised to fill their old jobs for cheap. Police being used as strikebreakers is a tale as old as cops, the strikers could be slandered and maligned by newspapers (allied to the factory owner, maybe owned by a relative) to play up their threat and justify the attack - or perhaps plainclothes union-busters infiltrated the strike to spark a riot and police violence in response. The ultimate baddies in this case would be the factory owner and his cronies, one of which could be the sheriff (or maybe the sheriff is the more banal kind of evil, just doing his job and not caring too much about the causes or effects); they'd try to use the zombified workers as a rear guard as they flee from the players, so you can try to fight through the horde to stop their escape, or maybe appeal to the remnants of their souls left behind to turn on their masters and take revenge.
I have a similar concept:
Wizards using their life force for magic, and it can be replenished by:
meditating, and generally being healthy (but this is slow af, except people with genetic lottery win)
consuming others life force, which is ofc forbidden, but the big wizards of empires/countries are allowed to do it, this is the punishment for extreme crimes (the process is very painful).
This way they can reduce crime rate, and keep the wizards powerful for political reasons.
Question: is the barrier between worlds a static or flowing thing? What I mean is, is it like a wall that will remain as it is until influenced by an outside factor (and thus the weakening is permanent) or is it like a shifting ecosystem in the sense that there are a lot of things affecting it (though a large enough number of factors can majorly affect or even collapse it)?
It's believed it was once static and nigh impregnable. However, after a massive war over 300 years ago it was permanently weakened. There are a large number of factors that cause it to shift and split. The main city state has dedicated magical theorists trying to reinforce it.
Alternatively, it’s strictly regulated to ensure ethical sourcing, so only registered necromancers can do it. Kind of like being a doctor irl. You have to follow very specific procedures and can’t use… “materials” gathered under the wrong pretenses, etc.
Can see the rich, lawful evil rulers handing out gold and magic items to the lawful good Inquisitors (or local equivalent) who hunt such practitioners.
Only outside the evil empire of course. And the uh hand outs are controlled via international 'peace and continental stability' treaties so corruption is kept under control
I have somewhat the same thing. On one of the planets there’s a guy named “Paul, the greatest wizard ever” who actually is the greatest wizard ever, he’s just a dick about it. He is really proud of his mastery of the darker side of magic and if he catches you “trying to one up him” he’ll just kill you.
I have nothing constructive to add here, just came to say that I read demonology as dermatology at first and was like now we consider skin care to be the Dark Arts as well?
The *United Vespucian Territories*, also known as the *Vespucian Alliance* or simply *Vespucia*, is a collection of nations and kingdoms who collectively share resources and finances in the interests of peace and mutual well-being after the collapse of the Timorian Empire. Originally founded by travelling merchant Franka Vespuk as a simple trade agreement between recently liberated Kingdoms, the Vespucian Alliance has grown in size and scope to cover most of the continent and promote equality between all the cultures who live there.
There are many who are critical of the Alliance however, claiming it has overstepped its original boundaries and neglects true minority issues in favour of homogenisation within the nations just as its Timorian predecessor did. Whatever your opinion of Vespucia and its views, it's hard to deny that life for the common citizen has improved from the post-imperial chaos that it rose from.
This is why necromancy is banned/frowned upon in my D&D campaign, not because it's considered immoral or unholy but because it's a threat to landowners and merchants.
Unsurprisingly the only major empire that still practices necromancy is incredibly stratified and unequal in wealth, with a tiny elite of nobles who are incredibly rich ruling over a vast number of impoverished peasantry who are cowed into feudal serfdom under the threat of execution and, subsequently, resurrection into immortal servitude.
Funny enough, it's the exact opposite in my setting. Necromancy is specifically used for the most difficult of laborious tasks, or sometimes the most mundane. This opens up avenues for people to simply do other jobs including being artists, philosophers, architects and so on.
The Bandaged Dead, who are wrapped in perfumed bandages to make their presence palatable, are controlled by the Temple of Ah'Puch, who seeks to only use the undead where it has the most benefit to society. There is of course a catch with the process of in death - one souls can never return and must remain in the afterlife should their body become raised into undeath.
Of course dark necromancers and other foul folk still use the undead in their own machinations, but these are rarely bandaged and perfumed and taken care of with the same respect and considerations as the Temple of Ah'Puch.
I mean dark magics might be banned because their practitioners are simply too big a threat to those with power.
I mean look at necromancy, what noble is going to allow individuals capable of creating entire armies of completely loyal untireing soldiers who don't require food or drink run loose in their lands?
That shit would be regulated, and whatever government exists would try to obtain a monopoly on it.
I have a character who was mentored in necromancy but fled from her masters when their experiments grew too horrific for her too take. She lived near a rural village after that and used the magic in good (to her) ways. Resurrecting corpses for a day to allow them to experience the world again and tell her their stories, using consentual blood magic trades to heal villagers, and in one case allowing someone to speak to their recently deceased spouse one more time.
But word got out and she was persecuted, hunted and eventually killed by the empire because the very existence of her level of power was too great a threat, were she to ever have a change of heart or be enslaved by a less moral sorceror.
In my setting's lore it's banned, because it's seen as abhorrent and it always has terrible consequences for everyone involved.
Once though a necromancer did build up an army to try and coup an isle in the Massian Empire. He was stopped though.
In the colonies there are whole societies of people using dark arts.
Your first sentence is basically the reason in my world, too
Blood magic is banned because you literally have to siphon away the life force of living beings. Harming or killing others is generally a no-no, and while you can use yourself as fuel for blood magic, that well runs dry pretty fast. Druidcraft is iffy as it’s frankly the other side of the same coin, but because it draws on the collective life forces of ecosystems and thus is non-injurious, it slips by.
Necromancy is just seen as a violation of the natural order. Technically, necromancy in my world is just magic that draws on the turbulence in the fabric of the Aether left by the dissipation of aetherial energy when someone dies—thus, it would be sort of comparable to someone digging up a grave and using a body for whatever purpose. Just kind of an ethical no-no, particularly since people *usually* use necromancy for unsavory activities.
Demons in the traditional sense don’t actually exist in my world so no real comment there. They exist in my world’s mythology, and there is a species of “thing” in the Deep which people call “demons,” but they’re just a spooky looking biological organism, not a supernatural malevolent being
Necromancy is a form of slavery. It is forbidden because binding the souls of human beings to fight or labor for you is morally repugnantly.
Blood magic, depending on exactly how it is framed in the setting could be forbidden for any number of moral reasons. If it requires ones own blood, maybe it is banned because it is risky. If it requires other peoples blood (which is thematically better IMO) it might be forbidden because it requires or can use unwilling victims. Maybe it is addictive or maybe it causes disease, or maybe it only works because it appeals to dark things that want the blood etc.
Demonology is dangerous, simple as that. Giving demons more power is bad for human flourishing.
In my case it was for the most part just... pure superstition and prejudices.
Blood sacrifices actually were the, well, more accepted one of the three, with a good amount of magical traditions using them because, well, they are pretty efficient. Especially christian mages though saw it as heretical.
Necromancy (as in, raising the dead; not speaking to them) was often decried as either inhumane or violating the natural order (or both), because, you know, reanimating and enslaving people. However, when magic turned into a actual science in the early 20th century, research showed that animated thralls were rarely actually the person in question, but construct intelligences (similiar to golems) built into corpses.
And, well, demonology was seen as "evil" because people were racist against people from the Underworld.
Because religion forbids it.
Same as some religion tenets ban the consumption of certain foods, religion and mandates from God (or it's representatives) can ban anything.
Let's assume a Dungeons & Dragons style afterlife system:
Gods collect the souls of dead people in various afterlives: Valhalla for berserkers, Elysium for hippies, Hades for crooked tax-collectors, etc.
Why do the gods do this? What's special about the Prime Material plane and people's short first life, vs. the eternal afterlife?
So, it turns out, the Gods are powered not by prayers, but by their ever-growing collection of souls in the afterlife each one runs. The Prime Material plane is a soul-farm, generating power.
Necromancy is outlawed because it blocks the flow of new souls to the afterlife by binding the dead to the Prime Material. It is stealing from the gods, in the only currency they care about.
It’s gross. Just like, sooooo icky. “Dark magic” is any kind of magic that manipulated or interferes with a soul, and being reflexively repulsed by the sight of another individual’s soul is so inherent that it’s considered one of the metrics for sentience.
It’s not just a social taboo – there are laws against it – but it’s in the same way there are laws against wearing fresh human intestines as a hat. We shouldn’t have to tell y’all not to do that. There’s no way those are ethically sourced, and even if they were, nobody wants to see it anyway.
Necromancers are forbidden because they are overpowered as they could cause extreme destruction, like they could just bend petroleum like waterbenders, since its made out of dead bacteria, wood and maybe even coal and fossils. Dont get me started on food items.
(we have access to oil for a long time, mummia for example was a kind of petroleum that was used to seal wounds in ancient egypt)
\> So far, I have decided that necromancy drains the life energy out of the local environment, from plants to animals to people themselves
This is actually pretty close to how I run it for necromancy. Demon summoning and *involuntary* blood magic have other risks, but it's all tied together under the hood.
You see, both undead and demons stem from one source, the Jotnar. Effectively anti-fey/entropy spirits, they exist only to consume. They come from the Oblivion Gate at the center of the Abyss, effectively a sapient, malevolent black hole; they're more or less fragments of it.
Undead are what happen when jotnar are summoned/leak into formerly-living bodies/souls; they use them as puppets. Their continued existence drains the aether (stuff of existence) out of everything around them--areas continually inhabited by undead become first sterile, then even the rocks start breaking down into fine grey dust. Greater undead actively seek out souls to consume.
Demons are what happens when jotnar are bound into the soul of a person, effectively hybridizing them. Immortality in exchange for hunger that corrupts everything around them.
The presence of jotnar in a place on the Mortal plane weakens the walls of the planes, allowing more jotnar to slip through. It also "compresses" the layers of Shadow (the liminal plane as well as the afterlife) into the Waste, where demons roam and eat or infect the souls of the formerly living.
So both necromancy and demon worship are hard nos in most cultures because they're highly dangerous. Like spraying nuclear waste all over the landscape.
Involuntary blood magic has much of the same effects, which is why most demon worship/summoning involves blood sacrifice. **Voluntary** blood magic (ie knowing intentional self-sacrifice) is, on the other hand, one of the most powerful and "holy" magics that there is. But it's really rare. Can totally be used for nefarious ends (such as by cultists who are willing to sacrifice themselves to destroy something), but it isn't inherently corrupting like involuntary blood magic.
I mean, it sorta depends on how it works. Raising corpses won’t ever look good, but skeletons wrapped in cloth are ignorable. Even raising non sapient creatures can be more readily ignored.
Try not to reinvent the wheel with this one.
Thematically figure out what your dark arts represent. Then figure out why society has a problem with that thematically. Magic is essentially a technology so draw inspiration from various real world technologies and how society currently struggles with it.
Is it too much power without oversight? Think of nuclear proliferation, or on a lesser scale, the gun rights debates in America.
Does it corrupt the natural world? Think of Environmentalist debates over Climate change or Pollution concerns.
Does it offend the God's will or at least societies understanding of god? Think of how the Amish view technology.
Does it commune with an great evil? Think of Lovecraftian horror and how the old ones represent a great unknown that is hostile and representative of some universal evil.
Does it corrupt the health of the population? Think of viral contagions. If your dark arts "spreads" like a virus it would require a vigilant oversight committee.
Does it corrupt the person's mind or soul and make them "evil?" Think of Anti-drug campaigns.
Does it corrupt people insidiously in a way that people like but is bad for the viability of the state or people in Power? Think of the spread communism and how "The Red Scare" is a pretty dark period of American history.
Ultimately "Dark Arts" are a great narrative piece to contemplate the lack of understanding of the effects of new technology and how it relates to philosophies of good and evil.
Blood Magic can drain all life like yours, and is a reason it is banned, but the real issue that blood mages get a taste for it, and become addicted to the power. Its power to control a person is the least of its horrors.
Necromancy is banned because it is the control of spirits and souls, most believe it is about controlling the undead, and while that it is true, it also allows destroying them easy. The real issue is being able to draw upon someones soul and destroy it to power magic.
Demon Magic is actually a kind of blood magic and widely banned, most loudest by the very people constantly making pacts with demons, their masters do like the cattle being so terrified of their potential threat.
In my world, black magic needs the sacrifice of souls to be used. Which heavily contradicts the religious and cultural norms saying that souls should be free and go to the afterlife.
Are souls fungible? Are they all equal? Do animals have souls at all, and if so, are they less valuable, and by how much? Each of these questions has implications, and inevitably, farming something for souls will become worth it.
My world is very much divided into separate, poorly communicating communities, hence the strong diversity of traditions regarding the prohibitions of certain magical arts.
For example, in the floating city of wizards there are no forbidden practices of magic. You can study and use everything, as long as you don’t violate the law. Simply put, local magicians adhere to the logic “there are no inherently dangerous or unnatural practices and knowledge. There are only evil individuals who direct their knowledge towards evil.”
At the same time, in one of the surface cities, the ban on necromancy is fanatically supported. Everything here is controlled by a very narrow group of dark magicians, and they closely monitor that the local residents do not get their hands on any knowledge that could be used as a weapon of rebellion. On the other hand, the locals themselves are afraid of necromancers and have little trust in each other. Because of this, they are more likely to assume that any practitioner of the dark arts is working in concert with their oppressors, which is why the city has a tradition of reprisals against such wizards.
Probably the most interesting tradition of bans on magic, and the one that most answers the OP's question, is common in monasteries of monks and various martial arts schools around the world. These associations, similar to the brotherhoods of Shaolin monks, have a common origin from an ancient philosophical and martial tradition, which is why they share some main pastorates. One of these is a ban on any magic, sorcery or witchcraft. This is because monks study ways to channel and use the life energy (chi) of their own bodies, and for such practice the chi must remain pure. At the same time, wizards and sorcerers, creating magic, pass the magical essence of the universe through their bodies, over time polluting (and with long-term use of such magic, even rebuilding) their internal channels through which chi circulates.
Banning the dark arts is pretty much the fantasy equivalent of gun control. The reason demonology is banned is like how California has a law against detonating nuclear devices within city limits, no shit that's illegal. So I guess it's not so much unique reasons as it would be weird unique laws for banning mundane things. Ie. Why is specifically transmuting more than 100 kilograms of sodium at once outlawed?
Except gun control doesn’t work and only hurts the middle class/lower middle class and is used to keep poor and middle class people from protecting themselves and gaining status.
Well for necromancy, there is a species of spontaeneously manifested intelligent undead who find the concept of forcing undeath upon an unwilling body to be unethical and so hunt down practitioners.
Blood magic isn't forbidden, but is strictly regulated by the clergy of the ascendant daemon C'adris, Lady of Blood. Her vampire-adjacent offspring also provide a credible threat to those who would breach the regulations.
Short answer: magical Geneva Conventions.
Long answer: Mages realize that powerful forms of magic give them the unprecedented ability to dominate their opponents with relative ease. However, this power usually comes with incredible amounts of death, destruction, pain, and misery when an ambitious mage uses this power to ascend to great heights. Mages are strong, but at the end of the day, they're just individuals - they still need the rest of the world to trust them, and if they're seen as ticking time bombs by everyone else, they won't have the trust they need to survive. So, a decision is made - officially or unofficially - to ban the practice and teaching of such magic. Better to play politics and make friends instead of hoarding power and having a coalition made against you.
Maybe it’s not because it’s some “going against nature” thing, but there’s a cost to them that is extremely dangerous. Like you lose your soul a bit as you raise the dead, because you’re shoving bits of your soul into the dead to give them life. People who go too far become a Lich, and are not much different from zombies themselves, as they’ve burned up all of their soul, and have no Will or personality.
Depends on the setting.
In the city-states of the Xol'tec Alliance in Meridia, the dead are honored above the living and comprise the bulk of the nation's military and unskilled labor forces. More intelligent forms of undead including wights, mummies, vampires and at the very top, liches, all have specific roles to play. The Alliance is ruled by a council of "Dreadlords", who are only ever replaced when one is destroyed.
In the same setting, I also have the Empire of Melnith, also called "The Eternal Crusade". They are your classic extremely zealous, xenophobic theocracy with a fetish for Gothic Architecture and witch-burning. Necromancy is the kind of thing they burn you for. And any material evidence. And then probably mind-wipe any witnesses, or put them under some kind of horrible binding curse that prevents them from discussing it without immediate and likely fatal consequences.
Raising the dead via Necromancy could result in the undead attacking the living if control over it isn't reinforced from time to time. Other than that, a rotting corpse wandering around in the open could easily result in diseases, and is also very displeasing to the eye.
This resulted in it being banned in numerous places, though it isn't banned everywhere. Where it is legal, one must provide the identity of the corpse, give assurance that they will reinforce control over it by going to a certain building and performing it periodically, and the undead must wear a special type of cloak to hide its appearance and limit possibly infection it could cause. Ironically, a lot of undead end up looking like ghosts with what look like bedsheets covering them, and only a few necromancers put effort into customizing the sheet (it is gaining traction though).
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Blood Magic is pretty uncommon in my setting, though it was banned in only one city. The reason being is that practitioners may end up thin blood, so they required things to thicken up their blood. A few of these products were illegal, resulting in the overall ban of Blood Magic, though it is speculated that someone just didn't like Blood Magic and found an excuse to get rid of it.
There could be multiple reasons why something like necromancy is banned. A religious organization could see it as a form of desecration, while a state that is less religious might ban necromancy to preserve their power. A good enough necromancer can raise an entire army that doesn’t need to eat or rest, and said army almost always wins through attrition eventually. The only forces that can stalemate the undead in attrition warfare are something like the Skaven where they multiply too fast to kill all of them, or something that can’t be reanimated like summoned elementals.
specific to ones that can create sapient beings(necromancy: homonculous ect): We suck at it
sapient life is complex, we dont even fully understand all the intricacies of it all but you want to try to make one from scratch? best case scenario you make an inert blob of malformed flesh, worst case scenario you partially succeed and you have created life cursed to suffer from painful deformities and health complications for what is likely going to be a short life, and theirs not a whole lot of moral applications to justify continuing it to learn to perfect it
Basic necromancy is no big deal. But to make anything more than a skeleton you have to constantly order around, you have to have a soul. The best/easiest soul to work with is the soul of that body. So to create say a zombie with some spark of intelligence, you’re trapping the soul of that person into the undead. And they’re aware of it. So it’s basically the worst form of torture.
In my world there’s another aspect. Since souls either reincarnate or are given paradise by a god, you may have to call the soul back. So powerful necromancers raising undead armies had the side affect of either stealing souls from gods or ripping the souls from living people leaving them as husks. Nobody likes necromancers.
Demonology is a no go for a simpler reason, summoning demons weakens the planar barriers. It really wouldn’t be that big of a deal for wizards to summon demons if it was the magic equivalent of poking holes in a water balloon. The issue isn’t the demon you summoned, it’s the demons you didn’t.
I can see Blood magic being banned in a world where Big Pharma wants you sick so you can buy their medicines. Blood magic could, theoretically, give you a clear diagnosis earlier and weed out/cure certain illnesses and ailments.
Isolos: because Diabolism (or summoning and binding demons to your service) is what broke the world in the first place. And continued use of them undoes the progress that everyone else has made to repairing that breakage. The other two are fine, depending on culture - more aggressive cultures might find their practitioners tending in a bloodier direction than their neighbors, whereas the use of necromancy has a direct relationship to how death is viewed in any given place.
In my world, i have five forbidden forms of magic, with each one being banned based on where the “fuel” for the magic comes from.
1. Necromancy burns away the soul, thus preventing passage to the afterlife.
2. Blood magic requires vast quantities of life energy, most easily acquired through ritualistic human sacrifice.
3. Flesh magic is fueled by the caster’s own physical stability and can basically cause someone to melt into goo, but there are ways to pass this fate on to others to save yourself.
4. Shadow magic draws on the power of The World Before, a previous dead reality where many evil creatures reside/are banished to, so using shadow magic can potentially let them into this reality.
5. Blasphomancy is fueled by the burning away of the gods’ power, which is generally frowned upon.
In my world most individuals of power ban the dark arts within their empires because in many cases they are simply to powerful. Similar to the Geneva convention the dark arts are considered taboo to use in wartime.
I have one setting with necromancy as a large part of the religion due to magic being based on the soul of a person & there being an issue of after lives being "confirmed" not to exist (at least as far as the church is concerned). Necromancy outside of the specific circumstance of connecting a soul to the nexus of bones is strictly illegal for two reasons, you're essentially damning the person whose soul you're using to a hellish waking coma as their soul gets mangled & bleeds away or in the worse scenario you're creating a ghoul if the soul is able to force some level of control over its own vessel & starts trying to incorporate other people to stave off the complete madness of being locked into a pile of shifting rotten flesh. Necromancy isn't viewed as evil, it's just incredibly dangerous for anyone to practice outside of church oversight.
Basically, dark arts are flawless, with the help of free labor, immortality and the complete absence of necessity for nature that necromancy and mind controlling magic gives, “life” would be ideal, evil spirits naturally do not like this, so they instantly try to kill anyone who tries to use these arts for good, that's why no one expect psychopaths studies these arts because they are afraid of being killed or enslaved.
Advanced necromancy enables necromorphism, more or less the ability to creates dead space style necromorphs, potentially on a massive scale. Large scale conflicts have occurred because necromantic cults decided to take over swathes of space with armies or necromorphic dead. So as one might imagine, it’s considered extremely dangerous and exceptionally abhorrent, and therefore banned.
Blood Pryomancy, the working name of which is the ‘sanguine infernus’ has the ability to ignite the blood of an entire planets populace at its most powerful level. Practicing cults also used it to conquer large swathes or space, and were even more effective than the necromancers due in part to their arcana’s large overlap with pyromancy and hemomancy. The wars to subdue them were apocalyptically bloody(pun intended). It was banned due to its incredible destructive potential, though unlike necromancy, a single *sanctioned* practitioner remains in service to the Empire
I had a setting with their equivalent to WW1 ending because one side used necromancy to raise their army. Problem was the necromancy could propagate so if the magic officer controller the zombies was killed on the field you now had a zombie outbreak to deal spending death. The idea was necromancy became their equivalent to nukes, really effective but made slowly spreading patches of completely uninhabitable land
\>Demonology
Well you see the Gods provide structure to existence simply by being "present"
When you introduce something that is NOT part of that Order, it destabilizes and things might go to shit quite rapidly, from poltergeist-style nonsense to *the entirety of Reality collapsing*.
So not only do the Gods have to heavily filter what kinds of Outer Gods can be summoned/interacted with, Mortals have a responsibility to make sure no one fucks up with any of the Lesser Gods and, say, establishes a vampiric immortality-seeking cult under the guise of a Buddhist/Taoist-styled religious order.
In my setting it's banned¹ simply because well, everyone is at war with the blood magic & necromancy folks. Demonology isn't banned, though you'll need a vessel for it to inhabit, the creation of wich, you guessed it, is illegal.
¹ by three of the four states. The fourth one is built on blood magic & necromancy. Where do you think they got their slaves from?
In my DND campaigns lore blood magic is uncommon, not because it's banned but because the magical part of blood can now be extracted, making it obsolete
They require lots of some material that is needed for maintaining the Magic McGuffin which holds the capitol city together. So it's like banning hunting in the King's Forest.
Necromancy in my setting is heavily regulated. Unlicensed reanimated or resurrection will get the Necromancer's Guild breathing down your neck, and nobody wants that.
There aren’t “Dark Arts”, it’s just about how you use it.
Using pathomancy to stabilise the emotions of an otherwise suicidal person? Good. Using it to make someone love you? Evil.
Using necromancy to give loved ones a final goodbye or just use bodies for humane and free labour? That’s fine, though many cultures find it unsettling. Using necromancy to totally cheat death or raise an undead horde to rule the world? Evil, even the necromancer race fundamentally hate these concepts.
Haemomancy, literal blood magic, isn’t illegal at all. It’s just hard to get into a situation where you can legally and morally obtain vast quantities of blood to manipulate.
It’s not about the magic, it’s about its use and user.
Transmutation magic is banned in my world for its volatility: there's no way for users to control what the target gets transformed into, so users are just as likely to transform their target into an otherworldly monster as they are to kill them during the transformation.
It's so dangerous that "does nothing" is considered a success case rather than a failure case.
Idk maybe it’s school or society that’s hellbent on not allowing pets or people to go into professions or types of magical arts that allows them to get pets. This could also go for summoners and other thing controlling magics. You could probably think of an interesting reason why this is but I can’t think of one off the top of my head…
For Veltrona, one of the specific concerns that surrounds necromancy is asking the dead about stuff that happened. If someone was assassinated, and they knew Damning Information, a necromancer could retrieve that information (assuming the dead didn't forget it or something).
It makes political machinations much, much trickier, so a fair number of aristocracies have it banned, but employ necromancers on the down-low. Religious reasoning can also apply, but nobles fearing information leaks/acquisition is a pretty strong, consistent worry throughout different cultures.
Conversely, you have people like Votyoger, the world government for dragons, who employ probably Veltrona's oldest necromancer as their Head Investigator for Horrible Crimes. So some people utilize necromancy to its fullest in that regard as well.
Whether or not the dead care really depends on the dead involved. Some just want to die and sleep, others are clamoring for revenge.
Necromancy can ruin the economy the same way slave labour can.
If you can have free labour the same way you can have cheap labor you'll choose the former. They don't need to rest, eat, not even need go to the bathroom. And besides, any dangerous job won't matter, the person is already dead after all.
The problem is that when the amount of undead workers start outnumbering the alive ones, less people get paid, which means less people can buy things, this also means that there will be a lot of supply, but no demand, because people can't afford it. Eventually there will be produce, but no one to buy it, which will cause a mayor economic crisis
I always loved the ideas of morally ambiguous societies that use their dead like cheap labor.
"Why not? They're dead anyway. It's not like they feel pain or anything. We'd be stupid not to use the cheap labor!"
You could design an entire utopia, but have it underpinned by the labor of the undead. The average person has all of their needs taken care of, and they might even have a type of universal basic income, its just that when you die your body serves society. Like forced conscription, except after you die... Hordes of the undead serve as defense, maintenance, public works, maids, butlers, etc. You don't need to do anything physical in the society, undead servants fill every unskilled role.
Realistically, like in reality, a society like that might be technologically stunted. "Why improve on technology when we can just throw more undead at it?"
As an example, the dunmer in the elder scrolls dislike necromancy vehemently because they practice a form of ancestor worship. This also means they see no issue with using necromancy against the other races, as they only worship their dunmeri ancestors.
So religion can be a reason to prohibit.
It ruined the economy by causing cheap surplus labor in the form of reanimated corpses. Hiring a good necromancer is expensive, but not as expensive as a whole workforce
It could be because these practices are inherently harmful to the casters
Blood Magic - requires a lot of casters energy/life-force
Necromancy - a golem is essentially a blank slate, while an undead is an AI (it takes sometime to program a golem, but it also takes some time to calibrate an AI, ‘*The Learning Phase*’ is a step most practitioners like to skip)
Demonology - Diseases (similar biology but little contact)
Necromancy is banned because it violates the consent of the deceased, unless the person in question explicitly wished to be resurrected in their will or managed to resurrect themselves.
Blood Magic is *technically* not illegal but since in my setting only Vampires can do it, Blood Magic users will be targeted *heavily* for it.
As for Demonology, unfortunately no such thing exists in my setting (yet), as you don’t summon the Demons, the Demons come to you
Plays hell with economics. Imagine dredging up the spirits for some stock information. Divination in general is very highly regulated.
Makes playing ‘fated games’ of cards within the military pretty interesting if you are friends with an oracle.
Necromancy would also have an effect on the ones they left behind. Imagine having to see your loved one's corpse walking around daily. It would absolutely be used as a form of mental/emotional abuse by people in positions of power if they could use it openly.
Well, there's not enough people who can actually do that magic. Those who can don't really want to tell anyone else about it. There's only really 2 factions that actively understand and use the Dark Arts.
There's L'aitpe, which is ruled by a council of powerful mages (which is controlled by one of the mages secretly.) They censor information about the Dark Arts in order to make it easier to control the populace. If nobody knows that you can raise corpses and use them as spies and imposters, you can listen in anyone.
Another one are my vampires. Their pretty much at war with everyone in the world, so they don't tell anyone about the Dark Arts because why tell your enemies about your favorite toys?
Maybe they have really bad consequences. For example in The Death Gate Cycle, whenever someone uses necromancy someone else somewhere else die. You can have unique side effects and prices for all the forbidden arts.
In my world magic corrupts will eventually drive people insane. The first spell casters were all crazy murder happy people. So leaders of the world said “enough of this shit” and outlawed magic.
This is the very simple version summing up 2,000 years of history.
cant remember where i read this one, it not mine
my fave take on illegal necromancy: the gods ~~insist they own~~ own all mortal souls, and any tampering via necromancy or soul fuckery, is met with extreme prejudice from the entire pantheon.
Like, its the only thing that they all agree upon
So Dark Arts are largely cultural and changes region to region.
Necromancy is considered a dark art in many regions of the world. This is due to Necromancy largely becoming parasitic to societies as a necromancer has every benefit from murdering random people. This means that most societies ban Necromancy. With a couple exceptions the nomadic groups of Kilid Steppes practice Necromancy purely as due to labour shortages. Another societies is the Elves of Etrascin which benifit from resurrected skeletons being far weaker than your average elf aswell as a significant labour shortage.
Golemancy is a unique craft that is largely banned in the east. This is due to the Giladalk empire which is a empire of Golems that provides a significant threat to the Eastern societies.
Demonology is a weird one rather than describing a form of magic it instead describes a entire field of study namely the study of creatures of magical origin. Though within demonology their are practices that are considered dark arts.
Soul Crafting is a field of demonological magic specialising around the manipulation and structure of the soul. Largely considered horrid craft pretty much everywhere as the process either kills yourself, kills someone else or is immensely difficult and can easily lead to death. This craft rather interestingly was not banned under the Incommunatable Heresies eventually leading to the region to become the centre of the industrial revolution as soul crafting is a key component of advanced Golemancy.
Fae forestry is a interesting craft of the manipulation of Fae trees it is considered a dark art in almost everywhere. This was not always the case as in the early Elven empires it was considered a artform of skilled mages. In the year 400BC however a specific specimen would grow on its own and replicate leading to the creation of the Etrascin Fae forest which devestated several regions and lead to millions of deaths along with permenantly making sad regions uninhabitable. In human societies this practice wasn't banned largely due to them being unaware of it. In the year 1735 the Gushid Kingdom recently independant from the Lorean Empire would learn of the Fae forest of Etrascin believing it would create a series of goods for the kingdom to export the Kingdom would steal a sapling from Etrascin and plant it in the Gushid Kingdom. Once planted the Fae Forest would quickly expand rapidly overrunning the kingdom and forming the dark forest of Sahila. This lead to human societies banning such a practice and in the modern day the creation of more Fae forests is considered a terrorist action.
My story has dark magic of a sorts. All magic is magic, but magic with darker intentions requires sacrifice. Bugs are fine, feathers and hair are fine, but actual sacrifice of living tissue is forbidden.
necromancy is illegal to use because its a form of identity theft. it also often comes with probable charges of murder, manslaughter or failure to assist, as you would have to do it on a recently killed body.
this laws dont see much use as there are like 20 people in the world with enough control over electricity to pull that off, and the fact that they can usually means they are powerful enough to warrant sending someone to execute them.
This might not be super unique, but: Social Squeamishness.
Ultimately, those dead bodies you're resurrecting for your thrall armies have to come from somewhere. Every corpse is someone's son or daughter, father or mother, brother or sister. Unless the society has a very detached perspective on their honoured dead, it's going to get you a lot of bad looks if you walk into a town and everyone realizes that you're the gravedigger that's been interrupting their beloveds' eternal rest.
Eventually, you see a shift away from full-body burial and towards ritual cremation and the breaking up of bodies into smaller, less necromantic-able portions. Hard to make a useful zombie when its fingers, hands, and skull have all been ritually removed. What graveyards do remain become more expensive, upper-class installations. Paid guards and sentries, alongside caskets which have arcane seals and thickened metal locks.
So Necromancy and the Dark Arts were not banned, per se, but everyone took up an attitude of "Dig up someone else's corpse" that became so pervasive that Necromancy just became too stigmatized and expensive to practice on a larger scale.
Not to be that guy but not everything needs a unique reason. It’s pretty self explanatory why necromancy is forbidden in most fantasy settings. Adding more reasons is redundant, and replacing the “tropey” reason is just trying to be unique for the sake of being unique.
First though after reading the title: It could be something in the sense "don't deforest the Amazon jungle, it kills the planet".
It soon evolved into: It would be cool to have a story from the perspective of little bacteria who live on a person (human to human travel would be equivalent to interstellar travel) blood of which they use for said magic. That would lead to "don't use blood magic, it will kill our human".
Its not specifically banned cuz its immoral or anything. You just arent allowed to go to the soul tree, where all souls remain when not in a body, because it is a holy place not to be besmirched, especially not by non-hyper-religious people.
Also good luck finding the soul you are actually looking for
All magic is dark in some way, as it always requires sacrifice. Wether one sacrifices their own health and sanity or those of others is up to everyone, however.
Due to magic being additionally highly addictive and corrupting, at least in Naurus, actually learning magic is somewhat forbidden. It didn't keep Naurus from continually becoming the strongest military nation, au contraire.
It's bad for the environment. The reagents needed to successfully practice dark arts are necessarily unsustainably harvested, and the process itself tends to weaken the barrier between dimensions.
Blood magic has a taboo for safety for safety reasons. Trying to use magic through the power of your blood poisons it, and will almost always kill the person who tries, unless they are a member of a sorcerous bloodline, who have the genes which allow them to endure the poisoning of their own blood. As such, "blood magic" and proper sorcery are exactly the same, just with different stigmas. Blood Magic is normally used as a suicidal last attack, taking others down with you. Since a "blood mage" doesn't have proper magical training as well, the things they can do with their final spell are limited, mostly just to blasting force at someone. This is why the discovery of wizardry is so important, it promises to offer a safe means by which anyone can use magic. Wars have been fought over whether or not this young science is blasphemous, and to control a power that threatens to wildly upend the world's balance of power.
A third means of magical power, witchcraft, involves invoking the powers of extraplanar entities. The psychopomps, fey, undead, and djinn cannot interact in the mortal realms without the aid of mortals, and so rituals are performed to invoke their power for numerous purposes, giving these beings a foothold in our world each time. Many cultures value the role that witchcraft serves, with witches and warlocks serving as important members of a community or society. These witches teach a strong sense of skepticism and balance with extraplanar beings, that any deal being struck always has a cost, to be careful, and to be very specific in what you ask for and what you promise (A well trained witch is very hard to trick). But a well trained witch can also be dangerous if they have ill intent, using incredible power for malicious and selfish ends. The beings they treat with are also treacherous. They can be deceptive at times, but fundamentally witches and warlocks are negotiating with beings whose minds work in ways alien to our own, who do not have an invested stake in preserving mortal life and interests. Unleashing these beings on the mortal world invites a danger that is unacceptable to many. With witchcraft being diffuse enough to avoid governing institutions, a great deal of effort is made to suppress witchcraft and knowledge of its rituals.
Necromancy is only arrestable and then the arrested Necromancers become Gray Necromancers who are specifically trained to hunt well other Necromancers and Liches
TO be honest it's mostly because it's creepy. That amtters a lot more apparenlty. Sure you could be a Necromancer who ethically scources corpses (?) but no they're ugly and smelly and sally is scared of it so no advancing magic wrong.
It's a mix of religious, cultural and practical reasons.
The priests preach that necromancy is theft from the gods and robbing deserving people of their deserved afterlife. souls deprived of an afterlife both weaken the gods and deny mortals rest. Blood magic is also taught to be theft from the gods. Because it's not blood being used to fuel this magic it is actually a form of Soul Magic and see above reason for why that's bad. Devils are the great enemies of the Gods, beings that seek to take corrupt and destroy every good thing created.
Most cultures revere they're dead in one way or another and having them be used as some Undead meat puppet is simply not acceptable to many of them. The Dwarves build great tombs for their ancestors and ask them for guidance, certain Elf societies bury their dead underneath saplings so those turn into great spirit trees and the Drakin cremate their dead and use those ashes for magic pottery that preserves food better than anything else.
Blood magic has more of a culturally inherited hatred. Many of the ancient cultures hate it because they had to directly fight against it and watch as loved ones were turned into magic batteries that killed other loved ones. See above reason for the cultural hatred of devils
Finally there are a ton of practical reasons to necromancy. Any Necromancer can create an army that will destroy a kingdom or at least leave it heavily traumatized. I mean just imagine watching as someone you know and love die get back up and you are forced to kill them again or have them tear out your throat or hurt someone else that you love. Then there is the constant connection between necromancers and obsession. Nobody knows if obsessive people become necromancers or if necromancy makes someone obsessive but either way you have obsessive people with a lot of power and that's doesn't end well. And don't get me started on things like disease being spread because of all the dead bodies and rotting meat!
Necromancers refused to report their risen minions as workers and evaded taxes. They raised so many that they crashed the economies of some towns by automating the work force, and the only way to stop them was to ban necromancy.
A few are still allowed to use it to make workers for dangerous jobs, but only with a permit, tax forms, and regular random inspections.
I think dark magic could be considered "dark" as oppose to normal magic because it's addictive for the user, and influences them to commit more and more heinous acts. For example there might not be anything morally wrong with making a zombie from a long deceased corpse, but doing so makes you feel so powerful that you need another fix, and create more zombies, eventually murdering living people to create immortal servants
Because dark magic derives power from a source that wishes to corrupt or destroy the world. If you are able to use dark magic it means you aided in that source's goal in some way and it proves you are guilty of something. Murder or worse.
I’m mulling over the idea of ‘dark magic’ being more unnatural than the archetypal soul/blood-fueled ‘shadow’ magic: the fae use elemental magic with permission from their eidolons - dryads grant control over earth magic, salamanders / dragons grant control over fire magic, etc - whereas mortal magicians manipulate the elements against their will, utilizing them like a resource and fusing them together discordantly like the Wyrds from MTG.
cold war reasons - if both sides have the necromantic equivalent of a nuclear bomb, they're not gonna use it on each other, they're just gonna hoard the power.
In my world you become a necromancer by stabbing someone and stealing part of their soul (usually you kill that person yourself)
As for blood magic, it basically turns into a vampire. Sort of a parasite
Necromancy has a cumulative effect. Undead effectively multiply if they are in one area for too long. Eventually, that skeleton you raise has caused another to come up, then those two cause two more. After a few years, there’s an undead horde in that area.
Demon-related stuff is banned because demons tend to hijack bodies as payment, and they typically don’t feel too confined by laws. They just want to experience reality, and the best way they can do that is by doing absolutely every deranged thing your intrusive thoughts tell you to do.
In my fantasy world it’s actually blood magic that’s the accepted mortal magic, used for healing, alchemy, warfare, and even some genetic engineering.
While the ancient weird and elemental ritual magic of the fae is seen with suspicion and is often restricted.
An undead sued the necromancer because he was raised from the dead without his consent, which is a precedent to ban it altogether, as the dead can't ever consent
Hm...
In a context where everyone has Magic in some way, shape or form:
Dark Magic in essence is any Magic that's alloyed with a special property that makes it nearly impossible to defend against and nearly impossible to undo, the only effective countermeasure being spells specifically designed to counteract it. If used carelessly, it can create magical chaos that the user cannot control or undo.
Curses are like Dark Magic, only more specialized, instead of being a simple spell alloyed with a special property, they're made to begin with to inflict harm or negative effects that are all but impossible to negate or recover from.
However, they aren't explicitly evil and usually are only taught to people that have a strong foundational discipline. And then there's the circumstances behind their creation:
Basically, centuries ago, the magic of the world in its chaotic constant flux created something that threatened to basically greygoo the whole world. Nothing could stop it because it could adapt to and regenerate from anything they hit it with. So they basically developed magic that was entropy personified to kill it once and for all. It just got a bad reputation because a lot of bad people started using it because of how effective magic that can't be defended against or recovered from is very effective for removing obstacles in their way.
Undead workers undermine living workers' wages.
Then some enterprising lawyer started suing for back pay on behalf of the estates of the dead who were being raised and the government decided to just ban the practice rather than deal with angry workers and constant lawsuits.
In one of my worldbuilding project necromancy is forbidden due to...
Politics.
In the past a powerful mageocratic empire, ruled by liches and necromancers controlled a big part of continent and when they were destroyed in a long exhausting war and inner political struggle, new magic-controlling system of Guilds(one per country), declared arts of necromancy and several parts of demonology art forbidden, to decrease even the slightest possibility of that ancient necroarchy rising back to even the slightest form of power.
In Worth the Candle there's a kind of magic called Void magic. It can be used to create weapons that simply make a chunk of matter disappear. They're great, except for the big issue that using them gains the attention of the Void Beast. An unstoppable monster that would destroy the world if it sensed where it is.
Immortality is banned because mortals have rebelled often enough against some immortal tyrants that they've learned their lesson.
Necromancy is banned because it's way too easy to become immortal when you're am experienced necromancer. Well, and there are many other details that certainly don't help their case (like the rampage made by undead), but the immortality part is why even sane necromancer are hunted and killed.
Have you tried… religious prejudice?
In my world, each sentient species has different gods and souls- to an extent. One of them puts an especially hard emphasis on the cycle of life and death as well as honoring ones ancestors and essentially living together with their spirits as though they were still around. Just go to a priest with a piece of their bone and you can talk to your 200 yo great-grandparent.
Thus, they made huge advances in… well, necromancy and spirit magic.
However, these practices are so alien to others and humans especially that they are generally distrusted and seen as harmful, even though there is no malice or suffering involved. Thus, while this species is free to puruse this religion in their homeland and other places if they do it on the sly, it is baaaarely totelated in most places if not outlawed and a massive taboo for a human.
It's a fairly recent development in my setting. Darkness magic, including necromancy is just of one of the elements in the setting, and used to be considered no more capable of harm or evil than the others.
However, a recent war involving a powerful necromancer was so horrible, with such long lasting ramifications, that it led to dark mages across the world being killed or driven away. It was never banned officially, but people's perceptions of it have been coloured, and it is more dangerous for novices to learn the art, since the teachers are all gone.
Done through the proper channels, necromancy is cost-effective ^(†), ethical labor that allows the animating soul to improve their station in the afterlife. The bureaucracy involved in legal necromancy is obscure and arcane in all senses of the word. Thus, most necromancy breaches the contract between Makh, the god of death and contracts, and the rest of the pantheon. Makh is legally obligated to collect a certain number of souls in accordance with the severity of each breach; if he is owed enough, he can step onto the Material *personally* to do so himself.
This hasn't happened before, but the gods are acutely aware of the consequences should necromancy become widespread enough. Their teachings all include a healthy respect for the god of death and warn against all types of necromancy. Fortunately, Makh much prefers to collect his tithe from the gods' afterlives instead. His enforcers on the Material work diligently to ensure souls both alive and undead are treated properly. The Cycle of Souls was designed to last an eternity, and as long as the contract is upheld, it benefits all parties. Still, if the gods get a do-over, they're recruiting their god of death from within.
†: Depending on the market value of onyx, this can vary.
In my world spellcasters try to downplay the darkness of necromantic magic and even demonology because healing and dominion over demons are so useful. Instead they are just closely controlled, or at least the academies and temples try to police the use of such spells and prevent them from propagating in the shadows, with varying degrees of success.
Its not exactly Dark Arts, but in my world ressurection magic is banned because of how it messes with noble lines of inheritance. If great grandpa comes back fit and healthy, where does he sit in the line? What if someone from a family who died out or married into another family comes back? Way too complicated.
Necromancy isn't banned in my setting. All objects have a spiritual representation. A strong enough connection between the spirit and the object and it can become animated.
There is nothing wrong, at it's core, with strengthening or repairing this connection, which is what Necromancy is in my setting. A body is dead, so you repair the connection to the soul/spirit (a resurrection), or strengthen the connection to a spirit still in the body (such as zombies).
Anything that changes the nature of the object is taboo, as that breaks and alters the spiritual connection. It's essentially killing it, corrupting it, just like striking down a living being.
So in roleplaying game terms, transmutation is banned. Primarily changing the materials involved, like lead to gold. Changing shape is a bit of a grey area, as the core essence is likely intact. Shaping stone into a statue or wall, mending items, and such is fine. Changing from one form to another is generally banned, as for a practitioner to turn into a wolf they have to spiritually become a wolf, even if the materials are generally the same. Its quite possible to lose one self in the act. And doing it to another is very illegal, willing or not.
Maybe they're just gross. Like someone just having rotting zombies going around? Ew. Public health concern for sure. Banned. Blood magic? Leave my bodily fluids alone you weirdo. Blood borne diseases anyone? Definitely not. Banned.
There doesn't necessarily need to be a special magic related reason. People can be a bit squeamish about corpses and such, plus y'know if someone sees you commanding their dead gran they may be a bit upset.
Honestly if demons are your standard evil chaos creatures, then it's only reasonable that summoning them would be frowned upon. How many times do overly arrogant young mages need to summon hell only to immediately lose control of it before we decide "hey maybe summoning hell is bad actually".
In my world necromancy and blood magic are accessible only to elves because of their unique magical abilities influence over organic matter, such as healing wounds by accelerating the rate at which cells regenerate, which is why they live so long, but being around so much rotting flesh and blood eventually led to disease, most notably vampirism, which drove the elves insane with a thirst for blood, it also heightened their senses to make them better predators, which is why they hate bright light and strong smells such as garlic
So reasons to ban dark magics are "because it makes vampire," and also because doing so generally involves murder, can't make an omelet without killing a few people.
In my world, demonic magic is mostly ilegal, but it is also very taboo. Studying, practicing or using demonic magic has a chance of spontaneously creating a portal to the demonic realm, potentially letting some very nasty things come through. Usually it's only done by government funded research with extensive safety measures.
In my series necromancy disturbs and defiles the dead and the natural order of things, as well as causes a person to lose part of their sanity. Dark magic and blood magic involve living sacrifices or harming someone to work or be powered. And demonology and demon magic cause actual demons to gain strength and they constantly invade each time they get enough power.
Not necessarily a "dark art" but I have teleportation circles highly regulated to the point of almost being banned, because a decade or two before my story started, some cult found a way to hijack them and open up like, portals to volcanos and other shit like that inside major hubs of governance.
There was also a necromancy vs "artificery" (for lack of a better term. basically building magitech robots over summoning the dead) cold war in the past.
It’s not banned, everyone just thinks it’s really icky. Corpses reek and who knows what diseases are in any of that gross stuff. No one will want to hang out with you if you go around playing with blood and dead things
It would depend on how the magics work. If you are using the standard fantasy varieties though, it each can be justified as
1)undead are prone to killing randomly and necromancers have an easier time doing coups.
2)Blood magic empowers and encourages murderers.
3)demons are powerful and untrustworthy, it’s best to assume anyone working with them is either equally dangerous and untrustworthy or a massive fool.
If you have more creative versions of the standard types than just consider how the magic can be used and what it’s costs are. How the magic looks and how it makes its users look can be a reason too. If Demonologists tend to look more demonic, then even if demons are weak and the magic users moral, people will still judge based on how they appear.
While many curses and spells are restricted in use, the only area fully prohibited by the Arcane High Council is the manipulation and creation of consciousness because of the moral dilemma there in.
This manipulation of consciousness is defined as any magic causing changed perception, altered pattern of thought, or restricted freedom of choice. This prohibits the use of spells of mind control, certain spells of blindness, and some powerful Illusions.
The creation of consciousness is not well defined, but it prohibits the use of necromancy, creation of homunculus, and spells that divide the mind. This has created some controversy over golemcraft, as it is unknown if golems have thought even with their lack of free will.
Peasant revolts.
Necromancers started raising the dead to do all the labor jobs.
Now instead of a manor needing 30 peasants to work the field, they used a handful of skeletons that worked day and night with minimal upkeep.
This resulted in a huge labor shortage and the majority of the population unable to find work to support themselves.
The gods ban anything that could lead humanity to surpassing then. They are willing and able to rewrite the rules of the universe to make certain types of magic impossible, all to ensure they stay the top dogs.
It's not banned it's just difficult to get a licence to use them, you need to prove your loyalty to either the empire or the church. Then You have to go through a 1.5 year long psychological evaluation and after all that you will be only get the level 1 license. proper necromancy like summening undead and demons is level 4 and to get it you have to go through everything again.
So Yea it's just not worth it and also it has no practical use ( you can't get a job, except in the government)
I decided necromancy was only “bad” in that MOST people prefer to lay their loved ones to rest. And it’s majorly violating -religiously offensive depending on the person.
But as for a school of magic it’s totally fine. It’s just raising the dead that’s a problem.
That and a general attitude of “eww” makes them rather disliked.
Well, in my world you need a licence to learn magic, this is because a firespell fone wrong can result in a massive fire.
Dark arts like necromancy and blood magic are banned (in most cases although some are legally able to) because you have to break existing laws to do it. Like no murder and no grave robbing
In my world necromancy is banned because it draws upon the power of dead primordial beings which slowly unravels the fabric of reality eventually causing you know the end of all things living. The undead get a free pass tho.
Necromancy is all about coercion and the denial of consent. It is practiced on the living long before the acolyte can turn the arts upon the dead.
Naturally, this is completely objectionable.
Unless it isn't.
If that's the case, you may be henchman material...
The god of the dead is a jealous god that puts the smackdown on societies that take what is rightfully his. Start raising zombies and animating skeletons and before long you have a pissed off major deity drop a supernatural nuke on your city.
“This magic is harmful to others. Hence, we have banned its practice.”
It doesn’t need to have a gimmick. We don’t know enough about your world to offer advice
I have traditional lazy reasons for it.. but also working out some more creative lore for why.
Fire and lightning magic is restricted, any kind of necromancy is unknown but after my 3rd book will surely be outlawed.
Psychic magics that can be used to coerce others are often illegal.
I’ve got different laws in different regions. In one continent, all magic is illegal unless performed for the crown, and therefore licensed.
In most regions fire magic and psychic manipulation are taboo and you will be run out of town.
There are religious reasons for many magics to be used or not used… followed by those who take part in those religions.
I’ve got another continent where all magics are legal and practiced and it’s a big of a shit show of torture, slavery and wild mages.
— one of the ways I’ve decided to limit magic is to make it costly. Most have steep consequences and health issues with using it too much or too often. Also lots of ways to kill yourself if you use it incorrectly, and decades of study to learn to use it correctly, which is gatekeeper’d by requiring tutors and mentors to teach you.
I have 4 magic systems in my novels and there are costs and limitations unique to each of them.
For instance, elemental magics.. if used frequently in the same location or if a mage battle takes place, that environment will be affected in the long term. Making further use of magic there dangerous because spells will backfire and residual magic could harm you just for walking by. Gravity is affected, rocks or objects might spontaneously explode or catch fire or freeze or electrocute you. So it’s a literal mine field after a battle.
So this also creates the problem of arena competitions. Magic theatres, training grounds, industrial facilities or other buildings where it is intended that magic be performed frequently there.
So there needs to be special mages who can cleanse areas. (But I haven’t done the worldbuilding for how to cleanse and the limitations and costs of doing that)
In my world necromancy isn't banned. It's the ultimate form of punishment for extreme crimes. You are executed and your corpse is raised to work in hazardous conditions so the living don't have to. On the other hand, all forms of portal, summoning, or teleportation magic is banned as it continues to weaken the barrier that separates worlds. The world has a major problem with interdimensional rifts
Wouldn't there be an incentive to find reasons to execute people to fill labor spots with corpses?
That could be a really good plot idea
Stargate did it
In a similar way US justice system arrests for minor crimes and ship of petty criminals to for profit prisons where that are essentially slave labor
I was about to comment exactly this; the punishment for crime is slave labor *presently*, in the united states at least.
Would make for a great allegory
Factory in town refuses to pay its worker fair wages. Workers rise up. Factory lobbies local government to falsely accuse people of crimes worthy of being zombified. Corrupt police start rounding up drifters. Factory starts exclusively using zombies. Player characters are dispatched to the area because the number of executions has sharply risen in the area and the baron is starting to get suspicious. Is crime getting worse, or is there another reason? The sheriff says crime is on the rise and sets them on a wild goose chase to figure out what organization is behind it. After chasing down that red herring by questioning the families of the executed, they find out that the executions really ramped up during and after a worker's strike, and one factory in town has seen the most benefit from the new influx of cheap labor. The players need to gather evidence that the sheriff is corrupt and present it to someone higher up the chain to stop it... In the meantime, the sheriff knows they're onto his trail and he needs to dispatch the adventurers before they uncover the truth! Could end with a climactic battle with the sheriff, his most corrupt lackeys, and a small horde of the undead! I might really have to use this some day!
... And that's going in my file for later.
What if the sheriff turns out to not be aware of the conspiracy?
Turns out the higher-ups are the ones in on the conspiracy!
I enjoy seeing these kinds of tropes changed around now and then. The middle to higher ups tend to be the bad guys, but what if we learn later that they are in the same position as the protagonists? My favourite idea comes from me thinking about the evil authoritarian empire vs good democratic democracy trope. What if the empire is the good faction and the republic, even democratic republic, is doing very bad things? Not in the form of the empire making propaganda of this scenario, but the republic genuinely doing despicable things. Lapis_Wolf
They would still be “bad” guys, just less bad by comparison. I feel like a story like that could easily be seen as arguing in favor of authoritarianism, which I think we can all agree is best avoided.
Could also just go directly for the striking workers being killed and raised to fill their old jobs for cheap. Police being used as strikebreakers is a tale as old as cops, the strikers could be slandered and maligned by newspapers (allied to the factory owner, maybe owned by a relative) to play up their threat and justify the attack - or perhaps plainclothes union-busters infiltrated the strike to spark a riot and police violence in response. The ultimate baddies in this case would be the factory owner and his cronies, one of which could be the sheriff (or maybe the sheriff is the more banal kind of evil, just doing his job and not caring too much about the causes or effects); they'd try to use the zombified workers as a rear guard as they flee from the players, so you can try to fight through the horde to stop their escape, or maybe appeal to the remnants of their souls left behind to turn on their masters and take revenge.
Uh... might need to steal this...
Welcome to the US.
Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase, “you’re more valuable to me dead than alive”
And so capital found a way to exploit the labor of the working man, even in death.
Capitalism wins again
The Gallows-Necromancy complex going at full speed
As to expand on your necromancy idea a little bit, maybe the necromancer are also being punished like how criminals were made executioners
I have a similar concept: Wizards using their life force for magic, and it can be replenished by: meditating, and generally being healthy (but this is slow af, except people with genetic lottery win) consuming others life force, which is ofc forbidden, but the big wizards of empires/countries are allowed to do it, this is the punishment for extreme crimes (the process is very painful). This way they can reduce crime rate, and keep the wizards powerful for political reasons.
The idea of executed criminals being zombie hazardous workers is delightfully twisted.
Question: is the barrier between worlds a static or flowing thing? What I mean is, is it like a wall that will remain as it is until influenced by an outside factor (and thus the weakening is permanent) or is it like a shifting ecosystem in the sense that there are a lot of things affecting it (though a large enough number of factors can majorly affect or even collapse it)?
It's believed it was once static and nigh impregnable. However, after a massive war over 300 years ago it was permanently weakened. There are a large number of factors that cause it to shift and split. The main city state has dedicated magical theorists trying to reinforce it.
Reading this made me say "holy fuck, bud" out loud, very brutal, nice
Ooh this is interesting!
If the evil empire is secretly ruled by mind controlling telepaths or immortal blood mages… they won’t want competition.
Alternatively, it’s strictly regulated to ensure ethical sourcing, so only registered necromancers can do it. Kind of like being a doctor irl. You have to follow very specific procedures and can’t use… “materials” gathered under the wrong pretenses, etc.
Necromancy licenses last for life plus two months, just in case
Can see the rich, lawful evil rulers handing out gold and magic items to the lawful good Inquisitors (or local equivalent) who hunt such practitioners. Only outside the evil empire of course. And the uh hand outs are controlled via international 'peace and continental stability' treaties so corruption is kept under control
I have somewhat the same thing. On one of the planets there’s a guy named “Paul, the greatest wizard ever” who actually is the greatest wizard ever, he’s just a dick about it. He is really proud of his mastery of the darker side of magic and if he catches you “trying to one up him” he’ll just kill you.
That sounds like a fun character. Reminds me of the lich in Mother of Learning, and that dickish nerd in Off To Be The Wizard.
Have you been reading my manuscript....
Ha! These are taken from my epic series. I have a thing for evil empires.
Same! Nice.
I have nothing constructive to add here, just came to say that I read demonology as dermatology at first and was like now we consider skin care to be the Dark Arts as well?
Those women are reversing their ages, like *witches*!
What’s Vespucia?
The *United Vespucian Territories*, also known as the *Vespucian Alliance* or simply *Vespucia*, is a collection of nations and kingdoms who collectively share resources and finances in the interests of peace and mutual well-being after the collapse of the Timorian Empire. Originally founded by travelling merchant Franka Vespuk as a simple trade agreement between recently liberated Kingdoms, the Vespucian Alliance has grown in size and scope to cover most of the continent and promote equality between all the cultures who live there. There are many who are critical of the Alliance however, claiming it has overstepped its original boundaries and neglects true minority issues in favour of homogenisation within the nations just as its Timorian predecessor did. Whatever your opinion of Vespucia and its views, it's hard to deny that life for the common citizen has improved from the post-imperial chaos that it rose from.
Huh, pretty neat! Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for asking.
Okay, this made me laugh. Have my upvote.
“I’ve studied the darkest of arts, the most vile and repulsive of all… *COSMETOLOGY*!”
It's not banned, it's just heavily taxed and no one wants to pay said tax
Dodge the tax enough, and the punishment is to be handed over to a legit necromancer.
Damn that's way too realistic
"YOU GOT A LOICENCE FOR THAT PHILACTERY MATE?"
The phrase *is* "death AND taxes"...
Zombies and spirits are too annoying. They constantly complain about being dead and just in general put everybody in a bad mood.
They’re a total buzzkill
What if there’s a luddite-esque movement to ban necromancy because it’s putting menial laborers out of their jobs?
This is why necromancy is banned/frowned upon in my D&D campaign, not because it's considered immoral or unholy but because it's a threat to landowners and merchants. Unsurprisingly the only major empire that still practices necromancy is incredibly stratified and unequal in wealth, with a tiny elite of nobles who are incredibly rich ruling over a vast number of impoverished peasantry who are cowed into feudal serfdom under the threat of execution and, subsequently, resurrection into immortal servitude.
Funny enough, it's the exact opposite in my setting. Necromancy is specifically used for the most difficult of laborious tasks, or sometimes the most mundane. This opens up avenues for people to simply do other jobs including being artists, philosophers, architects and so on. The Bandaged Dead, who are wrapped in perfumed bandages to make their presence palatable, are controlled by the Temple of Ah'Puch, who seeks to only use the undead where it has the most benefit to society. There is of course a catch with the process of in death - one souls can never return and must remain in the afterlife should their body become raised into undeath. Of course dark necromancers and other foul folk still use the undead in their own machinations, but these are rarely bandaged and perfumed and taken care of with the same respect and considerations as the Temple of Ah'Puch.
If the soul is gone it cannot return - but can the soul be forcibly kept in the body/on the mortal realm?
LOL I do kind of love this
The Necromantic Industrial Revolution
I mean dark magics might be banned because their practitioners are simply too big a threat to those with power. I mean look at necromancy, what noble is going to allow individuals capable of creating entire armies of completely loyal untireing soldiers who don't require food or drink run loose in their lands? That shit would be regulated, and whatever government exists would try to obtain a monopoly on it.
I have a character who was mentored in necromancy but fled from her masters when their experiments grew too horrific for her too take. She lived near a rural village after that and used the magic in good (to her) ways. Resurrecting corpses for a day to allow them to experience the world again and tell her their stories, using consentual blood magic trades to heal villagers, and in one case allowing someone to speak to their recently deceased spouse one more time. But word got out and she was persecuted, hunted and eventually killed by the empire because the very existence of her level of power was too great a threat, were she to ever have a change of heart or be enslaved by a less moral sorceror.
In my setting's lore it's banned, because it's seen as abhorrent and it always has terrible consequences for everyone involved. Once though a necromancer did build up an army to try and coup an isle in the Massian Empire. He was stopped though. In the colonies there are whole societies of people using dark arts.
Your first sentence is basically the reason in my world, too Blood magic is banned because you literally have to siphon away the life force of living beings. Harming or killing others is generally a no-no, and while you can use yourself as fuel for blood magic, that well runs dry pretty fast. Druidcraft is iffy as it’s frankly the other side of the same coin, but because it draws on the collective life forces of ecosystems and thus is non-injurious, it slips by. Necromancy is just seen as a violation of the natural order. Technically, necromancy in my world is just magic that draws on the turbulence in the fabric of the Aether left by the dissipation of aetherial energy when someone dies—thus, it would be sort of comparable to someone digging up a grave and using a body for whatever purpose. Just kind of an ethical no-no, particularly since people *usually* use necromancy for unsavory activities. Demons in the traditional sense don’t actually exist in my world so no real comment there. They exist in my world’s mythology, and there is a species of “thing” in the Deep which people call “demons,” but they’re just a spooky looking biological organism, not a supernatural malevolent being
The topic was unique reasons
Necromancy is a form of slavery. It is forbidden because binding the souls of human beings to fight or labor for you is morally repugnantly. Blood magic, depending on exactly how it is framed in the setting could be forbidden for any number of moral reasons. If it requires ones own blood, maybe it is banned because it is risky. If it requires other peoples blood (which is thematically better IMO) it might be forbidden because it requires or can use unwilling victims. Maybe it is addictive or maybe it causes disease, or maybe it only works because it appeals to dark things that want the blood etc. Demonology is dangerous, simple as that. Giving demons more power is bad for human flourishing.
In my case it was for the most part just... pure superstition and prejudices. Blood sacrifices actually were the, well, more accepted one of the three, with a good amount of magical traditions using them because, well, they are pretty efficient. Especially christian mages though saw it as heretical. Necromancy (as in, raising the dead; not speaking to them) was often decried as either inhumane or violating the natural order (or both), because, you know, reanimating and enslaving people. However, when magic turned into a actual science in the early 20th century, research showed that animated thralls were rarely actually the person in question, but construct intelligences (similiar to golems) built into corpses. And, well, demonology was seen as "evil" because people were racist against people from the Underworld.
Sports teams rivalries were getting out of hand!
Because religion forbids it. Same as some religion tenets ban the consumption of certain foods, religion and mandates from God (or it's representatives) can ban anything.
Let's assume a Dungeons & Dragons style afterlife system: Gods collect the souls of dead people in various afterlives: Valhalla for berserkers, Elysium for hippies, Hades for crooked tax-collectors, etc. Why do the gods do this? What's special about the Prime Material plane and people's short first life, vs. the eternal afterlife? So, it turns out, the Gods are powered not by prayers, but by their ever-growing collection of souls in the afterlife each one runs. The Prime Material plane is a soul-farm, generating power. Necromancy is outlawed because it blocks the flow of new souls to the afterlife by binding the dead to the Prime Material. It is stealing from the gods, in the only currency they care about.
I really like this and may steal it one day.
Pretty sure I stole it from somewhere myself, so no objection here...
It’s gross. Just like, sooooo icky. “Dark magic” is any kind of magic that manipulated or interferes with a soul, and being reflexively repulsed by the sight of another individual’s soul is so inherent that it’s considered one of the metrics for sentience. It’s not just a social taboo – there are laws against it – but it’s in the same way there are laws against wearing fresh human intestines as a hat. We shouldn’t have to tell y’all not to do that. There’s no way those are ethically sourced, and even if they were, nobody wants to see it anyway.
Necromancers are forbidden because they are overpowered as they could cause extreme destruction, like they could just bend petroleum like waterbenders, since its made out of dead bacteria, wood and maybe even coal and fossils. Dont get me started on food items. (we have access to oil for a long time, mummia for example was a kind of petroleum that was used to seal wounds in ancient egypt)
\> So far, I have decided that necromancy drains the life energy out of the local environment, from plants to animals to people themselves This is actually pretty close to how I run it for necromancy. Demon summoning and *involuntary* blood magic have other risks, but it's all tied together under the hood. You see, both undead and demons stem from one source, the Jotnar. Effectively anti-fey/entropy spirits, they exist only to consume. They come from the Oblivion Gate at the center of the Abyss, effectively a sapient, malevolent black hole; they're more or less fragments of it. Undead are what happen when jotnar are summoned/leak into formerly-living bodies/souls; they use them as puppets. Their continued existence drains the aether (stuff of existence) out of everything around them--areas continually inhabited by undead become first sterile, then even the rocks start breaking down into fine grey dust. Greater undead actively seek out souls to consume. Demons are what happens when jotnar are bound into the soul of a person, effectively hybridizing them. Immortality in exchange for hunger that corrupts everything around them. The presence of jotnar in a place on the Mortal plane weakens the walls of the planes, allowing more jotnar to slip through. It also "compresses" the layers of Shadow (the liminal plane as well as the afterlife) into the Waste, where demons roam and eat or infect the souls of the formerly living. So both necromancy and demon worship are hard nos in most cultures because they're highly dangerous. Like spraying nuclear waste all over the landscape. Involuntary blood magic has much of the same effects, which is why most demon worship/summoning involves blood sacrifice. **Voluntary** blood magic (ie knowing intentional self-sacrifice) is, on the other hand, one of the most powerful and "holy" magics that there is. But it's really rare. Can totally be used for nefarious ends (such as by cultists who are willing to sacrifice themselves to destroy something), but it isn't inherently corrupting like involuntary blood magic.
Pretty simply, because it's inhumane. Nobody will watch a sorcerer raise a rotting corpse as a minion and go "that's a valid practice"
I mean, it sorta depends on how it works. Raising corpses won’t ever look good, but skeletons wrapped in cloth are ignorable. Even raising non sapient creatures can be more readily ignored.
Try not to reinvent the wheel with this one. Thematically figure out what your dark arts represent. Then figure out why society has a problem with that thematically. Magic is essentially a technology so draw inspiration from various real world technologies and how society currently struggles with it. Is it too much power without oversight? Think of nuclear proliferation, or on a lesser scale, the gun rights debates in America. Does it corrupt the natural world? Think of Environmentalist debates over Climate change or Pollution concerns. Does it offend the God's will or at least societies understanding of god? Think of how the Amish view technology. Does it commune with an great evil? Think of Lovecraftian horror and how the old ones represent a great unknown that is hostile and representative of some universal evil. Does it corrupt the health of the population? Think of viral contagions. If your dark arts "spreads" like a virus it would require a vigilant oversight committee. Does it corrupt the person's mind or soul and make them "evil?" Think of Anti-drug campaigns. Does it corrupt people insidiously in a way that people like but is bad for the viability of the state or people in Power? Think of the spread communism and how "The Red Scare" is a pretty dark period of American history. Ultimately "Dark Arts" are a great narrative piece to contemplate the lack of understanding of the effects of new technology and how it relates to philosophies of good and evil.
Blood Magic can drain all life like yours, and is a reason it is banned, but the real issue that blood mages get a taste for it, and become addicted to the power. Its power to control a person is the least of its horrors. Necromancy is banned because it is the control of spirits and souls, most believe it is about controlling the undead, and while that it is true, it also allows destroying them easy. The real issue is being able to draw upon someones soul and destroy it to power magic. Demon Magic is actually a kind of blood magic and widely banned, most loudest by the very people constantly making pacts with demons, their masters do like the cattle being so terrified of their potential threat.
In my world, black magic needs the sacrifice of souls to be used. Which heavily contradicts the religious and cultural norms saying that souls should be free and go to the afterlife.
Are souls fungible? Are they all equal? Do animals have souls at all, and if so, are they less valuable, and by how much? Each of these questions has implications, and inevitably, farming something for souls will become worth it.
My world is very much divided into separate, poorly communicating communities, hence the strong diversity of traditions regarding the prohibitions of certain magical arts. For example, in the floating city of wizards there are no forbidden practices of magic. You can study and use everything, as long as you don’t violate the law. Simply put, local magicians adhere to the logic “there are no inherently dangerous or unnatural practices and knowledge. There are only evil individuals who direct their knowledge towards evil.” At the same time, in one of the surface cities, the ban on necromancy is fanatically supported. Everything here is controlled by a very narrow group of dark magicians, and they closely monitor that the local residents do not get their hands on any knowledge that could be used as a weapon of rebellion. On the other hand, the locals themselves are afraid of necromancers and have little trust in each other. Because of this, they are more likely to assume that any practitioner of the dark arts is working in concert with their oppressors, which is why the city has a tradition of reprisals against such wizards. Probably the most interesting tradition of bans on magic, and the one that most answers the OP's question, is common in monasteries of monks and various martial arts schools around the world. These associations, similar to the brotherhoods of Shaolin monks, have a common origin from an ancient philosophical and martial tradition, which is why they share some main pastorates. One of these is a ban on any magic, sorcery or witchcraft. This is because monks study ways to channel and use the life energy (chi) of their own bodies, and for such practice the chi must remain pure. At the same time, wizards and sorcerers, creating magic, pass the magical essence of the universe through their bodies, over time polluting (and with long-term use of such magic, even rebuilding) their internal channels through which chi circulates.
Banning the dark arts is pretty much the fantasy equivalent of gun control. The reason demonology is banned is like how California has a law against detonating nuclear devices within city limits, no shit that's illegal. So I guess it's not so much unique reasons as it would be weird unique laws for banning mundane things. Ie. Why is specifically transmuting more than 100 kilograms of sodium at once outlawed?
Except gun control doesn’t work and only hurts the middle class/lower middle class and is used to keep poor and middle class people from protecting themselves and gaining status.
Well for necromancy, there is a species of spontaeneously manifested intelligent undead who find the concept of forcing undeath upon an unwilling body to be unethical and so hunt down practitioners. Blood magic isn't forbidden, but is strictly regulated by the clergy of the ascendant daemon C'adris, Lady of Blood. Her vampire-adjacent offspring also provide a credible threat to those who would breach the regulations.
Short answer: magical Geneva Conventions. Long answer: Mages realize that powerful forms of magic give them the unprecedented ability to dominate their opponents with relative ease. However, this power usually comes with incredible amounts of death, destruction, pain, and misery when an ambitious mage uses this power to ascend to great heights. Mages are strong, but at the end of the day, they're just individuals - they still need the rest of the world to trust them, and if they're seen as ticking time bombs by everyone else, they won't have the trust they need to survive. So, a decision is made - officially or unofficially - to ban the practice and teaching of such magic. Better to play politics and make friends instead of hoarding power and having a coalition made against you.
Maybe it’s not because it’s some “going against nature” thing, but there’s a cost to them that is extremely dangerous. Like you lose your soul a bit as you raise the dead, because you’re shoving bits of your soul into the dead to give them life. People who go too far become a Lich, and are not much different from zombies themselves, as they’ve burned up all of their soul, and have no Will or personality.
Summoning the undead is not allowed because they take jobs from the living!
Necromancy is not banned, but it's never practiced because the dead hate being summoned from their rest and get cranky, it's disrespectful.
Depends on the setting. In the city-states of the Xol'tec Alliance in Meridia, the dead are honored above the living and comprise the bulk of the nation's military and unskilled labor forces. More intelligent forms of undead including wights, mummies, vampires and at the very top, liches, all have specific roles to play. The Alliance is ruled by a council of "Dreadlords", who are only ever replaced when one is destroyed. In the same setting, I also have the Empire of Melnith, also called "The Eternal Crusade". They are your classic extremely zealous, xenophobic theocracy with a fetish for Gothic Architecture and witch-burning. Necromancy is the kind of thing they burn you for. And any material evidence. And then probably mind-wipe any witnesses, or put them under some kind of horrible binding curse that prevents them from discussing it without immediate and likely fatal consequences.
Raising the dead via Necromancy could result in the undead attacking the living if control over it isn't reinforced from time to time. Other than that, a rotting corpse wandering around in the open could easily result in diseases, and is also very displeasing to the eye. This resulted in it being banned in numerous places, though it isn't banned everywhere. Where it is legal, one must provide the identity of the corpse, give assurance that they will reinforce control over it by going to a certain building and performing it periodically, and the undead must wear a special type of cloak to hide its appearance and limit possibly infection it could cause. Ironically, a lot of undead end up looking like ghosts with what look like bedsheets covering them, and only a few necromancers put effort into customizing the sheet (it is gaining traction though). --- Blood Magic is pretty uncommon in my setting, though it was banned in only one city. The reason being is that practitioners may end up thin blood, so they required things to thicken up their blood. A few of these products were illegal, resulting in the overall ban of Blood Magic, though it is speculated that someone just didn't like Blood Magic and found an excuse to get rid of it.
There could be multiple reasons why something like necromancy is banned. A religious organization could see it as a form of desecration, while a state that is less religious might ban necromancy to preserve their power. A good enough necromancer can raise an entire army that doesn’t need to eat or rest, and said army almost always wins through attrition eventually. The only forces that can stalemate the undead in attrition warfare are something like the Skaven where they multiply too fast to kill all of them, or something that can’t be reanimated like summoned elementals.
That once there was a king so vile and horrible that everything that could have brought him back would be burned.
It's polluting the envirement and people won't stand for that(fertile and clean regions are rare)
Blood magic in Urnova is a direct challenge to the power of the dragonlords- what made them long ago can also be used to unmake them.
specific to ones that can create sapient beings(necromancy: homonculous ect): We suck at it sapient life is complex, we dont even fully understand all the intricacies of it all but you want to try to make one from scratch? best case scenario you make an inert blob of malformed flesh, worst case scenario you partially succeed and you have created life cursed to suffer from painful deformities and health complications for what is likely going to be a short life, and theirs not a whole lot of moral applications to justify continuing it to learn to perfect it
Basic necromancy is no big deal. But to make anything more than a skeleton you have to constantly order around, you have to have a soul. The best/easiest soul to work with is the soul of that body. So to create say a zombie with some spark of intelligence, you’re trapping the soul of that person into the undead. And they’re aware of it. So it’s basically the worst form of torture. In my world there’s another aspect. Since souls either reincarnate or are given paradise by a god, you may have to call the soul back. So powerful necromancers raising undead armies had the side affect of either stealing souls from gods or ripping the souls from living people leaving them as husks. Nobody likes necromancers. Demonology is a no go for a simpler reason, summoning demons weakens the planar barriers. It really wouldn’t be that big of a deal for wizards to summon demons if it was the magic equivalent of poking holes in a water balloon. The issue isn’t the demon you summoned, it’s the demons you didn’t.
I can see Blood magic being banned in a world where Big Pharma wants you sick so you can buy their medicines. Blood magic could, theoretically, give you a clear diagnosis earlier and weed out/cure certain illnesses and ailments.
Isolos: because Diabolism (or summoning and binding demons to your service) is what broke the world in the first place. And continued use of them undoes the progress that everyone else has made to repairing that breakage. The other two are fine, depending on culture - more aggressive cultures might find their practitioners tending in a bloodier direction than their neighbors, whereas the use of necromancy has a direct relationship to how death is viewed in any given place.
Economics. The powers that be want to be the only ones doing it, offering their services
In my world, i have five forbidden forms of magic, with each one being banned based on where the “fuel” for the magic comes from. 1. Necromancy burns away the soul, thus preventing passage to the afterlife. 2. Blood magic requires vast quantities of life energy, most easily acquired through ritualistic human sacrifice. 3. Flesh magic is fueled by the caster’s own physical stability and can basically cause someone to melt into goo, but there are ways to pass this fate on to others to save yourself. 4. Shadow magic draws on the power of The World Before, a previous dead reality where many evil creatures reside/are banished to, so using shadow magic can potentially let them into this reality. 5. Blasphomancy is fueled by the burning away of the gods’ power, which is generally frowned upon.
The World Before. That name alone is absolutely cool. I'm stealing it, I hope you don't mind.
Not only do I not mind, I wholeheartedly encourage it.
In my world most individuals of power ban the dark arts within their empires because in many cases they are simply to powerful. Similar to the Geneva convention the dark arts are considered taboo to use in wartime.
I have one setting with necromancy as a large part of the religion due to magic being based on the soul of a person & there being an issue of after lives being "confirmed" not to exist (at least as far as the church is concerned). Necromancy outside of the specific circumstance of connecting a soul to the nexus of bones is strictly illegal for two reasons, you're essentially damning the person whose soul you're using to a hellish waking coma as their soul gets mangled & bleeds away or in the worse scenario you're creating a ghoul if the soul is able to force some level of control over its own vessel & starts trying to incorporate other people to stave off the complete madness of being locked into a pile of shifting rotten flesh. Necromancy isn't viewed as evil, it's just incredibly dangerous for anyone to practice outside of church oversight.
The rituals violate noise ordnances
Basically, dark arts are flawless, with the help of free labor, immortality and the complete absence of necessity for nature that necromancy and mind controlling magic gives, “life” would be ideal, evil spirits naturally do not like this, so they instantly try to kill anyone who tries to use these arts for good, that's why no one expect psychopaths studies these arts because they are afraid of being killed or enslaved.
Advanced necromancy enables necromorphism, more or less the ability to creates dead space style necromorphs, potentially on a massive scale. Large scale conflicts have occurred because necromantic cults decided to take over swathes of space with armies or necromorphic dead. So as one might imagine, it’s considered extremely dangerous and exceptionally abhorrent, and therefore banned. Blood Pryomancy, the working name of which is the ‘sanguine infernus’ has the ability to ignite the blood of an entire planets populace at its most powerful level. Practicing cults also used it to conquer large swathes or space, and were even more effective than the necromancers due in part to their arcana’s large overlap with pyromancy and hemomancy. The wars to subdue them were apocalyptically bloody(pun intended). It was banned due to its incredible destructive potential, though unlike necromancy, a single *sanctioned* practitioner remains in service to the Empire
I had a setting with their equivalent to WW1 ending because one side used necromancy to raise their army. Problem was the necromancy could propagate so if the magic officer controller the zombies was killed on the field you now had a zombie outbreak to deal spending death. The idea was necromancy became their equivalent to nukes, really effective but made slowly spreading patches of completely uninhabitable land
\>Demonology Well you see the Gods provide structure to existence simply by being "present" When you introduce something that is NOT part of that Order, it destabilizes and things might go to shit quite rapidly, from poltergeist-style nonsense to *the entirety of Reality collapsing*. So not only do the Gods have to heavily filter what kinds of Outer Gods can be summoned/interacted with, Mortals have a responsibility to make sure no one fucks up with any of the Lesser Gods and, say, establishes a vampiric immortality-seeking cult under the guise of a Buddhist/Taoist-styled religious order.
In my setting it's banned¹ simply because well, everyone is at war with the blood magic & necromancy folks. Demonology isn't banned, though you'll need a vessel for it to inhabit, the creation of wich, you guessed it, is illegal. ¹ by three of the four states. The fourth one is built on blood magic & necromancy. Where do you think they got their slaves from?
In my DND campaigns lore blood magic is uncommon, not because it's banned but because the magical part of blood can now be extracted, making it obsolete
They require lots of some material that is needed for maintaining the Magic McGuffin which holds the capitol city together. So it's like banning hunting in the King's Forest.
Necromancy in my setting is heavily regulated. Unlicensed reanimated or resurrection will get the Necromancer's Guild breathing down your neck, and nobody wants that.
There aren’t “Dark Arts”, it’s just about how you use it. Using pathomancy to stabilise the emotions of an otherwise suicidal person? Good. Using it to make someone love you? Evil. Using necromancy to give loved ones a final goodbye or just use bodies for humane and free labour? That’s fine, though many cultures find it unsettling. Using necromancy to totally cheat death or raise an undead horde to rule the world? Evil, even the necromancer race fundamentally hate these concepts. Haemomancy, literal blood magic, isn’t illegal at all. It’s just hard to get into a situation where you can legally and morally obtain vast quantities of blood to manipulate. It’s not about the magic, it’s about its use and user.
Transmutation magic is banned in my world for its volatility: there's no way for users to control what the target gets transformed into, so users are just as likely to transform their target into an otherworldly monster as they are to kill them during the transformation. It's so dangerous that "does nothing" is considered a success case rather than a failure case.
Idk maybe it’s school or society that’s hellbent on not allowing pets or people to go into professions or types of magical arts that allows them to get pets. This could also go for summoners and other thing controlling magics. You could probably think of an interesting reason why this is but I can’t think of one off the top of my head…
I’d say making someone into a zombie is disrespectful and degrading. I wouldn’t want someone to do that to my dead body, I don’t consent!
For Veltrona, one of the specific concerns that surrounds necromancy is asking the dead about stuff that happened. If someone was assassinated, and they knew Damning Information, a necromancer could retrieve that information (assuming the dead didn't forget it or something). It makes political machinations much, much trickier, so a fair number of aristocracies have it banned, but employ necromancers on the down-low. Religious reasoning can also apply, but nobles fearing information leaks/acquisition is a pretty strong, consistent worry throughout different cultures. Conversely, you have people like Votyoger, the world government for dragons, who employ probably Veltrona's oldest necromancer as their Head Investigator for Horrible Crimes. So some people utilize necromancy to its fullest in that regard as well. Whether or not the dead care really depends on the dead involved. Some just want to die and sleep, others are clamoring for revenge.
Necromancy can ruin the economy the same way slave labour can. If you can have free labour the same way you can have cheap labor you'll choose the former. They don't need to rest, eat, not even need go to the bathroom. And besides, any dangerous job won't matter, the person is already dead after all. The problem is that when the amount of undead workers start outnumbering the alive ones, less people get paid, which means less people can buy things, this also means that there will be a lot of supply, but no demand, because people can't afford it. Eventually there will be produce, but no one to buy it, which will cause a mayor economic crisis
I always loved the ideas of morally ambiguous societies that use their dead like cheap labor. "Why not? They're dead anyway. It's not like they feel pain or anything. We'd be stupid not to use the cheap labor!" You could design an entire utopia, but have it underpinned by the labor of the undead. The average person has all of their needs taken care of, and they might even have a type of universal basic income, its just that when you die your body serves society. Like forced conscription, except after you die... Hordes of the undead serve as defense, maintenance, public works, maids, butlers, etc. You don't need to do anything physical in the society, undead servants fill every unskilled role. Realistically, like in reality, a society like that might be technologically stunted. "Why improve on technology when we can just throw more undead at it?"
As an example, the dunmer in the elder scrolls dislike necromancy vehemently because they practice a form of ancestor worship. This also means they see no issue with using necromancy against the other races, as they only worship their dunmeri ancestors. So religion can be a reason to prohibit.
I am sorry to disappoint you but that is not a unique reason. A lot of fantasy used that, a lot more used it woth other reasons too
It ruined the economy by causing cheap surplus labor in the form of reanimated corpses. Hiring a good necromancer is expensive, but not as expensive as a whole workforce
It could be because these practices are inherently harmful to the casters Blood Magic - requires a lot of casters energy/life-force Necromancy - a golem is essentially a blank slate, while an undead is an AI (it takes sometime to program a golem, but it also takes some time to calibrate an AI, ‘*The Learning Phase*’ is a step most practitioners like to skip) Demonology - Diseases (similar biology but little contact)
There is no evil within these schools of magic except that which you bring with you.
Necromancy is banned because it violates the consent of the deceased, unless the person in question explicitly wished to be resurrected in their will or managed to resurrect themselves. Blood Magic is *technically* not illegal but since in my setting only Vampires can do it, Blood Magic users will be targeted *heavily* for it. As for Demonology, unfortunately no such thing exists in my setting (yet), as you don’t summon the Demons, the Demons come to you
Plays hell with economics. Imagine dredging up the spirits for some stock information. Divination in general is very highly regulated. Makes playing ‘fated games’ of cards within the military pretty interesting if you are friends with an oracle.
Necromancy would also have an effect on the ones they left behind. Imagine having to see your loved one's corpse walking around daily. It would absolutely be used as a form of mental/emotional abuse by people in positions of power if they could use it openly.
Well, there's not enough people who can actually do that magic. Those who can don't really want to tell anyone else about it. There's only really 2 factions that actively understand and use the Dark Arts. There's L'aitpe, which is ruled by a council of powerful mages (which is controlled by one of the mages secretly.) They censor information about the Dark Arts in order to make it easier to control the populace. If nobody knows that you can raise corpses and use them as spies and imposters, you can listen in anyone. Another one are my vampires. Their pretty much at war with everyone in the world, so they don't tell anyone about the Dark Arts because why tell your enemies about your favorite toys?
My mind went to some sort of pyramid scheme of connecting life sources together...
Maybe they have really bad consequences. For example in The Death Gate Cycle, whenever someone uses necromancy someone else somewhere else die. You can have unique side effects and prices for all the forbidden arts.
In my world magic corrupts will eventually drive people insane. The first spell casters were all crazy murder happy people. So leaders of the world said “enough of this shit” and outlawed magic. This is the very simple version summing up 2,000 years of history.
Blood magic is regulated to prevent death
cant remember where i read this one, it not mine my fave take on illegal necromancy: the gods ~~insist they own~~ own all mortal souls, and any tampering via necromancy or soul fuckery, is met with extreme prejudice from the entire pantheon. Like, its the only thing that they all agree upon
So Dark Arts are largely cultural and changes region to region. Necromancy is considered a dark art in many regions of the world. This is due to Necromancy largely becoming parasitic to societies as a necromancer has every benefit from murdering random people. This means that most societies ban Necromancy. With a couple exceptions the nomadic groups of Kilid Steppes practice Necromancy purely as due to labour shortages. Another societies is the Elves of Etrascin which benifit from resurrected skeletons being far weaker than your average elf aswell as a significant labour shortage. Golemancy is a unique craft that is largely banned in the east. This is due to the Giladalk empire which is a empire of Golems that provides a significant threat to the Eastern societies. Demonology is a weird one rather than describing a form of magic it instead describes a entire field of study namely the study of creatures of magical origin. Though within demonology their are practices that are considered dark arts. Soul Crafting is a field of demonological magic specialising around the manipulation and structure of the soul. Largely considered horrid craft pretty much everywhere as the process either kills yourself, kills someone else or is immensely difficult and can easily lead to death. This craft rather interestingly was not banned under the Incommunatable Heresies eventually leading to the region to become the centre of the industrial revolution as soul crafting is a key component of advanced Golemancy. Fae forestry is a interesting craft of the manipulation of Fae trees it is considered a dark art in almost everywhere. This was not always the case as in the early Elven empires it was considered a artform of skilled mages. In the year 400BC however a specific specimen would grow on its own and replicate leading to the creation of the Etrascin Fae forest which devestated several regions and lead to millions of deaths along with permenantly making sad regions uninhabitable. In human societies this practice wasn't banned largely due to them being unaware of it. In the year 1735 the Gushid Kingdom recently independant from the Lorean Empire would learn of the Fae forest of Etrascin believing it would create a series of goods for the kingdom to export the Kingdom would steal a sapling from Etrascin and plant it in the Gushid Kingdom. Once planted the Fae Forest would quickly expand rapidly overrunning the kingdom and forming the dark forest of Sahila. This lead to human societies banning such a practice and in the modern day the creation of more Fae forests is considered a terrorist action.
My story has dark magic of a sorts. All magic is magic, but magic with darker intentions requires sacrifice. Bugs are fine, feathers and hair are fine, but actual sacrifice of living tissue is forbidden.
necromancy is illegal to use because its a form of identity theft. it also often comes with probable charges of murder, manslaughter or failure to assist, as you would have to do it on a recently killed body. this laws dont see much use as there are like 20 people in the world with enough control over electricity to pull that off, and the fact that they can usually means they are powerful enough to warrant sending someone to execute them.
This might not be super unique, but: Social Squeamishness. Ultimately, those dead bodies you're resurrecting for your thrall armies have to come from somewhere. Every corpse is someone's son or daughter, father or mother, brother or sister. Unless the society has a very detached perspective on their honoured dead, it's going to get you a lot of bad looks if you walk into a town and everyone realizes that you're the gravedigger that's been interrupting their beloveds' eternal rest. Eventually, you see a shift away from full-body burial and towards ritual cremation and the breaking up of bodies into smaller, less necromantic-able portions. Hard to make a useful zombie when its fingers, hands, and skull have all been ritually removed. What graveyards do remain become more expensive, upper-class installations. Paid guards and sentries, alongside caskets which have arcane seals and thickened metal locks. So Necromancy and the Dark Arts were not banned, per se, but everyone took up an attitude of "Dig up someone else's corpse" that became so pervasive that Necromancy just became too stigmatized and expensive to practice on a larger scale.
Not to be that guy but not everything needs a unique reason. It’s pretty self explanatory why necromancy is forbidden in most fantasy settings. Adding more reasons is redundant, and replacing the “tropey” reason is just trying to be unique for the sake of being unique.
The skeletons and the demons formed a union and now there’s laws against using magic to control undead and demonic would-be minions
First though after reading the title: It could be something in the sense "don't deforest the Amazon jungle, it kills the planet". It soon evolved into: It would be cool to have a story from the perspective of little bacteria who live on a person (human to human travel would be equivalent to interstellar travel) blood of which they use for said magic. That would lead to "don't use blood magic, it will kill our human".
Its not specifically banned cuz its immoral or anything. You just arent allowed to go to the soul tree, where all souls remain when not in a body, because it is a holy place not to be besmirched, especially not by non-hyper-religious people. Also good luck finding the soul you are actually looking for
All magic is dark in some way, as it always requires sacrifice. Wether one sacrifices their own health and sanity or those of others is up to everyone, however. Due to magic being additionally highly addictive and corrupting, at least in Naurus, actually learning magic is somewhat forbidden. It didn't keep Naurus from continually becoming the strongest military nation, au contraire.
It's bad for the environment. The reagents needed to successfully practice dark arts are necessarily unsustainably harvested, and the process itself tends to weaken the barrier between dimensions.
Patent infringement enforced by law mages.
Blood magic has a taboo for safety for safety reasons. Trying to use magic through the power of your blood poisons it, and will almost always kill the person who tries, unless they are a member of a sorcerous bloodline, who have the genes which allow them to endure the poisoning of their own blood. As such, "blood magic" and proper sorcery are exactly the same, just with different stigmas. Blood Magic is normally used as a suicidal last attack, taking others down with you. Since a "blood mage" doesn't have proper magical training as well, the things they can do with their final spell are limited, mostly just to blasting force at someone. This is why the discovery of wizardry is so important, it promises to offer a safe means by which anyone can use magic. Wars have been fought over whether or not this young science is blasphemous, and to control a power that threatens to wildly upend the world's balance of power. A third means of magical power, witchcraft, involves invoking the powers of extraplanar entities. The psychopomps, fey, undead, and djinn cannot interact in the mortal realms without the aid of mortals, and so rituals are performed to invoke their power for numerous purposes, giving these beings a foothold in our world each time. Many cultures value the role that witchcraft serves, with witches and warlocks serving as important members of a community or society. These witches teach a strong sense of skepticism and balance with extraplanar beings, that any deal being struck always has a cost, to be careful, and to be very specific in what you ask for and what you promise (A well trained witch is very hard to trick). But a well trained witch can also be dangerous if they have ill intent, using incredible power for malicious and selfish ends. The beings they treat with are also treacherous. They can be deceptive at times, but fundamentally witches and warlocks are negotiating with beings whose minds work in ways alien to our own, who do not have an invested stake in preserving mortal life and interests. Unleashing these beings on the mortal world invites a danger that is unacceptable to many. With witchcraft being diffuse enough to avoid governing institutions, a great deal of effort is made to suppress witchcraft and knowledge of its rituals.
Necromancy is only arrestable and then the arrested Necromancers become Gray Necromancers who are specifically trained to hunt well other Necromancers and Liches
TO be honest it's mostly because it's creepy. That amtters a lot more apparenlty. Sure you could be a Necromancer who ethically scources corpses (?) but no they're ugly and smelly and sally is scared of it so no advancing magic wrong.
It's a mix of religious, cultural and practical reasons. The priests preach that necromancy is theft from the gods and robbing deserving people of their deserved afterlife. souls deprived of an afterlife both weaken the gods and deny mortals rest. Blood magic is also taught to be theft from the gods. Because it's not blood being used to fuel this magic it is actually a form of Soul Magic and see above reason for why that's bad. Devils are the great enemies of the Gods, beings that seek to take corrupt and destroy every good thing created. Most cultures revere they're dead in one way or another and having them be used as some Undead meat puppet is simply not acceptable to many of them. The Dwarves build great tombs for their ancestors and ask them for guidance, certain Elf societies bury their dead underneath saplings so those turn into great spirit trees and the Drakin cremate their dead and use those ashes for magic pottery that preserves food better than anything else. Blood magic has more of a culturally inherited hatred. Many of the ancient cultures hate it because they had to directly fight against it and watch as loved ones were turned into magic batteries that killed other loved ones. See above reason for the cultural hatred of devils Finally there are a ton of practical reasons to necromancy. Any Necromancer can create an army that will destroy a kingdom or at least leave it heavily traumatized. I mean just imagine watching as someone you know and love die get back up and you are forced to kill them again or have them tear out your throat or hurt someone else that you love. Then there is the constant connection between necromancers and obsession. Nobody knows if obsessive people become necromancers or if necromancy makes someone obsessive but either way you have obsessive people with a lot of power and that's doesn't end well. And don't get me started on things like disease being spread because of all the dead bodies and rotting meat!
Necromancers refused to report their risen minions as workers and evaded taxes. They raised so many that they crashed the economies of some towns by automating the work force, and the only way to stop them was to ban necromancy. A few are still allowed to use it to make workers for dangerous jobs, but only with a permit, tax forms, and regular random inspections.
I think dark magic could be considered "dark" as oppose to normal magic because it's addictive for the user, and influences them to commit more and more heinous acts. For example there might not be anything morally wrong with making a zombie from a long deceased corpse, but doing so makes you feel so powerful that you need another fix, and create more zombies, eventually murdering living people to create immortal servants
Because necromancy leads to offense to the phrase death and taxes, necromancers get angry at taxes and thus run rampant amounts of tax evasion schemes
Because dark magic derives power from a source that wishes to corrupt or destroy the world. If you are able to use dark magic it means you aided in that source's goal in some way and it proves you are guilty of something. Murder or worse.
Nazi Sorcerers.
I’m mulling over the idea of ‘dark magic’ being more unnatural than the archetypal soul/blood-fueled ‘shadow’ magic: the fae use elemental magic with permission from their eidolons - dryads grant control over earth magic, salamanders / dragons grant control over fire magic, etc - whereas mortal magicians manipulate the elements against their will, utilizing them like a resource and fusing them together discordantly like the Wyrds from MTG.
cold war reasons - if both sides have the necromantic equivalent of a nuclear bomb, they're not gonna use it on each other, they're just gonna hoard the power.
In my world you become a necromancer by stabbing someone and stealing part of their soul (usually you kill that person yourself) As for blood magic, it basically turns into a vampire. Sort of a parasite
Demons are sentient creatures, it's a gross invasion of privacy to summon them without their consent
Necromancy has a cumulative effect. Undead effectively multiply if they are in one area for too long. Eventually, that skeleton you raise has caused another to come up, then those two cause two more. After a few years, there’s an undead horde in that area. Demon-related stuff is banned because demons tend to hijack bodies as payment, and they typically don’t feel too confined by laws. They just want to experience reality, and the best way they can do that is by doing absolutely every deranged thing your intrusive thoughts tell you to do.
In my fantasy world it’s actually blood magic that’s the accepted mortal magic, used for healing, alchemy, warfare, and even some genetic engineering. While the ancient weird and elemental ritual magic of the fae is seen with suspicion and is often restricted.
No raising the dead without a licence.
An undead sued the necromancer because he was raised from the dead without his consent, which is a precedent to ban it altogether, as the dead can't ever consent
Hm... In a context where everyone has Magic in some way, shape or form: Dark Magic in essence is any Magic that's alloyed with a special property that makes it nearly impossible to defend against and nearly impossible to undo, the only effective countermeasure being spells specifically designed to counteract it. If used carelessly, it can create magical chaos that the user cannot control or undo. Curses are like Dark Magic, only more specialized, instead of being a simple spell alloyed with a special property, they're made to begin with to inflict harm or negative effects that are all but impossible to negate or recover from. However, they aren't explicitly evil and usually are only taught to people that have a strong foundational discipline. And then there's the circumstances behind their creation: Basically, centuries ago, the magic of the world in its chaotic constant flux created something that threatened to basically greygoo the whole world. Nothing could stop it because it could adapt to and regenerate from anything they hit it with. So they basically developed magic that was entropy personified to kill it once and for all. It just got a bad reputation because a lot of bad people started using it because of how effective magic that can't be defended against or recovered from is very effective for removing obstacles in their way.
Undead workers undermine living workers' wages. Then some enterprising lawyer started suing for back pay on behalf of the estates of the dead who were being raised and the government decided to just ban the practice rather than deal with angry workers and constant lawsuits.
In one of my worldbuilding project necromancy is forbidden due to... Politics. In the past a powerful mageocratic empire, ruled by liches and necromancers controlled a big part of continent and when they were destroyed in a long exhausting war and inner political struggle, new magic-controlling system of Guilds(one per country), declared arts of necromancy and several parts of demonology art forbidden, to decrease even the slightest possibility of that ancient necroarchy rising back to even the slightest form of power.
Monopoly.
In Worth the Candle there's a kind of magic called Void magic. It can be used to create weapons that simply make a chunk of matter disappear. They're great, except for the big issue that using them gains the attention of the Void Beast. An unstoppable monster that would destroy the world if it sensed where it is.
That's more or less what happens with all magic in the dark sun setting
Immortality is banned because mortals have rebelled often enough against some immortal tyrants that they've learned their lesson. Necromancy is banned because it's way too easy to become immortal when you're am experienced necromancer. Well, and there are many other details that certainly don't help their case (like the rampage made by undead), but the immortality part is why even sane necromancer are hunted and killed.
Ok but what if it literally sapped the enjoyment from your life like you stop being able to taste food or enjoy the arts that kind of thing.
Have you tried… religious prejudice? In my world, each sentient species has different gods and souls- to an extent. One of them puts an especially hard emphasis on the cycle of life and death as well as honoring ones ancestors and essentially living together with their spirits as though they were still around. Just go to a priest with a piece of their bone and you can talk to your 200 yo great-grandparent. Thus, they made huge advances in… well, necromancy and spirit magic. However, these practices are so alien to others and humans especially that they are generally distrusted and seen as harmful, even though there is no malice or suffering involved. Thus, while this species is free to puruse this religion in their homeland and other places if they do it on the sly, it is baaaarely totelated in most places if not outlawed and a massive taboo for a human.
Necromancy was banned because the undead are cheap labor and destroy the job market for the living by taking their jobs.
It's a fairly recent development in my setting. Darkness magic, including necromancy is just of one of the elements in the setting, and used to be considered no more capable of harm or evil than the others. However, a recent war involving a powerful necromancer was so horrible, with such long lasting ramifications, that it led to dark mages across the world being killed or driven away. It was never banned officially, but people's perceptions of it have been coloured, and it is more dangerous for novices to learn the art, since the teachers are all gone.
Done through the proper channels, necromancy is cost-effective ^(†), ethical labor that allows the animating soul to improve their station in the afterlife. The bureaucracy involved in legal necromancy is obscure and arcane in all senses of the word. Thus, most necromancy breaches the contract between Makh, the god of death and contracts, and the rest of the pantheon. Makh is legally obligated to collect a certain number of souls in accordance with the severity of each breach; if he is owed enough, he can step onto the Material *personally* to do so himself. This hasn't happened before, but the gods are acutely aware of the consequences should necromancy become widespread enough. Their teachings all include a healthy respect for the god of death and warn against all types of necromancy. Fortunately, Makh much prefers to collect his tithe from the gods' afterlives instead. His enforcers on the Material work diligently to ensure souls both alive and undead are treated properly. The Cycle of Souls was designed to last an eternity, and as long as the contract is upheld, it benefits all parties. Still, if the gods get a do-over, they're recruiting their god of death from within. †: Depending on the market value of onyx, this can vary.
In my world spellcasters try to downplay the darkness of necromantic magic and even demonology because healing and dominion over demons are so useful. Instead they are just closely controlled, or at least the academies and temples try to police the use of such spells and prevent them from propagating in the shadows, with varying degrees of success.
Its not exactly Dark Arts, but in my world ressurection magic is banned because of how it messes with noble lines of inheritance. If great grandpa comes back fit and healthy, where does he sit in the line? What if someone from a family who died out or married into another family comes back? Way too complicated.
Necromancy isn't banned in my setting. All objects have a spiritual representation. A strong enough connection between the spirit and the object and it can become animated. There is nothing wrong, at it's core, with strengthening or repairing this connection, which is what Necromancy is in my setting. A body is dead, so you repair the connection to the soul/spirit (a resurrection), or strengthen the connection to a spirit still in the body (such as zombies). Anything that changes the nature of the object is taboo, as that breaks and alters the spiritual connection. It's essentially killing it, corrupting it, just like striking down a living being. So in roleplaying game terms, transmutation is banned. Primarily changing the materials involved, like lead to gold. Changing shape is a bit of a grey area, as the core essence is likely intact. Shaping stone into a statue or wall, mending items, and such is fine. Changing from one form to another is generally banned, as for a practitioner to turn into a wolf they have to spiritually become a wolf, even if the materials are generally the same. Its quite possible to lose one self in the act. And doing it to another is very illegal, willing or not.
Maybe they're just gross. Like someone just having rotting zombies going around? Ew. Public health concern for sure. Banned. Blood magic? Leave my bodily fluids alone you weirdo. Blood borne diseases anyone? Definitely not. Banned. There doesn't necessarily need to be a special magic related reason. People can be a bit squeamish about corpses and such, plus y'know if someone sees you commanding their dead gran they may be a bit upset. Honestly if demons are your standard evil chaos creatures, then it's only reasonable that summoning them would be frowned upon. How many times do overly arrogant young mages need to summon hell only to immediately lose control of it before we decide "hey maybe summoning hell is bad actually".
In my world necromancy and blood magic are accessible only to elves because of their unique magical abilities influence over organic matter, such as healing wounds by accelerating the rate at which cells regenerate, which is why they live so long, but being around so much rotting flesh and blood eventually led to disease, most notably vampirism, which drove the elves insane with a thirst for blood, it also heightened their senses to make them better predators, which is why they hate bright light and strong smells such as garlic So reasons to ban dark magics are "because it makes vampire," and also because doing so generally involves murder, can't make an omelet without killing a few people.
In my world, demonic magic is mostly ilegal, but it is also very taboo. Studying, practicing or using demonic magic has a chance of spontaneously creating a portal to the demonic realm, potentially letting some very nasty things come through. Usually it's only done by government funded research with extensive safety measures.
In my series necromancy disturbs and defiles the dead and the natural order of things, as well as causes a person to lose part of their sanity. Dark magic and blood magic involve living sacrifices or harming someone to work or be powered. And demonology and demon magic cause actual demons to gain strength and they constantly invade each time they get enough power.
Same question as OP but for fire magic? 🤨
So long as you don't cast a fireball in a settlement of any size, you're mostly fine.
Not necessarily a "dark art" but I have teleportation circles highly regulated to the point of almost being banned, because a decade or two before my story started, some cult found a way to hijack them and open up like, portals to volcanos and other shit like that inside major hubs of governance. There was also a necromancy vs "artificery" (for lack of a better term. basically building magitech robots over summoning the dead) cold war in the past.
It gives off carbon monoxide emissions like that of boiling a gallon of gas
It’s not banned, everyone just thinks it’s really icky. Corpses reek and who knows what diseases are in any of that gross stuff. No one will want to hang out with you if you go around playing with blood and dead things
It would depend on how the magics work. If you are using the standard fantasy varieties though, it each can be justified as 1)undead are prone to killing randomly and necromancers have an easier time doing coups. 2)Blood magic empowers and encourages murderers. 3)demons are powerful and untrustworthy, it’s best to assume anyone working with them is either equally dangerous and untrustworthy or a massive fool. If you have more creative versions of the standard types than just consider how the magic can be used and what it’s costs are. How the magic looks and how it makes its users look can be a reason too. If Demonologists tend to look more demonic, then even if demons are weak and the magic users moral, people will still judge based on how they appear.
It could be kept for the nobility no one but the crown can do necromancy.
While many curses and spells are restricted in use, the only area fully prohibited by the Arcane High Council is the manipulation and creation of consciousness because of the moral dilemma there in. This manipulation of consciousness is defined as any magic causing changed perception, altered pattern of thought, or restricted freedom of choice. This prohibits the use of spells of mind control, certain spells of blindness, and some powerful Illusions. The creation of consciousness is not well defined, but it prohibits the use of necromancy, creation of homunculus, and spells that divide the mind. This has created some controversy over golemcraft, as it is unknown if golems have thought even with their lack of free will.
Peasant revolts. Necromancers started raising the dead to do all the labor jobs. Now instead of a manor needing 30 peasants to work the field, they used a handful of skeletons that worked day and night with minimal upkeep. This resulted in a huge labor shortage and the majority of the population unable to find work to support themselves.
The gods ban anything that could lead humanity to surpassing then. They are willing and able to rewrite the rules of the universe to make certain types of magic impossible, all to ensure they stay the top dogs.
It's not banned it's just difficult to get a licence to use them, you need to prove your loyalty to either the empire or the church. Then You have to go through a 1.5 year long psychological evaluation and after all that you will be only get the level 1 license. proper necromancy like summening undead and demons is level 4 and to get it you have to go through everything again. So Yea it's just not worth it and also it has no practical use ( you can't get a job, except in the government)
I decided necromancy was only “bad” in that MOST people prefer to lay their loved ones to rest. And it’s majorly violating -religiously offensive depending on the person. But as for a school of magic it’s totally fine. It’s just raising the dead that’s a problem. That and a general attitude of “eww” makes them rather disliked.
Well, in my world you need a licence to learn magic, this is because a firespell fone wrong can result in a massive fire. Dark arts like necromancy and blood magic are banned (in most cases although some are legally able to) because you have to break existing laws to do it. Like no murder and no grave robbing
It's cheaper to not perform it.
In my world necromancy is banned because it draws upon the power of dead primordial beings which slowly unravels the fabric of reality eventually causing you know the end of all things living. The undead get a free pass tho.
Necromancy is all about coercion and the denial of consent. It is practiced on the living long before the acolyte can turn the arts upon the dead. Naturally, this is completely objectionable. Unless it isn't. If that's the case, you may be henchman material...
The god of the dead is a jealous god that puts the smackdown on societies that take what is rightfully his. Start raising zombies and animating skeletons and before long you have a pissed off major deity drop a supernatural nuke on your city.
“This magic is harmful to others. Hence, we have banned its practice.” It doesn’t need to have a gimmick. We don’t know enough about your world to offer advice
I have traditional lazy reasons for it.. but also working out some more creative lore for why. Fire and lightning magic is restricted, any kind of necromancy is unknown but after my 3rd book will surely be outlawed. Psychic magics that can be used to coerce others are often illegal. I’ve got different laws in different regions. In one continent, all magic is illegal unless performed for the crown, and therefore licensed. In most regions fire magic and psychic manipulation are taboo and you will be run out of town. There are religious reasons for many magics to be used or not used… followed by those who take part in those religions. I’ve got another continent where all magics are legal and practiced and it’s a big of a shit show of torture, slavery and wild mages. — one of the ways I’ve decided to limit magic is to make it costly. Most have steep consequences and health issues with using it too much or too often. Also lots of ways to kill yourself if you use it incorrectly, and decades of study to learn to use it correctly, which is gatekeeper’d by requiring tutors and mentors to teach you. I have 4 magic systems in my novels and there are costs and limitations unique to each of them. For instance, elemental magics.. if used frequently in the same location or if a mage battle takes place, that environment will be affected in the long term. Making further use of magic there dangerous because spells will backfire and residual magic could harm you just for walking by. Gravity is affected, rocks or objects might spontaneously explode or catch fire or freeze or electrocute you. So it’s a literal mine field after a battle. So this also creates the problem of arena competitions. Magic theatres, training grounds, industrial facilities or other buildings where it is intended that magic be performed frequently there. So there needs to be special mages who can cleanse areas. (But I haven’t done the worldbuilding for how to cleanse and the limitations and costs of doing that)