The Dark Side of the Pact
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Im sorry but the idea of a hexxer being a suit and tie lawyer middleman between beelzebub and a mom and pop shop that's trying to stand a chance against Walmart is too funny for me.
*demonic walmart
plot twist:
Walmart is the demon, and it's been making deals with all the other shops. That's why they get swallowed up.
I read an interesting take on the warlock a while back. That your patron doesn't necessarily care what you do with the powers because you're an investment. They give you an infinitesimal piece of power, and then let you grow it. When you die, they take it back making them stronger overall.
That's a fun way to do it! Reminds me of the George Carlin joke that the Earth created us just to give it the one element it didn't have: Plastic.
I feel like a patron closer to mortality (a vampire lord, lich, etc.) would make more sense for that sort of contract than an actual deity or something.
Ooooh, stitchers are the main type of necromancers that I like to play.
Making horses out of people or a flying abomination from various monsters is very cool.
I also enchanted a cloak made from faces to have all the faces whisper incoherently all the time.
I’ve always liked the idea of a hexxer or warlock spending their mortal life working on their afterlife. Like instead of using a devils power to dominate the world in his current life he instead does odd jobs for the devil now and in exchange gets the devil to build and develop his retirement home in hell.
I guess that the evil demon-and-mercenary-controlled island that's left at the end of the novels I'm writing is gonna have a zombie labor force now
Very based
i want to see that. badly
A lot of necromancers try to avoid death. For that reason I think one who seeks to bring death to deathless things as a sort've embodiment of the naturalness of death could be interesting.
3.5 dnd has the Corpsecrafter feat tree that really helps out the butcher necromancer style
Personally, one thing I've always liked the idea that necromancers and the guys who create Golems are essentially using the same magic, but one is animating formerly living material and the other is animating something completely inert, and there is some key difference between the two that makes one less ethically palatable to most of society.
maybe the Dead regain some semblance of sentience when they are revived or something, which allows them to perform more complex tasks than Golems, but also essentially Dooms the revived individual to a life of pain and suffering in a rotting body with no agency of Their Own.
It gives you a good guy alternative, makes there be genuine reasons for why it's ethically dubious, but also gives there a temptation of why somebody might want to use necromancy. Good for you to have a golem Construction Company, but if they can only lug around heavy objects and you have to use human labor for hammering the nails, you may just get the Temptation to use some necromancy.
One who is animating something which is inert.. Is a magic called animism.
Death magic does much more than merely animating that which is no longer living..
I can see where the confusion can be from though.
Warlocks can easily be good characters, it's all in the motivation for why they acquired their powers.
To save their family/tribe is a common one, also maybe the entity they made a deal with gains in a non-evil way. An example would be the entity wants to occasionally posses them temporarily, as it wants to experience life as a mortal (possibility for amusing and/or dangerous consequences).
I can only imagine a bill cipher patron now, thanks.
It also makes me think of Anders from Dragon Age. You could argue that he's a warlock - he allowed himself to be possessed by the Spirit of Justice (which later transforms into the Spirit of Vengeance), who usually gives him powers but takes over Anders if Anders goes against his plans.
the first 27 seconds made me feel like i was having a stroke
have to say, i really like the subtle magic you described with hexers for all magic. it just makes it feel more mysterious, more ... magical
Combat hexer: summon 1 flying imp per turn and set it on the enemy - like fireball, but bitey.
There is anime movie called 'Empire of Corpses' which is about technology based on reanimating corpses for manual labor in Victorian Britain, think zombies powered by clockwork. Unfortunately the author died before completing the source material so halfway through it devolves into incoherent nonsense but the first half is pretty good, almost more like science fiction than fantasy.
Necromancer Medic character: ( *Secretly* a necromancer) I stopped your heart.
NPC / Character that had just died & was treated by thenecromancer: What?!? But I can hear / feel my heart beating!
Medic: Yeah, the heart muscle stopped on its own for a few minutes; but after I shocked it into stopping again it rebelled..I convinced your heart to fight for its own life. You're welcome.
NPC: So I was dead?
Medic: Sorta; for a little while. You're lucky I got here so quickly. That trick wouldn't have worked on a corpse. (little white lie, though there was a time limit.)
NPC: So, you saved my life. Thank you!
Necromancer Medic: Smiles, gets up to leave & moves on to the next dying person. 'Battlefields & hospitals, that's where I belong.' They thought. 'That's where I can do the most good, be of the most help. Where my skills are most useful & appreciated.'
Other NPC: 😱 We didn't call the medics onto the field until hours after the battle ended. Most of these people are dead. That person was trampled by a horse!
I think that story at the end about the society where the average citizen is unaware to how horrificly evil their society is, genociding surrounding areas to supply their zombie work force, works especially well with a fantasy world where races are plainly obvious. Say, wrapping each zombie like a mummy as shown in the book. If anyone were to actually peel the wrapping away, they would discover that the work force is almost entirely made up of OTHER races (orcs, elves, what have you), which flies in the face of the cultural story they tell each other. If only anyone bothered to scratch away the surface.
Hey burger, if you like the idea of stitching together a super zombie you might like the Grotesquery from Slulduggery Pleasant
Eldritch just means magic. And a warlock can have a specific contract giving them a lot of freedom. Really, if your DM is taking away your characters agency willy nilly, get a new DM.
Also, of all the warlock patrons only 2 are explicitly evil. most are neutral and one is explicitly good.
Absolutely shocked that there is not one mention of Overlord by Kugane Maruyama in which the main character is literally the peak of all necromancers and founds a country with an army of undead and massive undead labor which is not only great by itself but the undead labor part is best explored in the excellent fanfic Valkyrie’s Shadow by Aeridinae Lunaris.
Experimental log of crazy lich do it better...
I really appreciate that you put the adrolls in natural breaks within the video. I don't mind watching an ad or two since that's the only way I can support you for now
3:30 The Death God Squad campaign - for a twist, they're all castle under-servants who survived the death god wiping out the aristocrats and the higher-status servants who had influence and more than one pair of socks.
Been going over a bunch of these system agnostic vids, and this one ended up being quite well timed of a find; I had just finished up a concept of a Guild of Warlocks of a Deva of Ilmater known as the Architect, and made a custom Patron subclass for their order revolving around the Galder's Tower and other Spells which either provide for the Needy or Construct Homes for the Unhoused. My idea is that they work like a volunteer organization of Local Support and Mutual Aid, the Brotherhood of Builders, small work-groups travel the countryside with funding for the travel and magic for their mission, to defend the defenceless, house the unhoused, and to ease suffering wherever they walk.
0:20 False: Paranoia had _perfect_ mechanics
A fun Good Warlock concept you could play with is like the reformed villain, but they become a PC at the point they start reforming if that makes sense. Like, maybe they start their career as an evil Hexer, so they got the general skill set of working with extraplanar entities, but then they have one of those days where they decide they're gonna turn their whole thing around. To do this they make a pact with an angel or godly entity of some sort and trade their ability to make deals for another chance and some magical ability to help them right their wrongs.
I laughed at the eldritch complaints, well done, but I wanted to point out that "eldritch" in fantasy has connotations of "weird magic." (As opposed to the denotation of "weird and sinister or ghostly" or from the original Older Scottish "'Belonging to, or resembling, the elves or similar beings' and 'Connected with, proceeding from, suggestive of, elves or supernatural beings; weird, strange, uncanny'" for those who want to know) What that means is that while it's the same ability no matter what type of warlock is using it, flavour-wise it's supposed to be a blank slate and ideally should be flavoured according to the warlock's patron. So in other words, "eldritch" is all of those things you said it should be. (Other than damage type if you're talking about DnD, but then that might be too mechanical a term for this video series.)
I'll say, however, that it is rare anyone knows what the heck "eldritch" is. Most people seem to interpret it as a blast of raw, chaotic and unaligned magical power in my experience. That's just fine as far as interpretations go, but unfortunately the default assumption often becomes the standard and creates an accidental limitation that restricts roleplay, or at least flavouring. Eh, that's heuristic based social dynamics at work for you. Assuming I'm even using that term correctly.
When explaining what Force damage is, i just say it is raw magic or Arcane; see magic missile
here's an interesting concept for a roleplay session: The party is pretending to be friendly to another dark mage, but secretly want to screw him over in some way that requires them to take a small blood sample. so they prick him while he's asleep and then have the healer make the (tiny) wound completely disappear in order to prevent him from figuring out they did that. or, more interestingly, a novice team forgets to heal the wound and the hexer suspects them of fuckery because one of his knowledge would know to keep an eye out for those things.
I see necromancers as weirdos who are fascinated by death like some people are fascinated with drugs or japanese culture or ww2 or w40k universe. That would mean they are also thanatologists who know all the burial customs around the world and all that. Since some poltergeists are just like a leftover energy after a traumatic death they are also a little bit of demonologists, meaning they can recognize whether they are dealing with a regular ghost or a soulless ghost or a full on demon pretending to be a ghost.
They also have like a mortician education which entails a fair bit of medical knowledge, especially in the pathology field, so they can analyze corpses too, time and cause of death and all that. With that comes a knowledge of poisons and illnesses and maybe even microorganisms so maybe they can sell you a vial of flesh eating bacteria ointment that will give someone necrosis if you put it on a knife and cut them. Or anthrax, biological weapons in general. Also they would be very good at dealing with plague situation, thats healing it and helping to contain it but also spreading it if they wanted to. The stitching is kinda in a medical field as well, besides that id like to think they could even create in vitro homunculi and xenomorphs that cant procreate but can live for a few weeks.
And of course every necromancer can see if someone is close to death and have like cancer or something, that creates bad situations like should i tell this person or not. Maybe they cant tell because that would be interfering with fate and reality is deterministic to some extent. Also maybe in this world creating undead isn't doable with corpses but requires to have a live person/animal that gets fed progressively bigger amounts of certain poisons that slow down metabolism to the point of creating a mindless zombie with a 1000 year lifespan.
By the way real occult books are a nice inspiration for worldbuilding, necromancy-wise theres a book called "necromantic ritual book" thats some crazy stuff. Also grimoires in general its all online.
If a necromancer can deal with poltergeist, could they become a burglar - find a cemetery near a wealthy neighbourhood, recruit the ghosts of people trodden on by a rich guy, then lead them over to his house, use their powers to pick the locks and break in, and take all his stuff?
Please tell me I'm not the only one that heard "foreplay in other worlds"?
Granted uncanny powers of innuendo by the dirtiest deity.
21:40 That is literally the Sload from The Elder Scrolls...
I kinda laughed at your description of hexxers. Because I am currently working with an idea for a novel in which magic doesn't fully exist in the world. Rather wizards centuries ago separated the magical world from the original one, with only small portals and pockets remaining. So materials and entities from this alternate dimension are the only way to do magic. One of the most common types are individuals who are essentially magical lawyers who form contracts with extra planar beings.
The parallels are obvious I'm sure.
Warlock from Old English Wærloga meaning outcast, traitor or scoundrel transferred into Middle English meaning one who is in league with the Devil
21:26 kinda like overlord a bit
Hexers are basically John Constantine from DC then lol
To add on to the Warlock problem, That just seems like something core to D&D. Both Clerics and warlocks should draw most of their powers on theme to their diety, Thor, god of thunder shouldnt be giving his cleric the blessing to heal, but instead to call the storm and claim victory through battle. Similarly a warlock should be heavily defined by their patron, maybe with non-specific powers from other classes, but with the only unique attributes being directly lifted from their patron. (Warlock owing pack to a devil shouldn't have any overlap with a warlock owing service to a great old one.) (Fantasy craft does this quite well, with a player taking from a list of domains, allowing them to gain effects from increased combat strength, to spellcasting and similar.)
I really like the idea, both for hexers and warlocks, that most of their skill set is just from other classes, or from other locations in a classless system. A Fighter or warrior-type might make a pact with a creature of undeath to stave off his ultimate fate(Davy jones-esq). While his power-set might have a few tricks gifted by the creature(necrotic attacks, disgusting levels of resillence to damage) while at the same time still retaining the core them of being a warrior. While a sorceror or wizard taking a patron might be more focused on the magical spells they can access.
The best way i'd find to handle it would be to pull off these concepts into a series of feats, subclasses, or their own ability trees.(Why open character creators are much more fun then those with hard class builders.) A hexer might dabble in mostly lower levels, making a few small deals with minor entities, while a warlock might sell himself solely to one, climbing high up the tree, even at the cost of exclusivity.
I'm definitely stealing that last concept.
I thought I was having a stroke at the start of this video
Constantine would be a hexer
Does Gandalf count as a Hexer by his definition?
Burger, you should really just pre-record a section for the caveats in these videos.
I don't know if it helps the theory but I'm autistic and I would definitely become a lich if I had magic.
I like the idea of a corpse tithe empire that oppresses itself neighbours into giving them a labour force in the form of their dead. Starts off fine, but you can always do better with more workers ......
I really fell in love with the d&d idea of warlocks for it,s the Question of can you do less with more ?
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I'm coooooooomiiiiiiing!!!
Same.
The most powerful human empire in my world of tribes and kingdoms is an aztec-inspired federation of magitech necromancers spanning half a continent. Because they figured out how to make computers out of souls. With ghost internet.
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