No mage has more suspicion on them than the Necromancer, while raising the dead isn't technically illegal, graverobbing, desecration of corpses and occult activity is in most places. As a result Necromancers are often found hidden or masquerading as other mages. However the elegant form, and its draw of power, lives on.

https://crateredland.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-necromancer-and-cavalier.html

A: Black Magic

You can cast Necromancy spells, you do not gain magic dice and may not select new spell schools like regular mages. Instead you may expend your Death Dice (see Necromancy ability) to cast spells as per the spellcasting rules.

A: Necromancy

Necromancy works like casting spells. Pick a Form you know and have immediate access to (you don't need to be touching it, but you should be roughly within the same room), choose a Technique you know to use, and roll and spend any number of Death Dice in your pool. Death Dice return to your pool on 1-3, or after a daily rest.

Necromancy follows three laws. Break one while casting, roll a Mishap. Break two, roll a Doom. Break all three at once and the veil between the world of flesh and the world beyond will claim you like a lover, entranced by your daring and courage.

Law of Concentration. Flesh adapts to its new form and maintains new shapes, but death claims all things in the end. All constructs you create will end, without a Death Die to animate them.

Law of Conjunction. Flesh defies death. When you exert your will, life fights back. Roll with disadvantage if there's living tissue attached to the form.

Law of Continuity. As the fleshcraft law; you cannot turn one form to another through sheer necromantic power. Entropy takes its own time, and you cannot make it hurry. If you dare break this law, you must have both forms you want to transmute between.

Mishaps

1. Decomposition. Take sum necrotic damage.

2. Haunting. The spirit of whatever you've messed with doesn't appreciate it, and will tail you around heckling and bothering you until you appease it or stop playing with its remains.

3. Thanergetic Surge. Divide sum+dice necrotic damage equally around everything around you, allies and companions first.

4. Scavengers. You attract dice HD of local scavengers, who go for the Form you affected - or you.

5. See The Veil. You can see ghosts and magic and the dead for sumdice10 minutes, but everything else goes dark.

6. Shedding. The form falls apart into sum+dice minor undead and scurries off into parts unknown.

Dooms

1. Primary Doom. You partially die. Some of your skin flakes off - perhaps a limb, or your abdomen, or your head - revealing the necromantic forms underneath. While you can do necromancy on this, reduce your max Health by half.

2. Consequential Doom. You're hanging on to life by a thread as more of your body decays away. You count as undead, and can't heal without using necromancy to do so.

3. Terminal Doom. You die. This is less of an issue than you'd expect, because death is kind of your thing. If you've found a way to prepare yourself to evade it, this is a great way to see if your scheme for eternal unlife works.

Forms

1. Bone. Brittle and dry, but firm and lasting. Our constant companion, and our final remnant. Constructs of bone have Heavy Armor .

2. Carrion. Meat, once it's stopped twitching. Includes guts and organs and all the gribbly bits, once they cease to function and start to decompose. They still remember what they once were, and so constructs of carrion get an extra ability.

3. Rot. The sludgy growing mess of cell-corpses and split membranes. The leavings of scavengers and decomposers, without the offending messy organisms that usually facilitate the process. Constructs of rot can feed on living matter to heal and maintain themselves.

4. Spirit. Incorporeal souls linked to the remnants of their corpse. Not eternal, or at least not eternally here. Speak with them before they forget the last of themselves and fade into vengeful revenants. Bones anchor spirit best, as they decay slowest. "Constructs" of spirit are the ghosts of the departed corpse, or whichever pieces of its motive force remain, incorporeal and floating on the breeze.

Techniques

Some techniques have different effects on the living versus unliving versus the undead: undead are constructs raised by necromancy, unliving are corpses with no animating principle, and living is fodder for the Art that needs to get properly killed first.

1. Animation. Rolled Death Dice are invested to raise an undead of the chosen Form. It has sum Health and dice abilities of your choice (subject to GM approval; samples are flight, wielding a weapon, being large enough to ride, or possessing an ability it had in life). 1 die lets you raise 1 skeleton or equivalent undead (rot: zombie, spirit: ghost, carrion: horrific stinking meat blob). You can dispel the undead at any time; when it falls the invested die returns to your pool if it's 1-3. It follows simple commands, has stats of dice, and whichever properties the Form provides.

2. Communication. All parts of a corpse remember its past, though their memories are strange and fragile things. Spirits, Rot, and Carrion can be spoken to (they manifest strange mouths), Bone can only be read. Spirits remember their life in proportion to how much of their corpse remains lifelike (reuniting it or faking it can trick the spirit). Rot knows the form of what it once was and can be asked to rot particular things, or to spit up chunks of what it's eaten. Carrion knows what the corpse physically did in life, and its illnesses and addictions. Bone carries resonance of all that's happened since death, a silent observer. Ask dice questions and get specific true answers (including "I don't know"), or ask sum questions and it might lie if it has cause to.

3. Decay. Rapidly ages the target. Targeting unliving Forms causes them to melt and flake away en masse (sum*dice body-volumes). Deals sum necrotic damage to living creatures as necrosis sets in and they wither away. Decay+Rot deals dice extra damage, Decay+Bone also gives them osteoporosis and breaks bones, Decay+Carrion also causes organ failure, and Decay+Spirit also ages them sum years (but only deals half damage to things that can't age). Restores sum Health to undead.

4. Dowsing. Find the nearest dice deposits of the Form. You can either set dice conditions for the deposits (size, age, type of originating creature, etc.) and search within sum km, or sum conditions and search within [dice]*100m.

5. Generation. Engorge the Form. Doesn't work on the living, obviously. Either expand it as it keeps the same shape (fragments will return to the shape the whole once took), or make more copies of the thing. Increases volume sum*dice times. You can control the direction it expands in, though its shape remains the same (a femur remains a femur). You may invest a die (as Animate) to keep it going until you choose to recall the die. If you don't, it returns to its original form after dice*10 minutes or until you choose to dispel it.

6. Induction. Move or reshape the Form. Can't change its volume; can just blow it to pieces. If this deals damage, it deals sum+dice damage. If this motion or shaping increases entropy, it stays, but if it decreases entropy, it returns to how it was after [dice]*10 minutes.

Specialties

1. Army of Darkness. Requires Animation. You can maintain [templates]^2 points of 1-die undead without investing dice, each of which can have no more than [templates] Health.

2. Insorcist. Restore a Death Die to your pool whenever you kill a person without using necromancy.

3. Necro-Engineer. Requires Induction. You can invest Death Dice in Forms you induce to make them continue changing shape until you remove the die (in the way you set them initially; you can't change what you've induced it to do without using more Death Dice).

4. Spiritmonger. Requires Spirit. You don't need corpse remnants to call ghosts; they'll just show up if they died in the area - but you can't choose what kind of spirit will show.

5. Undead Dynamo. Your Death Dice return on 1-4 instead of 1-3.

6. Vast Range. If you definitively know the location of a Form (either by Dowsing), or having seen it there, you can do necromancy on it.