Necromancy

Necromancy is the magical discipline concerned with death, corpses, preserved remains, and the residual patterns left by the dead.

It originated from trollish magical practice and developed out of older troll familiarity with funerary rites, preserved bodies, spirits, and the magical state of the dead. Necromancy is learned magic rather than an innate function of troll biology. It later spread beyond trolls, most notably to humans.

Necromancy can animate, compel, question, bind, or otherwise work through dead remains. It does not restore ordinary life.

Relationship to the Wyre

Death ends ordinary living activity, but a corpse does not instantly become magically meaningless.

Recently dead and well-preserved bodies retain residual physical and magical structure that a necromancer can manipulate. These traces weaken, fragment, or change over time. Preservation can maintain useful structure longer, which is one reason mortuary preparation matters to necromantic practice.

Necromancy imposes function on what death has left behind. Reanimation is therefore animation or compulsion, not resurrection.

The discipline does not assume that a complete living personality remains inside every corpse. Any interaction with memory, identity, or spirits is limited by what actually remains and by the technique being used.

Practitioners

The Common practitioner term is necromancer.

Trollish velkhar means necromancy, and a practitioner is a velkharar.

Merethi adapted the Trollish term as velkar, with velkarin for a necromancer.

Troll necromancers can exist within traditions that recognize some necromantic uses as legitimate. Human necromancers are more often rogue, secretive, criminal, covertly protected, or members of hidden circles because most human societies reject the practice.

Aptitude and Training

Necromancy requires magical aptitude and specialized training.

Prior experience in shamanism, arcane magic, or another discipline may help a practitioner perceive the Wyre but does not automatically teach necromancy.

Training can include corpse states, preservation, residual magical patterns, binding, command structures, containment, questioning, and the safe termination of workings.

Access to remains is an obvious practical barrier. In societies where necromancy is illegal, serious study is difficult without grave robbery, covert patrons, hidden collections, or other criminal activity.

Core Principles

The dead are easier to manipulate than to restore.
The condition of the remains matters.
Preservation can extend the usefulness of a corpse.
Simple imposed behavior is easier than adaptive behavior.
A moving corpse is not automatically the person it once was.
The dead continue to deteriorate unless preservation or other measures slow that process.
More bodies and more complex commands increase control demands.

Necromancy does not make corpses infinitely reusable machines.

Corpse States

Necromancers distinguish broadly between different physical states because those states affect what can be accomplished.

Recent Dead

Recent remains retain the greatest biological structure and usually provide the clearest residual patterns.

Preserved Dead

Bodies deliberately maintained through mummification, drying, embalming, cold, sealed conditions, or other preservation can remain useful for particular workings long after untreated remains would have decayed.

Decayed Remains

Decayed bodies can still be animated, but reduced structure limits precision, strength, and the types of action that remain physically possible.

Skeletal Remains

Skeletons retain little biological structure. Workings depend more heavily on imposed magical control and are suited mainly to simple movement, guarding, carrying, or combat.

Damaged or Incomplete Remains

A corpse can only perform actions its remaining structure can support unless additional preparation or reconstruction provides a substitute. Magic does not make missing anatomy irrelevant.

Capabilities

Animation and Compulsion

Necromancers can cause dead bodies to stand, walk, carry, drag, hold, guard, perform simple repetitive labor, or attack under imposed instructions.

Simple commands are considerably easier than flexible decision-making.

Compelled Indication

Some of the oldest and simplest workings compel a corpse to point, indicate a direction, react to a known object or person, or repeat a narrow action associated with something it knew in life.

This does not make the corpse omniscient.

Questioning the Dead

More sophisticated techniques can retrieve limited information associated with the deceased.

The dead cannot provide knowledge they never possessed. Memory may be fragmented, distorted, inaccessible, or reduced by decomposition, trauma, time, magical interference, or poor preservation.

Questioning the dead is therefore useful but never a perfect source of forensic truth.

Guardians and Servants

Prepared remains can be bound to guard a location, perform repetitive work, or respond to predetermined conditions.

Greater autonomy requires more sophisticated preparation and carries greater risk.

Multiple Dead

A necromancer can control more than one corpse, but numbers increase strain and reduce precision. Large-scale control requires extensive preparation, simplified commands, assistants, binding systems, or other infrastructure.

Necromancers can learn to detect recent death, active necromantic bindings, disturbed remains, and some residual traces associated with corpses.

This does not provide universal awareness of every death at arbitrary distance.

Limitations

Necromancy cannot restore true life.

It cannot reliably reconstruct a complete living personality from badly degraded remains. Dead tissue remains dead, and corpses continue to deteriorate.

Complex commands are harder than simple ones. Greater numbers reduce control. Distance can weaken direct command unless a working has been prepared to function independently.

Destroying critical portions of a corpse can make particular actions impossible. Cremation is one of the most reliable mundane methods of denying remains to necromancers.

A necromancer cannot obtain information from a corpse that the dead person never possessed.

Costs and Risks

Necromantic workings are mentally demanding because they impose organized function on something no longer naturally alive.

Failure can produce collapse, uncontrolled movement, incorrect execution of commands, unstable bindings, damage to the practitioner, or disturbance of the surrounding Wyre.

Poor preservation can cause physical failure even when the magical working is correct.

The setting does not assume that every necromancer automatically suffers a universal moral or physical corruption. Risks arise from the actual workings, exposure to disturbed Wyre, the dead being manipulated, and the social consequences of the practice.

Methods and Techniques

Necromancy can use spoken commands, binding marks, prepared circles, corpse positioning, physical contact, written command structures, repeated ritual conditioning, funerary preparation, and preservation procedures.

Methods differ depending on whether the goal is animation, questioning, guarding, sensing, or long-term binding.

Materials, Tools and Preparation

Relevant materials can include preserved bodies, bones, funerary wrappings, binding cords, ritual inks, inscribed tags, preservation substances, sealed containers, and prepared chambers.

There is no universal necromantic reagent required by every working.

The corpse itself is usually the central physical medium.

Advanced Practices

Advanced necromancy can include control of multiple dead, durable guardians, complex conditional commands, preserved speaking remains, long-duration bindings, sophisticated reconstruction, and large prepared systems for military or labor use.

Questions such as true resurrection, permanent soul transfer, and magical immortality are separate major problems and are not assumed to be ordinary necromantic capabilities.

Interaction with Other Magic

Shamanic funerary and spiritual practices can detect or oppose some necromantic disturbance.

Sacred magic is particularly associated with protecting graves, consecrating remains, resisting necromantic control, and breaking some bindings.

Arcane countermagic can disrupt necromantic patterns when the practitioner can identify and reach the working.

Artifice and runecrafting can create wards, sealed containers, protected tombs, and other defenses against necromantic interference.

Necromancy remains a distinct discipline rather than a branch of arcane magic.

Countermeasures and Resistance

Mundane countermeasures include cremation, destruction of remains, secure burial, guarded tombs, battlefield corpse recovery, and preventing access to preserved bodies.

Magical countermeasures include wards, consecration, binding disruption, countermagic, and severing the necromancer’s control.

A body physically incapable of carrying out a command cannot simply ignore its anatomy because magic is involved.

Among trolls, necromancy can exist as a recognized but serious practice shaped by much older mortuary traditions.

Among humans, it is overwhelmingly rejected. Human necromancers commonly work secretly, beyond settled law, inside hidden societies, or under covert protection from rulers and other patrons.

Motives vary. Some seek knowledge, power, military advantage, answers from the dead, relief from grief, forbidden research, or forms of longevity.

Legal and Ethical Status

Most human states make necromancy illegal or severely restricted. Grave robbery, illegal corpse acquisition, corpse animation, necromantic experimentation, and violent use of the dead can all be separate crimes.

Troll societies regulate the discipline differently. Even where necromancy itself is permitted, manipulating another household’s dead without consent can remain a grave offense.

Rare places may tolerate tightly limited practices without accepting necromancy broadly.

Terminology

necromancy / necromancer — Common.
velkhar / velkharar — Trollish.
velkar / velkarin — Merethi.

Necromancy does not restore the dead to life; it manipulates what death has left behind.