Custodians of the Final Passage
Reimagining the Necromancer
More Than the One Who Raises Skeletons
When someone mentions a necromancer in fantasy, there's a fairly predictable image that comes to mind.
A dark-robed spellcaster. A collection of skeletons. Perhaps a crypt, a forbidden ritual, or an unsettling disregard for the distinction between the living and the dead.
It's a recognizable archetype, and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. There's plenty of room in fantasy for sinister practitioners raising armies of undead.
But I've always enjoyed taking familiar fantasy ideas and asking what happens when you start pulling at the assumptions underneath them.
The initial spark for my Necromancer class came from one of my players, who loves skeletons, undead, and all things necromancy. But there was a dissonance I kept running into: traditionally, necromancy and undead minions are associated with “evil” characters. The sort who desecrate tombs, steal bones, and bring chaos to the world.
But I'd also encountered very different interpretations. Garth Nix's Abhorsen books, for example, presented an approach to necromancy that enthralled me: wielding the powers of death for good, helping souls find their rest rather than exploiting them.
That contrast, along with a handful of other influences, became the first spark of an idea. What if I could preserve everything my player loved about necromancy without requiring the character to embrace its traditionally villainous role?
That's where my own reimagining of the Necromancer began taking shape.
Not necessarily to make it more powerful, or to create a better version of the traditional undead summoner.
I wanted to explore what else necromancy could mean.
After all, if a practitioner dedicates their life to studying death, why should their expertise begin and end with raising corpses?
Wouldn't they understand the process of dying? The distinction between a body and a soul? The circumstances that cause spirits to linger? The rituals and responsibilities surrounding someone's final passage?
And perhaps most importantly, what would society actually need from someone who possessed that knowledge?
Those questions began pulling the concept away from its familiar foundations.
The necromancer didn't have to be someone who sought dominion over death.
They might instead be someone responsible for making sure death happened properly.
A River Beneath the World
I've always been something of an appreciator of Greek mythology, particularly the stories surrounding Hades, the River Styx, and the ferrymen who carried souls between the worlds of the living and the dead.
So when I started exploring what a different kind of necromancer might look like, that mythology became a natural first resting point.
Rivers. The boundaries between life and death. The idea of a crossing, and someone responsible for helping souls make that journey.
For a while, that's where the idea sat.
The imagery of a River of Death, something that existed beyond the ordinary world but could perhaps be reached or interacted with by those who understood it felt like a promising foundation, even if I didn't yet know exactly what to do with it.
And then something clicked.
Dungeons & Dragons already has nine levels of spells.
I was thinking about rivers, water, and the mechanisms used to regulate their flow when the connection practically presented itself.
Sluicegates.
What if the River of Death had nine of them? What if each successive Gate represented a deeper reach into the River, corresponding to the nine levels of magic already established in the game?
Suddenly, I had a way to connect the mythology I loved with the mechanical language I already understood.
The Nine Sluicegates weren't just an evocative piece of worldbuilding. They gave the Necromancer a framework for understanding and describing their relationship with the River. As their magical capabilities developed, they could reach progressively deeper into its current.
And once that connection was in place, other mechanical ideas started falling into position.
If necromancers spent their lives working in and around the River of Death, wouldn't that exposure change them?
Resistance to cold and necrotic damage seemed like a natural expression of their familiarity with its environment. What might be devastating to an ordinary person was simply part of the world these practitioners had learned to navigate.
Then there was another mechanic I particularly loved.
Death saving throws.
In D&D, they're the precarious rolls that determine whether a fallen character manages to cling to life or slips away. They represent that uncertain moment at the very boundary the Necromancer was becoming responsible for understanding.
And if these practitioners were learning to oversee the crossing between life and death, shouldn't they have some influence over that crossing?
There's an old running joke in fantasy circles that necromancers are just healers who showed up too late. Or that raising a family is considerably easier when they're all buried next to one another.
Funny as those jokes are, they also highlight something I wanted to avoid. I wasn't trying to create a healer with a darker aesthetic, or someone whose answer to every problem was simply bringing people back from the dead.
These practitioners understood the boundary between life and death. They knew what it meant to stand at the crossing.
And perhaps that understanding could help someone hold on.
To reach out at that final moment, when a soul is beginning to slip away, and quietly say:
“No... not yet.”
That was the kind of moment I wanted this class to create at the table. Something mechanically simple, but carrying a much greater weight in the fiction.
A necromancer's presence could grant nearby creatures advantage on death saving throws.
And it was one of those satisfying moments in design where the fiction and mechanics began reinforcing each other. The River suggested the Gates. The Gates gave structure to the magic. And the idea of practitioners who spent their lives at the crossing began suggesting what they should actually be capable of.
I hadn't set out with a complete cosmology or a finished mechanical framework.
I had a handful of images, a familiar set of rules, and a series of questions that were starting to answer one another.
When Death Finally Took a Vacation
Of course, that raised another question.
Why would the world need an entire profession dedicated to shepherding souls?
Surely, in a fantasy cosmology where gods and supernatural forces exist, someone or something would already be responsible for maintaining that process.
And that's where Death entered the picture.
I imagined Death as an ancient, serious figure who had spent eons years doing an extraordinarily important and largely thankless job.
Not a malicious deity or a capricious monster.
Just a chronically overworked office manager who has kept an enormous institution running for longer than anyone can remember. Someone with an exceptionally dry sense of humor, an enormous amount of patience, and very little remaining tolerance for people who think they understand his job better than he does.
And now a generation of exceptionally powerful mortal mages has decided that they can do precisely that.
I could practically picture them barging into Death's office, full of confidence and magical self-importance, declaring that they'd surpassed the need for his services.
They challenge his authority. They boast of their mastery. They insist that mortal magic has advanced to the point where even Death himself is no longer necessary.
And Death, who has spent who knows how long making sure the entire operation runs smoothly, sits behind his desk and listens.
Eventually, after an extraordinary amount of patience, he simply has enough.
“You think you can do it better? Wonderful. I’m going on vacation. Keys are in the drawer.”
Humanity is now faced with a rather serious problem: all the work that had quietly been happening behind the scenes is no longer being done.
The River still exists.
People still die.
But humanity is discovering, rather abruptly, that dying and ensuring the dead actually pass onward are two very different things.
Souls begin lingering where they shouldn't. Some become lost. Others deteriorate into dangerous spiritual manifestations. The distinction between a vacant corpse and a body still occupied by its former soul becomes a matter of considerable importance.
The consequences are globally catastrophic.
What began with a fairly humorous image of an exhausted cosmic manager finally calling humanity's bluff, would end with humanity finding a way to shoulder that responsibility.
The very first necromancers were emergency workers.
And over generations, their desperate efforts became traditions, procedures, apprenticeships, and eventually a recognized profession.
That became one of the central ideas behind the entire class:
Necromancers do not rule death. They administer it.
Opening the Gate
With the River and its Nine Sluicegates established, I had a framework for how necromancers understood their magic. But understanding the River and actually wielding its power were two very different things.
And that raised another question.
What would happen if a necromancer didn't simply draw upon the River's influence, but could actually cause a portion of that current to reach into the living world?
That idea eventually became one of the class's defining abilities: Open the Gate.
Rather than simply casting another spell that dealt necrotic damage, the necromancer would briefly expose a target to the River itself. Cold and necrotic damage became natural expressions of that exposure, with the depth of the Gate determining just how severe the effect could be.
As the Gates increased in level, so did the intensity of that exposure. What started as a brush with the River's current could become something much more direct.
But the numbers weren't really the most interesting part to me.
I was thinking about how the ability should feel.
For much of their work, a necromancer might rely on careful observation, preservation, protective magic, ritual procedures, or simply talking to the people involved.
Opening a Gate was something else entirely.
It was an escalation.
Effectively dunking someone in the River of Death.
I loved the idea that a Necromancer could go from being a relatively reserved professional to suddenly opening a literal passage into the River of Death when the situation called for it.
There was something immensely satisfying about that contrast. The mechanics were straightforward enough to understand, but the imagery could become increasingly dramatic as the character grew in power.
And that was something I was increasingly enjoying about this design. Rather than coming up with abilities and finding ways to justify them afterward, the River itself was beginning to suggest what a Necromancer should be able to do.
Three Ways to Keep the Crossing
By this point, something else had become increasingly apparent.
What had started as an exploration of how I might reimagine necromancy within the familiar Wizard framework was rapidly becoming something much larger.
Between the River, the Nine Sluicegates, Open the Gate, and the growing ideas about the responsibilities of these practitioners, there was simply too much here to comfortably fit into a traditional Wizard School or subclass.
And I didn't particularly want to start cutting away the parts that made the idea interesting just to squeeze it into that framework.
This wasn't really a subclass anymore.
It was becoming a class of its own.
And with that realization came a whole new set of questions.
If this was going to be an entire profession, surely not everyone would approach the work in the same way. Some practitioners might become experts in navigating the River itself. Others might focus on the souls making that journey, or the physical remains left behind.
Rather than starting with a set of combat roles and building subclasses around them, I wanted to see what kinds of specializations naturally emerged from the work these necromancers were responsible for.
That eventually led to three disciplines: the Ferryman, the Deathwarden, and the Bonewright.
The Ferryman: I Know the Way
The Ferryman was probably the most natural starting point for exploring what these different disciplines might look like.
By this point, I'd started picturing necromancers quite literally walking along the banks of the River as they guided souls toward their final passage.
That imagery raised another question.
What if some of them didn't stop at the banks?
What if, rather than simply walking alongside the River, they learned to wade into its currents? Or even swim through them?
That was an interesting direction to explore.
Every Necromancer could learn to open the Gates and draw upon the River's power, but the Ferryman would develop a much more direct relationship with it.
They wouldn't simply understand the River or know how to briefly expose someone to its currents. They would learn to navigate it themselves.
And that opened up all sorts of possibilities.
Movement, passage, and transportation became natural extensions of the idea. If a Ferryman could enter the River and travel along its currents, could they bring someone else with them? Could they use it to reach places that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to access?
And what about Open the Gate?
If the Ferryman understood how to move through and interact with the River's currents, perhaps that expertise could also change what happened when they opened one of its Gates.
That eventually became the basis for additional effects at particular Gate thresholds, giving the Ferryman ways to influence an encounter beyond simply dealing more damage.
I liked how these ideas were coming together. The movement, navigation, and enhanced Gates weren't separate abilities that needed individual explanations. They were all growing out of the same underlying idea.
What I particularly enjoyed was how a relatively small change in the imagery—from walking along the River to actually entering it—had opened up an entirely different set of mechanical possibilities.
The Deathwarden: Seeing the Threads
The Deathwarden grew out of a different piece of imagery I'd been playing with.
I'd already been imagining necromancers possessing a kind of Astral Sight. The ability to gaze out across the mortal world and perceive wandering souls that ordinary people couldn't see.
I could picture them encountering spirits who were lost, confused, or simply unaware of what had happened to them. Souls lingering in places they no longer belonged, waiting for someone who could recognize them and help them find their way.
But what if a Necromancer leaned further into that ability?
What if they spent years honing that perception, learning to see not just the souls themselves, but the things connecting them to the world?
Tethers. Ropes. Lines. Moorings.
The threads of life and death themselves, and the relationships between them.
That opened up a whole new direction for the discipline.
If a Deathwarden could perceive those connections, perhaps they could learn to recognize when one was fraying, being pulled, or disturbed. They might see the difference between a soul naturally approaching its final passage and one being dragged away before its time.
And if they could see those connections, could they learn to interact with them?
Could they reinforce a weakening tether? Help anchor a soul that was beginning to slip away? Recognize when something else had taken hold of a connection that didn't belong to it?
Those questions began suggesting abilities involving soul perception, protective intervention, and the manipulation of the bonds between the living and the dead.
I liked that the discipline wasn't simply about preventing death. It was about understanding the connections that made life and death possible, and learning when and how to intervene.
And just as importantly, that perception needed boundaries. Seeing someone's soul or the threads connecting it to the world shouldn't automatically reveal everything about them. There was room for insight without turning the ability into an answer to every mystery.
The Deathwarden was becoming someone who could see the delicate relationships most people never even knew existed and had developed the expertise to do something when those relationships were threatened.
The Bonewright: What Remains Behind
The Bonewright took shape a little differently from the other two disciplines.
After spending so much time exploring the River and the souls traveling along it, there was still another part of the necromancer's traditional identity that I wanted to explore.
The bones.
After all, the original spark for this entire project came from a player who loved skeletons and undead minions. I wasn't about to build an entire Necromancer class and forget about that part of the appeal.
But the question was how to make it fit within the world and profession I'd been developing.
If souls and their physical remains were separate things, then animating a skeleton didn't necessarily have to mean dragging its former occupant back into service.
And if necromancers were expected to treat the dead with dignity, consent and the responsible use of remains could become important parts of that practice.
By this point, much of the core class had already taken shape. What I needed was a way to explore that familiar skeleton-summoning fantasy without simply reproducing the usual collection of disposable undead minions.
And that's where another project I'd been working on came back into the picture.
I'd previously developed a Corewright subclass for the Artificer, built around a modular, customizable golem. One of the ideas I'd enjoyed exploring was giving that construct different traits and capabilities that could be assigned, exchanged, and reconfigured depending on what the player needed.
So I started wondering what that same approach might look like for a Necromancer.
What if, instead of summoning a generic skeleton, you had a collection of skeletal assistants with different traits and perks?
And because this was a Necromancer, why stop at one?
That opened up an interesting mechanical space. The Bonewright could assemble and maintain multiple assistants, tailoring their configurations for different situations rather than relying on a single fixed companion.
Of course, that immediately raised another question: how many assistants should a character reasonably be able to manage?
Proficiency bonus provided a natural starting point. It already scaled with character progression, and using it as a cap meant the number of available helpers could grow alongside the Necromancer without requiring an entirely separate progression system.
From there, the fun became exploring what those assistants could actually do.
Different traits, different perks, and different configurations meant that skeletal animation could become something closer to a practical craft. A Bonewright might build assistants suited to particular jobs, then adjust their capabilities as circumstances changed.
And I liked how that brought the design back around to the original inspiration.
The player who loved skeletons could still have their skeletons. In fact, they could have several, each with its own practical purpose.
But now there was considerably more room for experimentation, customization, and the responsibilities that came with maintaining them.
Power With Boundaries
Of course, coming up with interesting abilities and actually making them work at the table are two different challenges.
And as the Necromancer continued developing, I was finding plenty of opportunities to explore that distinction.
The River, the Sluicegates, the ability to perceive souls, and an entire collection of customizable skeletal assistants all offered some exciting possibilities.
But each of them also raised questions about where their limits should be.
Take the Deathwarden's Astral Sight, for example.
I loved the idea of someone who could perceive souls, their connections to the world, and the threads holding them in place. But being able to see those things shouldn't automatically mean understanding everything about them.
There needed to be room for interpretation, uncertainty, and discovery.
Otherwise, an interesting investigative ability could quickly become a shortcut around the very mysteries it was supposed to help players engage with.
The Bonewright presented a different challenge.
Having multiple customizable skeletal assistants sounded like a great deal of fun, but anyone familiar with tabletop combat knows how quickly additional creatures can complicate an encounter.
Limiting the number of assistants through proficiency bonus was one part of that conversation. How those assistants acted, what they could accomplish independently, and how much attention they demanded at the table were equally important considerations.
And then there was Open the Gate.
I wanted the escalating exposure to the River to feel increasingly substantial, especially for the Ferryman, without every new threshold becoming another pile of effects to track.
Those were the kinds of questions I kept returning to.
Not simply whether an ability was powerful enough, but whether it created interesting choices, whether it respected the other characters at the table, and whether the additional complexity was actually earning its place.
I wasn't interested in making a class that could do everything.
I wanted one that had its own strengths, responsibilities, and limitations, with mechanics that reinforced the ideas that had inspired them in the first place.
The Ordinary Work of an Extraordinary Profession
As the class continued taking shape, I found myself thinking more about what these necromancers actually did when they weren't adventuring.
After all, if Death had walked away from his responsibilities and humanity had spent generations figuring out how to keep things running, there would have to be more to the profession than a handful of powerful spellcasters.
They would need entire teams of people supporting them.
And that's where the Clericals came into the picture.
By this point, the Necromancer had already picked up a few elements traditionally associated with Clerics, particularly through its cantrips and curated spell list.
So when I started thinking about the administrative side of the profession, the name practically suggested itself.
Clericals.
A little tongue-in-cheek nod to Clerics, but also a perfectly reasonable name for the people handling the paperwork, records, scheduling, and countless other responsibilities that kept the profession functioning.
And I liked that something which started as a bit of wordplay could fit so naturally into the world.
Within this larger, developing institution, they would absolutely need to keep dedicated records of everyone they helped send onward. The sheer scale of the operation would practically demand it.
They would need a ledger.
A traditional Wizard has a spellbook, a record of the magic they've learned and can prepare. But a Necromancer working in this kind of profession would have another reason to keep detailed records.
Who had they helped? What had happened? What responsibilities had they accepted? Were there unresolved matters that another practitioner might need to follow up on?
The spellbook recorded what they knew how to do.
The ledger would instead record who they had been responsible for.
I liked the distinction between the two, especially because it suggested a professional culture built around continuity and accountability.
Knowledge wasn't simply something an individual accumulated for their own benefit. It was something that needed to be preserved, passed along, and made useful to the people who came afterward.
And there was a certain weight to the idea that a Necromancer's final responsibility might be ensuring that their own work could continue without them.
Do not let your knowledge die twice.
That became another small piece of the profession's identity.
The magic was extraordinary, certainly. But much of the responsibility surrounding it was surprisingly ordinary.
And I think that's part of what made the entire concept increasingly interesting to me.
A World That Followed the Class
Something else had been happening alongside all of this mechanical development.
The more I explored what these necromancers did, the more I found myself asking what a world that depended on them might actually look like.
If this was an established profession, where did its practitioners work? What kinds of institutions supported them? How did ordinary people interact with them, and what happened when something went wrong?
Those questions eventually began shaping an entirely new setting.
A smaller, canal-filled city with a gothic, romantic atmosphere, where necromancers and their supporting institutions had become part of everyday life.
And what began as a way to give the class somewhere to belong was gradually developing into a place with its own character, history, and possibilities for adventure.
But that's a different story, and one I'll explore in another Design Journal entry.
From the Forge: Following the Questions
Looking back at where this project started, it's interesting just how far a relatively simple question ended up taking me.
I wanted to find a way for a player who loved skeletons and necromancy to enjoy those ideas without being forced into the traditional villainous archetype.
That was really it.
I didn't begin with a fully developed cosmology, an elaborate professional institution, or plans for three distinct disciplines.
Those things emerged as I kept following the questions.
What if necromancers helped souls pass onward? What would that work actually involve? What happened when Death stopped doing his job? How would people learn to take on those responsibilities themselves?
And eventually, what would all of that mean for the abilities a player could use at the table?
Some answers came from mythology. Others came from existing game mechanics, previous design projects, or simply a bit of wordplay that turned out to fit surprisingly well.
And each answer seemed to suggest another question worth exploring.
That's one of the things I enjoy most about designing games and building worlds. Sometimes the most interesting ideas aren't the ones you started with. They're the ones you discover while trying to make everything else fit together.
The Necromancer ended up becoming something much larger than I'd originally imagined.
But at its heart, it still comes back to that first question.
How do you take something a player already loves and give them an entirely new way to experience it?
Curious About the Necromancer?
Interested in learning more about the class, seeing how its abilities work, or perhaps trying one out at a QuestForge table?
I'd be happy to talk shop, answer questions, or explore how a Necromancer might fit into one of our adventures.
