[KaVir]

Oh I agree, and I hope you didn't think that that's what I was suggesting. I just think that the original meaning of "necromancer" is something which is often overlooked, but that it could provide an interesting avenue to explore - even if only as one aspect of the necromancer's powers.

Some of my colleagues "play" with dead bodies as well, but to the best of my knowledge they've certainly not killed anyone! Even the archtypical fantasy necromancer tends to be more of a graverobber than a mass-murderer - rather like many surgeons and anatomists in medieval and renaissance Europe (although they rarely stole the bodies themselves, they still paid other people to do so).

Animated skeletons and zombies are typically mindless and lack a soul - creating them might be irreverant and unhygienic, but IMO it's no more "evil" than building a robot.

Of course then there are the ethereal undead - ghosts, wraiths, spectres, etc. They lack physical bodies, which removes the whole "playing with corpses" thing from the equation.

In some settings the necromancer forces the still-aware souls of the dead to serve him, making him a sort of supernatural slaver. This would almost certainly be considered "evil" by todays standards, although the same attitute doesn't seem to extend to other sentient beings (eg it's usually considered perfectly fine to bind an elemental into eternal servitude).

Yet in other settings, the undead willingly serve the necromancer. For example in the Necroscope books I mentioned in my previous post, the dead willingly choose to reanimate their corpses in order to aid and protect the title character.

In one of the Anita Blake novels, a man had shot himself, and as a result his insurance company refused to pay anything to his widow - because they claimed it was a suicide. Serving in a legal capacity (with lawyers present), Anita temporarily animated the man, and he was able to confirm that it was a careless accident and not a suicide (in these books, the dead can't lie). The man said his goodbyes to his widow and children, and was then put back to rest. Was this evil? I would say no.

The Eberron campaign setting for D&D is set shortly after a great war. During the war, the nation of Karrnath was so short on soldiers that they started animating the corpses of those fallen in battle in order to defend their borders. Was this evil? Possibly, but it saved tens of thousands of lives, as fewer civilians needed to be drafted.

The necromancer is typically portrayed in fantasy literal as "evil", but personally I find such an overgeneralisation somewhat limiting. Like anyone else, a necromancer's abilities can be used for good or evil, and I think it makes them more interesting if you allow them to be judged as individuals, based on how they use those abilities.