As readers of this blog will know, while my aesthetic has always been a bit more 1990s slacker (an aesthetic that I have maintained since the actual 1990s, a decade in which I just barely made it into teenagehood with like six months to spare) I have a secret spooky goth underneath it all. When I started playing World of Warcraft... dear lord, 20 years ago (like, as of this month,) and encountered the Undead Scourge, I became particularly enamored of the undead specifically when it comes to spooky monsters.
I don't actually love gore as an aesthetic, but dusty crypts and skeletal warriors are totally my jam.
Anywho, the Necromancer is one of the great classic "evil wizard" archetypes, and in particular in D&D, among whose most iconic monsters are the Lich (I'd argue it's the single most wide-reaching contribution to the fantasy genre the game has made, such that it's sort of a surprise that the concept or at least the term "Lich" to mean that, as far as I can tell, didn't exist before D&D,) Necromancers are a very solid choice for a major villain.
Death, of course, carries with it countless taboos. Reckoning with death is a universal human experience (and I suspect it would be of any sapient species that isn't somehow immortal,) and the idea of reanimated corpses triggers a ton of different fear responses. We're hard-wired to find dead bodies, especially those that have undergone decay, repulsive, because that fear protected our ancestors from dangerous bacteria and fungi that might grow in a dead body and spread to the living. And then, on another, more intellectual level, there's something deeply unsettling about the idea of a corpse that is moving: not just in an uncanny valley way, but also as a reminder that one day, we too will be pallid corpses (though probably not shambling ones).
D&D characters need not be good or heroic figures - the concept of the game initially was that people of widely varying motivations and methods would band together to plumb the depths of dangerous dungeons. But I think in modern times, the tendency is for D&D parties to generally do heroics for their own sake - gold and treasure is more of a means to the end of being capable of taking on graver threats, rather than the inverse. (As the folks at MCDM have pointed out, especially in the design of their new game, Crows, D&D originally made gold and XP the same thing - the more gold you hauled out of a dungeon, the faster you leveled up your characters, a mechanic that Crows brings back).
Still, I think it's a good rule, especially if you're not just playing an old-school dungeon crawling campaign, to try at least to build a character who can play well with others and perhaps exist in society (they don't need to be popular.)
Necromancers have a huge advantage as a subclass, which is that they're Wizards, and Wizards are amazingly useful to have in any D&D party, providing a lot of utility to the group. That level of capability and expertise can also justify why your party is willing to tolerate the kind of messed-up stuff you do.
I think we're going to be building this to really conform to the archetype of the Necromancer. We may not be evil, but this is the Wizard who delves into forbidden knowledge and practices that might make them shunned by polite society.
Note that I think you can do similar things with a couple other classes and subclasses. Undead Warlocks and Reanimator Artificers are probably living in a very similar space, and nearly any of the subclasses out of Ravenloft: Horrors Within can exist in similar spaces.
But if we're really going into the notion of someone specifically delving into dark and hidden knowledge, this is really the ultimate subclass for that (though I'd argue Reanimators vie for that position as well, it's just that Reanimators are doing experimental research while Necromancers are perhaps more theoretical).
So, first question: is our Necromancer's research sanctioned or no?
It's a funny thing: in D&D, Necromancy is understood as one of the eight schools of magic, despite the fact that you could argue a lot of its abilities could be described using other schools: like, isn't raising the dead kind of Transmutation? Technically a corpse is an object that you could target with Animate Objects, after all.
But does this recognition of Necromancy as its whole own type of magic mean that magical institutions need to sanction its study and practice? Perhaps it's known, yes, that this eighth school exists, but it's the one you're not supposed to actually use.
I like the idea of a scholar who has been cast out of whatever institution they were a part of because of their pursuit of forbidden knowledge. You often need a reason why someone set aside their civilian life to pursue an adventuring career, and having your former career come crashing down around you is a pretty good reason.
So, I think our Necromancer was once basically a magical professor. Maybe they taught at some institute of arcane learning, a prestigious place. Professors generally have two tasks, teaching and research (with a lot of them far preferring the latter and teaching only because their college or university requires it,) but perhaps we give our character a somewhat more sympathetic characterization: they actually love the teaching side of it, and had some really meaningful connections with their students.
If this institution was one that banned the study of necromancy, what might have driven them to it, then?
Well, Necromancy, at least as practiced by Wizards, can't bring someone back to true life, but a Wizard might not be aware of that particular nuance. Let's suppose that our good professor had a favorite student. I'm going to say just to avoid any real ickiness we're going to say that the relationship was platonic, but it was the kind of relationship between a professor and student where they'll probably wind up lifelong friends and colleagues once the student earns their degree (my dad's closest friends are mostly his former PhD advisees from the 70s and 80s).
But tragedy strikes, and the student dies in some violent manner - it's not a natural cause, but maybe a magical experiment gone wrong or a random act of criminal violence. Our good professor feels somehow responsible - maybe they encouraged said experiment, or perhaps they sent the student on a task that put them in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The point is, their entry into Necromancy as a practice begins with noble intentions: to give life back to someone who lost it too soon.
But things don't go very well: first off, the attempt to bring their student back instead brings them back as an undead creature: here, the student actually becomes our undead familiar through the Necromancy Spellbook feature.
Someone at the university discovers the paper trail of banned books and finds the good professor's secret ritual space. They're not just fired - the school calls the authorities to have them arrested, and potentially executed for these crimes.
But our good professor A: doesn't want to die and B: still wants to figure out a way to bring their student back from the dead, so they go on the run.
If they want to accomplish their goal, setting things right and restoring their student to true life, they'll need to protect themselves and learn more. That means finding deeper, more forbidden lore and having the means to fend off the well-meaning but dogmatic forces trying to bring them to heel.
And thus, an adventurer is born.
Now, let's talk mechanics:
I think our pretty clear background here (class and subclass is obviously already spoken for) is probably Sage. While you might think Magic Initiate: Wizard on a Wizard is redundant, it mainly translates to an extra spell per day and some bonus preparations. Shield is a great option here (one of those spells you take on any character who can get it) given that Find Familiar comes with our subclass. For cantrips, I think any spellcaster is going to want to have one really solid damage cantrip, though this broadens our options a bit to allow a second one (we can also swap cantrips on a long rest now as a Wizard, so the one from this feat should be one we really always want to have). I might grab a utility cantrip with the feat like Mage Hand, as we're probably never going to want to swap that out.
But what about that main damage cantrip? There are only two necromancy cantrips in the 5.0 PHB for Wizards. Chill Touch is now, appropriately, a touch-range spell, which makes more sense with the name (though it still does necrotic rather than cold damage) but makes it less, you know, good as a primary damage option. Toll the Dead is actually not a bad choice - as a saving throw cantrip, it's equally effective in melee as it is at range, and it's also the highest-damage-potential cantrip if the target has taken any damage (which will be the case the vast majority of the time). Saving throw cantrips can't crit, though, and monster saving throw bonuses scale better than their AC, so it's not always going to be the best option, but it's a solid choice. If we want to go off-theme, I of course think that the new True Strike is fantastic, though it's not a classic Wizard aesthetic. Perhaps because of Warcraft, I often think of necromancers as using a lot of cold magic, so I think something like Ray of Frost would actually be a pretty on-theme choice even if it's an evocation spell. Oh, actually, Poison Spray is a necromancy cantrip, and it's certainly a lot better than it was in 5.0 (it's now a ranged spell attack with a 30 foot range,) but it does do Poison damage, which is great unless you're fighting undead, fiends, elementals, constructs, maybe celestials, some monstrosities... it's the least reliable damage type in the game.
Now, Wizards get a lot of spells, and you can even get plenty of spells for your spellbook in the course of your campaign depending on how easy your DM makes it for you to find more spells.
You're going to want to take a lot of the classics, especially any good utility ritual spells.
But to narrow our focus, let's talk about what we want to take every other level via our Necromancy Savant feature.
Note that we don't have to take a spell of our highest level spell slot with this feature, and perhaps as choices narrow at high levels, we might decide to grab some we had skipped earlier. But I'm going to assume that it's not impossible for us to find spell in the world, and so we'll go for the greatest efficiency in taking high-level spells and saving on gold and time copying.
So, what are the best Necromancy spells for us to take at each spell level?
At 1st level, our only choices are False Life and Ray of Sickness - though I'll note that when we get this feature, we can actually get two second level Necromancy spells. Of the two, I'm inclined to like False Life a little more, for similar reasons that I'm avoiding Poison Spray. But we'll only grab it if we can't find two second-level spells we want.
At 2nd level, Gentle Repose and Ray of Enfeeblement are our PHB options, but expanding outward, we also have Wither and Bloom and Death Armor. Gentle Repose can be very helpful if we don't have access to resurrection magic yet, so we can keep someone in the Revivify window long enough to get them to a healer. I'd then say perhaps Wither and Bloom is another option if we want a bit of light AoE (it's less damage than Shatter, but avoid friendly fire and can allow for a little quasi-healing (friends have to expend hit dice to get the healing,) which could honestly be pretty clutch.
For 3rd level spells, obviously we'll skip over Animate Dead given that we get it at Wizard level 6 automatically. We actually have a fair number of options here: Bestow Curse, Feign Death, Speak with Dead, Summon Undead, and Vampiric Touch are all in the PHB. Life Transference is in Xanathar's, and we have Spirit Shroud from Tasha's. If we want to go all in on summoning undead, I think Summon Undead is a pretty solid option. Spirit Shroud can act as a poor man's Conjure Minor Elementals if we want to go supernova with Scorching Ray. Bestow Curse can have some nasty effects, though we need to get in touch range to do it. That said, with our familiar, we can potentially send our poor old student we're trying to help to go do it (we might choose to flavor the familiar differently - maybe we just started studying necromancy to figure out how to raise our friend, but we didn't actually get a chance to try it on them yet). I think if we want to go all in on an army of undead minions, Summon Undead comes with some really powerful utility, like inflicting fear on a hit, or if we're a bit lucky, paralyzing on hit. Indeed, if we do pick up Ray of Sickness, we can potentially poison a target with our own action and then have a Putrid Spirit paralyze them with a hit, which can be a truly nasty combo assuming the target can be poisoned and paralyzed. Summon Undead and Animate Dead occupy similar conceptual niches, but they're actually compatible with one another, just as long as your fellow players don't get frustrated when you're commanding a ton of different creatures each turn.
For 4th level spells, skip Blight, as it doesn't do nearly enough damage for a single-target spell, which is rough because it's the only 4th level necromancy spell in the 5.5 PHB. Looking elsewhere, our only other option here is Festering Blast from Arcana Unleashed, which is a line spell that does necrotic damage initially and can poison, with the poison doing poison damage over time. Again, sucks if our foes are immune to poison, but this could actually be a great option to inflict poison on a bunch of targets and then paralyze them with a putrid spirit from Summon Undead. Festering Blast only does 4d10 damage initially (though it's a 10-foot line rather than a 5-foot one) but I think it's at least much better than Blight. Though honestly, we might dip back and grab a 3rd level spell when we hit level 7 because the options are so limited here.
For 5th level, there's not a single Wizard necromancy spell in the PHB at this level. But we have some good options elsewhere. In Arcana Unleashed, we have a bevy of options, with Enervation, Grave Ground, Negative Energy Flood, Spirit Lantern, and Waves of Exhaustion. From Xanathar's, we have Danse Macabre (and older version of some of the ones from Xanathar's). Now, I actually love Danse Macabre, especially with the buffed Skeleton stat block in 5.5. This lets you raise five undead minions, who use the zombie or skeleton stat block, but crucially, they get to add your spellcasting ability modifier to attack and damage rolls. A skeleton with a +5 to hit is going to start struggling when you start fighting creatures with 20 AC or higher, but if that becomes +10 to hit, and each hit doing 1d6+8 (5 times,) this starts to mean a lot of damage. (Actually, thanks to our Undead Thralls feature, make that 1d6+13!) If you have the raw materials (aka, a bunch of bone piles) this spell actually puts out an insane amount of single-target damage. Unlike Animate Dead, it only lasts for an hour, takes concentration, and also eats up your bonus action to command your minions, but I just have to advocate for this profoundly on-brand spell. (Also, the rule is that the verbal component is the entire Vincent Price "rap" from Thriller, which you must say in its entirety at the table the first time you cast this.)
Ahem. Again, I think this is a very good option, but if your DM is stingy about providing you corpses to reanimate, let's look at other options. I'm skeptical about Waves of Exhaustion: while you can potentially debuff foes to up to a -8 for all their d20 tests, doing so takes several turns. Spirit Lantern is conceptually cool, but works best if you're in a target-rich environment, when you might want to be casting Fireballs or the like. I actually really like Grave Ground conceptually and aesthetically, though I think it's more likely to serve as good battlefield control rather than a source of damage (which might be what you want it for). Particularly good in fights with bottlenecks you can block off. Negative Energy Flood does ok damage for a single-target spell, but can be a bit versatile as a way to heal up an undead minion (likely only your Summon Undead spirit is worth it, if that). I'd really go Danse Macabre or Grave Ground as a backup if you can't use 5.0 only content.
(Oh, one problem: Animate Dead also requires a bonus action to command our minions. The minions from Danse Macabre will hit much harder and more accutrately, so it's still potentially worth using anyway. Likewise, our commands can potentially carry over between turns, if we tell them to "attack that creature," they should continue to until it's dead, and I guess even afterward. So, while there might be an action economy pile-up, we could in theory get both the minions from Animate Dead and from Danse Macabre to work in tandem, but with a turn of ramp-up.)
At 6th level, we have a few options. From the PHB, we've got Circle of Death, Create Undead, Eyebite, and Magic Jar. I... think Soul Cage from Xanathar's is the rough equivalent of Magic Jar (checking... actually not really!) So, right off the bat, I think we'll skip Circle of Death, which is basically the same damage as Fireball but on a wider area. I don't know that that utility is really that useful given how huge a Fireball typically is, and it's hard to avoid friendly fire with Circle of Death, on top of the damage being low for a 6th level spell.
The math on Create Undead is interesting: naturally, we'll be able to raise more creatures with Animate Dead, especially with our Animate Dead feature. At this level spell level, Animate Dead can give us 9 skeletons/zombies, compared to just 3 ghouls with Create Undead. If we don't have the corpses to do 9 with animate dead, obviously we'd grab the ghouls. But with only a +4 to hit and slightly higher damage than skeletons, for pure damage, Animate is better. However! Ghouls can paralyze a target on a hit (there is a Con save involved, and it doesn't work on undead or elves,) and while the save DC is quite low, that can be massive utility. I think the larger army of skeletons or even zombies (though I'd say go for skeletons any time you can) is probably the better call, given how the damage bonus from our Undead Thralls feature will scale really well with the size of our army.
The other spells (other than Circle of Death) are weird utility and debuff spells. Eyebite can put out various quite nasty debuffs, though it takes our concentration and action each turn. Soul Cage is a weird one that does require a humanoid soul to trap, so it might be tough depending on the kind of campaign you're in. Magic Jar is maybe the weirdest of the bunch, which lets you separate your soul from your body so you can go and possess another humanoid. The use cases here are... profoundly varied. If you can figure out a great way to use this, by all means go for it. I think I'd go with Eyebite or Create Undead as more straightforward options.
Onto 7th level! Finger of Death is our only PHB option here. And it actually, genuinely, might be the only 7th level Necromancy spell for Wizards, as I just looked through Heroes of Faerun, Arcana Unleashed, Xanathar's, and Tasha's (I realize I'm leaving out a few scattered other sources). So pick that, I guess. Finger of Death isn't bad - it does less damage than Disintegrate, but it's a save-for-half spell and can potentially get you yet another permanent undead minion.
Now, 8th level: In the PHB, we've got Clone. Our only other option is Abi-Dazim's Horrid Wilting from Xanathar's. These are very different spells for very different purposes. Horrid Wilting does 12d8 necrotic damage in a 30-foot cube, with a Con save for half. A 30-foot cube is actually a little smaller than a Fireball. And 12d8 is an average of 54 damage, whereas an 8th level Fireball would do 45.5, so it is a step up in terms of damage.
Clone is a super weird one. It basically lets you avoid death, but it takes a long time (120 days) for the clone to reach a point where it can work. Then, you're also going to wake up without any of your gear, which has been left behind with your original body. You can use something like Drawmij's Instant Summons (though make sure you do so right away, as if the people who killed you pick up your gear, Instant Summons will just tell you where your stuff is, which you already know, presumably). Clone is very cool, but I think it's more useful as a kind of "campaign epilogue" spell, where you might go on to live for thousands of years by just slipping into your cloned body after you die of old age.
Finally, 9th level spells: Bizarrely, Astral Projection is actually considered Necromancy, and is the only one in the PHB. But Arcana Unleashed gives us Wail of the Banshee.
I love Astral Projection, but it's possibly a bit redundant given that you could have already gotten Plane Shift, and while it makes it safer to traverse the Astral Sea (unless you fight things that can cut the thread, which, like, most monsters in the Astral Sea can) I don't know that it's super practical. (Again, we can just Wish a Plane Shift if we lack the correct tuning rod).
Wail of the Banshee... is interesting. It can instant-kill any creatures of your choice within 60 feet who hear it if they have 50 HP or fewer. At tier 4, that's really marginal for most monsters you'll face. In the far more likely case that they have over 50 HP, though, they make a Con save, taking 12d10 psychic damage on a failure and being deafened, or half as much on a success without the condition.
I... I love the flavor here, and the fact that you can avoid friendly fire is genuinely a real selling point. But any 9th level AoE damage spell (and this is effectively that - even the instant kill function is effectively a flat 50 damage) is going to need to compare to Meteor Swarm, which does a whopping 140 damage on average. You know what would auto-kill a bunch of monsters with less than 50 hit points? A Meteor Swarm that does 70 damage even if they succeed on their saving throw.
Phew! That was a lot!
So, how do we play this?
Well, one of the joys of playing a Wizard is that you have so many options on how to approach each challenge, whether they be combat encounters or other things. But if we want to really lean into the subclass fantasy, we're primarily going to act as a battlefield commander for a legion of undead troops.
Talk with your DM extensively about how practical it will be for you to command a bunch of undead. While Summon Undead and Danse Macabre make temporary undead minions, remember that Animate Dead and Create Undead create undead monsters that don't die when the spell ends - they're just no longer under your control. This means you effectively need to re-cast the spell on the same minions to keep them leashed, perhaps supplementing fallen minions with new remains (though again, talk with your DM about whether a dead zombie is now a humanoid corpse that could be reanimated with such a spell).
It's also a really important thing for you to hash out with your DM what you have to do with your undead minions when you, say, go to town. Is this a setting where people understand that you're "one of the good guys," and thus your marching force of undead minions are allowed to come into the general store with you? Or, more likely, would people run screaming if they saw you at the head of an undead host?
The main reason I think DMs will "railroad" or "shut down" players' ideas is more about keeping the campaign manageable. If you're going to play this subclass, see if they're willing to make ample corpses available for reanimation in the game's world, and maybe if they don't, see if they'll agree to letting you endlessly "recycle" fallen undead.
One of the biggest challenges to a minion-commanding character in a TTRPG is that your turns might go on forever. While the Berserker Barbarian resolves their entire turn in like, a minute, rolling two attacks and then moving, if you've got a dozen minions that are all moving and attacking, on top of whatever spell choices you're making for your turn, it could get out of hand.
Consider whether some limitations might be helpful to keep the flow of the game going. Maybe, for example, you can only maintain a number of minions from Animate Dead that you'd be able to get from a single cast. As written, a 10th level Necromancer could blow all 3 3rd, 4th, and both 5th level spell slots to raise (er, 3x3 plus 3x5 plus 2x7, so that's...) 38 minions. That could be hilariously funny (and even with only a +3 or +5 to hit, that's going to wind up being an insane amount of single target damage per turn) but it makes the combat encounter the Necromancer show.
Limiting it to just one Animate Dead's worth of minions means just 7, which is still a lot but more manageable. Alternatively, we could look at Draw Steel for inspiration on how to handle minions.
The Draw Steel Summoner is entirely built around having a bunch of minions on the board, and groups these minions into squads that have essentially a shared health pool, with thresholds where individuals are killed and reduce the overall damage they do.
I'd be tempted to go a step further and make them move together as well. Here's an idea I'd propose:
Every time you get a square number of minions, you group them into a squad. So, say we cast Animate Dead at 5th level. We have 4 in a squad and then the remaining 3 act individually. This is only if they're the same creature choice.
If we have four skeletons, we group them into a Large Swarm of Medium Undead. They make a single attack together, pooling the damage they'd normally do so that it would be 4d6+12 (and then an additional 4x our Int modifier for Undead Thralls' necrotic damage). We likewise pool their HP and Temp HP, multiplying the usual totals by 4. Now, the math actually makes them a little tougher, but what we do is that when their HP drops to thresholds equal to the skeletons' individual max HP (so, we have 52 total, but at 39, 26, and 13) the swarm is diminished, subtracting one minion's damage from the total.
Again, the math makes them a little tougher because the monsters have to chew through all four minions' temp HP before any start going down, but I think that's fair. We might even nerf their damage by forcing them to take the average damage even on crits (which would also speed up combat).
Alternatively, to keep your fellow players engaged, try relinquishing control. Maybe you divide your undead minions and allow your friends to control them.
It's common wisdom in D&D that putting more bodies on the board is often very powerful, and Necromancers can put a lot of bodies on the board.
Again, I've been playing a Wizard for I think almost 5 years now, and so I'm eager to try other classes in some new campaign. I still haven't played a 5.5 Monk, and I'd love to get my hands on the new Artifcer as well.
But I've got to say, I would not hate playing a Necromancer.
