Cheshire,

Raise Dead is fine, it’s the second “become alive again” spell after CPR Revivify.

Animate Dead is the “get skeletons and zombies” spell.

That being said, the various re-alive-ing spells are kind of the best reason for a “necromancy is evil”-argument. Or at least, they used to be.

In 3.5, nothing - not even True Resurrection, which was just “name dead creature, creature pops up next to you, alive” - could bring someone back who had been turned undead, until the undead had been destroyed.

Which means the easiest way to prevent someone from getting brought back to life was to turn them into an undead skeleton and hide them somewhere, nothing short of direct divine intervention would be able to return them to life unless something destroyed the skeleton.

This strongly implied that turning the body into an undead also trapped and enslaved the soul. After all, otherwise, True Rez - requiring nothing but the name of the target, and able to straight up build a new body from scratch - wouldn’t fail to rez someone just because their body was desecrated.

Now, in 5e, True Rez says that it can be casted on an undead to return them to life, but also only that it can restore a body “if the original no longer exists”, which I guess implies that simply embalming/non-necromantically mummifying the body and hiding it away would also work (since the body still exists that way, and thus 5e’s True Rez wouldn’t build a new one), making the only notable difference between an undead and a corpse that the undead might not hold still during the resurrection.

Basically, Necromancy went from 3.5’s “implied soul slavery” to 5e’s “corpse desecration, which is a cultural construct”.

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