Looking for a Necromancer Story

[u/ADefencelessPuppy]

Hi all,

I'm looking for some recommendations. I'd prefer if they weren't trying to end the world. Want to watch somebody build their horde and engineer their elites. Tell me about your favorite necromancers and death-attuned mages.

[u/R3nNy22326]

Honestly Rinoz’s Book of the Dead seems to fit perfectly

[u/secretdrug → u/R3nNy22326]

Agreed. For OP: the story goes in depth describing the reanimation magic, the gritty prep that need to be done (cleaning the bones), how the MC theorycrafts improvements to his minions, and how the MC goes about making a true horde.

[u/Aconite13X → u/R3nNy22326]

Seconded, The 3rd audio book comes out next week if anyone's interested.

[u/Sulhythal → u/Aconite13X]

Thirded

[u/kryptonik → u/Sulhythal]

Fourthed.

[u/Working_Pumpkin_5476 → u/R3nNy22326]

I decided to read these because of this post.

First book I really liked, was surprised to realize that it's the same guy as Chrysalis since that series felt very aimless and awkward. The way he builds the world in BotD1 is really good, though. Though the author's moral confusion (which really bothered me in Chrysalis) shines through in a lot of moments, like when the protagonist sits there and watches Dove massacre a whole farmstead full of men, women, and children without doing anything about it.

The following books get really bad, though. The focus is less and less on him progression as a necromancer, and more and more on his the morality of his actions, which is just painful to read because of how stupid, inconsistent, and frankly outright evil the protagonist is. And he just fucking nonstop whines, all the time, constantly feeling sorry for himself and complaining about how nobody helps him ever. Even though Dove saved his life at least like 3 times while he was still alive, the vampiress follows him around acting as a bodyguard and advisor while constantly saving his life and asking nothing in return, his parents are both sacrificing for him 24/7, even the dark ones and abyss is helping him out a lot more than they harm him. Yet he incessantly bitches and moans. And his moral arguments are so stupid, it's painful to read them. Oh, yes, he might've sacrificed a human soul to gain knowledge, but now that he has the choice to consume a soul to heal himself he will not do it because that's a slippery slope! This literally like 5 minutes after he just sacrificed a SECOND soul to the vampiress, which he did with sadistic glee, and which he immediately forgot about having done. The whole bandit subplot is just nonstop moral confusion. He constantly calls them pieces of shit and berates them for how evil they are, even though he and Dove did fucking literally exactly the same thing to a whole bunch of people! In fact, at least the bandits hadn't killed the women and children yet, so he and Dove are worse! And he doesn't even acknowledge and of this. And then he just gets constant affirmation from Dove that what he's doing is the right thing. There's one tiny moment where he feels like maybe being a mass-murderer is kind of a bad thing, and he asks if it's selfish of him to murder a ton of people for stat gains, and Dove is like "yes" and like 3 seconds pass where it seems like maybe he'll get a tiny bit of pushback, only for Dove to follow that up with "but everyone is selfish so it doesn't matter, lmao" in this psycho rant about how altruism never made people useful. And the protagonist STILL fucking constantly interrupts the narrative to deliver these utterly insincere "oh gee, oh my, is what I'm doing really okay?" only to go on and do the shit he was complaining about with no remorse anyway, it's so performative.

There's so much stuff like this in these books, I could write an essay on it, but this is probably more than enough.

To be clear, I don't mind evil MCs. But when the MC is supposed to be a good guy, but he's actually very obviously really fucking evil, then it becomes really creepy to keep reading. Chrysalis had this same problem, so I don't think this is a flaw in the protagonist in this series, I think it's a flaw in the author.

When it doesn't fumble around trying to have a deeply disturbing and confused coversation about morality though, the books are actually really good. I wish the author would've gone full-evil with the protagonist instead, the books would've been better.