What I don't get about Necromancy is what's the point? Sure, some people are just curious, it could be fun, and the highly ambitious would want an undead army, but to casual necromancers, what's the real point?

I think the devs just wanted a good vs evil "jedi vs sith" type thing, but in the end magic isn't "light or dark", its just neutral and its how you use it that counts, like a weapon.

Well, that's because of the gameplay but using skeletons is just as stupid as them being Daedra. There'd have to be some sort of huge skeleton army hidden somewhere.

I reckon summoning a skeleton stands in for just about everything described in http://www.imperial-library.info/mwbooks/corpse_preparation.shtml. Which would be awfully tedious to do as a player and restrict every encounter with a necromancer to his lair..

That you can buy the summon skeleton spells in the guild of mages, well, blame gameplay.

What i understand is that necromancy at it's core i'm talking about, started with the dream of lichdom, the thought of prolonged life, the idea that you never die, this is what got the guy at Benirus manor in anvil, he wanted eternal life, however there are other reasons, there are stories of people who mourn for their dead loved ones so much to the point of wanting to resurrect them, necromancy is known for such feats and causes them to be caught up in the art, and as The Black Arts ON Trial says at the end necromancy can be addictive and can eventually consume you life and devotion.

Fearabbit, your theory of conjuration seems to be most accurate, a 3 step process of sensing, teleporting and binding although i would say that the binding would come before teleportation for the sake of the conjurers safety, however this still leaves some questions. Why does the summoned creature stay for a temporary while and where does it go after it leaves, i just remembered that special spell in SI where you summon haskill, seem to recall that haskill reappears at his previous spot before summoning, although i am not sure if this would count as firstly it is a lesser power and secondly it is bestowed by the daedric prince of all things wrong and confusing. The only reasons which i can think of for a creature to return to its original position is that the teleportation is more of a 'borrowing' from that point in space to another. For the question of why they stay temporarily i believe that this can be safely attributed to magicka cost, while 'borrowing' the creature you have to pay an energy fee in the form of magicka, this fee firstly counts the creatures soul level and then the undefined value, this value can be as large as pleased and in the end the higher the value the longer it stays.

But there are still some puzzles i have been unable to solve, where do these creatures come from, and how is it that the specific creature you summoned is the one that came (e.g. you summon a ghost, a fellow conjurer summons another ghost, how does each ghost get selected to go to that conjurer?) Also this area where the creatures come from, do they have a depletable source of these creatures or is it infinite, can conflicts occur if a creature is sensed, borrowed and binded by more than one conjurer? (e.g. For sake of argument, if 10000000000000000000000 conjurers summoned a ghost at the exact same time will all the conjurers have a ghost? Would any conflicts occur because these ghosts had been double summoned, more than one connjurer?)

We haven't even touched upon the matter of black soul gems, such as their relation to necromancy, and people seem to have forgotten completely about my notes on schools and elements (check my first post in this topic if you don't know what i'm talking about), come on people show some enthusiasm and try to mention something from everything in your posts :wave:

(THIS S AN EDIT)
P.S.



i forgot to mention that i think that the summoning of skeletons spells is kind of the mages guild's way to lessen necromancy, one of the major cases on necromancy is that it causes people to commit inhuman atrocities like grave-robbing. When you sell spells that summon skeletons you satisfy some of the necromancers wants, having less people dabble in the dark arts.

There's four possibilities in regards to summoning undead creatures, as I see it:
They're disguised Daedra: this is unlikely;
They're actual undead creatures, transported from their grave and given unlife by the conjurer;
They're actual undead creatures, transported from a place where they already existed in an undead rather than dead state; or
They're a simulacrum of an undead creature composed entirely if magical energies and held together by the conjurer's will.

I favor the 4th explanation, but the third is most likely for non-necromancer conjurers and the second is most likely for necromancers.

Maybe future games should have the player prepare a corpse and then be able to summon the lacky. :shrug:

Anyway, do undead occur naturally? As in, do ghosts and skeletons spontaneously appear without a Necromancer?

Also, you'd think they'd cremate their dead in Cyrodiil - no bodies for zombies and skeletons...

That's all very nice but it lacks a source and doesn't explain why a necromancer faced with constantly disappearing skeletons doesn't just build in some protection to prevent his skeletons from being spirited away. So it's kinda ridiculous.

But either way you're still trying to explain gameplay.

Yeah how do undead occur? I mean do people who die automatically become zombies or ghosts or skeletons?

http://www.imperial-library.info/mwbooks/corpse_preparation.shtml tells you how to how to prepare your corpses for animation.

Dear proweler if you read that entire post you would see that i talked about that, i used Fearabbit's theory of 'sense, teleport and bind' to create a minorly edited version of 'sense, bind and borrow' I talked about how the variable magicka cost spent is what keeps the summoned creature, they can't prevent the skeletons from being spirited away because of my proposed laws of conjuration, you aren't teleporting it completely but rather borrowing it from that point in space please post if you think i might have misunderstood your statement and as for a source i'm afraid i don't have any i'm not a lore-buff as some would call and mostly this is just theorizing based on what little i know from playing the game.

Corpse Preparation v1 mentions that certain mages that have preformed a great service to the empire are permitted to use the corpses of criminals.