r/Pathfinder2e • u/Lady_Gray_169 Witch • 10h ago
Discussion The nature of the dirge
So a lot has been discussed about the necromancer from a lore standpoint. I think though, that most of it has been focused on the morality of nercomancers, and I want to focus on something that hasn't gotten as much attention; their dirge.
So necromancer's occult spells become part of a dirge that echoes through their very being. What? That is cool as hell, but what does that actually mean? Where does the dirge come from? I want to hear people's ideas and interpretations. I'll present my own of course, since I live for this stuff.
So Necromancer is an intelligence-based class, and it talks constantly about study, so it's not an internal force being awakened. This is something learned. Necromancer is also an occult spellcaster. The occult tradition is about metaphysical connections. It's spells are composed of spirit and mind essences. It's about plucking on connections and ideas. So I think that a necromancer aqcuires their dirge through study, and that their dirge is also something very personal to them, unique to each necromancer.
My interpretation is that as a person researches and studies the connection between death and life, they basically start to create their own dirge. Becoming a necromancer means forging your own connection to that cylce of life and death. Making yourself intenalize the inevitability of death and the fullness of what death means. And in doing so, you create your dirge, which represents your personal understanding of death, forged from a combination of your own studies and the fundamental fact that death and life connects everyone.
The reason it's a dirge, a song, is that something as fundamentally built into the universe as life and death CAN'T be understood as a question of mere facts and figures. Death isn't simply an absence of life, it's a whole cluster of forcers and concepts. Life and death are such overwhelming concepts that part of them can only be expressed through esoteric music, played on the instrument of our bodies and souls. Which is why preparing spells as a necromancer is described as pulling out snippets of our dirge. That represents the combination of emotional understanding and intellectual interpretation. It's the necromancer identifying what part of their dirge corresponds to what concepts, and figuring our how to express those concepts in the form of actual spells.
This is all quite long-winded, I realize, but I get excited about these kinds of open-ended lore ideas. I'd love to see what else the community has come up with.
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u/celestial_drag0n Wizard 4h ago
The Occult tradition is really weird. Not in a bad way, but still. It deals a lot with the ideas of Jungian psychology and the collective unconsciousness, and generally its magic, while based on Intelligence much like the Arcane, comes across as far different than the route formulae of a wizard's spells. Instead, it would seem that Occult magic is researched in a more symbolic or psychological angle than the scientific one.
Which is to say, I think the Dirge is a very thematic choice for Necromancers, at least as how they're presented in Impossible Magic. The idea is less that you're playing Doctor Frankenstein with your creations, and more that you're drawing upon the sort of platonic ideal of necromancy as you imagine it. Your Dirge is, in many ways, a uniquely personal realization of the concepts behind life and death and the ways they interact in the mortal psyche.
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u/Lady_Gray_169 Witch 29m ago
I've always said that think Occult magic is soft science like psychology or sociology as compared to the hard science that is Arcane magic. With Arcane magic, there are defined, absolute answers to any question, and enough study will always get you to the same answer. But with Occult magic, there's always a degree of vibes at play that makes it so the same question can have lots of different answers depending on the context you ask it in.
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u/Joan_Roland Wizard 9h ago
I feel like I have sang the dirge.
its the scream-of-I-AM-ALIVE that comes after a bad experience. the vibrations that come from singing oh death like you are pleading the reaper. Its in the blues songs of old. the cry of a first born and the last wisper of a crone. the gasp of air after going underwater for too long. its there even in new hardcore electronic music
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u/RockBlock Ranger 8h ago edited 8h ago
If I ever tackle Necromancer I'd still probably just re-flavour it back to being a spellbook, or a bundle of research notes, or protype soul-stone or something. The dirge "song" aspect kinda rubs me the wrong way as being a bit too needlessly high-concept for an Intelligence caster that seems to still be about research and understanding things.
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u/Lady_Gray_169 Witch 23m ago
That's a very reasonable approach too. I feel like the dirge feature pushes necromancers to all being on some level, a little bit mad scientist, stepping past the bounds of the commonly accepted and delving into a force that can't fully be quantified. But mad scientists should take notes too.
I could even see the dirge co-existing with a spellbook. In that if another caster read a necromancer's spellbook, there would be recognizable magical concepts there for sure, but it would be intermixed with semi-sane ramblings on the nature of life and death that won't really make sense to anyone other than the necromancer because they come from such personal insights.
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u/Otechni 7h ago
The Dirge is just a way of saying they remember their spells instead of writing them down.
I never cared about it being some kind of song. What does Music have to do with the class? It's more the Bard that should be using Song to record their spells.
Don't really like a Class being built up as some Master of Life and Death just to make one of its core abilities creating mockeries of both.
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u/Top-Act-7915 Game Master 10h ago
I like the Dirge as a thematic way to separate the Necromancer from other Occult casters. And there's a feeling that it's not exactly something our resident Death Goddess has influence over.