Necromancer

Version 0.26: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

This page is about the player background. For the monster, see Necromancer (monster).

The Necromancer is a magician who specialises in the less pleasant side of magic. Necromantic spells are a varied bunch, but many involve some degree of risk or harm to the caster.

Necromancers are magicians who specialise in the less pleasant side of magic - that involving death and the undead. Since many enemies later in the game have some form of life protection, a Necromancer will probably have to branch out into other schools before they start facing demons.

Preferred Races

Hill Orc, Demonspawn, Deep Elf, Deep Dwarf, Vampire, and Mummy are the recommended races if you pick a Necromancer Background.

Starting Equipment

Some species may receive different items based on their unique restrictions.

• +0 robe

Available Spells:

• Pain
• Animate Skeleton
• Vampiric Draining
• Animate Dead
• Agony

Necromancers start with the Pain spell memorised, and can also memorise Animate Skeleton from turn 1.

Starting Skills and Stats

These are adjusted by your species' aptitudes.

• Dodging: 2
• Stealth: 2
• Spellcasting: 2
• Necromancy: 4

Choosing Necromancer adds 7 to your starting Intelligence and 5 to your starting Dexterity.

Strategy

Necromancers have the fairly useful abiltiy to create allies with Animate Skeleton, and later Animate Dead. They are also the only background who start with the skills to make pain brand weapons useful. Vampiric Draining makes this background particularlly attractive to Deep Dwarves, allowing them to regain HP without draining maximum MP.

Necromancers are more limited in their religious options than other non-religious backgrounds, as all the good-aligned gods punish the use of Necromancy severely. Luckily, none of the three major "magic" gods (Sif Muna, Vehumet, and Kikubaaqudgha) are among them. Kiku, in fact, offers powers and gifts designed especially for Necromancers, and is a solid choice for capitalizing on their strong start with the Necromancy skill, especially given that worshipping Kiku is likely to give you much more powerful offensive spells from his book gifts, as well as providing on-demand corpses, which cover necromancy's biggest weakness.

Of note, Necromancers started with the incredibly strong spell Borgnjor's Vile Clutch in 0.21. This contributed to the speed (and thus score) of the currently highest-scoring game (as of July 2021), a Gnoll Necromancer of Cheibriados.

History

• Prior to 0.27, Necromancers started with the Book of Necromancy. Spells were uneffected.
• Prior to the removal of Regeneration in 0.26, Necromancers had access to that spell. In addition, the removal of food made Animate Dead less punishing to cast.
• Prior to 0.25, Agony was able to target enemies from afar.
• Prior to 0.24, Fedhas Madash disaproved the use of Necromancy.
• Prior to 0.21, the Book of Necromancy had Control Undead. The removal of this spell gives Necromancers no way to deal with incorporeal undead using their starting spells. 0.21 also introduced Borgnjor's Vile Clutch, which was nerfed and removed from the Necromancer start in the following update.
• Prior to 0.14, Necromancers started with only 1 level of Spellcasting.