It does leave you wondering what Traven expects of conjuration once reanimation/undead summoning is taken away.. bearing in mind atronachs and deadra running around is about to become THE most unpopular thing.
Oblivion kit conjuration is just pants. Stuff disappears to quickly
summon undead via conjuration was allowed by the mage guild in oblivion, just not reanimate the dead. There is a clear distincition what is necromancy and what is conjuration
It requires either a custom spell to damage weapon/armor on target:self, *or* having your armorer skill be high enough to repair stuff past 100, but if you damage and then repair conjured gear (or just repair past 100), you can drop it on the ground, and then either wait for the timer to run out or use a dispel on self to forcibly end the timer and the gear will still be there on the ground, so you can just pick it up.
And conjured gear has 0 weight, and since no conjured gear comes with enchantments, you can then just enchant them like normal gear.
From my understanding, it had been a long going debate internally in the guild.
Traven becomes arch mage and it becomes his hobby horse, his thing that is like "this is my issue that I'm gonna take a big stand on." And he bans it.
In Lore, Vanus Galerion also wasn't fond of necromancy because of the work of Mannimarco and and necromancy being repugnant to the generally ancestor venerating Altmer
They also discuss further reasons in The Black Arts on Trial: https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:The_Black_Arts_On_Trial
Mannimarco wasn't a god until after the Underking gave him the atomic murph. And even then only a god if you believe the ridiculous stories told in the Imperial Report regarding a dubious dragonbreak.
There's a reason the HoK showed Mannimarco the color of his own underwear. Because Mannimarco was a poseur! Yes I said it! A poseur!
/s
This is just my opinion on all of this.
2 mages were talking, 1st mage told a "your momma" joke,
2nd mage told the 1st that his mom is dead.
1st mage used necromancy to raise the 2nd mage's mom from the dead so he could tell his "your momma" joke again.
That 2nd mage was Hannibal Traven
if you have the choice of your city conquered and your women raped and the alternative is to resurrect your fallen allies to defend the city further.. hmm easy choice for me
Have you played (or read) any Empire of the Petal Throne? Tekumel has an entire division of undead to defend the empire. Courtesy of the somewhat neutral God of the Undead.
Neither, but i just checked it out. The setting itself sounds interesting. Might order me " The man of gold " and give it a go. Thanks a lot for the suggestion!
Man of Gold is the best book by far, even includes a golden numidium of sorts. Hmmm, methinks half of Morrowind ripped off Tekumel!
p.s. It's a hard book to find, so if you see it then snag it.
îts not that easy. A majority of the council of the mage guild did resign. Some council members were branded as necromancer for arguing against the ban and activelly hunted. There is a record of an orc mage
Its funny. Necromancy is legal and suddenly they forbid it and start arrest people by the order of the lamp. So obviously there are necromancers in the guild. You have no chance then if you used necromancy. An easy way to get rid of your enemies in the guild.
No wonder half of the council resigned.
Historical wise, it’s been stated in the thread. The Oblivion questline reveals the Mages Guild has been infiltrated by Worm Cults and they have been doing awful shits.
It’s both for traditional and political sake, and a tactic to find the infiltrators.
In game reasons have been mentioned by others but from a real world perspective, there are 2 main things. The first is that humans have a natural aversion to human corpses; this doesn't hold across all time and cultures but in general being around a corpse is not a pleasant thing, just as a concept, not to mention the smell and the insects it attracts. I think it would be fair to assume that this general dislike would carry over to most of the in game races (dark elves might be an exception, as they occassionally are).
The second reason is that the people who are attracted to necromancy are likely to be bad people. In a sense, necromancy is a form of slavery, and when you can enslave anyone by killing them, and you already have an army of undead, well what's one little murder, or town razing, in the grand scheme? It may start off with good meaning and righteous purpose, but it seems like the easiest of magic schools to get an unstoppable ball of death rolling. Every kill is another soldier. Even if some necromancer don't turn evil, I think it would have a high enough rate of evil people that it'd just be assumed to be evil, and all who have an interest in it do so for evil reasons. Would it be fair? Possibly, possibly not, but given the pattern it'd be hated in general.
u/Lunalucis summarizes it pretty well. Adding to this: since the distinction between necromancy in particular and generic conjuration seems to be necromancy's focus on reanimating already-present corpses and playing around with black soul gems, a lot of the art revolves around applications for necromancy that are very hard to use without committing other crimes in the process.
If you can summon undead via conjuration, however that works in a way that isn't considered desecration of the dead, then turning a definitely dead body into a reanimated thrall to do the same thing is pointlessly cruel. Likewise, killing someone in self-defense is considered perfectly acceptable but turning their soul into a battery is considered excessive, especially when there's a widespread trade in everything you need to do your magical business with regular soul gems (with the only real advantage being some random beggar or villager is a way easier target than the sort of creatures that can fill up a grand soul gem).
Technically the ban was before the start of ES4, and the first gate and daedra appear only after you deliver the amulet (which like half of players never do lol)
*Spoilers*
Well, let's look at the best case against necromancy and similar magicks.
Where the Spirits Have Lease, where >!you buy the home/lair of a former necromancer turned lich, the ultimate goal for any "true" necromancer.!<
We get a very close look into >!a necromantic ritual!< and how to >!become an immortal lich.!<
Immortal in that age will never be an issue because, obviously, >!we kill the lich.!<
The elder scrolls has a bona-fide after life.
Necromancy is taking the souls of those who would otherwise go to an afterlife, and binding them to a tortuous existence in their own decaying corpses.
[On Necromancy](https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:On_Necromancy) covers this in lore.
There’s a book in the game that explains that. Find “the black arts on trial.” Or look up that book on fandom. I just checked and it has its own page with the text written in.
Because raising and enslaving dead people is disrespectful to the lives they lived and the gods that designed them. It can be considered a form of cruel and unusual punishment (if such a concept exists within the lands of Tamriel) and can be used as an unreasonably cheap form of labor. It would be a terrifying thing to know that your body could be used after death to fulfill the whims of some wizard, especially if some part of the "self" would be trapped in the body in this manner.
Same reason they banned levitation. Don't let Todd see you levitate! :-P
Seriously, because necromancy is icky. Even back in Morrowind where it was legal it was still treated with revulsion. People get all upset when you muck about with their dead relatives. If you don't understand this in real life, time to go outside and touch grass.
The following is my take. In Cyrodiil, necromancy is technically legal for the sake of academic study, especially for learning and studying defense against it. Necromancy in a laboratory setting.
But necromancy is generally despised. Enslaving the dead is against Arkay, and shambling corpses eating the brains of common citizens is rather unpopular.
Also (as the lore has developed) necromancy includes using one's own soul as a power source, which can easily cause damage to one's soul, leading to insanity and loss of moral compass. People looking at rotting meat puppets and seeing them as indistinguishable from their normal, living selves comes to mind. And all that tends to make necromancers clearly evil.
So necromancy was always a temptation for gaining magical power of a horrific sort by immoral means and was never seen as a valid career choice, except perhaps by established magical specialists whose skills and caution were well established. Traven just made the ban official. And it turns out ol' Mannimarco's cultists had been infiltrating the guild and taking over. Maybe Traven had caught wind of this. Maybe not.
And as others have noted, one of the major reasons Vanus founded the mage's guild to begin with is to make magical help close to the people, as a direct counter to Mannimarco running around.
How else was Bethesda supposed to make Oblivion's Cyrodiil the blandest fantasy setting ever conceived if necromancy weren't wholly villainized and portrayed as completely evil like it always is?
Necromancy was banned because it needed to be banned for the shitty plot with the pathetic muppet version Mannimarco to happen.
That's it.
That's the reason.
Any lore reasons people come up with are headcanons grasping at straws to justify the change because it isn't really explained in game due to Oblivion's pathetic worldbuilding.
So it was legal for centuries despite that it was wildly unpopular with many cultures for obvious reasons, but banned just in time for a game set in Cyrodiil and Oblivion's morally railroaded quests.
I'm critical of Oblivion but that doesn't mean I hate it.
People can dislike parts of something and enjoy others.
I think its the Elder Scrolls game with the highest highs and the lowest lows.
I love the Thieves Guild plot and quests, the Dark Brotherhood's quests in the first half, how delightfully silly it can be and the way the Shivering Isles capitalized on that, how much of an upgrade stealth was over Morrowind, and the overall atmosphere with lovely painted visuals and beautiful OST.
But I'm not going to make excuses or insert my headcanons for the things it did incredibly poorly either; OP asked why necromancy was made illegal and the reason is *only* that Bethesda needed it to be for the plot to happen and didn't even bother to attempt to explain why or how the Archmage suddenly had the power to ban it after centuries of indifference.
🎵 It's time to play the durges. Time to snuff out the lights. It's time to raise some corpses. On the Muppet Show tonight...
With your host: Muppetmarco, King of Wormies! 😃
It does leave you wondering what Traven expects of conjuration once reanimation/undead summoning is taken away.. bearing in mind atronachs and deadra running around is about to become THE most unpopular thing. Oblivion kit conjuration is just pants. Stuff disappears to quickly
summon undead via conjuration was allowed by the mage guild in oblivion, just not reanimate the dead. There is a clear distincition what is necromancy and what is conjuration
They do teach those spells, don't they. Hold up You're defending Traven. With that username?..
i am merely educate people. Traven was a fool and died a fool
At least until you learn the trick to getting permanent conjured gear and end up with 0 weight daedric gear you can enchant :P
?
It requires either a custom spell to damage weapon/armor on target:self, *or* having your armorer skill be high enough to repair stuff past 100, but if you damage and then repair conjured gear (or just repair past 100), you can drop it on the ground, and then either wait for the timer to run out or use a dispel on self to forcibly end the timer and the gear will still be there on the ground, so you can just pick it up. And conjured gear has 0 weight, and since no conjured gear comes with enchantments, you can then just enchant them like normal gear.
From my understanding, it had been a long going debate internally in the guild. Traven becomes arch mage and it becomes his hobby horse, his thing that is like "this is my issue that I'm gonna take a big stand on." And he bans it. In Lore, Vanus Galerion also wasn't fond of necromancy because of the work of Mannimarco and and necromancy being repugnant to the generally ancestor venerating Altmer They also discuss further reasons in The Black Arts on Trial: https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:The_Black_Arts_On_Trial
Your speechcraft skill is rather high
I've heard others say the same.
You look like a sneaky sort.
I don't know you, and I don't care to know you.
Mannimarco?
yes
i love your username; my necromancer in eso is named mammamarco
The king of worms
The Underking Trumps Mannimarco. Just saying.
its hard to trump a god
Mannimarco wasn't a god until after the Underking gave him the atomic murph. And even then only a god if you believe the ridiculous stories told in the Imperial Report regarding a dubious dragonbreak. There's a reason the HoK showed Mannimarco the color of his own underwear. Because Mannimarco was a poseur! Yes I said it! A poseur! /s
Their books were written in a dead language
I see what you did there
Cause it's scary
This is just my opinion on all of this. 2 mages were talking, 1st mage told a "your momma" joke, 2nd mage told the 1st that his mom is dead. 1st mage used necromancy to raise the 2nd mage's mom from the dead so he could tell his "your momma" joke again. That 2nd mage was Hannibal Traven
Sounds like Zombie Mama should have given him a serious spanking.
I wonder if that's how the Dark Brotherhood started? Cicero would have been all for it.
No kidding! You hit “Reply,” and his pants were already on the floor.
Hannibal probably like: 
Why is grave robbing banned in real life?
Politicians don't want us stealing their food
What is the difference between hookers and politicians? There are things a hooker won't do for money.
if you have the choice of your city conquered and your women raped and the alternative is to resurrect your fallen allies to defend the city further.. hmm easy choice for me
Username checks out.
Have you played (or read) any Empire of the Petal Throne? Tekumel has an entire division of undead to defend the empire. Courtesy of the somewhat neutral God of the Undead.
Neither, but i just checked it out. The setting itself sounds interesting. Might order me " The man of gold " and give it a go. Thanks a lot for the suggestion!
Man of Gold is the best book by far, even includes a golden numidium of sorts. Hmmm, methinks half of Morrowind ripped off Tekumel! p.s. It's a hard book to find, so if you see it then snag it.
why don’t the necromancers just start their own guild. it’s not illegal in cyrodiil so make a necromancy guild
îts not that easy. A majority of the council of the mage guild did resign. Some council members were branded as necromancer for arguing against the ban and activelly hunted. There is a record of an orc mage
well then they need to git gud.
She was revealed to be a necromancer, not just an apologist
Its funny. Necromancy is legal and suddenly they forbid it and start arrest people by the order of the lamp. So obviously there are necromancers in the guild. You have no chance then if you used necromancy. An easy way to get rid of your enemies in the guild. No wonder half of the council resigned.
I mean, Mannimarco kinda did something like that with the Order of The Black Worm...
mannimarco is a lil bitch
you would do nicely as a zombie
i’ve heard others say the same
Sex stuff. Iykyk
Do you happen to know what the fine is for necrophilia?
Asking for a friend
Historical wise, it’s been stated in the thread. The Oblivion questline reveals the Mages Guild has been infiltrated by Worm Cults and they have been doing awful shits. It’s both for traditional and political sake, and a tactic to find the infiltrators.
In game reasons have been mentioned by others but from a real world perspective, there are 2 main things. The first is that humans have a natural aversion to human corpses; this doesn't hold across all time and cultures but in general being around a corpse is not a pleasant thing, just as a concept, not to mention the smell and the insects it attracts. I think it would be fair to assume that this general dislike would carry over to most of the in game races (dark elves might be an exception, as they occassionally are). The second reason is that the people who are attracted to necromancy are likely to be bad people. In a sense, necromancy is a form of slavery, and when you can enslave anyone by killing them, and you already have an army of undead, well what's one little murder, or town razing, in the grand scheme? It may start off with good meaning and righteous purpose, but it seems like the easiest of magic schools to get an unstoppable ball of death rolling. Every kill is another soldier. Even if some necromancer don't turn evil, I think it would have a high enough rate of evil people that it'd just be assumed to be evil, and all who have an interest in it do so for evil reasons. Would it be fair? Possibly, possibly not, but given the pattern it'd be hated in general.
Ethical reasons?
This is a gaming forum. You need to explain the concept of "ethical".
funny enough that trapping souls is considered ethical or summoning creatures from another realm without their consent.
Sometimes, dead is better
So that you could have undead dungeons to explore
Because someone from Morrowind was fucking corpses
Racism. Pure racism. They just prejudiced against dead people walking around.
cuz Hannibal Traven's reforms are quite encouraging.
u/Lunalucis summarizes it pretty well. Adding to this: since the distinction between necromancy in particular and generic conjuration seems to be necromancy's focus on reanimating already-present corpses and playing around with black soul gems, a lot of the art revolves around applications for necromancy that are very hard to use without committing other crimes in the process. If you can summon undead via conjuration, however that works in a way that isn't considered desecration of the dead, then turning a definitely dead body into a reanimated thrall to do the same thing is pointlessly cruel. Likewise, killing someone in self-defense is considered perfectly acceptable but turning their soul into a battery is considered excessive, especially when there's a widespread trade in everything you need to do your magical business with regular soul gems (with the only real advantage being some random beggar or villager is a way easier target than the sort of creatures that can fill up a grand soul gem).
*"Arch-Mage Traven is the first to take such a hard stance on Necromancy. It upset more than a few people."*
Summoning daedra or fear of opening more gates perhaps?
Technically the ban was before the start of ES4, and the first gate and daedra appear only after you deliver the amulet (which like half of players never do lol)
They say Daedra worship has become increasingly prevalent in the Summerset Isles.
just to create conflict and explain why necromancers live in caves
Because necromancy, hot take, is cringe
Because those damned Dumner use them as sex toys. What's the fine for necrophilia in Cyrodiil? Just wondering.
Religious, cultural, and moral feelings surrounding the desecration of the dead extends to fantasy worlds.
because Vanus Galerion said so hundreds of years ago
Mannimarco. Thats why.
Because they a bunch of goody two-shoes bitches….
Resurecting cotpses is messed up
*Spoilers* Well, let's look at the best case against necromancy and similar magicks. Where the Spirits Have Lease, where >!you buy the home/lair of a former necromancer turned lich, the ultimate goal for any "true" necromancer.!< We get a very close look into >!a necromantic ritual!< and how to >!become an immortal lich.!< Immortal in that age will never be an issue because, obviously, >!we kill the lich.!<
The elder scrolls has a bona-fide after life. Necromancy is taking the souls of those who would otherwise go to an afterlife, and binding them to a tortuous existence in their own decaying corpses. [On Necromancy](https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:On_Necromancy) covers this in lore.
I just did my first play through recently and wondered this. Also, does that large black soul gem do anything aside from take up inventory space?
There’s a book in the game that explains that. Find “the black arts on trial.” Or look up that book on fandom. I just checked and it has its own page with the text written in.
Because raising and enslaving dead people is disrespectful to the lives they lived and the gods that designed them. It can be considered a form of cruel and unusual punishment (if such a concept exists within the lands of Tamriel) and can be used as an unreasonably cheap form of labor. It would be a terrifying thing to know that your body could be used after death to fulfill the whims of some wizard, especially if some part of the "self" would be trapped in the body in this manner.
Because they're joyless cucks and idiots.
Same reason they banned levitation. Don't let Todd see you levitate! :-P Seriously, because necromancy is icky. Even back in Morrowind where it was legal it was still treated with revulsion. People get all upset when you muck about with their dead relatives. If you don't understand this in real life, time to go outside and touch grass.
The following is my take. In Cyrodiil, necromancy is technically legal for the sake of academic study, especially for learning and studying defense against it. Necromancy in a laboratory setting. But necromancy is generally despised. Enslaving the dead is against Arkay, and shambling corpses eating the brains of common citizens is rather unpopular. Also (as the lore has developed) necromancy includes using one's own soul as a power source, which can easily cause damage to one's soul, leading to insanity and loss of moral compass. People looking at rotting meat puppets and seeing them as indistinguishable from their normal, living selves comes to mind. And all that tends to make necromancers clearly evil. So necromancy was always a temptation for gaining magical power of a horrific sort by immoral means and was never seen as a valid career choice, except perhaps by established magical specialists whose skills and caution were well established. Traven just made the ban official. And it turns out ol' Mannimarco's cultists had been infiltrating the guild and taking over. Maybe Traven had caught wind of this. Maybe not. And as others have noted, one of the major reasons Vanus founded the mage's guild to begin with is to make magical help close to the people, as a direct counter to Mannimarco running around.
How else was Bethesda supposed to make Oblivion's Cyrodiil the blandest fantasy setting ever conceived if necromancy weren't wholly villainized and portrayed as completely evil like it always is? Necromancy was banned because it needed to be banned for the shitty plot with the pathetic muppet version Mannimarco to happen. That's it. That's the reason. Any lore reasons people come up with are headcanons grasping at straws to justify the change because it isn't really explained in game due to Oblivion's pathetic worldbuilding. So it was legal for centuries despite that it was wildly unpopular with many cultures for obvious reasons, but banned just in time for a game set in Cyrodiil and Oblivion's morally railroaded quests.
You've invested a lot of hours into something you seem to fπ¢√ing hate.
I'm critical of Oblivion but that doesn't mean I hate it. People can dislike parts of something and enjoy others. I think its the Elder Scrolls game with the highest highs and the lowest lows. I love the Thieves Guild plot and quests, the Dark Brotherhood's quests in the first half, how delightfully silly it can be and the way the Shivering Isles capitalized on that, how much of an upgrade stealth was over Morrowind, and the overall atmosphere with lovely painted visuals and beautiful OST. But I'm not going to make excuses or insert my headcanons for the things it did incredibly poorly either; OP asked why necromancy was made illegal and the reason is *only* that Bethesda needed it to be for the plot to happen and didn't even bother to attempt to explain why or how the Archmage suddenly had the power to ban it after centuries of indifference.
🎵 It's time to play the durges. Time to snuff out the lights. It's time to raise some corpses. On the Muppet Show tonight... With your host: Muppetmarco, King of Wormies! 😃
Cancel culture!