Waypoint's graveyard

I doubt Church of Ehlonna , Tomb of the Unknown Heroes and Mausoleum are locations for our bonafide graveyard simply due to their background so my question is... where is our graveyard ?

That's an interesting question! The Tomb of the Unknown Heroes is specifically a memorial to the Storming of the Waypoint, meant to kept sealed after its dedication. The Mausoleum was raised by Limar and is still available for interment, but is really only for the remains of dragonblooded dead. Currently, the Church of Ehlonna  actually is the primary cemetery for the Stone River Waypoint. Ehlonna is not strongly associated with death, but as a nature goddess it does fall tangentially into Her portfolio--mostly in the sense of the "death and new life" cycle of the natural order, though She focuses more on the new life part. To honor this, the dead are generally buried at the foot of the trees in the Church's arbor (as Rezinov's angelic ashes were), so that they can nourish new growth and life.

I guess it could be nothing bad for the huge tree of Ehlonna , i had doubts because of it sapping the deads if it's next to it.  In a non-magic world it's A+...for sure... maybe i just overthought it being ^risky^ in D&D since good or evil, there is negative energy...then again.. consecrate spells ^exist^ , still, it's not immune to desecrate either.  Food for thoughts... that tree is drinking neg energy, non?

Also good questions! Here's a basic rundown of how the life cycle works in this setting: Negative and positive energy can be found mingled throughout the Material plane in roughly equal amounts. Negative energy causes decay, wear, breakdown, and death; positive energy causes organization, healing, growth, and life. The lifeforce of a creature is a sort of unseen mechanism that harvests positive energy (or negative, if it's an undead creature) from the environment, though it doesn't generally work unless it's anchored to the body and controlled by a soul (or something similar but less potent, for nonsapient lifeforms).  In order to stay alive, grow, and heal, living creatures generally maintain an imbalanced energy state with more positive than negative energy inside their bodies. When a creature dies, its lifeforce breaks down and its soul departs (or is destroyed, drained away, etc, depending on its nature and cause of death). Either way, without lifeforce the body basically becomes an object. Unimpeded by the lifeforce, entropy gradually shifts the body into equilbrium with its environment by redistributing some positive energy out of it and more negative energy into it; this influx of negative energy is why dead bodies decay more rapidly.  However , that same outflow  of positive energy has to go somewhere, so most of it gets concentrated into its immediate environment. This is why dead bodies tend to fertilize trees and plants: their lifeforce is basically drinking up the excess positive energy leaking out of the corpse as it strives to reach energy equilibrium. Incidentally, the reason why corpses often spread disease is also related to this cycle: evil particles (which are the cause of diseases) tend to be attracted to concentrations of negative energy (because evil likes destruction). So when bodies decay and negative energy grows more concentrated in them, any evil particles in the area tend to be drawn to them, where diseases then manifest from the higher concentrations of evil.

By that logic nathanial shouldnt be able to heal passively or by rest ingsince he is imbalanced with more negative energy. and on the astral sea that life force that was just floating around was just + and - energy mixed and unable to diffuse? could one create more life force by mixing the 2 ?

Josh said: By that logic nathanial shouldnt be able to heal passively or by rest ingsince he is imbalanced with more negative energy. I was wondering if anyone would ask about negative-attuned creatures. :P  So undead are basically a perversion of living creatures, intended to turn the normal cycle of life inside-out. With an undead creature, its lifeforce (some scholars instead refer to it as an 'unlifeforce' instead) harvests negative energy from the environment instead of positive, which leads to their bodies having a high concentration of negative energy and very little positive, the opposite of a living creature. So, why don't undead just rot away to nothing? This is where it gets really messed up. The unique thing about undead (and the key mechanism which allows them to exist at all) is that it's not just their energy attunement that's reversed, but also the way energy affects the relationship between their bodies and their environment.  Normally, negative energy entering a living creature from outside causes it to decay while its environment becomes relatively healthier (though the latter is less noticeable, since it's spread over a larger area). But for undead, this result is inverted: when negative energy enters an undead from outside, the decay is applied to its environment while the increased health is applied to its body. This sounds really weird, and it is. It's why pumping negative energy into undead heals them, and why the reverse also works: positive energy normally heals a living creature, but since undead have a reversed energy relationship with their environment, the repair effect of the positive energy applies to their environment while the decay effect applies to the undead. Keep in mind that for spells like cure and inflict wounds , the energy is conjured from the Inner Planes, so the effect on the target's local environment is negligible. In rare cases, living creatures (like Nathaniel and Corvus) can become attuned to negative energy just like undead, usually through the influence of powerful (often divine) necromantic magic. Their bodies then work the same way, though they often end up rather sickly because of the attraction of evil particles to their bodies (undead just can't be harmed by diseases because they don't have working organ systems, so it's not a problem for them). That's also why undead can never really be good, though: the high concentration of negative energy in the bodies, made stable and mobile by their reversed energy relationship, means that they become agent carriers of more and more evil over time. Josh said: and on the astral sea that life force that was just floating around was just + and - energy mixed and unable to diffuse? could one create more life force by mixing the 2 ? In that case, it was more because of the weird way time works in the Astral Plane. A lot of gradual passive processes, like decay and growth resulting from  negative or positive energy, are simply paused while visitors are there (though this can be overriden with magic). So the stray threads of life force you encountered in the corpses were just unable to fully break down and dissipate because entropy couldn't function normally on them. To this second question, no. Life force isn't really made of positive or  negative energy, and in a sense isn't made  of any thing at all--it's more like a conceptual infrastructure that moves energy around, and uses this flow to allow the soul to control the body.

Mh... from what i gather and understood , consecrate or desecrate would both perverse the tree's balance and its surrounding environment including the living or dead if it's the case , in indirect astral ways.     -I'll probably ave in character personal questions later on how sanctimonious is this tree . If it talks to is priests or is awoken . (because you mention souls) (I only assume Nathaniel and Corvus you are speaking about are good axed necromancers folklore. I may confuse edition rules on necromancers alignment permits or rebukes n the likes lol , but i know Xankoris should be totally for it )

They're characters in a different game Max is running -- it's an evil game set a few years before this one.

Cedric D. said: Mh... from what i gather and understood , consecrate or desecrate would both perverse the tree's balance and its surrounding environment including the living or dead if it's the case , in indirect astral ways.     Consecrate  basically evokes more positive energy into an area (for its basic use, not the alternate use of linking or delinking shrines/altars), so it would temporarily improve the growth of any living things in that area, and impede the decay of dead things. Desecrate  evokes in negative energy, so it would have the opposite effects. As for Nathaniel and Corvus, they're both very evil, and have their energy attunements reversed despite being living humans--Nathaniel because he's been so corrupted by experimentation with undead, and Corvus as a blessing from the evil god Afflux for his great devotion and many profane acts of worship. "Necromancer" in D&D generally just means anyone who works with life manipulation magic, ranging from people like Ering (who's a lawful neutral specialist wizard) to Corvus (who's an extremely evil cleric that tortures the innocent and summons undead). A necromancer could totally be good-aligned, though these are rarer (and mostly work in advanced medicine), as the most powerful aspects of the field are related to the creation of undead.