Tuesday, December 7, 2010

How Do You Become a Friendly Necromancer?

dstanfill1 asks this:
hey how do people become a friendly necomancer? :)
Well, let's see . . . how was the friendly necromancer born? It was a wonderful Summer afternoon when the "friendly" part of the friendly necromancer was born. He had a happy childhood that was full of wonder. That wonder not only included over-turning all the rocks in the backyard to watch the worms and potato bugs, but also the twiddling of Atari joysticks and buttons.

I do believe the "necromantic" part of the Friendly Necromancer was born during a solid game of Venture or Adventure or perhaps while attempting to get the Blackrazor from the epic D&D module White Plume Mountain.

Ahhh, Blackrazor. Blackrazor was an interesting sword to me in my childhood. It was basically a demon in the shape of a sword, which was considered an "intelligent" weapon. The publisher of the D&D module himself admitted that this weapon was a ripoff of a weapon called "Stormbringer," which he had read about in a series of books my Michael Moorcock. This particular sword was even sung about by The Blue Oyster Cult (you know, the band of the guy who wrote the Snorri quests). (props to Tipa for letting me know the existence of this song LOL)



You kind of get the gist of that weapon from that video. It's a sword that takes over its wielder and pretty much turns them evil while imbuing them with wicked awesome power.

That's pretty dark necromantic type stuff right there, right? right.

Anyway, so this small boy full of wonder for worms and potato bugs continues in life, part of him being a warm and friendly person. This kid has many times in his life when he just wants to fill himself up with love and happiness. This kid wants to volunteer towards good causes like Senior Telephone reassurance. Stuff like that. This is a kid who's fascinated with growing a garden full of Bachelor Buttons.


Photo lifted graciously from this page.

Stevie Wonder knows what that's all about:



Bailey, Kyle, Amber, and Diapermancer, my family, are definitely an awesome balance to the pull of the Blackrazor for me. For me, there is nothing in life that completely wraps you in love like being there for the birth of your children. Those moments were probably the most awesome experiences in life right behind marrying Bailey.

AND FINALLY, the makers of Wizard101 came out with this great game where one could pursue the dark arts yet run around in the commons basically being a big kid.

Pursuing a yin and yang balance in the order of something like the above is how one becomes a friendly necromancer. For every ounce of Diablo, there should be an equal amount of Daffodil. That, and, well, I just really liked the play on words a couple years ago when I came up with the name of this blog . . . just having fun. To be honest, there's much more friendly than necromancer here. ;-)

As for how the Friendly Necromancer became such a popular Wizard101 blog, well I guess that boils down to a lot of luck, hard work, creativity, and trailblazing--and awesome readers like you all.

Thanks for the question!

Happy Dueling!

4 comments:

Liam said...

Love you blog, it inspired me to make my own.

witchwarrior said...

Nice history!
Nice to know how you came to be, Tom.

Panglou said...

Thats deep man!

To lengthen this comment, I will make a... CYCLOPS FACE! @-)

Alex NightFlame (wizard101 accounts name) said...

hi friendly i think taht would b SO cool if u had a contest!!!


-Alex NightFlame