> is there anything stopping the Good-aligned 'Necromancer'?

There shouldn’t really be one [anyway](https://rpg.stackexchange.com/q/16655/4563).

> Is there anything stopping you using Animate Objects, with or without Permanency, to affect a bunch of corpses? If so, what? And would that qualify as an Evil, Chaotic, or Neutral act?

I believe corpses are objects, on the basis of the definition of an object (something without a Charisma or Wisdom score) and what it means to have or not have those abilities:

> Any creature that can perceive its environment in any fashion has at least 1 point of Wisdom.
>
> Any creature capable of telling the difference between itself and things that are not itself has at least 1 point of Charisma.

Since a corpse is neither self-aware, nor aware of its surroundings, it should not have Charisma or Wisdom scores, and therefore should be an object.

Moreover, a creature (that is, a not-object, since in game terms everything is either a creature or an object), requires being “alive or otherwise active,” which a corpse isn’t generally.

That said, the game never comes out and *says* that corpses are objects, and several spells that specifically target corpses lack the (Object) notation that they should have (including some that allow saving throws). Finally, a lot of object-targeting spells were most likely *not* written with corpses in mind. The *mending* spell, in particular, seems problematic (since it means a cantrip can do what a higher-level spell, *gentle repose*, does, and that’s not supposed to happen).

Anyway, point is, *if a corpse is an object* (and I think it is), *animate objects* seems (oddly enough) legit. The *animate objects* spell isn’t inherently Evil like *animate dead*, nor will your animated corpse involve a soul forcibly bound to it or whatever it is that makes *animate dead* evil in the first place. Depending on your setting, desecrating a corpse may be considered Evil or un-Lawful.

> Have you ever heard of this being done?

No, I have not.