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View Full Version : Necrotic Cyst (3.5)



JellyPooga
2009-06-05, 03:21 AM
I've always kinda liked the Necrotic Cyst spells...v. dark and evil and all that :smallamused: So I was taking another look at them, particularly Necrotic Burst and it occured to me; can someone have more than one Necrotic Cyst?

It doesn't say a character can't (I know that's not a good argument in and of itself) and the penalties a cyst inflicts are untyped, so they should stack if you can have more than one.

With that in mind, the Necrotic Burst spell is really nasty; once one person has a cyst (typically the person with the lowest Fort save), s/he becomes the target for Burst. Assuming they fail (and with the -2 vs necromancy, they probably will), they explode. Anyone surviving the damage has to take a Fort save of their own. If even one fails, then there's another Burst in the pipeline. Survivers that fail their Fort checks will have an incresingly harder time of passing that Fort save due to the stacking penatly against Necromancy. Add the fact that undead are not affected by the spell at all and that they do extra damage against cyst-bearers and that Skulking Cysts will be starting to appear makes the life expectancy of a group up against someone of sufficiently high level with a Mother Cyst quite low...

Not only that, but a Cleric employing this spell can go from being on his tod, walking into a village, to killing the lot of them, controlling the Skulking Cysts that result through Rebuke Undead and raising the corpses as his own little army...that appeals to my sense of evil.

This one spell combines save-or-die, save-or-suck and direct damage...not perhaps the best spell in exsistence as it requires someone to have a cyst in the first place, but that becomes less of a problem when you consider the possibility of having a minion (a Commoner that's been Necrotic Dominated perhaps) that you can send charging into the middle of a group (who could, theorectically raise to be an undead minion after the battle! Ah, minions that serve you both in life, dying and in death...what more could you want?).

So yeah, anyway...that point of this thread was to inquire as to whether one person can harbour more than one Necrotic Cyst. Any thoughts?