How do you raise an undead army? [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

Daftendirekt

2011-03-30, 12:02 AM

Become a necropolitan, then Spell-Stitch yourself and have Animate Dead be one of the SLAs you give yourself. Now you don't need to play the component cost.
Pale Master is cool for this too, but you lose a caster level.
Take Dread Necromancer to at least level 8 to get Undead Mastery, which A)Makes your created undead better and B)Makes you able to control WAY more HD worth of undead
Any class that gives Turn/Rebuke so you can control undead through that beyond the normal HD limit.
Yes, you pretty much need good Charisma to do it well. Plus Charisma helps your Dread Necromancer awesomeness.
No, you don't need Gentle Repose. That just keeps corpses from rotting. You don't care what condition they're in.

There's more, I just can't think of it at the moment and I'm sure others will chime in as well.

Darth Stabber

2011-03-30, 12:37 AM

The dread necromancer class (HoH) is pretty good at that particular trick (infact that is really the only thing they are great at in higher levels (ie the only thing they do better than evil clerics), they cast using charisma. Death masters (dragon compendium) are next best, and have a better spell list than dread necro (including actual utility), they cast using Intelligence. In remarkably close third we have evil clerics.

Rebuke undead is great (since you can get command undead), and you can spend a rebuke attempt to bolster undead to prevent them from being turned. Turn undead is nearly useless for a commander of zombie legions. All rebuking is based on charisma (which is why dread necro is good, SAD).

Keep in mind you can control 4*lvl hd worth of undead. Dread Necros of lvl8 and higher increase their cap to 4+cha modifier, the other reason their good at this.

Prcs that are "designed" for this type of build are aweful, just pick a full casting prc, and if it advances your rebuking, more power to you.

Gentle repose is unnecessary. If you want undead that look like the living it's not a bad call if you can pemanacize it cheap. Usually, you really don't care how ratty looking your troops are.

Also word of advice, if you are doing this, once you reach, say level 8, do not spend your controlled hd on lots of weak dudes, they die too easy. Instead focus on tough things like ghouls. Or get a couple of wights. Wights are nice since they create spawn under their control, ipso facto yours, except they don't count toward your controlled hd. The key to chaining wights is to leave the parent wights somewhere safe since if the parent dies the child becomes uncontrolled, and will likely turn on you, making the battle harder. Also some form of undead mount should be a priority (and a rank or two in ride can't hurt either).

Semi swordsaged.

Coidzor

2011-03-30, 01:23 AM

I've never seen it done for real by a player.

Well, there's a couple of very good reasons for that, one of which is there's generally no point in doing so.

What classes/prcs are useful?

What spells do you use?

Dread Necromancer and Cleric, though Wizards can, with the spell-stitching trick mentioned earlier, get a better, capless army that retains some reasoning abilities than any of the other methods of reliable undead creation.

I submit the following for your perusal

http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/19872726/Revised_Necromancer_Handbook

http://community.wizards.com/bleak_academy/wiki/Dread_Necromancer%27s_Handbook

Do you need charisma?

Generally only if you cast with it or want to somehow convince intelligent undead to willingly serve you.

Dont spells that control undead need gentle repose'd bodies? Wouldn't that be prohibitive to geating a large number of corpses? Not as far as I've ever heard.

How does tun/halt/contol undead fit here?

You can use rebuking to control undead that can also rebuke and control undead and create a daisy chain like that. Or you can control a couple of wights in a wight hierarchy and do the wightocalypse method and have the wights organize themselves into units based upon their hierarchy of spawn.

Murmaider

2011-03-30, 05:50 AM

Prcs that are "designed" for this type of build are aweful, just pick a full casting prc, and if it advances your rebuking, more power to you.

The True Necromancer is actually the only class that i can think of, atm, that is realy aweful.

If you can get your DM approval, Bone Knight and Necrotheurge of Chemosh are actually pretty awesome PrC's for any undead controlling cleric.

JeminiZero

2011-03-30, 06:04 AM

Well, there's a couple of very good reasons for that, one of which is there's generally no point in doing so.

Thats not entirely true. I've played an undead using Warlock before, and the addition of some extra meat (or bone) shields has its place.

But as pointed out above you need to either ignore the material cost to make it financially worthwhile: Spellstitched, class features that animate for free, BoH full of corpses for Warlock, Nightcaller's Whistle (warning: potentially breakable depending on how you read the rules).

I would also like to point you to THE undead using warlock: Silverclawshift's character in crystal cantrips (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=116836) (scroll down a bit, it starts in the 5th post).

Thurbane

2011-03-30, 06:41 AM

A Stitched Flesh Familiar (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20041001a) also lets you increase your undead control cap (but only by +4 HD).

Coidzor

2011-03-30, 10:34 AM

Thats not entirely true. I've played an undead using Warlock before, and the addition of some extra meat (or bone) shields has its place.

Well, generally, most games there's no real point to having, say, 300 undead as opposed to a more manageable 20-50. And even then, if you actually tried to use all 20 in a fight, it's generally more trouble than its worth to the running of the game unless the game is set up from the outset to grapple with the issue of combat en masse.

Good point about the BoH of corpses for the warlock though, heh. :smallamused:

Where is the Nightcaller's Whistle from though? The book of bad latin?

The True Necromancer is actually the only class that i can think of, atm, that is realy aweful.

If you can get your DM approval, Bone Knight and Necrotheurge of Chemosh are actually pretty awesome PrC's for any undead controlling cleric.

Note, Necrotheurge of Chemosh is from a Dragonlance book(IIRC) and Bone Knight is from Eberron.

Thank you for bringing Necrotheurge of Chemosh to my attention though.

I just went looking for it and found very little mention online, though I did find this delicious little blurb

The real kicker is at 6th level, which gives a huge bonus to your create undead spells. With it, it becomes incredibly easy to raise Mohrgs at ECL 11, which is utterly level-inappropriate if you have a means of controlling them (Divine Magicians undoubtedly will). While the novelty of that particular ability does eventually wear off, you still end up with the ability to control CL times 7 HD of undead at a time through Animate Dead, which in conjunction with the component-less castings of desecrate and animate dead is better than a kick in the teeth.

Which I wonder if that's out of the box or with the Deathbound Domain taken into account as well.

JeminiZero

2011-03-30, 10:55 AM

Where is the Nightcaller's Whistle from though? The book of bad latin?

Libris Mortis, yes.

Note that it is limited to 2 zombies per user, not per whistle. Each party member can act as 1 user, and then pass it on. Heck, the Wizard's familiar could blow it as well for good measure.

Murmaider

2011-03-30, 11:19 AM

I just went looking for it and found very little mention online, though I did find this delicious little blurb

That's the source I found out about it, when I was trying to figure out what book Dark Pilgrim of Takhisis is from. Also a very good PrC, although for a different specialization.

IMO that book(Holy Orders of the Stars) has some realy cool divine PrCs in it, if your DM allows conversion(who plays Dragonlance?:smallconfused:)

Which I wonder if that's out of the box or with the Deathbound Domain taken into account as well.

The CL*7 HD is just the class feature. Still not sure if it stacks with the Deathbound domain, since both are fixed numbers.

edit: was the deathbound domain errata'd? Because my spell compendium says it would increase the number of HD controlled from 2 to 3.

Coidzor

2011-03-30, 11:20 AM

Libris Mortis, yes.

Note that it is limited to 2 zombies per user, not per whistle. Each party member can act as 1 user, and then pass it on. Heck, the Wizard's familiar could blow it as well for good measure.

Heh. Reminds me of the mention Frank and K made of the Azun Gund...

Oh, wait, that's like dwarven for night caller... It's a 3.5 update to the item! Huh. Wonder how they missed that one. :smallconfused:

Well, I'll definitely be checking that out in the future then, a lot easier to look up something in Libris Mortis than out of an adventure.

Darth Stabber

2011-03-30, 11:52 AM

As others have stated, massed armies of weak undead are generally a poor choice for most campaigns. The exception is wight chains (or any other undead that makes spawn).

The better bet for the adventuring necromancer is getting a small number of stronger undead. Wights, ghouls, ghasts, allips, ect. Save the armies for when your adventuring career is done and you just need to rule the world.

Also, if at all possible, grab yourself a slaymate (LM), they are undead children (so bonus creepy factor), and they are a metamagic reducer that costs no feats/class levels (necromancy only, but since you are already specialized in necromancy it's not a big deal). Keep in mind that they have no combat use whatso ever, and protect them as a treasured resource. Bonus points if you treat it as though it were your own child, even more bonus points if it was your own child.

Coidzor

2011-03-30, 12:06 PM

Also, if at all possible, grab yourself a slaymate (LM), they are undead children (so bonus creepy factor), and they are a metamagic reducer that costs no feats/class levels (necromancy only, but since you are already specialized in necromancy it's not a big deal). Keep in mind that they have no combat use whatso ever, and protect them as a treasured resource.

I remember something about someone using shrink item (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/shrinkItem.htm) + Permanency to make the corpse teeny-tiny before creating them, so they'd keep the slaymate encased in crystal or sommat as a necklace. I believe it was a DM for an NPC that eventually passed it to a PC...

Edit: I just found a bit more about that Necrotheurge and it looks like they can animate all corpses within 20 feet of them as a supernatural ability eventually, which means their control cap becomes sort of moot due to the ability to stack corpses like cordwood... and do it in 3-dimensional space rather than flat upon the ground.

I'm getting the quite macabre image of a lincoln-log cabin of flesh and bone that is built around a dark priest by his servants as he meditates and then he casts a spell and the cabin starts shuddering and then peeling apart into hundreds of individual skeletons and zombies.

...Oh. And finding a wizard with shrink item and permanency to work with and you suddenly have all the nanites you'd ever need... :smalleek: Or just having some way to shrink item would take care of the corpses that would normally be too big to have within 20 feet.

ShneekeyTheLost

2011-03-30, 08:58 PM

Fell Drain and Fell Animate are also very fun metamagic feats to throw into the mix. Fell Animate automatically puts them under your control. And there's all kinds of cheesy ways to make particularly lethal spells. Enervation up to their HD being one of the easiest.

I second the Dread Necromancer. There's a Ring someone linked the last time this came up, basically permanent Desecrate around the wearer.

There is a way to make a lot of use out of crunchier minions. It's a Corpsecrafter feat that makes your minions explode when they die. Pretty nasty, actually. It at least guarantees that your crunchy minions do *some* damage when they die. And hey, HP attribution is not necessarily a bad way to beat someone if you've *got* the small army of crunchy minions.

Darth Stabber

2011-03-30, 09:28 PM

Also with that feat the zombie explosions are explicitly negative energy damage, meaning it will heal your other minions when one blows.

NeverSleep

2011-03-30, 10:05 PM

ShneekeyTheLost

2011-03-30, 10:11 PM

OP here.

Got another question(s)...

Once the undead are raised, what are the rules for controlling them?

Simple commands? Do they have to be able to see you/hear you? Complex commands? If/then statements? Different for int levels? Do they ever leave you?

Where can I find this info?

If using Rebuke/Command Undead, you look here (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/combat/specialAttacks.htm#turnOrRebukeUndead). Specifically:

Commanded

A commanded undead creature is under the mental control of the evil cleric. The cleric must take a standard action to give mental orders to a commanded undead. At any one time, the cleric may command any number of undead whose total Hit Dice do not exceed his level. He may voluntarily relinquish command on any commanded undead creature or creatures in order to command new ones.

If using spells, then you would refer to Command Undead (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/commandUndead.htm), or Animate Undead (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/animateDead.htm) depending on how they fell under your control.

NeverSleep

2011-03-30, 10:44 PM

So when you use your standard action, do you mentally control all undead, or just one at a time?

Silva Stormrage

2011-03-30, 11:47 PM

So when you use your standard action, do you mentally control all undead, or just one at a time?

Sadly one at a time.
Also a prestige class that hasn't been mentioned yet is the Horned Harbinger. It doesn't progress spellcasting at all so it generally is considered horrible. But it allows you to add your charisma to your caster level for animate dead and create undead. Also it gets all of those spells as spell like abilities. And it increases your cap for rebuke undead to 2 * your level at level 5 and 5 times your level at level 10. Also it gets some bonus feats for either improved turning, leadership, undead leadership, and some other turning feats like empower turning and quicken turning.

gooddragon1

2011-03-30, 11:53 PM

Very easily.

Eschew Materials
Wall of Stone
Fabricate into statues
Stone to Flesh the statues
Animate Dead as a SLA (if epic level get the ignore material components feat instead)

You will have no control over them, but there is NO LIMIT to the number of them you can create because you can create an unlimited number of corpses ("ordinary statue would become a corpse").

EDIT: Well other than spells per day. Though if you had all of these as use activated items you could do it. Alternatively, a teleportation circle linked to an underground facility with a conveyor belt and magic mouth continuously saying the command words when necessary to keep creating and sending undead into a place could work.

Coidzor

2011-03-31, 12:36 AM

I second the Dread Necromancer. There's a Ring someone linked the last time this came up, basically permanent Desecrate around the wearer.

I believe the item is from one of the web articles and is closer to the 3.0 run of such materials, however, I might actually be thinking of a ring of 1/day desecrate.

ShneekeyTheLost

2011-03-31, 08:33 AM

I believe the item is from one of the web articles and is closer to the 3.0 run of such materials, however, I might actually be thinking of a ring of 1/day desecrate.

the web article linked had two rings. One was a times-per-day, and the other was a constant effect.

Corrik

2011-03-31, 09:11 AM

With loving care and plenty of food.

Also I vaguely remember there being a book that allows you to raise undead, forget what it was called though.

GeekGirl

2011-03-31, 02:03 PM

Animate Legion, in HoB, lets you animate up to twice your caster level in undead. You still can control them without Rebukke, or command undead. but its a start to make a bunch.

Coidzor

2011-03-31, 02:46 PM

Animate Legion, in HoB, lets you animate up to twice your caster level in undead. You still can control them without Rebukke, or command undead. but its a start to make a bunch.

You sure you read that right? As that's what Animate Dead (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/animateDead.htm) does.
Regardless of the type of undead you create with this spell, you can’t create more HD of undead than twice your caster level with a single casting of animate dead. (The desecrate spell doubles this limit)

But it does call to mind this 3rd party source on Necromancy I ran into, that eventually makes an entire city of the undead become animated, but only within a certain distance of that city. Might also work on all of the dead of a city inhabited by the living too, can't recall the specifics... Another one raises an entire collection of sunken ships into a zombie-skeleton-ghost pirate fleet... Pretty much outside the range of play where that many would be all that useful due to the high level of the spells necessary and the utility of even a mass of skeletons at high levels.

Mongoose Publishing's Encyclopaedia Arcane: Necromancy: Beyond the Grave, I believe. But, well, third party. A bit amusing if you can take a gander though.

GeekGirl

2011-03-31, 03:33 PM

Pretty close, but doesn't seem exact.

Material Component
You must place a black onyx gem worth at least 25 gp per Hit Die of the undead into the mouth or eye socket of each corpse you intend to animate. The magic of the spell turns these gems into worthless, burned-out shells.

Material Component: A black onyx gem worth at least
100 gp. Cheaper for large hit die of undead.