Makeing alternate undead [pathfinder]

[Rentaromon]

ok so i want undead that can heal themselfs on my cleric undead lord arch. She will control a few high HD skeleton instead of a swarm of smaller ones. The way i want to do this is to simply make them bloody skeletons, so that they heal and do not stay dead.

But there are no rules for doing this!!!! So how would you giants handel this?

[Rentaromon]

ok i guess ill just do it myself then...

[Maralais]

So, you're trying to make an undead type that can heal itself and has lots of Hit Dice?

If that's the case, this belongs to the Homebrew forum. Furthermore, you need to make sure it will be balanced, because both being able to regenerate and having lots of HD might be an invitation to a TPK

and what do you mean by bloodied?

[sreservoir]

cleric liches.

[Rentaromon]

in pathfinder a bloodied skeleton essentially means it can regenerate, even when it dies(from non holy) it will come back.

i want to know if their are any rules for me applying this template so it wont be gamebreaking, like i cut the HD in half or something.

what downsides would upgradeding the type of undead i summon entitle?

im trying to not be OP here, i just want it to have regenerate.

[Maralais]

What do you mean you're not trying to be Original Post--Wait, that meant overpowered as well. Got it.

After reading the SRD, it seems the Bloody is a template that can normally be used to modify the usual skeleton template. You could always homebrew it and then say that it applies to all undead templates(zombie, skeleton, lich...), and ta-dah. Though would it be balanced with just a CR increase? I guess that can't be known without testing.

[Rentaromon]

well when u play a cleric with the undead lord archtype u get a skeletal minion and u can make it bloody by cutting its hd in half.

so i have been going by that, makeing their HD cost twice as much. it limits what i can make rather heavily but at least it does what i want.

[cartmanbeck]

You can make bloody or burning skeletons using the Animate Dead spell (but not Lesser Animate Dead), and they count as twice their hit dice for the casting of the spell, so if you have the ability to create skeletons of up to 10 hit dice (twice your caster level of 5, say), you could make a 5HD bloody skeleton. They still count as their normal number of hit dice when it comes to the total number you can control, though (so it would count as 5HD against the total of 20 hit dice, 4x your caster level, that you can control).

The real tough thing here is that humanoids lose all their hit dice from character levels when they are turned into skeletons, so you have to find a creature that has the right number of hit dice, kill it, and then turn it into a bloody skeleton using Animate Dead.

Source: (under Variant Skeletons) http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/monsters/skeleton.html