Necromancing and other related stuff...

[Nanoblack]

I've got a special place in my heart for necromancers and all of their fun tricks, but with the way games tend to go nowadays, it seems I'll never live the dream of my very own undead army.

I would like to indulge.

Please post any stories of awesome things pulled off by necromancing PC's. Also while we're at it, post any interesting houserules and/or homebrew that make necromancy more interesting.

[Snowbluff]

Dread Necro, from Heroes of Horror, get +cha HD/level for their undead count at level. With the regular 2/level you have more zombies than you canhandle anyway. In addtion, DN are great casters with a good spell list, and benefit very well from Versatile spells cast.

Look at Heroes of Horror, Libris Mortis, and the Monster Manual for extra info, spells, and monsters to make into minions.

[Wookie-ranger]

+1 on Dread Necromancer, its a fun Class.
start it with a Lesser Aasimar for fluff and profit; then ASAP become Necropolitan (libris mortis) for the extra level of Awsome at no level adjustment. you only need to pay, and lose a level, but you gain more then you lose.

try to get Hydra zombies and Troll Skelies if you want few but powerful minions. or you can take lots and lots of human or kobold skelies and give them short bows.

here are some links:

http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/19527634/Tome_of_Necromancy

http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/19872470/New_Dread_Necromancer_Handbook

http://community.wizards.com/bleak_academy/wiki/Dread_Necromancer/Notes

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

[Othesemo]

It's hell for DMs. I had a player who managed to get Lesser Aasimer Dread Necro 16 with around 40 charisma. He could control nearly 500 HD of undead, and this number kept increasing. He reanimated literally everything we fought, and still had plenty to spare. In his burgeoning days, he had a 12-headed cryohydra skeleton, a zombie of every young adult chromatic dragon, and a storm giant skeleton. He loaned the multitude of remaining and obsolete undead out to the local warlord as troops in exchange for a reasonable fee. He was a simultaneous bureaucratic and military god- he had sufficient manpower at 10th level to crush a small city-state.

So yeah, for your DMs sake, I beg you to keep to stories and never try it yourself.

[Snowbluff]

It's hell for DMs. I had a player who managed to get Lesser Aasimer Dread Necro 16 with around 40 charisma. He could control nearly 500 HD of undead, and this number kept increasing. He reanimated literally everything we fought, and still had plenty to spare. In his burgeoning days, he had a 12-headed cryohydra skeleton, a zombie of every young adult chromatic dragon, and a storm giant skeleton. He loaned the multitude of remaining and obsolete undead out to the local warlord as troops in exchange for a reasonable fee. He was a simultaneous bureaucratic and military god- he had sufficient manpower at 10th level to crush a small city-state.

So yeah, for your DMs sake, I beg you to keep to stories and never try it yourself.

Yeah, DN is way overkill for it sometimes. Cleric is another, more reasonable option if you stick to Necromancy. You get Animate Undead sooner, as well.

[Nanoblack]

Dread Necro, from Heroes of Horror, get +cha HD/level for their undead count at level. With the regular 2/level you have more zombies than you canhandle anyway. In addtion, DN are great casters with a good spell list, and benefit very well from Versatile spells cast.

Look at Heroes of Horror, Libris Mortis, and the Monster Manual for extra info, spells, and monsters to make into minions.

I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but this isn't exactly what I was after. I've read all of that handbooks and even buried my nose in some third party stuff. I was more interested in stories of fun things necromancer characters have done or homebrew and houserules that are necromancy related. Like the corpsecrafting rules form the secret college of necromancy.

[Rubik]

I had a shaper psion/constructor character with the psionic version -- Psianimate Dead, from Hyperconscious. It produces some seriously awesome undead if used on the right creatures, doesn't make them Evil if they weren't already, and allows them to keep their mental scores (and personalities as well). He was a little boy (anthro raccoon, fluff-wise -- apparently 'c-o-o-n is a swear-word, despite meaning 'raccoon'), and he thought he was 'healing' the dead animals he often found in the forested park areas near the mansion he lived in.

What he didn't realize was that he had huge swarms of undead squirrels, rabbits, and chipmunks hiding in the woodlands that often scared the bejeezus out of park visitors, but since they still had the behaviors of regular animals, none of them caused any problems until the mansion was attacked by revolutionaries trying to destabilize the government (as his adoptive father was part of the lawmaking process). Then he had hundreds of once-fuzzy undead abominations swarming the people invading his home.

[Silva Stormrage]

First character turned out to be this actually :smallbiggrin:

I was a newbie but new the game from neverwinter nights and was decently optimized (lesser aismir + corpse crafter feats and some good necromancy items essentially). I started out with two zombie minataurs and that was it since my DM didn't want me to start out with full. After the first encounter was defeated (A bunch of Xorn) it went like this.
Me:Okay I am going to animate these guys

DM: Okay, which ones
Me: "Looks over onyx gems (A LOT), looks at HD cap (HUGE), um... all of them.

DM: ... um four more Xorns start taking the corpses underground.

Me :smallsigh:

Later in the session I got my hands on a Dragon and would have had 400 kobolds corpses under my control (Couldn't animate that many but just storage) but the character was promptly banned the next session :smallbiggrin:

In a current campaign the entire plot is somewhat revolved around it. I control an entire party and my "Leader" is a dread necromancer who can animate a metric TON of undead. I also took undead leadership and leadership and every character has landlord. I have a super keep which is guarded by a ton of zombies, a death knight minion, undead followers, and a turret that shoots at will blackfire at an 1600ft radius around my keep at will (Yay artificers!).

Best part of all is my DM is letting me animate Lilitu Ghosts with a custom spell. And they are part of my animate dead HD cap not my rebuking one so I can have A LOT of them. And for those unaware of what they can do, they cast as lvl 9th clerics, have ludicrous charisma, and really good SLA's.


For interesting homebrew, well most of my stuff is somewhat necromancy related :smallbiggrin: Personal favorite is Lord of the Uttercold for the true undead army controller. It gets slightly more than Dread Necromancer which even I might admit is overkill :smallbiggrin:

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

I played a Necropolitan Dread Necro in a moderately high level (12-16 iirc) game quite a while back. He only had a few powerful minions he brought around with him, the rest stayed at his castle.

He had Undead Leadership, his cohort was his brother, a Tainted Minion Human Warblade/Crusader I think. He never even participated in any fights, he just kept an eye on the castle while my character was away.

The character's wife was a ghost who haunted the catacombs under the castle. I think she was a Diviner, but she wasn't necessarily friendly toward him.

His own daughter was a Slaymate, Spellstitched even, who traveled with him. It turns out you don't prepare meals often or even keep much food on hand when you and all your minions are undead, hence her fate.

For his powerful minions, some he'd animated himself and some he'd used Rebuke/Command to control. I had appropriate items to be able to Command undead of almost as many HD as his level. There was an Arrow Demon Skeleton which he'd used Awaken Undead on, and some kind of mount probably a skeletal (Legendary) Horse that never did anything in combat. I think I also had an Awakened Cave Troll Skeleton. There was also a Naztharune Rakshasa with the Umbral Creature template, and for some reason all his sneak attack dice added additional Str damage to his attacks.

The best one though, was a Half-Golem (Ironwyrm Golem) Curst, which used the 3.0 Monsters of Faerun Curst because that's all we had. Curst are specifically immune to turn/rebuke undead attempts made by Clerics and Paladins, so my character, being neither a Cleric nor a Paladin, was able to rebuke/command it unhindered. Half-Golem made it immune to the specific spells that were required to destroy it, and I forget what all it could do but I'm pretty sure it could deal more damage per round than anyone else in the party. I know it had the Ironwyrm Golem's 20d10 breath attack. A BBEG managed to make the ground split open under it, then close back up after it fell in, and that was the end of that monstrosity.