Animate Dead Question

[MattE]

So... if you animate say... an Ancient White Dragon using the Zombie Lord template, does it retain anything like spellcasting abilities or breath weapons or sla's?

[Yora]

As the template says "all special qualities of the base creature", it seems so.

However, you can't create a zombie lord with the animate dead spell.

[MattE]

However, you can't create a zombie lord with the animate dead spell.

You can create a skeletal champion, so why couldn't you create a zombie lord?

[MattE]

Double Post

[Benly]

You can create a skeletal champion, so why couldn't you create a zombie lord?

Except you can't (http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/monsters/skeleton.html). "A skeletal champion cannot be created with animate dead—these potent undead only arise under rare conditions similar to those that cause the manifestation of ghosts or via rare and highly evil rituals."

[Marnath]

Not only can you not create a zombie lord with animate dead, you can't raise an ancient white dragon as a regular zombie with animate dead, either. It has way too many hitdice for that.

[mikau013]

Not only can you not create a zombie lord with animate dead, you can't raise an ancient white dragon as a regular zombie with animate dead, either. It has way too many hitdice for that.

I wouldn't state that as a fact.

The special skeleton / zombie templates seem to override the default animate dead rules.

[Jeraa]

Pathfinder zombies don't have double the hitdice of the base creature like they did in 3.5. An ancient white dragon has 21 hit dice, and making it a zombie adds 4 more (as it is Huge sized). Undead created with Animate Dead can't have more then twice your caster level in hitdice. Half of 25 is 13 (12.5 rounded up), so a 13th level caster could animate an ancient white dragon as a zombie. (And desecrate increases the hitdice limit to 4x your caster level, so a 7th level caster could animate an ancient white dragon as a normal zombie within a desecrated area.)

Even a great wyrm gold dragon can be made into a regular zombie with Animate Dead. (Though, with 30 dragon hitdice, +10 from the zombie template, you would need to be 20th level to do it. However, in a desecrated area, that drops to 10th level.)

(Also, note the differences between the skeleton and zombie templates. Creatures with more then 20 hit dice can't be made into skeletons, but the zombie template doesn't have that limitation. Also, the special skeletons count as double their hit dice for purposes of creating them, but the special zombies also don't have that limitation.)