What is the best path to Minionmancy from level 1?

[Segev]

One of my pet peeves in D&D has always been that Clerics are better minionmancers than Necromancy-focused Specialist Wizards. Not only do Clerics get Rebuke/Command Undead at level one, but they also get Animate Dead at level 5 (while Necromancers get Command Undead [the spell] at level 3 and Animate Dead at level 7).

Unearthed Arcana has at least a bit of help with this, allowing the Necromancer to sacrifice his Familiar for a skeletal minion that's actually relatively impressive, but UA is...not always allowed even in games where multiple splat books are common. (It's "optional rules" and "variant rules" seem to make DMs think it's somehow more designedly unbalanced than the well-thought out and balanced rules in other splatbooks.)

Even the Dread Necromancer doesn't get to animate dead faster than a Cleric.

The earliest means of getting even one undead minion without hoping the DM throws one at you that you can Rebuke/Command, oddly, seems to be Incarnate level 2. Necrocarnum Circlet can make an Incarnum Zombie when you bind it to your Crown Chakra, which a straight Incarnate can do at level 2. (Whether this is wise or not is another question: the 2d12 damage that even a 1 HD corpse->2 HD zombie would do to the Meldshaper might well kill a 2 HD PC.)

But it strikes me as weird that the Incarnate is the fastest way to get undead minions that you create yourself (barring UA).

Or am I missing something?

Without using UA, what is the fastest way into minionmancy as a way-of-adventuring-life that you guys can think of?

[Dayaz]

Do you want pure undead minionmancy? If so I really can't help too much, but I can tell you that generally a focused conjurer can out minionmancy a necromancer any day of the week (since most of you summons have SLAs.... and nothing stops you from having a bunch of undead anyways)

[Gorfnod]

If Pathfinder is on the table, a summoner is fantastic. With the Master Summoner archetype you can take minionmancy to some crazy places.

[Saidoro]

A first level cleric with Divine Metamagic on Fell Animate can raise zombies. I prefer a homebrew solution (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=90961), though.

[TheGeckoKing]

Two of the quickest ways possible is a Level 1 Death Master (Dragon Compendium) with Precocious Apprentice (animate dead), or a Level 1 Artificer crafting a CL 1 scroll of animate dead off the Death Master's spell list.

[Segev]

The Conjuror solution doesn't really appeal, because when I think "minionmancer" I don't imagine the casting time of the spell to be part of combat, nor the minions going away after a brief period.

Death Master is something I'd recalled, but I hadn't considered Precocious Apprentice with it; nice catch.

Fell Animate is hard to make work at low level, because you have to deal the death blow with the spell. Admittedly, DMM does make it more feasible. Ironically, this actually gets weaker in comparison to the Necromancer as the cleric levels up, because the Necromancer eventually has much better damage-dealing than the Cleric. But it is the best way in at low level.

(Again, I confess to being irritated at how Clerics are just plain better at this than Necromancers.)

I've not looked much into the summoner in PF; can they be undead-focused? I thought they did things called "eidolons" that were their own thing, a la psions and their Astral Constructs. (Though admittedly the summoner does seem at least to have the ability to keep some of his minions around.)


I'll take a look at the homebrew; that could be interesting. Thanks for the thoughts, all! Keep 'em coming if you have any more ideas.




And, changing the rules back a little bit, does anybody think the UA trade-familiar-for-minion variant would be broken on a PF Necromancer? (The wizard specialist type.)

[123456789blaaa]

I'm AFB right now so I can't check the exact sigil combination but an Illumian can gain what is effectively DMM for arcane spells with one. Useful if you want to do the Fell Animate trick with an arcane caster.

A Summoner can customize her Eidolon using "evolution points" (giving it extra arms, some SLA's, turing it partially incoporeal etc). One of the features you can give is "Undead.Appearance". This doesn't actually change the Eidolons type from Outsider but it does gie some undead attributes (all spells that effect undead now effect the Eidolon, immunity to poison and such at higher levels etc).

The wizard is already really broken and the UA undead minion isn't that great. I don't think it would break anything.

[Karnith]

I'm AFB right now so I can't check the exact sigil combination but an Illumian can gain what is effectively DMM for arcane spells with one.
An Illumian with the Naenhoon sigils can do that, twice per day.

[Segev]

Good point on the Illumian. I tend to forget race can help out when it comes to defining "necromancer," which is a little silly of me.

[Ruethgar]

Deathwalker Wizards from Dragon 312 can take command of undead they come across at level one with a charisma check. Makes them MAD, but they also get 5*lvl HD in available undead instead of 4*lvl.

[ArcturusV]

Heh, course the other way you could do it and still be at level 1 is to be LA'd undead with Create Spawn. A wight, or a vampire, can run the Minionmancy game right out of the gate. Not the best option since you're eating generally quite a bit of LA for the privileged. But it's an option.