Animating dead as craft feat?

[JusticeZero]

I'd suspect there's a set of rules to do this somewhere, but I don't know where.. has anyone seen a way to create undead monstrosities of various sorts as an item crafting feat?

[EdroGrimshell]

I'd suspect there's a set of rules to do this somewhere, but I don't know where.. has anyone seen a way to create undead monstrosities of various sorts as an item crafting feat?

Tome of Necromancy over on Gleemax originally did this, but that entire book is very unbalanced. I think it'd need to be an entirely new set of homebrew.

That said, this is probably something that could be used in a Low Magic campaign to keep necromancers without being major spellcasters.

[Diachronos]

The closest thing I've seen is the Alchemical Zombie discovery that alchemists can get starting at level 8.

[JusticeZero]

Well yeah, that's the point.. I want to have skeletons and zombies and such as a creatable thing without using epic Clerics in P6.

[Stellar_Magic]

I'd look at the Craft Construct feat and see about finding a way to modify it for undead like skeletons.

[qwertyu63]

Since you are here in Homebrew land, I'll assume Homebrew is OK. With that in mind, here is what I have knocked out in a few minutes.

Flesh Stitcher [Item Creation]: (this is stolen from Ooze Crafter)
Prerequisite: Caster level 5th.
Benefit: You can create zombies and skeletons as though they were magical items. Creating an undead creature takes 1 day for each 2 HD the creature has. To create an undead, you must have access to a dead body to animate and you must use up raw materials worth 250 gp times the creatures HD. A newly created undead has average hit points for its Hit Dice. Undead created with this feat are uncontrolled.

Or an even simpler version:

Flesh Stitcher:
Prerequisite: Caster level 5th.
Benefit: You get Lesser Animate Dead as a spell-like ability usable once per day. The casting time of this spell-like ability is increased to 1 minute and you must provide the black onyx gem material component.

Animate Dead, Lesser (this is a non-homebrew spell from PF)
School necromancy [evil]; Level cleric/oracle 2, sorcerer/wizard 3

EFFECT
Target one corpse
Duration instantaneous

DESCRIPTION
This spell functions as animate dead, except you can only create a single Small or Medium skeleton or zombie. You cannot create variant skeletons or zombies with this spell.

Or the simplest option of them all; just have them prepare Lesser Animate Dead.

[JusticeZero]

What would the feat etc. cost and effect modifications be to be able to cast some form of Lesser Animate Dead 1/day be?

[Debihuman]

Why would anyone want a feat that's only good once a day when all he has to do is take 3 levels of cleric? I'm not sure what kind of undead monstrosities you are trying to animate.

Debby

[Nanoblack]

You could always buy a wand of animate dead. Necro-artificers are always tons of fun.

[rexx1888]

i suppose if you used item creation, you could customise your walking corpses a bit more :\

buuuuuttttt the whole point of e6 games is to remove that sort of unpredictable/unbalanced stuff from the players grasp. An you dont really need especially specific rules to just make npc's that make undead, as long as the Challenges fit in your CR range... follow on from that, if a player really desperately wants to make undead in that vein, make em research an incantation an run with that. In that instance, each undead they make is actually important to them and took time to create, an should avoid the whole "i use a corpse to spring all the traps in the dungeon" problem :)

[JusticeZero]

Why would anyone want a feat that's only good once a day when all he has to do is take 3 levels of cleric? I'm not sure what kind of undead monstrosities you are trying to animate.

Well, for one thing, three levels is half of the class levels you will ever get, period. It's not a small thing.
For another thing, it's for a campaign (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?363776-Duumgarten) where clerics are not even an available class option, for a couple of reasons (including the fact that I want to test the self-containment of some stuff).
Third, for story reasons, I sort've need the process of creating undead to be actually pretty easily accessible on the world level. (it's explained in the link above, I hope.) Higher level undead can be special, but I wanted skeletons and zombies to be pretty common.

[Coidzor]

Flesh Stitcher [Item Creation]: (this is stolen from Ooze Crafter)
Prerequisite: Caster level 5th.
Benefit: You can create zombies and skeletons as though they were magical items. Creating an undead creature takes 1 day for each 2 HD the creature has. To create an undead, you must have access to a dead body to animate and you must use up raw materials worth 250 gp times the creatures HD. A newly created undead has average hit points for its Hit Dice. Undead created with this feat are uncontrolled.

Why would you have a feat to make uncontrolled undead at 10 times the GP cost of the spell? :smallconfused:

If anything, I'd say spending a feat on it would either replicate Animate Dead/Create Undead where such wasn't available or exceed at least Animate Dead.

And have it take the standard amount of time to craft, 1 day per 1,000 GP, to keep it in parallel with Craft Construct as desired. Maybe have the crafting DC = HD or HD + 5, since crafting constructs the DC is the default CL + 5?

Really, the main question is, should there be a limited control pool to keep with animate dead or if we should bump the price up to some extent while having a theoretically unlimited control pool ala constructs? 250 GP per HP is less expensive than most constructs, so that might be a place to start and work up or down from for a permanently controlled undead servitor, I suppose.