What is your favorite humanoid necromancer NPC?

[Oryan77]

I need to create a BBEG NPC around the mid levels (not too high). I'd like something unique and a bit different than just your typical evil necromancer. So I'm coming to you guys for suggestions since you know much more about builds than I do.

The criteria is this:

Medium size creature. The more unusual, the better.
Necromancer or something similar that would pass as a worshiper of Vecna. I'm not so much looking for powerful builds as I am for really exotic undead or necro-like builds.
He'll have a magical arm grafted on him, replacing one of his normal arms. The exact graft is to be determined.
He's evil of course.
Must come from official 3.5 WotC books or Dragon/Dungeon Magazines.

So what would be your favorite villain that might fit that criteria?

BTW, I'm not asking for you to create it (unless you want to). I'm just looking for suggestions on race, class, etc, etc.

[Blackhawk748]

Well when in doubt go human, as that feat is freakin useful, or go Aasimar. Ya you read that right, Aasimar. They get a +2 Wis and Cha which youll need to be a necro and its so freakin unexpected that your party may stare at you blankly for a bit.

Now as to build, i see two ways of going about this:
1) go Dread Necro and take a bunch of Corpsecrafter feats, now you have an army of super minions and snag Arcane Disciple and take one of Vecnas Domains of your choice. Very thematic and focused here.
2) The Uttercold Assault Necromancer. Its usually Sorcerer and then a prestige class of your choice, id recommend Pale Master, Frost Mage, or Elemental Savant. The build revolves around the Lord of Uttercold feat, so you need to have Tomb Tainted Soul as you can now head yourself if you can either a) up the Aasimars natural cold resist or b) make yourself immune somehow. Now specifically you make skeleton minions and then cast things like Uttercold Wall of Fire and Uttercold Fireball and make sure you hit your minions, as they are immune to cold and will then be healed as you destroy your enemies. Its great fun.

The best part of these two builds is that they are rather generic and give you quite a bit of flexibility in how you present them as well as leaving plenty of options to mess with the specifics.

Now for personality id maybe have the Aasimar come off as a bit unhinged, not wacked out crazy, but a bit off. Have him invite them in, talk to them, and then present them with some weird little fact about them that they were probably trying to hide, nothing imoprtant, just something that he "shouldnt" know.

[Forrestfire]

My favorite is to go with the classic: a lich. For a good twist on the lich, instead of making it the normal sort of wizard-ish lich, go with a refluffed Jade Phoenix Mage.

Wizard 5/Warblade 1/Jade Phoenix Mage 5, with practiced spellcaster or something to get up to CL 11 for lichdom. His d12 hit dice can make him as tough as you need him to be as a boss fight, and he'll have Animate Dead and various necromantic debuffs, presumably. Any undead made with Create Undead could come from a scroll (or, if you make him higher level, his own casting). I also suggest that you use one of his feats (or give it to him for free) to give him Wings of Cover, so he can negate some attacks from the party to prolong the fight.

The beauty of this guy is that he can completely buck the expectations of a BBEG. He's a spellcaster necromancer overlord, but he's also a melee warrior, who presumably enjoys what he does. Not only that, he's a lich, so he can respawn if he dies. He can be his own recurring miniboss for a while, happening upon and challenging the party to a duel. Turn the witty banter up to 11, and hopefully the party will enjoy the character. After they dispatch him (or spare him, or he wins and spares them, because murdering such promising adventurers would be a pity), he can show up later for a rematch (or just to talk for a while, then suggesting a rematch). Maybe even temporarily ally with them for some other reason, if they're the sort who'd do that. All the while, his own machinations are running behind the scenes. Rinse and repeat. Recurring semi-evil frenemy/rival NPC.

Drop hints along the way that he's much more than he seems (that is, a traveling undead swordsman). Maybe if they party does work with him at some point, the enemy they're taking down responds with fear or confusion when he sees the lich bearing down on them. Try to make the party suspicious, and eventually have events conspire to reveal his true intentions and BBEG-type plan. The lich escapes, and the party follows. There's a dungeon crawl to stop him from aligning the twelve stones of worldbreakiness or something, and then the final showdown happens.

Instead of ordering his undead army to swamp the party, or using powerful magic to destroy them, the warrior lich challenges the party to one final duel. "For the fate of the world." So far, he's proven to be perfectly honest about honor and the like, so they have good reason to accept his challenge if they want to (they could decline and just fight, and then it'd be a minionmancy fight). In any case, this time, the BBEG has a few undead minions, crafted personally to be foils of the party, because they're such wonderful enemies to fight. None of the other battles have ended in permanent deaths, presumably, so this time he ups the stakes. Their souls and corpses vs his phylactery as additional bets on the duel. The battle happens, and if/when they win, they stop the world-ending ritual or whatever plan, and can choose to kill off this guy for real.

If they lose, then maybe instead of TPKing, the party gets turned into necropolitan versions of themselves, raised free-willed by the BBEG to oppose him again now that he's succeeded in step [retconned number] of his master plan. After all, they have so much potential, and the fights have been so much fun.


... Course, this entire possible plotline is very easy to shift around, and also requires the lich to be liked initially by the party. Hopefully a witty, bantering zombie swordsman is the sort of fun your players like having around, but if not, it probably doesn't work as outlined here.

For his magic arm, I think a magitech graft made of mithral and riverine could be cool. It'd look like metal Tron Lines on glass, probably, and have gears and clockwork mechanics and stuff. Maybe it could have the ability to cast Spell Thematics'd Wings of Cover, to negate an attack by blocking with the riverine bits.

[Grayson01]

Dread Necro: HALFLING (the one with the bonus feat). Add in Arcane Disciple, and maybe even one or two devotion feats. No one expects a creepy HALFLING to be the Big Bad, he can view undeath as the true nature the universe and life as a twisted mirror of what should be. He could be studying to turn all the Halflings from his home into undead minions as this is the best way to honor them. Or have him trying to raise all the fallen Halflings and job ales of some epic long ago battle.

[Azoth]

Always fun on a corpse crafter to give them destructive retribution. Throw that on a bunch of cannon fodder and watch the hilarity ensue.

"Oh you bypassed the thrall in my chamber and came straight for me. How cute."

Cue large AoE blast that destroys a large number of low hd minions.

Suddenly the party is making a bunch of easy to pass reflex saves for laughable damage each, but you voluntarily fail every save and suddenly heal for a considerable ammount.

[The Ravensong]

One tactic I've enjoyed is having a Cleric with Profane Lifeleech that burns his rebuke attempts to steal health from the hostages he has trapped underneath the grated floor. Buildwise you could have him doing any number of things, but one of my favorite tactics is to cast Fell Drain Kelgore's Grave Mist (accessible through the Divine Magician ACF) which deals 1d6 cold damage to everyone within the mist and causes them all to become fatigued and lose a negative level... with no saves. You can make this further frightening by adding enough levels of winterhaunt to tack on extra cold dice, as well as black lore of moil to add negative energy damage to it. If your necromancer is a lich (or necropolitan for lower levels) he'll be unaffected by the cold damage and exhaustion, and be healed by black lore of moil every round.
A Cleric5/Winterhaunt8 would do 4d6cold+2d6negative/round+fatigue for 13 rounds, and heal himself for that 2d6 on top of it.
You could add insult to injury with a second casting, which would do a second set of damage (and healing for the necromancer), negative levels, and move their fatigue to exhaustion.
All in all, the build does require 4 feats, which isn't terrible unless there were other things you wanted to get done, but it's just so delightful :3

[mabriss lethe]

I once used a demented dread necro version of Santa Claus. He flew around on a sleigh (or "slay" if you prefer) giving gifts of exploding zombie house cats in the city slums. Things got interesting when the feline detonations started causing the buildings to collapse.

[Coidzor]

IIRC, pretty much any/all of the undead graft arms would be pretty good, especially if you don't care about the cost. If he's melee-oriented at all then some of the fiendish grafts are pretty good. One of them doesn't even need to explicitly replace an arm...

You may or may not want to give him a red right hand (www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrxePKps87k).

[Oryan77]

Thanks for all of the suggestions so far. I would like to clarify though, I'm not really looking for ideas on specific optimization builds or suggestions on how to make the NPC more effective in combat. I'm looking for ideas more about fluff than crunch. Like, what kind of undead, what kind of class, prc, or feat selections that would make him interesting and not just choices to optimize his combat ability.

So if you want to give ideas for spells/feats and things, that's great and still helpful. But please, let me know what creature type and class you would find interesting. And again, I don't need your suggestion of race and class to be based on optimizing factors. If the race/class is not ideal for those spells or feats, but would still be unique and "cool", I'm all ears. Thanks!

[Ettina]

Tibbit necromancer. So the cute cat they meet in the village at the start of the campaign can turn out to be the BBEG.

[Coidzor]

Well, you could always do a Gheden or Dhampir or otherwise Half-Undead creature. Or you could do something along the lines of this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?323220-Creepiness-in-the-Daelkyr-Half-Blood-race), a flesh-warping monstrosity twisted child possessed in the womb by an abomination making something far worse than either on its own would.

Maybe even crib part or all of this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=16727771&postcount=18)and take something like Wild Cohort or that Necromancer ACF that replaces the familiar with a scaling undead that's set to its Riding Dog/she-Wolf Skeleton mother instead of a human warrior skeleton.

Considering the nature of the Daelkyr Half-Blood's origin, you could basically make the parent just about anything, including throwing on just about any template you want along with the Unholy Scion template the seals the deals. Heck, as the DM you can twist things and make it half-undead on top of aberration-and-fiend-tainted.

Travels the land spreading the taint of necrotic cysts(such a great line of spells :smallbiggrin: ) and gathering symbiote after symbiont.

Maybe he's melding his dual-ancestry into breeding some manner of IKEA Tarrasque minion that he can then go on to make his absolute undead slaves?