Undead animals

[ImSAMazing]

HI Playgrounders,

It might be just me, but 5e has a few spells to create undead. But every spell only works on Humanoids. I like that idea and I make use of those spells, but maybe it's just me, but I like the idea of having Zombie monkeys or zombie squirrels, both for fluff and for cool assasin's. Is it too OP if you can use Animate Dead to rise a Zombie beast with the stats of a zombie but with the height of the corresponding animal?

[Daishain]

The main reason they limit it to humanoids is because balancing it for other types of races is a fricken headache. For every cool fluff use, there is an absurdly OP one.

I would be willing to forgo the humanoid restriction, on the condition that the player accepts that specific uses are subject to DM review.

[Inevitability]

If my players would want something like that, I'd let them research it (several religion/arcana checks will be involved), then add a material component (a few hundred GP's of black onyx) and maybe force a higher level slot.

[PoeticDwarf]

If you can make an animal zombie, stats of zombie but height of animal, you can make tiny cat zombies sneaking in an enemy base and just attacking the leader for 1d6+1 damage, and much HP.
Conjure dead animals (just animals but type undead and resistance poison damage) wouldn't be OP.

[ImSAMazing]

If you can make an animal zombie, stats of zombie but height of animal, you can make tiny cat zombies sneaking in an enemy base and just attacking the leader for 1d6+1 damage, and much HP.
Conjure dead animals (just animals but type undead and resistance poison damage) wouldn't be OP.

With +3 to hit and just 8 AC a leader's bodyguard will kill it easyily. 7 damage isn't deadly for a Noble. Also it's about fluff reasons, a pirate has a parrot on his shoulders, a Necromancer a zombie Parrot.

[tieren]

Would be interesting for BM rangers, an undead animal companion would be more lively than their real ones that can't follow directions for more than 6 seconds at a time.

[Inevitability]

With +3 to hit and just 8 AC a leader's bodyguard will kill it easyily. 7 damage isn't deadly for a Noble. Also it's about fluff reasons, a pirate has a parrot on his shoulders, a Necromancer a zombie parrot.

"Awk! Polly wants the flesh of the living! Awk!"

[Shining Wrath]

The MM gives us the example of the Beholder Zombie, which still retains some of the Beholder powers. If an aberration can be zombified, so can a cat, or a mouse, or a bison.

It'd be homebrew at this point, but I see no reason why a balance between required resources and spell levels cannot be found for the creation of a zombie from any corpse of any type.

Stephan King's Pet Semetary would be a useful point of inspiration.

[Mellack]

I would allow regular zombie stats for medium sized creatures, such as a zombie wolf. If they were smaller, I would require them to do less, and have less hp. If you are sending in a zombie squirrel, it will only do 1 point damage on a hit and have only 1-2 hp.