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View Full Version : Player Help Making the Minions (mostly for undead other accepted)



Lanth Sor
2016-12-08, 01:48 PM
So I've been trying to find a solid way to make undead in any reasonable way. The only real method I've found was create undead/greater and animate dead. Summon undead does it temp but thats rounds a level and requires a corpse for that is used for what summon monster does without one. So I was wondering if there was any rituals or other things that make undead minions more accessible.

Segev
2016-12-08, 03:15 PM
Summon undead doesn't require corpses. It's just a lame summon monster. I really dislike it for a number of reasons, mostly surrounding the fact that it lacks the strengths of its fellow Conjuration spells and doesn't synergize well with a more proper Necromancer suite of abilities. (That said, it's used to good effect in a fanfic wherein a wizard from D&D winds up enrolled in Hogwarts. Turns out Avada Kadavra doesn't work on the undead, and wizards aren't used to fighting mobile thug-things that can't be killed with that.)

The Robe of Bones can create undead; if you have Craft Wondrous Item, you can make one of those. I would argue for using CWI to craft undead as magic items by the same rules.

You can Command a shadow or other spawn-creating undead to kill people and make more of their kind.

Some undead have specific rules in their monster entries for creating them, but a lot of those aren't worth the effort.

TheCountAlucard
2016-12-09, 09:35 AM
Is this D&D 3.5? Must they be under your control? Because if not, this is extremely cheesy, but works by the rules.

Buy a +1 unholy arrow. One is all you need. Put it in the hands of a good-aligned commoner - the first one you come across, if you want; the very act of him holding it bestows a negative level on him. Having only one "level," he'll instantly die. Per the rules, anyone who dies of negative levels becomes a wight overnight. Use that time to either prepare to establish control over your new wight, or just pick up the arrow and run like hell, depending on your needs and abilities.

Total cost: 366 gold pieces, 5 copper pieces.

Note: This little trick is almost-infinitely-reusable, as using the arrow in this fashion does not discharge its magic; in fact, you may not need to use this trick again, as anyone the wight kills will rise as a wight as well - and even faster, too.

It also works with holy, axiomatic, or anarchic weapons; it may even get you irony points for using a lawful good weapon to kickstart the undead apocalypse.

AnBe
2016-12-10, 08:39 PM
Oh, TheCountAlucard, that is genius. You evil mastermind, you. Totally going to try to do that in one of my friend's games.

If you want to see a variety of different undead monsters, check out Dark Souls. Pretty much everything in that game is Undead, even the character you play.

I've always found something kind of stupid in D&D 3.5's Animate Dead spell. To reanimate a corpse and make it your zombie/skeleton slave, you have to have an onyx to cast the spell, and the onyx has to be worth at least 25 gp per Hit Dice of the corpse you are trying to reanimate. How are you supposed to know how much Hit Dice the corpse has? Shall I go to the store and buy like fifty onyx stones each worth 100 gp? Would that be enough? Derrrrr. :smallannoyed:

Stryyke
2016-12-10, 09:12 PM
Another possibility. In one game I played, the DM had an item that made undead. It was a nail that, when driven into a newly dead corpse, would raise the corpse as your undead minion. The minion remains undead and under your control as long as the nail remains embeded in their body. Make them an enchantment item, and drive a nail into every corpse your group makes. Tip: best to drive it into a part of the body where any old Joe can't just pluck it out.