Summon Undead Description

[Zeros]

So for the enterprising necromancer in most D&D players there are the Summon Undead Spells which let you play with the powers of unlife before you get animate dead.

The spell says that it functions like summon monster. That's simple enough, but its a little different when its a skeleton imo.

So basically, how do you visualize that? Does the skeleton/zombie step through a extraplanar door, or just appear out of thin air?

Or are you maybe temporarily animating a skeleton that is already in the ground beneath you?

I'm just trying to get a good way to describe this IC, because just simple summoning of a skeleton doesn't feel quite right.

[Venger]

Just go with whatever you're comfortable with. Either of those sound pretty cool. The nonmechanical aspects of how a spell looks are up to you when not otherwise specified and it's a nice way to add color to your campaign.

[Inevitability]

RAW, it's the simple summoning of a skeleton.

Of course, there's a number of ways to visualize it. Perhaps a ghostly image drifts through a wall, slowly becoming more real until an actual skeleton stands there. Perhaps the material component (a carved bone) wrenches itself from your grasp and twists itself into a skeletal shape. Perhaps a skeleton bursts forth from the shadows.

Just find something you like.

[Duelpersonality]

I usually visualize it similar to the Diablo II necromancer. It looks like a skeleton claws out of the ground, but it's actually bone dust and detritus being held together with magic.

[TheBrassDuke]

I do something similar to the above, but when the ground opens up, milky white tendrils slither out of the hole and a creature claws its way up and out through a portal from the [Plane of Death], occasionally with a field of hands reaching up futilely, just brushing freedom. Sometimes you can hear the moaning and wailing.

And on rare occasions, the desperate hands of the damned actually burst from the ground and physically deposit a particularly powerful undead creature.

[Necroticplague]

I always viewed summoning as a sort of 'coalescing' process, where you gather scattered appropriate energies + a creature's essence, and combine the two. So for summoning Undead, you gather up local Negative Energy, slap it together, then bring in the essence of some undead, which will shape your blank vessel of energy to it's nature. This tends to look like a bunch of shadows coming together to form the undead (since negative energy absorbs light, among other things). Higher CL casters tend to look more dramatic, because they can gather more energies (thus, why they have a higher duration).

And on a similar note relating to energies, I like to add the detail that summoned creatures 'leak' energy, thus the incredibly short durations. For summoned undead, this typically takes the form of having some kind of black flame in their body where their Negative Energy is leaking out (eye sockets, mouth, or ribcage being the normal spots, for complicated magic symbolism reasons).

[Karl Aegis]

A small cloud appears with the word, "poof" lazily scribbled onto it. It is soon replaced by the summoned monster.

[ATHATH]

Have you ever played Baldur's Gate (or the Enhanced Edition)? The animation for Animate Dead might be a good base (basis?) for a description.