Segev
2020-01-06, 01:22 PM
Step 1: Build an altar to an evil god, designed with jointed legs and/or wheels that are meant to move, even if not necessarily under its own power.
Step 2: Enchant it to have desecrate continually radiating from it.
Step 3: Cast haunt shift on a skeleton under your control to force it into being poltergeist-inhabited.
You now have a self-motivating altar to an evil god that radiates an aura of desecration, for all your undead-animating and even localized tactical combat needs.
We've designed our altar with "intended-to-move" jointed legs so that we can have as small a HD of skeleton as possible inhabiting it; this enables us to potentially never have to resort to command undead to control it, as long as nothing is animated to force it out of control cap. (Remember, you pick what you lose control of, so as long as it's a pretty small number of HD - 1/4 to 4, or so, perhaps - you can just be careful not to animate anything that would be, by itself, consuming enough cap to force that last one out of your grasp.) If we don't mind using larger-HD undead, perhaps because we'll just cast command undead on it every few days or couple of weeks (depending on our CL), we don't need that specialized design.
However, a Haunting Presence can only motivate its inhabited item to move up to the base undead's normal speed. Since having your altar radiating your aura of undead-buffing highly mobile is desirable, what would be the best choices of creatures to animate as skeletons to force to haunt it? Speed and low HD are both desirable qualities, with leaning more towards speed as low HD is more "nice to have." I won't assume it can fly; it's not built for it and no amount of "animating parts to move" would really make it so.
Any other thoughts on optimizing such are also welcome, but I am primarily focused on the speed element, since choosing the base skeleton is a necessary choice to determine one of the statistics.
Step 2: Enchant it to have desecrate continually radiating from it.
Step 3: Cast haunt shift on a skeleton under your control to force it into being poltergeist-inhabited.
You now have a self-motivating altar to an evil god that radiates an aura of desecration, for all your undead-animating and even localized tactical combat needs.
We've designed our altar with "intended-to-move" jointed legs so that we can have as small a HD of skeleton as possible inhabiting it; this enables us to potentially never have to resort to command undead to control it, as long as nothing is animated to force it out of control cap. (Remember, you pick what you lose control of, so as long as it's a pretty small number of HD - 1/4 to 4, or so, perhaps - you can just be careful not to animate anything that would be, by itself, consuming enough cap to force that last one out of your grasp.) If we don't mind using larger-HD undead, perhaps because we'll just cast command undead on it every few days or couple of weeks (depending on our CL), we don't need that specialized design.
However, a Haunting Presence can only motivate its inhabited item to move up to the base undead's normal speed. Since having your altar radiating your aura of undead-buffing highly mobile is desirable, what would be the best choices of creatures to animate as skeletons to force to haunt it? Speed and low HD are both desirable qualities, with leaning more towards speed as low HD is more "nice to have." I won't assume it can fly; it's not built for it and no amount of "animating parts to move" would really make it so.
Any other thoughts on optimizing such are also welcome, but I am primarily focused on the speed element, since choosing the base skeleton is a necessary choice to determine one of the statistics.