LA Assignment Thread X: New Year, New Management, Same Old Unplayable Monsters

[Thurbane]

Atropal Scion

• Medium Undead.
• 9 RHD (d12 HD, 1 good save, poor BAB, 4 skill points/"level").
• Fly 30 ft (no manoeuvrability listed - I assume being supernatural flight, Perfect would be apt).
• +8 natural AC, Cha bonus as deflection - decent.
• Slam 1d8.
• Death gaze: 60 ft save-or-die non-discriminatory gaze attack. May result in uncontrolled wights, but you do have rebuke.
• Negative energy aura: grant turn resistance and fast healing to undead in a 60 ft radius; inflicts virtual loss of 2 levels of living creatures unless they are protected. Low level humanoids can become wights under your control.
• SLAs: 3/day - animate dead, create undead, cone of cold (DC 18), desecrate, dispel magic, invisibility, plane shift, speak with dead, teleport; CL 9. Decent set of SLAs, especially good for minionmancy.
• DR 10/adamantine - quite good.
• Darkvision 60 ft.
• Fast healing 8 - pretty decent.
• Rebuke undead 5/day - good. You can take Devotion Feats or similar to make this more worthwhile.
• Undead traits: usual immunities and drawbacks.
• Unholy grace: Cha bonus to AC and saves. Good. Seems like Unholy Grace is a lot more common in this book than Unholy Toughness.
• Str +2, Dex +4, Con --, Int +6, Wis +12, Cha +10: net +34, one non-ability. Nice.
• Small racial skill list: has some decent stuff, but with +6 Int and 4 skill points per HD etc. probably going to end up taking some cross class ranks.

Basically humanoid in form, and I guess it has limbs/hands from the illustration? Can speak.

Mainly good for it's SLAs and special attacks. Also has decent resilience for an undead. 9 RHD is a lot, but maybe you could slip into a fast-progression casting PrC? Or something that will increase the pool of undead you can control, like Horned Harbinger.

I'm going to agree with LA +2 (though I could be swayed to a strong LA +1): a lot of potential for minionmancy - but not a great deal else, though.