Military Applications of Necromancy

[Saurus33]

I have a Dread Necromancer character in a campaign using a lot of material from Heroes of Battle at the moment, so I started thinking up some ways to be militarily useful.

This expanded into a general question; what are the military applications of necromancy?

[AB]

Well, the obvious answer is: giant army of skeletons/zombies.

[Saurus33]

Well, yeah. Apart from the obvious instant army gambit.

I think it would probably be more useful to have a unit which can operate without having to worry about logistical issues, as they don't eat, sleep or do anything but work.

[ondonaflash]

Enemies die, pop them back up, send them to kill their former friends.

[Roc Ness]

Well, yeah. Apart from the obvious instant army gambit.

I think it would probably be more useful to have a unit which can operate without having to worry about logistical issues, as they don't eat, sleep or do anything but work.

Lets see... If you need to move a battalion of living and dead soldiers, use undead horses to pull the carts, they don't get tired so you can hustle them till the ends of the earth.

Quickly building fortifications: no need for shifts, or lunch breaks or any breaks at all. If you're in a real hurry you can disguise a bunch of these as a wall with an illusion as they can become completely still (they don't breathe. or have a pulse) You can use them to suprise attack, imagine what the enemy would think if the "wall" suddenly grabbed a guy and bit him.

Endure weather better, especially in a tropical climate. Have you heard of the Kakoda track? If you have, you can imagine it'd be much easier with zombies and skeletons.

Ninjas and spies. Undead are far more silent as they don't breathe. Undead birds are excellent: They are tiny, completely silent, have good eyesight, fast movers, don't need food and don't fear anything, you can send them anywhere.

- Of that, you can create ambushes too.


I have got to make an undead campaign

[Chrono22]

If you want to keep a living strikeforce around, providing them with vampiric weapons could give them some better staying power in a prolonged battle.

[Brother Oni]

Have them run a 24 hour logisitics supply train for the living soldiers (better to use undead that don't smell for this).

Work as sappers (building fortifications, tunnel building, etc) under the supervision of an intelligent undead. It's amazing how much earth you can shift with shovels if the workers never get tired or need to sleep.

Take a page out of the Pirates of the Caribbean and have them as an ambush force from an unexpected direction (out of the sea or simply out of the earth if you prepare a few mass graves ahead of time below the battlefield).
You could leave caches of bodies in various locations so you always can rustle up a force quickly.

Use them as the perfect garrison force. Hard to starve them out if they never need to eat.
On the flip side, use them to besiege the enemy at times unsuitable for living armies - use an undead army to siege an enemy castle for the whole of winter or in the middle of the wet season in tropical countries (when disease is usually rife in armies).

Use zombies to poison water supplies - all they need to do is infiltrate and then just fall in, or if you have enough bodies available, march them to a location where they can poison the entire water table.

[JellyPooga]

The undead are most useful in siege warfare.

In a siege there are several keys factors that the undead can simply ignore:

1)Hygeine. Keeping a siege camp clean and disease free is a factor that makes besieging a town/fort difficult. With an undead army, this is not a worry (except, perhaps, for any living contingent, which might find it more difficult to stay disease free).

2)Fatigue. Maitaining a constant threat with a living army is difficult. Your troops need to sleep, so you have to have an army twice the size to maintain a threat around the clock. This is not an issue with undead soldiers. They can keep up a constant barrage with catapults, your perimeter guards don't need to be routinely rotated and your sapping teams can work around the clock.

3)Moral. The deterioration of moral is a key factor for any besieging army. If you hang around too long without success, your army will soon fall apart as tempers rise and moral breaks. The undead don't have this. You can take as long as you like to break your enemy.

4)Logistics. Feeding your army is key to any strategy. When your army doesn't need food or water, you don't have to worry about supply trains or storage for those supplies. Your undead army can theoretically lay siege forever unless an outside force raises the siege

[Grumman]

An obvious start is the "raze and raise" method. Necromancy is well suited to attack in a total war, since every village you burn and every garrison you slaughter bolsters your forces, and you don't have the same need for supply lines as a normal army. You don't need to supply equipment, food or recruits from home, so you can just roam around the enemy country destroying and raising everything you find.

[Ernir]

Break out the biowarfare. Spread poisons and contagious diseases all you want, it is not like the opposition can respond in kind.
And if some of it spreads into your camp by accident? Who cares? Not the troops, anyway.

[Set]

A fear spell (or an undead that spooks animals, like a spectre) can wreak havoc on a cavalry charge. Sure, some of the knights might make their saves, but the warhorses sure as heck won't.

Certain effects (poison, disease, caltrops) or spells (mind-affecting, sleep, negative energy) don't affect undead at all, which means that your spellcasters (or mundane ranged attackers) can use those sorts of attacks with impunity, knowing that your troops will be fine. Arrow barrage into an army of skeletons and zombies with DR 5/bludgeoning and DR 5/slashing? Go for it. Caltrops covered with filth fever *everywhere?* Sure, they can't lame (or infect) the skellies and zombies. Nauseating clouds of troglodyte or ghast stench? Sure. Damaging extremes of cold or heat created by control weather? Yeah, my army makes all of it's Fort saves automatically, knock it out. Cloudkill? Stinking Cloud? Sleep? Deep Slumber? Confusion? Fear? Circle of Death? Wail of the Banshee? Mass Inflict Serious Wounds? Waves of Exhaustion? It's all good.

Animating a giant 'dire turtle' (or any monstrous insect / arachnid with a solid carapace that can be hollowed out and have some comfy chairs and an open bar set up inside for the command staff, although the first person to make a Wild, Wild West reference gets a saving throw out the window) and using it as a 'tank' is certainly an option. Animated critters can retain burrowing or climbing speeds (or, for some zombies, even fly speeds), allowing a necro to animate ankhegs to burrow under castle walls, or monstrous spiders to scale them and allow others to climb up the ropes attached to their carapaces. Dire Bat zombies can drop filth fever laden 'care packages' upon defenders heads, or satchels of offal swarming with venomous centipedes or similar unpleasant beasties light enough to survive being airdropped into a castle.

Hollowing out and then waterproofing a Dragon Turtle, animating it as a skeleton and then using it as a submersible is probably going a step too far, no matter freaking cool it sounds. Like the freakin' Dire Shark with the freakin' Wand of Scorching Ray attached to it's freakin' head, it sounds better in theory. :)

If you have a means to gain the services of shadows, wraiths or spectres, it's pretty much game over for the vast majority of armies, which will fall like ripe wheat, especially if attacked under cover of darkness, obscuring mist and / or other sight-limiting techniques that will spare the undead from effective retaliation by turning and damaging spells. Since incorporeal undead can just take a 5 ft. step to *go underground* (which blocks line of effect, and makes them immune to turning / most damaging spells), they are insanely hard to deal with, and even harder if they don't clump together, but disperse and wreak havoc in the enemy lines.

Even simple things, such as transmitting messages, can be made simple by animating a couple of HD worth of zombie bats (1/2 HD each) and having them flutter messages back and forth between your commanders. (Actually, a zombie bat gets a Str of 3, and could also drop alchemist's fire or whatnot on buildings inside the castle, being extremely hard to see at night, with their little black-painted payloads of incendiary doom...) Skeletal Spider Swarms or Zombie Bat Swarms are just mean. I'd totally go there.

[hamishspence]

Siege Crabs in MMIII come pre-hollowed out- all that is needed to make it suitable is to kill it, then raise it.

[Myrmex]

Undead can hustle for long distances. They move much faster than regular troops, and aren't limited to 8 hours of marching. They have little need for kit, since they ignore most environmental hazards, and don't sleep. You can also hide them in swamps, riverbeds, lakes, or on the sea floor.

The undead are most useful in siege warfare.

In a siege there are several keys factors that the undead can simply ignore:

1)Hygeine. Keeping a siege camp clean and disease free is a factor that makes besieging a town/fort difficult. With an undead army, this is not a worry (except, perhaps, for any living contingent, which might find it more difficult to stay disease free).

2)Fatigue. Maitaining a constant threat with a living army is difficult. Your troops need to sleep, so you have to have an army twice the size to maintain a threat around the clock. This is not an issue with undead soldiers. They can keep up a constant barrage with catapults, your perimeter guards don't need to be routinely rotated and your sapping teams can work around the clock.

3)Moral. The deterioration of moral is a key factor for any besieging army. If you hang around too long without success, your army will soon fall apart as tempers rise and moral breaks. The undead don't have this. You can take as long as you like to break your enemy.

4)Logistics. Feeding your army is key to any strategy. When your army doesn't need food or water, you don't have to worry about supply trains or storage for those supplies. Your undead army can theoretically lay siege forever unless an outside force raises the siege

You forgot:

5) Load them into catapults and hurl them over the ramparts.

[Eldan]

The falling damage from the catapults might kill most low-level undead, though. Those with regeneration, like vampires, might be useful, but they have better transportation methods.

But yes, an incorporeal undead makes siege warfare useless, unless the enemy has high-level casters or clerics to ward them off somehow. And even then, they drain a lot of resources from the enemy.

For cheap scouts/aerial troops: zombie birds or bats. Also fun: zombie rats, moles and other small, burrowing critters. They barely use up any HD of your control limit. Normal rats are a problem for a force under siege. Imagine if you can't fumigate or poison them anymore and they rip the cats to shreds...

[Myrmex]

The falling damage from the catapults might kill most low-level undead, though. Those with regeneration, like vampires, might be useful, but they have better transportation methods.

Just have the catapult with a delayed animate trap on it. It's a corpse when it goes over, but the next round a skeleton jumps out!

[edit]
Scouts: need to awaken them first. Otherwise they're pretty useless for scouting.

Incorporeality: There are a few ways to block it. One way is to use this paint from dungeonscape that prevents it for 24 hours, and paint bars on the walls.

[Eldan]

... Nice.

You can even tie several corpses together with rope to make a larger projectile. Make them these negative-energy exploding ones for even more fun.

[Myrmex]

... Nice.

You can even tie several corpses together with rope to make a larger projectile. Make them these negative-energy exploding ones for even more fun.

Ooh, good idea. Cheap bombs.

[AslanCross]

Biological Warfare. The Plague Walkers (MMIV) are suicide biobombs, while the Plague Spewers (MMIII) can spread a plague throughout an entire city just by vomiting diseased rat swarms.

The nation of Karrnath in Eberron used a lot of undead in the course of their history. Undead soldiers are obvious, but they've also put living knights on undead horses. They can keep running into the night while the riders sleep; apparently the skeletal horses offer much smoother rides.

[JellyPooga]

5) Load them into catapults and hurl them over the ramparts.

Whilst technically possible, you still have to factor in the fact that they need to survive the trip...without a Con score, Undead are notoriously frail HP wise for their HD (unless you also consider the various HP bonuses, like from being raised by a Dread Necromancer with the Corpsecrafter feat, wearing a Deadwalkers Ring in a Desecrated area...which, IIRC equals about +8HP per HD).

If you want some advice on what to raise, might I suggest Harsaaf (MMIII)...they're 6HD Medium Monstrous Humanoids with the [Fire] subtype, Str 14, Dex 16 and a Burrow speed. Perfect Skeletons. Add in all your various bonuses and they end up with Str 18, Dex 22, Immunity to Cold and Fire and +10 Initiative. If you Awaken them, they get Aletness and Lightning Reflexes as bonus feats (as well as the 3 feats from having 6HD), Blindsense 30ft, Fast Healing 3 and SR 17. The fact that they're Medium sized makes them easy to equip and disguise (good for infiltration missions if accompanied by an intelligent leader), whilst their high HD, Immunities and Special Qualities makes them better than most humanoid skeletons. As a Dread Necromancer, you can get a pretty fair number of these at your beck and call...you can get 1/level with a +2 Charisma modifier and a +8 Cha mod (not too difficult) will get you 2/level. 40 of these puppies makes for a fairly decent bodyguard, even at level 20.

[Grumman]

Just have the catapult with a delayed animate trap on it. It's a corpse when it goes over, but the next round a skeleton jumps out!

You are not going to get useable skeletons out of this process.

[Gamerlord]

Have a few wights? Laying siege to a large city? Know a secret passage into the city slums filled with lvl-1 commoners? I think you get my Point .

[Lunix Vandal]

Have an enemy-controlled area with plenty of low-level NPCs (aka cannon fodder) around? Sneak your necromancer in, then revel in the options that open up, even in Core-only games!

At CL 15+, create greater undead lets you pop Shadows -- being incorporeal, anything without magic weapons or spells is pretty well guaranteed to die (along with the 5' step into any solid surface for instant invulnerability mentioned by Set). And stuff that dies to a Shadow's 1d6 Strength drain attack pops back up in under 5 rounds as ... another Shadow. Controlled by its killer, who is (presumably) controlled by you. Not quite the zombie apocalypse of modern myths, but still.

At CL 16+, CGU lets you do the same thing with Wraiths instead, which have higher stats (faster flight, higher HP, AC and attack bonus) at the cost of being explicitly worthless in natural sunlight. Also, they do a combination of normal and Constitution drain, the latter of which has a Fort-negates save. Fortunately, any-and-everything killed by a Wraith still rises as another (controlled!) Wraith.

At CL 18+, CGU lets you do it with Spectres -- even higher stats than Wraiths, and they use negative levels. (Oh look, that city full of 1- and 2-HD commoners with only 10 AC? My Spectre runs around with its 80-foot-per-round perfect-maneuverability flight and insta-kills one with an attack roll of 4 or higher. And proceeds to do the same thing over again during each of the next 1d4 rounds while waiting for the first commoner to rise as another Spectre under its control.) Still incorporeal, but (again) worthless in natural sunlight. I'm sure you can work around that, though.

For Caster Levels below 15, I only see one (Core-only) option for this kind of cascading, nth-generation-controlled-spawn-of-something-you-made apocalypse: wights, though you do need a fourth-level Sor/Wiz spell slot. Throw an enervation at a 1-HD commoner a few minutes before sundown, wait for the corpse to rise later that evening, control it, and let it loose.

Of course, the problem with all of these is that if any of the critters partway up the hierarchy dies, you lose control of everything under it. Once there's more than you (or your allies) can reasonably defeat, you'd better be praying to Orcus and/or Vecna that some foolhardy adventurer or guardsman doesn't accidentally splatter one of the undead under your direct control. (For Shadows/Wraiths/Spectres, I would suggest implementing a standing order along the lines of "kill exactly two creatures, then return to my base of operations and hide in the walls/floor/ceiling until commanded to do otherwise; relay this command to the spawn you create in doing so.") Unless of course you don't care whether or not you can actually use the area once the undead are finished with it, in which case you can just drop the bomb and run for it.

[Dixieboy]

You are not going to get useable skeletons out of this process.

Semi rotten corpses were used in warfare in ye olde days, thus just made them twenty times as dangerous.
Spreading diseases AND eating your brainz.

[Myrmex]

You are not going to get useable skeletons out of this process.

Why not? Because some of the bones break?
It's not like you could get a usable skeleton out of a corpse, either, without all the ligaments and tendons attaching things.

To put it briefly; magic.

[Grumman]

Why not? Because some of the bones break?
It's not like you could get a usable skeleton out of a corpse, either, without all the ligaments and tendons attaching things.

To put it briefly; magic.

The rules for Animate Dead specify that you need a mostly intact corpse or skeleton. Anything that does enough damage to de-animate an animated skeleton (like smashing them to an unyielding surface by catapult) is also going to do enough damage to render it too damaged to be animated.

[Dixieboy]

Which is why we use corpses with a bit of flesh on.

Zombies.

[lyko555]

The rules for Animate Dead specify that you need a mostly intact corpse or skeleton. Anything that does enough damage to de-animate an animated skeleton (like smashing them to an unyielding surface by catapult) is also going to do enough damage to render it too damaged to be animated.

so make the catapult put a time delay mending spell on it to >?

[Myrmex]

The rules for Animate Dead specify that you need a mostly intact corpse or skeleton. Anything that does enough damage to de-animate an animated skeleton (like smashing them to an unyielding surface by catapult) is also going to do enough damage to render it too damaged to be animated.

In that case, you could rarely make a skeleton out of a creature that died anything but a natural death, since it would have taken enough damage to de-animate an animated skeleton.

[lyko555]

yeah but a sword isnt going to damage a skeletal structure the way flying into the rock wall at 180mph is

[Oslecamo]

In that case, you could rarely make a skeleton out of a creature that died anything but a natural death, since it would have taken enough damage to de-animate an animated skeleton.

Do you really need to breack half the bones in a person's body to kill them? I don't think so. It's enough to just cut soft tissue.

But the animated skeleton will only stop moving when you've grinded it to litle pieces.

Plus I think undeads are reduced to dust when killed.