I'm planning on my group to eventually run in At the Heart of Evil (author K. Axel Carlson) and I'm going to continue the adventure at the point where the Antipaladin surrounds the castle with his army of undead. I'm thinking the PCs will be around 13th level at this point (I'm beefing up the base adventure a bit).
I'm running into a problem though. It never says how the paladin accomplishes creating and controlling an army of undead. A paladin can take the control undead feat but paladins don't get the animate/create undead spells. The adventure specifically says he has patrols of skeletons wandering the barony.
I'm placing this in the Forgotten Realms in Damara. In the adventure, the antipaladin's dreams corrupt him and he finds a ruined tower where the evil workings of the adventure begin and he turns his paladin buddies into wraiths. I am making this ruined tower the Witch King Zhengyi's Tower Perilous (decades after his defeat). Zhengyi was known to have powerful tomes of magic left behind after his defeat. Some of these have been discovered and have cause major problems for those who found with crazy magic happening.
What I'm trying to do is figure out how to have the paladin create and control and army of undead without simply saying "he has a powerful artifact, poof, he can create an army of undead without limit". I want a mechanic.
I was thinking that perhaps the tome his dreams lead him to provides him with a Witchfire companion (who could then control a Hag coven or he has multiple Wichfire allies). The paladin could be high enough level to control the Witchfire who could create undead 3/day but even the Witchfire has a fairly low limit to the number of undead she can control as restricted by the spell. Also they can only cast at 9th level of ability so ghoul is the best undead it can do and wouldn't be able to control any ghouls that spawned from ghoul fever.
The other idea I had was to have control over a Morgh which can create an endless army of fast zombies (maybe have this one do plague zombies instead?) that it can control. This would take forever for one Morgh to kill enough people though.
Anyone have any good ideas for an Antipaladin to control an army of undead? Leadership feat to attract some intelligent ones maybe?
This comment may be a bit late... buuuut just a thought... no real evil threat makes it to the top without walking over the minions he has gathered.... so here's my thought:
at the top: Anti-Paladin
beneath him are different regiments that have specific duties.
have the leadership feat and have followers and a cohort.
These followers could all be Clerics of decently low level, almost easy targets for the PC's, but where they lack in level, they make up for in number. Now these evil clerics could all own a small platoon of undead "controlled" undead. Having a ton of charisma as the anti-paladin is good too as it aids his unholy resilience as well, making him have godly saves. Then for the few intelligent undead, what's stopping them from following this anti-paladin for the sheer purpose of an overall goal? Like, their services for endless gluttony or lust or greed or what not, reasons you could think up pretty easily.
Currently we're playing in a campaign where undead legions are overthrowing the world and we are mere troops attempting to conquer. Dog eat dog world n all haha.
You get my jist yeah?