I would say the price is equal to the effective HD, so doubled for the bloody skeleton.
And since Animate dead is kind of like a summon monster with unlimited duration, the slightly expensive material component is necessary to prevent players from swarming an enemy with animated undead. (You don't need to control all the undead, if you're fine with them just attacking anything in sight, so why not cart in a whole bunch of corpses and wreak havoc?)
Hi,
I have a question about the cleric undead lord archetype. One of our player in the group is asking if he should double the cost of onyx if he animates a bloody skeleton.
In the animate dead spell we can read that it count as double HD for casting. Is it only regarding the max number of HD he can animate with a single cast or does it count also for the price to pay ?
Bloody skeletons "count as twice their normal number of Hit Dice per casting," so yes, they cost twice as much money to animate. They're well worth it, though, since they self-heal and even if they're destroyed, they come back to "life" an hour later. The types of attacks that can permanently destroy them are things that the bad guys aren't very likely to have at their disposal.
By the way I found the price of animate dead a little expensive for low levels. Is it only my opinion, do you have custom rules for that ? Is there an easy way for the payer to find onyx ?
Gems shouldn't be too hard to come by. Onyx gems aren't like diamonds of other extremely rare gems. It should be possible to buy some in most towns and almost any city.
Your player might want to take a look at the Blood Money spell. It let's you take 1d6 damage and 1+ points of Strength damage in place of an expensive material component. This is an excellent spell for a necromancer, especially if you can animate your minions during downtime when you can rest off the strength damage. Otherwise, just ask the cleric for a lesser restoration, or even better, buy a wand of it for him to use on you. At 90gp per charge, it's still cheaper than most expensive material components.
The necromancer in my group is a cleric so he cannot cast such a spell. But the idea was good, is there a way then for a caracter to learn a single spell from another class ?
You could buy a wand or scroll of it and use it with Use Magic Device. That's about all I can think of.
I found the undead lord really powerful. The cleric in our group is only level 5 (with undead master and gifted adept feats) and he is able to animate 40HD of creatures (lvl 5 + 4 lvl from undead master + 1 from gifted adept), he is quite op compare to other PCs in the group which is a pain to balance because monsters hard enough for him would one shot other PCs. Is there something we are doing wrong ?
Animate dead is, I hate to say it, a broken spell. Whenever I take it I am careful not to abuse it. I usually only keep one combat minion and leave the rest of the HD for things like nightmare skeleton mounts for the party.
If it's a problem in your game, you should talk to your player about it and see if you can work something out. I'd suggest taking that step before doing something as drastic as banning the spell and invalidating his entire character concept.