Undead Lord advice


Advice


One of my players in my current campaign is running an Undead Lord Cleric.

I actually like the flavor of the archetype, but I feel that the Corpse Companion ability hasn't been fleshed out enough.

As it reads, it appears that you can only make regular Skeletons, or the modified skeletons that appear in the Skeleton entry in the Bestiary. I find that kind of un-flavorful. I kind of want to at least allow a Skeletal Champion to be created, especially since the party is up to 10th level, and a regular Skeleton (even at 10HD) doesn't really do much of anything.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to make the Corpse Companion a bit more interesting and able to contribute to the party?


Sure, skeletons don't do anything if you make them out of people. Any Undead Lord worth their salt will consider any humanoid that is not a giant mostly a waste of their time, especially if they're using their free undead ritual on them. If I were them, I would hunt down a five-headed cryohydra (or a pyrohydra for fun with stacking immunities), kill it, and then raise it as a burning skeleton (normal skeleton for the Pyro, thus upping it to 10 heads.). If I wanted it to just keep coming back, I'd make it a bloody skeleton instead. Boom, instant 10th-level profit. Hell, the fact that it can hand out 5 aid anothers on command alone is worth the trouble.


This ability is basically replacing a first level domain power, so it isn't expected to be all that powerful. With a few exception, most similar abilities are rarely used at 10th level, making this one already more powerful than most.

A 10 HD skeleton isn't going to do a whole lot. But it is free. It is able to provide some battlefield control and will suck up some damage before it is destroyed. Nothing great, but not bad either. I'd be hesitant to give it an upgrade for free.

I could see though having a feat 'Improved Corpse Companion' which would give you a 10 HD skeletal champion instead (with 8 class levels) putting it not terribly out of line with improved familiar or the leadership feat.

If you just want flavor, not mechanical changes, there would be nothing wrong with keeping the base skeleton stats, but adding in a possessing entity that is actually moving the thing around and has a personality. It could then talk do all sorts of flavor things without really changing the mechanics of the situation.


As written, the Corpse Companion is largely useless due to how weak it is. I'd suggest removing the HD penalty for applying variant templates to your corpse companion, and reducing the time required to replace it down to 1 minute.

mourge40k wrote:
If I wanted it to just keep coming back, I'd make it a bloody skeleton instead

If you use any templates the HD cap is halved, so you'll only get a 5 HD bloody skeleton. In other words, it's a false option.

Dave Justus wrote:
This ability is basically replacing a first level domain power, so it isn't expected to be all that powerful.

You're not just giving up a domain with undead lord, you're also locking into the deeply unfavorable undead domain. The undead domain has one of the worst lists of domain spells, and you're stuck with them as your only domain spells. It's actually a really nasty archetype from that perspective.

The corpse companion is actually about on par with the stuff like the fire domain ranged touch attacks; something you might use occasionally at low levels then completely forget that you have it at all at higher levels. You could buff it significantly and it would still be much weaker than the better 1st level domain abilities.


Since a character is giving up a domain, I think the ability should be as close to the Animal Domain's Animal Companion at the Cleric level minus three effective Druid level. We're high enough level that I don't need to worry, at this point, about how that would have impacted levels 1-3 for this character. The Undead Lord does get a couple of other little benefits in exchange for losing the Domain, but they're of pretty situational use. For example, the bonus Feat: Command Undead has yet to come into play since the party has not seen any Undead in the four levels since the Cleric joined the group. The Unlife Healer ability has been online for two levels, and it's been a decent combination with Death's Kiss for out of combat healing.

The issue I'm having is how to figure the creation of the Corpse Companion for a 10th level Undead Lord such that it is roughly equivalent to a 7th level Druid's Animal Companion.


We treat the ability as if it was cast using Animate Dead, so you can buff it (during creation) using Desecrate (two additional hitpoints per hit die if done properly!).

Additionally, we allow (if the player wants) to have the companion simply gain hitdice as the character levels, instead of having to go out and replace it every time the hitdice increase.

So, a level 2 Cleric could have a 1HD bloody skeleton with 1D8+4 HP (bloody has increase CHA, Desecrate adds more as well).

The same Cleric could KEEP this companion, so at level 20 could have a 10HD bloody skeleton (humanoid) with 10D8+40 hp.

That's how we do it. Houserule, yes, but it seems to work.


Don't underestimate Bloody Skeletons.

They aren't massive combat monsters, but they make WICKED flankers/shieldbearers (even if destroyed, they come back, plus with fastheal they stay up longer!)

Oh yeah, we let them use weapons, armor and shields.


alexd1976 wrote:

Don't underestimate Bloody Skeletons.

They aren't massive combat monsters, but they make WICKED flankers/shieldbearers (even if destroyed, they come back, plus with fastheal they stay up longer!)

Oh yeah, we let them use weapons, armor and shields.

This, for sure. (Though skeletons do keep the old weapon proficiencies anyways, as per the template rules written for them.) Not only can they flank, but you can simply direct them to use aid another actions as well. And as mentioned before with my Pyroydra example, you can get some nice bonuses going that way real quickly. Sure, the Pyrohydra doesn't have the highest attack bonus (+6 at 5 hit dice is meh, after all). But it gets 5 of them, which will definitely give just about anyone a headache when used to aid someone else.


Would it be completely inappropriate or overpowered to have something like Warrior levels and/or Feats like a Skeletal Champion has?

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder First Edition / Advice / Undead Lord advice All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Advice