Creating an army of undead with limited resources


Rules Questions


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Can I use create greater undead to make an army of incorporeal horrors if I only have access to a single corpse? Please explain your answer, sticking to the RAW if possible. Insofar as I can tell, there's absolutely nothing indicating you couldn't do this.


With a single corpse? Nope. You get 1 undead out of 1 corpse, and your undead need to kill more people, turning them into corpses, to spawn them into more undead.

Spectre's Create Spawn:
Any humanoids slain by a spectre become spectres themselves in 1d4 rounds. Spawn so created are less powerful than typical spectres, and suffer a –2 penalty on all d20 rolls and checks, receive –2 hp per HD, and only drain one level on a touch. Spawn are under the command of the spectre that created them and remain enslaved until its death, at which point they lose their spawn penalties and become full-fledged and free-willed spectres. They do not possess any of the abilities they had in life.

Also, undead you make with the spell aren't under your control, and are intelligent and evil, so have fun with that =D


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Is there a rule that limits it though?

As far as I can tell, from one humanoid corpse we could probably get two isitoq (undead eyeballs), or one beheaded, two crawling hands, a shadow, a shredskin (undead skin), a skeleton, one or more tekenu (undead entrails), an undigested (fecal matter), and maybe incorporate the rest of the corpse's remains into a necrocraft. Why wouldn't something similar work for other incorporeal undead?

The create greater undead spell clearly requires a corpse, but it doesn't animate the corpse, so you can theoretically cast it an infinite amount of times. I'm trying to find something in the rules that refutes that.


It's cheesey as hell, but there is no rule saying that you cannot make more than one undead from one creature.

It's just... sorta unfeasible in general to spend so much effort on one dead body (outside of the Create Greater Undead spell), so there isn't much reason for putting in extra conditions since it's such a niche case.

I mean, even if you go with the idea of it not being a "corpse" after a certain level of taking body parts away, one way I've seen people theorise creating undead from one person was to cut off the finger of someone who is dead, raise that person from the dead from the finger, animate their corpse, repeat.

Some GM's might say a torso isn't enough to animate a zombie, but few Gm's would argue that a body lacking a single finger is enough to prevent reanimation.


so are you hoping to get the corpse moved to the material components line just to come at us with some eschew materials type of thing next? that would be hilarious imho.

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