Tim Malmstrom's page

*Minor spoiler warning for Game of Thrones*

So I was watching the GoT TV series yesterday and I saw a White Walker animating what had to be hundreds, if not thousands of new wights (which had been killed by wights in the first place) with one spell/motion, and I got curious if that could be replicated within the existing Pathfinder rules.

The core rule for controlling undead in PF is that a spellcaster can only control his caster level in HD of undead, spread out among various undead as he sees fit. This makes controlling entire armies of undead pretty much impossible on your own, bar certain spells, feat and class abilities which increase this number.

Then I got to thinking. A common trait of undead created from the Create Spawn ability of an undead is that it reanimates under the control of its creator. Wight spawn certainly follow this rule. Now I got curious. Do new undead created by an undead that was created by a spellcaster count towards his HD limit? If yes, then this question is moot. But if it doesn't, it raises some interesting possibilities.

Let's got back to the GoT episode. The White Walker raises his hands and every human in the village behind him rises as a (frost) wight. Now, what if he wasn't actually animating them? What if that was simply a unique AoE spell/ability that speeds up the "animation time" of 'naturally' created wights to nothing? That way, he's not actually creating undead, he's just speeding up something that would have happened anyway, which I think is much simpler.

I don't believe I have ever seen a HD limit on undead with the Create Spawn ability in any of the bestiaries, so apparently those undead can create pretty much as many undead as they want, provided they do it personally. Spawn sometimes don't have the ability to create spawn of their own, but suppose they do.

Can undead command their own spawn over a distance?

Do they need to speak or is it a mental action?

Do spawn obey the creator of their creator?

Are there hierarchies among undead? Vampires in most fictions certainly seems so.

If this would be RAW possible, then a spellcaster "only" needs to create one undead with the Create Spawn ability, defend it while it kills and creates a suitable large number of spawn, then keep the "prime" undead controlled and safe while s/he sends out the new horde to kill and grow, while he keeps control of them with the "prime" undead.

What are your thoughts on this?

A gaming buddy of mine had something of a thought on the Soul Bind spell yesterday. He brought to my attention that while the spell has a listed value needed (a black sapphire worth 1,000 gp per HD of the target), it doesn't really specify that the sapphire in question needs to be "empty".

His angle to this spell is that instead of only being able to hold one soul, it can hold several, but the gp value determines the strongest soul it can hold. As an example of this, he showed me the book Start of Darkness, from the Order of the Stick series. On pg 106, the main villain, a lich, used Soul Bind to trap the soul of his recently-killed enemy, an epic-level wizard, inside a black sapphire. But the thing is, he had already trapped that wizard girlfriend, a high-level druid, inside the sapphire beforehand.

So that's two souls in one gem. Now, either that sapphire was big enough to hold all the HD of their combined souls (a bit of a stretch, but it was bigger than his hand, so, maybe), or it was big enough to hold the epic wizard, and the druid was just a bonus.

Now, either the author (Rich Burlew, great writer) was doing it by taking some liberties with the source material for the sake of plot, or he's found a genuine loophole in the spell.

I've read quite a lot of RPG books based in the DnD system, and there has *always* been spells, creatures, magic items and even materials that can trap a soul upon death, but very rarely (at least in my experience) has there been any such means that could hold multiple souls at once.

Now, there's nothing in the spell description that denies this possibility, but I'm a little unsure about how to handle it.

On the one hand, it gives the players an advantage in that the don't need to do as much hunting for resources if they, for whatever reason, want to use the spell multiple times. But then, NPC's gets the same advantage, and seriously, how easy is it to find a sapphire big enough to handle the beasties on the higher end of the CR-range?

On the other hand, thematically I don't think it'd be that much of an issue. It'd basically be like the caster putting all their eggs in one basket, which has its own shares of dangers. And there are plenty of examples in modern entertainment of methods of holding multiple souls (I'm mainly looking at the Darksiders series here).

Imagine for example a necromancer that had used the above method, and had a very big sapphire holding several souls of his enemies. If that gem was to be smashed, or for that matter crumbled to dust because he simply miscalculated how many HD a new target had, all the souls inside would be freed at once. And if I was feeling like some poetic justice, I'd have all the now-freed souls manifests as ghosts and promptly proceed to kick the necromancer's ass.

Any input on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Hey everyone. I'm new here on the boards, and this is my first post. And I'm already asking for help. Great.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I read a chapter about how the visual/physical effects of channeling energy varies depending on what god you worship. I remember reading that clerics of Nethys who channels negative energy makes half of one side of the victim's bodies become horribly burned.

I know it's somewhere in my collection, but that's like 200 PDFs and my free time doesn't allow for quite that much.

Does anybody recognize what Im talking about? You'd make a Pathfinder newbie really happy if you could tell me.