Alright. Can you cast a DELAYED Animate Dead spell...having the corpse as well as the opal in place? or would you just have to have them in place then, obviously, cast the spell right away and have the effects be instantaneous- as per normal?
Furthermore, can you cast Animate Dead on a corpse with Gentle Repose cast on it?
I presume you can since there should be no such hindrance to the enterprising necromancer.
(I ask the first question because I decided to disturb the corpse of my player character's brother, by placing a black opal in the mouth- and this would be rather than a useless shell of a black opal. So, would this basically be placing the corpse in line to be animated via a clerc/wizard necromancer or necromancer proxy such as a glyph spell or a ward of some sort? I'm looking for ideas to animate dead on the move essentially. Rather in character the PC appraised the opal, even admitted out of character what I was clearly trying to do and put the opal BACK in his mouth, he even told the npc cleric rather cryptically, asking if he put any stones in his brother's mouth, and the cleric said no, what kind of stone? and with his PC answering funky stone or the like rather than "black opal" the Cleric shook it off as a weird dwarven practice as he is a halfling from a land far away.)
I guess I might be either getting too creative or too stupid to animate dead properly in the fashion I'm attempting to. (I'm still thinking of the problem the pcs are encountering as a plague of undead, so far the pcs are separated but they'll be brought together on the issue soon.)
If you guys don't support the Animating Dead on the Go idea, then I'll probably let the corpse of the PC's brother rest in peace with a cryptic gift in his mouth. It was just one of the on the fly ideas I had after not having had any sleep, perhaps I put too much emphasis on what looked like a disturbed covering to the body and not enough on the possibility that it could have happened later for instance, like during the night after their last encounter. Oh well, if one evil plan doesn't work, there'll certainly be another I can use.