Animate Dead (HD)

[Detect Magic]

I have two questions:

1.) When casting animate dead, is the HD of the risen corpse dependent upon the racial/creature HD of the creature to be risen, or does the caster elect how many HD the corpse will be risen with? (Example: When raising a human as a skeleton, is it risen with 1 HD or can the caster, in this case a 5th level cleric, raise it with 10 HD?)

2.) If the answer to the previous question is that the corpse's HD is dependent upon it's racial/creature HD, is there a way to grant it more HD?

[Nigrescence]

Detect Magic wrote:

I have two questions:

1.) When casting animate dead, is the HD of the risen corpse dependent upon the racial/creature HD of the creature to be risen, or does the caster elect how many HD the corpse will be risen with? (Example: When raising a human as a skeleton, is it risen with 1 HD or can the caster, in this case a 5th level cleric, raise it with 10 HD?)

2.) If the answer to the previous question is that the corpse's HD is dependent upon it's racial/creature HD, is there a way to grant it more HD?

Skeletons wrote:

Hit Dice: A skeleton drops any HD gained from class levels and changes racial HD to d8s. Creatures without racial HD are treated as if they have 1 racial HD. If the creature has more than 20 Hit Dice, it can't be made into a skeleton by the animate dead spell. A skeleton uses its Cha modifier (instead of its Con modifier) to determine bonus hit points.

That pretty much spells it out. It is dependent upon the racial HD, and it is not up to your choice as a caster.

As for your second question, no, but you can sort of use up more HD as far as raising and controlling is concerned to add variants to the skeleton form, but this doesn't actually increase the HD.

Skeletons wrote:

Numerous variant skeletons exist, such as those whose bones burn with an unending fire and those who drip with gore and reassemble themselves over time. Both of these variant skeletons can be created using animate dead, but they count as twice their normal number of Hit Dice per casting. Once controlled, they count normally against the controller's limit.

[Tom Baumbach]

The answer to #1 is found in the descriptions of skeletons and zombies in the bestiary. Both templates drop Hit Dice gained from class levels, leaving races that only gain Hit Dice via class levels with 1 Hit Dice.

So yes, the Hit Dice of a risen corpse is dependent upon the racial/creature Hit Dice. To get more powerful undead, use a stronger spell or find more durable corpses.

Also, relevant links.