Death’s Head Talisman pricing, broken?

[Maxximilius]

I stomped upon this while looking before building a BBEG Dirge Bard for the DM.
Isn't the price, like, totally off ?

[skrahen]

Looks about right.
Costs about 50gp per hd to animate them.
Plus a little bit extra for materials, and corpses.

Scroll of animate dead that duplicates the 14 hd amulet costs 1225 for the cleric version
And has the same effect without taking up a slot. The amulet costs 1400 and it has it's own built in conveniences... So it looks right to me at least. What seems unbalanced to you?

[Maxximilius]

Just the idea that a non-magic character may get 24HD of undead under control, which is pretty awesome as a meat shield, and doesn't seem really costly for the benefit - even if destroyed undead means no more power on the amulet. But I may be doing armchair comments right now.

[Mirrel the Marvelous]

To make this even more broken, include the variant undead such as blood skeletons, then you could have 24HD of meatshields that come back to (un)life after an hour (method of death excepted of course).

[ikki3520]

Or for even more fun. Make the amulet slotless for twice the price.
Now you can essentially staff and guard your own lil kingdom for a mere 15k (5 amulets -> 9 skeleton troll bodyguards & 48 human skeleton servants)

Or if one wishes to break the world.. 2 blooded 12-headed hydras per amulet..

[hogarth]

skrahen wrote:

Scroll of animate dead that duplicates the 14 hd amulet costs 1225 for the cleric version

And has the same effect without taking up a slot. The amulet costs 1400 and it has it's own built in conveniences... So it looks right to me at least.

The spell Animate Dead can be made into an oil (it's level 3 and it targets an object), so you don't even need a scroll.

A CL 12 oil of Animate Dead would cost 2400 gp (600 for the onyx and 1800 for the CL 12 level 3 spell). Of course, that would only allow you to make a single 24 HD skeleton or zombie, not multiple creatures.