Buffing Undead


Advice

Scarab Sages

I'm having trouble with this: I'm thinking about a necromancer, and I'm wondering what buff spells actually work on undead. I know desecrate buffs them, but what about other spells? I was looking at Bull's Strength, but a friend told me it won't work. I can't see why not, but I suspect he may be right. (Knowing me I read right over the reason and just kept going.) So exactly which spells can be used to buff a necromancer's undead minions?
Thanks
Q

Dark Archive

I see nothing in the rules that would stop spells like Bull's Str from effecting an undead. You would be better off asking for a list of buff spells that could not effect the undead.

From what I can tell, most of the normal buff spells should work.


Happler wrote:
From what I can tell, most of the normal buff spells should work.

Well... Bear's Endurance might be a tad underwhelming when applied on your undead minions...

SCNR

Shadow Lodge

d20pfsrd.com wrote:

Undead

Undead are once-living creatures animated by spiritual or supernatural forces.

An undead creature has the following features.

d8 Hit Die.
Base attack bonus equal to 3/4 total Hit Dice (medium progression).
Good Will Saves.
Skill points equal to 4 + Int modifier (minimum 1) per Hit Die. Many undead, however, are mindless and gain no skill points or feats. The following are class skills for undead: Climb, Disguise, Fly, Intimidate, Knowledge (arcana), Knowledge (religion), Perception, Sense Motive, Spellcraft, and Stealth.
Traits: An undead creature possesses the following traits (unless otherwise noted in a creature's entry).

No Constitution score. Undead use their Charisma score in place of their Constitution score when calculating hit points, Fortitude saves, and any special ability that relies on Constitution(such as when calculating a breath weapon’s DC).
Darkvision 60 feet.
Immunity to all mind-affecting effects (charms, compulsions, morale effects, patterns, and phantasms).
Immunity to bleed, death effects, disease, paralysis, poison, sleep effects, and stunning.
Not subject to nonlethal damage, ability drain, or energy drain. Immune to damage to its physical ability scores (Constitution, Dexterity, and Strength), as well as to exhaustion and fatigue effects.
Cannot heal damage on its own if it has no Intelligence score, although it can be healed. Negative energy (such as an inflict spell) can heal undead creatures. The fast healing special quality works regardless of the creature's Intelligence score.
Immunity to any effect that requires a Fortitude save (unless the effect also works on objects or is harmless).
Not at risk of death from massive damage, but is immediately destroyed when reduced to 0 hit points.
Not affected by raise dead and reincarnate spells or abilities. Resurrection and true resurrection can affect undead creatures. These spells turn undead creatures back into the living creatures they were before becoming undead.
Proficient with its natural weapons, all simple weapons, and any weapons mentioned in its entry.
Proficient with whatever type of armor (light, medium, or heavy) it is described as wearing, as well as all lighter types. Undead not indicated as wearing armor are not proficient with armor. Undead are proficient with shields if they are proficient with any form of armor.
Undead do not breathe, eat, or sleep.

So, can't use con buffs, but Cha buffs work the same way. And spells/effects that provide a morale bonus don't work on them. Doesn't say anything about enhancements not working, or luck, profane/sacred, circumstance, competence, insight, or most any other buff descriptor.

Now, if your friend is the GM, he might just be telling you how it works in his game, but otherwise most buffs will work fine.


I'm not sure there exist non-mind-affecting spells in the Enchantment school, so that whole school is out.

Dark Archive

Quantum Steve wrote:
I'm not sure there exist non-mind-affecting spells in the Enchantment school, so that whole school is out.

Yep, the core book says:

Quote:
All enchantments are mind-affecting spells.

So, the Rage spell, for example is out.


If you really wanted to use enchantments on your undead you could take a level of Sorcerer and go with the Undead Bloodline. They can treat corporeal undead who used to be humanoids as humanoids for spell targeting purposes..


Interestingly, I went and did a search on a spell filter and got results of there being 191 Enchantment spells in general and there being 175 Enchantment spells with the [mind-affecting] descriptor. Two of those ended up having the [mind-affecting] descriptor on Archives of Nethys.

Keep Watch and Bungle are two that don't have it in their spell descriptions, even on AoN.

Swallow Your Fear, Delay Pain, Bestow Insight, Severed Fate, Bleed For Your Master, Instant Enemy, the Downtime spells Business Booms & Prosperous Room, Bite the Hand & its Mass version, Die For Your Master, and Utter Contempt also all apparently lack the [mind-affecting] descriptor.

I don't see any of those being used to buff undead, though. Barring maybe Bestow Insight if there's some kind of undead skillmonkey in the party.


A friend of mine had her PFS witch learn Unliving Rage because she's played several scenarios with another player's bones oracle (who never animates undead himself, but has the Raise the Dead and Undead Servitude revelations to gain temporary "friends").

Sovereign Court

Would there be any options available through Shadow Enchantment? Technically doesn't have the Mind Affecting keyword, though it specifies that:

Shadow Enchantment wrote:
Objects, mindless creatures, and creatures immune to mind-affecting effects automatically succeed at their Will saves against this spell.
Saving Throws wrote:

Voluntarily Giving up a Saving Throw

A creature can voluntarily forgo a saving throw and willingly accept a spell’s result. Even a character with a special resistance to magic can suppress this quality.

Does choosing to fail a save override automatically succeeding on the save?

Also, does the shadow line inherit the keywords from the mimicked spell? Its been a while since I've used them.


Firebug wrote:
Would there be any options available through Shadow Enchantment?

Very dubious; the Shadow Enchantment spell is still duplicating the effect of the spell in question. If that spell is a Mind-Affecting Effect, then it should still be even if the effect was created by Shadow Enchantment. It doesn't explicitly state that it inherits the keyword so there is some wiggle room to rules lawyer it, but if this came up at my own table I'd shoot that down and say it's still mind-affecting. It would be easier to get around this with the Threnodic Spell metamagic.

The go-to buff option on the Enchantment spell list is Heroism, which gives a morale bonus. Undead explicitly cannot benefit from morale bonuses (completely independent of their immunity from mind-affecting spells) so even if you got past their immunity they still won't actually benefit. Same deal for the Bless spell. The only way I'm aware of to get around this problem is with the Undead Sorcerer bloodline arcana, which straight up causes them to be treated as if they were of the humanoid creature type instead of the undead creature type, bypassing both the immunity to mind-affecting and the inability to benefit from morale bonuses at the same time. Undead Sorcerer is normally a pretty terrible bloodline, but buffing allied undead is one of its legitimate niches.


Quantum Steve wrote:
I'm not sure there exist non-mind-affecting spells in the Enchantment school, so that whole school is out.

Unless you apply the Threnodic Spell metamagic. It is a +2 spell level. But you could get a lesser Threnodic Metamagic Rod for 9,000 gp. Good for 3/pay uses on a spell of 1st to 3rd level, such as Heroism.

/cevah


Cevah wrote:

Good for 3/pay uses on a spell of 1st to 3rd level, such as Heroism.

/cevah

Threnodic Spell does not work on heroism. It gets around undead immunity to mind-affecting spells, but does not bypass the restriction that undead cannot benefit from morale bonuses, so threnodic heroism still doesn't affect undead.


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Two levels of dirge bard will push your mind effecting spells onto undead "as if they were living creatures, even if mindless." Not sure if that "as if" will get morale bonuses in play or not.


It appears to allow your mind-affecting spells to ignore all aspects of the undead creature type, so that would work for affecting them with mind-affecting abilities. However, it's written just vaguely enough that a restrictive GM might shoot it down.


Dasrak wrote:
It [Secrets of the Grave] appears to allow your mind-affecting spells to ignore all aspects of the undead creature type, so that would work for affecting them with mind-affecting abilities. However, it's written just vaguely enough that a restrictive GM might shoot it down.

That is a tough one, luckily this is Advice. So we can be a bit more open to ideas and interpretations, however, Secrets of the Grave certainly is not written to ignore all aspects of the Undead creature type, however.

It very clearly states that while it allows mind-affecting spells to work on undead, it still has to be able to work on Undead, meaning a charm person will not work, because despite being a mind-affecting spell that is now allowed by Secrets of the Grave, the undead is not a Humanoid, even if the were a Humanoid.

So depending on how your GM interprets that, it could clearly mean that a [mind-affecting] spell that somehow caused death or poisoned the target (I don't have any examples) would also have no effect, even though the undead is not immune to the spell itself. Because those immunities are based on something separate from their mind-affecting immunity.

In the case being discussed here, fortunately, you would be right, because the wording for morale effects falls entirely under an Undead's mind-affecting immunity clause, so those would be allowed, whereas a hold monster spell would still have no effect, because despite being mind-affecting, it specifically causes paralysis (uses the word 'paralyzed'), and an undead is immune to paralysis as a separate part of being Undead.

Silver Crusade

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the best buff spell I've encountered for use with Undead would be Ablative Barrier...

+2 AC, and "... the first 5 point of lethal damage the target takes from each attack are converted to nonlethal damage..." with a duration of 1 hour/level (or until it converts 5/level HP of damage), it makes Undead much harder to put down.

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