Hoard of Undead Squirrels

[Swish!]

Rules question up front: If a creature has a base damage of say: 1D2-4, but they get bonus moral damage from a source, say from a Desecrate spell
for undead, do you add the bonus damage after you subtract the -4 from the dice roll, or before?

Backstory:

I am designing an encounter for my party where they will be tasked with killing a corrupted Treant known as the Squirrel Lord. In his good aligned days, he was known as a safe haven for Squirrels, however due to a demonic incursion across the land, he was corrupted by Orcus.

I am using a Gnarlwood as the basis for the boss. Because of his Animate Dead SLA, and his caster level of 14, he can control 56 HD worth of Skeletons or Zombies. He also has Desecrate and Unhallowed, as well as an alter to Orcus.

My idea, is that he can control up to 56 skeletal squirrels, will the skeletal squirrels be doing 1 damage per hit, or 3 damage per hit (with the Desecrate spell)?

[Berinor]

It's all affecting the same value, so it would be applied before computing it. Per: "Minimum Damage: If penalties reduce the damage result to less than 1, a hit still deals 1 point of nonlethal damage." you would only get 1 nonlethal. I'm not sure what would happen on a critical hit...

[Lincoln Hills]

In case anybody else is unclear on this, a horde of monsters guard a treasure hoard. They are homophones, not synonyms.

(Stupid English! Other languages are better.)

[Nalia]

Lincoln, you misunderstand.

The undead squirrels ARE the treasure.

[Nalia]

Swish - lets say the modal bonus is...+5.

So, damage is 1D2-4+5, so 1D2+1

Berinor - I would say that all the plusses and minuses are sorted out before the die roll.

[daimaru]

Lincoln Hills wrote:

In case anybody else is unclear on this, a horde of monsters guard a treasure hoard. They are homophones, not synonyms.

(Stupid English! Other languages are better.)

Nah. Japanese is full of homophones too. The words for nose and flower, for instance, sound exactly the same. Both are pronounced hana.

[EvilMinion]

Hmm...
Why not just have undead squirrel swarms?

Model it after a rat swarm, but add zombie templates (or perhaps a few with skeleton templates)

Voila.

Then damage isn't an issue =)

The swarm would still have 3 HD with the zombie template.
So you could then have 18 of them... each one consisting of upwards of 300 squirrels! That's alot of squirrels.

[Joex The Pale]

EvilMinion wrote:

Hmm...

Why not just have undead squirrel swarms?

Model it after a rat swarm, but add zombie templates (or perhaps a few with skeleton templates)

You have no idea how happy you made me with this imagery! Undead rat swarms! I love it! Sure, they're tree rats, but the thought still counts. I'm so stealing this! :)