Agent of the Grave's Inspired Necromancy

[Bashamo]

I am having some trouble reconciling this ability with the text of Animate Dead.

Inspired Necromancy (Ex):

When determining the maximum number of Hit Dice of undead he can control with spells like animate dead, a character counts his Agent of the Grave levels twice. This ability does not factor into how many undead he can create with a single casting of a spell. Thus, a cleric 7/Agent of the Grave 3 would be able to control 52 Hit Dice worth of undead with animate dead.

from Animate Dead:

No matter how many times you use this spell, however, you can control only 4 HD worth of undead creatures per caster level.

Now, the HD limit calculation seems very straight forward at first. In the example given: 4 HD/CasterLv * (7 Cleric + 2 * 3 Agent) caster levels = 52HD of undead. What's tripping me up is that Agent of the Grave is a 5 level class, but, as per the class chart, the 1st level does not progress spellcasting from the base class at all. So, the effective caster level when reanimating for our Cleric/Agent in the example would be 12 (7 Cleric + 2 * 2 Agent), for a total of 48HD of undead.
Am I just misunderstanding how Caster Level works in regard to prestige classes, or is there really something wrong here? It could be that the example is simply wrong, or that the Agent was supposed to be a full-spell-progression class and the chart is wrong, or the Agent breaks the normal Animate Dead rules just because.

Spells per Day/Spells Known:

When a new Agent of the Grave level is gained, the character gains new spells as if he had also gained a level in a spellcasting class he belonged to before adding the prestige class. He does not, however, gain other benefits a character of that class would have gained, except for additional spells per day, spells known (if he is a spontaneous spellcaster), and an increased effective level of spellcasting. If the character has more than one spellcasting class before becoming an Agent of the Grave he must decide which class he adds the new level to for the purpose of determining spells per day.

[Samasboy1]

This appears to be caused by a possible change that was missed in editing.

The Spells text would imply that the AotG gets increased casting every level (It says "When a new Agent of the Grave level is gained," not "Every level after 1st" or "Every level starting at 2nd level"), but the chart shows no spellcasting increase at 1st level.

So the example was probably written assuming full casting progression.

Personally, I think you could easily give the PrC full casting and be fine.

[Bashamo]

Samasboy1 wrote:

This appears to be caused by a possible change that was missed in editing.

The Spells text would imply that the AotG gets increased casting every level (It says "When a new Agent of the Grave level is gained," not "Every level after 1st" or "Every level starting at 2nd level"), but the chart shows no spellcasting increase at 1st level.

I almost chased that chain of thought in my original post, until I opened up Paths of Prestige for some examples. The spells/day thing was actually a mistake on the part of whomever copied the class to DD20PFSRD. In PoP, spells/day has its own entry at the start of the book rather than for each class. They used a phrase like "for each class, at the levels indicated on their chart...", so that's not valid evidence. It would be fantastic if AotG was full progression, though.

[Samasboy1]

But Agent of the Grave isn't from Paths of Prestige, it appeared in Broken Moon, part 3 of 6 of the Carrion Crown adventure path.

The Spells text appears there.

[Bashamo]

Oh my bad. Not sure how I made that mistake. So it does say "every level" in the original text then? That probably does mean that it was meant to be a full casting progression class at some point in its development.