This is very much a "talk to your GM" thing, particularly when it comes to creating an entire animated ship. Sure sounds cool, and I'd let you do it as a GM, but with some significant effort and sacrifice.
There's a feat, Undead Leadership, which might help to give you a crew that's somewhat less likely to rise up and kill all the players in their sleep. Or you could just create and control lots of undead as normal.
The main limit with Bonethrall is the 1 HD/caster level thing. A full-size ship would probably have lots more HD than you have caster levels, so you may have to talk with your GM about that. (Rule of Cool might trump RAW, and a ship has some limitations, like not being small enough to follow you into dungeons or ashore, but ... talk to your GM.)
Animate object is the general way to get things to move around, but using some variant on prehensile hair is a cool, if creepy, way to visualize it.
This spell might be of interest to you:
Skeleton Crew
About making the whole ship undead I don't know if there is any way to do it but it looks interesting.
It would be worth, but as someone said in these forums long ago when talking about a ship propelled by a huge undead croc; if you are doing it chances are someone in the Shackles is doing it too.
I would suggest you tell your GM to look into Raugsmauda to spice things up.
On the practicality, pirates are written as superstitious, not fond of the undead. Talk to your GM if this will be a problem with socialising and gaining favour in the Shackles with others, since it could be problematic or not a problem at all.
|
To take you literally, you may want to look at something from Bestiary 4 - the Necrocraft.
All you need is rope, pitch, Animate Dead and its monetary cost, good UMD and a scroll of Make Whole or someone who can cast it and be willing to help you with this venture, and of course, 50-100 dead people of Medium size.
Ask your GM if you can give it a Swim speed but no land speed, and spend your Construct Points toward increasing its speed, giving it DR 5/Slash, or whatever you want it to do. There you have it: a literal undead ship made of waterproofed corpses stuck and lashed together that's big enough to house your friends. You don't even need a Skeleton Crew; just tell it to move as your navigator commands, and it'll make all necessary adjustments by itself! If you need more precise control, go belowdecks to your cabin and Possess it yourself. For extra fun, ask the GM if you can make the figurehead a Hovering Head that you can speak through when you're possessing the ship.
Downside: everyone's going to be terrified of you, and your friends may not want to sleep in your new ship. Also, getting the requisite volume of bodies may also be tricky/morally suspect.
Our campaign had a necrocraft really big fish. Future plans were to make it able to tow a ship. Campaign ended first. :-/
My own witch character, however, was looking an the Animate Object variation of making a construct, combined with the Coven ability to raise caster level. Given his Leadership feat, hitting the CL 32 needed for the Colossal sized ship would not be too hard. With Salvage not available for a while, I made plans to make an animate submerging dock that could load a sunken ship onto itself, and bring it back up to the surface. Along with Unseen Crew to do repairs, I could easily increase my fleet by scavenging recent battle losses. I could also loot ships that sunk easily. With a Cloak of the Manta Ray and a Vest of the Deep, I could command it from below the waters. Alas, my plans fell through due to the campaign ending.
/cevah