Ok so I have a question about Animate Dead the spell. So say for example a 5HD thing we're to be raised using animate Dead. Can I only get a 5HD thing or can I go up to the max I can animate? Example I can animate 12HD.
The Animate Dead spell allows for 4x your caster level in HD as a total amount. Think of it like a bucket. For example, let's say you're level 6, but let's also say your caster level is 8 when performing Animate Dead because you have the Spell Specialization feat and you've specialized in Animate Dead, this would net you a total of 4 x 8CL = 32HD worth of undead you could have animated at any given time.
In this bucket, you could have 30 undead that are 1HD each, plus one undead that is 2HD. Or, you could have 4 undead that are 7HD a piece, and 1 undead that is 4 HD.
Any way you'd like to fill up your bucket of 32HD is up to you, but it cannot exceed this amount or you'll have to give up some undead to make room for something new.
So let's say you have 28HD worth of undead in your 32HD bucket, and you come across an 8HD creature that you would like to animate with Animate Dead. You would then first have to drop 4HD worth of undead (or more), and then cast Animate Dead on your new 8HD creature.
I understand that part but my question is, does the dead creature dictate what I can animate or my caster level? So say I can animate 12HD with 1 casting. But there is a body on the ground that had 5HD worth. Do I just animate the 5HD or my max
Regardless of the type of undead you create with this spell, you can’t create more HD of undead than twice your caster level with a single casting of animate dead.
So in the same above example, you can animate up to 2x your 8CL with a single casting of Animate Dead, so 16HD in a single monster.
You can increase this amount with the feat Undead Master though.
I understand that part but my question is, does the dead creature dictate what I can animate or my caster level? So say I can animate 12HD with 1 casting. But there is a body on the ground that had 5HD worth. Do I just animate the 5HD or my max
In your example, you would raise the creature with 5HD with a single casting, and it would be a 5HD undead.
However, you can augment that creature with different templates if you want as well. Such as the Bloody or Burning templates. You could theoretically turn that 5HD creature into a 10HD undead by adding the bloody or burning template to it.
Check this page out for adding templates to various skeletons.
"The bloody and burning skeleton variants are created using the animate dead spell, but count as twice their normal number of Hit Dice per casting. Once controlled, they count normally against the controller’s limit."
I understand that part but my question is, does the dead creature dictate what I can animate or my caster level? So say I can animate 12HD with 1 casting. But there is a body on the ground that had 5HD worth. Do I just animate the 5HD or my maxIn your example, you would raise the creature with 5HD with a single casting, and it would be a 5HD undead.
However, you can augment that creature with different templates if you want as well. Such as the Bloody or Burning templates. You could theoretically turn that 5HD creature into a 10HD undead by adding the bloody or burning template to it.
To clarify here. Because that reads...weird (to me anyway).
1. Raising a 5HD creature
You get a 5 HD Zombie, Skeleton, what have you.
2. Raising blood skeletons, and other higher HD raises
The caster level required must high enough be able to raise something with double the HD of the creature you're raising but:
The HD of the raised creature(s) are still the same.
It counts against your bucket of controlled minions for the same amount. That is, its actual HD.
I understand that part but my question is, does the dead creature dictate what I can animate or my caster level? So say I can animate 12HD with 1 casting. But there is a body on the ground that had 5HD worth. Do I just animate the 5HD or my maxIn your example, you would raise the creature with 5HD with a single casting, and it would be a 5HD undead.
However, you can augment that creature with different templates if you want as well. Such as the Bloody or Burning templates. You could theoretically turn that 5HD creature into a 10HD undead by adding the bloody or burning template to it.
To clarify here. Because that reads...weird (to me anyway).
1. Raising a 5HD creature
You get a 5 HD Zombie, Skeleton, what have you.2. Raising blood skeletons, and other higher HD raises
The caster level required must high enough be able to raise something with double the HD of the creature you're raising but:
The HD of the raised creature(s) are still the same.
It counts against your bucket of controlled minions for the same amount. That is, its actual HD.
Okay, if you're a level 6 caster and you have Spell Specialization Animate Dead, you have an effective CL of 8CL, and a bucket of 4 x 8CL = 32HD worth of undead you can have under your control at a given time.
In any single casting of Animate Dead, you can only create an undead with an HD equal to 2 x 8CL = 16HD.
If you come across a 5HD creature and want to animate it, you have several options:
- Raise the creature as a 5HD undead
- Raise the creature as a 10HD undead with a bloody template
- Raise the creature as a 10HD undead with a burning template (and so on)
- Raise the creature as a 15HD undead with burning bloody template (there are mixed interpretations for double double = triple or double double = quadruple, such as FranktheDM's interpretation is quadruple, I personally go double double = triple. The RAW is ambiguous in this matter)
Once you've decided on how you're going to raise this creature, and let's say you've decided a Bloody Burning Skeleton, you cast the Animate Dead spell, and it becomes added to your 32HD bucket as a 15HD undead.
Animate Lesser Dead officially sucks... So I am LVL 5 wizard and I can control 45HD of undead right now and I am finding only 1 or 3 HD things to animate and I can't add templates... So what this post is telling me that I have to wait for a long time before Animate of any type to be USEFUL...
Pretty much. Lvl 6 is when it finally gets good.
Level 7... And even then I will probably just resort to Necrocrafts to get anything with lots of destructive power... GM won't just plant 20 HD dead things in my path...
See if you can find the locations of famous battles, graveyards, taxidermy shops etc.. where high value bodies might be found. Maybe an evil temple that would view such things as commodities to sell. What is the highest HD animal for sale in the local markets? Can you get a deal on an old, sickly one? Or buy a recently deceased one for "meat"?
I understand that part but my question is, does the dead creature dictate what I can animate or my caster level? So say I can animate 12HD with 1 casting. But there is a body on the ground that had 5HD worth. Do I just animate the 5HD or my maxIn your example, you would raise the creature with 5HD with a single casting, and it would be a 5HD undead.
However, you can augment that creature with different templates if you want as well. Such as the Bloody or Burning templates. You could theoretically turn that 5HD creature into a 10HD undead by adding the bloody or burning template to it.
To clarify here. Because that reads...weird (to me anyway).
1. Raising a 5HD creature
You get a 5 HD Zombie, Skeleton, what have you.2. Raising blood skeletons, and other higher HD raises
The caster level required must high enough be able to raise something with double the HD of the creature you're raising but:
The HD of the raised creature(s) are still the same.
It counts against your bucket of controlled minions for the same amount. That is, its actual HD.Okay, if you're a level 6 caster and you have Spell Specialization Animate Dead, you have an effective CL of 8CL, and a bucket of 4 x 8CL = 32HD worth of undead you can have under your control at a given time.
In any single casting of Animate Dead, you can only create an undead with an HD equal to 2 x 8CL = 16HD.
If you come across a 5HD creature and want to animate it, you have several options:
...
- Raise the creature as a 5HD undead
- Raise the creature as a 10HD undead with a bloody template
- Raise the creature as a 10HD undead with a burning template (and so on)
- Raise the creature as a 15HD undead with burning bloody template (there are mixed interpretations for double double = triple or double double = quadruple, such as FranktheDM's interpretation is quadruple, I personally go double double = triple.
This is actually incorrect, immensely so.
"Both of these variant skeletons can be created using animate dead, but they count as twice their normal number of Hit Dice per casting. Once controlled, they count normally against the controller's limit."When you cast the spell you can raise 2*CL at once, and creating variants multiplies the number of HD FOR THIS PURPOSE ONLY. The creature is still it's normal HD, it is just harder to raise as a variant, does not gain more HD.
Level 7... And even then I will probably just resort to Necrocrafts to get anything with lots of destructive power... GM won't just plant 20 HD dead things in my path...
I'm surprised bodies are a problem. I recall having the opposite problem, I had more things to animate then I had available under my HD cap. I ended up storing the bodies from a battle in a warehouse like structure in an abandoned town.
But I agree with java man. You should take a look at what corpses you can get your hands on in town. What does the local slaughterhouse do with their "leftovers"?
Alternatively, you can take a more sinister approach and scout out the bar and see if anyone looks like they would make a good "personal guard". Get them drunk and have them come back to your place. A casting of animate dead and a suit of armor that covers the body and you have yourself a new personal guard. Give him a mask and let everyone know that asks that he's a mute and you're good to go.
Also, while personally I prefer skeletons over zombies, zombies are good at low levels since they get bonus HD. A large 3HD creature for instance suddenly becomes 5HD when you animate it as a zombie even without templates.
I'm just bummed because I thought no matter what the corpse was I thought you could animate the max amount the undead cod let you. Eg skeletons can only get to 20HD per skeleton. So say of I found a 1HD dude on the side of the road. Killed him then animate dead, bam he would then a new 20GH (CR 8) human skeleton under my command. However my DM wants me to double check that, because she is under the impression that I can't control bsomething more powerful than myself LVL 5 (CR4 PC)
yeah, what you're describing is a necrocraft. Basically you take a whole bunch of corpses and then combine them into a big powerful undead creature.
Both zombie and skeleton are templates that get applied to a baseline creature. They don't spontaneously gain hd just because the caster happens to be powerful. Like if a 20th level werewolf bites you and you're only 5th level, it's not like you suddenly become a 20th level werewolf as a result, you just gain the template along with whatever increases are provided directly by the template.
Your DM is partially correct. The feat command undead will not allow you to control more hd then your cleric or wizard level. Additionally, the create undead spells limit the kind of undead you are able to create based on your level.
However, the animate dead spells carry no such restriction. If you cast animate dead inside of a desecrate spell (which you'll want to do every time if you can anyway), then you could potentially animate a single creature that once animated has a number of HD equal to your caster levelx4. Adding additional features like bloody will reduce this limit. So, at 7th level you could animate a 14 HD bloody skeletal dire tiger. The risky part is that control of that creature could be taken from you if someone hits it with a 2nd level command undead spell. Which btw the skeletal tiger wouldn't even get a save, the spell would just work.
I had something along these lines happen to me. We were camping at night when an unseeen enemy grabbed control of my hill giant skeleton and ordered it to attack me. I finally won the opposed charisma check(against the creature who cast the spell as per the conflicting orders rule) after having my armor of determination go off. While the rest of the party literally stood around and watched since they honestly didn't want to piss off my character by attacking his undead servant. Even though said servant was beating me to a bloody pulp. This inspired me to grab a wand of halt undead just in case something like it happened again.
This is actually incorrect, immensely so.
"Both of these variant skeletons can be created using animate dead, but they count as twice their normal number of Hit Dice per casting. Once controlled, they count normally against the controller's limit."
When you cast the spell you can raise 2*CL at once, and creating variants multiplies the number of HD FOR THIS PURPOSE ONLY. The creature is still it's normal HD, it is just harder to raise as a variant, does not gain more HD.
So how would that work then? Can you give an example with CL and HD numbers of how it's supposed to work?
If I'm reading what you're saying correctly, would it take 5HD to raise the skeleton, +5 for Bloody Template, +5 for Burning Template = 15 HD (so within the 16 HD Caster Level requirement), but then once it joins your army, it would only occupy 5HD worth of your Animate Dead bucket?
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So how would that work then? Can you give an example with CL and HD numbers of how it's supposed to work?
If I'm reading what you're saying correctly, would it take 5HD to raise the skeleton, +5 for Bloody Template, +5 for Burning Template = 15 HD (so within the 16 HD Caster Level requirement), but then once it joins your army, it would only occupy 5HD worth of your Animate Dead bucket?
So, you have a 5 hd creature's corpse and you want make a skeleton and apply 2 templates like say bloody and mundra. If we assume that this is only a x3 instead of a x4 then the creature counts as having an effective HD of 15 for purposes of cost and how many hd you can raise per casting.
Once the spell is successfully cast you now have a 5 hd bloody mundra skeleton under your control and it counts as 5 hd against your total limit for the animate dead spell.
Can you combine zombie and skeleton templates on the same creature?
generally speaking you can not. There are some templates that can be applied to either. But once you decide if it's a zombie or skeleton you are restricted to using only templates for that type of creature. Unless you're the GM.
If you're the GM you're free to apply whatever template you like to whatever creature and unless players regularly make really high knowledge checks and have rules lawyer levels of memorization of the monster manual(s) they probably won't even notice that X creature is technically not eligible for Y template.
Just make a bloody skeleton champ, it’s basically the same as a juju zombie just harder to get under your control.
So silly question/statement. The spell does not say anything about the HD of the corpse. Just how much you can control/animate with 1 casting. Where do you find the rules that say that the HD of the corpse is what dictates the power of that 1 undead?
I have the Spell Blood money so I am not concerned with the material components for the spell so all I need to do is cast 2 spells then I should be able to animate 1 very powerful undead... Right?
Skeleton and zombie rules in bestiary tell you how to figure HD.
An undead only looses its class levels if the template says they do there are ways in which you can have the minions keep their class levels see juju zombie template.Garion - a corpse's HD is the RACIAL HD for the corpse's race. Don't include HD from class levels but do include HD from templates. This means virtually all "playable" races give only a single HD undead. They're good for making mobs of weaker undead. Big animals and monstrous humanoids tend to be better for making fewer, more powerful minions.
My Cleric with that one AT that grants a Corpse Companion likes to use a fast zombie heavy horse with gentle repose cast on it to stop it from decaying, and we both wear angelskin studded leather / light barding to make it harder to pick us up on detect evil :)
It should be noted however, that most undead outside of zombies and skeletons are created via the create undead spells not the animate dead spells. Even Juju zombies actually require create undead to make. Create undead doesn't automatically grant you control over the undead you create with it. Meaning you have to rely on other class abilities or spells (eg. Command Undead, Leadership, Diplomacy, etc.) if you want to use them as minions.