Undead Army and templates


Rules Questions


Hello everyone. I am playing in an evil gestalt game, and i am playing a dhampir wizard/dread necromancer. So i will have a literal ton of undead soldiers, so i need help understanding the templates associated with making undead, as I am trying to be smart with the undead that I have around. I would like to stick to using skeletons as they don't rot and stink and potentially carry diseases aboard ships. (Also easier to pack).

I am looking for ways to get long range (archers) to stay with me and protect me.
Big melee monsters to go attack my enemies.

I kind of understand how it works but i need a refresher and maybe some advise. Please help out thanks.


I'm not sure what information you're looking for. But to start with what sort of corpses do you have available to you?

Ideally you'll want creatures with really good physical stats for their HD. Also, creatures that are naturally capable of using manufactured weapons and armor. In my experience this means that giants of all types are decent choices, but really any monster that naturally wants to beat things to death with a club or sword make good choices as they lose very little getting turned into a skeleton.

As far as templates go, bloody gives your undead unparalleled survivability. Since usually even if they get killed if you just have to wait around for an hour they are back good as new. This is especially true if you're mainly fighting evil creatures that don't have access to the things required to permanently kill them. This is pretty much pointless if you plan on fighting good aligned cleric types though.

I also got good mileage out of the mundra template. With 4 arms your undead can wield a 2 handed weapon, carry a shield and a sling. This lets it deal high damage without sacrificing AC and allows it to make ranged attacks as needed. For medium and smaller creatures (iow skeletons without high strength or reach) you can instead arm them with 3 sickles and a shield. Thus granting them 3 attacks while maintaining a decent AC.

The other thing to keep in mind is gear. When you only have a few big powerful champions you end up giving them magic items same as you would a cohort. However, this quickly becomes impractical when you're talking about equipping an army. So, you'll want the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to gear. I ended up giving my skeletons the following kit.

Sling with rocks (0 gp)
heavy wooden Shield (7 gp)
Wooden armor (20 gp) or parade armor (25)
sickle x 3 (18 gp) or a lucerne hammer (15 gp)

On a creature with a 10 dex this costs you 42gp to 50gp each but gives you a medium creature that has an AC of 19, fast healing and either 3 attacks that do 1d6 each or a 2-handed attack that does 1d12.

For ranged skeletons you can swap out the mundra template for the archer template and you can swap the 3 sickles and shield for a shortbow and 20 arrows for a kit that costs about 6 gold more.

The general consensuses is that applying 2 of these templates costs you 3x the normal cost to animate (75 gp per HD for a skeleton). However, once animated you just use their actual total HD for control purposes.

If you find that you don't have as many undead as you would like You can take leadership and make your underlings commanders, giving each one a Death's Head Talisman. The amulet effectively adds 75gp per HD to be created but allows those undead to be controlled by whoever wears the amulet. The net result is the amulet costs 150 gp per HD of bloody mundra/archer to be tied to it.


Thank you for the awesome suggestions!! I mainly have humans for corpses. So i have nothing with really big bang for my buck yet, however i am thinking about necrocrafts. But i read 2 conflicting things and i still have questions about them.it says i can't have a necrocraft with more HD than your caster level. Now here are my questions.
1) Does increase to CL help with this? Ie Signature Spell, traits, favoured class bonus?
2) Does the necrocraft count toward your HD limit? I've heard yes and no.
3) Can you add templates like bloody if you use all skellies?


Garion Beckett wrote:
I mainly have humans for corpses.

Try to upgrade to orcs : You loose nothing (AFAIK), and gain a good deal of strength. Nice and easy.


Garion Beckett wrote:

Thank you for the awesome suggestions!! I mainly have humans for corpses. So i have nothing with really big bang for my buck yet, however i am thinking about necrocrafts. But i read 2 conflicting things and i still have questions about them.it says i can't have a necrocraft with more HD than your caster level. Now here are my questions.

1) Does increase to CL help with this? Ie Signature Spell, traits, favoured class bonus?
2) Does the necrocraft count toward your HD limit? I've heard yes and no.
3) Can you add templates like bloody if you use all skellies?

Sure thing! :)

So, part of the problem is that the necrocraft creation rules casually reference animate dead without going into much detail. Additionally, animate dead its self gets ambiguous pretty fast once you start asking questions.

As a result, the only real answer I can give you is to ask your DM how they want to handle animate dead and necrocrafts. Because there isn't a clear official answer.

What follows is my interpretation and understanding. Please note that a different understanding of how the spell animate dead works will give wildly different results and/or limitations.

The spell animate dead gives you 1 "bucket" worth of HD to work with. The lesser and mythic animate dead spells check the same "bucket". When (and only when) you cast the spell. At that time its cast, it animates whatever it's going to animate and then adds that to whatever you had controlled before. if this is above your HD limit for this casting (typically 4 times caster level) then at that time you are forced to release control of enough undead such that you are at or below said HD limit.

IMO necrocrafts when created count toward the HD limit that exists at the time of casting the spell.

If you are able to boost your caster level when you cast the spell this allows you to control additional undead.

IMO the feat Undead Master is intended to also apply when determining how much undead you can control. Because otherwise it gives you +4 CL when using the Command Undead feat to create undead which isn't something the Command Undead feat can even do.

As for templates, since a necrocraft is its own type of undead creature it is not eligible for templates that only affect skeletons or zombies. However, if it has the mostly skeletons or mostly zombies trait it seems reasonable to me for the DM to allow related templates to be applied, modifying the cost accordingly.


I have a Gestalt necromancer in my current campaign, and this link below is a great resource for understanding how it works and having a pre-made sheet for tracking all your undead's stats. :) :)

Brewer's Guide to Undeath


Thanks guys. Is there any other suggestions right now? We are in the shackles and we under the flag of a pirate lord so i have access to a bunch of humans and other humanoids for now. But eventually i will be getting vile leadership and gaining a cohort who will specialize at melee and construct making. I was planning on him to make bone constructs to keep to flavor of skellys. Is there anything there you could help out with?


1 person marked this as a favorite.

Have you considered zombie sharks to accompany your boats? Strap a bunch of skeletons to one, it rams the enemy vessel, skeletons climb aboard. Profit. A boarding party of flaming, bloody skeletons sounds fun, just catapault em over if you have to. Can swarms be undead? I allow it, but not sure about RAW at the moment.


Beheaded are worth consideration here if you have a large enough control pool to afford a small horde of minions in addition to your heavy hitters. The Belching variant is based on a touch attack, so even though it's weak damage, it can be potentially relevant damage even at higher levels, and you can give them a mix of different energy types to somewhat mitigate the common forms of energy resistance and immunity. The Flaming variant will give it immunity to Fire, which is one of the more popular energy types for AoEs against masses of weak creatures. Swarming is a bit weird, and you'd have to work with your GM on that front, but depending upon what you work out, it could also be worthwhile to look into.

One of the best things about Beheaded is that they don't care how weak the base creature was, unlike Skeletons. They can also be skulls instead of heads with fleshy bits still on them, though that's ultimately cosmetic rather than mechanical.

Of course, if they do end up getting blasted anyway, if you conveniently had them far enough away from you that none of your party members or important undead are caught in the blast, that may be a significant amount of damage that ISN'T dealt to the party, especially if multiple enemy creatures had to spend actions to blast them.

As for Necrocraft, some tables allow them to be more customizable in form, to the point of having them serve as vehicles or at least weapons platforms. So that would be another thing to add to the list of things to check over with your GM.

On the subject of basic skeletons, don't forget about things like Trample. Cows and such use Bison stats, and getting trampled by several of them is no picnic, even for higher level characters.

Equipping Skeletons:
When it comes to equipping skeletons, don't forget about cheaper weapon materials. Stone is 1/4 the cost of regular weapons and the only real difference in most cases is that the weapon breaks on a natural 1 and the limitations on what weapons can be made from stone. With arrows it literally doesn't matter that they're made out of stone unless the creature has some kind of immunity to stone or specific damage reduction, it's just cheaper and therefore easier on your wallet when equipping large numbers of creatures. They also weigh less, which is important when considering cargo space aboard a ship. Plus, if you have a way to mitigate the cost of Masterwork Transformation, even the fragile quality goes away.

There's even some potential shenanigans that you could get up to with higher CL Stone Discus and the fact that Conjuration (Creation) spells with an instantaneous duration permanently create matter unless otherwise stated.

Obsidian weapons are half the cost of the regular weapon, and have the same weight reduction as stone weapons. Provided you're able to either source it or buy the weapons directly, that's a savings that will add up when you're looking at many minions.

So, going back to the earlier example that LordKailas provided, but adjusting it for the fact that you can't make Sickles, 3 Stone Light Maces would be 1.25 * 3 = 3.75 gp to buy outright, or, if you couldn't buy them, it'd cost 1.25 gp to get the raw materials to make them and they would be very fast to make even with just having a high Intelligence score and the spell Crafter's Fortune. You can make Sickles out of Obsidian, though, so 3 Obsidian Sickles would be 9 gp and cost 3 gp in raw materials to make.


Garion Beckett wrote:
Thanks guys. Is there any other suggestions right now? We are in the shackles and we under the flag of a pirate lord so i have access to a bunch of humans and other humanoids for now. But eventually i will be getting vile leadership and gaining a cohort who will specialize at melee and construct making. I was planning on him to make bone constructs to keep to flavor of skellys. Is there anything there you could help out with?

General advice:

If you make really good use of the feat Undead Master and the Extend Spell MM feat, you can make your 2nd level Command Undead spell into a 3day/level spell for a 3rd lvl spell slot (you'll want to get Heighten at some point so your DC is more reliable for the mid-late/late game). Prepare multiple castings of Extended [Heightened, when necessary] Command Undead and Create Undead spells per day. If you're not high enough level to cast Create Undead yourself yet, make friends with a high level NPC Wizrd and get scrolls until you are.

When it comes to using the Command Undead spell, this is your "juggling" act. The Juggling Act is this: Every day prepare multiple castings of Command Undead, and each day try to command as many new undead as you can. Keep track of how many days that you have them under your control, and then on the day that your spell expires, re-cast it and keep control over them. You can theoretically have infinite HD in your Command Undead bucket because it's only restrained by whether you can influence the target you're trying to command and how many Command Undead spells you've prepared each day. So having multiple castings of Extended Command Undead that last 3days/level and Create Undead is key to having as many Undead as possible at any given point. If you don't want to waste a Create Undead spell/scroll on a corpse, you can always use Animate Dead and then voluntarily lose control of it, and then use Command Undead on it. But Create Undead is how you get all really good undead.

Agent of the Grave is an awesome prestige class for pumping up your Animate Dead bucket and general necromantic effects as well as becoming a Lich (if that's one of your character's goals). However, you lose a level of spell progression, so take a look at this PrC and see if it's something you want to do.

Blood Money is a level 1 spell that you should pick up just for your Animate Dead spell. Your Animate Dead spell has a reagent requirement: an onyx gem worth at least 25 gp per Hit Die of the undead. And it's EXPENSIVE over the course of a campaign, especially for a Zookeeper. Blood Money can make sure you're not always poorer than John the Baptist. So if you use Blood Money, you reduce your gp cost greatly for the simple cost of 1d6 health and 1-2 Strength damage.

Until you get a decent Juggling Act going, you're going to have to use your Animate Dead bucket for your army. While you are a poor budding little Necromancer, you should be Animating your Undead with the Bloody Template. Your Animate Dead bucket undead are expensive, so make them last as long as possible. Bloody Skeletons respawn after an hour of being killed, unless there's a Paladin or Cleric nearby with a bunch of holy water or hallow spells. So watch out for stuff like that when your DM has clearly had enough of your shenanigans.

You’re probably going to come across Intelligent Undead throughout your campaign, and this is what you definitely want to use your Heighted Command Undeads for because you DO NOT want this to fail. Intelligent Undead are extremely useful because they can usually cast spells and help as advisors, but they don’t like being controlled, and depending on how well/poorly you treat them, there’s a good chance they’ll slit your throat in your sleep the first chance they get.

.

As far as "bucket" management goes, what I'd advise is this:

1) Use your Animate Dead bucket to keep your favorite undead that you never want to see actual combat, because for one, they're expensive, and two, they're permanently yours and you never have to make checks against them. Also, use this bucket to control the Undead that you don't normally interact with on a daily basis. You don't have to make checks against them, so there's no real reason you can't leave these guys at your base of operations performing w/e mundane tasks you might require.

2) Use your Command Undead spell bucket as your "throw away" undead; these are the undead you use in combat and don't care if/when they die, because anything you kill with them, you're going to Create Undead from their corpses and Command Undead the new ones to replace the ones that have fallen.

3) Command Undead feat is nigh worthless because it gives you an extremely small bucket to work with and you need all the feats you can get. Unless you get it for free from an archetype or dip, don't waste a feat slot on the Command Undead feat.

.

So! If you're going for a Zookeeper Necromancy build (and it sounds like you are), I'd recommend getting the following feats:

Undead Master: HUGE bonus to your Command Undead Spell, and minor bonus to your Animate Dead spell and Command Undead feat. Combined with Extend Spell, these two feats literally increase how many undead you can have in your Command Undead spell bucket at any given time by 200%. It goes from 1day/level to 3day/level.

Spell Specialization (Animate Dead), Varisian Tattoo (Necromancy), Spell Perfection (Animate Dead): Your Animate Dead HD Bucket is based off CASTER LEVEL, so boost this as much as you can for the Undead you want to permanently keep and not have to make checks against every day. Also, not a feat, but get an Orange Prism Ioun Stone for a +1 Caster level.

Metamagic Feats: You need 3 metamagic feats for Spell Perfection, and Heighten and Extend Spell are "Must-haves" for a Zookeeper build! The 3rd MM feat is unreserved so pick anything you want. If you like to be a debuffer, Persistent is really nice, or if you like to use Enervation, Empowered Enervations can be pretty beastly. Dazing is also highly recommended if you want to be more control-y in combat. Quicken is also highly recommended for obvious reasons, but you might want to just Quicken with MM rods, it’s up to you though.

.

High level stuff:

Once you get Create Demiplane, enchant something that you can carry with you with Create Demiplane and carry your army with you. By the time you're level 15+, your army is going to be well over 100 units and easily 200-300 HD worth of stuff if not more. Walking into a major city will definitely draw unwanted attention, so carry your army with you.

Find a dragon and animate it as a Fast Zombie (not a skeleton) with your Animate Dead. Permanent Flying Mount.

If/when you become a Lich, get the spell Secret Chest, and hide your Phylactery somewhere obscure in the Ethereal plane.


Speaking of juggling control pools and aiming for massive amounts of minions, if Words of Power is at all on the table, you can raid it for an additional control pool, though it is only for basic Skeletons or Zombies, at least used as-is.

The Experimental Spellcaster feat can be used to snag the Undeath effect word, which should have its own control pool.


Garion Beckett wrote:
Thanks guys. Is there any other suggestions right now? We are in the shackles and we under the flag of a pirate lord so i have access to a bunch of humans and other humanoids for now. But eventually i will be getting vile leadership and gaining a cohort who will specialize at melee and construct making. I was planning on him to make bone constructs to keep to flavor of skellys. Is there anything there you could help out with?

Given the campaign setup you are in the unique position to make use of the spell Skeleton Crew. While it creates skeletons that are non-combatants, they don't count against the HD limit of any other spell/ability. Additionally, you would be able to have multiple ships under your command.

You will find that unfortunately constructs are horribly expensive to create and maintain compared to undead. Except for the incredibly broken/OP Trompe L’oeil, one of of most cost effective constructs I've made was a glass golem since they get healed by the most common type of elemental damage. Unless you use constructs primarily for non-combat roles and thus don't have to worry as much about repairing/replacing them.

You will definitely want either a permanent desecration effect or the ability to cast it prior to animating your undead. You'll also want to invest in either an alter or a reliquary weapon/armor in order to get the maximum effect out of it.

While it is true that blood money works for animate dead, it's a rare spell that comes from a specific adventure path. As a result your DM may or may not be cool with you using it especially after reading how it works. That being said, there is another way to cast animate dead and even create undead for free. Namely the feats Deific Obedience, Fiendish Obedience and Demonic Obedience.

Deific Obedience [Urgathoa] + Diverse Obedience + 10th lvl = Animate Dead for free
Fiendish Obedience [Orcus] + Damned Disciple + 12th lvl = Animate Dead for free
Demonic Obedience [Orcus] + 12th lvl = Command Undead for free
Fiendish Obedience [Circiatto] =
Command Undead for free @ 12th lvl/10th (evangelist)
Animate Dead for free @ 16th lvl/13th (evangelist)
Create Undead for free @ 20th level/16th (evangelist)

The way these work is, the above combinations allow you to cast the listed spell as a spell like ability.

Universal Monster Rules: Spell like abilities wrote:
Spell-like abilities are magical and work just like spells (though they are not spells and so have no verbal, somatic, focus, or material components).

So, while you only get so many per day, you get to completely bypass the material cost. Which is fine since these aren't spells you're likely to be casting multiple times per day anyway.

Oh, and since you're using 3.5 content you should see if your DM will ok the magic items from Wotc's Dead Life article (thankfully I saved that thing off to my google drive, it doesn't seem to exist on the official website any more). The minion coffin is a personal favorite, as it's basically a bag of holding for undead minions.


Oh I forgot about this neat little trick, at some point, get Preferred Spell for your Command Undead spell so you don't even need to prepare Command Undead anymore. Your low level feats are going to be dedicated to Spell Focus (Necromancy), Undead Master, Extend Spell, Varisian Tattoo (Necromancy), Spell Spec (Animate Dead), and Heighten Spell, so as a Wizard you should be able to afford getting Preferred Spell (Command Undead) around level 9-13ish. Once you have Pref Spell in Command Undead, you can Persistent/Extend/Heighten it on the fly as well. This will give you a massive amount of flexibility when preparing spells every day.


LordKailas wrote:


While it is true that blood money works for animate dead, it's a rare spell that comes from a specific adventure path. As a result your DM may or may not be cool with you using it especially after reading how it works.

I think it comes from RotRL? So yeah, talk to your DM about using that to mitigate your gp costs. It's not game-breakingly powerful, so there's a good chance your DM will be okay with it. I have a gestalt JujuOracle/GravewalkerWitch PC in my current campaign who is trying to be a Zookeeper Necromancer, and I allowed her to use Blood Money. It's not as overpowered as it sounds and it keeps her happy because she's able to afford gear at appropriate levels.


Btw, when you say you're a Gestalt Wizard/Dread, are you referring to the Dread class from Psionics? and if so, how much 3rd party content are you allowed?


Ryze Kuja wrote:
LordKailas wrote:


While it is true that blood money works for animate dead, it's a rare spell that comes from a specific adventure path. As a result your DM may or may not be cool with you using it especially after reading how it works.

I think it comes from RotRL? So yeah, talk to your DM about using that to mitigate your gp costs. It's not game-breakingly powerful, so there's a good chance your DM will be okay with it. I have a gestalt JujuOracle/GravewalkerWitch PC in my current campaign who is trying to be a Zookeeper Necromancer, and I allowed her to use Blood Money. It's not as overpowered as it sounds and it keeps her happy because she's able to afford gear at appropriate levels.

Blood money is totally OP. Creating undead for free is also pretty OP, but not anywhere as game breaking as free wishes or miracles...

I wouldn't allow it at my table unless everyone was playing extremely optimized characters.


Garion Beckett wrote:
Is there any other suggestions right now? We are in the shackles and we under the flag of a pirate lord so i have access to a bunch of humans and other humanoids for now... Is there anything there you could help out with?

Brewer's guide that was linked earlier is fantastic and describes the concept of buckets. There is another 'bucket' that would be particularly appropriate for you and that is the bucket for a 'Skeleton Crew.'

The spell Skeleton Crew will allow you control a crew that can do nothing but crew your ship. Normally you can control 2xCL in HD, or 4xCL in HD if cast with desecrate active.

This allows you to get your own ship and crew (or just replace the crew but keep the party as officers). It would particularly appropriate if you took a ship in a raid with your party, then slaughtered everyone on that ship, animated them as crew and added this ship (YOUR ship) to the fleet that the party is now commanding.


Artofregicide wrote:
Ryze Kuja wrote:
LordKailas wrote:


While it is true that blood money works for animate dead, it's a rare spell that comes from a specific adventure path. As a result your DM may or may not be cool with you using it especially after reading how it works.

I think it comes from RotRL? So yeah, talk to your DM about using that to mitigate your gp costs. It's not game-breakingly powerful, so there's a good chance your DM will be okay with it. I have a gestalt JujuOracle/GravewalkerWitch PC in my current campaign who is trying to be a Zookeeper Necromancer, and I allowed her to use Blood Money. It's not as overpowered as it sounds and it keeps her happy because she's able to afford gear at appropriate levels.

Blood money is totally OP. Creating undead for free is also pretty OP, but not anywhere as game breaking as free wishes or miracles...

I wouldn't allow it at my table unless everyone was playing extremely optimized characters.

Well, you can't do it multiple times a day, you can only do it once per day, or once every other day, and it only affects your Animate Dead bucket, not Command Undead. Command Undead is the lion's share of your undead army anyway. Casters typically dump Str, so if you're doing it multiple times a day with a Str score around 7-9, you're going to be intolerably weak. Even a novice DM could capitalize on that hard.


The problems with blood money start with combos like casters magic jarring ogres before casting, buffing with bull strength before hand, and other methods of increasing temporary strength. None of these need to last longer than the actual casting and then receiving enough lesser restorations.


Java Man wrote:
The problems with blood money start with combos like casters magic jarring ogres before casting, buffing with bull strength before hand, and other methods of increasing temporary strength. None of these need to last longer than the actual casting and then receiving enough lesser restorations.

That sounds like an awful lot of wasted spells per day just to save ~500g. I dunno, I let my players use Blood Money and they don’t abuse it like that. Different tables I guess.

In my experience, I have found it’s not overpowered and keeps the player happy. /shrug


Ryze Kuja wrote:
Java Man wrote:
The problems with blood money start with combos like casters magic jarring ogres before casting, buffing with bull strength before hand, and other methods of increasing temporary strength. None of these need to last longer than the actual casting and then receiving enough lesser restorations.

That sounds like an awful lot of wasted spells per day just to save ~500g. I dunno, I let my players use Blood Money and they don’t abuse it like that. Different tables I guess.

In my experience, I have found it’s not overpowered and keeps the player happy. /shrug

Minor healing and restoration or similiar pretty much negate all downsides of the spell.

It's also pretty much only know by a handful of ancient Thassolonian wizards, so there's good reason for a PC to know it.

Casters don't need more help being OP, honestly.


False Focus has some potential value to you for creating garbage Skeletons and the like. Especially if they're only an intermediate step in the process of creating Necrocraft.

You'll already have saved 25 gp the first time you make 5 Skeletons with 1 HD in order to cannibalize them into a Medium Necrocraft, or 150 gp for a Large Necrocraft. The savings would be more if you were having to use 2 to 4 HD Skeletons as raw material.

Depending upon how your GM parses the creation text for Beheaded, and which particular textblock(s) they choose to use as the basis for this, you may even be able to create Beheaded for with no gp expenditure using False Focus.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It should also be mentioned that you should not forget about or discount Isitoq, either, even if they aren't skeletal or a template.

They are the only intelligent undead that you can make and control with Animate Dead. They are Diminutive, Stealthy, and can Fly. You can literally see through them without having to expend any further magic. Their only downside is that they don't have a way to directly communicate with their master and the fact that their master can only see 60 feet out of them, rather than their full sight range.

Still, they're intelligent enough that you could easily work out some kind of signal for them to do for when they spot a ship and then another set based upon the flag of the ship, if you wanted to use them as scouts.

They're even a free, slow source of infinite tears, if you can ever find a way to leverage that sort of thing.

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder First Edition / Rules Questions / Undead Army and templates All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.