Negative Healing Spells for Undead Cleric

[Dogfax]

Hi Folks,

When playing my undead cleric, I stumble across a lot of healing potential in spells, but the vast majority are "Vitality" based. I cant see any rule on this, but it seems odd that there isnt just a "negative" version of each healing type spell?

We have the Heal/Harm pair, but very little else.
Example. there is Breath of Life, but no "Kiss of Death".

Is there any rule that says all these decent heal spells can be swapped over the their "dark" verions?

Ta muchly

[HammerJack]

There is not.

[Errenor]

Dogfax wrote:

Is there any rule that says all these decent heal spells can be swapped over the their "dark" verions?

No.

Soothe heals undead because it's not Vitality. It's Occult only though.

Why Harm isn't enough? Heal is enough for living, everything else is just a nice bonus.

[Dogfax]

Yes Sooth is on my list too as I have PSychic dedication. ok thanks for confirming.

[YuriP]

IMO the main reason that we don't get negative void versions of most positive vitality spells are because the number o PCs with void healing is just too small to designers make void versions of most spells.

So it's a shame because we don't have a void version of spells like Shock to the System but it's not a great disadvantage once that as most adventures are not focused into fight vs undead and a void PC can benefit of things like AoE harm damage most enemies while heals itself.

[Claxon]

It could be because designers don't want to spend time and pages on something that the majority of players won't be using...

However it could also be justified in game that Void energy just doesn't (and maybe shouldn't) have as many avenues for healing as Vitality. Void is anti-life. We don't think of it being primarily used to healing, but for harm. It's why we also don't see a parity of vitality damage spells (with the exception of spells that are kind of focused on harming undead).

I like to think it's all of the above. Page count, usage, and justifiable reasons in the form of magical energy/tradition.

[Zoken44]

While Claxon and YuriP are very right, I want to put out there this one idea: Rule 0. Talk to your GM, see if you can get him to drop the vitality trait (maybe even make a down time activity or plot point of your character learning how to do this, could be good story telling). If you have enough Undead PC's that these extra spells would be helpful, see if you and your GM can't work something out. It's all about fun. If a rule is preventing fun, bend or break it to the GROUP's benefit.

IF things are getting too out of hand and it's a bad interaction, work with your GM to find compromises. Keeping dialogue up with your group to make sure you are facilitating the most fun is the most important part. Oh, and if you try that, let us know how it works out. Could be good data for homebrewers and Paizo devs.

[Claxon]

There's always room to have a character that was healer in life, who through no fault of their own was given to undeath. In death they may want to heal other undead, as they did the living in life. So it would not be unreasonable to "research" "new" spells to do exactly that.

But as a GM, it wouldn't be a given and it probably wouldn't exactly mirror vitality spells.

[Agonarchy]

A feat or feature that allows you to swap vitality to void would be reasonable to introduce.

There are some thematic and balance reasons for vitality to be more common and easier to use. Void healing would ideally lean into the theme more by draining life, even if it was just something like eating a lot of food (meat, rotten fruit, etc ) or draining the environment along the lines of defiling from D&D's Dark Sun setting - basically sucking the life force out of the plants, soil, water, etc. and leaving inert ashes that could never support life again.

[BenT1]

The easiest way is just to talk to your GM. Especially if the campaign is an undead PC group, it should not be a problem to just look at the spells with the Vitality tag and change them to have the Void tag with little or no tweaking. The particulars of whether these spells already exist within your god's ability to grant or characters need to develop them and convince their gods that it would be useful and right to spread the new Void spells to their other clerics and the like could be an adventure in itself.

[Ascalaphus]

There wouldn't be a lot of market for it for Paizo to make tons of void healing spells. But it's not an inherent thing that absolutely mustn't exist in the game. It's just not a priority to publish.

If your group is an outlier and needs it, that's a good spot to do a bit of homebrewing. Homebrewing is not a dirty thing.

[NorrKnekten]

Shouldn't be any hard to have a spell that when an undead creature would reach 0 hp you can heal it as a reaction.

But what I don't see mentioned is that unlike living, The undead don't actually turn into corpses but RAW they are destroyed and become unable to be brought back (again), With the exception of rituals or restoring the corpse before raising them again.

But theres no shame in making a void version of stabilize or similar for a party with multiple undead members.

[Claxon]

Ascalaphus wrote:

There wouldn't be a lot of market for it for Paizo to make tons of void healing spells. But it's not an inherent thing that absolutely mustn't exist in the game. It's just not a priority to publish.

If your group is an outlier and needs it, that's a good spot to do a bit of homebrewing. Homebrewing is not a dirty thing.

I would like to challenge that notion, and say there isn't an inherent reason for void spells to heal equally as well as vitality spells (in terms of having spells that mirror/replicate the majority of effects).

In fact, in my opinion for "thematic" purposes they shouldn't. Void should be better at dealing damage and worse at healing, that's my opinion.

Now, if my group were playing a game of only undead, and someone was playing a healing focused character (see my above hypothetical of a cleric type that was made into undead and still wanted to heal) I would be willing (as a GM) to work with them to create new void based spells with healing. They wouldn't exactly mirror the vitality versions, because that kind of trivializes the difference between undead and living creatures, which I'm not a fan of. But I also wouldn't want to screw over an entire party just because of my views either.