Make Your Dungeon Master Cry: Animate Dead

Make Your Dungeon Master Cry: Animate Dead

The beauty of a game like Pathfinder lies within its multitude of options. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), the amount of build options leads to many opportunities to find overpowered techniques, feats, and spells.. Surprisingly, some overpowered abilities can even be found in the core rules.

When I first started playing RPGs, my Dungeon Master had a vehement hatred for any summoning spell. A player being able to give himself allies out of thin air really seemed to unbalance encounters for him. He said that it made the game too much like Pokemon, and not enough like a medieval battle. Thing is, despite the power of the Summon Monster series, each casting only lasts one round per level. In combat, this usually does not pose a problem; but at level 20, this amounts to only two minutes of time. When every turn in combat matters, the brief duration of the spell prevents one from relying on it too much.

And...then there's "Animate Dead." If you're like me, you may have skimmed over the necromancy school of magic, only finding a few spells that stand out. "Animate Dead" lets you make skeletons and zombies out of corpses. No big deal, right? Except for the fact that it's the most overpowered thing, like ever. I'm not kidding.

Remember these irritating things? You get to make them.

Let's take a look at what makes "Animate Dead" so broken. The spell let's you make a zombie or a skeleton out of any corpse you come across. Now the Zombie and Skeleton template doesn't add a lot to a particular creature, and the base creature loses most of its special characteristics, so this spell is best used on big, dumb brutes with heavy physical attacks. Unimpressed so far? We're just getting started.

First off, while the basic skeleton template is pretty lackluster, with a little extra oomph, you can create bloody skeletons, which are immortal. Yeah, you heard me, immortal. Even when they die, they regenerate to full health in like an hour. Did I mention that this spell is permanent, so the creatures created last forever? Did I also mention that you can control up to four Hit Dice of creatures per character level?

So at relatively low level, you can start walking around with an undead army of minions at your beck and call. Feel free to give your new army equipment and magical items as well, further helping this spell scale into later levels. And unlike later level undead control spells, which create intelligent monsters that might turn on you, "Animate Dead" creatures are mindless, following your commands without hesitation.

No joke, the only way my Dungeon Master has found so far to check the power of this spell is to suddenly make onyx (the material component needed for the spell), disappear overnight from the entire planet. Do prepare to get hard focused in encounters when you bring this puppy out--oh wait, that's fine. You have a legion of loyal soldiers to take the hits for you.