There's nothing quite like an army of skeletons and zombies to let the party know that you're the bad guy. But if you're a DM like me, you might find yourself feeling like there are certain gaps in terms of stat blocks for undead you can throw at your party.
Basically: there's a knife's edge balance when it comes to big swarms of undead, or really any mass combat situation. There are rules for how to run this - essentially averaging out damage over how likely a large number of foes are going to hit your party members.
But there are only a couple of true zombies in the Monster Manual. You can certainly run an encounter with a mass of them, but I find that, while fights against really big gangs of bad guys can be a lot of fun (I ran a one-shot that involved I believe 14 enemies against three party members with two allied NPCs) it can also get tedious and slow.
Taking zombies and skeletons as the absolute classic undead armies, I've homebrewed up a couple of stat blocks.
I started with the harder one, which is zombies. Taking inspiration from the Bar Brawl from Creature Codex (by the Kobold Press - an excellent 2nd party supplement, along with their earlier Tome of Beasts,) rather than just having you send, say, 20 zombies at your party, I've made a swarm.
Conceptually, I started by simply multiplying the zombie stat block 9 times, essentially treating a 3-by-3 square as one Huge-sized swarm. As it turns out, 9 zombies is not really that impressive. And given that the 5-ft square is implied to be a space occupied by a hero who really wants full freedom of movement, it's also not quite as dense as I wanted for this swarm.
So I bumped that up to 20.
Next, I bumped the hit die up - swarm hit dice are calculated based on the size of the swarm, not the individual, so even though it's made up of medium undead, the swarm itself is Huge, meaning it gets a d12 hit die. That wound up being helpful, as it put the health in a better range for what I wanted - an average of 190.
The AC is still very low - like a standard zombie, it's 8. But if your hero can hit a single zombie, it seems fair that they should have an easy time hitting a swarm of them.
Naturally, the swarm has the standard swarm abilities - it can't regain HP, it can't get temporary HP, and (and here's the nasty part) it can occupy other creature's spaces. Oh, and it can squeeze through any space a medium sized creature could, for obvious reasons.
In terms of damage, I gave it multiattack, hitting three times (it's a lot of zombies after all.) I also boosted the damage, treating each attack as if three zombies were hitting you at once (literally just multiplying the zombie's slam attack three times.) That means that on a given turn, 9 of the 20 zombies, effectively, are striking out, which seems fair. Those big hits allow this slow, easy-to-hit mass to feel scary.
Given that the whole point of a Cleric's destroy undead is to clear out hordes of zombies and the like, I wanted to throw clerics a bone, so to speak, and so the horde has a feature that causes them to take significant damage if they fail a Turn Undead save against a Cleric who's level 5 or higher.
So it was mostly done, but I wanted to give it something scary - a little extra juice.
So I created an ability called Overwhelming Lurch. This is when the zombies get all 28 Days Later and speed forward, trampling over party members. The creatures hit with this need to do a strength saving throw or get knocked prone and grappled - it's supposed to be that nightmare moment where someone gets engulfed by the mob of undead. It's not a terribly difficult DC, but low Strength characters are going to be in a really tough spot. Meanwhile, your beefy paladin or barbarian or fighter can laugh as they revel in this new target-rich environment.
The Massive Zombie Horde is CR 6 - enough to be pretty scary on their own to early tier 2 parties. But here's the thing: there ain't anything saying you can't use more than one of them! To peel back the curtain a little, I've got a town that is totally filled with corpses my party is going to come across in their current adventure, and my hope is to push them to certain locations within the town, so they're probably going to encounter more of these than they're supposed to fight. The hordes are slow, though, and for all I know the party will just kick an absurd amount of ass, so I think it'll be fine. But my initial plan was for a hundred zombies. So I might throw five of these hordes at them (might have them fight one or two to start with and then reveal the rest.)
Moving on to the skeletons:
I was a little less radical in my design here. Essentially, I just beefed them up. I treated the basic skeleton stat block as if they were sort of generic characters - like limited fighters. So I gave them an extra attack at level 5 and ability score improvements at levels 4 and 8.
First was the Elite Skeletal Archer, which I essentially bumped up to level 10 (getting two ASIs and an extra attack) and then slapped some scale mail on them to boost their AC to 16. Easy peasy, and the archer becomes a CR 2 monster, or in other words, a much better tier 2 or 3 minion monster. While normal skeletons are being sent out on patrol around the Lich's territory, these guys are probably patrolling the ramparts of their dread citadel.
But you can't just have archers. You need some guardsmen! And for that, I bumped things up further.
The Elite Skeletal Guard is bumped to level 17 and outfitted with plate armor as well as halberds - because halberds seem like a great kind of weapon for guardsmen. I also basically swapped the standard skeleton's strength and dexterity before applying the ASIs to boost their Strength, Constitution, and Wisdom. I also granted them proficiency with perception, because they are supposed to be guards, aren't they?
These guys wind up being CR 5 - meaning they can form the backbone of a combat encounter with some of the archers mixed in with them.
Finally, what readers of this blog should not find very surprising, a lot of my "army of the dead" concept is inspired by the Scourge in World of Warcraft - sure, they use mindless zombies, but they're mostly a pretty well-regimented army of skeletons, some of whom retain some magical ability.
So I've created the Elite Skeletal Mage. These are not meant to be boss-level casters, and so I tried to keep their abilities relatively limited. Essentially, they're there to magically harass the party while the archers and guards bring the pain. The idea is to sprinkle one or two of these guys into a larger encounter with other skeletal minions.
I basically gave them a character level of 6, but 4 levels of wizard, and boosted their Intelligence to 14 so that they can actually cast some stuff. They actually wound up being a lot like a Cult Fanatic, except they're wizards instead of clerics. They have Ray of Frost as a cantrip (bit of a Warcraft reference there) and then use Magic Missile, Mage Armor, Shield, Hold Person, and Ray of Enfeeblement. Again, they're less about pumping out the damage than harassing the party that is being pelted with arrows or sliced with halberds.
So I've managed to put together a nice little army of the dead. None of these guys are terribly complex on their own - they're all built to be minions or mid-way encounters. And if your characters have wisely chosen to go with bludgeoning weapons (I get the aesthetics of it - my Paladin's going to be going with a greatsword, but why would you ever not just take a maul? Frankly, in the vast majority of cases I like my Paladins to swing mauls,) they'll carve through these guys at double speed.
But we do want some kind of a boss, right? And that's where my next homebrew monster comes in: I want to create a Death Knight that the players can fight in tier 2. I'm aiming for about CR 8 or 9. Basically, I want the boss guy to lead all these nasty skeletons. But the Death Knight, a CR 17 monster, is a bit much for a party of, say, level 9 characters.
Beyond that, I'm going to be working on some vampire variants as well. Indeed, I'm now thinking about all the statblocks I want to generate. I actually need to make a bunch of ancient robots for my setting, so we'll have to take a look at some earlier ones I designed and come up with variants.
This is fun.
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