Halloween holds a special place in my heart. It was always my favorite holiday as a kid, perhaps because growing up in New England, it was kind of the quintessential environment for such spookiness (though I'll acknowledge here that it's a little messed up how often we tell stories about actual witches in Salem, when a bunch of innocent people were murdered by religious fundamentalists). My mother ran the neighborhood Halloween party at the local community center, and so it was always a big production around this time of year. In fact, I'm going back to the East Coast for Halloween this year because a friend of mine is getting married with a Halloween-themed wedding.
But that aside: in D&D, Necromancy is one of the eight schools of magic, but it's the one that is kind of invariably the dark and spooky one. There's a classic archetype - usually a villainous one - of a powerful spellcaster who raises the dead to fight for them.
If we wanted to play such a character (perhaps playing against type and making a heroic necromancer... or not,) where to start?
First off, let's talk class options. The School of Necromancy Wizard is probably the most obvious option - it's right there in the name. This subclass gives you two features that enhance your rapport with the undead, one specifically enhancing Animate Dead, while the other allows you to (sometimes) force an undead creature to work for you (this can technically work on a Lich that has used up its legendary resistances, but the likelihood of success if very low).
But there are a couple other options. Among Wizards, we're not going to bother looking elsewhere, but we should mention options for Warlocks and Sorcerers.
The Shadow Sorcerer is the "dark" version of the class, but we run into an issue here, which is that the dead-raising spells - and really most spells that allow you to bring in new creatures to fight on your side in battle - are not available to Sorcerers. Thus, any real "necromancy-themed" Sorcerer is going to lean more into their necrotic-damage, life-stealing spells. The only real option for Sorcerers is the 7th-level Finger of Death, which is mostly a single-target damage spell that then has a bonus of giving you a permanent zombie companion if you kill a humanoid with it.
The Warlock, however, shares the Wizard's penchant for summoning conjuration spells and dead-raising necromancy (we'll be focusing on the latter). And, as it turns out, Warlocks have ample subclasses that are associated with Undeath as a force. The first of these is the Undying - which I think was kind of a dry-run for a better subclass that I'll mention in this paragraph. Undying goes out of its way not to explicitly have your patron be an undead entity - it could be something that has just extended its life magically. So screw that one. The Hexblade, then, is an instance where the patron itself is not undead (unless it's the a spirit bound to a weapon) but the subclass' connection to the Shadowfell (the plane most associated with the undead) and the 6th level feature that lets you draw a specter out of a foe you kill. But then, the Undead patron is the most straightforward option.
The somewhat left-field option here, though, is Cleric. Surprisingly, Animate Dead and Create Undead are on the Cleric spell list (they are not, notably, on the new "Divine Spells" list). A Death Cleric would certainly make sense here, but they miss out on the newer spells.
There are only a handful of spells that raise the dead as undead (as opposed to bringing them back to true life). Animate Dead and Summon Undead are 3rd level. Danse Macabre is 5th level. Create Undead is 6th level. And then, Finger of Death is 7th, and is somewhat less of a direct undead-creating spell. Of these, Warlocks oddly don't get Animate Dead - it's not even on the Undead Warlock expanded spell list, which I found shocking.
Thus, I think we're going to conclude that, for the quintessential undead-raiser, we've got to go Necromancy Wizard (though I do think Undead Warlock is in a pretty good position as first alternate).
Now, Necromancy Wizards automatically add Animate Dead to their spellbooks at level 6 if they didn't get it at level 5, and the spell grants you a bonus zombie or skeleton (so two total when cast at 3rd level). But they also get a number of other bonuses to any undead creature that has been summoned - first, adding their Wizard level to the creatures' maximum HP, and then also allowing them to add your Proficiency bonus to the damage they deal.
So let's take a look at the various spell options you have here.
For 3rd level spells, there are Animate Dead and Summon Undead.
Animate Dead takes 1 minute to cast, so you need to do it before combat starts. It raises one zombie or skeleton (depending on the material you're working with) though, thanks to the subclass, we're getting an additional one. Upcasting the spell adds two additional undead creatures for each spell level above 3rd, making this one of the rare spells where upcasting it grants greater value than casting it at its base level (though we're going to get linear scaling thanks to the subclass). The undead creatures don't have a set duration, but after 24 hours you will lose control of them unless you cast the spell again, making them potentially hostile. We're a bit incentivized to take this thanks to our subclass, though of course many of the benefits of "Undead Thralls" extend to any undead creature created with a necromancy spell.
You're going to be limited by the corpses you find as to which stat block you use. Skeletons officially come with armor scraps and weapons, so you might work with your DM to see what kind of attacks they can do. Skeletons in the base stat block have shortswords and shortbows, but I think a DM could reasonably change that based on what the remains you find have on them. Zombies just make slam attacks, which any creature with limbs could do. Skeletons have far lower hit points and are vulnerable to bludgeoning damage, while zombies are relatively beefy (though with a profoundly low AC) and have Undead Fortitude to potentially survive a hit. So, if you have your choice of corpses, skeletons might be better damage-dealers, while zombies can be decently effective at tanking hits, and can be used as a shield between you and the monsters.
Summon Undead is in line with the other Tasha's-introduced conjuration spells, except it's necromancy. Compared to Animate Dead, it has the following upsides: first, no corpses required, as long as you have the material component (which costs 300g). Second, the undead spirit you summon is capable of putting out a lot of damage. Third, like all these spells, it scales very effectively with spell level, especially if cast at an even level. Fourth, you have three options for which kind of undead spirit to summon. And finally, it uses your spell attack modifier to determine its attack bonus, making it far, far more effective at hitting monsters than the +3 and +4 bonuses that standard zombies and skeletons (respectively) have. However, there are downsides. For one, it's concentration. Next, it lasts at most an hour. And third, it only ever summons one creature, which means you won't be able to use it to make, say, a zombie-wall.
With Summon Undead, you get three choices. The Skeletal spirit is the obvious choice for damage output - it does the highest damage, and the damage is necrotic (which few things resist) and it's ranged, allowing you to put it far away from the action to take potshots from afar. The only downside is the skeletal spirit has low HP, but you're hopefully going to keep it out of the fray. The ghostly spirit has to get into melee, but it has a 40 foot fly/hover speed and its attacks (which also deal necrotic damage) can also potentially frighten targets - a pretty powerful effect, with no "if you succeed on the save you become immune for 24 hours" rider. It also has incorporeal movement if you have to deal with a bunch of cover, which also makes them decent for scouting. Finally, the putrid spirit is sort of ghoul-like, and this one does slashing damage, but it also has an aura causing nearby creatures that start their turn around it to potentially be poisoned, and then its attack can trigger a second saving throw to potentially paralyze a poisoned target.
My instinct is that the putrid spirit will be amazing when it actually manages to paralyze a creature, but that's probably going to be unusual, given the need for both two failed Con saves and a successful attack and that the monster is not immune to the poisoned condition. The skeletal spirit is probably the default choice, but if you need some crowd control, the ghostly one could be clutch.
Moving on, we'll next look at Danse Macabre. This is a 5th-level spell from Xanathar's Guide to Everything, and, on its surface, looks similar to Animate Dead, but there are some benefits and a couple of downsides. Like Animate Dead cast at 5th level, you'll get five total undead creatures (though of course Necromancers would be getting 6 from a 5th-level animate dead). The first major benefit is that it takes 1 action to cast, meaning you can do this mid-combat. You can also cast this one any Small or Medium creatures, if your campaign doesn't have you fighting humanoids all the time. Third, you get to choose whether the undead are zombies or skeletons. And finally, the biggest bonus here is that you get to add your spellcasting modifier to both the minions' attack and damage rolls.
That last part might be the most important. At level 9, when you can first get this spell, you likely have an Intelligence of +5, giving your zombies a +8 to hit and your skeletons a +9 to hit (though if your DM insists the skeletons have to find finesse or ranged weapons to use their dexterity to attack, that's down to +2/+7 with strength-based attacks). That actually makes it far more likely that they're going to connect even with pretty heavily-armored foes. Without something like Wand of the War Mage or an Arcane Grimoire, your own spell attack bonus at this point is probably +9 anyway. The damage the minions do is also not insignificant - a zombie's slam typically does 1d6+1, but with both this spell and your subclass bonus, you're now looking at 1d6+10 (13.5 on average) coming from five different zombies (for a total of 67.5 average damage per round!)
Something I've really come to appreciate while running high-level D&D (15 at the moment) is that one of the deadliest aspects of high-level monsters is their high attack bonuses. You can hit pretty decent ACs even at low levels, but you hit a plateau in most cases around 20. Monsters then have a very hard time hitting you, but when you start to get monsters with a +8, +9, or even a +12 to hit, sitting at 20 AC still means getting hit a pretty high proportion of the time. And with every hit is HP lost, potential spell slots for healing spells lost, and overall hinderance to the party. Animate Dead might net you an extra zombie or skeleton, but when those guys are only getting a +3 to hit, you're realistically only hitting occasionally with those against a foe that has an AC of 17 or 18. A Necromancy Wizard's zombie minion is doing 1d6+5 damage with its hit, or about 8.5 damage. But Danse Macabre is adding your spellcasting ability modifier five times to the damage, which is 25 with an Intelligence of +5, which not only makes up for losing the sixth zombie, but that's before we even get to the idea that these zombies are going to be hitting far more often.
Of course, because Animate Dead is not concentration, you don't actually need to choose one or the other.
Next, we have Create Undead. Create Undead functions similarly to Animate Dead, in that it takes a minute to cast and you get 24 hours of control over the undead creatures, after which you need to cast the spell again to reassert control. At the base 6th level, you can make 3 ghouls from Medium or Small humanoid corpses. Ghouls' primary benefit over Zombies is that they can paralyze their targets - which, to be fair, is a pretty huge benefit, though the saving throw to resist this effect is only DC 10 - you might have better luck with the Putrid Spirit from Summon Undead. Ghouls are also more mobile and harder to hit than zombies, but they lack Undead Fortitude. When upcast to 8th level, you can raise Ghasts or Wights in place of ghouls, and at 9th level, you can summon Mummies. This starts to get very complicated, as the effects these various undead creatures can create are not all pure damage.
Once again, we should note that without concentration, you can have this spell active along with Animate Dead. If you have plenty of corpses to use, you can amass a fairly large undead horde. But in terms of damage output in the short term, I do think that Danse Macabre might be the best option.
But, just for fun, let's consider how many minions we could raise as a 20th-level character. We'll assume we take Animate Dead as one of our Signature Spells, so we get the chance to cast 4 of these per day (and thus maintain control of that many minions). So, we'll say we cast 4 3rd-level Animate Dead spells, giving us 8 minions. Then, we cast the spell 3 times at 4th level, giving us 12 more minions (up to 20). Then, we're going to cast it twice at 5th level and reserve one slot for Danse Macabre, giving us 12 more long-term minions and 5 1-hour minions, putting us up to 37 minions. Now, we'll cast Create Undead at 6th level twice, to give us 6 ghouls, putting our minion count up to 43. We spend our 7th level spell on Create Undead as well, giving us 4 more, putting us to 47 minions. At 8th level, if we're just going for minion count, we get five more ghouls, or 52 total minions. And then at 9th level, we'll get an additional 6 ghouls, for 58 total minions.
But actually, if we didn't care about the slightly-better ghouls, and just wanted to upcast animate dead, we can skip Create Undead and just upcast Animate Dead at 6th level twice, giving us 16 more minions (total of 53) and then at 7th level we get 10 zombies, so 63. At 8th level, we've got 12 more, giving us 75. And finally, at 9th level, we're getting 14 more minions, so we now have 89. (And if we wanted to go back and replace Danse Macabre with Animate Dead, we can make that an even 90).
This is, by the way, a good way to drive your DM and your fellow players insane, as your one turn in combat will probably be more creatures' turns than the whole combat encounter would likely take, and most of them will be "and that's a 12 to hit the Tarrasque."
Practically speaking, I think that the minions from Animate Dead and, somewhat, Create Undead, might be more effective when used for non-attack actions. Often, in combat, it can be somewhat painful to have to give up a turn to, say, drag an unconscious friend out of a Cloudkill, or to try smashing some evil demonic idol on an altar to see if that does anything. Having an extra undead minion to do those things while you focus on damaging foes can really free you up. I also think that minions can be great when used to grapple enemies (though this will probably be less effective if the new grapple rules from the One D&D UAs make it live). In terms of damage output, I think Danse Macabre is probably your best bet, unless you need non-physical damage. Summon Undead, I maintain, is very good as the ultimate flexible option, not just because you can pick the minion that suits your needs, but also because you don't need to have any corpses to raise. Indeed, the real downside to Danse Macabre as an in-combat trick is that you need to have a bunch of corpses lying around.
Of all the minions you can summon, the Ghostly and Skeletal Undead Spirits you can get from Summon Undead have the quite enormous benefit of dealing necrotic damage. Of all the summoner subclasses, only Circle of the Shepherd allows you to give your summoned creatures "magical" damage to overcome resistances and immunities. The one time I cast Danse Macabre, we were fighting Yeenoghu, and while the zombies managed to work very well as a wall to prevent the demon lord from getting to the spellcasters (though I think technically under the new rules he could have walked over them because they were two sizes smaller) but their attacks did nothing to him thanks to the immunity to nonmagical bludgeoning damage. There are monsters that are immune or resistant to necrotic damage, but far fewer than nonmagical "BPS" damage.
Now, minions aside, what spells might you pick up to supplement this playstyle?
The Necromancy Wizard gets healed if they kill a creature, and gets extra healing if the spell that was cast is a Necromancy one - though this doesn't actually apply to cantrips. So, technically you can run Fire Bolt as your main cantrip. However, I think Chill Touch is still a really strong choice (arguably overpowered, as it shuts down many creatures whose longevity is built on health regeneration) along with being thematic.
The Strixhaven spell Wither and Bloom can give you a bit of healing help to your party, making it an interesting spell choice. If you want to pay forward the healing you're receiving from Grim Harvest, you can pick up Life Transference to get a pretty powerful heal at the cost of your own vitality (you effectively can heal someone for 8d8, or about 36 HP, though you're going to be taking half of that). This is another one of those "good side of necromancy" spells that could fit with a good-aligned character.
Vampiric Touch can work in the opposite way, allowing you to drain foes of HP to help heal yourself up, though as a melee spell, this might be better reserved for desperate situations.
Enervation is actually very similar to Vampiric Touch, but with a longer range, and once it connects, you can automatically continue the damage and healing, a little bit like Witch Bolt, but with twice the range, making it harder for foes to break it simply by running away.
Negative Energy Flood is an interesting option, because it can be used to give a minion temporary hit points, or if used to kill a creature, you create a... zombie who is not under your control, but also not under your enemy's control either.
Finger of Death is a pretty obvious single-target bit hit attack, dealing 7d8+30 damage on a failed Con save, or half as much on a success. So, that's an average of 61.5 damage on a failed save. If you kill a humanoid with this, you get a permanent zombie pet. This is a necromancy spell, so you would also get the Undead Thralls bonus. Honestly, though, that amount of damage, while impressive, feels a little low for a 7th-level spell (a Danse Macabre at 7th level would raise 9 zombies, who would be dealing 1d6+11 damage each, meaning 130.5 damage per round).
Weirdly, Astral Projection is a Necromancy spell, but that's the sort of spell that you pick up for plot reasons.
Circle of Death is a 6th level spell that does a Fireball's worth of necrotic damage in a sphere that's three times the radius. Personally, I think it's rare you're going to need to hit quite such an enormous area - fireball's already huge, and Circle of Death, if I have the principles of basic geometry right, should be nine times the area (or twenty seven times the space). This is, make no mistake, an absolutely gigantic area, but that means that you're also going to have a much harder time avoiding your friends, and this will generally cover the entirety of most battle maps (on Roll20, the default is a 25x25 grid of 5x5 spaces, and this would be a circle 24 spaces long and tall). As huge as that is, it's still only a Fireball's damage - 8d6. That's nothing to sneeze at (and indeed, Fireball is intentionally overpowered for a 3rd level spell) but for casting a 6th level spell - a spell level in which you only get a second slot when you hit level 20 - I feel like you could have better uses unless you're facing an army of troops besieging a castle or something and you need to kill a lot of low-level enemies.
Abi-Dalzim's Horrid Wilting is similar, hitting a relatively small (though not tiny) 30-foot cube with 12d8 necrotic damage (average of 54 damage - which is just shy of two Fireballs' worth). This is particularly powerful against plants and specifically water elementals (as a DM I'd include any water-based elementals like Water Weirds,) who have disadvantage. But the real reason to consider this is that Constructs and Undead are unaffected by the spell. So, if you send your army of zombies at a group of foes, perhaps holding them down while your party is facing off against something outside of your 30-foot cube, you can drop this on top of all your minions without any fear.
Blight, back to lower level spells, is a single-target spell. This, likewise, can't affect Constructs or Undead, but if it hits a plant, they both make the save at disadvantage and also take max damage from the spell. The damage is only 8d8 (average of 36), but it's only a 4th level spell, making this a solid option in single-target situations or against some dangerous plant-monster like a Shambling Mound. A Fireball is still going to net you more damage if you can hit multiple foes, but this is a decent blast if you need something dead and quick.
One last necromancy spell that I think is easy to forget is Gentle Repose. This basically pauses the resurrection time limit on a dead creature for 10 days. That means that, if in the heat of battle, your Rogue dies while the Cleric is out of 3rd-level spell slots or doesn't have the diamonds to cast Revivify, you can give your party a leisurely window to fix the problem. In fact, it's a ritual spell, and there's nothing that says you can't cast it on a creature already under its effects (it's true that a creature can't be under the effects of the same spell multiple times, so I'd talk with your DM if you can keep this in effect indefinitely or if it can only give you a 10-day window). Especially in low-level play, where spell slots and gold to buy diamonds with are in short supply, this can seriously help a party member from being lost. It's also a great anti-necromancer spell, as it prevents the target from being raised from the dead, and also prevents it from decaying. We once used it on a deer to prevent the meat from going bad in my old Sunday campaign.
In terms of magic items, only Summon Undead is really going to benefit from items that boost your spell attack modifier. Most of these spells are somewhat independent of your stats, though remember that you need to be of a Wizard level that can cast those higher-level spells, meaning Create Undead requires you to have 11 levels in the class, even if some multiclass thing got you 6th level spell slots.
Anyway, there are some strong capabilities that a player can attain if they want to commit to the spookiness of Necromancy.
No comments:
Post a Comment