Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Pellanor 05-10-06, 12:31 PM	I was looking through Libris Mortis, and one thing that caught my eye was the variant undead. I got thinking to myself, "How does one go about creating one of these?" and "How does one go about balancing these, for control purposes?". First off, with creating them. As far as I know there is no mechanic for these variants to be created. No spells, not special rituals, nothing. Is there something I missed, or will I have to homebrew something. In the case of homebrewing, anybody have any suggestions? Next up is balancing them for control. Compare a Human Commoner Zombie to a Human Commoner Bloodthirsty, Fast, Diseased, Hunting, Unkillable Zombie. The second is obviously more powerful, with a CR of 4 compared to 1/2. However if you're controlling them, they both have the same number of hit dice. So if you can control 12 HD of undead, then you can have either 6 basic zombies, or 6 tricked out zombies. Which would you choose? So yeah, I'm trying to figure out how to get these variants to actually work within the game. Any suggestions? Thanks in advanced.
CzarGarrett 05-10-06, 01:08 PM	Off the top of my head, I wouldn't consider it to be unreasonable to go through and as a DM say that X ability counts as +1 HD. Maybe some abilities would be +1/2 HD and some +2 or more HD. So the zombie would be Base + X HD rather than standard. As your example, you could either have 6 2 HD zombies, or 3 Improved zombies (2 base HD + 2 1HD abilities). Making it a choice as to numbers or power. As to creation rituals, I would probably require a spell of sorts that is vaguely similiar, like if you wanted Fast zombies, the casting of Expeditious Retreat might be required during creation. Or diseased zombies might require Cause Disease to be cast. I'd aim for 0, 1st, and 2nd level spells for the most part.