Hey all, so the DM and I are discussing something, my Necromancer Wizard is carrying a lot of the party's weight, literally, with his army of ten Skeletons acting as the party's bearers and bodyguards during camping.
I'm not _too_ bummed about having to burn two (at least two) of my 3rd level spell slots every day to keep this up, but I've asked the Dungeon Master if I could possibly start investigating how to 'bind' control of a small number of Undead into an Amulet, to create a permanent 'bond' to a small number of this army.
My pitch to her was 'so the amulet is cursed. So long as you use it, your constitution is dropped by -2, so a Con of 15 becomes a Con of 13, and you are forced to be Attuned to it, tying up one of your slots until you are exposed to a Remove Curse spell. The Amulet, if used as part of the spell Animate Undead, permanently binds the Skeletons or Zombies created in the ritual to the person attuned to the Amulet, and they are not released from service after 24 hours."
She's fine with that, and we're assuming the amulet will cost a significant amount of money to make, probably close to 10,000 to make the amulet (well within my range at 8th level) and will cost an extra 200 gold in ritual ingredients during the spell-casting per hit-dice of the Undead raised, with a maximum of 4 HD of Undead per point of Intelligence of the caster, so at 8th level with 18 Int, that means I could bind 16 HD of Undead to the Amulet. That brings us to most of the Skeleton Union under permanent control and, let's be honest, pushing the remaining 2 Skeletons into a bonfire isn't going to be that much of a problem considering at 8th level, even with Scale Armor and Shields, the Skeletons are, at best, a minor nuisance to most creatures we're going to be facing.
So a player-made amulet costing (at least) 10,000, plus research and experiments costing at least half of that to make sure it works, plus multiple Arcana checks to make sure the magical theory works, and then slapping an extra 200 gold per hit-dice into the ritual to bind the Undead to the amulet for a whopping total of 18,320 gold for a cursed item that will eat up an Attunement Slot and decrease my constitution by -2, dropping my Wizard to a Constitution of 12, down from 14.
What else can we add onto this to make sure it A) doesn't break the game for our DM and B) Should the costs be increased or not? We're a little bit more wealthy than we should be because of aforementioned Skeleton Union and prodigious use of Bags of Holding and Tenser's Floating Disk to strip literally everything out of the various dungeons and ruins we've been sent in to clear out for the Empire's army to occupy, so at 8th level I have (not including enchanted items and gear) a wealth of close to 20,000 gold right now, or at least that much I can claim from the Imperial Army.
It has the potential to leave my Necro-Dancer nearly broke, but freeing up two spell slots per day and preventing the whole "slept through the snooze alarm and getting murdered by my own minions" aspect that has nearly happened twice now because the rest of the party likes getting the person who sets things on fire with his mind drunk off his ass and seeing what he'll do, and I'd rather not go out like a chump who hadn't memorized the Evil Overlord's Guide.
Orcus has an ability called Master of Undeath which raises undead permamently under his control so maybe part of the creation process is contacting him and performing a task, this becomes the source of the curse on the item. The DM can then use it as a plot hook if she needs to and have Orcus talk to you occasionally, sort of like a warlock patron without actually mutliclassing warlock.
EDIT:
Potential quest idea: You contact Orcus (via contact other plane if you have it) about controlling undead for longer periods of time and he says he'll give you a ritual to create the item but you need to do him a favour first.
One of his Clerics has been captured. For failing Orcus has stripped the cleric of his powers. He cleric was supposed to have commited sucicde but hasn't and is now being held in a town pending transportation to a city for further interrorgation and trial.
Orcus says if you can kill the cleric, take his holy symbol and raise the cleric as a zombie, the ritual is yours.
This does then leave you in the debt of a god but hey....you get the ritual you need to make the item.
If you wanted to "nerf" it any more, I would recommend that it be fashioned to only work on skeletons. You have already made it an expensive item.
I don't understand why you shoulder this burden alone with a party that thinks it is funny to punk you, but it is just a fantasy game so if y'all are having fun then that should be OK.
So you have loads of Bags of Holding? Do you have any of those backpacks that act like BoH? Have you considered a cart and a mule? I often use a cart and a mule, but this creates two problems. Who guards it when we are "in" the dungeon? How do we handle it in an encounter on the road? A cart could be pulled along by two or four of your skeletons and is allowed to carry about 900 pounds of stuff IIRC.
Good luck and enjoy.
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
Orcus has an ability called Master of Undeath which raises undead permamently under his control so maybe part of the creation process is contacting him and performing a task, this becomes the source of the curse on the item. The DM can then use it as a plot hook if she needs to and have Orcus talk to you occasionally, sort of like a warlock patron without actually mutliclassing warlock.
EDIT:
Potential quest idea: You contact Orcus (via contact other plane if you have it) about controlling undead for longer periods of time and he says he'll give you a ritual to create the item but you need to do him a favour first.
One of his Clerics has been captured. For failing Orcus has stripped the cleric of his powers. He cleric was supposed to have commited sucicde but hasn't and is now being held in a town pending transportation to a city for further interrorgation and trial.
Orcus says if you can kill the cleric, take his holy symbol and raise the cleric as a zombie, the ritual is yours.
This does then leave you in the debt of a god but hey....you get the ritual you need to make the item.
We are nominally the good guys here. The Empire is a multi-racial nation that allows freedom of religion, abolishes slavery and in the case of Necromancers like my Kobold, we're basically bound by our Order to only ever raise the Criminal, the Enemy and the Mindless, ie only people on murder row, the soldiers (and ONLY the soldiers) of an enemy nation during times of war, and Monstrosities/Abominations that have an Int of 2 or lower.
Orcus does exist in the setting, however ... and permanent Undead minions certainly is in his domain. I'll toss this to the DM if this might be a heretical item I'm making here. We were tossing up using the sacrifice of Constitution as the cost of affixing the Undead permanently, a constant drain on the Necromancer's body to chain the Undead to their will, but throwing Orcus into the mix who is looking to corrupt the White Bone Tower from within could be fun!
If you wanted to "nerf" it any more, I would recommend that it be fashioned to only work on skeletons. You have already made it an expensive item.
I don't understand why you shoulder this burden alone with a party that thinks it is funny to punk you, but it is just a fantasy game so if y'all are having fun then that should be OK.
So you have loads of Bags of Holding? Do you have any of those backpacks that act like BoH? Have you considered a cart and a mule? I often use a cart and a mule, but this creates two problems. Who guards it when we are "in" the dungeon? How do we handle it in an encounter on the road? A cart could be pulled along by two or four of your skeletons and is allowed to carry about 900 pounds of stuff IIRC.
Good luck and enjoy.
We're one of the 'Advanced' Scouting Parties the Empire is sending out to reclaim and reinforce the border they share with a very, very xenophobic band of Human zealots who are out to purge the world of the 'unclean', ie anything that isn't Human, and it is only because the Humans are currently in the middle of sticking large, sharp pieces of metal into each other over a dispute of if skin colour determines who is more 'pure' that the Empire's got a chance to push back, retake territory and reinforce the border.
We need to move, and move quickly. While we're still limited to 30 feet, the Skeletons never suffer from Fatigue, so with all our heavy equipment stuffed in our Bags of Holding, the Skeletons princess-carry the party after we've been marching for eight hours for another eight hours before we make camp, and the excess Skeletons carry the gear that won't fit in the Bags with our Ranger following in the back obscuring our tracks when she can.
I'll ask the DM if we can add the part about Skeletons. It'll also prevent the rest of the party stealing the item and trying to create unholy cheese with it. I am, once again, roleplaying the sole Lawful Adult in a group of Chaotic Horny Bard-types and unfortunately it has become something of a meme in the group to make that one stick in the mud change alignment, no matter the cost.
We have, at the moment, three Bags of Holding, two Handy Haversacks and one Bag of Preservation (essentially Bag of Holding but has a Gentle Repose spell woven in which we use for our edibles and perishables), so while we're not exactly overloaded with the ability to haul stuff around, the fact we're currently in the middle of a war-zone and have to keep as low a profile as possible while we weaken or clear out old forts and underground bunkers for the Empire's army, which is significantly larger but also a lot slower, to take and re-fortify under their own power, means we not only have limited chances for reinforcements if we get caught but we're also having to really focus on not getting caught after all the shenanigans we've pulled.
Never forcibly recruit Chaotic people. They might get the job done, but by the Gods you'll wish for death before the end...
And since we're currently 18/3 when it comes to taking the Holy Order's stuff and peeing on their 'Champions' ashes, we kinda have some incredibly pissed off Blackguards-who-think-they-are-Paladins hunting us down, and it has only been through MacaulayCulkin-ing bridges, dungeons, tunnels and the occasional act of actually fighting them that we've made it this far.
To put it bluntly? At one point I had 32 Skelley-bois by burning every 3rd and 4th level spell and using my Wizard recharge ability to get that last group in, and one encounter with this band of xenophobic edgelords dropped me down to 11. And we only got out of there because we'd loaded up the Skeleton Union with bags of Alchemist's Fire, flasks of oil and gunpowder and ordered them to bum-rush the Blackguards and give them hugs.
I dropped these people off a cliff with an explosion powerful enough to not only set them all on fire, but to cause an entire side of a ruined castle to shear off the side of a mountain and take them with it, and they were back for more in seven rounds.
Hey all, so the DM and I are discussing something, my Necromancer Wizard is carrying a lot of the party's weight, literally, with his army of ten Skeletons acting as the party's bearers and bodyguards during camping.
I'm not _too_ bummed about having to burn two (at least two) of my 3rd level spell slots every day to keep this up, but I've asked the Dungeon Master if I could possibly start investigating how to 'bind' control of a small number of Undead into an Amulet, to create a permanent 'bond' to a small number of this army.
My pitch to her was 'so the amulet is cursed. So long as you use it, your constitution is dropped by -2, so a Con of 15 becomes a Con of 13, and you are forced to be Attuned to it, tying up one of your slots until you are exposed to a Remove Curse spell. The Amulet, if used as part of the spell Animate Undead, permanently binds the Skeletons or Zombies created in the ritual to the person attuned to the Amulet, and they are not released from service after 24 hours."
She's fine with that, and we're assuming the amulet will cost a significant amount of money to make, probably close to 10,000 to make the amulet (well within my range at 8th level) and will cost an extra 200 gold in ritual ingredients during the spell-casting per hit-dice of the Undead raised, with a maximum of 4 HD of Undead per point of Intelligence of the caster, so at 8th level with 18 Int, that means I could bind 16 HD of Undead to the Amulet. That brings us to most of the Skeleton Union under permanent control and, let's be honest, pushing the remaining 2 Skeletons into a bonfire isn't going to be that much of a problem considering at 8th level, even with Scale Armor and Shields, the Skeletons are, at best, a minor nuisance to most creatures we're going to be facing.
So a player-made amulet costing (at least) 10,000, plus research and experiments costing at least half of that to make sure it works, plus multiple Arcana checks to make sure the magical theory works, and then slapping an extra 200 gold per hit-dice into the ritual to bind the Undead to the amulet for a whopping total of 18,320 gold for a cursed item that will eat up an Attunement Slot and decrease my constitution by -2, dropping my Wizard to a Constitution of 12, down from 14.
What else can we add onto this to make sure it A) doesn't break the game for our DM and B) Should the costs be increased or not? We're a little bit more wealthy than we should be because of aforementioned Skeleton Union and prodigious use of Bags of Holding and Tenser's Floating Disk to strip literally everything out of the various dungeons and ruins we've been sent in to clear out for the Empire's army to occupy, so at 8th level I have (not including enchanted items and gear) a wealth of close to 20,000 gold right now, or at least that much I can claim from the Imperial Army.
It has the potential to leave my Necro-Dancer nearly broke, but freeing up two spell slots per day and preventing the whole "slept through the snooze alarm and getting murdered by my own minions" aspect that has nearly happened twice now because the rest of the party likes getting the person who sets things on fire with his mind drunk off his ass and seeing what he'll do, and I'd rather not go out like a chump who hadn't memorized the Evil Overlord's Guide.
Orcus has an ability called Master of Undeath which raises undead permamently under his control so maybe part of the creation process is contacting him and performing a task, this becomes the source of the curse on the item. The DM can then use it as a plot hook if she needs to and have Orcus talk to you occasionally, sort of like a warlock patron without actually mutliclassing warlock.
EDIT:
Potential quest idea: You contact Orcus (via contact other plane if you have it) about controlling undead for longer periods of time and he says he'll give you a ritual to create the item but you need to do him a favour first.
One of his Clerics has been captured. For failing Orcus has stripped the cleric of his powers. He cleric was supposed to have commited sucicde but hasn't and is now being held in a town pending transportation to a city for further interrorgation and trial.
Orcus says if you can kill the cleric, take his holy symbol and raise the cleric as a zombie, the ritual is yours.
This does then leave you in the debt of a god but hey....you get the ritual you need to make the item.
If you wanted to "nerf" it any more, I would recommend that it be fashioned to only work on skeletons. You have already made it an expensive item.
I don't understand why you shoulder this burden alone with a party that thinks it is funny to punk you, but it is just a fantasy game so if y'all are having fun then that should be OK.
So you have loads of Bags of Holding? Do you have any of those backpacks that act like BoH? Have you considered a cart and a mule? I often use a cart and a mule, but this creates two problems. Who guards it when we are "in" the dungeon? How do we handle it in an encounter on the road? A cart could be pulled along by two or four of your skeletons and is allowed to carry about 900 pounds of stuff IIRC.
Good luck and enjoy.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
We are nominally the good guys here. The Empire is a multi-racial nation that allows freedom of religion, abolishes slavery and in the case of Necromancers like my Kobold, we're basically bound by our Order to only ever raise the Criminal, the Enemy and the Mindless, ie only people on murder row, the soldiers (and ONLY the soldiers) of an enemy nation during times of war, and Monstrosities/Abominations that have an Int of 2 or lower.
Orcus does exist in the setting, however ... and permanent Undead minions certainly is in his domain. I'll toss this to the DM if this might be a heretical item I'm making here. We were tossing up using the sacrifice of Constitution as the cost of affixing the Undead permanently, a constant drain on the Necromancer's body to chain the Undead to their will, but throwing Orcus into the mix who is looking to corrupt the White Bone Tower from within could be fun!
We're one of the 'Advanced' Scouting Parties the Empire is sending out to reclaim and reinforce the border they share with a very, very xenophobic band of Human zealots who are out to purge the world of the 'unclean', ie anything that isn't Human, and it is only because the Humans are currently in the middle of sticking large, sharp pieces of metal into each other over a dispute of if skin colour determines who is more 'pure' that the Empire's got a chance to push back, retake territory and reinforce the border.
We need to move, and move quickly. While we're still limited to 30 feet, the Skeletons never suffer from Fatigue, so with all our heavy equipment stuffed in our Bags of Holding, the Skeletons princess-carry the party after we've been marching for eight hours for another eight hours before we make camp, and the excess Skeletons carry the gear that won't fit in the Bags with our Ranger following in the back obscuring our tracks when she can.
I'll ask the DM if we can add the part about Skeletons. It'll also prevent the rest of the party stealing the item and trying to create unholy cheese with it. I am, once again, roleplaying the sole Lawful Adult in a group of Chaotic Horny Bard-types and unfortunately it has become something of a meme in the group to make that one stick in the mud change alignment, no matter the cost.
We have, at the moment, three Bags of Holding, two Handy Haversacks and one Bag of Preservation (essentially Bag of Holding but has a Gentle Repose spell woven in which we use for our edibles and perishables), so while we're not exactly overloaded with the ability to haul stuff around, the fact we're currently in the middle of a war-zone and have to keep as low a profile as possible while we weaken or clear out old forts and underground bunkers for the Empire's army, which is significantly larger but also a lot slower, to take and re-fortify under their own power, means we not only have limited chances for reinforcements if we get caught but we're also having to really focus on not getting caught after all the shenanigans we've pulled.
Never forcibly recruit Chaotic people. They might get the job done, but by the Gods you'll wish for death before the end...
And since we're currently 18/3 when it comes to taking the Holy Order's stuff and peeing on their 'Champions' ashes, we kinda have some incredibly pissed off Blackguards-who-think-they-are-Paladins hunting us down, and it has only been through Macaulay Culkin-ing bridges, dungeons, tunnels and the occasional act of actually fighting them that we've made it this far.
To put it bluntly? At one point I had 32 Skelley-bois by burning every 3rd and 4th level spell and using my Wizard recharge ability to get that last group in, and one encounter with this band of xenophobic edgelords dropped me down to 11. And we only got out of there because we'd loaded up the Skeleton Union with bags of Alchemist's Fire, flasks of oil and gunpowder and ordered them to bum-rush the Blackguards and give them hugs.
I dropped these people off a cliff with an explosion powerful enough to not only set them all on fire, but to cause an entire side of a ruined castle to shear off the side of a mountain and take them with it, and they were back for more in seven rounds.
This has officially become a stealth mission.