Corpse Zoo

"Some creatures aren't done with the world yet and some people aren't ready to say goodbye."

You touch a creature's skull to beckon a its consciousness back into its corpse for aid.

Afterwards, the skull glows an otherworldly light and gains a body made of necrotic energy that mimics the body it had when alive. The creature becomes a vessel and counts as an undead. If you or your allies acted hostile to the creature while it was alive, the spell fails.

Your vessel acts independently of you, but it always obeys your commands. In combat, it goes before or after you in initiative.

While on the same plain of existence, you can use an action to see through your vessel's eyes and speak through your vessel. The vessel retains memories of when it was alive and can understand all the languages the caster can. Furthermore it can telepathically convey simple ideas to you, but cannot speak.

If the vessel drops to zero hit points then the necrotic energy disappears and the skull falls to the ground. The skull will be branded with arcane ruins that retain the vessel's consciousness and memories of its time serving you. Recasting this spell on the skull again brings back the same vessel. If the skull is destroyed, the vessel is permanently destroyed.

Your vessel can either be a lupus, ursa, avian, felis, fae, fell, or dragonic (determined by what type of skull you use) and uses the Vessel stat block. The skull you chose determines certain details in its stat block.